Happy Australia Day

The week had to end well, didn't it? It was of course Australia Day, despite a very dodgy rendition of Advance Australia Fair to the Tune of Working Class Man, by a lunch time guest, our celebrations were Bonza! Fair Dinkum.

We finished the week with W receiving and award form his teacher for doing good writing crikey!, ironically this was the day D and I had the follow up meeting with the principal, not sure if our message for positive feedback and proactive dealing with behaviour was already passed on to the teacher or not. In any case he was pretty chuffed with the award and so were we, you little ripper.

I atended M's Nursery school and read Possum Magic to his class, distributed clip on Koala's and Anzac biscuits to the children and teachers. M thought this was all pretty cool, particularly since the big kids had a half day off school and were able to come into his class room too.

On Saturday we hosted some mates, neighbours and our landlords for lunch. For us it was a typical Aussie BBQ, too right, which means tandoori marinated chicken pieces, sausages (went with Turkey to be Kosher for our Jewish guests) coleslaw, salad, beer, wine and champagne and PAVLOVA...life really is good. Of the 12 people around the table we represented Austrlaia, New Zealand, Scotland, Israel, India and America, stone the crows!. It was very cool, everyone was interested in learning about some one else and some new friendships were formed. We are living in a great part of the world here, it is very multiculteral and even the Americans living here have often moved here from some where else.

The 10 children ranging in age form 4 to 17 spent teh afternoon watching movies in the basement and we hardly heard from them at all. Fair Dinkum, it was very pleasant. Apart form the ice still covering much of the backyard it almost felt like home among the gum trees. It was probably the first time that we have had a function where we did not know half of our guests and had only become recenlty acquainted with the rest.

Whatever you did for Australia Day, I hope that you had a bonza time, we think of you all often (fair dinkum) and wish you all the very best for the rest of 2007, January is almost over already crikey, we have been here for 7 weeks, some times it feels like a lifetime, others like not very long at all.

Cheers, happy Australia Day J