Murri Christmas!

Polaroid from our annual trip to visit Murri Claus! (This is our Christmas card, but it won't make it to all of you until the new year...)

2 Years

Roxy turned two this weekend! We had her birthday celebration all planned out. What we didn't count on was Roxy waking up with a fever:

Cuddles with Mama after lots of cuddles with Papa. 

She perked up and we continued on with our big celebration! First stop: Boost smoothie shop for a Strawberry Swirl Smoothie in a Supergirl cup:

Look at the focus.

Next stop: South Bank for playing in the water features. Doc and I hung out on the sidelines while she and Nate splashed around in the water for an hour. She did lots of JUMPING and SPLASHING with all of the other kids.

 The view from the sidelines.

She did not want to leave.

After a long nap in her air-conditioned bedroom (we cranked it on for the first time this year), we enjoyed the afternoon thunderstorms and Nate made spaghetti with olives for dinner. It was too hot to bake pizza. We sang Happy Birthday and she blew out the candles in her bowl of strawberry ice cream.

I know it looks like I'm blowing out the candles, but really she did it.

Happy Birthday to our sweet girl! She's getting bigger, smarter, sweeter and funnier every day!  

Two Months

Doc turned two months old on Dec. 1. As much as I've been wishing for the days to slow down so that he doesn't get too big too fast, I'm afraid he just keeps growing. He's gained nearly five pounds and grown nearly 2 inches since he was born. He is such a good, sweet baby.

Second Anniversary

Today marks two years since we left the homeland for this sunburned country. When we first arrived, I didn't know if I would last six months, let alone two years. But here we are, with no immediate plans to leave, raising our two Aussie babies on the outskirts of Brisbane.

Although she's an American citizen, I think Rox qualifies as an honorary Aussie. She recognizes emus, koalas and wombats in books (but not squirrels), has vegemite on her toast for morning tea, endures nappy changes, sleeps in a cot, and loves going for rides in the pram. Oh, and she enjoys the occasional bikkie as a treat.

I wanted to get a family picture to accompany this post, but I just haven't done it yet. So for now, you'll have to be satisfied with a collage:

 Doc in his grunge onesie.

She thinks she's pretty funny (we think so, too).

Nate on paternity leave.

Me and Doc freshly sprung from hospital.

The Undies have Landed!

We moved last weekend to a new place. It was all very quick - not at all like what we were used to in the U.S., especially coming from a college town where we signed rental agreements 4-6 months ahead of the move-in date.

Timeline of Move:

• Monday: Perfect House is listed on rental website
• Tuesday: Open inspection for Perfect House is held from 4:00-4:15. If you can't make it then, you're out of luck.
• Wednesday: I returned completed rental application with photocopies of our passports, driver's licenses, bank statements, birth certificates, pay statements, utility statements and phone numbers and addresses for two personal references each.
• Thursday morning: Realtor calls each of our references to make sure we are who we say we are.
• Thursday noon: Realtor calls us to tell us that we have been chosen as tenants for Perfect House! We have to submit 2 weeks' rent and a signed copy of the lease within 24 hours (not so easy as we were in the outback with Charlie and had limited/no access to internet banking or a fax machine. Fortunately we figured it out!
• Friday. Start packing as the new lease starts in a week!

The telecommunications system here (Queensland? Australia?) is a bit slow and broken. We were having a lot of connectivity problems at our old apartment (I blame the possums chewing on the telephone lines), our ISP-supplied router is kind of busted and to top it off we had to wait more than a week to get our DSL transferred to the new phone number. 

Anyhow, we are now reconnected to the world wide web. Ready to skype and chat and e-mail with ease!

I'll write a more detailed post about our new abode at some point. It's a great house with a big backyard, air conditioning, a brand new kitchen, a shower with double shower heads (!) and a great big verandah and it's all in within our budget. How is this possible, you ask? It's on a main road, so we gets lots of traffic noise. No biggie - Nate has likened the constant whooshing cars to ocean waves. It's all about perspective, right?

We're right across the street from a great big park full of new birds. Here's Roxy saying hi to the new neighbors:

(Click on the picture to enlarge to see the pretty galahs.)

A closer shot of the galah taken with my point-and-shoot. Google "galah" to see just how pretty they are.

We've been so busy the past few months that Nate has gone a bit feral. Here he is relaxing in the new house and sporting his Wolverine look. 

Eat your heart out, Hugh Jackman!

Happy Easter

Nate left for Greece late Saturday night and missed the visit from the Easter Bunny (and his chance to act as Daddy Taxman on any goodies left for his daughter).

Mr. Bunny brought Rox a chocolate Humpty Dumpty this year. Crack ol' Humpty open and out spill his guts (M&M's). Here's a pic of her trying to get the carnage started:

She managed to scrape some of the chocolate off before I took it away from her and broke him open to reveal his delicious entrails (and to give her a couple of manageably-sized pieces).

Later that day we went over to Shaun and Ann's for an Easter lunch and egg hunt. They're not big on Easter baskets here, so she filled her paper bag with as many eggs as she (we) could find before the big girls got them all.

Doing her best impersonation of an Easter egg with her stripey pants.

The rest of the day was filled with Wii golf and sneaking strawberry patty cakes. Shaun and Ann (Nate's boss and his wife) and their family are moving back to California next month. Good for them, sad for us to lose our good friends, so we'll try to soak up as much of them as we can before they depart!

update

We've all been on the road for the past few weeks. Lots of stories and pictures to come, but we're working through jetlag and Nate's on an epic multi-day journey to get back to Brissie.