The 36-hour birthday

How to have a 43rd birthday a month after arriving in Australia:

Send the kids to their first day of school. Watch one or maybe both fighting tears as they get out of the car and make the long solo walk to their new starts. Feel simultaneously proud and powerless.

Go home and have a little empathic (and probably birthday crash) meltdown. Cry in your bed a little. 

Get up and go to a movie with your love, who has taken the day off  (and who patiently waited for the carthartic tearstorm to blow over). Have lunch. Go shopping. 

Get an ipad. Officially and enthusiastically join that fan club.

Happily chat with parents via phone, who have lovingly ushered you through 43 years since that noon birth in New York City in 1969. 

Pick up the kids from school. Feast on their stories and observations and--especially!--the knowledge that everything will work out. Remind each other that friendships and new lives are not made in one day. Or one month.

Walk into your favorite Italian restaurant for dinner.  Hear the waitress say "Oh! Welcome back! So nice to see you again!" Mentally give yourself a high five.

Go home and decide we're all too full to have birthday pie. Offically extend birthday celebrations to the next day.

Wake up to heart-filling facebook messages and birthday emails. Relish and savor each little word morsel and maybe revisit them a couple of times throughout the morning.

Exchange chat and gossip and affection with Lauren via the phone.

Do some laundry. Go on a walk. Look forward to pie tonight.

Enough. Now go and embrace the year ahead.

Uniformly speaking

School starts in a couple of weeks (see below for more about that) so it was time to get the kids fitted out with uniforms. Say what you will about uniforms, they certainly make being the new kids a heck of a lot easier. No wondering what the cool clothes will be and whether your clothes are okay. Everyone wears the same thing, no worries, no exceptions. 

The girls' summer uniform is a cotton dress, blue wide-brimmed hat, white cotton anklets, and black shoes with a green blazer. Oh, and hair up and no (noticable) make-up. There's a p.e. uniform, too: shorts, shirt, jacket, rugby shirt, swim cap, and swim suit. Not all at the same time. We hope.

Ha! Sam threw his hat across the room just as I clicked this

Maddy's swim cap says "Deakin" for her house (yep, kinda like Griffindor and Slytherin)

Sam in his rugby uni, Maddy in swim cap and track jacket.

These two have been nothing short of heroic in their gameness to jump right in with enthusiasm. They have each toured their campuses, met their house masters and tutor group teachers, met with student buddies and been assigned classes.

In fact, when Sam toured his school they mentioned the school musical auditions were that week and invited him to try out. And he did!  I'm not sure I would have the wherewithal to show up at an audition at a school I didn't yet attend. But he decided to jump right in and went for it by himself, even though it was completely outside of his comfort zone.

Maddy pretty much took my breath away with her poise and positivity and confidence as she interviewed and chatted with all of the requisite people at her school. I could practically feel the ptwing of a few apron springs springing free.

Sly mompaparazzi shot of M's school tour

It's not all sunshine and bliss, let me quickly add. Of course there are teary times and nostalgia for what we left behind. The kids are at times a bit bonkers with all of this free time, no school yet, and none of our belongings here. Sometimes new isn't adventurous and exciting, it's just hard and unfamiliar. Sometimes the ketchup tastes different or our uber-togetherness sours to irritation or starting from scratch with finding friends feels overwhelming.  As Sam said last night, "Sometimes I just don't want to be the new guy anymore." 

But time will take care of most of it. One day we won't be the new guys anymore and it will all feel like home. In the meantime, we're in this rare, mostly blessed, in-between time, dwelling in possibility.

. . .

I've had a lot of questions about the kids' schooling here. The shortish answer is that they are starting up on October 15 with the 4th term of the school year, Sam at a boys' Anglican grammar school and Maddy at the girls' Anglican grammar school (though the two schools collaborate on music and theatre and other clubs so it isn't completely segregated all the time). While there isn't an international school here, these were the schools that were highly recommended to us by both Australians and expats; the studentbody is mostly Australian students with a bunch of international kids mixed in. Both schools offer the fantastic IB diploma program for years 11 and 12, which Maddy will begin at the start of next school year.

After this upcoming term they'll have another summer holiday! Since the seasons here are basically reversed from where we were (we are just heading into spring here as Concord heads into fall) the school summer holidays are in December-January and the students all move up to their new school year afterwards in February.  

That meant we had to decide whether to skip our kids forward 3/4 of a grade or back 1/4 of a year.  After lots of consideration and deliberation we all decided that they would repeat the last term of the year they just ended in June. This way they get to have that term to get used to life here, meet friends, get involved in activities and not have the pressure to zoom forward in all of their subjects. On top of all the other changes, why jolt them like that, you know? 

Dreaming in Brown

Not one to flit between interests willy nilly, Maddy wholeheartedly embraces miniature obsessions that become part of her. She had a thing for the violin and The Wizard of Oz at age 3, for Harriet Tubman and presidential politics at age 8, for World War II and Audrey Hepburn at age 12. Right now she has a thing for stripes, 20th century history, photography, orange, and Brown.

Brown University has been one of her dream schools for a long time (at least since this if not before). Knowing we were leaving the country soon, Maddy put an official Brown visit high on her New England bucket list. So we booked a tour and info session and today was the day!

It's a little early to be worrying about applications and, yes, she knows it's a very selective school (to the tune of 30,000 applications for 1500 spots) but dreams are meant to be a stretch, right? (Cue Fame scene: You got big dreams? You want fame? Well fame costs and right here is where you start paying, in sweat. Of course, we all know that getting into a selective school is not just about hard work and great scores but also about luck, timing, location, and the mysterious mixture of the entering freshman class and je ne sais quoi they're looking for. That's a post for another day, though.) This was like window shopping at Tiffany's. She knows it's a long shot but I love that she's all in, dreaming big anyway.

Delightful tour guides. They won me over, even though they said right up front they wouldn't answer questions about Emma Watson. And I was curious, since she was in their entering freshman class and is reportedly returning to finish with the class this year. Oh well.

Maddy patiently tolerated my surreptitious photo documentation. Believe me, I exercised restraint.

Look! She fits right in.
It was a dreamy day. 

Round trip to Oz

Heigh-ho!

We decided to take a rather last minute, quick house-hunting, school-searching jaunt to Australia. When I say quick, I mean lickety: I was there for all of 3 1/2 days. (And I think it's going to take me at least twice that long to recover! I've been back four days and I'm still staring at my ceiling for a good portion of the night and dragging all day. But it was worth it.)

Sadly, I left G there to start his new job and came home without him. Sigh. We saw houses and made decisions and bought supplies for him for the coming months. As I left I had the odd feeling that I was dropping off my husband at college: the errands, the setting up, and the farewell all had that same melancholy tinge from last fall with Lauren. We will miss him dearly in the meantime but he is occupying himself with traveling around to the different offices he will oversee and getting to know his new role. August, come quickly!

On a brighter note, we loved Canberra, Australia, all of it. We found a great home in a lovely neighborhood called Yarralumla (with the bonus of being deliciously fun to say), across the street from a park and a stone's throw from the lake. It's tremendously comforting to be able to picture where we'll be. G will be able to ride his bike to work and we're less than 10 minutes from church, schools, and just about everything else. That right there is a game changer, folks!

I'm breathing a sigh of relief now that Maddy and Sam have each been offered a place at the schools we were hoping for, the ones that came up most often highly recommended from helpful friends-of-friends and G's work colleagues. Maddy will attend the Canberra Girls Grammar School and Sam will attend Canberra Boys Grammar School. Walking around them both, I felt like I was entering an Australian version of Hogwarts. When we were there, the boys were preparing for a Music Festival that is a competition between the different houses (3 points Griffindor!). It will be so interesting to enter the world of uniforms and houses and cricket and chapel and tutorials.  I know the transition won't necessarily be easy in those first few months but I'm grateful that my kids are up for giving it a go.

Canberra Boys Grammar School

Canberra Girls Grammar School

Now that we've crossed house and schools off of our list, I feel much more at ease with the looming changes. As long as we have a place to feel at home and my kids are (hopefully, forseeably) happy, everything else is just details and will work out in the end. That's true, right? Humor me. Or, I should say, humour me.

p.s. I'm thankful for my mom's willingness to fly out to care for M & S at the drop of a hat (even though she had just visited us here that week before!). My kids loved it and it made the whole thing possible. Thanks, Mom! xo

Cinema Francais

In 8th grade all of the middle school students in our town construct a building for a French or Spanish or Chinese village, depending on what language they're taking. They draw the building assignment randomly and it is with great seriousness and excitement that the assignments are made and buildings constructed. The towns sit proudly on display in our library for several weeks afterwards.

Sam came home with the assignment to build a French cinema. He knew right away he wanted it to be a corner building with little movie posters and iron balconies. I think it's pretty wonderful. I'd love to live in the top story.

Being the third child does have its advantages! By now we have learned all the little lessons about early planning and lightweight materials and adhesives. Most of all, we know that this is a BIG deal at the school--every year there's a poor kid who, unaware,  builds a lego building and calls it good.  Turns out the bar at our little over-achieving school is a little higher than that.

Lucky for me, G is the chief assistant on these projects and I think Lauren, Maddy and Sam will each have fond memories of the month of evenings spent together with him transforming their visions to reality.  I am so glad this is G's specialty. Give me the task of daily homework oversight and I'll gladly hand big, hives-inducing projects to patient, tool-savvy G.

Speaking of cinema and France, have you seen Hugo yet? We loved it. And Sam was happy to think of his cinema fitting right in.  I just want to know if his cinema serves chocolat viennois because that would make it just about perfect.

. . .

p.s. If you want to take a peek at what G and I will be talking about in one or two decades, here's your glimpse. No kidding.