Sledging! (or in Aussie - Tobogganing)

On Saturday we finally, after 20 months of living in Melbourne made it up to the high mountains for some snow.
Although Spring has now arrived (it was the 2nd Saturday of Spring and was 25°C in Melbourne, at last!), the ski season has been “a ripper” and is expected to make it out into October this year.

So, buoyed up by reports from friends from their trip the weekend before, we got in the car for the 2 hour drive to Lake Mountain. This is a smallish ‘resort’ where you can do a little bit of skiing but primarily it’s for families to play around in the snow and slide down the slopes on sledges. We all had a fantastic time.


Check me out - I'll surf down!


Me and Mummy

Maddie was feeling quite independent at times (no surprise there) and went down the slope on her own a few times…but she also liked going down with Mummy (faster than Daddy as it turned out, clearly better sledging technique).


She is also a mean shot with snowballs..!



And of course, we made a snowman. However the snow was thinning by then (even up on the mountain it was almost 10°C), but the slight lack of snow didn’t faze Maddie…

Evolution of a snowman
Not enough snow to build a snowman? No problem...pile this up here...


Eyes, nose and mouth...


Whoops, forgot eyebrows! Silly me!


All done - me and my snowman!


We'll definitely be back next year!

What we've been up to

Well as usual it’s been a long time since the last update. Partly I blame the hard winter we’ve had which has meant we’ve not been up to quite as much – but also we’ve had very little spare time.

I have been away every week since the start of August - for at least 3 days a week and normally all week - which has been pretty hard for all of us. Toni’s days go pretty quickly (as they would do looking after a hectic toddler!) but it is pretty boring for her in the evenings. From my point of view I miss them both hugely when I’m away so much.

On top of all of this, we have put our house on the market! Some of you may be thinking that this is a bit quick, well it is and in retrospect we bought too quickly. However we have learnt from the experience and on the positive side, we know that we chose the right area of Melbourne to live in & we definitely want to stay where we are.
In fact we have found a nice new house only 1 mile away from ours…although the house is not actually built yet, but should be ready in April. More on that as it gets nearer and once we sell ours (fingers crossed).

Selling a house is very different here, you basically have set times when your house is “Open for Inspection” and people have to get themselves there (rather than being taken by the agent) at those times. Typically it will be for 30 minutes on a Sat and the same on a Sunday. The sellers leave the house for the agents to open up and market.
What this means in practice is that for those 30 minutes your house needs to look like a show home - and preferably the less evidence of anyone actually living there the better! It is a big effort and Toni did brilliantly to get it all shipshape on her own over a few weeks when I was pretty much always in Sydney.

The house now looks very good but when it comes down to it we need a 3rd bedroom and it's going to be easier to do that by moving than by extending - plus we can move to a quieter road (ours is on a dual carriageway which didn't seem that big a deal when we bought - it's only a 35mph speed limit - but has come to bother us).

Watch this space for the next post about last weekend. We went tobogganing!

Dom