November catch up

So many adventures, so little time to blog about them...

Earlier this month we had Will's company family Christmas fun day. This was great fun although rather strange in some respects. Firstly, it was of course no where near Christmas. Secondly, it was a blazing hot day and a bearded, costumed man seemed somewhat out of place. Thirdly it was at Melbourne's answer to the Masaai Mara, Weribee Safari Park. T was predictably slightly unsure about sitting on Santa's knee but nevertheless accepted his gift (a cheap version my little pony) whereas Dulcie thought the whole thing hysterical (although Mummy has 'lost' her gift, a delightful pink bear that sings an abridged version of rockabye baby in a high pitched electronic tone.)

Last weekend we went camping with friends Paula & Pete and their three girls Lia, Rosie & Liberty, to Wilson's Promontary, a beautiful bit of coast about 3 hours south east of here. The wildlife was amazing. Our campsite was regularly raided by cockatoos, possums & wombats and with a couple of toddlers dropping half chewed bread on the dust, there were rich pickings! We camped by a serene tidal river, and the beaches were pristine. One had amazing sand that sqeaked when you walked on it. It was called squeaky beach - well, that's the Aussie way. Tell it like it is. Disappointingly it was the coolest weather we've had all month, so not quite the sunbathing & swimming in the sea vibe that we'd hoped for. Of course, since heading back to Melbourne it has been hitting the 30s on some days.

Did we say that Dulcie learned to walk? Also, her hair suddenly went very very curly. Odd. Also, V started doing one day's work a week on a trial basis for an e-learning company.

Well, hopefully that's brought us all up to date. Enjoy advent!

Gallivanting with Grandma

Phew. How busy have we been lately? You'll have noticed the rather large gap between blogs. Sorry about that. I'll try to do a few over the next few days to catch us up with each other.

We spent most of the last month having far far too much fun doing touristy things with Vicky's mum.

First of all we headed down the Mornington Peninsula to stay at St Andrew's Beach where there was plenty of appropriately beachy type activity. A real highlight was a tour we did of the bay in a little boat looking for seals and dolphins. Grandma donned a wetsuit and got up close to the seals. She did pretty well as a novice snorkler to manage to hang on to the back of the boat and see stuff!

Following the nature/water theme, we had another great evening in the city harbour on a penguin tour. There is a colony of 'little penguins' which has taken up residence on a man made breakwater off St Kilda Pier, and by going out on a sunset cruise we got the chance to see them all coming in from a day's fishing, zooming round the baot underwater, and clambering up the rocks to find their nests. They were most cute.

Then Vicky & her Mum headed off for a relaxing girls' weekend away to the red centre of Australia - Uluru. It rained for the first time in 5 months when we were there so some of the activities we planned to do weren't possible, but we had one wonderful sunny day when we did a walk near the rock in the morning and went on a tour of the nearby Olga rock formations in the afternoon. And lots of time for chatting and chilling out.

Finally, you can't be a Brit in Melbourne without visiting Ramsay Street. Yes, we are far more serious about Neighbours than the locals and the bus that takes you to the residential street where they film is full of UK citizens. We got to walk around the street, go to the set of the garage & greasemonkeys, and meet one of the cast. Unfortunately I (Vicky) haven't actually watched Neighbours for a while so the chap we got to meet ("Fraser") was a mystery to me, but my Mum seemed pretty happy to get her arms round him.

All too soon it was time to wave V's mum off again at the airport. Sadly her journey home was a bit eventful, with a bout of food posioning necessititating a short stay in a Singapore hospital en route.

One is fun!

Happy Birthday Dulcie!

We have had a beautiful day today celebrating Dulcie's first birthday (I know! Where did that go?) today along with very special guest Grandma (V's mum) and lots of our lovely friends. V's mum arrived last night and was picked up from the airport by V and T. Unfortunately V managed to get completely disorientated on the way back and get lost not once but twice. The 40 minute journey from Melbourne airport took over 2 hours. Whoops. Fortunately T had fallen asleep (mid sentence, she was so shattered) after five minutes of this epic journey.

This morning Dulcie had a few presents, we all went out for breakfast and W bought a few tons of sausages for the afternoon. We had a couple of lovely treats: Auntie Harriet sent us some amazing cupcakes which we found in a beribbonned box on the front doorstep, and then Gordon & Helen phoned from Tajikistan - the first time we've managed to actually talk to those dear friends in months.

This afternoon we held a special first birthday BBQ for Dulcie and lots of our new aussie (well, the majority were South African, Scottish, or from UK actually) friends. We hired the hall at Thea's kinder, Possums, which has a delightful enclosed garden with barbeques and lots of lovely play equipment. The weather was perfect, about 24 degrees with a light breeze, and the garden had loads of trees providing dappled sunlight. It was wonderful. Thea particularly enjoyed opening all of Dulcie's presents.

Here's some pics of the day so you can all imagine you were there with us too. That would've been nice, eh?

Where does the time go?

Whoops, so sorry. Weeks are slipping by and no new blogs. We will have a word with those responsible and make sure it doesn't happen again.

Well, since we were all last here, winter turned into spring; we've had to start putting the sunscreen on the kids again, packing the sun hats instead of the woolly ones, and drinking ice coffee instead of latte all the time. Having said that, we have seen the unpredictability that Melbourne is famous for, and the buggy rain cover stays in the boot, just in case.

We've all been pretty well apart from me (Vicky) who had a bit of a monster virus which took over two weeks to even think about packing its bags and departing. Unfortunately it co-incided with the school holidays when everything (kinder, playgroup, singing, dancing) shuts down for two weeks so there was a lot of DVD watching in our house with mummy only lifting her head off the sofa to beg Thea not to put the Wiggles Safari on for the 17th time but please to switch to Beatrix Potter (Mummy's favourite with nice soothing music.) My friend Paula came round one morning so I could go to the doctors and get some sleep, and when I finally surfaced she had cleaned my kitchen. That is the kind of friend you need! Anyway, I'm back to firing on most cylinders now.

Thea continues to enjoy making unusual things from recycled cardboard boxes, masking tape, string and pegs. We are running out of space to store these creations so every few weeks Mummy rounds them up at night, secretly dismantles them and puts the pieces back in the big drawer marked 'junk modelling'. We have bought her a digital clock for her room and trained her not to make noise or come in to see us until she can see a 7 at the front of the numbers. Each day we are now greeted at 7.01 am by squeals of 'I see a seven, I see a seven.' Unfortunately once she got over excited when she saw a 7 and forgot that it was supposed to be the FIRST number - 6.27, not good for the poor slumbering parents.

Dulcie is not quite walking, but loves pushing a trolley around and walking holding people's hands. She can stand up on her own in a wibbly wobbly kind of way. She tends to refuse her morning sleep most days so we are down to one long sleep a day at lunch time which is convenient for everyone else most of the time. She claps, says 'ta' when you give her something, wipes her face if you give her a cloth, climbs into inappropriate places (the dishwasher this week) and finds her older sister quite hilarious. I spend a lot of the day rescuing Thea from Dulcie's crude expressions of love and interest ("Mummy, help, Dulce is eating my pencils/turning my programme off/going to ruin everything.")

OK, here are a few pics of what we've been up to. There are some of us at the MCG watching Aussie Rules, supporting our local team, the Hawthorn Hawks, who were unfortunately knocked out soon after these pics were taken. AFL, to our British eyes, has some really comedic moments, like when you suddenly realise there people all over the pitch who aren't even playing - people carrying water to the players, and men dressed in fluro yellow who carry messages from the coaches to individual players. Plus at the end you all have to sing the winning team's song seven or eight times. I reckon it's closer to Quidditch than it is to footie. But it's all in good humour, the fans aren't even segregated and you don't get any aggro. We enjoyed watching the finals on TV. We barracked (= rooted for, but you can't say that here, it's rude) for the Cats (=Geelong), and they won, hurrah.

Other pics include the kids enjoying Mainly Music, shaking their shakers and feeling the groove, plus a recent family outing to St Kilda, one of the bayside suburbs. You can just about make out the scary face behind us which is the gateway to Luna Park, the famous amusements down there.

Ok, I think that's got us up to date now. We'll be back very soon.

Head to the Hills

All I did was make a casual comment about a beautiful mountain whilst skiing and the next thing I knew I was signed up for a 3 day hike up Feathertop. But when the hills call you've gotta answer. So with my Dad's time off pass clutched in my hand we set of for Harrietville in the Victorian Alps to establish base camp in the luxurious accommodation of the local motel. The first day's hiking got off to a bad start when the path disappeared and our search to find it again led us up the wrong spur. However, once we were 500 m of altitiude up the wrong spur it suddenly became the 'right' spur and the route was quickly re-planned as a circular walk taking in the delights of the razor back ridge. A not altogether bad outcome. The first day got us up to the ridge and a decent camp site with a good patch of snow for water. The sun set was exquisite and the al la carte supper of pasta with curried sausages tasted magnificent due to the exertions of the day. Day 2 was a hike to the summit at 1926 m through the remains of the snow - we couldn't have had a better day for it, with blue sky and light winds - and down the northwest spur to the Melbourne Uni hut. The Hut was great and the snow melt spring water especially invigorating for the morning ablutions. Day 3 was the rapid and thigh busting descent into the valley. I found the old adage to be particularly true: Descend Feathertop in haste, struggle to walk for the next 4 days.

Happy holidays

We did a very spontaneous thing last week and went off on holiday at 4 days notice. We booked to fly up to Queensland where the weather is currently warmer than down here in Victoria, and headed to a place called Noosa which is very popular with Melburnians this time of year, situated on a beautiful network of rivers at the coast. We booked on the Tuesday, and on Wednesday Noosa experienced a one in a hundred year rain event (almost a metre of rain, can you imagine) and got flooded. We had a worried few days, but took some advice and in the end headed up as planned. In the event, a few of the roads were closed when we arrived, but most things were functioning as normal.

We stayed at some very swanky apartments, with gorgeous pool and roof terrace with bbq, TV the size of a radiator etc. Unfortunately they were renovating the apartment below us but the builders were very very nice and at our request didn't do any noisy work when the kids had their lunchtime rests. It sounds like a recipe for holiday disaster doesn't it, inundation and brick dust, but actually we all had the most wonderfully relaxing time. We spent most of our time on the beach or in cafes, and Mummy and Daddy took turns to have a surf lesson each: both managed to stand up a couple of times by the end of their sessions, how proud were we? There was also a stunning national park which we strolled round, and a sunset river cruise where we drank bubbly and rubber necked at the multi million dollar properties. The girlies were completely delightful, although Thea is currently scared of big waves so wouldn't go in the sea at all, and Dulcie consumed quite a lot of the beach. On the way back to the airport we dropped into Australia Zoo (once home to Steve Irwin). It's a little odd how Steve Irwin is now regarded as some sort of national saint now (they've renamed the highway near the zoo after him), and also how the zoo functions as if he'd never died. There are huge pictures of him everywhere, and he's refered to in all the literature as if he's still around. Mummy got to stroke a wombat while we there. Well, when in Rome...

More ordinary stuff

Well, as the title of this (and the previous) post implies, we haven't been up to anything particularly spectacular recently, but have nevertheless been having a great time doing everyday stuff.

We're really enjoying the kids. Dulcie seems to be doing different things every day. She has got a new facial expression which I hope you can see clearly in the picture: it's a kind of screwed up nose grin. If you look carefully in one of the pics (click on them to make them bigger) you should just be able to make out her crazy vampire teeth, the middle two haven't really come out properly yet but the next two are right out and looking rather fangish. She crawls really, really fast now (so fast that you're looking around the room wondering where she's got to.) Today we found her on top of our mini trampoline, so climbing is obviously a skill she's about to get going on! And her hair's started to go a bit curly at the back!

Thea is very imaginative in her play and we spend a lot of time following her instructions being kings and queens, all sorts of animals etc. She's very loving and affectionate. Days are spent making, building, colouring, painting, picking flowers. Her current preferred media are blu tack and selotape. Recently, the whole gang of her soft toys were selotaped up and we were told that they were wearing space suits and going to the moon. I have had the genius idea of getting her a CD player in her room and buying a few story CDs, which means she actually lies down for a bit at 'siesta' time and doesn't just trash her room for an hour.

The lady you won't know in one of the pics is Jane. She's going to be looking after the girls on 3 out of 4 Friday afternoons for us to give Mummy a bit of a needed break. She's brilliant; we met her at playgroup as 4 days a week she nannies one of the little girls Thea knows at playgroup.

We are on a bit of a self improvement drive at the moment. Our church homegroup is studying The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work by John Gottman (why do these NY Times Bestsellers always have to have seven of something? Despite that I recommend it...), we're going to an excellent parenting course on Sunday afternoons developed by these people in New Zealand https://www.parentsinc.org.nz/toolbox-parenting-group-information/, and stone the flaming crows if I haven't taken up jogging. I know, I know, I've said a thousand times that I CAN NOT run on the road but having invested in a good pair of shoes it appears that I can. Slowly. And not very far!!! The plan is to crank it up to go a couple of times a week so I can actually start to lose that post baby spare tyre. I think I'll have to ration my trips to the coffee shop to even start to make a dent in it, to be fair...

And today I pruned the roses. It's all beginning to sound a bit middle aged, isn't it? I guess I can redeem that by adding that we've been 'gigging' a bit lately and have the seen the Shins (average) and The Cure (pretty darn good) in the last two weeks. And we celebrated our 11th wedding anniversary this weekend with a marvellous Burmese takeaway with Brown Brothers bubbly one night, followed by a night out to a swizzy restaurant the next. Hurrah.

Ordinary stuff

Here are some recent pics. I'll tell you what's been going on soon!

OK, here's some explanation of a couple of the pics.

"Look, I'm dressing up as Mummy," said Thea. I turned around and saw the attractive stilletto & rubber gloves outfit. How does she know?!

Look, we've gained a son! No, it's just James, sharing a bed time story. Amy & Richard Bala, whom we knew in Cambridge, have just arrived here in sunny Kew for 18 months, with their little boy James and baby Isobel. It's been lovely to have them around and makes us feel very established here to suddenly be explaining how things work to them. They are going to be living near, which will be fun.