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Gundagai to Sydney


06 May

Posted in Friends, NSW, Travel | No Comments »

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The drive from Gundagai to Sydney went smoothly, though the kids were getting a little over traveling. We couldn’t find anything for breakfast in Gundagai so I bought a few things from the local IGA to help with hunger until we found something more substantial to eat. Funnily enough, as soon as we had started driving, we turned a corner and found a cafe open, but we kept driving.

Although we made several stops (for food, toilets and petrol) we made good time and were in Sydney by 2 pm. We had a late lunch of chicken rolls from a favourite little Vietnamese place in Mascot, and the kids played in a nearby park that we used to walk to when we lived in Mascot. We then found our accommodation for the next week. It is an old building, is reasonably priced (by Sydney standards) , and just down the road from Mel’s house. Just a few metres past our room is a kitchenette with a stove and microwave, and some living space with sofas and bookcase with books and games. It is a really nice place, with a sort of old-world charm to it. It suits our needs perfectly!

We unpacked the car and then dropped in to see Andrew, Mel, Sarah and baby James. It was wonderful to see them all!

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Chicken roll

Aqua nails


06 Jan

Posted in Friends, Nathan the preschooler | 1 Comment »

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Today we met up with a friend from Sydney, Kristie, who is visiting Melbourne for a few days. We met at the cafe at CERES in Brunswick where the kids had a ball in the playground (with the exception of a couple of mishaps, one being that Toby was stuck upside down in one of the structures while I was chatting, and another being a boy with a stick told Nathan and others to leave an area they were playing in or he would kill them).

Nathan was fascinated with Kristie’s purple fingernails, and Kristie asked him if he would like a blue nail. He said yes, she got some nail polish out of her bag and Nathan was all serious with his fascination. Once one nail was done he held his others out for painting. He was excited about his blue nails all afternoon!

It was great to catch up with Kristie, and her friends I met were lovely too.

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Getting ready to paint.

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Blowing to dry the nail polish.

Homesick


04 Oct

Posted in Friends, Mascot Living, Melbourne, Sydney | 2 Comments »

I never, ever imagined that I would be homesick for Sydney….but I am.   There were many, many good reasons for moving to Melbourne, but that hasn’t stopped me longing for the beautiful city of Sydney and my friends there.

I miss the convenience of living in the inner city area.  So many places that I frequented were very close by, with some being just waking distance away.  I miss the wonderful Sydney Park, that had so many different things to do there.  The playground is one of the best I’ve seen anywhere, there were ducks to visit with eels and turtles to be seen in the water as well, there was a little traffic area for kids on bikes complete with traffic lights and roundabouts, and of course lots of open space.  Newtown cheap(ish) eating was just a few minutes in the car, and the ocean beaches were only 15 minutes of driving away.  Eh, I even miss the little 1 bedroom flat that was so light and bright where we saw aeroplanes and sunsets through the foliage of the gum trees, even though we had well and truly outgrown it.

I miss my wonderful Monday group of parents (mostly mums but one dad) and kids, who met up at Sydney Park that has a fantastic playground.  My Friday group was also great, but in a different way.  The Monday group all had a similar approach to parenting, but my Friday group was made up of women who all have similar aged children, having all been loosely associated with a Mother’s group when our first kids were babies.  We certainly had different approaches to parenting, but were all lovely people.  And then there is Mel and her daughter, Sarah.  I met Mel when Nathan was just a few weeks old.   Sarah is just 5 days younger than Nathan.  We became friends pretty quickly, and have met up on a regular basis over the last 2.5 years.  Mel is also a member of the Friday group, but we would generally meet up on a Thursday as well…just Mel, me and the two kids.

Nathan has a little chant that he yells at top volume when he is tired and when he wants to wake a sleeping Toby when in the car….the volume is almost unbearable in the confined space of the car.  He yells “Mummy, Daddy, Nathan, Toby, Sarah, Mel” over, and over, and over again.  As far as Nathan is concerned, these are the people he loves most in the world, because these are the people he has spent the most time with and knows best.

This chant nearly brings me undone every time.  Nathan loves both Mel and Sarah, and so do I, and it brings me to tears to think about how much we both miss them.  It’s not just missing them for the things we did together, but also the knowledge that we will miss the eventuation or not of their hopes and dreams.  I won’t be there to celebrate moving into their new house.  I won’t be there when (hopefully when) Mel is pregnant again.  We won’t share in the growing up of our little families other than from afar.  All these thoughts bring me to tears.

I can’t say that I have been particularly excited about this move to Melbourne.  Intellectually I can appreciate so many great reasons for relocating, but emotionally it has been so much harder than I thought it would be. Yes, it has only been a week so far.  Yes, I do have some friends here already though they are not just around the corner and I find traveling hard and tiring with two kids.  And yes, I will probably make more friends with kids.  If anyone else tells me not to worry, that I’ll make more friends through the kids, I think I will burst from wanting to say that I have friends and they can’t simply and easily be replaced.  Great friendships are born from years of shared experiences, and there will never be a way to replace those who have been with me through my first years of parenting.

I am sure that the fact that I dislike the rental we are currently staying in doesn’t help with the homesickness at all.  The stained carpets, the cheap and nasty items within the house (it’s furnished) that make cooking and cleaning difficult.  The vacuum cleaner that barely sucks, the washing machine that leaves fluff on all the clothes, the bedrooms with that musty old house smell, the shower that barely fits a single body inside (to wash my hair I have to stand on the diagonal so that my elbows fit in), and the horrible beds.  At least it’s all temporary.  There are good things too….a heated roof over our heads, the big back yard and being less than 3 km from Andrew’s workplace.

I think this move to Melbourne is going to be a good thing for us as a family…..but right now it just doesn’t feel much like it.

And now, just because Nathan insisted that I also put this photo into my blog……

The Nathan photo-a-day project


15 Mar

Posted in Friends, Nathan's first year | 2 Comments »


Andrew had a project to take a photograph of Nathan every day for the first year of his life.  It took weeks of looking through some 30,000 photos, but he has now finally finished choosing and editing the photos.  There are a couple of days where he chose more than 1 photo, and there is a day 0 photo (taken just hours before Nathan was born), so instead of 366 photos (it was a leap year) he’s ended up with 374 photos.  Most photos were taken by Andrew, several were taken by me, and at least one was taken by our friend Stephanie.  The last thing to do now is to make a photo book and get it printed.

Andrew had uploaded the photos and has used some kind of programme that orders them randomly and you can click to zoom into a photo and then use arrows to scroll through.  He had to split the photos into two lots, the first half and the second half.  Beware though, before clicking on the links, that there is some nudity and each one is about a 15 MB download.

10 months old


11 Dec

Posted in Friends, Nathan's first year | 1 Comment »

Our baby is growing up….he took his first step on the weekend.  Admittedly is was only one wobbly step to move from a bench he had just been hanging onto to Andrew.  I missed it as I was looking away at the time, but I’m sure there will be more.  He is standing quite confidently without support, but I still don’t think he will be walking anytime soon.

On Sunday Nathan finally got the concept of clapping, and he practically hasn’t stopped.  It’s almost the first thing he does in the mornings after waking up now, which Andrew and I think is really funny.  He had a couple of days of grinding his teeth, and clicking them together, but that seems to have pretty much passed now.  I guess that having teeth is still quite a novelty for him.

Babyproofing the flat has pretty much finished for now.  The computer has been moved out of the loungeroom, locks put on all the low cupboards in the kitchen, and a piece of dowel put through the handles of the drawers.  It doesn’t stop the drawers being opened, but there is less risk of little fingers being squashed than without the dowel.  The kitchen bin is now a source of fascination.  The fridge is now covered in magnetic letters to help entertain Nathan in the kitchen.

Nathan is standing unsupported quite confidently now, although he does still tend to wobble a bit.  He even stands in the bath, though this is no longer so hazardous now that we have a non-slip bath mat.  Another favourite past time is delving into the shopping and taste testing everything in it.  In the photo below we see a mango that had a small bite taken out…..

And finally, Nathan enjoyed helping mummy to pot out some plants last weekend.  He tried several times to taste the potting mix, and still does pick up potting mix for tasting when we go outside to check on our garden.

I constantly wonder what new challenges will present themselves when we take him camping over Christmas.  😀

Edit:  I meant to have an update on Nathan’s sleeping patterns.  His official bedtime these days is 8 pm (that hasn’t really changed much over the months), though by the time we have dinner (all of us together) it generally gets pushed to around 8:30 pm.  This doesn’t mean that we don’t still have later nights but they are becoming less rare.  Also, he doesn’t wake up after the first 30 – 40 minutes anymore, he sleeps through that transition.  Although Nathan has slept up to 8 hours before waking, he generally wakes between 11 pm and midnight (and does a wee), and again around 4 – 5 am.  It is very hard to get him to go back to sleep at this time, but he generally will and wakes for the day around 6:30 am.  Other nights he doesn’t wake until around 3 or 4 am, at which time he usually does a wee and goes back to sleep again pretty easily until he wakes for the day.  He still sleeps in the hammock until his first wake and then sleeps the rest of the night between Andrew and I.  Daytime sleeps are still generally half an hour, 2 or 3 times a day.  Occasionally Nathan will sleep for a longer stint, but often it requires additional help.  For example, on the weekend he woke after the first 40 minutes, he went back to sleep when I fed him but he didn’t like being put back in the cot.  Andrew was having a little kip, so I put Nathan in bed with Andrew and the two of them slept soundly for another hour.  🙂  So all in all I think that Nathan is finally getting better with his sleeping.  It is certainly a lot better than it was, and I now feel like I’m getting a reasonable amount of sleep.  Hoorah!

Sunday activities/Darjeeling Express


18 Jan

Posted in Friends, Movies, Snorkelling | No Comments »

Last Sunday Iris came over to visit and we took her snorkelling.  She had never been before, and so we went to Clovelly which is a pretty easy sort of place to start.  We had a nice time in the water with the rest of the hoards, but it started to rain just as we were getting out.

We then headed to Newtown for dinner (Indian) and went to the movies.  Darjeeling Limited (hope I spelled that correctly) is the movie we saw.  It was a good movie, but certainly not one I’d recommend to everyone!  It was very strange with rather unlovable main characters, but I enjoyed it anyway.  It also had a strange music score, and yet it suited the movie well!  I thought it was very well done.

New Year’s Eve


04 Jan

Posted in Friends, Sydney city | No Comments »

Our new year celebrations went really well. Gabe and Julie parked at our residential complex, and we all took the train into the city together. There were loads of people already on the Cahill Expressway when we got there, but we squeezed ourselves into a good spot and ate our picnic dinner. The fireworks at 9 pm were pretty good, and then we were kicked off the road. Andrew and I had tickets to the midnight fireworks as well, so we said goodbye to Gabe, Julie and Matthew and lined up to go in again. We got through the bag search area but then had to wait for the gates to open before we could go find ourselves a spot. We found a great spot right at the front of the road and Andrew set up the tripod in preparation (so we didn’t lose our spot!). He took lots of photographs while we waited, and I had a bit of a snooze on the fold up chair that we’d taken.

The midnight fireworks were quite specatcular, with some fireworks being set off from the tops of the buildings surrounding circular quay. However, the bridge didn’t seem to feature in the fireworks until the grand finale. Everyone had set themselves up where we were in order to get a good view of the bridge, and so many were a bit disappointed.

Anyway, for my first lot of fireworks I’ve seen in Sydney for New Year’s Eve, I thought they were pretty good. Andrew didn’t think they were as good as other years. He did get some good photos though!

Then began what felt like a long trek back to the train station, along with hoards of other people. I’ve never seen so many people in the city before! Thankfully we didn’t have to wait long for our train, and it wasn’t too full either.

Jervis Bay weekend


12 Dec

Posted in Friends, Snorkelling, Travel | No Comments »

Last weekend a group of 6 of us went to Jervis Bay. We drove down on Saturday morning, stayed at Bristol Point camp ground that night and drove home on Sunday afternoon. Our little group consisted of Aurelie, Nico, Andrew (Rose), Manibu, Andrew and I. We went to the Blow Hole at Kiama, followed by the Little Blow Hole and we stopped at Nowra to get some food for the trip. After we had set up our tents at our camp site, we walked the 400 metres to the beach and went swimming. Everyone went snorkelling except me, since I’d forgotton to bring my contacts!!!

From there we went to a beach on the other side of the peninsula, which was at the end of a long dirt road. On the way we saw numerous wallabies hopping away from us, but we also saw an Echidna which just tried hard to bury itself while we tried to take photos. The beach was lovely and white with firm, fine sand that was easy to walk on.

Back at the tent site we cooked our dinner over a fire, and just sat around and talked.

I didn’t sleep well because it was hot in our tent, so when I woke up at 4:45 am I decided I’d go down to the beach and watch the sun rise. I dragged Andrew along, but it wasn’t a very impressive sun rise and we were eaten alive by mosquitos, so at 6 am we went back to the tent for another snooze. We both felt cooler and slept for a bit.

We had pancakes with fruit and maple syrup for breakfast, then packed up the campsite and went to Cave Beach for a couple of hours. The boys had fun trying to body surf on the waves. It was very windy on the beach, making it a bit unpleasant, so we decided to find somewhere else for lunch. The lunch spot ended up being Hole in the Wall, which was very nice and after lunch Aurelie, Nico and Manibu went snorkelling. We also saw a huge eagle soaring up in the sky, and as it got near we realised it was a sea eagle. I’ve never seen one in the wild before, so that was something very special.

Then started the trek home, with a little detour to Husskinson where we got ice creams, and on a short walk on the rocky beach we saw a Sooty Oystercatcher and loads of Port Jackson shark egg cases. I’ve never seen so many in one place before, there were thousands!!

Rikke’s visit


30 Oct

Posted in Friends, Snorkelling, Sydney | No Comments »

Last Wednesday my friend from Denmark, Rikke, and her mother and mother’s friend (Lisa) arrived for a holiday in Australia. I picked them up from the airport and dropped them at their accommodation in Clovelly. Friday night we picked them all up and went to visit Mick in his new flat in Randwick, and then all went out for dinner. We went to a Lebanese restaurant which was very tasty!

Andrew had to work on Saturday night, from around 11 pm to 7 am, so I decided to take Rikke and co. snorkelling at Balmoral Beach to see if we could see any sea horses there. I picked them up at Clovelly around 9 am, got lost on the way to Balmoral Beach (I should have paid more attention to the street directory) and when we finally arrived we had to spend quite a while searcing for a carpark. So we finally made it to Balmoral beach, with Rikke nursing a hangover, but when we got in the water we discovered it was very turbid and so the visibility was dreadful. The water level was higher than I’d ever seen it before, and there was no way you’d be able to snorkel along the net without hitting your head on the jetty. So much for our snorkelling trip!

We decided to call it quits, went back to the car and I drove them to North Head to see the views across to the city. We had lunch at a cafe there, but the food was overpriced, wasn’t great quality and we waited ages for it to be brought to our table. I certainly won’t be going back there again!

I dropped everyone off in Manly and got home around 3 pm. Andrew had only just woken up, so it was good to be out of the flat so that I didn’t disturb him….and it was nice to get into the water, even if it was dirty and polluted with rubbish.

They all flew to WA on Monday morning, but will be back in about a month for a couple of days before flying home again.

My busy week in Victoria


21 Oct

Posted in Family, Friends, Melbourne, Travel, Vic | 1 Comment »

My one week holiday has gone very well really. I spent a night with Grandma in Timboon, then drove to Melbourne and spent a night with Janis, took the car into the Docklands Subaru service place on Monday morning to get the cruise control reset and then had the rest of the day for shopping (I needed bras). I popped into Kate’s mum’s place to drop off birthday presents for the girls and then ended up at Steph’s for the night. We decided to have pizza for dinner, but found that the pizza shop was shut so we made our own with mushrooms, capsicum, spinach, goats cheese and normal cheese. It was really yummy!

Tuesday morning I went to a bra place in Camberwell that was fantastic and got me fitted out in less than 15 minutes with comfy and supportive maternity bras. I hadn’t felt so comfortable for probably the last 4 months!! Then I visited Liz and Tony for lunch and stayed there until almost tea time! I stayed that night with Trish and we ordered pizza for dinner. It wasn’t until I was driving over to Huntingdale to meet Tim and Janine for a pizza lunch on Wednesday that I realised how much pizza I’d been eating! Oh well, it was all yummy.

After lunch on Wednesday I went for a swim at the pool in Waverley Road. The complex was being built when I lived in Melbourne but didn’t open until I left, and was busting to go there. I used to swim in the 50 m outdoor pool before the complex was built, but now it’s nicely heated. Nothing like the freezing water that Tim and I used to do lunchtime laps in many years ago now. From there it was to Oma’s house where my parents were staying, and we went to a Vietnamese place for dinner with Bruno, Keren and Conrad, and finished up at their house for desert. I stayed that night at Oma’s.

Thursday morning I drove to Andrew’s friend Aaron’s warehouse in Ringwood to drop off Andrew’s turbo that he no longer needs. I hadn’t really spent much time talking to Aaron before, and was amazed that we chatted away quite easily and I was there for an hour! From there I headed to Danielle’s place in Bayswater, but before visiting her I dropped into a great second hand children’s clothes shop at The Basin called Hand Me Downs and purchased 11 little outfits for $1 each. It was great to catch up with Danielle and meet her son Nathan for the first time. He’s now 5 months old, and Danielle gave me her bassinet and some clothes that Nathan no longer fits into. He was a bit grizzly all afternoon, but he was still very cute!

I was spending the night at Tricia’s house again, but I’d only just got there when it was time to go and pick up Andrew from the airport. So off I went, picked him up and went back to Tricia’s. Ian was spending the night, and Aaron was there as well, and we all had a late dinner after Andrew and I got back. We celebrated with Trish the fact that she most likely has a new job because we wouldn’t be around in a week when it’s all sorted out.

Friday morning Andrew and I took the car back to Docklands Subaru because the engine light had come on again and the cruise control light was flashing. They told us that the problem was the catalytic converter, and it was just going to keep happening. I had hoped that we’d get some time using the cruise control on the way back to Sydney, but at that stage it seemed unlikely. And as expected, the engine light came on again not long after we left Melbourne so cruise control was inactive for the entire trip back to Sydney.

I had left my bag at Tricia’s house, so we had to pop back there to pick it up, and then we drove to Jeff’s Shed to meet up with mum and Andrew’s mum to go to the baby expo. Thankfully it wasn’t as busy there as it was in Sydney, and I felt I got more out of it. We spent about 3 hours at the expo, then walked to Swanston Street to have lunch at the Hari Krishner place, went to Koko Black for a chocolate each, and then got the tram back to the car. We drove to Oma’s house where we packed the car with all the stuff that Mum and Dad had brought to Melbourne for me, went to Tamani’s for dinner with mum, dad and Andrew’s parents, and then went back to Andrew’s parents’ place to stay the night.

Saturday morning we left early to drive to Echuca. It was a pretty hot day, and when we got there we went to the tourist info place to get ideas of things to do. We decided to do a 1 hour cruise on a paddle steamer, and ended up choosing to go on the one that starred in the 1980’s tv series All The Rivers Run. Before the cruise we had a yummy lunch of fish and chips, and afterwards we walked around town for a bit and then booked into our B&B which was a gorgeous old house with some 100 years of history. There were 2 rooms available to stay in, and we had the one with the spa bath in it…and given I’d never been in a spa bath, I just HAD to have a bath. It was devine. The B&B was also just walking distance from the restaurant we were booked into for dinner, and it was a very pleasant balmy evening and perfect for being outdoors.

Sunday morning we cooked our breakfast, and left for Sydney just before 9 am. It’s now nearly 5 pm and we have just passed Goulburn, so I guess we have about 2 hours to go. I’ve had a great week. 🙂

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