Savour

Happy New Year and all best wishes for a wonderful 2014!

2014 is a massive year for us, which I'm looking forward to with a mix of trepidation, terror ('school run' - do just the words make anyone else shiver in dread?) excitement and joy.
This year my first born, my baby-boy, my darling, ever-active Sprocket starts primary school.
In roughly four months we welcome our third (and last) baby into the word, a little girl we've already nicknamed Littlest.
This year we're deciding where in Australia to apply for my Beloved to do his medical internship. While our first preference is for the Sunshine Coast near my Beloved's kin, we're also going to be putting down places like Townsville, Rockhampton, Cairns, Mackay, Geelong, Gold Coast, Melbourne. We probably won't know for sure whereabouts we've been matched until… December, a few weeks before my Beloved starts work.
Which leads me to… in ten shorts months, all going well, my Beloved will be a Doctor! The medical sort my dad calls 'quacks'.  These long (and somewhat challenging, if amazing) four years will draw to a close and we'll move on to the next step in our lives. Goodbye Student-hood! (Although My Beloved is already lining up the Masters he wants to start and depending on what specialty he decides on he'll have a further four to nine years of study while working, raking out thousands to sit exams, some of which have a fail rate of up to thirty percent.)
To celebrate my Beloved becoming a Doctor we're travelling to the UK for Christmas and New Year 2014 with my Beloved's folk. Come November next year we'll be packing up our house to sell, packing to hopefully move two states away to the tropics, and also packing for a white Christmas. With three kids.
Deep breath. Very deep breath.
It is going to be fantastic. And amazing and we are all kinds of blessed and grateful. But… deep breath.

Over at Maxabella Loves the wonderful Bron is asking what 'word' people are focusing on for 2014.
And I didn't have to think hard to realise what word I'll be focusing on.
Savour. 
I want to savour every moment of 2014. Appreciate it. Revel in it. Drink it in.
Because time is racing by so quickly and these precious days of my kids childhoods are just disappearing.
This is the last time I'll feel a growing baby kick-boxing within me. That I'll put my hands to my tummy and feel new life within, with all it's wonder and promise. This is the last year that I'll exult in my own newborn, spend hours admiring the ever changing expressions, the tiny curling toes and little grasping fingers as they slowly reveal who they are.
I suspect this year is one of the last that my Sprocket will reach for my hand while we're walking, will climb into my lap when he's nervous, will come to me to kiss it better and for a cuddle for no reason at all.
This year I intend to stop and let my heart sing as my kids run and play together on the shore, carefree and light as birds.
This year I'll savour their amazing, emphatic stories, wallow in the giggles as they tell me of tiny, invisible flying sharks that have hidden their toys and the ubiquitous Super-Villain who moves the bricks, spills the milk and generally wreaks havoc and mayhem.
My kids will be small for such few short years and these years will never come back. I want to savour every moment. Even the ones that have me pulling my hair out and asking the sky various aggrieved, rhetorical questions.
Savour.

Ah Folks, I Need a Little Help...

In two weeks we're going on our very first road trip as a family, driving up to Queensland from Melbourne as part of our annual Great Migration.

And camping.*
And I'm excited, of course I'm excited. I love seeing new places and catching up with friends. And spending 1,980 kilometres in a confined space with my nearest and dearest. This is the stuff of childhood memories. This is how magic is born. (I hope.)
But this is a big trip.
This is 21.5 hours of driving (and then back again!) With a two year old and a four your old.
We're driving up to Queensland via friends in Lightning Ridge and family in Milmerran.
But there's a big gap between Melbourne and Lightning Ridge and somewhere in that gap is our perfect camping site. And also hopefully some cool things for the kids to see on our frequent run-the-kids-around stops.
Does anyone have any ideas? Know of any perfect camping places? Things we HAVE to see?
Tips for toddlers in long car trips. (Drugs aren't an option!)
On the way home in January we're sticking to the coast. But before I open my lonely planet - does anyone have things we have to see or do? Know of any good camping sites along the coast between Caboolture and Gippsland?

The board is open, gentle folks, any and all help or advice would be much appreciated!



*The last time I camped I got the blisters to end all blisters walking around Wilson's Prom and a kind policeman ended up giving me a lift back to the car from where the track joined the road. (The sight of me tramping in socks with a massive backpack might have given him the hint I'd appreciate it. Or mybe it was the face scrunched in agony...)
The time before was my folk's lone attempt at a family camping trip. It was so windy we didn't even get the tent up... and drove back to our beach house.

My parents went camping in the highlands of Scotland for their honeymoon... and were flooded out. Abortive camping trips do not lack precedence in my family.
We are starting off well for Anderson family tradition. The Sprocket has already broken the tent pegs on our brand new, never-been-used-in four-years-tent. We're using my baby brothers, veteran of many confests...

The 'H' Word.

I've been pondering this for awhile now - why are so many swear words about an activity most of us really quite enjoy or body parts we're pleased to have attached and in working order.
When really, the truly nasty things all centre around the 'h' word. Whisper it h-h-h-housework.
You know, the really nasty one. Scrubbing poo off a toddlers undies during the Great Toilet Training, the zillions of loads of sheets during a particularly virulent lot of gastro, scrubbing the toilet - anytime, although particularly when an enthusiastic toddler has demanded to empty the potty themselves and then shook it... And that's not even getting onto the stuff that should (ahem) be done everyday, the never ending sweeping, mopping, removal of half eaten apples, disposal of compost and rubbish.
Scrub it. I feel queasy just thinking about it all.
Before we started going out not one, not two, but three separate people (that I know of) warned my beloved that I am Messy. Note the capital. Not just a leetle messy. Really, really messy.
I count this circumstance as fortunate as it left my Beloved no excuse for thinking housework and myself were ever going to be anything but the bitterest of enemies and any cleaning done would (and does) fall largely on his shoulders.*
Myself, I suspect it was not my ability to mop a floor my Beloved was thinking of at the time, and find the warnings entertaining, but then, they've worked out very well for me.
But now I'm at home all the time with a messy house, googling how to mop a floor and wondering if I just stock up on enough bleach will the house magically clean itself. Sigh.
And all I can say is scrub it.

What's your relationship with housework? Friends? Enemies? Frenemies? 

And what would your ultimate swear-word be? 'Scrub it' works for me, but I can see there could be interesting variations. 

*This is as it should be, according to longstanding Anderson Family tradition, as my Dad also does all the cooking and housework. I believe it's very important to respect and continue our cultural ways. My Beloved had time to observe this before we married, so he went in knowing the importance of ensuring that dinner is on the table at 6.00 precisely, with salad and vegetable sides. Of course, he's still learning, so I grant him some lee-way.