Help has arrived

Well, when I last wrote, I talked about the fact that we were getting a live in helper starting on the weekend. That has now happened, and after 1 day, things are going well. Anelen arrived yesterday. She has worked in Singapore for the past 5 years, with 2 Australian families. She is very relaxed with both of the kids without being too over the top and in their faces. Alex seems to have taken very well to her. Tara is doing well - a little clingy but she is going through the "I want my Mummy" stage at the moment so is quite clingy to me most of the time in any case. It will take some getting used to having someone else live in the apartment. However, I think we will hopefully find that our relationship is harmonious and works well. I feel pretty positive about it. Today it has just been so nice having someone else around to help with the kids.

Unfortunately Tara had a short afternoon sleep so I didn't manage to get to the gym or go for a swim, but there is plenty of time for that. One of the things I have to get used to is having someone clean my space, whilst I am in the house. We had a cleaner come once every 2 weeks in Adelaide and I always tried to go out whilst she was there, partly to give her space, but also I felt guilty when someone else was cleaning up my mess and I felt I should have been doing it. Obviously this is not the way to go when you have a person live with you - you can't really go out all of the time.

I think overall it's going to be really nice having someone to help us out. I suspect that Gary and I will spend a lot more quality time together. Remember the time before we had kids when we had all of this time together? I remember when I was pregnant with Alex and people used to say to us "appreciate the time you have together now as it will all change when the baby comes along". Yes they were right, but it changed in a great way. However, it will also be really nice now to be able to spend more time together in the evenings doing things like going for a swim together or popping out for a quick bite or whatever, stuff that we wouldn't necessarily have got a babysitter in for but that we can do if we have someone in the house, listening out in case either of the kids has an issue.

We had a nice weekend, especially given that Gary was working really late on both Thursday and Friday so he was pretty jaded by Saturday.

I was disappointed to miss our Mid Autumn festival on Saturday night. The babysitter we had booked was supposed to be at our place at 7 but didn't get there till around 7:40. This was really annoying as I was really looking forward to the lantern parade, but there's always next year - we'll probably keep Alex up late next year to enjoy it too. We ended up going out to dinner instead which was nice, just no mooncakes!

On Sunday, we decided to go to the West Coast Park where they had "Children's Day Carnival" on. Firstly, it was stinking hot here yesterday. I think this was because of the humidity. Seriously, I normally love the heat but I really felt like yesterday was so hot! There were some fun rides at the carnival and we decided that Alex should experience some of them. Rides were $3 each, but you had to buy a $12 coupon so it was a 4 ride minimum. Firstly, Alex went on the helicopter.



He looked slightly worried, but assured us when he got off that he had a good time. Next was the train.



Then we had 2 tickets left. We asked him if he wanted to go on the carousel or the pirate ship. He was adamant that he wanted to go on the pirate ship, so Gary went on with him.



He seemed to really like it. I discovered yesterday that my little Panasonic point and shoot camera does take video so I took a couple of video shots too. Here's the results.