Month Six Report

I had to reach back pretty far in the month to find some photos taken in the sun. June started out just gorgeous. We had day after day of sun and then midway through the month the rain came and never left. June felt hard at times. For the first time I felt like we were missing out on meaningful events back home. Brian and I missed our fifteen college reunion. 

While friends posted about the start of summer we snuggled under blankets.

The girls started saying more about missing home. From time to time they would say they prefer the US to Australia and I'd remind them that it's okay to feel that way because the US is home. 

There are things that I really miss from home - Monty, our bed, family and the easy intimacy of old friends. I really really miss having a familiar grocery store. I do not miss having a second car. I love living in a truly walkable area. I enjoy the freedom of not having house projects to do and a yard to manage. I'll be excited to get back to our house and our kitchen and our cozy, cozy bed. But I'll be so so sad when it's time to leave here. 

I really adore our new friends here. The girls have each met a wonderful group of kids at their school and Brian and I really enjoy the parents as well. When we walk through town we invariably see people we know and we really feel a part of the community. As Emily says in her letter to friends says and Tessie's party reminds us it really is great here. 

Ballerina, Jewelry, Dress Up Party

Tess turns five on July 9th, midway through our two week July holidays. We decided to celebrate her birthday early so we could catch friends before they went out of town. We invited all the girls in her class plus two other friends and to our delight all but two could come. 

I asked Tess what kind of party she wanted and she decided it should be a Ballerina, Jewelry, Dress Up, Everything Girlie party and that's what she got! Her friends played along and all came in fancy dress or dance wear.

I'm not big on party games (despite their popularity here) but I do enjoy a good craft so we set up three activities for the girls. 

The kids really enjoyed the crafts. I loved seeing them all spread out on the floor busy with markers and glue.

Here one of the mums demonstrates how to balance the butterfly. If you look closely you'll see another mum is wearing a Froot Loop necklace. 

After doing some crafts, enjoying some free play and building a blanket fort we broke out the Peppa Pig cake that Tessie picked out.

We then opened up gifts. Tess received some amazing games and many fun crafts. The girls can't wait to dig into them. Lucky for us we have two weeks off school to do so.

Our wonderful babysitter Kate helped a ton with everything from making signs and cutting out butterflies to managing crafts and cleaning up. We were so glad she could be a part of the day.

Check out the stop motion video of the party. It's two and a half minutes long. The party starts around the 0:30 mark, the Froot Loop necklaces are at the 1:00 mark and Kate falls asleep around 1:35. Poor girl, she's sick now. I hope we didn't wear her out!

News and videos

This morning I helped with reading groups in Tess's classroom. I try to do this once a week. I love seeing her in a classroom setting. Today I also stayed for fruit break and news time. This week the kids were asked to talk about a way to improve the school. Tess suggested we add some tree houses.

As we were wrapping up I looked out the window and spotted an adorable green parrot with a colorful belly. Tess pointed it out to the class and we all went out to admire it in the tree. 

It turns out it's a rainbow lorikeet like this one below.

Speaking of Tess and reading, she just made a big leap in reading. It brings me so much joy to hear her. Here she is reading a book that Emily was reading at the beginning of the year. 

And here is Emily singing a song from school. I love hearing her Aussie accent. I notice it most when she sings since she's working so hard to mimic her teachers.

And now, after eleven long days, Daddy's back!

Bali Dreaming

Where in the World is Daddy? - that's the title of the map and calendar on our fridge. Over the course of eleven days Brian is traveling for work to Penang, Malaysia; Bankok, Thailand; and Jakarta, Indonesia. This adds three countries to his already impressive list of countries visited. 

Meanwhile, the girls and I are weathering a particularly rainy cold snap back home in Sydney. We are occupying ourselves with a lot of craft and a little more eating out than usual. Both girls have discovered babycinos - a coffee-free kids version of the cappuccino that consists of steamed milk with chocolate powder on top. 

While our US friends are sending us their end of the school year pictures we are listening to the driving rain and cozying up to the two places in our apartment with heat - the living room and Brian and my bedroom. The girls have electric blankets on their beds so we warm up their beds before they climb in. 

We have one more week of school and then we will have two and a half weeks off for July holidays. This allows us some time to relax and do play dates with friends and then it gives us the opportunity for our next exciting international trip - Bali!

We will be in Bali for six days. I've showed the girls a few photos from our hotel and they are getting really excited. Emily has a friend who went there and stayed in the same hotel and said that it has the largest water slide in the whole wide world! I'm pretty sure this last bit won't hold up to vigorous fact checking but I'm not making a thing of it. 

Month Five Report

I have put off writing this one long enough that we are now half way into month six. Eek. I feel like time is flying by. I want to slow it down and savor every day. At the same time, I know I will love going back home. There are plenty of things I miss. Boston really is home. Sydney is a wild and wonderful adventure.

So what happened in May? For one thing we experienced an Australian autumn. I hesitate to call it fall because it really didn't feel like fall. It felt strange to experience autumn without pumpkins, cider, apple picking and falling leaves. New England really excels at fall and Sydney cannot compare. That said, Sydney in autumn is still sunny, warm and full of flowers so I consider an Aussie autumn a reasonable substitute for a New England spring. When I toggled back and forth between the Belmont forecast and the Balmain forecast on my phone I found the weather to be surprisingly similar for much of May.

A few trees in our area changed color but mostly we are surrounded by a sea of green. To my amazement bushes continue to produce new flowers. Even when it poured - and it occasionally did - I looked out and realized the rain was pouring down on palm trees and a pool.

The air definitely feels crisper. We have cooler mornings and less humidity than when we first moved here. The beach seems less tempting. People wear scarves in the morning but still end up in short sleeves by afternoon. I definitely felt a little autumn boost in energy. I felt like turning over a new leaf even if it wasn't the start of the school year. I started running in May and I'm now six weeks into training for a 5K race. I really enjoy getting out and exploring the Balmain peninsula. I'm even getting better at running hills since that seems to be most of what we have here. I also find that running helps slow down time. A half hour run seems to last an eternity so three more months must be a very long time indeed.

Getting into the autumn - and now winter - mindset also makes late August seem very far away but, of course, it's not. I have already signed both girls up for soccer in Belmont in September. I have completed Tess's Kindergarten registration for Winn Brook. I took a look at the calendar and realized that we arrive home the Thursday before Labor Day weekend and the girls start school the following Wednesday and Thursday! So that will be a tight turn around but I'm going with the theory that kids benefit from routine particularly in times of transition.

Athletics Carnival

Today we experienced another Australian first - a school Athletics Carnival. All the kids from Kindergarten, Year One and Year Two rode chartered buses over to one of the town fields to spend the day running races and having fun outside. 

They divided the kids into three houses and asked them to come dressed in their house colors - either Garnet, Saphire or Amber. Emily and Tess were thrilled to have a day off from wearing their school uniforms. We don't have a lot of non-school clothes to chose from so we made do with pink striped shirts. Families are kept together so Emily and Tess got to be in the same house. They were joined by three of Emily's closest friends from 1S - Maya, Julia and Frances.

The teachers sorted the first races by age. Tess ran in the youngest set with kids who turn five this year. As we dressed for school she looked concerned and claimed she didn't want to run in any races but once there she gamely competed. She came in third in her race and got to wear a special ribbon for the rest of the day.

Emily ran with the turning seven set. She came in second. She really seemed to enjoy it. I can definitely picture her running track one day.

After the age based races they shifted to some silly events - egg and spoon race, a three legged race, hop like a frog, wear ski clothes and the like. I had gone home for lunch by that point but another mum got this great photo of Tess with her apron, egg and spoon. 

All told they both had a lot of fun. Their school does a good job of keeping them outside and active, encouraging competition but also just making it fun. They have a wonderful sense of community. Having days like this also assuages some of my guilt over keeping the girls in school for June, July and August while their American counterparts are heading off on summer vacation. I guess we had our carefree summer days in January. We have a two week holiday coming again in July and we've just booked our tickets to Bali so really these kids have a pretty good life. 

Camping on Cockatoo Island

Last night we ticked another item off our Sydney bucket list - we went camping on Cockatoo Island. Or I should say glamping. Given that we left all our gear back in Boston we chose to go with the full service option where you arrive to a tent already set up with camp beds, linens, lounge chairs and lanterns. After leading dozens of backpack trips over the years it felt odd to make this Emily and Tess's first experience sleeping outside but it was unique and wonderful in its own way.

We had a two bedroom tent with twin beds on one end and a double bed on the other and a covered area in the middle. 

We took the ferry over to Cockatoo right after school let out so we only had an hour and a half to explore before sun set. We walked around the campsite area to get our bearings and then explored the water's edge while the sun went down.

The girls grabbed their notebooks and wrote down details about their experience. While Brian and I fussed over getting a few good pictures in the fading light they stopped every few feet to keep asking me how to spell Cockatoo.

When the sun went down a few dim lights along the path came on and then the lights of Sydney and surrounding suburbs started coming on. 

We cooked our dinner over the electric grills in the communal kitchen area. We heard the campsites  get quite crowded in summer but on this warm and lovely first weekend of winter we practically had the place to ourselves. 

Brian's colleague Joel and his family came in on a 6pm ferry and joined us for dinner and the night. We enjoyed talking with them while the kids ran around with their torches and glow sticks and marveled at all the stars.

We left the glow sticks out next to the girls beds and put a lantern in the middle of the tent so they had a little bit of light. To our amazement they fell asleep around 7:30pm and slept through the entire night. 

Brian got this cool long exposure photo of the kids' setup.

Thanks to Vivid Sydney we could clearly see the lights on the Harbour Bridge. In fact they changed color ever minute or so. What a treat!

"Winter" camping in the southern hemisphere has a few distinct advantages. Given that the sites don't book up completely we were able to look at the forecast before we booked and chose a Friday night with highs in the low 70's and lows of about 60 degrees. The early sun set cut short our exploration time but ensured that the kids got to sleep at a reasonable hour. We got a full night's sleep and awoke around 6:30am in time to take in a gorgeous rosy sunrise.

We loved the quiet and the stillness of the harbor in the early morning.

Brian cooked up his traditional Saturday morning pancakes on the grill.

Tess and Emily really hit it off with Joel's three year old daughter. They loved the freedom of running and playing in all the open space.

We packed up our bags, checked out of our tents and set out to explore the island in day time.

Cockatoo Island holds a UNESCO World Heritage listing for both its early convict history and its later importance for ship building. When traveling with kids we haven't put much emphasis on convict sites. The girls are still fairly oblivious to this strange and fascinating part of Australian history. They only vaguely grasp how prisons work and at this age I'm okay with that. 

From 1839 to 1869 Cockatoo Island served as a secondary punishment area for convicts that reoffended during their time in the colonies. As such it represents some of the darker and more sinister side of the time - think Alcatraz. We walked through the old prison buildings and read the descriptions of historic overcrowding, solitary confinement, forced manual labor and a lot of other unsavory details. The kids skipped along through the area oblivious to the deeper meaning. I, for one, am glad I read all this information after we had spent the night and not before.

The island also served as one of Australia's biggest shipyards. The abandoned industrial site felt as if the workers just walked away one day. We walked through the random tunnels, peaked in the windows of the buildings and looked at the rusted out cranes that hung silently.

The area has since been re-imagined as a conference center, event location, art gallery space and now urban camping locale. During the day I found it all a little creepy but definitely uniquely Australian and not like any place I'd ever been before. I imagine in the heat of summer with the hopping Island Bar open and the sunlight and crowds it would have a very different feel. Still, I am definitely glad we went.