December Recap
It's New Year's Eve, and we are currently on Day 2 of our mandatory quarantine in Sydney, Australia. December has been a crazy month, as you might be able tell by the lack of activity on the blog. I'll write a whole post about our flights to Sydney and our quarantine experience in the coming weeks, but so far it's not been too bad. But first up, a recap of the month of December!
The weeks before Christmas were spent going through our belongings, deciding what to pack and ship, what to sell, and what to give away. It doesn't feel like it was that long ago we were doing this for our move to Canada, and I can safely say I really hope we don't have to do it again for a long time! We tried to be really ruthless this time, and in the end we packed up our lives into four shipping boxes and seven suitcases. As we spent the whole time we were in Canada at my parent's house, we didn't have any furniture to worry about. We'd mostly accumulated toys for the kids. We sold the big stuff so we could have some funds to buy new toys with, and gave the rest away.
We tried to get in a few activities around the packing in the lead up to Christmas. Driving or walking around at night checking out Christmas lights was a favourite thing to do. We went to a paid drive through Christmas Lights experience that was set up in the multi-level car park at the airport (clearly they don't need all that parking space at the moment). It was kind of cool, but I think we preferred just checking out local houses more.
We had some mild weather and got in one last hike at Crawford Lake conservation area, and we took one last trip down to Lake Ontario in Oakville where Ollie could throw rocks in the lake.
I worked up until a week before Christmas, and I was very sad to say goodbye to my colleagues and the students I've worked with for the last year and a half. I really enjoyed my teaching job in Canada and had some lovely messages from students and parents before I left.
We also said goodbye to Ella's kindergarten teachers, who she has had for both Junior and Senior Kindergarten. (In Ontario all kindergarten classrooms have one teacher and one Early Childhood Educator.) They were both phenomenal teachers and we feel so lucky that Ella had them as her first teachers, as she really blossomed and loved school since starting last September. They gave her a copy of the book "The Places You'll Go" and wrote lovely messages inside, and had her classmates sign it. It was so touching... and yes I cried when I saw it!
The week before Christmas we had a few of our friends drop by for some backyard socialising. Luckily as I mentioned the weather was pretty mild so we were able to sit outside around a fire without it being too cold. And then before we knew it, it was Christmas!
We had Christmas on the 24th this year, as our flights to Australia were early on the 26th. This gave us a bit of time to do last minute packing on Christmas Day. This year Ella was very aware of Christmas, and we had a countdown going for weeks. On our Christmas Eve Andy showed her the Santa Tracker (we had to look up an old one on YouTube as it was really only the 23rd), and was like "look Ella, Santa is in France! He's on his way!" Ella completely freaked out and was like "we have to go to bed now! What if Santa comes before I'm asleep! Let's go!" She actually got quite panicked about it and we had to calm her down, trying to rationally explain that France was really far away. I thought it take her ages to fall asleep, but she ended up crashing after her initial freak out.
Ella then woke up at 5am, ugh, and we managed to convince her to crawl into bed with us initially. She kept poking me, asking if I thought Santa had come yet, and finally at 6:30am I gave up trying to go back to bed and let her go downstairs. She was SO excited that Santa had come, and we had to work really hard to convince her to not open any presents until everyone was awake.
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| Here we all are, in our matching Christmas PJs |
Once Ollie was up and we had fuelled up with coffee (and Bailey's) we opened our stockings. We then had breakfast, complete with champagne and orange juice, before opening up the main presents. Both Ella and Ollie had a really fun time. We even managed to include Andy's parents by FaceTiming with them during the morning.
The kids had fun playing with their new toys the rest of the day. We gave each of them an iPad (old ones that we already had between us and my parents) and a set of headphones. We figured they'd be good for the plane. Here Ella looks like she's set for a long plane ride:
We discovered that we could play the game Codenames really easily online, so we played with my brother and his wife that night. They were supposed to come to Canada for Christmas this year, but of course with Covid that was cancelled a while ago.
It started snowing in the late afternoon and continued all night. The next morning, which was actually Christmas Day, it was a beautiful winter wonderland, the perfect amount of snowfall for Christmas Day. We took the kids out tobogganing for the morning which was a fitting way to end our time in Canada.
Boxing Day we were up at 4am for the first leg of our flights to Sydney, which I will write more about in my next post! Happy New Year everyone... here's to a more hopeful start to 2021!
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