A year in pictures! The db's best bits of 2012.

I cannot believe that I am sitting here "rounding up the year"!  Where has it gone??  I know the saying goes that the older you get the faster the years fly by - but am I that old already??  2012 has been our first complete year spent in Sydney and has certainly been action packed.  Here is a quick summary of our best bits.....  

January
It was a lovely start to 2012 having mum and dad stay with us for a few weeks.  I loved  having them around so much that when I dropped them back at the airport to catch their flight I sobbed the WHOLE way home.  Luckily I had been warned that this would happened and after a few days I was back in the swing of things and waiting for their next trip to Sydney.     

February
Master J started Kindergarden his month.   It was an emotional day for me as he looked so grown up, yet so small in his school uniform.  I may have shed a tiny tear, but managed to hold it together very well.  Miss H also started her little Kindy and looked so grown up.  As they both started on the same day (very strategically planned) Mr D and I decided to take the opportunity to enjoy a lovely kid free lunch.  We were having such a great time that we almost forgot the kids and ended up being late to pick them up........on their first day!  Such bad parenting!!!!

March
March was a big month for Mr D as he was promoted at work.   On the 18th March we also celebrated making our first year in Australia.

April
This month our Miss H turned 3.  She celebrated her birthday at Steve Irwin’s ‘Australia Zoo’ in Queensland.  We spent the easter school holidays in Queensland, exploring some of the stunning Australian coastline.  It was our first loooooooong drive with kids and a very pregnant me, but it didn't put us off and we'll defiantly be doing it again.

Crikey! It's my birthday!

Enjoying some of Queensland's spectacular beaches

Beautiful Byron Bay and a big bump

May
On the 29th of May our beautiful little Miss L arrived into the world. We had a couple of slightly stressful false alarms on the week running up to her birth, and when she finally arrived we only JUST made it to the hospital on time!! (and gained a speeding and parking fine along the way).   I had the most amazing 5 night stay in the most beautiful hospital (or hotel) getting to know my new little munchkin.    It was hard being so far from my family at this time but I am so grateful to all our wonderful new friends that went out of their way to help us settle in as a new family of 5.  Miss H and Master J was SOOOO excited to have their new baby at long last and we had to visit both schools to show her off.  It really is amazing to see how innately strong the sibling bond is.

June
This month was a bit of a blur for me to be honest as I was a little sleep deprived to say the least! I did however manage to get a huge parking fine and crash the car! Fortunately no one was hurt (apart from our bank balance) but it was a real lesson for me, that I can’t do EVERYTHING on my own and that it’s ok to accept help. But on a more exciting note – we got news that my little sis and her Mr are expecting their first baby girl next year and I’m going to be an Aunty!!!

Settling in as the new dB5

July
Mum arrived this month from England (just in the nick of time) to meet our little Miss L and to help us all get through the first school holidays with three kids. It was an absolute godsend having her here and even though it was the middle of winter, the weather was beautiful and sunny and we had a wonderful couple of weeks. It made me realise just how much we miss not having mum and dad down the road.

When Granny came to stay

August
This month I decided to turn my blog writing into something a little more permanent. I initially started writing it as a means to keep family and friends up to date with our lives in Sydney.  I enjoy writing it so much that I’ve decided to go a little more public with it.  I suddenly have found myself immersed in a new world of social media and had no idea how ‘big’ it was out there! I’m learning so much all the time and want to keep going (even thought I’m hard pressed to find the time sometimes). 

Mr D takes the kids on a tree climbing adventure to give me some time to write!  

September
School holidays again! Can’t quite believe we are two­‐thirds through the first school year!  We headed up the north coast on our first road trip as a family of 5. It was only a 4 hour drive but we had to make several stops for feeding and wee’s and leg stretching. Thank god for ipads – I don’t know how my parents survived without them! We stayed in the beautiful Port Stephens Bay for a week and did nothing but chill out at the beach.  I even managed to read a book!!!

Road-tripping with 3

Family time on the beach

Miss L's first swim.  What a cutie x

Beautiful Hawkes Nest Bay

October
This month Master J turned 6 – at last!! I say that because he asked me at least once a week from the beginning of the year ‘how many sleeps until I’m 6?’ He seems to have grown up so much this year and bringing with it a whole new set of parenting challenges for us. Especially now that he can read – nothing is a secret anymore. The other day he managed to get onto the school canteen app on my iPhone and order his own lunch!!!! Telling me he didn’t feel like my sandwiches that day. However we are so proud of how he has settled, not only into his new life in Aus but also into school. (Not sure how I’m going to cope next year when the homework starts to come home). We also spent a long weekend away with my cousin LCJ and MT in a beach house up the North Coast of Sydney. I love it that I have one family member that is ‘almost’ around the corner.  It was an awesome weekend with lots of laughs!  The boys were on a fishing mission and even ended up knee deep in mud just to get to a great fishing spot!!!

Master J turn 6.  What a bunch of cheeky riders!

Mr D and MT relaxing with some ocean fishing.  Unfortunately they didn't catch anything we could actually eat!

LCJ with her newest niece

All this mud was Miss H's idea of HEAVEN!

November
The Sydney weather kicked up a gear or two in the heat department this month and has given me an indication of what’s to come in the summer!! HOT HOT HOT!! We’ve had some extremely humid days making my daily job of getting in and out the car a hundred times (well not quite hundred but it feels like that sometimes) not so pleasant! Roll on the school holidays. Master J also started nippers (junior surf life saving) and ocean swim club this month. He has taken to the water so well and I think we might have a little swim star on our hands.   Miss H did her first ballet recital on stage this month and was absolutely beautiful. It brought a little tear to my eye (yes, another one!!).

Master J swimming his awesome 25m race in the big pool!

Miss H and her beautiful ballerina friends waiting for their turn to go on stage

Ice-cream at the beach after school - you know it's summer time!!

December
This month we will have our first Christmas ever with just the 5 of us! We’re going to be house sitting for a colleague ofMr D's, so will spend Christmas and New Year at a lovely Beach House just kicking back and enjoying all the festivities.

I have had loads of fun taking Candy Bows to the local markets over the festive period

Have a good chat with Santa x

Miss L meets Santa at the beach.  It's strange to think she'll never know a cold, wintery Christmas.

Master J's school Christmas concert.  It was so cute I might have welled up just a tiny little bit.

With that I’d like to thank you all, my lovely readers, for following Mrs D this year.  I wish you all a very Merry Christmas and an exciting 2013. 

New House, Noisy Birds!

It’s Tuesday morning and I’m woken up yet again at 5:30am by the raw screaming of the wild Aussie cockatoo’s that sit outside our bedroom window.  It’s such a loud, distinctive scream that it would win any award for the worst alarm clock.  It’s also absolutely bucketing down with rain, and as I peer out the window all I can see is a blurred vision of the world.  However, I couldn’t be happier – just because it’s Tuesday!  Today, and every Tuesday (for the next few months anyway) I have between 9:30 and 3pm ALL TO MYSELF!

The last time I wrote anything on this blog was early December so I have a bit of catching up to do.  Going back a couple of months we had an email from our landlords advising us that they were putting the house, which we were finally calling home, on the market to sell.  I was gutted and very quickly went into a state of panic!   The thought of moving house (only 9 months after the big move from the UK) just made my stomach lurch – I just couldn’t face packing up AGAIN!!  And not just that, but my parents were due to arrive in a couple of weeks!  I had been looking forward to their arrival for months and the last thing I wanted to do while they were visiting was move!  There was also the small issue of my ever-growing bump was not getting smaller!!!

View of Narrabeen from the top of Collaroy Plateau.
Our house is just beyond the two high rises!

Slowly realising that my idea of moving into a lovely rental and staying there until we were ready for our next chapter was ever so slightly naive.  I had no choice but to throw myself back into the world of viewing houses.  Once again I found myself queuing up outside rental properties, with all the other prospective renters, being shown around by an estate agent with the enthusiasm of a sloth!!  I really did see some shockers and it still amazes me how some landlords can put their houses on the rental market in such truly revolting states.  But I guess you can do anything when you own a house in this little corner of paradise.  Eventually I found a very cute little house (I say little as it’s quite a bit smaller than what we had got used to) but it has the most perfect location.  It’s about 2km further down the coast from our old house on a narrow strip of land between Narrabeen Beach and Narrabeen Lake, with everything I could possibly need only a short stroll from the front door.    

Beautiful beach 500m from the front door.  How lucky are we??

The only downside would be the unlikely even of a tsunami!!  And of course those damn cockatoo’s!!!!  As mentioned above, there is just no escaping the noise!   Not long after moving in we discovered that the old lady over the road was feeding them.  So at precisely between 5 -7am and 6- 7pm EVERY DAY about 40 to 50 of these large, screaming parrots descend around the house.   It’s quite fascinating to watch (for the first couple of times anyway) as they are just everywhere – they sit right outside her door waiting for her to bring the food out as well as gather in the trees, swing off the telephone wires, hop along the tops of cars…..and SCREAM!!!!!  We have decided that she must be deaf otherwise ‘why on earth would you encourage them??????” Especially so early in the mornings!!!!  Mr D got so desperate one evening that he went on to Google to see if he could find out how to get rid of them (without buying a shot gun of course).  He discovered that their only natural predator is a snake!!  So he and Master J decided to buy a rubber snake, attach it to a piece of string and lay it across the road, while hiding in a bush!!  Unfortunately I have to report that their plan did not work!!  Any other suggestions for plan B are most welcome though!!  

I suppose I should be grateful that I have not yet seen a spider in this house. Between the cockatoos, the rainbow lorikeets (beautiful but just as noisy), the kookaburra's and not forgetting the Pelican, some days it really feels like we're living in an avery!!  I should mention that I went outside the other day to collect some washing off the line, as the heavens had suddenly opened, only to find a rather large pelican just sitting on the patio table!  I swear it was bigger than Miss H and it gave me the fright of my life!   

The move itself was a lot less dramatic than I had worked myself up to thinking it would be.  Thankfully Mum, Dad, LCJ and MT were all around to help.  I’m not sure it was exactly what they had bargained for on their trip to Sydney, but they were an amazing help!  We hired a van and two men to move everything from the one house to the next.   They arrived in a huge van that didn’t exactly look like it would pass any legal road-safety tests and neither of them spoke a word of English!!  As none of us spoke any Cantonese, there was a lot of hand signalling going on.  However, they were fantastic and moved everything over in a couple of hours!!  Unpacking was the interesting part with two alpha males in the house!  Mum and I had quite a few giggles!!!  Dad’s motto is “measure twice and cut once”, Mr D’s motto is “don’t bother measuring, just cut!”  We had to store quite a lot of stuff in the garage so you can only just imagine how the two of them organised it all!!!