Update!
Hello! It’s been a while, I know!! The second half of 2022 seems to have flown by in a blur… a very cold and rainy blur here in Melbourne. But we are on summer holidays now and I finally feel like I have the time and space to think about this blog again. And also… my parents are here!! They arrived just over two weeks ago and are here until mid-March. It is so fabulous to see the kids with their grandparents again, and of course it takes a lot of pressure off of Andy and me. I am especially thankful of the help I have from my mom when it comes to preparing dinner... it's like having a permanent sous-chef!
So here’s a quick snapshot of what we’ve been up to since our trip to the UK in June/July.
This was the first year that Andy and I have both been working full-time since having kids without any support (ie grandparents). Last year we had multiple lockdowns that gave us a break from the feeling of full-time life so in a way we kind of eased in to being back here in Australia on our own. I will admit that this year felt at times pretty relentless. Especially for the nine weeks over the winter that Andy and I both have the addition of “Saturday sport”, which is part of the job at all big independent schools here in Australia. That period in particular was challenging, as we had to take turns taking the kids to our soccer games. Luckily they were generally well-behaved and played together, and sometimes even watched the matches. (We’ll forget about the time a player on Andy’s tram dislocated his knee, or the time a player on my team got into a fight, or the time Ollie ran on to the pitch and nearly got run over by a bunch of Year 12 boys … all very fun to deal with, I can assure you!)
Thankfully we are done with that by the beginning of August and we can enjoy the entire weekend free of school activities again. The kids have their own extra-curricular activities, and this year they both did swimming lessons and tennis. It was great to have the consistency of these things without lockdowns this year and the kids have really come a long way, especially with swimming. Ollie can now swim about five meters without a life jacket and Ella does short laps of front and back crawl.
At work Andy started at a new school this year and I think has found his forever school. He’s at a very prominent and well-regarded boy’s school and has found that they treat their staff very well. Having had a lot of changes over the past 5 years I think he’s pretty happy to finally feel settled.
I too have found something at work that I feel quite happy about. When we returned to Melbourne last year I went back to the school I had always taught at and took back the position of Head of Maths. But I wasn’t really enjoying it all that much… I’ve been a head of department for a big part of my teaching career and I was just a bit over it! But this year I was appointed Head of Academic Extension which is a new role at the school. I’m working across both primary and secondary, across all 3 of our campuses, to develop programming for high potential and gifted students. It’s very interesting work, first in learning about the individual needs of gifted students and then working out which programmes to develop that are in line with our school values. It's a pretty strategic role and I'm looking forward to getting stuck in to that fully next year.
I also have a small additional job, which is working for a company to develop and record maths video lessons that align to the Victorian curriculum (VCE). I did this about five years ago, but we have to re-record all the videos as there is a new VCE maths curriculum in 2023 so the lessons have to match the new study design. It's A LOT of work and a big part of the reason the blog has been so neglected, as my free time on weekends has been devoted to working on this project. My part should be all wrapped up by the end of March though and then those videos will last for six years, (and I'll earn royalties for the six years) so it's worth it to do now... short term pain for long term gain!
Here’s a few pictures from the last 4-5 months.
The NGV continues to be one of my favourite places to take the kids. We had a chance to check out the Picasso exhibition in August, with our friends Verge and Taryn and their children Charlie and Theo. Charlie is in Ella's class at school and Theo goes to daycare with Ollie, and they are also an expat family, so needless to say these guys have become good friends of ours this year.
We always spend a long time outside the gallery at the fountains outside first:
And then we attempted to go through the Picasso exhibition, which was quite busy and a more rushed experience with the kids along, but they did a pretty good job and finding some things to be interested in.
There was a children's part to the exhibition which kept the kids amused for quite a while. Below is a space where they could create their own abstract sculptures.
And a digital picasso-esque portrait of Ella:
The pink pool installation in the gardens was a hit as usual. We were lucky to have a warm sunny winter day for this visit.
We spent another afternoon at the NGV about a month ago. The pink pool installation has been replaced with a colourful replica of the Parthenon which is quite cool.
Another sunny winter weekend day was spent walking along the Yarra River discovering bronze statues of endangered species. The conservation-focussed public art exhibition is called Wild About Babies, and is designed to raise awareness about endangered species.
This spring we had A LOT of rain, resulting in the Yarra rivers and it's distributary channels flooded in many areas around Melbourne. The bike path I normally ride on to work was flooded for over a week.
We visited Dights Falls and it was pretty crazy to see the amount of water running over the usually modest falls. I actually ran into a former student of mine who was there to kayak. I was afraid it was a bit dangerous but he does compete in kayaking for Australia so I suppose he knew what he was doing!
Halloween continues to get bigger and bigger over here and the kids had a great time trick-or-treating this yer. It's still nowhere near as big as in North America, so you have to walk quite a bit in between the houses, looking for decorations to signal that they are giving out candy. The good thing about this is that the kids don't actually go to that many houses so we don't have too much candy brought home... it's a far cry from the pillow case full of treats I used to have as a kid!
We visited Melbourne Museum for the first time in a while. This place always reminds me of being on maternity leave with Ella and I used to visit the children's section quite frequently. Nowadays the kids enjoy seeing some of the other exhibits but they haven't quite grown out of the children's section yet! Both kids looooooved this mirror part when they were toddlers and it was funny to see that Ollie was still amused at seeing multiple versions of himself!
Ollie has got super into drawing which is pretty cute. He can follow some of the drawing tutorials on Art for Kids Hub on YouTube which is Ella's favourite drawing channel. I'd never really seen him draw anything even semi-realistic so this was a surprise for all of us (as you can see from Ella's expression below).
Here is one of his more abstract pieces from daycare which he was pretty proud of so it is now framed in our hallway:
It's now Christmas Eve and we are getting ready to go to our friend's house for the afternoon. Now that we are on school holidays it will hopefully not be another three months before I find time to post again. Merry Christmas everyone!
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