Isn't That Special?

Some sweet anonymous person out there in the blog-o-sphere nominated Yellow Brick Road for this Circle of Moms expat blog award.

Circle of Moms Top 25 Expat Moms

See that button up there?  I'm posting this so my mom can click on it and vote for my blog.  Then I will have 2 votes.  Two votes is a lot better than one.  And if any of you other gentle readers are so inclined, feel free to click and vote.

Ta.  (That's "Thank you very much" in Australian).

An American's Guide to Easter in Australia

Brown eggs made pretty

Shortly after we arrived in Australia 2 years ago the room mom in my daughter's class organised an Easter Egg hunt for all the kids.  Her email invited us all down to the beach after school and asked each parent to bring a bag of Easter eggs for the hunt.

I searched high and low for Easter baskets (and finally found one style at the fake Aussie Target).  But the big plastic Easter eggs were elusive.  I emailed the room mom to ask where to get the eggs.  Her reply was something like this, "Each parent should bring a bag of chocolate eggs.  They are available at all the shops."  Duh.

Easter eggs=chocolate eggs.  And they are everywhere.  The shops are packed with choco eggs, along with choco bunnies and the occasional choco bilby.  But good luck finding any other Easter candy.  No peeps (gasp!), no jelly bellies, no reese's eggs, no pastel M&Ms. 

When we showed up for the egg hunt my kids were ready, armed with their bright green cheap-o Easter baskets.  (I was really wishing I had brought our cute personalized Pottery Barn ones).  To my surprise they were the ONLY kids there with baskets.  A few kids had plastic grocery bags.  Some used paper lunch sacks.  Others just used their pockets to hold their loot.  I got several comments about our "American" Easter Baskets and it was painfully obvious that I was missing the nuances of Easter- one of the biggest Aussie holidays.

So here are a few tips for Americans celebrating Easter in Australia.

*Easter is a long weekend here.  Everything is closed on Good Friday.  And for good measure  Aussies take Monday off too.  This year, Anzac day is on Monday.  So Tuesday is a public holiday, too.

*Little kids (generally Kindy and Year 1) will have Easter hat parades at school.  You will be expected to supply a variety of arts and crafts items to decorate the crazy hats.  After the Little Princess' parade they sang a few songs, including "Aussie Easter Oi Oi Oi" and "Disco Inferno".  (The musical selections at these school functions always baffle me).

*The Easter Show has nothing to do with Easter, other than they both come at the same time of year.

*Little girls will not be dressed up in fancy new dresses on Easter Sunday.  In fact the whole "Easter Dress" concept is unheard of here.  We got lots of strange looks that first year when we went out to breakfast.

*Aussies don't dye hard boiled eggs.  If you want one of those PAAS kits with the little coloured tablets you better have someone send one from the US.  And, there are no white eggs to speak of here.  But fortunately, brown eggs work just fine.

*Sadly, Easter is a secular holiday here.  Everyone celebrates Easter, but there is hardly a mention of Jesus. 

Two hard at work.  One supervising.

So tonight, on this night before Easter, we dyed our brown eggs and watched the Veggie Tales Easter Carol.  We talked about the true meaning of Easter and left a carrot out for the Easter Bunny.  Tomorrow there will be a treasure hunt and lots of choco eggs too.  We'll go to church and the Easter Show.  We're a little bit Aussie, and American too.

Happy Easter, Oi Oi Oi!

Jervis Bay

Last weekend we took a family road trip down the south coast of NSW to a beautiful area known as Jervis Bay.  It's about 200 km (125 miles) from Sydney.  All the brochures state it is an easy 2.5 hour drive.  I guess they mean it is 2.5 hours if you have only adults in the car and you leave at 11:15 am on a Tuesday.  Friday afternoon with three kids makes the trip a lot longer.  About twice as long in fact.  But, after 5 hours in the car, we arrived at this lovely holiday apartment in the town of Vincentia.

There is always a flurry of excitement when we arrive at our destination.  The kids run around, check out their room, open all the cupboards, explore the place and, in general, send me into a panic that something will be broken before we even unload the car. 

Luckily, no knick-knacks were harmed on this holiday!

We were up bright and early Saturday morning and set off to explore the town of Huskisson.  We had an uninspired breakfast at the Husky Bakery- which is only worth mentioning because they had an actual McDonald's playplace in the back of the cafe.


We had just enough time to book a dolphin watch cruise on The Extreme.  We thought the fast 1.5 hour trip would be perfect for the kids.  So we headed to the dock, armed with motion sickness tablets and armbands for the Little Princess.  We were all amazed to see large pods of dolphins jumping and swimming right next to the boat.  Of course, the dolphin watching was overshadowed a bit by the melt down and near panic attack suffered by the Little Princess.  She completely lost the plot (as they say here) and was terrified by the boat ride.  Afterward I asked her if it was all worth it to see the dolphins up close.  Her reply was a resounding, "NO!"  Oh well, I thought it was thrilling.

Jervis Bay is known for it's gorgeous beaches.  Hyams Beach claims to have the whitest sand in the world.  It is nearly pure silica and squeaks when you walk on it. 

The next day we took some time to explore Booderee National Park.  We bushwalked to Green Patch via the Rock Platform and saw lots of Neptune's Necklace in the tide pools.  The views were stunning (Would you expect anything else?  This is Australia!)


We also spent some time at beautiful Murray's Beach.  We saw more dolphins and even a stingray swimming very close to shore.  The water was absolutely crystal clear and still warm even though it is early Autumn.  It was a perfect place to spend the afternoon.  None of us wanted to leave.

But, as the weekend drew to a close we had to load up and head back to Sydney.  I wish we could go back during whale watching season, but I'm afraid that won't happen.  Too many places to see and, sadly, not enough time.

Mufti Day

We had a mini-crisis this morning in the school drop off lane.  As soon as we pulled up I realized what I'd done.  I completely forgot it was Mufti-Day.  When the Little Princess realized it, the tears started to flow.  She didn't want to get out of the car.  I felt horrible.

Any decent mother would have put this date in her diary (that's calendar for you Americans) weeks ago.  The memo would have been slapped on the fridge and the outfit laid out carefully the night before.

But we were away all weekend in gorgeous Jervis Bay (more on that later) and I just completely forgot. 

Mufti-Day is the term used here for a "free-dress" day at school.  And I guess when you wear a school uniform every day you DO NOT want to show up in your uniform on Mufti-Day.

So I did what any guilt ridden mum would do.  I raced home and gathered up some clothes and darted back to the school.  When I went up to her classroom I saw that the Little Princess had stuck a stringy red feather in the back of her pony tail.  She said she found it on the playground and stuck it in her hair so she wouldn't be left out of Mulfti-Day even for the 20 minutes it took me to go home and get her clothes. 

She had a big smile on her face when she saw that I stuck her glittery purple Converse in the bag for her.  Because the outfit just would not have been the same with her black uniform shoes. 

You better believe the next time a Mufti-Day memo comes home I'll be setting up a reminder on the iphone, writing it on the calendar, posting it on the fridge and writing it on my arm in Sharpie.  We won't miss the next one Princess. 

Inefficiency Perfected

Americans are a model of efficiency. In America virtually everything is faster, better, and cheaper. Some days, like today, I really miss that.

Today, after a four month wait, the little buddy finally got in to see an ophthalmologist for an eye exam. Getting an appointment to see a specialist around here is kind of like winning the lottery, and I knew I would need extra time to find the office and get a "park" so I left extra early. I'm glad I did because when we eventually did find a "park" it was right next to a park! Score one more for my summer mission!

Mooramba Park Dee Why

Even though we had an appointment we had to wait nearly 2 hours to see the doctor. Two hours is a really long time when you are a four year old boy. Even if you are a four year old boy with a new ipod touch.

Afterwards, I felt so sorry for him with his miserable dilated eyes that I was easily conned into getting him McDonalds for dinner. McDonalds just happens to be located at the mall, right next to the grocery store. Now you might be thinking, "How convenient to have the grocery store right at the mall." But in reality it is anything but. Try pushing a 4WD style shopping cart filled with a week's worth of groceries through a mall out to a multi-level carpark and you will quickly realize how absolutely inconvenient it actually is!

So it was with some hesitation that I wandered into Woolies to grab a few essentials this afternoon. I reasoned that the Little Buddy would be happily contained in the trolley with his cheeseburger and I could zip in, grab my milk and bananas and get out unscathed.

Of course just as I'm about to unload my 5 items he announces to me that he has to pee. Urgently. He's "bursting".

Every American mother of small children knows exactly where to find the restroom in the grocery store. It's as familiar to her as the dairy aisle. But alas, Woolies offers no toilet facilities for customers. Instead, we are directed to the mall bathrooms.

So I abandon my trolley- half eaten Happy Meal and all- near the check stand and make a mad dash into the mall with the Little Buddy in my arms. Luckily, we made it, and quickly headed back to Woolies to reclaim our trolley. I guess I shouldn't have been surprised to find the same customer standing at the check out. (That's right- it took less time for us to walk to the mall bathroom, pee, wash hands, and walk back than for the Woolies checker to move one customer through the line). Only now, I had lost my place in the queue and had to get behind a sweet little old lady with about 20 different types of produce in her trolley. Not surprisingly the checker didn't know what half of the items were. (Oh, these are regular peas, not snow peas? Let me cancel that transaction and try again). Eight minutes later, we finally made it through the torture that is shopping at Woolies!

And to top it all off, my $6.00, 3 litre bottle of milk leaked all over the "boot" of my car on the way home.

If my kids are eating dry cereal for breakfast next week, you'll know why.

Over breakfast this morning:

Little Buddy:  Mom, did you know some "bygals" are round and have holes in them?

Me:  Bagels?  Yes, they are round with holes in them.

Little Buddy:  But not the Australian kind.  They don't have holes in them.  They're just round.

Translation:  Pikelets=Australian bagels (apparently)

Real bagels how we miss you . . . .

A BYOB Hospital

Or everything you (n)ever wanted to know about having a baby in Australia.


Things I Loved:

-The private hospital where I delivered was lovely. All private rooms, carpet on the floors, flat screen TV, comfy chairs, mini-fridge- almost more like a hotel room than a hospital room.

-Morning and afternoon tea brought around by a lady with a little trolley. Yes, I'd love some biscuits, thank you!

-Self serve kitchen with help yourself snacks and drinks for mums and partners.

-Decent cafe in the lobby with toasted sandwiches and fresh baked goods.

-Variety of classes offered to mums during their stay. Bathing, settling, breastfeeding, physio, etc. I'm sure these would be really helpful for first timers.

-My OB/GYN (although they never use that term here) was outstanding, and most of the midwives who cared for me afterward were great too.

-In the operating room ("theatre") they handed me the baby right after he was born. No one wiped him off or wrapped him up. I got to hold him immediately. It was awesome- and it made me feel much more involved than I had with my previous c-sections.



Things I found Annoying or Just Plain Strange:

-Hospital food is still hospital food. The only thing I found edible during my 5 night stay was the Rice Bubbles (Rice Krispies) I ordered for breakfast each day.

-It's BYOB- Bathe Your Own Baby. Seriously, no one does this for you. And since we are super lazy parents, our kid only had one bath while in the hospital.


-They don't provide Kleenex, bulb syringes for sucking gunk out of baby's nose or those nifty peri-cleanse squirt bottles I always got at the American hospital. In fact, when I asked about the nasal aspirator, the midwife looked at me like I was crazy and said, "We stopped using those a long time ago." Huh? Aussie babies don't get gunky noses? Go figure.

-No crushed ice! This should not come as a surprise to me as ice is often hard to find in Australia. But I figured they would have it in the hospital. Chewing on ice chips was standard post-op procedure in the U.S.

-Parking. Yes, the only parking is in a multi-story carpark, complete with huge pillars and low headroom. The lot was so over crowded that it was literally full when we arrived to check in for our scheduled c-section. Fortunately, a nice hospital employee allowed us to leave our car in the drop off zone- seeing as we were about to have a baby and all. On subsequent visits, my sweetie had to circle the lot searching for a spot. And, of course, we had to pay for parking.

-The "clothing" provided for the babies consisted of little tank tops ("singlets") and miniature hospital gowns that tied in the back. These looked completely uncomfortable to me- so we quickly switched to our own clothing from home. (The midwives all loved my baby nightgowns- apparently these aren't readily available in Australia). They also don't put hats on the newborns here- apparently to allow them to regulate their body temperature better.

-Limited access to a pediatrician. There was no pediatrician in the delivery room, and in fact, no one came to see the baby until he was 30+ hours old. Very different from the standard care in the U.S. When we finally saw the pediatrician, she basically told me that since this was my 3rd baby she wouldn't need to see us again. She actually said, "I don't believe in well baby checks." Um, OK, I guess.

-Nursing care was much more "hands-off" than in a U.S. hospital. One of the midwives actually told me that it was just too difficult for her to keep track of when I was due for my pain medication, and it would be up to me to call when I needed something. They seemed to be constantly writing things down on scraps of paper and sticking them in their pockets, unlike at the US hospital where the nurses logged everything on a computer and showed up at my bedside promptly every 4 hours with pain medication.

-Finally, leaving the hospital was a different experience here in Australia. In the U.S., babies leave the hospital in mom's arms, and a hospital volunteer pushes them out in a wheelchair. They also provided a trolley for us to load up all our flowers, gifts, and bags for easy transport to the car. All I had to think about was holding my little bundle of joy. But here, we were on our own. And, of course, it was pouring rain. Getting to the car with the baby and all our stuff was a bit stressful. Of course, we made it, but I found myself longing for that wheelchair service we took for granted back in America.


Overall, having a baby here was a good experience. And now that we're home with our amazing newborn boy, all the little annoyances seem so insignificant. Having a baby here was like most things in Australia- familiar enough to make you feel somewhat comfortable, but just different enough to keep things interesting.

The First Day- Take Two

I love the first day of school. I love the new supplies, the fresh clothes, the eager faces, and the excitement of having a new class. It's the teacher in me, I guess.

So, I was a bit let down by the way the first day of school unfolded for the Little Princess yesterday. First of all, we never got a school supply list so there was no big shopping trip to pick out fresh crayons and textas (that's Aussie for markers). Instead she took her old pencil case from last year. I did buy her new uniforms in the next size but they were too big so I decided just to let the hem out on her old ones. So no fun mother-daughter school clothes and school supplies shopping day.

Nevertheless, she was so thrilled to be starting year 2. She woke up early, got herself all ready had a huge smile on her face when she saw many friends waiting in the COLA (covered outdoor learning area). Unlike our American school, we didn't find out which class she was assigned to. Instead, all the kids line up with their previous teacher and go to their old classroom first thing in the morning. Then, at some point in the morning, they were assigned and moved to the new classroom.

I was eager to hear all about her day, so I waited for her after school. She came bounding out, telling me about how her BFF is in her class and so are several other dear friends. She told me her teacher's name and then bolted off to play with the other kids.

I fished through her backpack, looking for the typical (American) packet of back-to-school paperwork but came up empty handed. Nothing. No note from the teacher, no supply list, no forms to fill out, nothing that shows which classroom she is in or how to spell the teacher's name.

When I asked her about her day here's what I got:
"Tuesday is sport day, Mondays we go to swimming, we have a smart board in our class, we share a room with another class, and we can bring sliced apples into the room to eat while we work." Huh? That's it?

I'm hoping (but not necessarily expecting) to get more information today. This is Australia and as they say, she'll be right. I guess.

Beautiful Bather's Pavillion

For nearly six months I've been looking out my kitchen window at a beautiful 1920's art deco style building known as the Bather's Pavilion. It sits right on Balmoral Beach and houses a kiosk (where the kids can get their babyccinos), a cafe (where we've been known to order a basket of 4 pastries when there's no breakfast food to be found in our place) and a fine dining restaurant (which, before last night, we had never set foot in).

We've recently added a weekly date-night to our schedule. You know, we hire a babysitter and go to restaurants that don't have macaroni and cheese on the menu. It's so refreshing! So last night we decided to walk across the street and see if Bathers lived up to its reputation as one of the best restaurants in Sydney.

We weren't disappointed. Like many fancy restaurants around here, Bathers has a set menu. You select one entree (aka appetizer), one main (aka entree), and a dessert (this term is universal around the world) for a set price. They also bring out a little something before your selections to, I suppose, whet your appetite. Last night it was a teeny tiny thimble sized mug of potato and leek something and an equally teeny tiny spoonful of jewfish something or other. It is very hard to understand Aussies when they are speaking about fancy food. Suffice it to say, everything was delicious!

The restaurant also features a vegetarian and a degustation menu. Since I'm not a vegetarian and I had to google "degustation" I just stuck with the standard menu. Everything we had was amazing. Bather's isn't one of these overrated, over the top type of restaurants. The food was "beautiful", the service superb, the location perfect. All in all it made for a lovely date night. And we didn't have to worry about how to get home.

Surfs Up

It's Autumn here (not Fall) and the stormy weather has brought some big waves to Sydney beaches. This weekend we drove out to Manly (our closest ocean beach) and were impressed by the huge surf which closed the beach.

When we returned home we were surprised to see surf at Balmoral (the typically calm harbour beach right in front of our apartment).

Surfers off Rocky Point Island at Balmoral Beach



Sunday we headed out to Bondi for the first time and watched heaps of people surfing the big waves out there as well. Check out this cool ocean pool for lap swimming.



Bondi Beach



I'm sitting on the balcony typing, watching the sunrise and listening to the waves hit the shore while waiting for the Woolies guy to bring my groceries. (I have completely given up going into Aussie grocery stores. It's better this way). Life is good. And, to top it off, this time tomorrow I will be heading to the airport to pick up my mom. No wonder I'm smiling.

Drumroll Please . . . . .

For those of you waiting with bated breath to see which rental we selected . . .
The wait is over! Our rental application was approved this week!

Take a look at where we will be living for the next two years.
The apartment on The Esplanade. Doesn't that sound glorious- to live on a street called "The Esplanade"? It is 230 sqm (translation: 2400 square feet) of brand new luxury living.




We'll be eating breakfast on the balcony looking at this view of Balmoral Beach:



I'll be making lunch here:




Soon this gorgeous living room will be scattered with toys and this beautiful dining room will be littered with crayons and biscuit (translation: cookie) crumbs.



Yes, it has a guest suite and yes, you are invited.

Not What I Expected

Upon arrival in Sydney one of the first things on my list was to get myself a pedicure. I hadn't worn thongs (translation: flip flops) for months so you can imagine how desperately I wanted to get some lively shade of pink painted on my toes! I made a booking (translation: reservation) to get one at the hotel salon.

Let's just say it was not what I expected.

When you get a pedicure in the U.S. the person doing the sanding, buffing and polishing generally sits on something like this:



The customer usually sits in a chair, or if it's a nice place you might get a fancy massage chair like this:


So you can imagine my surprise when she walked me to a back room and told me to lay down on a table like this:


I almost stopped to ask for clarification:
I'm here for a pedicure so my feet will look good in thongs, not for a bikini wax so I'll look good in a thong, right?

I climbed up, awkwardly bending my legs (while wearing a skirt) to soak them in the foot bath placed at the end of the table. The rest of the process was pretty standard although it took at least twice as long as any U.S. pedicure I've ever had. The whole ordeal cost me $75 plus a tip (which I later learned is not expected in Australia).

And, of course, my pretty pink toes were smudged no less than 3 hours later while traipsing through the Botanic Garden.