Birth Order (T)

Seb is such as calm, pleasant and contented little baby, he follows with warm and shining eyes any adult in his vicinity, and to give him attention is to recieve a huge smile of afirmation. It is as if any attention he has is a bonus, as he grows up in the shadow of his older brother. It makes you think about 'number two' child and the differences with 'number one'.


Though my father maintains that according to psychology, only being first born has any predictive power in life outcomes. Nevertheless, at the dinner table, birth order is a recurrent theme, and not solely due to positions taken out of vested interests (number twos are so stable and well adjusted), regardless of who is at dinner, the subject never fails to generate enthusiasm. I'm sometimes struck that there seem to be no special words in English for second or third born; perhaps there are.

Grandma (T)

I think for my mother, the perfect world would be to live in a small, pretty English village with frequent unexplained violent murders, to test her detective skills. Caring for her children and now her grandchildren, though, must be a pretty close second.

Here she's helping fire up the steam engine for Eddie's amusement, and stopping work on her Bayeaux Tapestry to read the boys stories.

Homecoming (T)

Thursday is homecoming day; in Eddie's imagination I get off the plane after being airborne for 3 days.

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Babies (T)

My cousin Jim and his wife Annie are also living in Port Macquarie with their two little girls.....actually make that three little girls...Poppy was born last Friday in PMQ hospital.

All of a sudden Sebastian seems big.

Visits (T)

We're about 5 hours drive north of Sydney, and about 7 hours from Brisbane, I guess. With the creek or swamp out the back to walk around, it's a very easy location for hosting a visitor; lunch followed by a walk. So far most weekends we've had a visit, last weekend it was Kack & Les, this weekend Jonathan. There's a koala who sometimes makes an appearance, over the back fence. As you can see, I tend to wear the same outfit to keep things really simple.

Rachel in Thailand (T)

After 142 days, my sister Rachel has updated her blog, by guessing her way through the Thai language blogspot menus. It's short and sweet, but you take what you can get after 142 days. The thing is, blogspot thinks it's very clever and so it uses the principal language of the country you are in to display the menus, without any obvious way to revert to English.

The elephant hat in the picture is Rachel & Victor's 2nd birthday gift to Eddie.

Over the board walk, down behind mum&dad's (T)

Port Macquarie