Growing Family

Welcome, Winter

Today, June 1st, heralds the First Day of Winter Down Under. You might be drinking a cold beer in the shower after mowing the lawn, or cleaning off the barbeque for the season, or running out to buy sprinklers for the kids to play in, but we are doing very different things. 

We are drinking tea. Lots of tea.

Every Aussie home has a benchtop (countertop) electric kettle. I think they are standard issue when they stamp your visa at the airport. We keep the sugar bowl full, and milk at the ready. I go for a large mug of earl grey, but we have a whole cupboard of tea. 

Aussies take their tea seriously and there is a whole body of tea language. I take my tea sweet and white, if you must know. I once had a tradesman working at my house who sent the tea back two times before coming into the kitchen to sugar/milk it to his specific preferences. True story. 

We are pulling out the footy pjs, buying new flannels, and thermals and putting extra doonas (duvets) on the beds.

I've heard lots of Aussies talk about putting the flannel sheets on the bed, but we sleep European style - with a bottom sheet and a duvet on top, with a duvet cover, and no top sheet. I'm thinking about making some flannel duvet covers to get in on that cozy experience.

As soon as my oven is fixed (I could write a very negative post about a certain appliance repair company who has been "fixing" my broken oven for two months now...) we will be baking quick breads, muffins, casseroles, and roasts.

Currently we are enjoying adventures in slow cooker/crock pot cooking, and I am super excited about my Freecycle vintage crock pot! Some recipes have been more successful than others, but it is just so fantastic to come home from a really long and busy day where there is no time to cook, to a hot and hearty meal. Please send me your favorite crock pot recipes!

Creamy cauliflower soup tasted better than it looked...okay, maybe not. Strike that one off the list.

We're still enjoying afternoon highs around 20C (68F), but things are starting to cool down. We've got the heater on low downstairs to keep the place from getting really chilly (double brick and lots of glass can act like a giant cooler...which is good...in the summer). 

We're starting to layer up and in the evenings I'm pulling out my favorite vintage New Zealand wool blankets to cuddle up and watch tv, with my knock-off Ugg boots, and thermal underwear. 

What do you do when the weather turns cold? I want to celebrate the changes instead of moan about the chill. After all, I can look at pictures from my friends in Michigan's UP and that shuts me right up!

 

House Hunting in Sydney

I have several friends house hunting at the moment. The housing cost to income ratio in Sydney is one of the highest in the world. We were so blessed to come across our fantastic house, yet we are paying dearly for it.

You'll imagine then, why I had to share this gem of a property for anyone out there looking.

"Lifestyle living in Sydney's Inner West. Cozy unit with innovative design to maximize the floor plan is paired with spectacular waterfront location, access to public transportation, and nature views. This property has it all - location, creativity, and potential! This opportunity won't last long, view it today."

A Great Day

I am not on twitter or instagram, but I have gotten totally hooked on Pinterest (an online pin-board that provides hours of eye candy covering just about anything you could be interested in). I am the kind of girl who used to have 503 tabs open in my browser because I wanted to come back and look at something again. 

I love Pinterest because beauty makes me happy, and it instantly gets my creative juices flowing. Also, I read a few design blogs and am constantly noting things I want to revisit.

One problem, however, with my new found inspiration, is that it seems like MOST of the world is blogging/pinning/posting from the northern hemisphere (can I get a witness Down Under!?). 

Everyone is chattering about spring florals, and summer vegetable gardens, and the swimsuit for their summer holiday. The mommy bloggers are talking about summer vacation ideas for the kids, and the food bloggers are whisking up perfect warm-weather concoctions.

Here, in Sydney, we are layering up our clothes. We are raking fallen leaves in the garden. We are piling an extra quilt on top of the doona at night. We are pulling out the scraggly, ragged remains of the summer garden to prepare for the winter crop. We are getting chestnuts in our weekly veggie boxes, and cooking hearty soups served up with dense breads.

At the shift of the seasons, there tends to be a bit of a disconnect from the rest of the online world, and it is in full effect by the time we have winter opposite summer. 

No matter, today I had the best day.

Hours in the garden, tearing out shrivelled cucumber vines, and pruning all the fruit trees in my back garden were extremely satisfying. Three apples, two citrus, and two stone fruit. If you could see the size of my garden, you would be scratching your head as to how they all fit...they don't. Hopefully the hard pruning I gave them today will boost their health and keep their size in check. 

The Captain helped me out after spending some time sleeping on the trampoline (an ultimate weekend indulgence he earned by taking Small Sun to his 7:45 AFL game, 45 minutes away!). He climbed up into the stone fruit trees with lopper and a saw and took care of what I couldn't reach on my bright yellow two step stool (we really need a ladder).

We cleared all the cuttings out, raked the lawn, and dug out some other non-essentials. Now the back garden looks perfect for our autumn schemings: a fire pit for regular sausage and marshmallow sizzling. We may not be flitting into springtime, but we're having jolly good fun Down Under!

2012 First School Holidays

Thanks to each of you that went and voted for my blog. For reasons that involve politics I am not involved in (thank goodness), the Circle of Moms has cancelled the competition. Oh well. It was fun to be nominated, and to have people vote, and to see my blog traffic spike in a significant way, so thanks for that!

We are in the second week of Term 1 school holidays. I LOVE the holidays. In Australia the school year is broken up into four (roughly) 10 week terms, and between terms there are two and three week holidays, alternately. 

By the end of the term we were just dragging, especially with two extra kiddies in the house. Now we are sleeping in, watching movies, I am curling up in my bed during the day to read The Hunger Games for hours, it is delightful.

This last weekend we went up the coast to camp with friends at a gorgeous little holiday park where our tent opened up to a view of the water. The kids ran around playing in the dirt and trying to build fires while we read magazines from our camp chairs, sipping tea.

We are just letting it all. hang. out. It is so wonderful to have a break.

Here are some gems from our hols so far:

 Good Friday at Narrabeen

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 Apple Picking at Bilpin

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 Round the house goodness which included my 31st birthday

Camping at Soldier's Point 

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 Whatever you are doing this week, I hope you find the joy and beauty around you!

Community and Foster Care

This second experience with foster care has be thinking about the importance of a supportive community and how much that can impact the success of a placement.

I was dealing with some serious stress about this placement and I told my friends. I didn't tell them to pressure them into helping me. I told them because I was stressed and I think being honest is a really important key to making sure I don't end up depressed and overwhelmed on my own.

My friends have amazed me.

The girls have been with us four days. On the first day a precious friend offered to bring my older kids home from school, and deliver dinner to us as well. She followed through even though her own child stayed home sick from school that day, even arranging the little details like calling the school to make sure the kids knew they were riding with her, etc. Amazing.

The next day another friend offered to bring the kids home and said she could do the same several other days.

Yet another amazing friend gave me a list of days from her calendar and said "I can do whatever you need, for as long as you need, for as many of these days as you like. Just tell me."

Another amazing sweetheart said "these are the days I can get off of work early to come and help you with the bath/dinner/bedtime routine."

Tears are coming up just writing it down.

We are so blessed.

This abundance of thoughtful helpfulness has brought me over the line from being totally stressed, to enjoying having these girls with us. 

Not everyone can or should adopt or do foster care. However, if you want to support adoptive or foster care families and contribute to what they are doing, these kinds of offers of help can make a world of difference.

Other bloggers have written thorough and fantastic posts about what people can do to help, I just wanted to take a minute to honor the stunning people I have in my life who value me and what we are doing, not just with verbal affirmations, but with actions. I have never felt so surrounded.

My friends started lifting me up even before I started to drown. Is there someone in your life doing something you admire or want to support? I'm sure you can find a way to support them. You might never know how much of a difference your help might make!

Welcome 2012

I love boating. Canoes, kayaks, pontoons, speedboats, ferries, I love them all.

Sometimes when you are on the water you can look down and see everything you're passing over with crystal clarity. Other times, it is just a shadowy blur, and sometimes you can't see anything at all.

Even when you can't see anything, you're still moving. You are still passing markers.

Sometimes in life you have a goal and you are cruising towards it. You can measure the distance and plot a course. You can figure out how long it will take you, given different variables.

Sometimes you drift and end up somewhere unplanned.

January 1st I filled out our request for a NSW Adoption Information Package. January 2nd, the Captain went to the bank for the $40 handling fee you're required to submit with it. January 3rd I took the dog for a walk to the nearest outgoing postbox (a brisk 10 minute walk) to drop it in.

Just like that, we moved the first bit in the direction of adopting again.

If I look over the edge of the boat we are travelling in, I can't see that any progress has been made. Maybe 2-3-4-5 years from now I'll look back and realize "that was the start". 

I definitely feel like I'm crossing over from "can we do it? should we do it?" to "our kids are out there somewhere. They might even be born already and they might be living through some really tough stuff. They need us to get to them."

It seemed like the most important thing to do at the dawn of 2012.

The Joy of Family at Christmas

Between Christmas and New Years

The time between Christmas and New Years is a padded cacophony of joy. The kids are playing in boxes, and climbing on their father, who lounges on the couch for a grand total of 17.8 minutes a year.

Ever since we came home we've let them run riot.

Yes, we've been gone. First we went to Nashville to spend a glorious week and a half with all of my family. For the first time in about four years, we all gathered from our global corners (Canada, Tanzania, NYC, and Australia) to sip and sup and glow together. Despite my brother being sick, we had a great time and especially for the cousins, it was everything I wanted it to be. 

Then we drove up to Michigan to spend time with aunts, uncles, and my cousins. Again, the time was so fantastic, and I'm incredibly glad that we went.

We weren't planning on going this year, but when we discovered that the whole family was convening at my parent's house in Nashville, it was too good of an opportunity to miss.

We were amazed at the continued connection with our friends in Nashville. The relationships we had there took so long to build (Nashville has a high "flake factor"), but many of them seemed circumstantial and I expected that after we moved, over time, most of them would naturally dissolve. 

Both our core group of life-long friends, and our greater circle all rallied to embrace us. Some cancelled trips to spend time with us, others travelled from neighboring cities, and in general people went out of their way at the most busy time of the year to spend time with us. It impacted me and I am still processing what it all meant for me.

The trip to Michigan was also very special. My grandfather organized a special evening to celebrate us all coming to town. All my in-state relatives made repeated efforts to see us while we were there. Perhaps more than any other time. They were so generous and enthusiastic to see us. Like in Nashville, we felt celebrated and valued.

My grandmother has Alzheimers and is was so wonderful to see her interacting with my children, and getting to spend time just being near her, even if she doesn't know me anymore.

The trip was so worth the 40 hour door-to-door effort of getting there. The only shadow was having to leave baby with another foster family while we were gone. Now we are all reunited and shaking the walls with the happy exuberance of being in our own home, in our own routine. It is wonderful to go, and wonderful to come home again.

 

Holiday Weekend Staycation

This weekend was a long weekend for Labor Day. We had hitched our fortunes to a camping trip with seven other families from church. We bought our gear, we planned a doggy holiday for the pooch, we received approval to travel with the baby and re-arranged his parental visits, and we counted down the days with breathless terror over camping with four children excitement.

Then, it started to rain. Taking inspiration from Small Sun's recent debut in the school musical "Noah's Amazing Cruise", it rained and rained and rained. And the forecast for the whole weekend? Rain.

Thursday night the phone calls started buzzing. Ringing and texting, the inquiries started to fly. "If it keeps raining like this, do you still want to go?" "Do YOU want to go?" "Should we cancel?" We cancelled.

Friday was a gorgeous day, and Saturday was pretty nice too. But then overnight it poured and poured and we all slept like cozy cats in our beds, listening to the rain and thanking our lucky stars we were not in a tent with three children and an infant on a cold night, with the rain coming down in sheets.

Well, if you've been counting down to a camping trip for weeks, you have to find something to fill the void for three very eager children.

This is what we did over the holiday weekend.

We went couch shopping. Herding four children through endless furniture displays would have been easier if we had pre-recorded a message that said "don't touch glass statues, don't jump on the couches, don't lay on the beds, climb off of the coffee table, stop running" and left it running on repeat. 

Then, we went to Costco. Back in Nashville I scorned the giant box of savings, but now that they've opened one near our house in Sydney, and we are currently a family of six and actually use pallets of toilet paper, I decided to give it a try. As we approached the giant warehouse I explained to the kids "this is a little piece of America in Australia. Not all of America is like this, but this idea of buying lots and lots of stuff, for as little money as possible, is very popular in America."

Oh my goodness, I can't believe we made it out alive! The carts are huge! We bought so much stuff! Finch was exhausted since we rolled right through his nap and forgot to give him a snack. Baby had to be fed while I held him, walking through the store (he's much to heavy for me to do that!). Then he completely soaked through his outfit and I didn't have a spare (grumble, grumble, grumble, Aldi diapers, grumble), and Finch's diaper sagged to his knees with ripeness. 

By the time we got out, buying an 18" pizza for $14.99 seemed the most logical thing to do! (I have never seen a pizza so huge in Australia. I forgot they could even make them that big! In Sydney you spend that much money for a pizza 1/3 the size.) The Captain also got three "smoothies" and when Finch saw him carrying them, but he couldn't have one yet because there was no straw, he just lost it, falling down and crying inconsolably, the poor darling. People stared at the mother with three children (one wailing), the giant cart overflowing with bargain goods and a baby car-seat, and the man juggling a leaky infant and three smoothies. We were a sight. 

Saturday we recovered from Friday. It took us until 4 p.m. to make it into the city for the Salsa Festival. Each show featured costumes tinier than the last. At the final stage we watched an amazing Brazillian drum band, and then I saw the dancers queing up off stage. The paraded on in amazing feathered splendor (on their heads).

"Mom, why are those girls showing their bums?" from Sprout on my right.

"Mom! why can we see those girl's butts?" from Small Sun on the left.

"Well, they only had a little bit of material for their costumes and they wanted to make the amazing head-dresses, and they ran out of feathers to put down on the bottom of their costumes." I explained. 

After a thoughtful silence, Small Sun stated matter-of-fact-ly, "well, they did use enough to cover their hole." Ahem. Yes. Yes, they did.

We left the salsa festival (and the breezy bums) to enjoy dinner with friends at one of the few authentic Mexican restaurants in Sydney.

Sunday we went to church in the rain and shook our heads sadly with the seven other families whose weekend plans were also disturbed. 

That afternoon we snuggled in under piles of blankets to watch one of my all-time favorite movies from my childhood, The Black Stallion. The kids were talking the whole time, trying to figure out what was happening and what would happen next! The Captain and I looked over their heads at each other, the three of them snugged between us and the baby passing back and forth.

We put mattresses down that night and rigged up a tent with sheets and twinkle lights for a night of magical indoor camping. After baths and stories, snuggles, and prayers, we kissed them goodnight and admonished them to go to sleep. Nearly two hours later all three had been banished to their own beds, after insults were yelled, soft toys were thrown, and the twinkle lights were turned off. So much for a magical indoor-camping experience. Heh.

Today we returned to the couch store, to finalize our order, before going to the hardware store to buy a birthday present. Once home I escaped into my garden to try to find some sanity (my insides seem a bit wobbly from the noise and intensity level that comes with the school holiadys). After an hour of planting seeds, I walked with Small Sun and Sprout to a birthday party at a nearby friend's house. 

The long-weekend is over. It might not have been camping, but the staycation was colorful, productive, and relaxing at a couple points as well. And thankfully, "they did use enough to cover their holes." 

 

 

Certainty and Substance

Tonight I went out to dinner with some mums from one of the two playgroups we attend. I sat across from a mum of one of Small Sun's classmates. She confided that after three years of "extended holiday", they are moving back to their (Australian) home town. Part of it is job related, but mostly they just know it is time to go. As their parents are getting older, they recognize that time together with family is most important to them. They'll move at the change of the year.

While I know jealousy is not an emotion to be cultivated, I did feel envious listening to her conviction. When I imagine "the future", I don't really imagine it being here in Australia. I can see us staying here for about five more years, maybe, and then moving on. 

My friend tonight had a very clear "home" to return to and the centrally important people of her life are all conveniently grouped there. 

To be perfectly honest, when I am around people who have lived in one place their whole lives and have their family all around them, I simultaneously despise and envy them. I experience a kind of explosion of emotions, wishing I was like them, and being thankful that I'm not.

The fact that I have no "home" to return to makes me heartsick. The fact that when our parents start to age and have failing health, we will confront having them on multiple continents, makes me feel anxious. 

Before we moved Down Under, we were visiting with my brother and his family. I hatched a wild scheme to keep our children knowing each other. I planned that we would all take our kids back home to my parents for the month of June. They would run in the woods, play in the streams, and spend a month dreaming and fighting their way into cousindom.

I failed to take into account the opposite seasons and the holidays that don't align. Now my parents have off and moved to Canada, renting out the house I imagined being the one rock I could tie my roots to. 

This week we had a plan to talk to my mother, sister in law and my nieces in Tanzania. My brother was to Skype in from India, where he is working at the moment, and my dad from Canada. We bought a Skype Premium day pass. We planned our day around this phone call. 

When the magic moment came, no one was on Skype. Eventually my brother got on and said he tried to get in touch with my SIL to no avail. It ends up the internet was down at their house for several days. 

Tonight I was riding home in the car by myself with the music on so loud I couldn't hear anything else. No traffic, no wind, nothing. When you have young kids in the car you never get to really blow your eardrums. I blanketed myself with sound and cried over the steering wheel.

Living abroad, when you have a family you love and miss, is hard. Not being able to get in touch or stay in contact with people you love is hard. Not having a "home" to return to is hard. Not having a continent in common with any family member is hard.

My friend tonight had conviction. She had a plan. She had timing and clarity.

Sometimes I just feel lost in the feeling that my family has been spread like a puff of dandelion fluff on the wind, and we'll never be able to regroup, or cluster back together again.