Christopher settled in wonderfully at the Melbourne Montessori School, and Annabelle started at its Early Learning Centre for two 2-hour afternoons per week. This is her first time away from mum and dad, so it was quite hard for her the first few times.
Luckily Annabelle’s classroom is next to Christopher's, and on one afternoon her teacher called him in: her big brother then held her and dried her tears...
Even though she still doesn't like being dropped off, Annabelle does enjoy being 'at school', and when we come to pick her up she's always participating fully. Our little girl is not a baby anymore (of course she is turning 3 in June).
So we had a dilemma: staying in suburbia where we're not really happy, or leaving a school where our kids are thriving. In the end the decision was simple: there are a few other Montessori schools in Melbourne (and we feel it's mostly the Montessori approach to education that suits our kids), and we need to be somewhere where we are comfortable.
And we need some stability: we moved 5 times in the past six years (not counting all the moves around our trip to Europe last year), and it really is time to settle down.
So we set our sights on the Eltham area - on the North-East of Melbourne, not too far from the city and Doris' parents, and close to the Plenty Valley Montessori School, which has a good reputation. Eltham is more rural than normal Melbourne suburbia, there are many parks and trees, and we could see ourselves living there.
In December we started to look in and around Eltham for houses to buy. By now we must have looked at hundreds on the internet, and visited at least 20 in real life. We seriously considered buying a block of land and building our own house, but land is in short supply, and the block we liked was too limiting and expensive.
A few real estate agents had mentioned properties in Diamond Creek - a suburb we didn't know. We looked at these properties on Google Maps, with its fantastic Street View features. In case you don't know: Google has driven around most of the main population areas in the US and Australia (and has started in Europe too) with a car-mounted camera that takes 360-degree photos every few meters. So now besides the great satellite imaging on maps.google.com, you can also see what an area looks like from the road. Try it: you can't see our new house (because it's at the end of a long driveway), but our current house is easily viewed.
Diamond Creek didn't look that nice on the internet: a bit barren and tree-less, so we weren't too interested. Then on Thursday we went to have a look at a house there. The house was OK, but not quite our style. However we were quite impressed with Diamond Creek itself. It has a real community feel, and is lovely, on the edge of Melbourne. It reminds me a bit of how Taroona is a self-contained community outside, but really part of, Hobart in Tasmania.
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