I think Jude would say the highlight for him of the past two weeks was having guinea pigs for a weekend. Anna’s preschool has guinea pigs and each kid gets to take them home for the weekend. While Anna enjoyed the guinea pigs, Jude was in heaven. As soon as we got home from an outing Jude would ask if he could hold one of them; sometimes he even wanted to come home from an outing specifically to see them. They were very tame and are used to little kids not so gentle touching. Both kids had such a great time that we signed up for another weekend later in the year.

The other highlight of the past fortnight was our family day at Luna Park. This is an amusement park right on Sydney Harbour and went there this past Friday. Jude is officially in kindergarten four and half days a week but by Friday he is exhausted so we are planning on taking him out of school most Fridays and the teachers are fine with that.

Anyway, Jude is a huge fan of Luna Park, in particular the Wild Mouse roller coaster. Marcy lost count of how many times they went on it but in the end she told Jude she needed a break. They take a photo of every car in one of the steep sections and we had to buy one of them – Jude looked just like this in all 15 or so rides they took.

This morning was one of the most spectacular sun rises I have seen in a long time. Jude even woke Marcy up to make sure she didn’t miss it. I took this photo from the office window.

These days Jude loves to run. He particularly likes chasing birds as we have mentioned but he also often falls behind when we are out walking because something has grabbed his attention. Today we went to the Australian Museum in the city and we walked back through a park and I snapped this photo of Jude running at full tilt.

Jude started Kindergarten 10 days ago and as expected it was a bit of a tough transition. He cried a lot and didn’t want me to leave him and the first day I took him home after an hour or so. The second day he was much better and after a week he has settled in nicely. He still wants me to stay when I drop him off but I can see that once I leave he is totally fine. He seems to enjoy school and has lots of stories to tell us when he gets home. Here is a photo of Jude with Marcy as he is about to go off to his Sydney school for the first time.

Last weekend we all ventured out to Aunt Robyn and Uncle Mark’s farm in the country. Jude and Anna had a blast – they got to ride horses and explore the 30 acre farm. They had a little dam that Jude explored in great detail – studying at the fish and all the insects – but his favorite part was definitely riding the horse. Here you can see Jude riding bareback on Cruise the thoroughbred and former race horse. Jude and Anna took a tandem ride on Cruise that I captured on video here.

Yesterday we decided to meet up with some good friends and take a walk over the Sydney Harbour Bridge. We caught the ferry into Circular Quay, met our friends and then walked over the bridge. It is probably a good couple of miles all told and Jude walked pretty much the entire way. Anna was a trooper and walked about half. Here we all are halfway across the bridge.

One of Jude’s favorite things to do these days is to chase birds. When we get to a park or the beach he just wants to run and try and catch a bird. He sometimes gets pretty close where he might be able to catch one but he gets scared when they start flapping their wings hard. Well today, we had a family lunch at a cafe overlooking the Parramatta River and there were plenty of birds around. Uncle Mark had some pigeons under his chair and he managed to grab one much to the delight of Jude – he went over to give it a pat on the head.

We had a wet week here in Sydney although the rain did stop briefly for Australia Day on January 26th. We were planning on spending some time on the beach that day but instead we decided to go to a barbeque with some friends.

Here Jude was introduced to cricket for the first time. Jude has been curious about cricket ever since he saw some teams playing on the local field at Manly. He wanted to give it a try so on Australia Day Jude had his first taste of playing cricket – he did quite well, making solid contact with the bat several times.

This week also marked the first date for Marcy and I in many weeks. We had Alicia Miers (the daughter of a good college friend) come over to babysit for us. The kids love her so it was easy for us to leave. We had a great night – caught the ferry into the city and had champagne and oysters at the Oyster Bar that is literally right on the harbour. Then we had a seafood dinner at Doyle’s and a walk around the harbor foreshores, and we even caught at late movie. It was a great night.

After two weeks at the beach we moved to our more permanent home in Cremorne. While we would have loved to have stayed at the beach the drive to Jude and Anna’s schools would have just been too long. We estimated it would take 45 minutes each way to drive there from Manly and that is just too long in a car each way.

While we loved the beach we are just as happy with our new home. It is a three bedroom apartment in Cremorne within walking distance to the ferry and right next to some of the nicest walking trails in all of Sydney. Here is a picture Marcy took on my phone on an early morning walk a couple of days ago.

We tried to make the most of our last few days at the beach. Marcy and I rented a paddle board for the day which is basically a really big surfboard where you stand up and paddle. We each had a go and then the kids wanted to take a turn. Jude did pretty well holding the big paddle and pushing himself along.

Jude also tried his turn at the surfboard for the first time. This was also a gift from the Miers family (along with the boogie boards and many other things) and Jude enjoyed playing around on it. We were just in the quiet bay but it was good to get him used to the balance of the board. He likes the surfboard but he is just as happy playing the sand at the water’s edge.

One of the other advantages of our new home is that it is close to the zoo. So we took out a family membership and will likely be spending a lot of time there over the next 5-6 months. They have a pretty cool gondola that gives great views of the harbour as well as the animals in the zoo. It is also a hit with the kids.

What a couple of weeks we have had. We celebrated Christmas and then it was time to get ready for our move to Sydney. This was complicated by the fact that we had sold our house so we had to get absolutely everything out of the house before we left. This proved to be a bigger task than we anticipated.

But we tried to keep the kids lives as normal as possible. We had one of Anna’s teachers, Cyndi, help out a lot and she was a godsend because she kept the kids entertained while we were getting everything ready. We went to the Zoo lights on our last night which has become something of an annual tradition which the kids really appreciate.

Then it was off to Sydney on January 2nd. The last day was certainly one of the most stressful I have had in recent memory. There was just so much to do to get everything completely out of the house. I had sold my car so we had a rental car that had to be returned. We had a storage unit to rent. Around noon on January 2nd (just seven hours before our flight was due to leave for Sydney) we realized that we needed another large storage unit. So, that was one of many hiccups that day. Then the taxi was late and we were not sure all of our 14 bags (yes, you read that right) would fit in to the taxi.

Once the taxi arrived it was all smooth sailing from then on. We got to the airport with some time to spare, the flights were on time, and what is more the kids were really well behaved and slept for 7-8 hours on the flight from LA to Sydney.

We made it to Sydney and met up with my brother who took some of the 14 suitcases home with him. Then it was time to check into our apartment and straight down to the beach. Jude and Anna loved playing in the sand and water.

On our second day we had a big family lunch gathering. Everyone was there except for Mark, Robyn’s partner, and it was really good to see everyone, especially my mum who I hadn’t spoken to for almost nine months (she is very hard of hearing and phone conversations are no longer possible). She seemed to have a good time along withe everyone else.

The transition to life in Sydney has been about as easy as we could have hoped. The kids did really well adjusting to jet lag – far better than we expected. The first morning they were up at 3:45am but then the second morning they slept through until 5:30am. And they are getting along better than ever. They have been playing with each other more and these pretend games will sometimes last an hour or more. Here they are on our walk down to the surf beach yesterday, deep in conversation.

Speaking of the beach we met Scott & Elaine, some old friends of ours, down at Manly yesterday. And they brought us some beach gear which included a boogie board for Jude and Anna. Jude jumped in right away and he loved it. If the water wasn’t so cold he would have been out there for hours. Anna will probably enjoy hers when the water warms up later in the summer. Here is Jude’s form on the boogie board.

Welcome to our shiny new blog. Here we will be chronicling the life of the Renton family. We are living in Denver but are about to move to Sydney for six months. This blog will keep a record of these adventures and more.

We had a white Christmas in Denver this year, thanks to the foot of snow we received on December 22nd. So, today we bundled up Jude and Anna (although at 40 degrees they hardly needed bundling) and took to the sledding hill near the Museum of Nature and Science. Here is a great one of Jude flying over a jump on this sled.

I made a cooked breakfast this morning (egg souffle and bacon) and we had our now traditional Indian take out for Christmas dinner. It was delicious.

We are moving to Sydney for six months on January 2nd and we have sold our house. So we have lots of boxes, which make great play toys for the kids. They made a two story “house” out of the boxes earlier this week.