Two infections and a stiff neck

…summarizes this week quite nicely. Basically, we have been all sick-lish. Eneida twisted her neck badly and could not turn her head until she was “knocked back into shape” by an osteopath. She is now feeling much better but the neck is not yet 100% good. Thankfully, it seems only a ligament which got stuck in her neck and there are no slipped discs or similar nasty things. If everything continues like this, she should be fine again this week. Zoe and I were both fighting with infections. I am feeling already much better but poor Zoe has still some fever and is fighting hard with her viral infection. We hope she will be better in the next few days, as she is not happy with being sick.

And that was pretty much the week. Just a comment on the picture below. Zoe loves going swimming and she always wears a Lycra top as it protects from the sun and keeps her warm. Now, she always tells us when she wants to go swimming by bringing this top to us and pointing at the door. She has done that already a few times but now she is trying to put her swimming top on so that we get the message. Last week she finally managed to somehow put this top over her head and walked around proudly with her swimming top half on. So here we go, we have a true Aussie girl who wants to wear her swimtop and bike helmet all the time.

More yogurt and cars (sort of)

Sunday evening, time for another blog entry. Papa in bed, Zoe in bed, mamae can deal with photos, videos and write the blog for a change.

Another week flew by and we can barely believe it’s almost November. Soon it’ll be our second anniversary here in Australia (!).We had a great week, especially with summer around the corner. Work for the parents, kindy for Zoe, and leisure for everyone – beach after work!! We even had the opportunity to see two whales swimming by Clovelly beach last week. That was quite surreal, pity we didn’t get that well on camera. You’ll have to trust me on this one, it was really beautiful.

Weekend: we managed to take Zoe swimming (looooooves the water), went to the farmers’ market (Zoe loved patting the piglet and the baby goats), had friends over for lunch (yummy BBQ octopus on a bed of warm Mediterranean salad, and garfish in vine leaves also on the BBQ! Thanks to Papa chef)…also did some shopping (Michi especially, not me) and had sushi. Well, it was a little busy…

By the way, sushi is Zoe’s new favorite dish. Last Wednesday I offered her to see if she’ d have one or two. She went on and on eating until she had 7. Ok, they’re called baby sushi for a reason (quite small), but 7?! Anyway, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised given her obsession with rice and soy sauce at the moment…

Just to illustrate our routine lives, a couple of videos of last week. On the first video Zoe’s enjoying her yogurt (which she’s crazy about), and on the second one she makes the “vroom vroom” car sounds while playing with her, hmm, cars?

Vroom vroom…

Preparations for the summer

We are in full preparations for the summer and so it seems the Australian media, which are full of advertisements of tanning creams (for the girls), barbeques (for the boys) and weight loss programs (for both genders).

Anyway, we have taken the opportunity to make the most of the first warm days (yesterday it was the first day over 30C since last summer!) to prepare ourselves for a typical Oz outdoor summer. Zoe loves the rucksack on walking excursions (see first pic below – although only an old one, because we don’t have a new pic). This made us think that she might also like a bikeseat for the summer to go on bicycle excursions.  So we bought and installed a seat, put Zoe in for trial in the garage and…

she loooovvveeed it! After such a positive start we decided to take her for a ride around the park and…

she HATED it!

What was going on? Well, basically, she hated the bicycle helmet she had to wear (no negotiation there, and it’s the Australian law). She always wanted to pull it off, which didn’t work because of the strap under her chin. So she got really angry, and was screaming all along the bicycle ride while trying to pull off this thing from her head. What should have been a short & quiet family excursion became a seemingly long and stressful outing. Back at home we had to think how we could make her believe that wearing the helmet was fun. We decided that we ALL would be wearing our bicycle helmets through the evening – including dinner time (hopefully the neighbours didn’t see us hahaha) – while telling her all the the time that her helmet was the most beautiful one and she was such a good girl when wearing her cool helmet.

The next morning, we got up and… Zoe wanted to wear her helmet first thing in the morning, and did not want to take it off. Relief…So we had a few days when she was running around with her bicycle helmet on most of the time (see other pictures below). Now she is always very proud of wearing her helmet when we go out on the bikes and she can’t wait to climb into the cycle seat for another ride.

How quickly things can change…

…now I’ve stopped smiling because she is so much heavier

…not sure yet about the helmet

Eating with helmet I

Eating with helmet II

Checking the laundry with helmet

Can’t stop smiling now…

Helmet mission accomplished… everyone happy

Lulu again

All good here. It is finally getting warmer and we had some visits to the beach and enjoyed the beautiful weather. So, we thought we post 2 short videos of Zoe which document everyday life in our household.

The first video shows Zoe’s relationship with her doll Lulu. Lulu is now taken everywhere… and we mean everywhere… except if Bunny is around…hahaha
Lulu has now even a “bed” beside Zoe’s cot and we kiss her also goodnight before Zoe goes to sleep. Interestingly, Zoe has been now much better with the other children and is more caring. But she still wants to have a bite from everyone’s food in the kindergarten. hahaha

Speaking of caring, the video below shows how Zoe is caring for Papa and exploring his eyes, ie are they opening and closing like Lulu’s eyes?! How exciting!

An Orange weekend

There we are again, back from our weekend trip to Orange – a small town in the inland of our state (New South Wales), located roughly a 4-hour drive from Sydney.  As you can see from the pictures, Zoe was already very excited during the drive out there, which resulted in complete exhaustion (see next picture). We stopped on the way to have lunch in another small countryside town called Bathurst. At the cafe we had lunch and Zoe was given some paper and pencils to colour, which she absolutely loved! So we had a very creative (and restful) lunch with some good food.

View Larger Map

On arrival in Orange we were all tired and just dumped our luggage in the little house we were renting. Despite being very tired, Zoe had to explore the whole house immediately, which included a very thorough inspection of the paperbins (see pics). Well, you never know what could be hiding in there!

Because of its inland location Orange can get quite cold in winter & spring, in contrast to Sydney’s mild weather. This meant we had night temperatures of -2C degrees! At last an excuse for my two ladies to dig out their winter couture, which they weren’t able to wear in the non-existent Sydney winter. On the photos you can see our little “model Zoe” showing off her fur tank top, which was given to her by tia Regina and tio Paulo from Brazil.

Another positive aspect of Orange is that it is located in a small but very nice wine producing region of Australia. This was obviously the perfect excuse for us to taste some of their wines. We visited a small vineyard called Bloodwood, run by Steven and Rhonda. They were the pioneers of winemaking in this region of Australia ~25 years ago (see last photos). We had the pleasure of tasting their wines in the kitchen of their house, guided by Rhonda’s helpful comments. It seems their wine got to our heads because suddenly our car was full of wine bottles/cases, with our other belongings carefully draped around this precious cargo. Well, at least we don’t need to buy wine for a quite a while, and we bought some delectable bottles.

All in all, the Orange weekend was a big success. We all enjoyed ourselves immensly and could even relax a little bit from the city life (no computer for 2 full days!).  Now, it’s back to the rat race and 25C in Sydney – spring has truly arrived here!

So much excitement…

… too much excitement!

Beautiful Mamae

Drawing together

Say: “Cheese!”

Has anyone checked this already?

Well, I do it then.

Confronting the camera

In a pensive mood…

Vineyard I

Vineyeard II

Orange countryside

Zoe and Lulu

Zoe has a new friend: Lulu.

Lulu is her first doll, which is now carried around a lot -  although “Bunny” is still the unbeaten champion of Zoe’s unashamed adoration and love. Anyway, we thought it might be good for Zoe to practise some social skills with a little baby doll. The reason is that Zoe can be sometimes a bit “rough” with other children, and in particular smaller children. So, to teach her how to “be gentle” with other children, Lulu was purchased as a …ahem… well, a test crash dummy. We can see already that she understands much better that one needs to be gentle with other children after we show her “what Lulu likes”.

Below some pictures of Zoe and Lulu, as well as other pictures from this week. As you can see she has really the look (and sometimes the behaviour) of  a “cheeky monkey”, “danadinha”, “Frechdachs”… She definitely didn’t get that from either me or Nene… hahaha

Zoe and Lulu

An opthalmologist in the making…

Clapping hands

VIVA! Hurra!

Showing off her teeth

Showing off her belly

Blowing a kiss

Cars and other means of transportation (or Zoe’s German side)

Two short videos:

• On the first video Zoe is showing a new love for cars (what a good German girl!). She is now taking her toy cars always for a spin and making vroomvroom noises. She is completely self-absorbed doing this and does NOT want to be disturbed by anyone, in particular her parents! We caught her on camera while “driving” through the flat.
• Talking of driving, she is now in love with the ladybird pushbike, which Bine & Stefan brought as a present when they visited us in March. She previously liked pushing this ladybird around with her hands but now she found out that she can actually push it with her feet while sitting on it. What a delight! Now she zooms (or vrooms) through the flat – with only the occasional furniture collision

… and again her world has expanded a bit more. Enjoy.

Car obsession

“Taming the ladybird“

Sandstorm and bunny addiction

As you might have heard, we had today a huge sandstorm in Sydney which brought the red sand straight from the center of Australia. So, we woke up on “Mars” with everything coloured in red. Below two pictures I took from our kitchen window. One was taken at 6.30am during the storm and the other one was taken in the afternoon after the storm had settled. Incredible how low the visibility was but not surprisingly Sydneysiders were not impressed and the day was completely normal with people jogging out on the street and dropping children at school. How laid-back can one be?

I also attach 4 other pictures of our precious little one, showing again her addiction to the bunny which some days does not get out of her mouth. She is therefore dragging this bunny everywhere while rummaging through the cupboards, reading books, poking in candles … you get the picture. She had developed again so much and is now much more vocal by saying lots of things – although in a language we still do not understand. We also noticed that  she gets now frightened by loud noises and recognises things by their sound, so she turns when she hears the cat meowing or an aeroplane passing etc.  She loves pointing to the planes (like Marianna used to!), cats and dogs, while saying something we can’t follow. What a change to the little baby we had a while ago.

“Life on Mars”

Life back in Sydney

Bunny sucking I

Bunny sucking II

More bunny sucking…

Nice smile!

Rice monster

Just a fresh video from today’s supper. Zoe L-O-V-E-S rice and we are not sure whether it’s due to her Japanese or Brazilian genes    She’s also enjoying using the fork now…after all, spoons are only for babies!

We had a very good (normal) week, and Zoe’s having so much fun at the kindy. There are many babies now, but she is still spoilt by the cook (who has her photo on the fridge door), the manager (who takes her to the office) and the carers from the older room (who take her to play with the bigger children). She’s even been sitting on a proper chair recently – upgraded from the highchair! She makes such a mess when eating that they leave her only in her body suit for lunch. Nothing like mastering independence!

And in case you can bear another quick video, this is Zoe loving to put the key in the keyhole – and Papa very proud of her skills

Da or Ta?

Last week Papa and Mamae were struggling to understand what Zoe was saying when taking an object from us. Mamae was sure it was “da” (give me), whereas Papa was sure it was “da” for the beginnings of “danke”.  Then, when dropping Zoe at Kindy last week, mamae witnessed Zoe saying “Ta” to the carer, when receiving a toy from her. And the carer was practising with Zoe, giving and taking the toy and saying “Ta”. Ahh, so it was”Ta”, in ENGLISH!!  (which is the children version of  “Thank you”). Surprise surprise, so much for Portuguese and German – Zoe prefers English after all.

On Saturday it was the wedding of good friends of ours (auntie) Sharpley and (uncle) Nelson. It was a perfect day for a wedding with blue sky and 27C, and Sharpley and Nelson looked stunning and so happy. Unfortunately we only have a photo of Sharps! And little Zoe looked amazingly sweet in her beautiful dress, which she got from vovozinhos for the birthday. Well, she was too small then, but it now fits perfectly!

Today we had an easy going day (after our exciting weekly cleaning of the flat, argh!)…we went out for lunch at small restaurant called Clodeli and even managed a short visit to the beach, which was great because it was unseasonably hot today (31C). Zoe also tried out the seawater, and loved it!

Some pics to summarize our last few days:

Almost there!

Got it!

All dressed up (for a change!)

So beautiful…

…feeling suddenly so old!

Stunning bride!

So happy!

Like Eva

Loving the water!

Yuhu!

Watching the other children