Better days

Since lockdown started in Canberra three weeks ago, I have been meaning to post this latest blog. What better time to sit and reflect on the better days now that I’m in isolation? In addition to my previous posts, here's what we've been up to before Lockdown 2.0.

It’s a bit surreal that it was not too long ago that it felt like things were almost back to normal. We were lucky living in a bubble for the past 15 months. 2021 started off to be a better year. We were able to travel (within Australia) a bit and see family and friends outside of Canberra. The new school year started in February and Phil went back to work on campus in March for 3 days a week. Life was beginning to slowly ease back to what it used to be.

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Nicholas (15) and Catherine (11) were able to celebrate their birthdays with friends. They both had sleepovers. I made a black forest cake on Nicholas’ actual birthday, and we had grandparents over for afternoon tea. For dinner we went out to sushi train, Sushi Go, in Kingston. I took the kids out for another Nicholas birthday celebration with family friends to watch Godzilla vs. Kong at Dendy Cinemas and lunch at Papparich afterwards. Later that week, 5 of Nicholas’ school friends spent the night eating pizza and a chocolate chip cookie cake, gaming, roasting marshmallows and watching a movie. We did it all over again for Catherine. She had 4 friends over. They all had their nails done, ate burgers and fries from McDonald’s and an ice cream cake from That Gelato Place, sang karaoke and watched a movie. On her actual birthday we were supposed to go to Star Buffet, but I had a cold, so we postponed. We stayed in and had chilli con carne and Viennetta instead. We finally had a belated birthday lunch in July.

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The first half of the year we were more social than usual, attending a wedding and a few birthday celebrations and catching up with friends. Our last trip to Sydney was to celebrate a friend’s milestone birthday. It was over the Queen’s birthday long weekend and unfortunately, when and where this current outbreak all started. We were fortunate to be able to see our Sydney friends again. We had a great weekend away celebrating our dear friend with a birthday picnic at Centennial Park, followed by a fancy Queen’s Feast at Sydney Town Hall. The next morning, we left our old haunt, Coogee Beach, to drive back to Canberra not knowing that the current Sydney lockdown would begin 2 weeks later.

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