26 Monday Jun 2017
Posted in all about me, creativity
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The first HP book was published 20 years ago today. A hardback print run of just 500 copies.
My girls grew up with Harry and his friends, reading the books, listening to the audio version on car journeys, watching the movies at the cinema, the dvd a guaranteed Christmas gift.
Thank you J K Rowling, our family have have spent many, many happy hours in that wizarding world.
11 Thursday May 2017
Posted in days out, weekly photo challenge
Here are some reflections from our trip to London in March, from The Shard, The Eye and at Greenwich.
02 Sunday Apr 2017
Posted in 52 challenge, all about me, remembering / musing
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“A Letter to my daughters”
I’m grateful that I met your dad
A man from the land down under
A place far away
I’m grateful that we had both of you
That we created our own little family
The joy, the laughs
All your lives, you’ve had family overseas
You’ve grown without grandparents nearby
Visits two years apart
Relatives in photos and letters, occasional visits
Now on email, message, skype and Facebook
The world seems smaller
You are grown now #properadult
Making good choices, creating your lives
Choosing your homes
It’s hard that we are a distance apart
In different countries, different continents
Different time zones
But inevitable, with your background
With your strength and independence
Your personalities
It’s a joy to know you are happy
In your place, with your lives
Love you heaps
#proudparents
21 Monday Sep 2015
Posted in all about me, remembering / musing
September is balloons and streamers
for both our girl’s birthdays.
September is autumn,
golden leaves and conkers.
September is a new school year,
end of summer holidays.
September is birthdays,
presents and cake.
September is parties, going out,
friends and sleepovers.
But this year it’s different
away from our girls.
Posting cards and gifts,
transferring money to accounts.
Messages, emails, phone calls,
Facebook chat and FaceTime.
This year they are celebrating
with boyfriend, husband.
Not with us, their parents.
They are happy,
celebrating their own way.
But no balloons or streamers
in our place.
No caterpillar cake here.
05 Saturday Sep 2015
Posted in weekly photo challenge
10 Monday Aug 2015
Posted in all about me
For decades, we’ve had family and friends spread across the globe.
Back in the day, we wrote letters. Occasional phone calls between UK and Australia were a rare treat at one pound per minute. Aerogrammes and special occasion telegrams were treasured.
As we raised our daughters, grandparents were not on the doorstep. “Nan” lived a few hours drive away and came to stay for a weekend, every couple of months. “Gran” lived a twenty four hour flight away and came to stay for several weeks, every couple of years.
Colleagues lived in the same street as their parents and / or adult siblings. Extended family dinner every Sunday was the norm for them, but never for us.
We had strong relationships despite the distance. It is great to have family and friends that you have not seen, face to face, for a few years, but with whom you can pick up the conversation as if it was only yesterday that you last sat down together.
Our girls grew up and spread their own wings. Technology changed and emails took the place of letters.
S~E moved to Sydney and we got into a regular Sunday Skype chat routine. Our UK morning to her Australian evening. We also had real time email and iMessage conversations.
C~M spent six months in Buenos Aires and we chatted on face time each monday. My winter evening to her sunny afternoon. Internet connection was limited in the orphanage where she was working. She had to sit outside one particular house. I loved our conversations with a sheep in the background, with dogs wandering by, with kids calling out and chatting in Spanish.
I admit to stalking my kids on Facebook. It’s a great and easy way to share snippets of life and photos. I now use Facebook more than the girls do. Their lives are busy and they are posting less in their twenties than they did as teens.
Now that we are in Australia, regular phone calls and face time chats with Aus family is easy. Family discussions with phones on speaker, not just private one to one conversations. I’m used to being nine hours ahead of the UK. I now have a regular Monday evening Skype chat with my Mum as she starts her day.
Chats with C~M are still a bit irregular. She has a busy social life so weekend mornings are not always a good time for her. Several friends have been celebrating twenty first birthdays recently, so lots of parties and nights out. We speak most weeks, but not at a set day or time. The last couple of weeks it has been during her lunch, sitting outside the children’s nursery where she works.
Last week, S~E visited us and it was delightful to hear both my girls voices together in the same room. They had a long Skype chat, with lots of giggles. Just random sister stuff but great to overhear. It’s been two years since our family unit of four has been together face to face, but it doesn’t seem that long with today’s technology.
I still like to receive old style post in the mail box. I have the time to hand write letters, to send postcards each week, to have snail mail correspondence with a few friends. Sometimes I hand write the postcard but I also use a lovely app, Touchnote, that allows me to create postcards from my own photos.
There are so many ways to keep in touch now across the miles. But voices still have a special place.
04 Saturday Apr 2015
Posted in all about me, making changes, remembering / musing
This time next week, we will be landing in Hobart. It’s exciting and a little bit scary, it’s happy and sad.
I’ve been to Australia many times, but this time it’s different.
I first set foot in that amazing country, thirty years ago, single, in my twenties, on a working holiday visa valid for one year. It was the best year of my life to that point and I vowed to return one day. It was more holiday than working, it was fun, relaxed, it was a few short term jobs and a lot of exploring the country.
My next visit was back to Sydney, married, with an eighteen month old daughter. Aussie Mate had come to the UK on a working holiday and never gone back, so this was his return trip and my first introduction to many of my in-laws. Looking back, how did we manage the twenty four hour flight with a toddler who didn’t have her own seat?
Aussie Mate’s parents were divorced when he was young. His Mum and family lived in a large house with a swimming pool in the garden, a few minutes walk from Middle Harbour. His father and family lived one street back from one of the Northern Beaches. I had this big dream that if I moved to Sydney, I wanted the harbour view or the ocean view, not a back street home in one of the inland suburbs. Dream on!
We returned again with our daughters aged seven and four. I can still picture a curious C~M on the flight, wandering off for a walk and returning with several other kids in tow, like the “pied piper”, introducing each of the to us. “This is X, she is going to visit her Grandma in Sydney” and “this is X, he’s been to London on holiday”. We went to Taronga Zoo and “Skippy Park”, the Blue Mountains and the beaches, showing the girls the Aussie side of their heritage.
Our next trip was “the big one” when our girls were aged eleven and eight. A holiday for us as well as catching up with family. My Mum joined us for a trip were I showed Aussie Mate parts of his country that he’d never been to before – Alice Springs, Uluru, Brampton Island on the Great Barrier Reef – as well as the familiar Sydney and Canberra. This was a fantastic trip, long drives in “the Red Centre”, a memorable puncture in the middle of now-where, a helicopter tour over Kings Canyon, cave paintings as we walked around Uluru, playing and buying a didgeridoo, to snorkelling the reef, wallabies on the path between our cabin and the breakfast restaurant, parrots landing on our table to share the breakfast.
As the girls got older, we stopped in Hong Long on route, and S~E stayed longer to travel back on her own. She had another holiday on her own before taking a one way flight when she was nineteen.
Our last trip was to celebrate our silver wedding anniversary. S~E was settled in Sydney by then and our visit coincided with her engagement. C~M joined us for part of the time and travelled back to the UK for her own commitments. We had a wonderful time catching up with family, meeting new nieces and nephews, sampling wines of The Hunter Valley and getting Aussie Mate to visit Melbourne.
He and I spent the final week of our trip in Tasmania, a part of the country that neither of us had been to before. We loved it, the contrasts of Hobart, Port Arthur, the countryside and coastal towns, the emptiness of the centre of the island state, miles of unmade road.
Each of these trips have been holidays for me, as I travelled on a tourist visa.
Now I am returning to Australia on a permanent visa. I can stay and live and work there for as long as I like. I have the excitement of going on holiday but I need to change my view and acknowledge that this is trying a normal working life. We’ll have to get jobs, earn a living, pay bills, budget our finances, settle into the community as we plan to stay for a year or more.
This is a fantastic opportunity for me to experience life in Australia, to live near the sea, but I need to get my current “I’m going on a long holiday” attitude out of my head. This is real life.
28 Saturday Mar 2015
Posted in all about me, more to life, remembering / musing
This is an adaption of my post from 29th October last year. It feels very relevant now as we finally head off on our “adult gap year”, thinking from the position of both a daughter and a mother.
* * * * *
I read somewhere about motherhood being the least secure job in the world. As soon as you get the hang of something, such as bottle feeding, it becomes obsolete and you move on to the next phase. As soon as you establish a family routine, the kids have newfound independence and opinions. But this, of course, is the point of it all – preparing your children to leave you.
The best thing about being a parent is when you see that your child is going to surpass you, that their curiosity will take them to places and teach them things that you never even thought about.
Being a parent of adult children is another phase. Your family grows through your children, you have new people to love. As couples and new family units, your children make their own decisions. We have to respect their choices, we encouraged them to see the world, to spread their wings, so we have to accept where they choose to settle and live their lives.
Roots and Wings
“There are only two lasting bequests we can hope to give our children.
One is roots and the other is wings.”
If I had two wishes, I know what they would be
I’d wish for Roots to cling to and Wings to set me free;
Roots of inner values, like rings within a tree,
And Wings of independence to seek my destiny.
Roots to hold forever to keep me safe and strong,
To let me know you love me, when I’ve done something wrong;
To show me by example, and help me learn to choose,
To take those actions every day to win instead of lose.
Just be there when I need you, to tell me it’s all right,
To face my fear of falling when I test my wing in flight;
Don’t make my life too easy, it’s better if I try,
And fall and get back up myself, so I can learn to fly.
If I had two wishes and two were all I had,
And they could just be granted.
I wouldn’t ask for money or any store-bought things,
The greatest gifts I’d ask for are simple Roots and Wings
01 Sunday Mar 2015
Posted in all about me, remembering / musing
Everyone has their dream of the perfect wedding. For some, it is the big white dress, vows in a church, in front of all their family and friends.
For others, it is a small, intimate affair. For our daughter, it was to elope.
S~E had been settled in Sydney for a few years. We knew of the plans that she and G~J were making to elope to New Zealand. A friend of mine knew a wedding celebrant, helped chose the outdoor location, was their witness, while her son was the photographer.
So, at this precise time, one year ago, Aussie Mate and I sat at home, wearing our wedding outfits (new pyjamas) and celebrated with a bottle of champagne.
We had a copy of the marriage ceremony. When I shared that with a few relatives here, my aunt commented “That was lovely. I didn’t expect to go to a wedding today. I feel I should have dressed up in something nice before reading this.”
We felt part of their marriage celebration even though we were on the other side of the world, our evening to their morning, our spring to their autumn. Photos were sent through to us as they had their wedding breakfast. We saw the beautiful park overlooking the ocean, we heard about the orca whales that were in the bay below, that they stopped to watch.
It was the perfect wedding for them.
We were happy to have been at their engagement the previous year, when we were visiting Sydney. We understood their choices.
Aussie Mate and I had made a similar choice ourselves. We were living in London and we eloped to Wales. That was our perfect day and twenty six years on, we are still glad that we chose that specific way to get married.
Happy anniversary kids.
30 Tuesday Dec 2014
Posted in all about me, creativity, remembering / musing
In our fast paced lives, we are often so caught up in now, what we have to get done today, tomorrow, that we to forget to look back, to remember the good times, to reminisce. We should take the time to recollect. Even in the tough years there are always some things that made us smile, things to be grateful for, happy memories to share.
There are various ways to think back on the past twelve months.
Facebook has collated a summary of our posts and photos.
I’ve seen blog ideas such as “2014 in 100 words”.
Here is another way that our family have enjoyed.
Each person selects a few pictures, images, a word, that relates to others in the family / group, or to themselves, during the past year ….. places visited …. achievements …. concert attended …. a new hair style …. new friendships. The list is endless.
Everyone, cuts out their pictures, rolls them up tight, covers them in tissue paper – all in secret. All are placed in a bag or hat.
When everyone is together, each person takes turns to pull one item out of the bag, all guess who and what it relates to (some pictures are quite obscure). It is fascinating to see what others remember, the different memories, personal highlights of the year.
We started this with teenagers on Christmas Day, when there were no young children in the family so no “magic of Santa”. W
e’ll be sharing our year this evening.
