Apricots on the lawn

We’re here Australia! It’s been a hectic week as we moved the 3 little ones from Singapore to the sunny Mornington Peninsula last Thursday.  Milo just arrived this morning as well but he’ll be in the Quarantine Motel for a month till he stops acting crazy (hopefully!) but we have been promised that we’ll get him on Christmas Eve, just in time for him to unwrap a juicy bone.

The new house is not going to be ready for another couple of months so we’re renting a beach house opposite Mills Beach in Mornington town, about an hours drive from Melbourne CBD. It’s a lovely seaside town full of quaint little shops, a long pier, many beaches and a view across the bay to the distant skyscrapers of Melbourne.

We have a couple of new nannies, Kathryn does Monday – Weds and Jess does Thurs – Sat morning. Sunday is the day of unrest. We also have a cheerful and efficient housekeeper named Cassie who won my mom over when she arrived at our doorstep with an arsenal of cleaning products and mops and started scouring the floorboards like a tasmanian devil. I think we’ll call her Tassie.

So far the kids have taken to Nanny Kathryn (they haven’t met Jess yet) quickly as she is very keen on getting them outdoors-  most mornings she takes Dylan for a stroll to Main Street to charm the townsfolk, in the afternoon she spreads out a picnic blanket under a tree in the garden or a suntent and gets the kids out there for snacktime, and she made chocolate fudge with Sean this afternoon as well.

My mom travelled down with us as well to spend a week here and help us settle in, so it’s been a pretty smooth transition, we’re pretty lucky! Especially since my mother’s a household Nazi, her talents have been put to good use organising the various cupboards and cleaning away the hordes of spiders and cobwebs which would otherwise have been consumed by Dylan. Now everything is in shipshape and the floorboards are spic and span thanks to mom and Tassie.

The kids are extremely happy,  especially Finn who is over the moon that he can go to beach everyday and see the all the yachts. Today he asked a jetski owner if he could sit on his yellow jetski and the owner said yes, so he spent 5 minutes going vroomvroom on top of the thing. Then he saw a red kayak along the beach and asked the kayak owner if he could sit on it as well, (so shameless!) and the man who owned it was kind enough to strap Finn in the seat and tow him up and down the beach.

Finn has also been allowed to “drive” the tourist trains at the depot while they were being cleaned, various ditchdiggers, steamrollers and bulldozers, an antique red tractor, a ride-on mower and a boat trailer…  I’m a little worried as none of his requests  “can Finn Finn ride on it pwease uncle?” have ever been turned down by strangers yet and I caught him looking at a helicopter overhead with an appraising eye today!

Dylan has been familiarising herself with all the new things to put in her mouth and has consumed a vast quantity of carpet fuzz, fireplace muck, a tiny ball of aluminum foil (most of it was fished out from her mouth in time) and fistfuls of beach sand. Oh well. I guess it was about time the Leahy family had a gastronomical adventurer! She has very rosy cheeks and nose now from all the walks and looks the very picture of a plump cherub. She is an angel baby except for when she’s having her bottom washed as the water is very cold over here!

Sean is still in absorption phase and nearly fainted today when we took him to see the new house and saw the 3 acres of lawn between the house and the dam that he had to mow. Then he saw the hammock on the verandah and embraced it so intimately he had to be surgically removed from it at the end of the visit. He also caught a crab on the beach today but we decided it was too small for chili crab. Sean also found a “Halo Encyclopedia” in the Dymocks bookshop the other day so his appetite for violent computer game data has been temporarily sated.

We’ve just finished used the “basket of goods” CPI method of analysis to calculate Sean’s new pocket money and Sean determined that his weekly allowance should be 4.5 bottles of Gatorade or 2.5 comic books, so that works out to about $12.50. We rounded it up to $13/week and threw in the extra duties of mowing the lawn, collecting firewood, minding the babies on weekends, helping in the kitchen, making bottles in the morning, catching flies and bluebottles and carrying groceries in from the car. I think he regrets asking for a wage increase now…

Mark and I are completely exhausted from the shopping of the past week. I think we’ve been to Target and Coles about 3.5x a day since we’ve gotten here. And bought about 273 baby things that we didn’t think were important to bring along but found absolutely indispensable since! I have also become well acquainted with our lady postwoman as she has already delivered quite a few goodies necessities from Amazon.com, shopbop.com and babysgotstyle.com.

The weather has been extremely fickle – one afternoon we were out sunning ourselves and complaining about the 37 degree heat and within a few minutes a storm came in and the temperature dropped to 20 degrees! It actually made the papers the next day… I’ve now learnt that layering is the key to survival in Melbourne. That and cashmere. And online shopping. And nannies.

Right not Mark is watching “The Castle”, a hilarious Australian “comedy classic” on telly, and I’m about to go to bed. You may not believe this but I actually get up at 7-8 am most mornings these days. It’s impossible to wake up later in the country, especially in summer, especially with Dylan caterwauling to be rescued from her sleepsack. But we sleep earlier and better as well, the fresh air is amazing. So I’m off to bed now, do feel free to drop us an email! We miss you all!!!

Some pics:

There are of course a hundred films floating around the internet which attempt to explain the Copenhagen Conference, and what we should be doing there. Some of them are horrifically complicated, and others are fantastically simple.

Here at Baby, we really feel that the simple ones are on to something. We hate all these attempts by politicians to make things seem more complicated than they are; we wonder whether they’re just trying to cover themselves.

So we asked a 6-year-old child what he thought we needed to do at Copenhagen, and this is what happened:

How much more complicated can it be?

Lmao.. This n*ggas a joke

“Who are the 5 greatest rappers of  all time? Dylan, Dylan, Dylan, Dylan & Dylan”

Classic..ctfu

Dylan Did his thing with this song! The video is aiight too. We play this song on the show every week! He even called the show…well here you have it Dylan Dilinjah (MAking The Band) Big Ego Video!

The Dylan Bamboo Bicycle by Organic Bikes

Just returning from a trip to see the production of our Dylan bamboo bike- and boy am I excited.  My eyes saw a room full of nearly-done bamboo frames!  They are just waiting for final decals and packaging- and then watch out world!

At this point it is looking like around Christmas before the Dylan frame & complete 1 or 3 speed bikes will be available.

Trust me- it will be worth the wait!

Bob Dylan  1966  - Edinburgh ,Scotland by Barry Feinstein. ©Barry Feinstein

Bob Dylan, the gift that keeps on giving!

Brilliant.

“Great Expectations”

November 18th, 2009

In terms of the great comedy battle of 2009, which continues to rage amongst shows both new and old, Modern Family is at a distinct disadvantage: with Parks and Recreation delivering some legitimately great comedy and Community doing a really compelling and confident meta-storyline, the simplicity of this show is a disadvantage in terms of being flashy. There comes a point where the hype surrounding the show creates greater expectations than the storylines themselves can live up to in terms of their premise, requiring viewers to appreciate the strong execution where originality isn’t overtly present.

“Great Expectations” is a solid episode of the show, featuring a number of fun loving gags and a couple of big guest stars, but nothing stands out as particularly stunning as compared to some of the other comedies. In this instance, I think there was enough nuance to each individual story to continue to prove how strong the writers understand these characters, but it nonetheless follows similar patterns to what we’ve seen in the past. I think it’s one of their stronger episodes due to a nice role reversal, but it’s not reaching as high as some of the other comedies are right now.

For me, this episode is about the little things more than it is about the guest stars. While Elizabeth Banks (playing Cameron and Mitchell’s barhopping friend Sal) and Edward Norton (playing the bass player/backup vocalist from Spandau Ballet) are both very funny and integrated well into the episode, the storylines they’re involved in really have very little to do with them. I thought the Cameron/Mitchell story was perhaps the episode’s least interesting, if only because it was so predictable: we’re shown that they’re having trouble getting out with Lily around, they make a night out of it with a friend, and discover that their friend is jealous of Lily and devolves into a petulant child. There’s nothing wrong with the storyline, and Banks sells the child-like reaction perfectly, but the storyline had absolutely no twists or turns or nuances to it – just a couple of fun moments (Mitchell refusing to allow her to hold her, Mitchell’s “I’m going in!” Re: new boobs), and strong performances all around.

I thought the other two storylines were simply more interesting conceptually. Jay’s Night, featuring Sloppy Jays and western movies, was the sort of storyline that was charming because of how great Ed O’Neill is and more importantly how you get small little running gags like Gloria’s tone deaf singing or Luke taking everything that Jay says as a sign that he’s going to die soon. Combine with the running battle between Jay and Haley, which nicely ties into what we know of Claire’s own childhood, and the conclusion with Dylan wanting to stick around for Jay’s Night, and the storyline just had a nice flow to it. It was never overly dramatic or overly broad (Jay squirting Manny like a dog was perhaps a BIT broad), staying within a simple comic mode and delivering on its promise.

And I thought the Claire/Phil storyline was the episode’s strongest, if not comically, then certainly in terms of the characters. Phil is still a bit too much like Michael Scott (the scene listing off the things he wants could have very easily been put into Steve Carell’s mouth without much in terms of change), but as with Michael it’s always good when he gets to be the smart one. He, unlike his wife, is capable of being romantic, so the anniversary becomes about Claire’s struggles rather than Phil’s. It’s a nice change of pace, as Julie Bowen is likeable even when she’s incapable of being romantic and Ty Burrell was great in interacting with (his good friend) Edward Norton as they struggle over whether the charade (which was a pretty ingenious comic device) could be continued. Like I say, the big laughs weren’t there, but the emotional payoff was solid and it kept Phil out of his usual tomfoolery role.

Nothing complex, but a funny and enjoyable episode – no need to place it relative to anything else to enjoy that.

Cultural Observations

• Alex gets all of the best one-liners amongst the grandchildren, and here she both played into Haley’s vanity and created Luke’s trauma over her grandfather’s death. Hoping for another episode for her soon.
• I was thinking of how Edward Norton was going to do “funny” in this show’s style, and it’s clear now that I should have thought of “accent” right away. Always funny!
• Spandau Ballet, of course, is an actual band, although I didn’t entirely realize this until I heard him humming the melody of “True” and I realized I recognized it (but would never have known the band name). I did enjoy the joke the show got out of this, as the reason Izzy Lafontaine refused to continue the performance was that the song was called “True” and the story was false.
• Wait, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark was also a real band? Oh, The 80s.