Heatwave

What a week, and weekend, it has been. The first heatwave of the year has struck us. Thankfully, here at the coast we were spared from most of the heat for the week, with temperatures ranging from 27-33C here in Sydney. However this weekend was much hotter, including today: 41C!!! It was a real scorcher, and the only way out was running to the waters. We went swimming twice (morning at the pool and afternoon at the beach) and Zoe spent the rest of the day playing in her nappies (see pic). Still, we should consider ourselves lucky as some inland places were even hotter, for example Alice Springs had temperatures of 46C for the last 3 days. Anyway, it seems the worst is behind us as the temperatures are supposed to fall tomorrow to a cold 23C. What a relief…

Zoe seemed to have minded the heat much less and was very happy playing in (and with) water the whole day. It was also finally an excuse for her to have some ice cream, which she enjoyed a lot, as you can see below. Otherwise, there is nothing really new here… we are just working hard and we can’t believe that Christmas is already around the corner. Zoe is changing again so fast and is copying now everything we are doing. She is also speaking much more, although she seems still to sort out the different languages. For example, she says most of the time “wagua” for water, which is a mix of “wasser” (German) and “agua” (Portuguese). We are also having the feeling that she understands now many things in the two languages. For example, if you ask her in any of the two languages where something is, she goes directly to pick it up. What a clever girl we have! An unbiased Father’s opinion, of course

Who needs clothes?

What’s this called again? Ice cream? Eis? Sorvete?

Not bad this ice cream

…even mamae has ice cream

Nice try Papa but it is mine!

Quick before he gets it

Mmmmm, nothing like icecream

Corn for dessert

Mamae’s corn is best

A rare appearance of the (main) photographer

And this is Michi, if you forgot how he looks like…

ps. 41 C is VERY hot – even for Brazilian mamae!

Sculptures by the sea (2009)

November is in full swing and with that the days got longer and it is much warmer. Another sign of the coming summer is a free art exhibition, called “Sculptures by the sea”, which is running every year in November. The nice thing about this exhibtion is that the art installations are mainly by local artists and even better the exhibits are dotted along a very beautiful costaline path from Coogee to Bondi beach. Even more importantly, on our arrival in Australia, we went on the first day (with John) to this exhibition in 2007. So, we made it to our “tradition” to visit this exhibition every year… which is not a hard tradition to keep, I have to admit. Anyway, so below some pictures of this year’s exhibition to which we took Zoe. She enjoyed herself first a lot in the rucksack, before exploring some of the sculptures in person.

…as if we wouldn’t know that…

Hats for everyone!

Anyone for a sip…?

At last, some useful advice…

Nice one

Another nice one

“Can you just hold this for me for a second?”

If this is art, I love it.

…just can’t get enough of this art stuff.

Oh please, close your mouth for once, Papa!

Et tu Brute?

Mango smooooooooooooooooooooooothie!

Much better to be carried by Mamae!

Another terrible Sunday morning in Oz.

Two years Australia

Incredible but true it was today, two years ago, that we arrived blurry-eyed and jetlagged in Australia. We remember it like yesterday when John picked us up and took us directly for a walk at the sea, actually to an open-air exhibition called sculptures by the sea. Even more incredible is to think how much has happened in these last two years, especially with the arrival of our precious Zoe.

We are feeling really settled now here and are starting to get nicely integrated. No wonder that we will be applying for permanent residency as soon as we can. Australia has been really good to us by having great jobs and a great lifestyle. What can we ask for more?

First day

19 weeks

2 weeks

9 months

Enjoying a nectarine

Checking the laptop

Who’s having more fun??

Dressed like Papa

Today

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“