Housewarming and Toni's Birthday

Two reasons for a party! And seeing as this was Toni's first experience of a Summer birthday, we had it in the garden. We had a great day for it (as you can see from the photos) - even the sight of an Englishman at the barbecue couldn't bring the rainclouds out.

Maddie could have been forgiven for thinking it was her party, as all her friends were there...she certainly treated the cakes as if they had been brought especially for her!


Fortunately the garden full of children (mostly under 3) we had were accompanied by an equal number of sets of parents to keep them under control!

Enough time has now passed to state confidently that I did not poison anyone and I have to say that for all a gas BBQ lacks in traditional activities (struggling to light it, wondering if the meat will cook before it starts raining, etc), it is definitely the way to go. We even started it up again in the evening to cook for the "night shift" of child-free couples who turned up at 7pm just as the last of the kids was leaving!

We eventually wound down well after dark with every workspace in the kitchen filled with bottles and plates! (It could have been much worse though - a big thank you to everyone who helped clear up despite our efforts to stop you).

We've been busy lately doing Christmassy things - taking Maddie to see the Christmas windows in town, going to an outdoor candlelit carol service last Sunday and also we've had quite a few work Christmas do's between the two of us. Too much to bore you all with here you'll be pleased to know :)

...oh and of course we're preparing for the 24 hour flight home on Thursday!! There will be a full report on how much sleep Maddie lets us have (and how many of the 350+ passengers she personally says hello to!) once we have recovered..probably at the weekend.

Dom

Long time no blog

We're getting worse! Over a month since the last blog. Oops. Well in our defence we have been very busy: starting the planning of the house extension that will happen sometime next year; getting ready for our housewarming party / Toni's 30th this Saturday; getting ready for the flight back to the UK for Christmas; and generally having fun in the sun with Maddie!

The weather is great at this time of year and we're really making the most of living in Williamstown now. It's easy to pop down to the beach after work with Maddie for a bit of splashing around...

...or go down to the harbourfront (usually for some ice-cream! Williamstown even has its own
ice-cream factory.

Anyway, got to dash now - I am in Sydney again and need to get back to work! Hope you're all well and looking forward to Christmas!

Feeling hot, hot, hot!

We're getting our first taste of the summer to come now (it's now nearly 2 months into Spring*)...Last weekend it was 25 degrees on Saturday followed by 31 degrees on Sunday! We spent a lot of time out in the garden, but far from relaxing we got stuck into all kinds of projects: making a vegetable garden; making Maddie a sandpit; and putting together the barbecue (about 6 weeks after I bought it - shame!).

As you can see Maddie didn't let a lack of any clothes stop her from giving me a hand with the assembly!!


It's been too long since we've written, and I can't really remember all of the things we've done. Maddie has started to make friends - her best friend is called Mabel (or "May-May" as Maddie prefers to say it).

We are starting to look forward to coming back to the UK for Christmas although only now do we realise quite how horrific the flight is going to be! Maddie is too small for a seat, but too big for the skycots, so she will have to clamber all over us all flight. (That is, in the brief interludes when she won't be running up and down the aisles non-stop, tripping up the air hostesses, and so on!)

Anyway til next time
Dom

* Aussie seasons start conveniently on the 1st of the relevant month: Spring - 1st Sept; Summer - 1st Dec; etc

Beach babe

It's been a glorious weekend here and as you can see Maddie has been making the most of it!












We cycled down to the beach (Maddie in her bike seat - she doesn't have her own bike just yet!). Maddie likes to take your helmet off for you when you stop, and then makes sure you put it back on before heading off!

She is also very strict with shoes and slippers - it is forbidden in Maddie's house to be barefoot. She brings your slippers when you get home - like having a puppy! - and won't leave you alone until you've put them on. As we have found out even being in the shower is no excuse for not having slippers on!

Also this weekend, Toni has just managed the busiest event to date at the Immigration Museum and so we're enjoying a few glasses of bubbly right now.
On which note I think I'll sign off...cheers!

Spider count: No more poisonous ones yet...
Snakes: 0

Spring has Sprung

Well, as of 1st September it is officially Spring here. For the last few weeks the weather has been lovely (about 20-25 degrees - hotter than a UK summer it seems) although we've been told by locals that it isn't normally this hot at the end of Winter/beginning of Spring!

It's meant that we've been able to get out and about lots, we had fish and chips sitting by the pier the other night and we've also been to the beach so that Maddie can play in the sand.

Dom is currently looking into buying a BBQ (barbie). They're not the simple affairs that they are in the UK and so there seems to be lots to consider. It seems that people put as much thought into buying a barbie as they do a house! Dom is considering taking a barbie cooking course...at least it means less cooking for Toni!

All else is going well...we're still unpacking but we're almost there.

We'll write more soon.

Spider count: starting to lose count (a couple of redbacks in the back garden, a couple of huntsmen (1 dead and 1 alive)
Snakes: 0
Visitors scared by spiders: 1 (that'll be Laura ;))

We're in! and (almost) unpacked

It's the end of our 2nd week in the house now and some form of sanity has begun to emerge from the boxes. Actually we've been surprised by how much space there is here - once all the other people's stuff has gone it looked totally different.

Maddie loves running around the place at increasingly alarming speeds! And although climbing the stairs was something of an obsession in the old place, she doesn't seem to miss them...having complete free reign of the house more than makes up for no stairs to climb I think. She also has her own kitchen cupboard, so she can help out by passing us her plates, bowls and cups when she's ready for food (i.e. all the time).

Maddie's settling in well at her new nursery. Slightly disconcertingly she has had 2 comments in her coomunication book that make us think she might be becoming a bit of a bully - 'maddie is increasingly communicating her emotions to the the other children' and 'maddie thinks that the cubby belongs to her and she shepherds out the other childrn'. This theory was reinforced when Toni and Maddie were at playgroup and she defended the cubby there by shouting at anyone who came close. Oh well, another developmental phase to ride out! Other than that though, she's being an angel and we're really enjoying her company.

Right then, we'd beter get back to our last few boxes...

One day to go!

Just a day (and a few hours) until we get the keys to our new house. Very excited, although we are starting to worry that we have too much stuff to fit in it! For the last 3 months we have been living with about 40 boxes still left packed as we couldn't put them anywhere here, and the new house is technically smaller...Hmmm.

On the bright side it is a great place and I will have a proper-sized shed with power at last!

It's late here - I am up watching the Tour de France 16th stage live and eating Corrina and Dave's wedding cake. Cheers guys. (Some of the TdF riders look to be eating something similarly calorific but I am 100% sure not as tasty.) Can "our" boy Cadel Evans (yes, he is Australian but there aren't any Brits in with a chance!) move up from 3rd place today?

I've just been over to Sydney again for a couple of days. This time I got to make it to the harbour/bridge/Opera House area for an evening as opposed to staying in the outer suburbs where we always get put up with work. Sadly a career in engineering is never going to get you the prime office locations! Although I still remain horribly biased towards Melbourne as all of us are over here, it was good to see the "nice bits" of Sydney again. It reminded me of coming over here on holiday way back in 2005 and thinking about moving to Australia.

It's been a busy 3 weeks since the last blog entry, finalising things for the house move and playing the proud hosts to Corrina and Dave for the last 4 days of their honeymoon. It was great to see you both. 5 weeks to go now until our next visitors - Stu and Laura will be here from Amsterdam for a few days. Time flies - I can't believe we have been here over 6 months already.

Toni has reduced her work from 4 days to 3 days a week which means she can do more things with Maddie and I hope will meet more Mums and babies in the Williamstown area - she is already into it with a regular playgroup on Wednesdays, so things are looking good.

The weather has been glorious this week - blue blue skies and 17-18 degrees (which might not sound like much but remember it's Winter!). That said you can always get out to some "proper" Winter weather - Corrina Dave and I drove out to Daylesford (1hr 40mins away) and saw snowmen on the side of the road!

Right - back to the Tour now...next blog will be from our new house (er, once we get the broadband up and running again...should be just under 2 weeks' time).

Dom

No new creepy crawlies since last time.

Moving to Williamstown

Well it looks like I've failed to keep updating this regularly, but I will try harder in future I promise!

News at the moment is that we are moving house in just over 3 weeks (28th/29th July). We're both very excited to be going back to home ownership, and also to be making that all-important step to living walking distance from the BEACH.
"Living the dream" indeed!

Here's a slideshow of photos taken in Williamstown, just to give you a flavour.
Stop press - there are actually 5 slideshows. At the risk of boring you all:
Harbourfront 1
Harbourfront 2
Nelson's Place and seafront strip
Beach

(I have to admit we didn't take any of these!)

More on the move as we get closer...

Spiders: still 1
Snakes: 0
Rain: quite a lot! (but mostly at night). Almost as much as at Wimbledon in fact...

Maddie's 1st Birthday!

So in case the title and the photo didn't give it away, Maddie is one! Well actually she's now one and 3 1/2 weeks, but time flies and so this blog is a little late.


As you can see she soon got to grips with present opening!











and she was even happy to share her presents with Mummy...



...and Daddy.

She had I think 14 people (4 "smalls" and 10 adults) at her party. Typically after 3 months of no rain it drizzled on her birthday so our grand plans for a picnic in the Botanical Gardens were shelved.
Things got a bit hectic once everyone arrived in the afternoon so we didn't get many photos (sorry) but this one will give you an idea of the state of the house!

In the background is Maddie's friend Daisy who despite having English parents is actually a bona fide Aussie by birth. She doesn't talk with a funny accent though (yet).

Thank you to everyone who has sent presents and cards (and to those who came out!), it was lovely to have so much post arrive - she is a very lucky little girl.

Next blog update won't be so long coming, although now that Toni is addicted to Facebook it is suffering a little bit!

Love from us all, hope you are all well.

Spider count: still only 1
Snake count: 0
Rain: some (hooray!) although the 12 months to the 15th May was the driest year on record (boo!)

Christmas!

...ok not Christmas, but a huge delivery of parcels nonetheless. Our worldly goods arrived, appropriately on St George's Day, a mere 3 months and 26 days after we last saw them!

The funny thing is, the things I thought I would be most desperate for, I haven't missed as much, and some of the things I was most looking forward to getting back were just odd.

What does it say about me when of all our possessions two of the ones I was most anticipating ripping the packaging off like a kid on Christmas morning were the hoover and the ironing board? (Actually it probably just says it's impossible to iron a shirt on a $10 floor-level IKEA ironing board. And it turns out there is a limit to how long I can go without hoovering after all. Who'd have thought?)

The arrival of 126 boxes / packages in one morning can be pretty overwhelming, particularly when you have guests arriving 5 days later (Toni's Mum, Malc and Toni's Gran)! Incredibly though we managed to open all the boxes, check for breakages (nothing significant luckily), unpack and get the house looking tidy before they arrived.

We had the Anzac Day bank holiday to help us though, which fell on a Wednesday (25th April). If you ever wanted to destroy workplace productivity for a whole week, arranging a bank holiday for a Wednesday is a surefire winner. Think about it: on Monday everyone's still getting going/moaning about it being Monday, on Tuesday everyone's talking about plans for the bank holiday and winding down, Thursday: talking about the bank holiday and saying things like "doesn't this week feel short? Or is it long? Come to think of it, it's like 2 weeks. I'm knackered!" and then it's Friday.

Plenty of other news too:
We bought a house!
AND
MADDIE IS 1 !!

More on both to follow, and obviously, photos of Maddie's big day.

Bye for now
Dom

Spiders: 1
Snakes: still none

The 100 Greatest Comparison Lists...Ever

We've been here nearly 3 months to the day, so naturally the mind turns to wondering if we made the right choice coming all the way over here. I could answer this with a well-constructed essay debating the merits of Melbourne/Australia versus London/England, but to be honest nothing beats a good list. Just read High Fidelity if you don't believe me.

Pros:
Parking - it's easy & mostly free
Strangers are friendly
Beaches :)
Living in the poshest part of town
Weather (yes, even in Melbourne)
A possum in our back garden (we have named him Pete)
Hardly any chain coffee places
Butchers and bakers in every neighbourhood
Eating out is cheap and better quality and with better service
Babies are welcome everywhere (pubs and fine dining restaurants included)
Good access to the great outdoors
Not much traffic
They have IKEA

Cons:
Non-existent ability of Aussie drivers to merge lanes or indeed drive in general!
Connex are screwing up the trains just as badly over here!
They have IKEA
Gravox is nowhere near as good as Bisto
There is no Waitrose

I'm sure there are other, more deep and meaningful pros and cons but we're tired and need to go to bed!

Night, night zzzz

Lazy Bloggers

Firstly a big apology for the lack of recent posts. We had a few problems setting up broadband in the new place, and we’ve been busy exploring our new home city & its surroundings.

I (Dom) have a job now (I was offered it the day after the last blog posting, and have been there 4 weeks there so this is quite old news now). It is at MTU Detroit Diesel Australia, a joint venture between Detroit Diesel and MTU who basically both make big (and some very, very big) Diesel engines that go into trucks, yachts, ferries, mining trucks, cranes and so on. So far it is going well although the frequent air travel to Sydney is giving my conscience a battering over my Carbon footprint! I have to say that my 3 trips to Sydney so far have reinforced our initial impression that Melbourne is a nicer place to live – sorry to any Sydneysiders out there!

Anyway, as I said we have been busy exploring:

Puffing Billy
We went on this for my Mum’s birthday in February but hadn’t gotten around to blogging it. It runs right up into the mountains and you get some great views and that evocative steam billowing up around the carriages.




Healesville Sanctuary
This place lets you get right amongst the native Aussie animals – you can literally get within an arm’s length of a Koala which was amazing. (A couple of weeks later though it was topped when we went down the Great Ocean Road and we did the same with “properly wild” Koalas!). Healesville also has the added bonus of being nestled in the Yarra Valley amongst all the vineyards so you probably combine a visit with a cheeky wine tour (NB don’t do the boozing first!).
Toni’s sister Talie was here for 3 weeks (she left on Friday) and saw a lot of Melbourne. When we’ve not been at work we’ve done our best as tour guides, including a 3-day road trip down the Great Ocean Road but I’ll save that for when we’ve gotten some more photos from the camera.
Lastly a couple more photos of Maddie – she is thriving as you can see!





Spider count: 1
Snake count: 0

Man v Spider

well...Dom v Spider at any rate! We were at a friend's house today and encountered our very first redback spider (unless you count the ones we saw in Melbourne Aquarium). It was by their front door and after looking at it for a while and going 'oh, ah, how horrible' we decided that we should kill it as there were 2 crawling babies around (I know, we're mean). Greg sprayed it with some stuff and the spider started to writhe around in agony. Toni remarked that this was rather a cruel, prolonged death and perhaps we should just stamp on it. Greg didn't have any shoes on so Dom volunteered for the job (in his flip flops). He proceeded to completely bungle the task and was left with the redback dangling from his flip flop and looking very much like he might fill his pants!!!! Sarah (a woman of course) completed the job and put the poor spider out of its misery.

Dom - in my defence I should point out that it was pretty much dead by the time I had finished with it. Although not normally agressive I think its mood had been changed somewhat by being sprayed with 'ACME Instant Spider Death' and it seemed to manage to evade my foot surprisingly quickly. I think the Fear of taking on the world's 2nd most poisonous spider in a pair of open-deck flip flops became a self-fulfilling prophesy of failure!

Spider count: 1
Snake count: 0 (although we did see a sign in a park warning us that they were around)

Daddy Day-Care

Congratulations are in order for Toni who has got a job already! (Don't even start, Dave). So it looks like I will be a kept man, free to spend my days on the beach / visiting bike shops and hiding the the joint account receipts ("it was in the sale"...). Recommendations for other leisure pursuits gratefully received.

Otherwise we've been busy - hence no blogging - we're now fully moved across to our Toorak house, no hiccups except our 9-day old washing machine doesn't work!!

We're getting used to the reaction when we say we live in Toorak - usually a muted "oh" combined with raised eyebrows. We are now thinking of saying we live somewhere else: Armadale is a contender (this is the inverse-snobbery equivalent of saying you live in Battersea when you really live in Chelsea)!

Snake count: 0 (although reports of massively increased central Melbourne snake sightings!)
Spider count: 0

Two wombats tall

..that's how tall Maddie is, as we found out yesterday at Melbourne Museum (see photo). She also made friends with a Spanner Crab - albeit a dead one in a display case!

We've all had a very busy week: Toni and I have been buying everything for the new place (you don't get a fridge, washing machine etc with a rental place here) and Maddie has been doing more exciting stuff like learning to crawl and growing another tooth! She has also learnt how to nod and shake her head in response to yes and no (& a bit of prompting...) but sometimes she gets them mixed up!

We took her swimming again for all of ten minutes when my optimism about how warm it would be in the outdoor pool proved ill-founded. Chattering teeth and goosebumps are not an attractive sight on a nearly-9-month old! (As you may have guessed, it is not always tropically hot here...about 26 degrees most days at the moment.)

We went out for Australia Day fireworks on the riverbank last Friday - Maddie's first display as she stayed in for Bonfire Night in the UK. (Incidentally they banned Bonfire Night here in the 70's on "safety" grounds or something ridiculous like that.) The display was also a first for us as it consisted of four 'launch sites' which surrounded us where we were standing - fireworks in the round! Maddie loved them too.

We've had a look round our first nursery which looked really good although we were exhausted by the time we left - the tour was at the end of a very busy day and the concentration levels you need to work out whether you're happy with leaving your baby somewhere, ask questions and so on took it out of us!

We're off to the beach today on a much-needed day off from home organising, job hunting, and childcare finding - so I should sign off now or we'll never get there. Those of you back in the UK might be amazed to learn this will be our first visit to the beach!

Toorak Tractors

Hi,

We've found a house! It's in Toorak Village, which apparently is the most prestigious suburb in Melbourne! It's also given rise to the phrase Toorak Tractor. Basically lots of posh people driving round in their horrible 4wds! Anyway, it's a 3 bed Victorian in a very nice street with lots of trees.

We collected our car yesterday, it's as shiny as we'd hoped it would be and smells like a 'new car'. Maddie has a brand new car seat which has passed the comfort test seeing as she fell asleep in it when we were out and about today.

Maddie is adapting well to Aussie life. Last night she slept through the night for the first time ever!!!!!!!!!!!! That's right, between the hours of 8.30pm and 6am she did not wake up once. Long may it last.

It's Australia Day tomorrow so we're off into town for the celebrations. For all you Aussies, half Aussies and wannabe Aussies out there - happy Australia Day!


Spiders: 0
Snakes: 0

Sharks: one apparently swallowed a man somewhere off the coast of Victoria and he survived. He now has a celebrity agent!

Househunting...in the rain!

We've had a busy day today spending 8 hrs out and about and walking about 8 miles looking at places to rent. Unfortunately for us (but not for the bush firefighters) it chose today to rain...all day! Our viewing was not exactly an unqualified success:
out of 5 places, 1 was a no-show from the agent, 1 the agent couldn't get into, 1 was on the top floor with no lift, and the other 2 weren't really for us.
They do things differently here: the property is open for viewing at a set time (normally a 15 or 30-minute window) and everyone has to turn up then. Mostly there were around 15-20 people looking but one place today had a queue to get into with over 50 people shuffling through inside! It looks a little like finding a place might be more difficult than we thought, but we still have a lot of places to look at and we have the advantage of not being at work during the week.

Speaking of work, I (Dom) have a meeting with a recruitment consultant on Monday, he was very positive on the phone so we'll see how that goes.

Maddie has (fingers tightly crossed!) set her body clock to Oz time and in fact had her best night's sleep ever last night. She is asleep now (Mum and Dad unwinding with glass of wine) so we're hoping for more of the same tonight.

What else have we been up to? Well, Maddie went swimming on Thursday, her first time ever in an outdoor pool. She has some rather fetching new dayglo swimwear which she is modelling in the photo! She is also mid-clap which is one of her newer skills and currently her favourite thing (although it is in danger of being supplanted by chewing her foot...).
She loved swimming as much as she did back in London, so we will definitely be going again (possibly tomorrow morning, although not if it rains like today...still raining as I type this!).

Right, better sign off now as we need to do some more websearching for somewhere to live!

Spider count: 0
Snake count: 0

Sharks: allegedly a great white spotted off Philip Island (eek!)

Zoom-zoom

Those of you with a knowledge of UK car advertising campaigns will know "zoom-zoom" means Mazda...yes, we have bought a new car! Our first proper New Car. Very exciting! It arrives next Wednesday so look for an overexcited post all about new car smells and all that.
We've also ordered Maddie's car seat which goes all the way from now to when she is about 5yrs old. She looks a little lost in it!

Do you mind if I fix it later?

Before we came we had heard a lot about the more relaxed Aussie pace of life, and we got our first taste of this yesterday morning.

We ordered a take away coffee the waitress (or should that be barrista) asked '"do you mind if I fix it later for you?".
This was at 7:50am on a weekday within walking distance of the city high-rise blocks...I can't imagine that happening back home in the city rush hour!

This conversation took place on the way to the Queen Victoria Market, which apparently is the largest open-air market in the southern hemisphere and fortunately for us is just around the corner. For the Londoners, it is a little like a much much larger Spitalfields with more of a bias on fresh food and of course plenty of fresh fish of all kinds.
As Little Miss was up so ridiculously early (see yesterday's post at 4:30am) we got down there for about 8am, where she promptly fell asleep in her buggy for the next 3 hours as we pushed her around! The luxury of being an 8 month old! Anyway the market trip was a success for me (Dom) as we managed to get bananas for $2.50 (1 pound) a kilo which is close to the UK price. I had become quite worried about the price of bananas after Cyclone Larry last year! Of course the Market caters to people without a banana obsession too with a huge range of fruit, veg, meat and fish and I can see us becoming regulars every morning, at least whilst we are in this apartment.

We're off shopping for baby things today, a task made much easier by the loan of a car from Barney and Carolyn - thank you, you are too generous - and we're also going to take Maddie swimming in her first outdoor pool! She will also get her first "big girl" forward-facing car seat too.

Right, better go or we'll never get anything done (need to move early if it's going to be as hot as yesterday when they stopped play at the Australian Open tennis due to it being 40.8C!).

First day

Well, we've finally arrived in Melbourne...and yes, it is quite hot and sunny! Maddie was an angel on the flight and managed to charm both fellow passengers and crew! However, it's currently about 4.30am and we've given up trying to convince her that it's actually night time and she should be sleeping. She's impatiently waiting for Dom to make her favourite banana porridge!

Leaving the UK proved to be much, much harder than we could ever have imagined. If you ever wonder how much you love someone or how much a friendship means to you, try leaving them to move to the other side of the world...we will miss you all. Come and visit soon!


Spider count: 0
Snake count: 0
...and long may it continue!