Leaving Tasmania
After we’d left Tasmania some people commented on how ‘Tasmania hadn’t worked out for us’… But that’s not how we experienced it at all! We loved living in Tasmania, and probably would’ve stayed if it we’d had family there.
Both Doris and I didn’t really experience our grandparents. We’d like Christopher and Annabelle to have that special relationship, and also know their cousins and aunts and uncles well. We have chosen to live overseas from our family in Holland, but we don’t have to live ‘overseas’ from those in Australia also…
We definitely miss ‘our’ house up on the hill with the gorgeous views, and are finding suburbia somewhat hard to get used to again. And we’d take the ‘Hobart rush hour’ anytime over the Melbourne one!
We knew we’d always regret it if we hadn’t tried living in Tasmania – so no regrets here!
Looking back on Europe 2008
We’re quite happy that we took the opportunity to spend three months in Europe this year, but our (read: Bernt’s) plans had been a bit ambitious. Travelling with two young children is not easy (as everybody was telling us beforehand) and was hard for them. Not much stability, which is what children need early on in life. Between leaving Taroona and settling in Bentleigh East, we slept in more than twenty different beds. Fine for Doris and me, but too much for especially Annabelle.
One of Bernt’s goals for the trip was to improve the kids’ Dutch. Well, it actually had the opposite effect: because the four of us were together all the time, we practically only spoke English. At least in Australia when Bernt was alone with the kids we spoke Dutch…
We feel very grateful we got to spend some more time with especially mama and Bernt’s family and friends in Europe. We all gained experiences and memories we’ll never loose.
And possibly most importantly: it was the catalyst for what seems to be the final trip in Bernt’s journey back to good mental health and a happy life for all of us.
The end of the European trip was a bit unsettling for us. We had to say goodbye to mama, knowing that this was most likely the last time we’d see each other.
Then we came back to Melbourne not having a home of our own to return to. We expected to be able to find a rental place quickly, but that took almost two months. We stayed at Doris’ parents part of the time, but they don’t really have the space. Luckily Doris’ sister Diana offered her hospitality: she was in their newly-built home in Beaumaris that had lots of space.
We still didn’t know whether Christopher could get a place at the Melbourne Montessori school. Because he needed something to do, we booked him at a crèche at the ABC Learning Centre with his cousin Natalie. This was not a big success – he didn’t like it much and we weren’t too impressed with some of his new behaviours, that also seemed to rub off on Annabelle.
After looking at oodles of houses, we found a nice 3-bedroom weatherboard house on Centre Rd. We’d initially avoided main roads, but this house is on a corner, and has its driveway on the side street, taking away one of the big disadvantages of main roads. We still have the traffic sound though but that really only bothers us in the main bedroom…
We had applied for the house, and also got an interview for Christopher at the Montessori school. On the Monday morning while we were driving to the school, we received a call that we’d been accepted for the house… and an hour later Christopher had been offered a place at the school… it was a good day!
A funny thing happened then: Christopher had to have an assessment by himself with his future teacher, Nirmala. Christopher can be very stubborn (where did he get that from?) and if he doesn’t feel like it, it can be very, very hard to get him to do anything. This was one of those situations: he didn’t want to do anything that Nirmala asked him. She was at her wit's end and even called people at the other campus to see what else she could try.
Then a policeman came into the classroom for some unrelated matter, and a few seconds later Christopher walked up to Nirmala saying ‘So what did you want me to do?’…
We have no idea where he picked up this respect for the police, but it sure helped!
Christopher started with two half days one week and then went full-time: 5 days a week from 9 til 3. After the second half day Bernt picked him up and he said: ‘Daddy, I had such a good day at school today’, repeating that to Doris when she got home that night!
We are really impressed with the Montessori education so far, and it seems to agree with Christopher well too. Of his own account he started helping us at home: setting the table, helping doing the dishes and cleaning up after himself. And he only just turned 5.
He still loves school too: on one of the last days before Christmas when we were dropping him off before school, he said how much he liked school… isn’t that what every parent wants?
Christopher hadn’t been interested in computers at all, actually not wanting to touch the mouse. That all changed when he found out that you can find trains on the internet… in no time he was ‘driving’ the computer and watching train videos on YouTube… Back in Tassie we got close to our download limit one month, whereas Doris and Bernt hadn’t used the internet more than normal. That turned out to be Christopher’s YouTube videos…
We incidentally had to limit and monitor his YouTube use more when he started staging crashes with his trains and generally becoming a bit destructive: the videos he loved most had quite rough behaviour in them.
Annabelle is just a gorgeous two-year old. She is so girly, loving her clothes – especially pink ones. She loves being outside and playing with Christopher, and misses him a lot when he’s at school. She often still calls him ‘brother’, although she can now say ‘Christopher’.
Annabelle is very determined and can be stubborn. She may want her Teletubbies bowl for dinner time after time, but then suddenly change her mind and want the ‘Olle and Appie’ plate. She’s very clear in her choices, and when you ask her something she might think about it for a while, but always has an answer. Not something you’d expect from a 2-year old.
She can be quite moody, but switch to her bright, cheerful self in an instant – a bit like her dad used to be (and not just as a kid ;). With being two come the ‘terrible twos’, and she’s not skipping those… When she’s in one of her moods she can be very, very loud, and she’d be impossible to reason with (she’s only two after all). We regularly have to resort to putting her in the car, or in her room by herself.
Regrettably Annabelle has been suffering from a severe case of constipation for a long time. We eventually linked it to her great love of milk, and switching to low-fat milk and diluting it helped. We now have the constipation under control, but her bowels have to re-learn how to work, so she’s still having problems.
Bernt’s mum is continuing her slow decline. It has become quite hard to have a telephone conversation with her – especially when there’s nobody close to her because she might drop the receiver from her ear and wouldn’t be able to hear you. Regrettably in November a little growth was found under her breast, which the GP removed a few weeks later by which time it had grown considerably. The autopsy confirmed our fears: it’s a form of secondary cancer, possibly coming from mama’s lungs.
Doris is doing well – being the loving, stable, hard-working centre of our family. She started back with her old boss in Melbourne, and recently had some business issues resolved that she’d been trying to change for the past 4 years - quite a relief. She is working in Richmond, which without traffic is only a 20 minutes drive, but Melbourne traffic has gotten so bad that it normally takes her over an hour. That’s something that will have to change in the next year: there are oodles of pharmacies just on Centre Rd…
Besides being with the children, one of Doris’ favourite pastimes this last year has been studying The Keys videos, created by Maharaji (Prem Rawat). Maharaji’s message is one of Awareness and common sense, not unlike Eckhart Tolle, Landmark and numerous other aware teachers out there, and resonates well with Doris.
