Our trip to Melbourne

We had a fantastic time in Melbourne! It was great to get away for a short family vacation, even though Blake had to work most of the week. We arrived on Saturday afternoon, 12 April. After taking a frightening cab ride to our hotel (the cabbie not only practically killed us with his driving, he also charged us an extra $10 to go one extra block than we thought our hotel was on) we checked into our hotel and walked down to Southbank to see the river. It's colder in Melbourne than Sydney, that's for sure!

Here are Blake and the kids at Southbank the day we arrived:

On Sunday we checked out the aquarium, which was actually pretty impressive and both kids loved it:

These last 2 pictures are of the biggest "regular" fish I've ever seen (forgot it's name, of course) and of Brady pointing at it to give you an idea of how big it was!

After nearly 4 months of everyone being busy, I actually was able to meet up with our long-lost friends from Sydney, Nicky, Jud, Lucia and Milijana in Melbourne of all places! Jud is an opera singer so the family has been in Perth and then Melbourne on holiday while Jud performs. It was great to catch up and we promised to get back together at home next time!

Lucia is such a sweetheart and asked me why I called a nappy a diaper... it was hard to explain to a 5-year-old! She said she's going to start saying diaper now and I told her she better stick with nappy around here but if she ever went to America to say diaper! She's very happy in this picture because her Daddy bought her some silly jelly-like stuff...

Our kids had a ball in the hotel room... Anna actually discovered the CD player first, but then Brady took charge of controlling it. The kids loved taking a real bath since we don't have a bathtub at home!

Our hotel room overlooked the filming of a couple scenes from the upcoming movie "Knowing" starring Nicholas Cage. We knew there was a movie being filmed since the street was blocked off, but what really cracked me up was looking out our window and seeing the American flag hanging outside! Supposedly the movie is about Nick finding a time capsule at his son's school and the terror the world is about to undergo... we determined that this scene was supposed to be set in NYC since they had subway entrance signs and had changed the street names on the corner to "Worth" and "Lafayette" streets in Manhattan. Obviously this was staged to look as if a bomb or terror attack had just happened...

We were so lucky to enjoy a couple of date nights while in Melbourne! We ate a wonderful meal at Blake's (and now mine) favourite Chinese restaurant ever, the Empress in Melbourne's Chinatown on Monday night followed by some fun at the blackjack tables at the Crown Casino. The kids were great for Miss Kim up until we got home and Anna proceded to wake up 45 minutes later (12:30 am) FOR THE NIGHT. Yep, Tuesday was a fun one for me (ha, ha). Wednesday was filled with some shopping for the kids, and I even bought myself a new silk blouse for our Wednesday date (shown below). We again had a wonderful meal, this time at Rockpool in the southbank. We again followed dinner by hanging out at the blackjack tables at the Crown and watching some shooting fireballs over the river. We won enough to cover our $200 baby sitter, so that was great! I hadn't been to a casino since the summer of 2004, before I became pregnant with Brady. We really enjoyed our time together and feeling like a married couple instead of "Mommy and Daddy" again!




Cheers, mates!