Isla Rolls Over

Autumn in Australia is autumn in slow motion. There are no great storms or cold snaps or all the trees seeming to change colour overnight. Instead Autumn quietly creeps in in little installments. Each day a couple more leaves have turned red or fallen from the tree. Night comes a little earlier and temperatures gradually sink over the weeks until one morning you wake up, look around and think -wow it really is autumn now after all. 
The unfolding of the year and the seasons is still new and strange to me. Winter is coming but we are not looking forward to Christmas or New Year or Halloween or Guy Fawkes. In winter here nothing special happens. There are some school holidays and there's lots of football on the telly and there is a kind of tradition of a second Christmas on the winter solstice in June, but that is about it. I'll just have to wait and see what happens.

You may have noticed that I've not been able to update my blog so much recently but you probably understand why -work and baby! Now I'm back to normal work the weeks are flying by and any spare time I have is spent doing things with Isla and Julia. Also I don't have as much exciting news to report. After all the excitement of babies and shoulders and moving to Australia and looking for work it is a wonderful feeling to have the most exciting thing being when Isla does a poo.
So the most exciting thing that's happened in the last few weeks is that Isla has rolled over all by her self. Here is the video evidence:

She is now performing this maneuver on a daily basis. And she has a few more tricks up her sleeve as well: she is now eating rice cereal, she has been to the swimming pool with Julia,  she likes sitting in the high chair, she giggles when you tickle her or blow raspberries on her tummy and she has developed a particularly annoying and earpierceing screeching noise which she uses to try and stop being put to bed.
Did I mention that Isla really doesn't like going to sleep anymore? She really doesn't and has embarked on a campaign of protest and non-cooperation over the last couple of weeks which is driving Julia up the wall. Isla will be tired and yawning and her eyes hanging out of her head but when she is put in her cot she miraculously recovers and is bright as a button, full of chat and cute smiles and then if that fails she starts with the screeching and if that fails she's starts with the crying. She does go down eventually but it is not without a fight, and she now wakes up maybe once or twice a night to feed when she didn't need to before. As I am at work all day it means Julia is doing all the hard work and it is pretty tiring but I suppose you all know about this. All good baby stuff!

We had Isla weighed and measured the other day and she is 7.5kg, that is in the 90th percentile for weight. She is a big baby! Julia must be feeding her some kind of super-powered milk for her to get so big. It is the one time in your life when it is absolutely fine to be chubby.

Aside from the baby stuff there have been a few other things happening here. It was Mother's Day in Australia a couple of weeks ago. Julia was very happy to get a card and present from Isla, and even happier to get a break from her and go out to lunch with her own mum and Simone. The week after that is was Marks 40th birthday party. Mark and Nicole put out a great spread of food and drink for their families and thank you very much for that. Isla spent most of the party charming various aunties and cousins.

My work is continuing to go well and the best thing about it is that I am now working most of the time down in Moonee Ponds. Moonee Ponds is a very nice suburb that's only 10 minutes away from our house on the tram. It is a little more upmarket than Preston (the other area I work in) and the population is more traditional Melbourne - Anglo/Greek/Italian. In fact I seem to spend much of my time making false teeth for little old Italian ladies who don't speak much English.
Moonee Ponds has good shops, bars, restaurants and supermarkets. There is also a lovely park (Queen's Park) where I can sit at lunch time, watching the ducks in the pond and eating sushi. Yesterday Julia and Isla came down to visit me and we had pasta for lunch.
Moonee Ponds's most famous export is Dame Edna Everage. How is that for a claim to fame? I have yet to see her shopping on Puckle Street though.

Anzac Day

It was Anzac Day last Wednesday (the 25th of April) and this is a very important day in the Australian calendar. It is a public holiday and a national day of remembrance to honour the members of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) who fought at Gallipoli in the Ottoman Empire (Turkey) during World War I.
Anzac Day is a very big deal here. Traditionally there are dawn services all across Australia followed by marches through the state capitals by veterans and members of the Australian Defence Force and other groups. There is a special AFL match on each year at the MCG which always features Essendon against Collingwood, and much of the prematch build up is a further tribute to Australian forces overseas. There is a great tradition of young australians travelling to Gallipoli in Turkey to attend the dawn service there. This year tens of thousands of people braved wet and miserable conditions at 4am to attend the dawn service in Melbourne. There is constant coverage on TV of the various services, marches and tributes to the Anzacs.

Australians commemorating Anzac Day in Turkey

Anzac Day at the MCG

As an outsider the passion with which this particular part of Australian history is commemorated is rather bewildering. Anzac day is important to young and old Australians alike. The whole country comes to a standstill. On first impressions the scale of the commemoration seems way out of scale with the actual events (the campaign in Gallipoli didn't actually achieve it's goal of capturing Constantinople and while the 9,000 Australian lost there is significant, there were also 20,000 UK troops lost and Gallipoli doesn't get much of a mention in our Remembrance Day services). However this is missing the point. Anzac day is about so much more than just a small battle in a very distant land.


First of all Anzac day is about the legend and heroism of the Anzacs. It is about the brave young Australian and New Zealand men who fought for eight months in terrible conditions against a much larger force. It is about their sacrifice and their Anzac Spirit. This spirit has become one of the defining characteristics of modern Australia. It is about mateship and self reliance. Mateship is a very Australian concept that goes back beyond Gallipoli and the first settlers in the outback to perhaps as far as the early convicts who had to rely on their bonds with each other rather than the state for survival.
Anzac day also now commemorates not just the Anzacs but all Australian and New Zealand men and women who have been lost in military conflict over Australia's history. It commemorates those lost in World War II, in Vietnam and most recently in Afghanistan.
And perhaps what Anzac day seems to be as much about as a remembrance service for war dead is about the birth of the modern Australian nation. World War One was the first time that Australian men had to travel overseas and fight for their country. Though a part of the British Empire at the time they were not fighting for Britain but for themselves, for Australia. Anzac day is a call for Australians to stand up and be proud to be Australian, proud to be their own unique, independent country, that they would be willing to fight and die for if required.

As a Scottish person it makes more sense for me to relate the relevance of Anzac day to our own country's history (both the facts and the legends). Most obviously we have the likes of William Wallace or Robert the Bruce and much our our unique identity as Scottish people is tied up in these historical figures, now hundreds of years gone, who first defined what it is to be Scottish (mainly by fighting the English!). So with that in mind I think I am now understanding some of what it means to be an Australian better and the special significance that Anzac Day has for Australians.


Having said all this you may well be wondering what Julia and Isla and I did on Anzac day and the answer is not much! We watched some of the memorial services on TV and then I watched the football - Essendon vrs Collingwood at the MCG. I am now barracking for Essendon, seeing that is where I live, and it was very close. In fact it came down to the last minute when a Collingwood player kicked a final goal and won the game by 1 point. Isla was heart broken as she is now an Essendon fan too. We consoled each other with a cuddle.

shocked at the result

happy again!