Celebrations.

This is a quick update before our holiday because today is our 8th wedding anniversary. Hooray! To celebrate I made secret brownies in the middle of the night so that Ruth could stuff her face full of chocolate when she woke up. They worked out pretty well considering I finally finished the icing at half-past midnight and felt like I'd lost all sense of what was real and what was unreal. The mini M&Ms are supposed to spell out "I heart U" but my hands were shaking from lack of sleep so they really spell out something like "fbjihnihir". It made sense to me at the time.

The rain from a couple of weeks ago has stirred up the river so much that our water is still full of river mud. It's meant that Ruth has had to be careful with our laundry - washing some white clothes in red mud has some undesired results. It's also created some interesting bath time situations. I don't know if we're supposed to use rain water for bathing babies, but we've always been crazy, anarchic kind of people.


Australia is so much more an outdoor place than the UK. It's not that we don't have outdoors in England. We do, and some of it is amazingly pretty. It's just that it seems a lot less attractive when you have to dress up like Scott of the Antarctic to mow the lawn. Here's something that you'd never find in the UK for example. A public grill. A communal BBQ. You'll frequently find them in parks and the like. Free cooking methods! You can actually turn up with your shrimps and snags to a park and cook them there. Who pays for that I wonder? It would be a nice break in your morning walk to work if you could cook your own bacon and eggs on the way, wouldn't it? I think they'd work really well in some of the London parks - especially if you could convince a pigeon to land on one mid-frying. That's teach those flying rats a lesson they'd never forget!


Here's something that I'm beginning to understand. Even the most ordinary of life's events can become an occasion for joy if it's understood to be a gift from God and treated as such. Enjoy the ordinary things over the next couple of weeks. We'll let you know how we got on.