I know that I have not posted anything new for awhile. I will place most of the blame on the black plague that has been circulating in our house for the last couple weeks.
I had just recovered from a tummy bug and then I came down with what I am certain was swine flu. It really knocked me out for a few days, and ticked every box in the swine flu symptoms checklist, of course being here, going to a GP was not going to be a simple excercise so I just stayed at home and quietly died. The kids all had the flu too, everyone except Win and of course George... he has a nack for avoiding these things. The secret to his success I believe is that he keeps his puppy's tail firmly pressed under his nose to act as a filter against all the airborne germs.
It makes you appreciate good health all the more when you have been very sick for a couple weeks. I woke up from the first normal nights sleep last night and felt like a new person.
On the plus side of being sick, I watched some day time TV, and it just so happened that it was the airing of Oprahs' Australian Show.
I was pretty excited to see the show, each place they showed bought back such memories. The great barrier reef made me relive our honeymoon, and the episode on Sydney's harbour bridge and opera house bought back a mix of memories from when I was six and Nanny took me out on the Ferry to see the harbour, then all the years in between when I lived there, visited and more recently when we traveled to Sydney to get our visa .
Win and I flew to Sydney in late November, about 3 weeks before we left Australia, with all the kids in tow, for our visa interview at the U.S. consulate.
As some of you know Win came down with an almighty migraine the day before. He was so debillitated that I came home to find him passed out on the floor. He couldn't lift his head to drink, let alone fly to Sydney with 4 small kids.
However, we had booked our tickets and we could not reschedule the Consulate appointments. It was also 2 days before settlement on our house sale, so we had to do the final cleaning of our house that day. My Mum helped me clean our old house and later that night Joe Rice came around and gave Win a blessing. He blessed him that he would be able to have the strength to get through the next day in Sydney. Well, his migraine continued through out the night, and we we had to be up at 5am for our flight. It must have been about to the hour that we had to leave for the plane that his migraine eased, and the vomiting side effects subsided.
Win was extremely drained, but he was able to function that day, as we made it through the airport, onto trains and found our way around Sydney's CBD to the U.S. Embassy. There we had to sit around and wait for quite a time and Win had to go off and find a post office because we had forgotten to get the self addressed envelope that the embassy needed. I was left in the waiting room alone with the kids. They were particularly mischievious that day, I suppose the 5 am start and excitement of being in Sydney was taking a toll, because I can tell you that we cleared out that waiting room in 3 minutes flat! There were 3 areas of waiting rooms and all the single men that had been sitting in our area decided to relocate because of the noise.
There was one positive that came out of this. The Staff members realised the chaos was not good for morale so they rushed us through earlier than normal. So we were finished before lunch, and we had the rest of the day to kill in Sydney.
Because we were in walking distance to the Botanic gardens we and it was a hot day, we found a shady tree and left Win to lie underneath (remembering that he had not kept down any food
in the last 24 hours, he was very weak).
The kids and I decided to explore the botanic gardens and we walked all the way from one end to the other in an effort to see the sydney opera house. I wanted the kids to have seen it with their own eyes. The walk was a lot further than we originally thought and when we finally came around the curve in the boardwalk and it came into full view the kids didn't give it a second glance. All they were interested in was staring over the cement railing at the harbour, and the thing that captured their imagination? The rubbish in the water. "What if they kill the fish??" Who would do such a thing?" they kept asking. I think that their interest stemmed from "finding Nemo" because I did hear them discussing that 'Sydney was where Nemo lives (if you remember the Dentist that caught Nemo was looking out on the harbour).
So the Opera house was a non-event for the kids. Which brings me to the point of all this reminiscing- as we were watching Oprah's show in Sydney they showed the harbour and opera house and I said to the kids "Look, we saw that, remember?" they stared at me blankly and said "no we didn't". So note to self: Don't bother with the road trip to the Grand Canyon.
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