We're Ba-ack!

So, we had a holiday in Tasmania. It was brilliant. This is what we did:

Night Crossing

I take ginger pills, and no one is sick. No one sleeps, either, but that's okay, it feels like an adventure.
Best bit: Alice looks out at the night sky over Bass Strait at about 2am, totally covered in stars.

Day 1

 Stagger off the ferry at 6am. Drive to Launceston and stop at Cataract Gorge, a place of stunning beauty. Because we've arrived there so early, we have the place virtually to ourselves for two hours, and the girls splash like happy otters in the (unexpected) swimming pool.
Drive to Swansea, where we have lunch and visit their lovely little brand new museum. Drive on to Orford. Instantly go to the beach. Fabulous.
Best bit: Cataract Gorge.

Day 2

 Two visits to the beach. Play Jenga and Connect 4. Read books. Relax.
Best bit: the girls learn to body surf.

Day 3

 More beach. Evie and I sculpt a hippo out of sand. We're all sunburnt in different places, but we don't care. The weather is perfect, hot enough for swimming but not uncomfortable.
Best bit: trying to boogie board in the shallow, but quite fierce, waves.

Day 4

Say goodbye to Orford. Evie cries when we discover that yesterday's hippo has been washed away. We drive to Richmond, admire the cottages and the pretty bridge with ducks, and eat lunch there. Visit a nearby zoo where you can feed the animals from the back of a truck. Hands pecked by emus. Then on to Hobart. Our hotel has a swimming pool, and the girls have a long swim. Fish and chips with gravy for dinner! Amazing sunset.
Best bit: the cute marmosets at the zoo.

Day 5

 The girls spend the morning in the swimming pool (their swimming has improved out of sight). We explore Salamanca, and visit the Tasmanian Museum, and the Hobart Maritime Museum, which Mikey adores.
Best bit: we find some art we like and buy it.

Day 6

Port Arthur. The weather is perfect, the scenery stunning, the ruins impressive, the atmosphere melancholy. Last time I was here was two weeks before the shooting, which is hard to forget.
Best bit: the roofless church. I wish all churches were like this, open to the heavens.

Day 7

(Photo: Daniel Bowen, because we forgot to take any)
It's Saturday, so we dive into Salamanca Market. Best Market Ever. The girls happily spend their holiday money. Walk to Battery Point and stumble across the house that was on Who's Been Sleeping In My House? In the afternoon, have a lovely catch-up with an old friend who I haven't seen for about fifteen years, and his partner, who now live just outside Hobart.
Best bit: seafood dinner extravaganza!

Day 8

MONA!
OMG, MONA. You have to go. You just have to. It is extraordinary. Mikey thought the girls might last an hour. Four hours later, we emerge, blinking and shellshocked, into the sunshine. Just - wow.
Drive to Devonport. The drive is lovely. But let us, in all charity, draw a veil over Devonport.
Best bit: a waterfall that makes words out of droplets of water

Day 9
Day crossing. It rains. It's a bit rough. It's the first day the weather hasn't been perfect. Alice throws up before the boat leaves the harbour (though after this, admittedly, she is completely fine). I feel queasy for nine and a half hours. The girls play happily in the cabin, making cubbies, and constructing pirate ships out of biscuit boxes, totally shunning all the shipboard activities provided.
Best bit: I fall asleep for a bit. Coming home.

Sorry I've Been So Quiet, Faithful Reader...

... but I had a lot of this to do.

Weekend in Boort

Mikey checking out the old railway station.

The top of my head, with the main street as backdrop.

The all important war memorial. This one, unusually, lists only those soldiers killed in conflict, not all those who served. Those names are listed beneath a mural on the wall of the RSL building down the hill.

Cracked mud under a bridge over the creek. This shot turned out a lot more arty than I'd intended!
Trees near Little Boort Lake. We walked all the way around it. Twice. There's not a lot to do in Boort on a Saturday afternoon when there's no footy on...

View of the lake from the window of our B&B. It was so peaceful, we could hear frogs croaking all night. And there were birds everywhere - swans and ducks and galahs and cockatoos and wrens - there were lots of others but I didn't know their names. And of course there were crows...


One of the many scarred trees by the lake. Boort was once an Aboriginal meeting place, and the people would remove long scoops of bark from the trees to make canoes, shields, containers and baby-carriers. Boort means 'smoke on the hill' - a signal for meeting, perhaps.


We made a visit to the cemetery, too. Mikey searched for fallen diggers, and found a few. Lucky we didn't bring the girls, I don't think they find old country cemeteries as fascinating as we do.


We also investigated a 'dry' lake that wasn't as dry as it was supposed to be. We spent the next three hours scraping mud off our shoes.

So why did we drive for three and a half hours to spend a night in beautiful, historic, isolated Boort? You'll have to wait and see...

On the Irresistibility of Sand and Water

So we went to the beach.

We were invited for a couple of days to a friend's family beach house at Jan Juc, and I forgot to bring a camera. But we went to the same beach at the same time last year, and once again the three girls were drawn to the magic combination of running water, wet sand, stones and sticks.


Just imagine everyone slightly bigger, and with longer hair, and the banks of the stream not quite so steep, and Alice with a different hat, and you'll have a pretty accurate picture of how they spent every morning.

Liz wondered if the urge to alter the course of running water is hard-wired, or if it's culturally determined -- are there any societies in the world where children don't feel compelled to build a dam or dig a deeper channel? I suspect it's a primal instinct. No matter how cold or wet their feet became, how raw their hands from digging and scraping, they couldn't keep away.

Our Holiday



All photographs by Alice (except the one of her smiley-sunscreen legs, which was taken by Evie)

Lost

A sad thing happened on our holiday: we accidentally left these little guys behind on the front beach at Sorrento. Though Evie has a vast collection of Littlest Pets, these two were special, her "babies." They were called Sugar and Nuttlex.

We were all culpable. It was Alice's fault, because it was her idea to bring them to the beach; Evie's fault, because they belonged to her, and she should have looked after them; Michael's fault, because he arrived with kites at a crucial moment and we think that's when they were dropped in the sand; and my fault, because I'm the mum, and it's my job to keep track of everything, isn't it? Anyway, I feel really bad about it. Ridiculous, I know, but it does feel as if Sugar and Nuttlex were part of our family, and I hate the thought of them, so small and helpless, abandoned on the beach, as we gathered up our towels and strolled away forever.

It's absurd to single out the loss of Sugar and Nuttlex when you think of all the toys that drift out of our lives - left behind, broken, thrown away, lost in the garden, sifted to the bottom of the toy drawer, marooned in the attic. I remember other objects which were once precious and have now disappeared from my life - a ring, a book, a photograph - and I mourn them vaguely, but because I can't pinpoint the exact moment of their loss, the grief is blunted. I can let them go. But I almost felt Sugar and Nuttlex slipping from my grasp, and the pain is small but sharp.

Evie cried. I said, don't be disappointed if Daddy can't find them. She said, are you kidding? I'll disappoint my head off!

Daddy couldn't find them.

So we hope that means that some other child has picked them up and put them in their pocket, that they've been carried away into a new life, with a new family and a whole set of new adventures. They won't be Sugar and Nuttlex any more. But we hope that someone loves them.

Remember I said I was going on a yoga weekend and I was scared I wouldn't be allowed to read books? Well, I went, and I was allowed to read.

But I didn't want to.

Five Things I Loved About Yoga Camp

1) It was beautiful.
This was where we stayed. The ashram is surrounded by forest. Kangaroos and wallabies wander the property, magpies, parrots and kookaburras call, fairy wrens hop through the gardens, and a tiny but insistent frog tok-ked periodically from the pond. (We saw rabbits and foxes too.) The gardens are serene, the simple buildings look out over trees and gardens drenched by gentle rain. No TV, no phone, no radio, no internet. Just being there was refreshment for the soul.
2) The yoga.
Well, the whole experience was all sort of yoga, but I'm talking about the bendy-stretchy stuff. My favourite sessions were Yoga Nidra, where you lie still and someone talks you through deep relaxation and a kind of guided meditation. It was absolutely blissful (and two story ideas came to me while I was in a trance, hooray). Some people fell asleep. Okay, I fell asleep too, but only for a second.
3) The chanting.
I didn't know there was going to be chanting, and to be honest, if I'd been told, I might not have come. But it was great. We chanted mantras, and even though I didn't know what they meant, the experience of community singing or chanting is so powerful and joyous, it didn't matter. Group singing was always the part I loved about church, when I went, and this was just the same (albeit in Sanskrit). It's interesting that different spiritual traditions end up using the same tools - music, meditation, prayer, work - though they might label them differently.
In one session our teacher talked about the yogic tradition of using chanting to alter energy in the body, to create healing energy in the world, and I couldn't resist a private smile as I thought about the magical chantments of my Tremaris books. Maybe it's not so far-fetched after all.
4) Getting up at 5am
No, really. Okay, you'll just have to trust me on that one.
5) Karma yoga
This means housework. We didn't have to do much, just half an hour a day - mopping bathrooms or cleaning toilets. If we'd stayed longer, we might have helped in the gardens (they have an incredible vegie garden, and most of the meals we ate were grown on the ashram) or the kitchen, preparing the vegetarian meals. But it didn't seem like work, because everyone was doing it at the same time. The idea is that, if done mindfully, domestic work can be a kind of meditation too. And I must say, it was lovely to be somewhere that was uncluttered, and tidy, and scrupulously clean. It made me realise how stressful it is to live in the kind of mess that I'm used to at home. I need to re-think my attitude to housework - and enforce it on my family! This might be a work in progress...

In fact, there were more than five things I loved but I won't bore you any further. Suffice to say that I'm very glad I went, and while I won't be joining the ashram any time soon, I came away with a renewed determination to practice yoga every day, and some new ideas about how to enmesh it into my life. Thanks to Elizabeth for asking me to go with her.

Hari om!

A Room of One's Own (and a minute to one's self)

Oh my God. School holidays. Lord knows I love my children, and they are excellent company; but I am not a sociable person, and my daughters have now reached an age when they count as People. They don't need bums wiped any more, but they do need conversation.

I need my time alone. I am someone who has always largely lived inside my own head, and it's a hard habit to break. Even in crowded share houses, there was always my own bedroom to retreat to, my own door to shut. It's not so easy for a mum to be unavailable. Michael is very good at disappearing to the gym or the shops if he needs some space; for some reason, I find it difficult to just vanish like that. I'm not sure if it's a mother thing, or if it's just me.

I find myself relishing the minutes spent hanging up the washing at the bottom of the garden, or guiltily extending my time in the shower (not that abluting is any guarantee of privacy). Or now, these precious moments snatched in front of the screen while everyone's busy elsewhere. No time to think, no space to write, no time to string a coherent thought together.

And here comes Evie to ask for lunch, and the solitude dissolves almost before it's begun.

Things I've Been Doing Instead of Blogging*

building toy railways
building replicas of Hogwarts castle to stand picturesquely beside railways
rescuing runaway trains from under beds
swimming at the pool
cooking sweet potato and roasted corn soup
watching season 4 of Dr Who
supervising playdates
visiting grandparents
picking Littlest Pet Shop pets out of the bath
helping to make a papier mache volcano
attempting to answer the question "can humans fly?" for the upcoming school science fair**

** the answer is, sadly, no -- not with wings made from old shirts and balsa wood, anyway

Things I Haven't Been Doing
writing


* with apologies to Poppy from Dear Swoosie, who loves a list

The Sea, The Sea

This weekend I sat with my back to the dunes and watched my little family jumping the waves. My parents and sister were looking down from the holiday unit behind us; we'd all gone away to the beach together to celebrate my sister's birthday. The Lark and the Owl were in heaven, building dams, playing trains, digging in the sand, cooing at baby lambs.

Perhaps it's the sheer vastness of the sea, its impersonal beauty, that gives us a glimpse of eternity. The waves roll in, the waves wash out. But as I sat there, with my birth family sheltered behind me, and my husband and children standing between me and forever, I couldn't help but feel a profound gratitude: that we're all safe, all healthy, all more or less happy, so blessed to have each other and the glory of the sea.

We asked the Owl to rate her holiday out of ten. "Two million, three hundred," was the emphatic reply.

Yeah.

Beach

We are so lucky to have friends whose family has a beach house. We walked in the rain, built sand bridges (and had to rush home for hot baths), played Guess Who? and Scrabble and Cluedo, ate tacos and pizza and fish and chips, read books and magazines and the Saturday paper, went to bed late, and played wizzy-dizzy in the enormous living-room.

And thanks to the vagaries of weather and geography, there was an almost permanent rainbow outside the window all weekend. Honestly! Which says it all, really.