74 days and counting.......

Just over 2 months until we jet off for our European adventure. We haven't done much organising in the last month or two. Been a bit busy with a certain young lady turning one!

It's finally close enough to start booking our train travel. It has all been costed and planned for awhile but the tickets weren't available more than 3 months out. We now have our Eurail passes and we are booking the tickets for our Switzerland trip, which we are planning on doing a couple of weeks after we arrive in Paris. We aren't planning on booking all our train travel yet, but the journeys we have fixed dates for, and we are trying to book these once they become available. Mostly because we want specific departure times to work around our itinerary.

Of course British Airways are helping to make this harder by changing our Brussels to London flight yet again! This particular flight keeps changing it's departure time and we are catching the train from Ghent to Brussels so we might just hold off booking that one for awhile yet. I suspect it will move again before we are done. At least they haven't changed our Sydney - London connection for awhile. At one stage we were down to a 20 min lay-over in Singapore at 2am with a plane change (with luggage). That sounded like a bad idea so we got ourselves bumped to the flight we originally wanted but couldn't get frequent flyer seats on. Now if only Qantas and BA would have another stuff up and get us bumped to first class :) I'm sure that will never happen, but it's a nice dream. For some reason if we log into our bookings on the Android app it tells us we are in First for that flight. Sadly, it must be a glitch because it doesn't appear to be the case if we log in anywhere else. Still, it's nice to dream.

Tech Savvy

Apparently being born in the 21st Century and having geeky parents means you learn to operate all manner of technological devices before your first birthday. I guess Astrid has always seen us using computers, laptops, tablets and smart phones and she doesn't comprehend a world without them. In fact, she finds it odd that my laptop doesn't have a touch screen (unlike our phones or her dad's tablet) and is constantly swiping at it trying to get it to 'change'.

When she was 6 months old she got a toy laptop from her great-grandparents, in a vain attempt to get her to leave our computers alone. Well, she has always loved 'her' laptop but it's nowhere near as fun as mum and dad's. She is constantly playing with our computers. She often emails random people from mine. Changes my font settings. Is obsessed with turning caps lock on and manages to open things I didn't know existed. She also 'chats' to her dad in gmail. One day her chatting will make sense but for now he can usually tell when Astrid is helping as it makes slightly less sense than I normally do.

Hopefully all this computer interest will mean she might be able to fix one of the 7 million computers in our house when they break. There seems to be one broken every week, so that would be a useful skill. Learning to type at an early age would also be useful. If she inherits either of our handwriting styles, typing will be her best friend. Speaking of skills, lets not even discuss how she figured out that the remote from her toy plane opens and closes the curtains in the media room. She now wanders over to the toy bucket, pulls the remote out and points it at the curtains and waits for them to open or shut, then claps! Clever baby......

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The letterbox that Nic and Anto built

Well Ok, it is really the letterbox that Anto built. Nic consulted on design and painted the letterbox but Anto gets 90% of the credit.

Note that the letterbox is actually finished, and functioning. After only 7 years we now have that letterbox we were going to have within a few months of moving in. So sure that we were going to have our 'nice' letterbox done after not too long, we bought the cheapest and ugliest temporary letterbox. The temporary letterbox looked pretty worse for wear after 7 years of not much love and lots of yucky weather. Note the lovely rust in the photos. There was so much rust on the inside that we thought our mail might fall through one day. Aussie post have left us notes suggesting we get a new letterbox. We got there eventually.

Due to Anto's extreme awesomeness the letterbox even has a sloping roof to match our house roof slope, and it has the same tin and trim as our roof. Very trendy!!Here are the before and after photos: