Term 3 School Holidays

Ok so I started this blog post about 5 weeks ago and I’m just going to finish it off, even though it is a bit out of date now! The school holidays this post is about were between term 3 and 4, for two weeks starting mid-September.

For the first time this year, we spent the entire school holidays right here in Melbourne. Although it was excellent to visit Thailand and Canada earlier this year,  it was so nice to skip the packing, the long-haul flights, and the whole jet lag ordeal. Instead, during these holidays, we embraced the art of staying put, which basically meant a whole lot of lounging around at home. Glorious when the weather was nice, which it was about half of the time. Not quite as much fun on the cool, rainy days!

We used the time off work to start chipping away at the mountain of logistics for our big move to Queensland, which, by the time I've got around to publishing this, is less than three weeks away!) We booked the movers, mapped out the road trip, found some hotels along the way, and researched different suburbs that we wanted to live in. After years and years of renting, we decided it was FINALLY time to buy our own house. Over the school holidays, we enlisted in the help of buyer’s agent to help us crack the Gold Coast real estate puzzle, and spent a good amount of our lives analyzing listings on realestate.com.au. (Spoiler: we bought a house about two weeks ago! Yay!)

In between all that planning, we managed to make room for a bit of fun too. We kicked off the holidays by celebrating Michelle’s 40th birthday at Stomping Ground Brewery—the same spot we had our farewell party when we left Melbourne back in 2019. This was a big party with both family and friends. Michelle and Steve brought their kids, so we brought ours. Ella had the time of her life, while Ollie... well, not so much. From 7:30pm, he was loudly declaring his desire to go home because ‘he was soooo tired.’ This kid is definitely not a night owl! We managed to keep him there until 8:30pm but then decided to call it a night - luckily Steve and Michelle's kids were leaving then too, so Ella wasn't too heartbroken at the early exit.

The next morning, for reasons still unknown to me, Ella decided to surprise me with breakfast in bed! No complaints here, but I was definitely wondering if this was going to become a thing. Spoiler: it was a one-off event, but hey, one can dream, right?

Early in the school holidays we tackled the dreaded toy clean-out. It turns out Ella is a bit of a hoarder (which we knew), while Ollie’s turning out to be somewhat of a minimalist. I was shocked at the amount of things he told us to give to charity or throw out! The playroom already feels much less cluttered, and we managed to sort through both the shed and the kitchen as well. We felt pretty productive over the holidays, although as an update we've hardly done any other cleaning out since we've been back at school and my stress over moving out has returned!

Midway through the first week Michelle and I took the kids to ACMI - the Australian Centre for the Moving Image. We've never been there before and so it's one of the places I have on my 'must do before leaving Melbourne' list. There was an exhibition on where the kids could stand in front of figures on a big screen and the figures would mimic their movement.

ACMI also has some really old school video games for people to play. This was a huge attraction for Ollie in particular!

After a couple of house exploring ACMI we headed to the nearby Fitzroy Gardens for some lunch and a play in the park. This was all great except for some aggressive birds, one of which swooped down and tried grab Michelle's toastie right out of her hand!

It was a great day out with our friends, who I am going to miss very, very much once we leave Melbourne (sob!)

Ollie had a Bounce playdate with a few of the boys from his class. Funnily enough one of the other mums there announced to everyone that their family is moving to Brisbane! This was a really fun day out for Ollie and it was nice to see how well he gets on with other kids his age.

We went on a few family bike rides over the holidays, stopping at local cafes and parks. It's great that Ollie can ride a bike now, though we find that it's better if Andy and I jog alongside the kids instead of all four of us on bikes at this stage. We will get there though!

And lastly we had a super fun night with Verge and Taryn and the boys. Another family we are going to miss so much - it's just so easy to have them over. The kids play so well together and we obviously love catching up with Verge and Taryn. Here are the kids putting on one of their "shows" for us. Very entertaining!

And that's a wrap on our Term 3 2024 holidays! Very low key, but lovely to catch up with some good friends, have some family time, and of course it was the start to us organising our next big move.