VanAussie Daily

We’re going home + Powell River & Vancouver Island Circle Trip

Wednesday, August 25th, 2010

With the boys now at home and occupying most of my spare time and pretty much 100% of Nat’s time, we’ve realised a couple of things:

1. Having twins with no family support around is rather tough
2. With kids, you can kiss any sort of reliable spare time good by
3. With young babies, getting out of the house takes lots of planning, and longer trips are pretty much out of the question for the time being
4. Those folks who reminisce about the “new baby smell” have glossed over the more pungent memories of sour milk and poop.

SO with the above and a few other things in mind, we’ve decided to head back to Tassie next April (2011). It wasn’t a decision that we took lightly, but in the end it wasn’t that hard – the support and having the kids grow up around their grandparents (free babysitting!) pretty much made up our minds plus the cheaper cost of living available in Tassie. I’ll also be taking my job home with me, so that’s another plus, as there won’t be that horrible job searching part.

In light of all this, there won’t be many exciting trip stories to tell, just burping and pooping stories which you’ll find on the boys blog, plus tidbits from my life around Vancouver. So I’ve decided that to make this blog a more complete memory of our time here in Vancouver, I’m going to go back through all the trips that we’ve done previously and stick them in here for posterity. I hope you enjoy the ride and they inspire some of you to get out and about. My particular favourites are the trips to Oregon, Tofino on Vancouver Island and Nahatlatch, which is in the Fraser Canyon (kinda), about 5 hours east of Vancouver, but we’ve actually been to a surprising amount of places in our time here… enjoy!

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Vancouver – Sunshine Coast – Powell River – Courtenay/Comox – Nanaimo – Vancouver round trip

Looking at that title, that seems like a hell of a lot of places to visit and a fair bit of distance to travel, but we did it all in the space of a weekend not long after we got to Vanco (more…)

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Posted in In and around BC, Previous trips (memory lane), scenery, travel, Twins | 1 Comment »

Dr Sun Yat-Sen gardens

Wednesday, August 11th, 2010

One of the things about being home with newborn (or in our case, newly arrived home, as they were born 11 weeks ago but only came home last week) is that it’s hard to get out of the house. We managed to get out of the house the other day for the twins very first adventure out in the real world, and we took them to the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Gardens, which happen to be just up the street from us and quite a nice walk.

These gardens are one of the little not-so secrets of Vancouver. There is a free section of these walled gardens, then there is the main part itself, which you have to pay cash to get into. Needless to say that I’ve only ever been into the free section but for me this part is great to get away from the city a little and just check out gardens from another culture. There are turtles (tortoises) and GIANT goldfish (carp?) flitting in between the lilys which flower if you’re there at the right time of the year. A pagoda occupies the center of the gardens, but there are various gravelled strolls throughout the garden where you can check out the abundance of flora… just watch out for the tourists…

Roaming the garden paths

Token shot of the boys

Ohh, look at the cute little goldfish...

AAAAGH, the Zombie Carp are swarming!

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Posted in Downtown Vancouver, scenery, Twins | No Comments »

Mid-May Twin update

Monday, May 10th, 2010

Time for a quick twin update for those who are interested

They’re both doing great! Had an ultrasound last week at 25 weeks 3 days, and both are still growing well. Due to their nature, we have to have regular checkups and ultrasounds to make sure that they’re still healthy, which is nice.

With twins, they measure growth in terms of weeks/days against the growth rate of what a normal single baby would be undergoing. So while Nat was 25.3, Twin A is 25.2 and Twin B was 26.1. This means that Twin B is growing at a faster rate than A, however they’re both doing really well in terms of growth rate.

It’s interesting having a couple of kids in another country. As it’s a Commonwealth country, and pretty closely related to Australia, lots of things are very similar to how they would be in Aus. We’re now going to see an Obstetrician every few weeks, as well as ultrasounds every two weeks.

Fingers crossed that everything goes great for the next 12 weeks and beyond, as the very latest they’ll let them go is to 37 weeks.

Here’s a gratuitous pic of Twin B, just to make up for Twin A featuring in the last post :

The face of Twin B at 25 weeks

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Posted in Twins | No Comments »

It’s been a bit quiet around here…

Thursday, April 22nd, 2010

…almost too quiet…

I have a confession to make. I’ve been neglecting this blog and CanAussie a little over the last little while, which sucks.

However, I do have a good excuse! I’m getting married tomorrow, and we’re due to have twins in July

My beautiful lady and I moved to Canada two years ago on April 15, 2008, and neither of us had any clue then what adventures we would get up to, and what would happen. Well, they’re still happening!

It’s been a whole new discovery process for us finding out about how we can tie the knot, how good maternity leave is here in BC (38 weeks paid leave), and realising that we’re going to need two of everything…

So, bear with me over the next while and I’ll resume normal transmission sometime soon. The blog may even take on some new stories where you’ll get to read about some of the adventures that we go through starting a family in a foreign country. In between times, I’m sure I’ll update you on what’s happening. Those of you who’ve been complaining about the lack of pictures on this blog recently… well… at least I’m actually updating my blog

This blog post gets the thumbs up from Twin A:

6 people like this post.

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Posted in Musings, Twins | 2 Comments »