Loving our neighbours

We have had the nicest weekend with our neighbours, who we think may soon believe we are weirdos from a neighbour-loving cult. (Which is ridiculous because everyone knows we formed our own splinter cult from the neighbour-loving cult months ago.) Saturday started with aslightly more successful ballet class for Scarlett who only had to be talked into dancing for the first 20 minutes of the 30 minute class, before finally joining in, and then only with Margaret the 56-year-old teacher. In the afternoon we went in to see our next door neighbours Kirsty and Simon for a bbq. Scarlett and Gabe play so well together we hardly saw them and Florence and two-year-old Charlie pottered about in the garden. Watching the kids play swingball, took me back and made me feel old all at the same time. The grown-ups in the meantime settled in for an afternoon of Singapore Slings, thanks to the generous donation of bush limes from another neighbour, while the sausages and chicken cooked and the potatoes roasted. When it was time to eat the kids all sat together at 'the kids table". My god, it really doesn't seem that long ago that I was sitting at such a table, when mum and dad had friends over to our house. After dinner they jumped in the bath together before being snapped, ensuring embarrassing incriminating photos to be produced at 21st birthday parties in the future.

This morning was gloriously spring-like, despite the season still officially being about 4 weeks off. After soccer,  and with Rob sleeping off a night shift and Florence out for the count in her cot, I sat on the front verandah in the sun reading the papers, chatting to Kirsty and Simon, doing the same on theirs, while the kids zoomed up and down the footpath on their scooters. It feels like home.

The new weekend regime

In an effort to keep Scarlett occupied during the winter, in absence of an open air pool or ocean warm enough to swim in, she has started a new term of gymnastics once a week. She loves it, works up a good sweat and is very good at listening to the teachers, if not us. Something goes wrong whenever we try ballet, however. We have already had to get a full refund from the first ballet school we tried, when after begging to do ballet for about a year, she refused to join in after the first class. A good deal of stroppy arm folding and marching away accompanied any attempt to persuade her to go into the school hall where the classes took place. We suspected the problem was either the formality of the lessons - which were very much of the 'first position, second position' variety - and the fact that parents had to wait outside during the class.

Last weekend at the local market, we bumped into a friend of a friend who told us about a local ballet school that sounded much more Scarlett's pace and that would appeal to her sense of humour. The class is run by 62-year-old Barbara, who looks about 45, who has run the classes since 1972, prompted by a sense of community instilled in her by her old Welsh commie dad. Wearing just a pair of tights with knickers over the top and a woolly jumper, she and her sister (in her late 50s) run about like fairies, followed by a parade of small girls in fairy and ballet dresses. It's hilarious. Again for reasons unknown Scarlett refused to join in... until Rob agreed to join in too. It was agreed by the rest of the parents in the room, that this was the best laugh anyone had had in years, as Rob was put through his paces. One of the other mothers there is the director of Play School and suggested Rob would make a great Play School presenter. On Saturday night Rob and I booked our babysitter and went out on a date. We realised recently that it had been years since we had been out for dinner when we weren't with other friends or the girls or reviewing restaurants. We booked two seats at the counter of the fantastic Glebe Point Diner, a new place in Glebe that has received terrific reviews since it opened. High demand meant earlier attempts to get in were impossible. We started off out on the deck with blankets over our knees sipping champagne before going inside for duck, rabbit, chocolate mousse and other comfort food. Apart from the food, what we enjoyed the most was that, as it's only a suburb away from our house, we were able to walk there and back through a lovely harbour front park.

This morning, we were out and about again, this time taking a stroll down the hill to the local football pitch for the soccer skills class put on every weekend for free by the local football club. Being Australia, 'football' means rugby league or Aussie rules, so what we poms call football is known as soccer here. Attempts to educate Aussies otherwise is met with laughter and name calling. They are not interested in hearing the words "world game".Once again, Scarlett was really looking forward to it and was great practising her ball control skills, but as soon as the kids were split into teams to play she was having none of it. While she stropped about the edges of the pitch, we caught up with some mates and drank coffee. Florence in the meantime seems like a natural, and I am officially a 'soccer mom'. The weekend finished with our friends the O'Briens and the McPhersons coming over on Sunday afternoon for drinks.

Food and photos

Today our dining room took on the appearance of a photographic studio when a Sydney Morning Herald photographer and stylist came to shoot a number of dishes I had cooked. It was all for a cover story  I am writing for the food section of the paper, comparing the cost and convenience of home-cooked food with takeout. Yes, these are the serious and lofty journalistic endeavours I now undertake. Kate Adie look out. For a week Rob and I ate only takeout followed by a week of eating home-cooked food. Eating a lot of takeout started off as a fun novelty but then very quickly became BOOORRRINNG. Today I had to cook all the meals again for the stylist and photographer to make look incredible. Suddenly a pile of brown casserole looked like something from the pages of a Roux Brothers cookbook.  Now we have 14 portions of cooked food to eat, so tonight our next door neighbours are coming in to help us eat a roast chicken, a mushroom rissotto, a lamb casserole, a chicken casserole, roasted salmon and fillet steak. Food poisoning anyone?

This is Winter

The Pope has brought spectacular winter weather to Sydney this week alongwith zillions of happy, singing pilgrims, road closures, prayer vigils and funny t-shirt sightings. This week he took to the water on a huge boat full of priests and cardinals for a big harbour tour. He ended up outside my waterfront office surrounded by hundreds of boats. The 8 helicopters hovvering outside our office windows was more than a little distracting.

With Greg, the world's best handyman banging and crashing about the house reorganising our miniscule laundry, fixing things and filling in things I took the girls to Balmoral beach for our first beach trip since the Autumn. It was spectacular. A cloudless sky, not a breath of wind on the harbour and hardly anyone else on the beach, save for a few hardy folk - usually in their 80s - who swim in the ocean all

year round. It was perfect for a morning of shell collecting, sand castle construction and paddling and, for Florence, her first walk along the beach since getting on her feet. Here are a few pix of our beach trip and our house.

Pope on a rope

Sydney has been overrun with zillions of rapidly reproducing Catholics this week, all here on a pilgrimage to see the Pope who arrives this week for World Youth Day aka the Catholic Olympics. The arrival of his eminence is imminent, as Pope Benedict, or Benny as he is known to his closest friends, flies into Australia on Sunday for the week long Catholic knees up. However he will not be seen in public until next Thursday when he holds a massive mass. One can only assume he will be spending these three days getting over jetlag, pottering about the shops around The Rocks, taking surfing lessons and attempting Bridgeclimb like every other tourist in the city. T-shirts sporting the logo "I've been touched by the Pope Down Under" have been spotted, but so far no sign of the must have bathroom accessory of the year - the pope on a rope.

Happiness is a house in Lilyfield

We have had our first complete week together in our new house all together, since Rob got back from New Zealand. We are so blissfully happy here, it works so well as a family house and there's so much space for everyone and everything. On Friday we had the fireplace in the sitting room opened up and had our first real fire that night which was fantastic. Rob hasn't quite got over the novelty of it yet and has been lighting fires in the mornings as well as at night. We really need it now as winter is upon us, and despite lovely sunny days, it's still chilly in the morning and at night. We had a our first lot of visitors here at the weekend for a couple of boozy afternoons, including one with our lovely new next door neighbours. On one side we have Simon and Kirsty with their new baby Maggie, 2-year-old Charlie and 6-year-old Gabe. Scarlett and Gabe hit it off immediately and are in and out of each other's houses and gardens on a regular basis. Scarlett starts school next year and will hopefully be going to the same school as him too. On the other side are Steve and Barbara, and their grown up kids, who are incredibly friendly. We are a short walk from the organic markets held every Saturday, are only minutes from the tram stop to the city and my bike ride to work is now only 15 minutes instead of 35. There's also a massive park at the end of the road which all the kids love going to, and another one down the hill that connects to a wetland walk for spotting turtles, blue-tongue lizards and fish. In other news Florence is now walking. It took her until 15 months, just like Scarlett. She is the happiest baby I have ever known and is a super cuddler. She and Scarlett are starting to spar a bit more now, fighting over toys and books but they love each other to bits.

Quite a send off

Barb had an amazing send off last week at her funeral in Carterton, followed by an enthusiastic wake in Greytown that went on until the early hours. Rob brought a DVD of the funeral service back to Sydney with him and so I was able to watch what was a moving, funny and fitting tribute to his mum. Lots of different family and friends got up to speak about Barb's love of family, wine, and argument, her open door policy and lots of late nights playing cards.  I was especially proud of Rob overcoming his fear of public speaking to deliver a fantastic eulogy. Despite going to bed late on Saturday morning, Rob and his siblings got up and drove down to Wellington, to Island Bay where they grew up, and scattered Barb's ashes in the ocean.

Barbara

Rob's mum Barbara died in hospital in New Zealand this morning. Rob was with her.  She was diagnosed with lung cancer towards the end of last year and her health had been declining steadily ever since. She was here staying with us just a month ago and although she was clearly a shadow of her former self,  we had a great visit with her with plenty of laughs and a chance to say goodbye. Barbara was very popular and had many friends, many of whom she had known most of her life, and who were still coming to see her until the day she died. Barbara spent her last weeks with all her family around her.  Rob's brother Craig, his sisters Catherine and Helen and Rob's dad Ian, had all been staying near her in Greytown, where she lived for the last few years, and were taking turns caring for her until a fall, that broke her hip, sent her to the hospital in Masterton, where she died. Barbara was a super mother-in-law, always up for a white wine and good long chat. She leaves her four children and an affectionate ex-husband in Ian, and six grandchildren - Nicole and Ryan in Brisbane, William and Libby in London and Scarlett and Florence. She was much loved and will be missed and remembered with affection and a smile by all of us.

Above are a couple of photos of Barbara taken at Florence's christening in July last year. x

Packing

We are about to vanish into a black hole of packing boxes and there maybe radio silence for a week or two on the blog. That last couple of weeks have comprised mainly of trying to fit work and children's activities in around packing and organising all that has to be done before we move in next week. There are now soooo many boxes piled up around the house that we have made a fort in Scarlett's bedroom by throwing a blanket over four of them. I can't complain as I secretly really like packing. Have decided to splurge when it comes to the kitchen however and we are paying for it to be packed for us ( by 'us' I mean 'me' as Rob is not 'into' packing). The hardest bit is knowing when to pack the girls' rooms and all their toys. Yesterday Scarlett asked for something that had already disappeared into a cardboard box abyss. Greg the handyman is working at the house this week knocking the hell out of the hideous blue tiled water feature in the garden (in terrible rain that shows no sign of stopping), planing and rehanging doors now the carpets have been laid and generally being fab and adding more jobs to his list every time I think of something else I know we can't do. Yesterday we went and chose our Jetmaster fireplace and tomorrow, with the girls in daycare, we are off to buy wardrobes for their rooms, curtains, a tv cabinet and a new bathroom vanity unit. All very exciting. Today is my last day at work for 2 weeks. Huzzah.

This week I had to go back to the ABC to visit the Play School set to watch the filming of the epsiode I had seen in rehearsal. At the last minute the Play School director invited Scarlett to come with me. Rob leapt into action and delivered her to the studio to meet me at 10am and we spent two blissful hours meeting the presenters, the toys (there are 3 Humpties), helping make icing for the gingerbread making segment and watching all the action. Scarlett was thrilled and was made a big fuss of by Georgie Parker. I will post pics of this dazzling event when we get the mac set up in the new house.

Open wide, come inside...It's Play School

Play School has come back onto my viewing radar after a delay of, ooh, about 35 years. It plays a pivotal role in the bedtime (and disciplining) routine of the 4-year-old in our house. We tape it every morning and it is watched every night between bathtime and books. Naughty behaviour is punished with its withdrawal, with devastatingly effective results. As I've sat watching toilet rolls tubes become a happy family, hummed along to Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star or listened to a story being acted out with the help of the toys, I have considered that this is not work at all, but grown ups having a laugh and getting paid for it. I mean, how hard could it really be? Having mentioned this to the Tv editor, this morning I found myself at the ABC studios taking part in rehearsals for an episode of the show. It was brilliant fun, amazingly tightly scripted and a really good laugh. After the reharsal I was taken downstairs by the set designer to the magical, props-stuffed workroom she calls her office. Though cramped and windowless, it is a craft lovers dream, housing every conceivable kind of cardboard, cotton reel, box, pipe cleaner, paint, glitter, glue, cupcake case, feather, ribbon and loo roll. Heaven. Here I am cuddling the toys, with actor/presenters Georgie Parker and Rhys Muldoon (who were hilarious) and in my costume apron playing Old Mother Hubbard.

I blame a cold for my appallingly tuneless rendition of I'm A Little Teapot. Nonetheless I have been invited to go to the taping of the episode next week to see how the rehearsal compares to the real thing. As a sweetner there is the promise of the chance to sing the song again on the proper Play School set (OH MY GOD!) so I can have a tape to show Scarlett. It's too fabulous to resist. In my research I have discovered that Jemima totally lives up to her reputation for being difficult and that Humpty isn't as big in real-life. Who knew?

Me and my girl

Me and my girl Scarlett both tried something new last weekend, one of us more successful than the other. On Saturday at 9am we all turned up at Leichhardt Public School for Scarlett's first ballet class. Scarlett has been badgering us for ballet classes since she watched her first episode of Angelina Ballerina. She looked quite the young novice dressed in her beautiful pink ballerina dress and matching bolero. Of course, Scarlett was much talented than all the other children who were hopeless jokes whereas she was clearly a young Margot Fonteyn in the making.Oh how the other children looked on enviously. On Sunday, I subjected myself to total humiliation with my first (make that my last) trapeze lesson. Goodness me it really does look easier than it is. Which is not to say I didn't enjoy it, I did. I was particularly proud of my ability to face my awful fear of heights which exists in spite of an ability to toss myself from a plane and climb a 98 foot mast on a moving ship, but I have also frozen solid on top of the high board at the pool and half way up Angkor Wat. Stepping out on the narrow ironing board-sized launch platform was a breeze compared to stepping off it into an abyss of shame and humuliation and within seconds being expected to swing my legs up over the bar I was holding on to. It was hell on the stomach muscles and my hands were blistered by the end. It didn't help that while I was a beginner, while the other 3 in the class were aged 11, 14 and 15 and were on their 10th class. While they were backflipping, attempting catches with a catcher swinging on a second bar, I was flailing in mid air still trying to get my legs over the bar while stopping my leggings from slipping down. Scarlett was very proud however.

We have had a few visitors of late. Rob's mum Barb has been staying with us for 10 days,and while she was here her brother Barrie and niece Susie flew up from Melbourne for a visit. On Saturday night our old mate Sarah-Kate came for dinner. She was in Sydney for a few nights and will be back again soon before heading off to live in Mexico for the best part of a year while Mark works there on the new third Narnia movie. Also, some pictures of the girls wearing glasses. I don't know why it's funny, it just is.

Finally, next week I am auditioning to be a Play School presenter for a story for the paper and the week after will be interviewing The Wiggles.

I don't look a day over 39...

...however I am now 40. We celebrated in style with a week on magnificent Lord Howe Island. A drop in the Pacific, 2 hours' flying time from New South Wales, it is quite the island paradise. There are pristine empty beaches and the most beautiful lagoon where we did the best snorkelling I've done, apart from in The Maldives. We took the girls kayaking in glass bottom kayaks, went on a turtle spotting snorkelling trip and a round island boat trip. We cycled everywhere and took the girls on lovely walks along the beach, we fed kingfish on Ned's beach and watched them whip into a frenzy as we threw them bread. Our hotel was particularly gorgeous with just 12 little bungalows dotted in a rainforest, surrounding a day spa, which was filled with some really interesting people. At happy hour drinks each night we had some great laughs with other guests including Brits Joe and Janet Royle. Joe played football for England and used to manage Man City. We also enjoyed some great evenings with Dick and Juliana O' Bryan from Melbourne, the most well connected couple we have ever met. Scarlett was very well behaved (most nights) when she joined us for dinner, always finding a willing victim among the other guests to read her books or play cards and only passing out in the restaurant twice. The weather was a bit hit and miss, but on my birthday it was a perfect. We took the bottle of champagne sent by the McPhersons (thank you, you lovely people) and cycled to the lagoon with a bbq packed lunch, prepped us by the hotel, of fillet steaks and salad. While Florence slept in the pram, Rob got the fire going and Scarlett and I swam out to the pontoon in the lagoon for a sunbathe, returning for lunch and champagne. It was absolutely perfect. Later in the day I had a massage and facial before drinks and dinner with some of the other guests. Thank you to everyone who called me on the day, even if you didn't get to speak to me, it made me feel very special, and to everyone who sent gifts for Rob to bring over with us. I'm looking forward to enjoying one of my gifts this weekend - my first trapeze lesson. Watch this space...