February Highlights

The month of February was all about getting settled into our new routines with work/school/daycare. Our mornings usually go something like this: Andy and I wake just before 6am, and usually have at least half an hour to get ourselves ready before the kids wake up. I shower the night before, so at this time I'm usually packing my and Ella's lunches, making breakfast and our second coffee (Andy makes the first immediately). If I'm super organised I might have time for a 10 minute morning yoga session. Breakfast for the kids is generally Weetbix or porridge. They both have a second breakfast at daycare and before school care, but we cannot for the life of us convince them that they don't need breakfast at home as well!

We need to leave by 7:15am, so the kids need to wake up by about 6:40am for this all to work. If Ella has woken up on her own, she mainly does the morning routine on her own: gets dressed, eats breakfast, brushes teeth, puts on shoes. But if we've had to wake her up and she is tired this is all a bit of a struggle and it is likely there will be tears about something at some point. This happened more and more towards the end of term as she was super tired, but I'll save all that for my March update!

At 7:15am Andy takes both kids in the car and I hop on my bike. We meet at Ella's school. It's only about 800m away and we started the year with Ella and I walking, but boy was that a LONG walk with her that early in the morning. After a few days of rain we decided that driving her was easiest for all of our sanity. Andy drops off Ella, and then continues on to Ollie's daycare with him. I take Ella into the before school program. At that time there are not many other children there, so I usually help her get her second breakfast, and then she stands at the door and waves at me until I get on my bike and leave. I have a 15 minute bike ride to school along the Darebin Creek, which is a beautiful way to start the day, especially if we've had a more challenging morning at home as mentioned above.

Here are a few pictures of my morning commute:

And one of my school's sports grounds in the early morning:

As Andy takes Ollie to daycare I am not sure how that part of the morning goes, but by all accounts he's pretty easy to drop off. They normally have a plate of toast waiting for the early children and Ollie hops up to the table for his second breakfast and happily says goodbye to daddy. Andy then has a 30 minute drive to work, which I think is getting busier as people start returning to the office in Melbourne.

In the evening we normally pick up the kids around 5pm or earlier if we can manage it. Andy almost always picks up Ollie as daycare is about 2km from our house so it's much easier with the car. I sometimes ride my bike to Ella's school and then we walk home together, or sometimes Andy picks her up. I am still figuring out the best things to make for dinner as there never seems to be enough time. We had regular  weekly deliveries from Dinnerly, a meal kit service, this term, which helped in that there was always something that could be cooked for dinner. Andy and I have liked all the meals we've had, and you can select your meals so there is some control over the food you are cooking. But it was not always something the kids would eat, and/or sometimes the dinners just took a little too long or were too much for a weeknight. 

We had a mini five day lockdown in Melbourne in mid-February. I think a lot of people here were anxious that it would turn into a longer lockdown but it did just end up being the five days, and the Covid outbreak was contained. Not that I want people to be getting Covid of course, but for us the five day lockdown was actually kind of nice. Daycare was still open, and Ollie's daycare offered to take Ella for us as well. So we taught online from home with no kids and it was pretty cruisy compared to when we were teaching online with them at home last year in Canada. It helped that it was just for three days (two of the lockdown days were on the weekend), and I wouldn't want to go back to months of endless online learning, but it gave Andy and I some time to sort out the house a bit more while the kids were not home. We were able to order and build some outdoor furniture to make the space look more inviting. It also helped that the weather was nice and the playgrounds were still open. Lockdown in sunny Melbourne isn't too hard to deal with. (I do realise that we are lucky and our jobs are secure even if we go into lockdown, so I feel grateful to be in that position!)

Below are some pictures of the back garden:

The week after lockdown I had to go on school camp with Year 7 students. Camp is a pretty normal thing in Australian schools, and as a teacher at my school all teachers are required to go on one school camp per year. As camps go, Year 7 is a pretty nice one. The camps get increasingly more challenging as the students get older, but Year 7 camp is all about the students meeting new friends and transitioning to secondary school. The outdoor education activities are fun, things like canoeing, high ropes, mountain biking, and hiking. 

Camp was good, except for one very Australian encounter... I was walking back to our campsite with a group of students that had forgotten their water bottles. There were six of them, five of whom were laughing and running through the bush trail a bit ahead. I was at the back with a boy who was travelling a bit slower, we were having a chat as he'd started to feel homesick. Up ahead I heard the other students shriek and run, which I didn't really clock as out of the ordinary at the time (shrieking/laughing/running are pretty normal behaviours for Year 7 students on camp!). About five seconds later, we came upon the source of the shrieking... a big black snake was on the ground, about three meters away from us. The snake's head was up and its tongue was flicking around. The other students had obviously disturbed it, and it was now on alert. This was, in all honesty, one of the scariest moments of my life. I was shaking as I whispered to the student beside me "don't move". I knew the right thing to do was to just stand still as we had been told this by our camp leader. But everything in my body was screaming at me to RUUUUUN!!! I think that because I was the teacher in the situation I forced myself to do the right thing and stand still but man was it hard. I closed my eyes as the snake started slithering towards us. It passed by me with about half a meter to spare, and then disappeared into the bush. 

I will be dining out on that story for a long time.

On the last weekend in February I went out for a seemingly normal lunch with some friends. Upon returning home... SURPRISE! Andy had organised a 40th birthday party for me! To say I was surprised is an understatement, I had absolutely NO IDEA that he had been organising this over the past month. I still can't really believe he managed to pull it off! I was really not expecting to do anything big for my 40th, both the pandemic and our recent move meant the timing wasn't great so this was so, so lovely. We had mid afternoon drinks and food while all the kids ran loose through the house and back garden - setting it up during lockdown really paid off! (My birthday isn't until March so technically I'm still 39 in these photos!)

When it got dark we went outside for sparklers which the kids loved.

And here are a few other random pics I found from the month of February...

When Ollie started daycare he refused to nap at first. A few weeks after he started Andy came to pick him up, only to find that he had gone outside, found himself a nice cushion and gone to sleep. The educators covered him with a blanket and left him there. He now takes himself off to a quiet corner every day when he is ready to nap (which is not necessarily at the same time as the other children). He usually goes into a little teepee they have to have his sleep. So cute!

We visited our old house in Abbotsford one weekend. Of course Ella doesn't remember this house, she was only 16 months old when we moved out. But that area will always hold a special place in my heart. It's the house we lived in when we became parents, where I spent my first maternity leave and met my mother's group who I'm so happy to be back in touch with. We took the kids for a walk along the Yarra  river, past the Collingwood Children's Farm and it brought back so many memories of walks we did with Ella when she was a baby. 

Hot air balloons! We can sometimes see them through our windows at home, and I often see them on my bike ride to work. They are such a Melbourne thing to me, I remember when we first arrived here back in 2013, waking up early to go on runs (pre-children of course!) and seeing the hot air balloons in the warm early summer mornings.

And that sums up our second month back in Melbourne!