Nine.

Hello from the house of vomit......where three of my children, so far, have been riding the porcelain bus with a particularly messy bout of gastro.  Having spent a lot of time in the decidedly unpleasant clean up, I've been pondering why, when I've endured such high levels of exposure,  I've never managed to become immune to vomit or poo. So, as you do, I've been deliberating which is worse....with the jury  still out.

As if a sudden dose of gastro hasn't made life hectic enough, the clock is relentlessly ticking and we are now down to NINE days before we board that plane and bid 'au revoir' to Hobart and 'bonjour' to the South of France. I've also taken another trip to the dentist's chair and had my other two wisdom teeth unceremoniously pulled out.....knowing what to expect I tried every delaying tactic in the book and shamelessly used exhibition openings, children's birthdays and a trip to Brisbane to try and avoid having to go through it all......again. I was scared as had been pre warned that these teeth had curly roots. Oh, the agony. Afterwards, I sought comfort in flicking through a book about Prince Charles' garden and one of my boys dedicated his afternoon to sitting on my bed and patting my hair.....it worked and I managed to hold off on the painkillers.

Anyway, yesterday was our 14th wedding anniversary. My husband came through with flowers just when I was despairing, as only an afternoon of cleaning up poo will do, that maybe I'd made a big mistake setting myself up for domesticity on such a grand scale:

I love Irish Bells.....there's something so unexpected about a lime green flower, don't you think? This is what the five year old dressed me in to wear out to dinner down the road at our favourite haunt, Le Provencal:

The J Brand sparkly coated metallic jeans were on sale at Revolve and I've had the By Malene Birger sequinned top hanging in the cupboard for years. He initially wanted me to wear the jeans and the top without a jacket, however seeing it was 10 degrees outside and the top's a bit big, I managed to talk him into letting me workshop the look with the jacket.....yet only on the promise that I took it off once inside the restaurant where it would be warm.

It may have been warm and looked like the South Of France:

yet I flagrantly disregarded his instructions and kept the jacket on. While compiling the insurmountable list of things still to do over dinner, the thought crossed my mind that it's much easier to pretend to be in France in a French restaurant that we can see from our house......than it is to actually go to France. Too late now.

Over the last week, between loads of vomity washing, I've been hanging out in the hot room like a woman possessed, because the sad fact is that I'm going to have to let my Bikram Yoga addiction slide once I get to France. There's just no way that I'm going to be able to keep up five classes a week. Geography is not on my side.  Like the total tragic that I am, I've been using Google Maps to work out exactly how far it is from where we will be living in Uzes to the Bikram Yoga studio's in Montpellier (1.5 hours)  and Marseilles (2 hours). Here in Hobart, I drive literally from one side of town to the other to feed my addiction and it takes me.....all of 12 minutes. Rationally, I'm thinking that 1.5 - 2 hours in the car on a regular basis might not be feasible, although it makes me upset to admit it out loud. Hopefully, I'll be able to make the commute on a couple of occasions and if I can find a window of opportunity to do a class or two in Paris, then I won't have to go cold turkey.....which is some consolation.

Apart from putting Bikram Yoga classes in the bank, it has also been a great way to tame my monkey mind (for an hour and a half at least) and help with my overwhelming worries about the immediate future.....will our geriatric beagles survive the separation.....when are we going to find a tenant.....is my father in law's health going to rally.....will our property development be finished before we go.....etc etc etc ad infinitum. Most nights I wake up at about 3am and start to think and worry....and think....and then I try to engage my husband in conversation about these particular thoughts....much to his horror as he is holding out until 5.30am when he can get on his bike and go for a ride. You wouldn't want to be getting on a plane next Sunday. I might need to try and schedule two Bikram Yoga classes tomorrow.......

Rx

Three Weeks.

The clock is unremittingly ticking and the days are vanishing at great speed. The deadline of having the house and our family all packed up and organised before we board the plane is looming. It's scarily close now.....we have just passed the three week mark. I have been waking in the early hours of the morning and tossing and turning and panicking......about everything. In theory, it all seems like such a wonderful thing to do, to relocate your family from Hobart to the South of France for a term, yet trust me, in practice it's daunting. I would usually be the first to deny this now blatantly apparent fact and I'm ashamed to admit that I really am a creature of habit and staring down the barrel of change and challenge is difficult.

I remember all of these emotions from 2010 when we went to France for 8 months.  At three weeks out, I had an incredibly graphic dream one night, about giving birth. It was technicolour in it's clarity.....I was on the operating table and they were actually performing the caesarian. It was so real. The next day was Anzac day and while we were walking into town for the march a text message from a friend came through announcing the  birth of her baby daughter. A wave of memory engulfed me about my dream and prompted me to tell my husband all about how I'd given birth to our fourth child.....in a dream. We laughed our heads off. I think we were almost crying with hysteria about the ludicrousness of it.  Nevertheless, there remained an overwhelming feeling of uncertainty that I just couldn't shake off...it had been that kind of a dream. We, of course, decided that there was absolutely no way that it could be an omen....yet, just to make sure we stopped off at the chemist on the walk up the hill on the way home.

So, I peed on the stick....all the while berating myself for doing so....as if. Lo and behold it was positive. I was 38 and accidentally pregnant. I was having a baby and it would be born while we were in France. Dreams of wine and blue cheese* were dashed. Every minute detail of this impending trip had been worked over and over......for three long years. I can't describe the feelings of terror, confusion ad uncertainty that engulfed me. There was lots of crying. I felt sick....yet maybe that was just morning sickness. There was no way that my basic school girl French was up to it. We had already rented our house, so we couldn't stay at home even if we'd wanted to. Emails were sent to the American Hospital of Paris and replies received.....a caesarian and five day hospital stay....would amount to approximately AUD$20,000. Eek. What were we going to do?

We got on the plane. We thought that we'd suck it and see. Mercifully, once we arrived in Espondeilhan, one of the families who lived around our courtyard had a six week old baby which was how we got the recommendation of an obstetrician. Our landlady, who had spent days instructing us in the idiosyncrasies of the local areas shop opening and more importantly, closing times, rang the obstetricians rooms, explained our situation and convincingly haggled to get me an appointment. She wouldn't take no for an answer and they acquiesced. So, then I had a doctor and a quote for a caesarian and stay at the local private clinic....for AUD$5,000. Phew. The relief. The experience was similar enough to going and seeing my Hobart obstetrician, except that he had no long, detailed, repetitive boat conversations with my husband.....as he just didn't understand enough French. My own French was stretched to the limits as my doctor spoke no English. No English. This, as you can imagine, was just a tad tricky, especially as at our first appointment he jabbered something in my direction and left the room. 'I think he just asked me to take my pants off' I told my husband in confusion. 'You want to be sure that's what he said!' he replied. He had. Now though, I have a fully operational vocabulary of French gynaecological and breast feeding terms....words they just don't teach you in French classes at school or at Adult Ed. I also have a a beautiful two year old daughter who was born in France and was such a special, special souvenir:

So, once again, three weeks out from our departure, we are wrestling with a cacophony of emotions. My 91 year old father in law was rushed to hospital last week. He is still there. Yet again, we have been questioning whether or not we'll actually get on the plane.

Rx

*The French, surprisingly enough have a very draconian policy of zero tolerance to alcohol consumption during pregnancy yet their attitudes towards eating cheese are much more enlightened. Having endured three pregnancies in Australia where the fear of eating blue cheese or any soft cheese is promoted, in France eating blue cheese is OK....I checked with the pathologist not once, but three times to be sure......just so long as it doesn't contribute towards you putting on any more than the prescribed 12 kgs weight gain. My French doctor weighed me at every single appointment......I had never been near the scales when seeing my doctor in Hobart.....and commented, at one stage, to my husband's utter delight, he told me that I had to reduce! Truly.

Bull.

One night last week, we got the babysitter in and ventured into town to go to the theatre:

Up in the cheap seats at the Theatre Royal (Australia's oldest, no less), where the chandelier is almost at eye level, you wouldn't want to suffer from vertigo as it is dizzyingly high. We went to see The Select (The Sun Also Rises) by an experimental New York theatre company brought to Hobart as part of Tasmania's International Arts Festival, Ten Days On the Island. Amazingly, a sizeable chunk of the dialogue was lifted directly from the pages of Hemingway's novel Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises  which was narrated predominantly by the main character and acted by the cast.  A play within the pages of the novel was revealed and it was long, almost three and a half hours....if you were a fast reader you could a almost read the book to yourself in that time (I read in on the two planes between Hobart and Brisbane). The production was witty and clever, which managed to save it from being a tad on the dull side, and used a pastiche of words, music, sound effects and....trestle tables, which did duty as.....trestle tables, beds, trout and most dramatically.....a bull:

Yes, a bull, because you need a bull/trestle table for a bullfight. And there was a bullfight, just before the promiscuous Lady Brett Ashley ran off with the bullfighter, having shagged most of the other male characters, except for Jake....because he was impotent due to wounds sustained in WW1. Hemingway, of course, loved bullfights.....after he committed suicide in 1961, two tickets to the upcoming Pamploma bullfights were discovered in his desk.

I can't say that I share his appreciation, as I don't like bullfights. All of that testosterone dressed up in pink tights and gilded, garishly hued, tight costumes......the absurd stances, pelvic thrusts and floppy hair. Not to mention the overwhelming barbarity and the blood and guts.

I went to a bullfight at the arena in Beziers in 2010....coincidentally, it was just around the corner from the hospital where I had my baby four months later. My overriding impression, from what I saw through my tears, was a cruel attention seeking display of virility. The odds are stacked against the bull from the minute that it runs, confused and scared into the arena. It is never going to get out of there alive. It is going to be taunted and formulaically stabbed, until it can barely hold it's head up and then some egotistical maniac is going to utterly humiliate it and kill it in an attempt to show off. Don't be fooled...it is nothing like the children's classic storybook The Story of Ferdinand.

Occasionally, a bullfighter gets gored:

.....good on the bull I say.

Peversely, outside the arena before the corrida, it was almost how I imagine going to a Tom Jones concert would be like.....lots of giggly, excited women....young and old, clutching flowers, cards and notes to throw at the bullfighters feet as an act of infatuation. If the judges want to show their approval, they don't present a trophy and fizz up the champagne...they award one or two of the beasts severed ears and if they think it was particularly good, it's tail.

Bullfighting in the Langudoc area of South West France continues to grow in popularity...in may have been outlawed by an act of parliament over the border in Spain's Catalonia, yet in France it attracts a massive crowd and various towns have a week long hard sangria drinking, paella eating, bullfighting focused Feria associated with it.

In just over three weeks we are heading back to the Languedoc. The closest sizeable town to the village where we will be living and our children going to school, is Nimes, which boasts several important remains from the ancient Roman Empire including an amphitheatre which was built around 70AD. In the late 19th century it was remodelled as........a bullring, which is still in use today. Needless to say, I won't be going there to see a bullfight however I am tempted to maybe get tickets to see Depeche Mode perform there in July.

Rx

Canal.

So this morning my fabulous friend Nicole in Espondeilhan sent me a link to the new Bikram Yoga Studio in Montpellier which opens on 1st July with the words "Now you really can come back!!" So I've been indulging in some serious reminiscing about the time when our family lived in France:

Thanks to my husband's pedantic diarising of the entire eight months we were away, I know for a fact that today, two years ago, we were cycling along the Canal du Midi:

We had lunch by the canal at Poilhes, at the picture perfect, restaurant La Tour Sarracine:

And this is what I ate. Scallop risotto with truffle shavings:

Followed by cuisse de lapin:

Et pour le désert, chocolate fondant with choc/mint ice cream:

I can still remember how it tasted utterly delicious. Sitting out in the Languedoc sunshine on a beautiful blue afternoon:

We went to the same restaurant at the end of our stay, for lunch the day before I checked into the hospital in Beziers for Camelia's birth. No sunshine that day as it was the middle of winter. So we sat inside and Tobes fed  bits of his steak hache to the restaurant dog:

This would never happen in Hobart as dogs aren't allowed to be within a one metre radius of the outside of any restaurant, let alone inside. It really is a long way between Tasmania and France. Especially as we now travel with not three but four children. Having previously negotiated all of the challenges that you face when you move your family to France for 8 months - visas, the language, schools, shop opening hours, bureaucracy AND having a baby - I would do it all again.....in a heartbeat. And I'm sure the rest of my family would too.

R

First.

Hello and welcome to my first post - coming this evening from my kitchen benchtop in South Hobart!

The idea to start a blog manifested itself in my head on the mat during a Bikram Yoga class last week. Of course I wasn't meant to be listening to my monkey mind, yet I did. I came home and told my husband the news.  I have a track record of random 'idea visualisations' which arrive unannounced. The last one was five years ago when I was away at a course in Sydney - it resulted in the birth of Tobes, our third child. Before this I had quite vocally denounced, to anyone who would listen, ever having any more children than the two I already had. How lucky I was to have followed through, as children are such precious gifts.

Yesterday, our fourth child, Camelia,  celebrated her first birthday. What better timing to start a blog (have I mentioned yet that it's also the first day of the school holidays)?

Here is a photo of the early morning festivities yesterday:

And a close up of the cake for our little girl who shares a name with a flower - 3 layers, light pink, dark pink and mauve. I sprinkled the top with the petals of the only rose in my garden still in flower (David Austin's Sharifa Asma):

Surprising, as this was my back garden three weeks ago:

This time last year we weren't living at home in Hobart, we were living in France. Sigh. For eight months our family lived a dreamlike existence, outside our usual everyday reality, in the tiny village of Espondeilhan, in the Languedoc, South West France. 

The setting was a converted stone stable behind a chateau: 

set amongst vines as far as the eye could see:

After three years of fastidious planning - it was like a part time job organising children, houses, schools, cars, visas, language, kennels for beagles, new homes for chooks etc etc etc - we discovered three weeks before we got on the plane that we were having a surprise pregnancy with a due date scheduled for while we were away. Camelia was born in the Clinique Champeau Mediteranee in the nearby city of Beziers. My fourth caesarian was in French and, now that I've whetted your appetite, it might have to be a story for another day.  

So, as I've talked about living in France for most of last year it's time to bring up my other favourite topic of conversation - Bikram Yoga - to which I nurse an addiction and practice most days. And the other first, which was that today my eldest daughter Mimi, who is ten, didn't continue up the stairs to the child minding as she usually does, she came into the hot room to do the floor series for the first time!

Here she is out the front of Studio New Town before class:

Later, as we left she said that she felt 'amazing and light and floaty'. It really is an amazing feeling. 

R