OZ Fighters

It's taken me a long time to write this next post. The period from September to December was rather hard to digest. I think I've taken enough distance now, and with all others in bed, and still some good spirits keeping me up late at night, I should be able to fill the gap and drop a few lines now.

We had a great time in Switzerland and a great start on our return back to Sydney. It was like jumping from the Swiss summer to the OZ winter, with OZ winter days feeling just the same as the Swiss summer nights - absolutely fabulous! But the cold side of reality returned rather fast - September brought the coldest days of the year, and just a couple of days after the kids' birthday party, we got the message that we had to leave our flat back to the owner. We'd just thought we'd be able to enjoy a nice easy springtime and focus to develop a good balance of work, kids and sleep...
We ended up looking for other places in the neighbourhood - as the kids just got a third day approved in childcare, there was no way we'd move away to another suburb such as to Sydney's Northern Beaches. Anything further than 1km West of the Pacific rim would have meant nothing at all to us. Lucky enough one of the flats on the top floor in the same building was free and so we decided to move in, despite significantly higher rent - just because we'd already too much fixed our expectations of how we'd wish to spend the summer at the beach...

During all this tumult, childcare rejected looking after our kids as they suspected chickenpox. So Anh-Dao and I had to take turns to babysit at home. This endured more than 5 weeks, since the first time was false alarm, and then Laetitia really developed the chickenpox, 2 weeks ahead of Oceane. Anh-Dao and I ended up working night shifts to catch up on our professional duties.
All this was a bit hard on our nerves, and Anh-Dao developed some kind of strange eye disease, which took months to be examined by various specialists. I remember her looks like a cat's eyes in the dark, after she got back from eyes-tests. It felt weird and exotic in the same time ;-)

We'd still tried to break out of this tedious routine at times, so we booked a couple of weekends back in Old Bar 4 hours North of Sydney, to try and catch some good wind in a superb flat lagoon and get some good time kitesurfing on the water, and spending evenings at the BBQ with friends. The latter ended up to be famous times, but we were not really lucky with wind. Anh-Dao had a close encounter with one of the fins, as she tried to surf the shore break near Wallabi Point. I wouldn't want her to look like the pirates in the carribean...

Anyway, we seemed to have survived the time all the way to Christmas. Anh-Dao's eyes seemed to have fully recovered after lots of anti-inflamatory pills. And I really needed the holidays just to do nothing and care about nothing at all - work was getting hard on me despite me having switched to 80% in May already. New projects kept dripping in and appeared to be more and more urgent all the time. Crazy enough, I ended up working another 28 hours non-stop after my last workday and delivered just before we left Maroubra with the kids and all our kitesurf gear in our little car. Anh-Dao had prepared all the trip and the equipment, and so we could leave at midnight towards Queensland for a two weeks road trip, just before all the other Sydneysiders would start their race up along the coast. You bet I'd rather have stayed at home over Christmas. Thanks God I had Anh-Dao who was full of energy and positive drive, as we ended up having a really enjoyable and resourceful time!

Once again, I learnt how important it is to always keep smiling - especially in front of the kids who really don't need much more than that to be happy!!!
All this may look like a lot of dark times - that's just how I remember that period. The pics on flickr show some of the easier moments from that period - at least the kids reminded us constantly what we were fighting for - a simple and happy family life. Those little girls are walking now, growing healthily, and just becoming more and more cute every single day!!!
Australian Summer Album Collection.