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.

Skitastic baby

Last weekend we took a long weekend break and headed for the snow. It had been raining gloomily in Melbourne for weeks before which meant that the mountains were getting a decent amount of snow cover. So off we headed to Mount Hotham in the Victorian Alps. It was about a five hour drive. (You can tell we are getting more aussified as we didn't think too much of that. People over here are prepared to travel so much further by car.) We stayed in a lodge which is a cross between a youth hostel and a European style ski chalet: we had all our meals cooked and the full gourmet luxury experience yet we were expected to all sleep in bunks and depending on numbers, share rooms with strangers! Wisely the lodge manager didn't put anyone else in with us, as Dulcie did her waking up in the middle of the night yelling thing (an hour earlier each night we were there, ARRGGHH) but our friends Richard, Raechel & Abigail had a couple of people sharing with them who came back from a night at the bar and tried to get into the wrong bunk. Chaos ensued.







So, skiing in July. Weird huh? (The last time we went skiing must have been almost exactly 18 months ago, as the day we got back that time I discovered I was pregnant with Dulcie, and she hit 9 months last week.) It all actually worked very well with us taking it in turns to ski and do childcare. Abigail took her Pingu DVD and Thea took her new Fifi and the Flowertots, so the gilrs were happy. Thea said she was desperate to "ski fast" so one afternoon we hired her some boots and skis. Cue all manner of whinging. "These boots are tooooo tight." Will skied her down a very flat slope in between his skis and she moaned all the way down, and of course said "Again, again" at the bottom.

We couldn't help but notice a few key differences between the Victorian Alps and the French Alps, our usual ski haunt. Hotham was smaller & lower of course, but it seemed very uncrowded, no real queues. In fact on our way up the mountain on the way there we kept thinking we had gone the wrong way as there was no traffic. And this was on changeover day. Also, the Aussies who work the lifts etc are eternally cheerful, ask you how your day's skiing is going, help you get on the lift, and would never ever dream of closing the lift if they could see someone skiing down towards it. I couldn't help but feel that they should pop over to France and offer the ski resort staff there some lessons in customer service. Also the Aussies are health & safety freaks and insist on scaring you to death by putting signs at the top of black runs which say, "Expert skiers only. Do not fall over on this run," which is the kind of thing that makes me far more likely to fall over.

Anyway, we all got back in one piece, apart from a nasty bruise I sustained to the kneecap by walking into the tow bar on the back of some ridiculously oversized chelsea tractor in the car park of the place where we were returning the snow chains we'd hired. (Long sentence, but grammatically ok I think).

Being away at the weekend meant I missed the release of Harry Potter 7 which led to a pretty desperate time on Tuesday afternoon whizzing round Melbourne looking for a shop that hadn't sold out of them. I was successful on the fifth attempt and spent most of my free hours last week with my heart in my mouth wondering what was to become of the boy wizard. No spoilers here apart from to say I thought JK dun well.

Other news, I have been looking into doing a bit of work and have a few chats with different contacts I've made to see what's out there. Nothing definite yet but some interesting leads. Salaries seem a bit lower here and childcare costs the same, so I need to just make sure I don't lose any money! I think it's about time I got out of the house without the girlies a little more. They are both gorgeous and I love being with them, but it's too full on at the moment and I think a day or too when Mummy has a rest at work would probably do us all good.

Girlies news: Thea has completely turned into a blue-peter-presenteresque reuser of household junk and I am constantly being told off for throwing something away which she wants to make into something unfeasible. She gets this crazy look in her eyes and nearly always starts the process by saying, "Mummy, I've got a brilliant idea, let's make a ..." Today she threw a wobbly when Will left a cafe without the two empty cardboard cups she'd earmarked to make a mask with (?!). Dulcie has started crawling quite quickly now and as I have mentioned before, sees it as a personal mission to tidy up the by-products of Thea's craft work by eating them. She seems so grown up all of a sudden. A friend has lent us one of those baby entertainment centres that they stand up in and she just fiddles with all the toys on it, upright and perky, babbling a load of nonsense that sounds more like speech now. Anyway, if I don't finish this soon she'll have nothing to eat next week as I'm out of frozen baby mush. More anon.

July jaunts

Hello again from a wet and chilly Melbourne. We are learning to love the rain, cos rain means snow in the mountains and we have booked to go skiiing this weekend! Skiing in July. Crazy stuff. Actually a lot of the Aussies seem to have a sense that it's just not quite right to have the seasons this way round (heritage I suppose) and you see shops selling tinsel, fake trees etc for 'Christmas in July' celebrations that people do.

We are finally starting to feel a bit better. I had to go on antibios in the end for a chest infection. The kids are taking a few days break from being snotty, although D is still afflicted with teeth issues. Actually her teeth are coming through in a very odd looking way. The top two middle ones not thru yet but the next ones across on each side have come out mid way down the gum, almost like they are pushing forward as well as down. She looks like a little vampire when she grins! Suffice to say there has been an element of wailing in the night (her and me) and you can't even buy Medised (sure fire knockout drops) here. I had a discussion with a friendly pharmacist today about how I might mix my own. Dulcie has started crawling in a rather determined way. She also hates being carried and deplores being sat down. She tries to hurl herself out of our arms and insists on being stood up against things. Alarmingly this has co-incided with Thea going through a phase of increased creativity which involves cutting, sticking, building, gluing, taping, and a lot of dropping small items on the floor. We are averaging around 3 choke hazards a day..

Photos for this blog entry include the wonderful Pixar exhibition that we went to see in the city centre the other weekend, a trip that we did with our friends Emma, Alec and Sebastian to Weribee Safari Park (the kids had more fun bundling each other on the slide than on the safari bus, I think) and Thea's trip to the wonderful Kew traffic school. This is where kids cycle their bikes round a mini road system, complete with dinky functioning traffic lights and painted sheds to look like little buildings, supposedly to learn the highway code. Hmmm. Thea spent more time playing shops in the huts than actually cycling, but she had fun.

June jaunts

What happened to June?! (And I don't mean poor old Blighty's complete lack of summer.) We seem to have slipped onto some kind of fast forward mode. We've have suddenly been here six months, Dulcie is eight months old, we've done two terms of all our weekly activities, and Melbourne midwinter is upon us. I'll start with the weather since that's so topical. Well, for the first time since we've been here, the Melbourne cliche 'four seasons in one day' is finally starting to apply. You can't really look at the sky and make a plan for the afternoon, as it can change and change back again in the space of a few hours. As a result I have occasionally been caught out in a heavy shower with a buggy full of greengrocery, two small kids, no coats, umbrellas or raincover.

The womenfolk of the house have all had rotten colds on and off for a month. The last bout has been a bit frustrating, with everyone coughing and spluttering. At night there's a cacophony of soprano and treble hacking, with an accompaniment deep bass snoring. It's the school holidays here now for two weeks and all our groups have stopped, so I hope that we'll be in contact with a few less germs and be able to properly get over things. Dulcie has returned to old tricks of waking up when it's still dark, so all in all what with illness and tiredness we've been feeling a bit sorry for ourselves at times.

A couple of weeks ago it was Will's company's annual knees up, which took place at the famous MCG in the members' rooms (which they project managed when it was built). I didn't have particularly high expectations, particularly when I found out the theme was 'hollywood glamour' (nothing in my wardrobe answering that description, had to get the Audrey Hepburn option from local fancy dress hire) but it turned out to be an absolute blinder of an evening, fantastic views over the city one way and the vast sports ground the other way, excellent food and wine and a band playing our kind of music. Here's a pic of us attempting to look glamorous, self portrait when we got home (2am, latest stop out since having kids)! Can you check out my bling?


We've been enjoying family time together at the weekends lately. There are so many great places to go in Melbourne, and as we're still basically in tourist mode, we tend to go and do more things than some of our friends who live here all the time. These pics are us enjoying a bit of family jumping (off a wall next to the Collingwood Children's farm near us) and the visit we did yesterday to MSAC (Melbourne Sports & Aquatic Centre) on the other side of town. To my huge surprise, Dulcie coped really well (first time we've got round to taking her swimming) and stayed in the water for quite a long time. Thea did brilliantly in the waves pool and to my utter shock agreed to go down the water chute with Daddy. This was a really high, dark, enclosed slide with lots of twists and turns, the sort of thing that I have to pluck all my courage up to go on. I think Will was desperate for a go but too embarrassed without a small child as an excuse, so he talked her into it. Apparently as they were spat out into the pool at the bottom she said, 'Again!' This is yet more proof that she has more Williamson genes than Ewins ones. It was a good way to get a quiet afternoon tho as both girls were exhausted from the activity; Thea was so weary that she actually fell asleep with a toy in her mouth.