Happy Christmas!

Happy Christmas to you! The excitement of four little kids on Christmas morning is hard to beat. This year, our oldest came and woke us at 3:30 am because he couldn't sleep. Ha! Back to bed with you was my response. Funny enough, when I woke up about 6:45, all was quiet in the house. Santa had come and the kids were still sleeping. It was a mere few minutes before they were all awake and the present frenzy had begun! Lots of toys and treats were had, and then we carried on with what seems to be one of the laziest days of the year. We sit around in our pjs playing with all our new toys. This year, there was one difference- we all went for a swim to play with our new toys! We ended our fabulous day with shrimp on the barbie, ham, veggies and banoffee pie for dessert. Yum Yum! Hope you had (or have since it is not yet light in America as I post) a very wonderful Christmas!

Christmas Eve

Christmas Eve has come and gone in our house. We had a wonderful time as always. We spent the day making Christmas goodies - peanut butter balls, Happy Birthday Jesus cake (with some special cupcakes for Santa), and more. Then we went to the evening family service at church before heading home for our traditional Italian Christmas Eve dinner. After dinner, it was time for birthday cake and then one present before bed. The kids seem to have figured out now that the one present always seems to be new Christmas pjs. Now, to bed to wait for Santa...

Ready for church - it is still so strange to go to Christmas Services in a sundress instead of a scarf!

Silly little girls posing for me

All ready to celebrate Jesus' birthday and welcome Santa

The first present of Christmas - new pjs

All ready for bed... I hope Santa comes tonight!

Fun with Gia and Boppa

Tea at Gunner's Barracks

Zoo time

View at the zoo

Yum Cha in China Town

Riding the carousel in Darling Harbour

Fun, Fun, Fun!

Surfer Dudes

This past week was our first week of summer vacation. Seeing as we live in Australia, we thought a little surfing was in order. The two big kids took lessons for four morning this week and became little surfer dudes. They did amazing! Both of them caught on quickly and were standing up catching waves. While it was lots of fun, it was lots of hard work too. They were both exhausted after fighting waves all morning. We had very calm and quiet afternoons after such hard work! Enjoy the pictures and videos of their surfing. Oh, and please excuse all the screaming in the background. Myself and the other "mums" just could not help ourselves!

The little ones had a ball playing on the beach every morning too!

Speech Day

An Aussie tradition here at the end of the school year is Speech Day. This is kind of like the end of year show. For Prep school, it included a few boring speeches from the board, principal, etc. and then some darling singing and dancing from the kids. Here is a video from M's performance yesterday. Poor quality but we did what we could!




This morning I am off to Darling Harbour to the Convention Centre to watch A's speech day. Sadly, I hear it will be torture. Once you reach year 3, it is only speeches and the same ones year after year no less. To make matters worse, A's class does not even do speeches. Thank goodness for the Kindle for iphone app... it should really help those 2 1/2 hours pass for me. And thank you to my Aussie friends who told me the real story about Speech Day!

Thanksgiving in the Summer

Our first Thanksgiving in Australia has come and gone. It was strange but nice. It was a hot day and felt a bit more like the 4th of July as far as holidays go. Although it was very different than our past Thanksgivings, we enjoyed it.

We hosted a Thanksgiving dinner for some local friends here on Friday night with all the fixins'. I had another American friend who helped and thank goodness! My Aussie oven could not handle Thanksgiving. Fortunately she has a big oven and was able to fit a turkey while I took care of the rest. Thanks to my American pack mules (you know who you are) we were able to enjoy pumpkin pie and even green bean casserole with derky onions on top! It was delicious!

On Saturday we celebrated Thanksgiving in a big way! We went to the beach with about 60 other Americans and enjoyed another traditional spread. There was more food than we knew what to do with and it was a wonderful afternoon. Again, not your traditional Thanksgiving but what a way to celebrate in Oz. Thanks Jenny for organizing it all and making a great day for all of us!

Check out this spread! What a view for our turkey dinner!

Oh Jacaranda!

My favorite season has always been fall. This November I am missing fall but spring in Sydney may be my new favorite. My world is filled with sunshine, sea breezes and beautiful shades of purple! Oh, jacaranda tree, you are beautiful!

Trick or Treat?

We have just celebrated our first Halloween in Sydney. Like most holidays, Halloween in Sydney had a way of making us long for America. The holiday is fairly controversial here in Sydney and is not widely celebrated. Those that do celebrate, seem to have adopted the more "evil" side of Halloween and have left much of the fun, community minded side of Halloween that we know and love somewhere in the garbage with the pumpkin guts. This lends to a difficult decision for the mom of American kids. Do we continue with our Halloween traditions in spite of the way that looks to those around us, or do we succumb to pressure to steer clear of the "evil, pagan holiday?" After much deliberation, we decided to carry on with our family traditions and focus on the wonderful, positive aspects of Halloween.

So, we carved pumpkins - very EXPENSIVE pumpkins. Take a look at our masterpieces. $97 and an hour of work later and we have the first signs of Halloween in our yard. I will admit, it was a little strange to be carving them under the shade of an umbrella after having just applied sunscreen. It takes a little bit of the "fall fun" out of the pumpkins. But, we still carved away and even roasted the pumpkin seeds afterward.


Now that we have the required decoration, we can trick or treat. There are a few streets around us that we were told participate in Halloween so we planned to meet some other American friends there and trick or treat together. As a side note, these streets that are good ones to trick or treat on, mean about 1 in every 5 houses hands out candy. People will put out an orange balloon or pumpkin of sorts if they are participating.

But first, costumes! Because Halloween is so low key here, we went low key on the costumes too. I told the kids they could be anything they wanted as long as they found the costumes in the house. For the girls, that was easy. They just wanted to be princesses and fairies and we have an ample supply of girly costumes in the dress up corner. For the little man, he wanted to be Zeus. He is obsessed with Greek mythology right now after reading Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson series. So, a toga it was. As for the babe, I just grabbed a giraffe costume from the dress up stuff and off we went. Although I must admit the little giraffe was none too happy to participate in this activity. Poor thing woke up with a fever Sunday morning so she was not really able to enjoy Halloween with us.

We met our friends at the park and prepared to descend upon the neighborhood...

Much loot collected on this hot, sunny afternoon. Time to head home...

Kuranda

The final day of our Holiday in Cairns we took the Kuranda Railway up into the rainforest. It was 1 1/2 hours chugging up the mountain to the little village of Kuranda. The kids loved the train ride - for the first hour at least. It got very hot and sticky as evidenced by our red faces in the pictures! We stopped part way up to look at the waterfall where a fellow traveler nicely snapped a photo of all eight of us. Then it was on to our destination.


In Kuranda, we ate lunch and then walked around town a bit. It is filled with shops and markets that are full of the required tourist junk. If you know me, you know I love to walk around places like this so I thought it was great. Sadly for me, the kids desire to go to Bird World outweighed my desire to browse market stalls and it was off to Bird World.

I do not like birds. J does not like birds. None the less, we spent $50 to go stand and cringe as hundreds of the dirty creatures flew around us - many narrowly missing our heads. The kids could not get enough of course. They held them and fed them while I tried to snap photos and resist the urge to send the birds packing. Fortunately, it was a small place and it started raining again so we did not spend too long there.


After about 2 1/2 hours in Kuranda, we had to catch our skyrail back down. What an amazing way to travel. As beautiful as the train was, the skyrail was spectacular. The views were outstanding. We traveled above the rainforest canopy and could see out across the Coral Sea. Another reminder of God's beautiful creation!

Tjapukai

One afternoon we took the two big kids to Tjapukai Aboriginal Park. It was a highlight of the trip. It was pouring rain (again) but everything was under canopies which got this excursion off to a great start! We started our aboriginal experience with traditional face painting. That is always a kid pleaser! The kids also participated in a special didgeridoo lesson, message rock painting, a dancing performance, dream workshop, and spear and boomerang throwing. What a way to teach the kids about another culture. The sociologist in me was in heaven. Besides, what is a holiday without at least a little education. (Yes, I know I am my mother's daughter!) Much to my pleasure, the kids have listed this educational experience as one of their favorite activities of the trip.

Hartley's Crocodile Farm

It has been said that no visit to Cairns is complete without stopping at Harley's Croc farm. Being the shameless tourists that we are, we made our trip complete and stopped there. There sure were a lot of crocodiles. I did not, however, see Crocodile Dundee!


We saw a snake show (boring), and a croc show (not as boring), and went on a boat ride. Well, some of us did. The little girls were beat and being very naughty at this point and it was POURING rain, so I took them to the car where they were much happier. The rest of the gang went on the boat ride. This is where the real action began. They took the boat around Hartley's lagoon and coaxed the crocs right out of the water. Next time you want to see a croc, just put a chicken on a pole. Voila! Out they come!