As the title suggests this my random collection of pictures from the last week. Unfortunately, our main photographer (Nene) is still in India and you have therefore the dubious pleasure of my snapshots.

First off the havaianas, which are plastic sandals which we wear all summer… well not for work but… anyway, Zoe has already her own proud pair from Brazil. However, last week she was suddenly very keen on my pair of havaianas and spent a good half-hour to put them on. The results you can see in the photos below. I honestly can say that I didn’t help her and she managed it all by herself. Finally, once both shoes were on the feet (well somehow) she started walking (again somehow) through the apartment proudly showing off to me my havaianas. Thank you darling, that’s lovely…

Second, we have been today to Maroubra beach with two friends of ours from Chile (Karen & Cristian). We don’t go often to this beach, although it is breathtakingly beautiful, because the waves are mostly very high there and it is quite dangerous to swim because of the strong currents. This beach is therefore full of surfers trying to catch these waves, while the swimmers are not very keen to go into the water. Not surprisingly, in the time we where at the beach, we saw three people being pulled out of the water by the lifeguards with their jetskis. That says it all, I would say…

Finally, in a park behind the beach there was a kite festival with different flags and kites flying. Zoe loved these coloured kites flying around, which also sometimes crashed unpredictably to the ground. She also loved the flags standing there. It was quite funny because she was so curious and wanted to touch the flags but on the other hand she was afraid because they were banging quite loudly in the wind. In the end, Papa had to hold the “evil” flag so that Zoe could touch it… and another day was saved.

All good here. Eneida left for India two days ago and seems to have a great time. Zoe and I are also very good and coping (still?) well without Mamae. The weekend is already fully booked with things to keep us busy and so time will fly until Mamae returns.

One more thing, Zoe had a group photo taken at the Kindergarten which you can see below. So, let’s see if you can spot our little Darling. You also get some impression of her Kindergarten “friends”. Finally, we had to laught that she looks so serious, nearly supiscious at the camera, maybe not sure whether the photographer does this properly. 

Enjoy.

What beauties!

…or so it feels to us at the moment. The year has been very busy and we can’t believe that Christmas is again around the corner.

The old notion that “with age the years start to fly past”, is definitely true. The only measure of how quickly time passes is Zoe’s development. She is in a very cute phase and we are having a lot of fun with her, in particular going to the beach on the weekend to splash in the water and bake some yummy “sandcakes”.

Otherwise nothing new – at least not yet, Nene is flying on Wednesday to India for a conference so that Zoe and I will be alone for a week. I am curious how this will all go, although I am sure that Zoe will be fine no matter what. Nene is also in her mind divided, on the one hand she is really looking forward to meet her India collaborators and see some bits of India (Kolkata, Delhi and Hyderabad), but on the other hand she doesn’t want to leave Zoe. The classic parent’s dilemma in life.

Finally, some random pictures of this week:

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

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

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.

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?

…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.

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…

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…

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!