If We Could Have a Holiday...

Actually, we can!

As of 5.00pm this afternoon, I'm on holidays! For a whole week.

Tomorrow night, Imogen, Toby and I fly out for Perth, where we'll spend the week with our respective families.

The reason for this little jaunt is that my sister, Sue, who lives in Texas with her family, is out visiting for a few weeks with her two little girls, so it's a great opportunity to get all the kids in the family together in the one place with some of their grandparents. They arrived in Perth yesterday, after a marathon 28ish hours on planes, all the way from Houstin to Perth, via L.A and Sydney. It makes tomorrow night's flight for us look like a doddle. (Especially when you consider that Sue did the trip solo, travelling with a 3 year old and a 1 year old and no sedatives.)

It's one of the difficult things about this modern world, actually - my poor parents have three grandkids at present - two who live in the USA and one in Canberra. Actually, in part this is the nature of life in Perth - it's one of the most lovely places in the whole world, but also one of the most isolated, and as a result, young people tend to move away from it, especially when they're building careers and /or families which can often take them to far-flung corners of the world. Or Canberra. And as much as I love our life here in the nation's capital, especially during election season, I do regularly regret the fact that my folks don't get regular 'Toby time'. If nothing else, we could use the free babysitting.

Luckily, though, there's always skype, and so Toby does at least get to see and talk to Grandma Margie and Poppa Dave (they picked the names, not me) regularly. And my mother has become an absolute master of the "Skype Toddler Game" - the things she can come up with to play across a computer link have to be seen to be believed.

So it'll be a lovely week. We've got my youngest niece's Christening, the booklaunch for Daywards, a trip to the zoo, and just a lot of general hanging out and being a family to look forward to.

And, of course, blogging. (Now that Trish has put the pressure on for me to see this thing through properly.... ;)

I'm also going to fire a handgun. But more about that next week.

In any case, we're just about ready to go. This afternoon I downloaded an entire series of 'The Wiggles' onto my iPad, which I'm hoping will help all of us get through the flight. (We generally enforce a 'no screens' rule with Toby, so this should be a real treat. Or at least enough to stop him trying to climb onto the other passengers. Fingers crossed.)

So wish us luck. I won't be blogging tomorrow - screen free and intracontinental saturday and all that - but I'll shoot a few posts in from Perth.

Cheers, everyone.