I’m doing that thing I always do when I come back from new and wonderful, and I try to transport the lifestyle. When H and I went to Borneo by steamer sometime back in the 1800s, we came home and bought an entire pantry’s worth of ingredients to make complicated sambals and rending pastes, not to mention buying five limes for what would have bought us 100 kilograms of them in Kota Kinabalu. I’m doing the Scandinavian equivalent. I’m eating rye bread and smoked fish, putting d

My suitcase, in disgrace It’s my fourth day in Finland and I know three words. They’re same three words I knew before I got here. Sauna, hej (hello) and kittos (thank you). That’s fairly disgraceful, but it’s three more words than I actually need to get by here, because every Finn I’ve met speaks better English than I do. Thanks, Finnish education system. We flew over on the A380, a sort of flying shopping centre affair operated by Qatar Airways. Our seats were near a door th

This useless slack-jawed snake will not do its job. I swear to Odin, the first thing I am going to do when I get to Scandinavia is go find the iCloud. I presume it’s up that way somewhere, around the top of the world. Surely that’s where you’d put it. Then I am going to go through it and figure out if any of my photos are really in it and if not why not. I’ve spent hours trying to back up and sync and download and delete and free up space on my phone and my computer so I can

That aside, we are really very extremely excited. We are going to Finland, Sweden and Denmark. The trip has come about because Jess is a teacher and very interested in the schools in that part of the world, which are apparently better than ours for reasons that will be revealed to me as we go along. I believe it has to do with starting school a bit older and not having homework and maybe also herrings? To be confirmed. Anyway, Jess wants to visit some schools since that is he

This seems lovely, doesn’t it? Until you realise that is not the ocean Garnet is wallowing in but actually self-pity. See the ripples of misery he is causing? See how they threaten to knock H off his stand-up paddle board? The school holidays are over. May Blossom went back to class this morning, creeping like snail unwillingly to school, after we’d located her lunch bag and drink bottle, and wiped the slug trails off her hat. The family Gusto spent a good part of these holid

How I cope with this is to put aside what I should be doing (perhaps preparing my keynote speech for the International Conference on First-World Problems) and spend a lot of time researching where to go on holiday later in the year. I am looking exclusively at places where the weather is exactly like the weather I hate so much here. I’ll admit it doesn’t make much sense. We have been exceedingly fortunate to be able to travel overseas a fair bit, both before our kids were bor

Waikiki at dawn. I like this place best between 4 and 6 am. Aloha from Hawaii, where I am finishing up a three-week lecture tour of the United States. I have lectured May Blossom and Garnet in public and private, day and night, on planes, in hotels and restaurants, through three states. The first two weeks of our trip were to the mainland USA – Denver and the mountains of far southern Colorado, where we spend a very strange and tumultuous week that needs, and will have, a pos

To this end, we have employed the time-honoured parenting practice of a rewards chart. It is called ‘Operation No Brokeback Mounts’ and it lives on the side of our fridge. It has 24 dates down the vertical axis, because that’s all the time we have left, and four columns on the horizontal. Every day, it is possible to achieve four stamps: for eating well, drinking enough water, not drinking any hooch, and doing exercise. H’s stamp is a picture of a rhino and mine is an elephan

Two hours and all the towels in the house later, he was a limp pile of empty little boy on the sofa, and I was reading the fine print on the travel insurance policy. We could cancel, but since it is now almost March, we realise this is just the beginning of the illness for the year, and there’s a very good chance that someone in this family will be sick at every point until next summer. We can’t wait that long for this holiday. We’ve kept Garnet pretty clear of May Blossom, s

Train for illustrative purposes only. Not a Tangara. When my train pulled into the station this morning, I thought ‘Ooh, fancy: a Tangara.’ Crossing the Harbour Bridge we passed several more trains. They were Tangaras too. I’m beginning to suspect that these days all Sydney trains might be Tangaras. And that maybe we don’t even call them that any more. That’s when I realised it has been a while since I was last a regular train commuter in Sydney. Before I went on maternity le

Thing 1: Since one or other or another of his or my recent colds or ear infections or other random maladies that have blurred into one long misery I like to call Winter, baby Garnet stopped sleeping in his cot at all. He now sleeps in our bed at night, or in the car, stroller or carrier during the day. This is good because he sleeps much more soundly at night when he is with us, neither H nor I have to drag ourselves out of bed to resettle him, and he is a delicious bundle of

I spent a bit of time on that flight in the galley, bobbing around while getting Garnet off to sleep, and so I was privy to the pursed red lips of the flight attendants as they took turns peering down the aisle at the man to whom they had served five small bottles of red wine, and who was now acting like he might have already had a head start with a small bathtub of gin (it was 10.30 in the morning). He was shouting and growling aggressively at people, refusing to sit in his

1. Gazpacho in cartons from the supermarket 2. Ruins: ruins are lovely. Why don’t we have more of them? 3. Orangutans: Australia should get these. They are much more entertaining than koalas. 5. Really practical underwear, like this Venetian bra I’m not being critical of the innovators of my homeland, I’m just saying that adopting these six things would make this a much better place to live. Humane treatment of asylum seekers and refugees isn’t a bad idea either. #underwear #

1. You have to stay somewhere as good or better than home. My very clever friend Other Jess once told me this, and I think she is right. Once you have a child, and probably until they are at least five, for a trip away to in any way resemble a holiday you need to stay somewhere this is not inferior to your own home. Staying in a crappy hotel when you are travelling in Mexico without kids is fine. You can eat out every meal, spend all day sightseeing, and just use it as a plac

We have just spent seven days on a dude ranch in southern Colorado with my extended family on my mother’s side. We do this every couple of years. It helps keep a geographically disparate family connected while allowing us to ride horses, fall off horses, fish for rainbow trout, hike, swim, nurse the ear, chest, throat and sinus infections we’ve picked up on the plane, and read books to our hearts’ content. This trip was May Blossom’s first such holiday. Two years ago she came

Oh for the days when the in-seat phone was all the entertainment she needed. In about four hours we are heading to the airport to fly for fourteen hours to LA. Then we will wait at LAX for another five hours, before flying for two more hours to Denver. I am more daunted by this trip than I have been by any other I’ve taken. It’s not as if this is the first time we’ve flown with May Blossom. We’ve taken this trip twice before, and many other shorter domestic flights too. But t

The Show is a two-day affair, Friday and Saturday, and a celebration of all things agricultural. It is also, in its own way and perhaps unintentionally, a hilarious celebration of all things a little bit Not Quite Right. An entry in the Porcelain Doll class. The stuff of nightmares. So while outside in the main arena you can watch a proper showjumping competition and serious woodchopping, the winners of which will progress to the regional show and finally to the big one, the

Hello there. Did you survive Christmas? Are you still speaking to any of your family? Did anyone lose an eye when the top button of your pants pinged off and richocheted around the room after you forced one too many ham sandwiches down on Christmas night? Have you broken all your gifts yet? Did you like anything anyone gave you? Were you convincing with your present face when you opened something that was, shall we say, not to your taste? Me neither. Since last I wrote, H, Ma

Perhaps someone could explain to my eyelids why I am so damn shattered then. Maybe it’s because on our splendid holiday we visited the doctor no fewer than four times. Ear infection x 1, mastitis x 1, which led to the thrushes flying south for the winter x 2, if you’ll excuse such an indelicate reference on a family blog, bad back x 1. Outwardly now we look normal, but inside anti-biotic and pro-biotics are locked in a pitched battle to the death. Maybe it’s because travellin

Freezing fog, that’s the forecast for Denver this morning. I didn’t even know that was a thing. Shows how much I know about weather. Maybe lightning sleet is a real weather phenomenon too, or burning rain. But I’ll say this for freezing fog: it’s mighty pretty. Outside my window right now it looks like someone is firing a glitter gun horizontally through the rays of morning sun. The air is composed of trillions of tiny glassy sparkles. When the wind blows hard, it feels like