Moving Across Town

red brick church Sandy Bay Road Hobart

You might have guessed from the silence on here that we have been mid-move again.

Believe it or not, the short move across town has been a lot more challenging than the move across the world was.

In part, that’s because of the physical scale of what we’ve been doing. Rather than walking into a dinky little furnished cottage where we needed to do little more than empty three suitcases into the cupboards, we have been unpacking the contents of a forty-foot container, some of which we only packed up nine weeks ago, but some of which we haven’t seen in over two years. (Hello DorkySon’s old playpen, and random wooden medicine cabinet that I don’t remember ever buying…). We have been trying to fit nearly forty large boxes of books into a house with just one built in bookcase. And for the first time ever, we are in a house with a flight of stairs, which is helping me discover all sorts of new muscles I didn’t even know I had. Continue reading →

The Rules of Guising

This is a guest post from my good friend Adam Ramsay, who thinks that Halloween isn’t what it used to be…

Last night was Halloween. I arrived home to adorable hoards of marauding small children, giggling and shrieking their way up and down my usually quiet residenial street – the kind of street where couples move to breed. Knowing my housemate was walking home from work, I quickly called her, and soon, she arrived with a large bowl of sweets to distribute to the various parties who knocked on our door.

The whole event made me infeasibly happy. But it seems that the cultural phenomenon that is Halloween has changed significantly as I have moved South and with time.

You see, I grew up in rural Scotland – the land where Halloween comes from. And so for me, it was all a bit different. So, let me tell you how Halloween worked when I was a child. I think there are five rules:

Continue reading →

5 Great iPad Apps for Preschoolers

You might remember that during our move from the UK to Australia, I had a pretty horrendous mummy failure moment. I left the iPad with all of DorkySon’s games and apps on it at Dubai Airport. It was particularly bad timing because I knew that in our first weeks here we’d be spending a lot of time standing in queues, sitting in meetings, waiting for estate agents and the like. I’d been planning on using the iPad as a needs-must babysitter for those first few weeks, and had loaded it up with quite a few new apps.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, we survived those first few weeks without the iPad (DorkySon ended up eating his own weight in bribery-related chocolate buttons instead), but we did eventually, miraculously, get it back.

Since then, DorkySon has been enjoying some of the new apps that I’d installed for him before we left, and I thought I’d pull together a roundup of some of the best ones. Continue reading →

20 Signs that you’re Getting Old

An image of the rings in a tree trunk, with the text '20 signs that you're getting old'.

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you’ll know that I turned thirty earlier this year. I wasn’t too worried about it at the time, but in the months since I’ve noticed some odd things happening that definitely weren’t part of twenties-life. I think *whisper it* I might be starting to get a bit old.

In an attempt to reassure myself that I’m not the only one (that means you have to leave lots of comments agreeing with me, please) I thought I’d compile a list. So here it is. 20 signs that you’re getting old.

Continue reading →