Blue Mountains Getaway

My sister Lisa visited last week, and we planned a sort of last-minute weekend trip to the Blue Mountains. My husband was kind enough to let us leave him with the baby (my first time leaving her overnight!). We needed something that we could drive to from Sydney, and the Blue Mountains were perfect. It took about 2 hours with little traffic and once we got there we stayed at Lilianfels. We had read mixed reviews on Trip Advisor, so we were pleasantly surprised at how incredible the service and rooms were. It had "old world charm" as my sister would describe it. We had a nice dinner the first night at the sister property Echoes next door and had a wonderful 3 course meal while we watched the sunset over the mountains - such stunning views. From the restaurant, we could see Scenic World, which we visited the following morning. After that, we had a 4WD safari to see kangaroos. It was really cool to see them in the wild hopping around. We did the Blue Mountains Guides tour. It was from 5:30-11pm so we saw the roos as the sun was setting. Then our guide Craig fired up the BBQ and made a great meal. While we were eating though I was bitten by a small leach, and as I was freaking out about it we saw A HUGE FUNNEL WEB SPIDER. This is the most dangerous and deadly spider in Australia. OMG. I will have to load photos soon. It was super scary but we got away unharmed. I highly recommend the Blue Mountains. Oh and we shopped one day in Leura and it is such a cute little town. Another must if you have the time.

Sky Car At Scenic World

Birds at Scenic World

View from Echoes Restaurant

Funnel Web! Eww!

Blog Award Nomination - Moi?

I am so excited to tell my very few followers and readers that this blog was just nominated for a Liebster Award! When I googled the actual award name, I get lots of blogs mentioning it but failed to find the actual web site housing the awards. From what I can find, I was nominated by a Liebster award-winning blogger who is actually Australian and living in France for a year with her family of seven (cool!). Check out Our House In Quercy to read all about it. The requirements to be nominated include less than 200 Google followers (easy to "tick this box" - American translation: "check this one off the list") and of course have some cool content. Thank you to Our House In Quercy for the nomination. Here's a link to her nomination page.

Traveling To America By Myself With a 9 Month Old

Months leading up to our departure, I was dreading this trip. Most Americans, I think, feel the same way I do. But I know many moms in my mom's group who travel to other countries with their bubs and don't seem to give it a second thought. They don't all do it by themselves, but it's much more of a common thing to do here, I guess because so many have family in other countries. And that's why I sacrificed my sanity, spending 2 weeks away from my husband, and I'm glad we did it. However, if I had known that the return trip would be a million times harder than the flights out, I may have had second thoughts.

Let me begin by saying that the trip there could not have been easier unless we had had a bassinet seat. I got to the ticket counter in Sydney and they offered me 3 bulkhead seats but no bassinet. Ugh. How to have a 14 hour flight and a baby sleeping on me? How do you use the bathroom? Will she even sleep? How do I eat my meals? Fill out customs forms? All of these thoughts rapidly ran through my head. But I sucked it up, got on the plane, and by a miracle was given a "floor bassinet," which was really a duffel bag with some cardboard supporting the sides. See below.

She barely fit in there but somehow was comfortable enough to sleep. God bless her. Then we got to SFO and happened upon a baby playroom. Jackpot! Avery is crawling and needed an outlet to release all that baby crawling energy and this was perfect. Long story short, this was a dream travel day. Of course I should mention a few things I noticed as an expat. United Airlines is much less accommodating to single moms or moms/families in general than other Australian based ones. Quantas and Jetstar both were wonderful. I had heard from friends that the stewards and stewardesses were trained to help mothers, holding the baby while you use the bathroom, washing bottles, etc. This was not the case on United. It was a much more annoyed/flippant attitude. I asked one if they had anything I could wash bottles with besides the hand soap in the bathroom and was quickly and flatly told no. The people, however, who are parents or grandparents and traveling alongside you can be godsends. I don't know what I would have done on the return flights without these angels who helped me out.

And to that, I won't go into a lot of detail because it's something I'm trying to block from my memory, but basically within two weeks, my baby became 100% more active, refusing to even let me change her diaper, and add to that severe jetlag, and you have a miserable 24 hours. Charlotte to San Francisco included a few hours of screaming and middle seat friend who didn't want to move to another middle seat (someone behind us kindly offered!), so when she wasn't screaming, Avery was trying to grab his computer, book, arm hair, and then wasn't able to nap because he had his reading light on. The second flight she slept for five hours and the other 10 weren't so bad thanks to a surrogate dad sitting next to us who was a new father himself and was great helping me out.