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Sydney

happy birthday to me! yesterday i closed out my 33rd year of existence which for some reason feels like a bit of a turning point. in my mind 32 is still kind of an acceptable age to be irresponsible, but 33 sounds like its firmly in the adult world. of course this is all total nonsense, but that’s just how it feels to me. having said that, i have to say that i love getting older. i have an amazing partner in brenda, who is always expanding my mind in weird and wonderful ways, a gorgeous, healthy, clever son who i am completely ga-ga for, my yoga practice has deepened into something very profound, and i am happy. obviously life has its own set of challenges, but overall i like where i’m at and the direction i see our little family heading in. and who can ask for more really?

i wanted to keep it low-key this year, and my wish was granted. on sunday we had a great dinner over at aunty yanny and uncle colin’s house with a bunch of the other rellies. thanks so much to the hosts! it was almost nayou’s bedtime by the time we arrived, but he soldiered on with a smile on his face until around 9 at which point he passed out cold. here he is getting the royal treatment from josh – he was watching a video but the sound was a little intrusive so they hooked up him with a special handset!

aunty r’adele made a delicious flourless cake which was pretty decadent. when they brought it out i couldn’t believe how big it was, but then i found out that it was set on top of an upside down bowl. sneaky!

at one point nayou got a hold of the camera and decided to take portraits. they turned out really well.

my actual birthday fell on a tuesday. which meant i had to go to work. but we did to presents in the morning. i got some new yoga gear which was definitely a good thing. at home i practice in my boxers (the poor neighbours), but when i teach i end up wearing these super ratty tank tops and shorts. the clothes are at least three years old and have holes in them, so this is a welcome upgrade! plus brenda got a session for me at this hawaiian massage that our friends chris and stacie told us about. definitely excited for that this weekend!

brenda has been diligently taking photos of her doings with nayou so i can at least live vicariously through the images while i spend long hours at work. we have 58 more days to go until we deliver. at the pace we’re going, there are going to be plenty more long days ahead. i’m consoling myself in the fact that i’m getting paid for being there, and that all the extra money i earn now will fund our adventures to come. its only two more months! anyway, here are some cool snaps from our recent stash.

construction right outside our house. its been going on for months, which has provided nayou with many many opportunities to see diggers and other machines up close.

nayou’s latest obession has been the octonauts. his knowledge of sea creatures has broadened considerably from watching the show, and usually our play acting always involves one or more characters from the show. here he is making a reef in his tub.

he loooooves to sit in noelene’s lap at his gymbaroo class. noelene is the organiser.

o glorious day! i am writing this just after 5pm on sunday while waiting for nayou to come home after spending the day with uncle colin and aunty yanny. brenda and i spent the whole day in adult land, and it was awesome. we kicked off the morning in style at a screening of my favourite anime tekkonkinkreet at the opera house. the showing was part of a graphic storytelling festival, which is the kind of thing that makes me appreciate living in a city like sydney. the screening was accompanied by live music from a duo called plaid, who did the original score for the movie. i love how the opera house is loosening up and hosting all these cool events. brenda and i were laughing that the two times we’ve been to the opera house were to see yo gabba gabba live, and a movie.

after the movie we wandered around the rocks for a bit, followed by a late lunch at mad pizza, afternoon tea at room 10 and then home. halfway through our day we realised that we’d left the house with no keys and were locked out. our kitchen window was open, but its about 3m from the ground and it has bars on the window. normally this would be a hopeless situation, but as luck would have it there are several long ladders in our building, and brenda has been stashing nayou’s collection of long sticks in the hedges by our house. so armed with a ladder, a long stick and brenda’s ninja skills we managed to fish out the keys that were hanging up in our kitchen. yeehaw!

nayou was soooo excited to see yanny and colin this morning. he is going through a phase where he is being really funny (and not in a ha-ha way) with people lately, so it was good to see him actually looking forward to hanging out with someone other than us. yanny is amazing as well – she sends us photos and txts of the goings on so we know he is having a good time. not that i think its possible for nayou not to have fun with them! a big thanks to them for giving us some much needed time alone!

they’re going to be here any minute now so i will leave you with a short video of recent random bits. the indoor gym-like place is this weekly thing called gymbaroo that nayou goes to. there is a shot of him sitting in noelene’s lap, who is the lady that runs the sessions. it was a long road to friendship for those two but now nayou loves her!

sydney has over four million people. its not a mega-city by any means, but four million is a lot of people. so you’d think the chances of bumping into someone you used to know when you lived here seventeen years ago would be more or less none. since i’ve been back, i have randomly bumped into enough old friends that its seriously making me lose my faith in chance. the coolest one (to date) happened on wednesday night as i was walking back from work. as i was walking past our local supermarket this girl came out who looked exactly like gemma, a girl who used to live two doors up from me for five years when i was ~9-15. we both looked at each other for a bit before doing the “are you…?” thing. it turns out gemma had just landed in sydney three hours prior from brisbane for an art show of hers. and her sister nicki was flying in later to attend the opening as well. but the best bit was that gemma and nicki were both staying at their mum’s place, which is literally across the road from where we live. crazy!

gemma’s art is cool. at first glance it looks simple, but the more you look at it the more things you notice. its hard to explain, but this site does it pretty well. it was fun going to the opening. its been a while since brenda and i checked out an art gallery. nayou wasn’t that into it, but i bet if gemma painted bulldozers it would be a different story.

the intensity at work has definitely picked up and i have been working late nights with more regularity lately. still managing to avoid working on the weekends, but it still cuts in pretty seriously into the time i get to spend with brenda and especially nayou. lucky for me, brenda has been super awesome about taking lots of photos so i can at least picture what went on during the day. here is nayou being lazy in bed. this kid loves to lounge around in bed in the mornings, which is completely fine with us!

nayou also received a long overdue haircut. his fringe was getting a little too emo for my taste, even though it looked cute. he wasn’t too thrilled with the experience, despite getting to sit in a plane and watch tv.

nayou’s current obsession is digging and construction. he loves excavators, bulldozers, front end loaders etc etc. we don’t have a garden, but there is a small green space next to our house which we have appropriated as our own. lots of people bring their dogs to go to the bathroom, so brenda went to the hardware store and made a quick fence to mark our territory. its been working really well!

brenda has been doing these spectacular sidewalk chalk paintings while nayou digs. everyone who lives in the neighbourhood absolutely adores them because it gives an otherwise public but sterile area a bit of life and colour. i love coming home and seeing the additions to the paintings, especially when they are messages for me 😉 i think this is some sort of cake that they made for yours truly. mmm.

i’ve been making sure we spend lots of time together over the weekends. on saturday he said he wanted to go to see the toys at the qvb and david jones, so off we went. it was so cute to see him go around and around to see each of the toys repeatedly, examining the boxes, asking what certain words meant on the boxes etc. luckily for us, nayou is amazing about not nagging or whining about toys, which makes it a pleasure to take him to places that sell them. he does ask whether he can take certain things home, but is a good sport when we tell him no.

my favourite episode from the weekend was when we walked past a gift shop and saw one of those porcelain human statues that have all of the meridians painted on them. kind of like those phrenology heads:

nayou saw it in the window and says “look, papa, its a person map!”. my second favourite was when we were on the train discussing what each of the colours in a traffic light meant. once we were done, nayou asked “what does brown mean?”. i said i didn’t know so he thought about it for a bit and then goes “i know! brown can be the colour that helps the trains coming up steep hills!”. that’s my boy! hehe. i’m totally turning into one of those parents that can’t stop talking about their kid…. but since most of this blog is dedicated to doing exactly that, i figured this is all being lapped up eagerly…. right?

 

 

 

 

 

 

its probably safe to say that alex and nayou are best friends. they don’t play together every day, but we do see quite a bit of alex since he only lives three floors above us.

nayou is a social creature and he loves having a playmate. its good for us parents to have him around as well, because we get a nice chunk of time to engage in more adult conversation 🙂 alex used to be a bit of a terror, but brenda has read him the riot act and now he is as well behaved as any eight year old could be. here are some photos of when they went to taronga zoo recently.

 

 

 

 

 

we’re going full steam ahead with our heads down on happy feet 2. the movie is coming out in november come hell or high water, so the studio is in a bit of a frenzy! i did my first week of overtime, which actually wasn’t nearly as bad as i was anticipating. the only thing that really sucks about overtime is that it cuts out off of the precious family time we have, minus about a hurried hour in the morning. i console myself knowing that the money earned now is fuelling some extended hang out time in just a few short months.

last week we released the first real trailer (we had a teaser out before). neither of them give you any idea what the movie is about, but at least you can look at the pretty pictures. i would be lying if i told you that animated penguins are a passion of mine, but the renders that are going through look really nice. enjoy!

i thought we were rather scant on photos lately and it turns out i had just forgotten to copy stuff from out point and shoot onto our computer. oops. looking back at what’s on there, its clear that we have been rather busy beavers!

earlier this month we finally made it into the inside of the opera house for none other than the extravaganza known as yo gabba gabba! the whole cast was there, including the legendary biz markie. i can’t believe they brought him on tour just to be on stage for less than five minutes. it was a great show, although nayou was a bit over stimulated by the end. it was funny to see a bunch of adults with no kids in attendance. and singing along to all the songs. i like yo gabba gabba as much as the next parent, but i don’t think i would watch it if it wasn’t for nayou. to each their own i guess!

we went with my supervisor paul, his wife josa and their cute kid wyatt.

its still winter here, so there has been a fair amount of rain. which means that there has still been lots of this:

we’ve been making sure nayou stays bundled up when its cold. sometimes he looks very dapper:

… and sometimes he looks like a homeless pirate:

one rainy day we went to see the steam trains at central station. that was pretty cool.

of course june in this household is synonymous with brenda’s birthday. we made a full long weekend out of it (i was “sick” on the 6th) and had a blast. we kicked off the celebrations with presents in bed.

we even left nayou with a non-relative babysitter for the first time ever to go out and party like adults. brenda and nayou met this girl kate who works at the aquatic center near our house, whom nayou adores. she was happy to come and spend an evening with him so it worked out perfectly. i have to admit i was skeptical whether the arrangement would go smoothly – nayou is not exactly the kind of kid who will open up to anyone – but he really really likes kate. when we told him that she was coming over to play while we went out, he was ushering us out the door the moment she arrived!

we didn’t take any photos that evening, but i managed to take a couple the next day when we headed out to bondi for a birthday surf.

followed by a rather indulgent afternoon tea! (indulgent for us, anyway ;))

this weekend we rented a bike trailer from the amazing watershed bike library. we hauled nayou all over the place in this thing! on saturday we rode from potts point all the way to sydney park. nayou really likes it which is cool. it does make my legs tired quickly though. i am a bit of a wimp when it comes to biking 🙂

nayou had a big play at the park, which resulted in this on the way home:

today we rode to circulay quay and took the bikes on the ferry to manly. it was a gorgeous day, and warm enough that nayou could play naked on the beach without getting cold. which is crazy considering the winter solstice is in two days! gotta love sydney for its weather, thats for sure!

the memory card also had a fair amount of video which i will edit and post soon!

 

here we are, rushing headlong into mid-july. where did the first half of 2010 go?! i swear time is accelerating. my contract at dr. d is up at the end of september, although they will almost certainly extend it for another month. our lease is up at the beginning of december as well. all of this means that its time to start thinking about what our next move is going to be. brenda and i have weighed up several options, and for now its looking like we will be heading to bali for a couple of months. so many friends from all walks of life have recommended bali to us, and given its proximity to australia it seems like a natural choice. the more i read about the place, the more i want to go.

there is a place in bali called desa seni, which is this gorgeous eco-resort with an emphasis on yoga, organic farming and community integration. they attract master yoga teachers from around the world, and their director of yoga, tara judelle, is amazing. desa seni has a three month resident teacher program, where you teach yoga and become part of the community they have there. the opportunity to teach and practice yoga with these amazing teachers, not to mention live in a community like that, probably doesn’t come up very often. however, the application form is a bit daunting – it says that most teachers have between 5-13 years teaching experience (i have 4), and they have probably been teaching full time for most of those years (i haven’t). it definitely brings up some insecurities i have as a yoga teacher 🙂

still, you never know until you try. and in the interest of promoting myself, i did something i have been meaning to do for ages – create a website to present myself as a yoga teacher. it was a fun process to get back into designing with flash after all these years, and i am pretty satisfied with the final result. so click on over and have a gander: somewhatslanted.com/yoga!

i’m going to stop whining about how long its been in between posts. it seems like every time i sit down to write, i start off with something about how long its been. from now on, i’m gonna just write what’s up and leave the excuse making alone 🙂

things have been pretty cruisy lately. nothing major happening, but lots of day-to-day fun. we’ve been enjoying the small stuff this “winter” (sydney winter is like a wellington summer) – going to markets, playing at home or at parks, digging (nayou’s new obsession), reading, that sort of thing.

oh yeah, somewhere in there brenda and i did a ten day juice fast. compared to the lemonade diet that we used to do, it was super easy. i felt amazing afterwards and we have continued on with the juicing in the mornings. here is nayou getting acquainted with the fruits and veggies.

this photo is amazing because it was taken on the front lawn of the house i used to live in back in high school! we stopped by took look at the house on our way back from a market on the north shore, and the owners were super nice and gave us a tour. they are in the midst of a huge renovation – essentially a new house – so i was just in time to see our old kitchen cabinets before they went off to where old cabinets go to die. the owners also found an old box of books that we had left in the attic 17 years ago so we scored some pretty awesome new reading material too!