Day 3: bedtime story

Day 2: fairy of the ferns

Day 1: the boat

Our Holiday Begins in... Blackburn

We are having a night at Martin's mum's house before heading off on the boat to Tassie tomorrow morning. Anything we don't have now, we won't have for two weeks. And I can live with that.

Packing

We are packing to go down to Tassie for two weeks under canvas (give or take a night with friends). We do a lot of driving and find that as long as the girls each have peppermints, water and MP3 players chock full of music and stories (Mamma Mia, The Jimmies, Police, Kate Rusby for sleepy time, Play School Rainy Day Stories, Kate Winslet reading The Faraway Tree, Charlie & Lola...), the girls are content to look out the window and watch the world go by. I often peer into other people's loungeroom-sized 4WDs with dvd players in the back and feel a wave of superiority, tinged with the humble knowledge that one day I too may go there. Never say never. Luckily at the moment, they both still sleep in the car.
I am looking forward to the trip, optimistic that we have our camping down to, well, nowhere near a fine art (we saw an artful photograph in the newspaper of wooden cafe table and chairs and wafty gauze draping from a tree), but it isn't a schemozzle either. We still need to master cooking - we don't tend to take the gas stove, as going and scoring a latte somewhere is the kind of luxurious distraction that neither of us could live without, and it's a pain checking it in when we go on the boat to Tasmania. We're getting more creative with public barbecues though, combining salad making with some kind of grilled meat, veg or fruit arrangement or making a meal out of fried bread (quesadillas were a hit). We do miss our one pot wonders though - rice, pasta, soup*.
With the girls the age they are, most of our camping has been short stints so far, and the way this trip has panned out we'll be moving on a few times. I am looking forward sometime in the future to camping in one spot for two weeks so we can perfect the campsite's aura. Maybe even drape some gauze of our own. Martin is infinitely practical, I am the one whose only issue with camping is the aesthetic of it - everything is green and brown. Nature is perfectly entitled to its green and brownness, I mean the tent and stuff. So I will have to sneak the airy white gauze in myself, and regretfully accept that there will probably never be a lovely wooden cafe table in our kit (though I hasten to defend myself - I am no glamper).

*for those who follow me on Twitter or know me in real life, you might know that recently we went low-carb. I couldn't hack the vast quantities of meat, and I found it hard to keep our salt intake down, so after a month's trial we abandoned it. We are still avoiding vast quantities of sandwiches, potatoes, white pasta and rice though.

Christmas & Birthday Books

Frederique (aged 6)
Una Pearl (aged 4)

Penni (aged 35 and 1 week)



Martin (38, one week and one day):

Happy New Year

I have long held the superstition that the way you celebrate New Year's portends the year ahead.

Last night it rained. Big, fat, soaking, dam-raising, tank-filling rain. Lightning danced across the sky, lighting up the world as if it were day, and thunder echoed in the sky for so long, it sounded like an ocean tumbling past. We watched the clouds roll in from the West, while in the North-East, in a patch of clear sky, hung a huge round silver moon - a blue moon, the second full moon of the month.

Before the rain, in the pendulous, sultry heat, my children played under a sprinkler for the very first time. And in the dark, just before a fine mist frothed into the air, there were sparklers.

At midnight, a frog came to see the four of us as, climbing up the fly-wire door we sat drinking our last glass of wine. The children had just fallen asleep.

A quick google confirms what I already suspected. Frogs are a symbol of luck, fertility and transformation. Frogs also signify healing and prosperity.

I felt the universe flow through me last night, a quick ripple. There's something on the horizon, a kind of magic, something to do with friendship, love, peacefulness and hope.
Mark my words.