Fair shake of the sauce bottle - Ross & Jay become Ostrylns

Ross steels himself for the traditional Australian armpit greeting from Dan.

See, that wasn't so bad, was it.

Andy welcomes two new cobbers with a bottle of Oomoo.

Jason eats his first ever lamington. All he needs now is a vegemite sandwich and some pavlova and he won't be invisible!

Grace shows off her plate of cheezels, lamington, pavlova and rissoles.

Bonne fete ti-loup!

Un beau paquet de maman pour son petit garcon.

Sock Monkey IV - Vanuatu Vacation

While sock monkey was playing giant chess and just chilling out, I was working too bloody hard, but at least sock monkey was having a good time.

Jason le petit Australien

Jason became an Australian citizen on Thursday - he is finally allowed to wear shorts and thongs, and use the word 'strewth'. Here he is taking the oath (under God!! He thinks he got put in the wrong group). Can you spot him?:

Here he is getting his certificate from the mayor of Yarra.

Here is the mayor of Yarra pointing at my mother so that Jason will wait and pose for her. My mother took about half an hour to get her camera out, so she only held the ceremony up briefly.

Here is Jason finally getting his photo taken by my mother. You can see that the mayor has already lost interest.

Here is Jason getting some sort of medallion from Dick Wynne, Housing Minister and Member for Richmond. Mr Wynne is shaking Jason's imaginary hand. He did shake the real one later.

And here is Jason getting a real, genuine, made in China koala from the Carlton Rotary.

I waved my flag so enthusiastically when Jason came up that it broke! But here we are with some new ones.

Tarte a l'erable

One more to cross off the list...

Not Our Cat

But acting like it is. It still doesn't have a name, although it is to us le petit Champlain #2, after the appealingly chunky ginger cat who used to live next door to us in Montreal, who had a similar habit to this one of kneading the ground (or the sofa, or your leg) with its paws when content. Les deux chats aiment faire le pain.

It has made itself pretty comfortable.

Kennett River - still great!

Another fine visit to Kennett River. Still gorgeous, still relaxing, still more food than any group of a dozen people could possible cram into their distended bellies.

Monday morning saw a fine batch of cinnamon brain (tick it off my new year's resolution list!)

Grace poses for the tourist brochure.

Ross gets wet!

Andy and Dan get slinky!

Dan is obviously a good man because I am pretty sure he did this just to make Grace and Felicity happy.

Look how happy Grace is!