Transitioning.

Hello from a wintery afternoon in Hobart.....complete with snow on Mt Wellington:

We are home. After a meticulously executed 44 hour trip from Nimes, which involved hire cars, trains, planes and pre booked maxi taxis we materialised at our front door only to discover that we'd forgotten to organise......the keys. Cue the locksmith. By this time it was dark and cold. Bleak. We had to go out again. To say goodbye to our last remaining beagle. Somehow he managed to make it to the day that we arrived home and we were able to say goodbye. Cue the tears.

The last two weeks have been a fog of jet lag and displacement....and I'll admit to also indulging in a tad of gratuitous homecoming malaise.....I have packets of sunflower seeds sitting on the kitchen bench waiting to be planted and I've been painting my toenails YSL 'Bleu Majorelle' which is the colour of the Mediterranean sky:

Sigh. So while I may have been daydreaming about our sojourn in the south of France the reality has been the unrelenting horror of unpacking the house.....how did that happen so soon.....and a never ending whirlwind of athletics carnivals, Irish Dancing Competitions, teacher meetings and myriad trips to the uniform pool. 

So, I've been trying to console myself with some soothing (although possibly manic) gardening....planting more box (because you can NEVER have too much), roses, punnets and punnets of hollyhock seedlings......and the beagles. Look how stunning this hedged rose garden in Stockholm was:

And those Danes have an incredible gift for using hollyhocks, they seem to just sprout out of the footpath:

 So beautiful. Needless to say,  I'm determined to try to achieve this effect at my house.

Things have been made to feel worse as I've succumbed to a nasty little lurgy, which has been working it's way through the whole family and has now taken up residence just behind my face. So yesterday, I had to pull out all the stops and between rain showers we all rugged up so that I could lead an expedition to the Botanic Gardens to gaze upon the wonderment that is Peter Cundall's Veggie Patch made famous on the ABC's 'Gardening Australia' programme. It's always guaranteed to make me feel happy.....however the sight that greeted my eyes was enough to make me.....almost....cry. It's been gutted:

I had no idea. 

Anyway, I've also been engaging in a spot of comforting home decorating which ultimately involves wallpaper and upholstery....be still my beating heart....yet to set the plans in motion it also involved getting the plasterer in, who, of course, reduced the house to an utter mess. Plaster dust = days of dusting, vacuuming and mopping. There is no way around this sorry fact. 

I keep flashing back to our road trip to Sweden, Denmark and Ireland, where everybody in the family had a turn at ticking something off their bucket list. The boys lived their dream of two days at Legoland and a night in the hotel.....where our room overlooked the magic that is Miniland and our Irish Dancing aholic daughter celebrated her 12th birthday in Dublin....complete with tickets to Riverdance at the Gaiety Theatre. 

And me? Mine happened in Stockholm, when I'm not ashamed to admit that I dragged the whole family to the recently opened ABBA: The Museum:

Tick. I loved every single minute of it. How could I not....I danced on stage to 'Mama Mia', sang 'Waterloo' in the sound recording booth, sat in the 'Arrival' helicopter:

And then.....I stood in front of these:

It all came flooding back.....how desperately I coveted one of these dresses as a five year old. In fact, given the chance, I'd still love to give one a whirl on the dance floor. 

Did you know that the girl's had their names emblazoned on the back...see:

And that back in the early days of ABBA, Frida used to make their costumes. 

And my husband? He was very excited to actually drink Guinness and watch 'Father Ted'.....in Ireland. I'm pleased to report that he did both....even on a couple of occasions at the same time:

And then, just because it was there and it had to be done, we all kissed the Blarney Stone:

 Even the baby:

I mentioned this to an Irish friend the other day at the school gate and she promptly told me that all of the local lads after closing time at the pub in Blarney.....go and pee on it. I hope she made that up.

Rx