The Holidays Are Nearly Over!

Poor us! After 6 long weeks of sun, sea, Sydney, swimming, sgardening, sdecorating and meeting up with friends, we are reaching the end of the summer holidays. Bernie starts back on Monday, still on 30 hours at the moment - her boss is fine with her reducing the number when necessary. I don't have to go in until Friday, but will go in before hand to move into a more centrally located laboratory (woop-woop!) and prepare for the whopping 5 subjects I'll be teaching this year - Science, Maths, Horticulture, PE and Conservation... variety is the spice of life as they say... I guess I'm quite like a curry...

Bad jokes aside, we decided to do one of our favourite walks this morning - up into the hills (Grampians) above sunny Nelson and tried to tire out our tireless dog... which is by definition, impossible! We took it nice and slow and made the steep ascent at a comfortable pace for Bernie - allowing me heaps of time to stop and throw sticks to Bobby.

Once at the top we spent a good while taking in the beautiful landscape of Nelson and surrounding wineries, mountains, beaches and islands. Our house is approximately where Bernie's left shoulder is and the place where I've swum with dolphins and we've both kayaked with a Southern Right Whale, is next to Bernie's left eye:

We practiced our cheesy grins - I didn't realise my face creased up this much!

We managed to wrestle Bobby's stick away from him for a quick moment to get him in on the cheesy grin effort - he smiles more than the pair of us combined!!


Looking inland towards the wineries and Monaco - where we used to live (the dog-legged finger of land projecting into the estuary)

It was bang on high tide and a large boat set-off for some distant land... the picture doesn't reflect the very rugged topography of Nelson:

Our first ante natal session went well t'other day - an interesting bunch of couples and plenty of humorous conversation about wind, back-ache and tiredness - and that was just from us men!! We got a little overwhelmed by the presentation on car seats, but if anybody wants to give us $1,200 for an all singing, all dancing child booster seat then I'll send you our bank details! We have another 5 weeks of these sessions and alongside the multitude of books we've acquired over the years, we're getting better prepared for meconium ('google images' it if you dont know!), sleepless nights and temper tantrums.... yeah right!

In reality, we're trying to enjoy our last slice of 'easy life' and have a couple more BBQ's, sea swims and beautiful walks before school begins on Monday... 87 days to due date!

C&B! x x