It's Sunday night, the last day of the two-week Easter break. We had an epic 10-day holiday in Thailand, which I'll write about in my next post. We got back on Thursday morning and have spent the past few days unpacking, doing laundry, cleaning up and catching up with friends before we get back to reality and the new school term! When arrived in Melbourne it was a grey, drizzly morning, and quite depressing after our tropical weather in Thailand! Apparently, it has been very rainy for the past two weeks, so of course I feel very smug that we were not around! The clocks have also changed, so it ..read more

In early February my parents came for a six week visit - just two short months after they left us in early December. We felt incredibly fortunate to have them back so soon after their last visit - made possible due to a timely Air Canada seat sale! You would think that having them around would have allowed me to have more time to keep up with things like this blog, but we managed to pack a lot into their stay at the weekends, thus there was not much time to sit around on the computer.  Here are my top 10 highlights from their stay! 1. Beach days We had lovely summer weather the majority o ..read more

We are nearly finished the first term of the 2024 school year, and what a whirlwind it has been! Ollie started prep and my parents were here for a visit, arriving just after we went back to school. Thankfully the Labour Day long weekend is in March, perfectly timed to coincide with my birthday falling on the Saturday this year. We decided to head east of the city to Gippsland, settling on the boating town of Metung for some much needed rest and relaxation. Our adventure began on Friday afternoon when my parents picked up the kids from school at lunchtime so they could get ahead of t ..read more

We've had a pretty low key summer, with not much planned besides an invitation to stay at a new friend's beach house for two nights in mid-January. We met these new friends (Sarah and Adrian) in October, through a party at a former work colleague of Andy's. Adrian is a Design Technology teacher like Andy, and they have two girls aged 7 and 8 who Ella and Ollie played with all afternoon. Sarah and Adrian lived abroad in a few different countries for a long time, most recently in Sweden, and had just come back to Melbourne to be with Sarah's family (Adrian is originally from Belgium). We cli ..read more

It's 2024! Holy moly, how did that come around so fast?! Christmas was a pretty quiet affair for us this year. My parents spent the holiday in California with Mike and Ashley, as they were with us here in Melbourne last year. Not only that, but the weather here was terrible. It rained all day, only clearing up around 5pm - definitely not the weather we've come to expect here for Christmas, but I suppose it can't be hot and sunny every year. We tried to tell the kids not to wake us up before 6:30am on Christmas morning, but of course I heard them giggling together just before 6am. Ollie crawl ..read more

Some of you might recognise the title of this post as a line from a song from the movie Spirited, a Netflix reimagining of "A Christmas Carol", starring Will Ferrell and Ryan Reynolds. It came out last year, but we only got around to watching it a few weeks ago. It's so good! Ever since I have quite a few of the songs from it stuck in my head, which is not a bad thing. Watching Christmas movies is one way we've got into that Christmas morning feeling this year, with Spirited being the first one. Ella has watched just about every "made for TV" Christmas movie on Netflix, she's really into them ..read more

A few weekends ago we decided to head into the city to check out some of the free festivals happening over the weekend. My parents have been visiting us since mid-October, and we really hadn't done much exploring in the city since they'd arrived. That Saturday morning started as it usually does: with Ella's netball match. My mom and Andy took her to that, while my dad and I stayed home with Ollie. Ollie isn't keen on going to her matches, so if we don't have to drag him along it's easier for everyone involved. He doesn't yet do his own team sports, which he believes is "totally" unfair. (Ollie ..read more

This post is follows on from my last post on our three days in Byron Bay.  The day we left Byron Bay it was rainy and cool - weather we are very used to in Melbourne this time of year, but a bit disappointing for our holiday in Queensland! We left our cabin in Byron mid-morning, driving about 45 minutes north to Currumbin Beach, located in the southern part of the Gold Coast. The Gold Coast is actually a city - the sixth largest in Australia, even though the name makes it sound like a region. The city stretches along the eastern coast of Australia for about 70 km, and as the name implies ..read more

It's been a while! The months just seem to be whizzing by and sitting down to catch an hour or two to write a blog post seems impossible these days. Here is my attempt to get started again, finishing off a post I had half written at the end of September. During our Term 3 school holidays this year we spent a week "up north", spending three days in Byron Bay and the other four in the Gold Coast. This post is about our three days in Byron Bay, which is located on the east coast of Australia, about two hours south of Brisbane. The morning we left we caught a 9am flight from Melbourne to Gold Coa ..read more

Ok, one month later! Here is a snapshot of our last two days in Adelaide during our winter school holidays. I wrote about our drive from Melbourne to Adelaide here and our first two days here.  Our third day was a cold and cloudy day. We started the day with a visit to our house. Yes that's right, our house! Over the past 18 months we've been having a house built as an investment property, and it was completed and has been rented out since May. We figured we should actually check out this place we'd invested in so we drove the 40km or so out of Adelaide to a suburb full of new build house ..read more