Happy Birthday Frankie Lulu!

Wow, I can't believe the last time I posted was for Piper's 5th birthday, and now here we are with our baby girl turning 1 last week.

It has been a long time between posts, I am hopeless at lying and there has been a lot going on in our little world. While we have known for a couple of months some big changes were ahead we weren't ready to make any public announcements until details were finalised. You will notice I also stopped blogging during the first half of my pregnancy for the same reasons, I can't blog when I am only telling half the story.

All is in motion and there is no turning back - we are coming home.  Our house in Dubai has been packed into a shipping container and we have moved in with friends for the next month. We are coming home to Australia just in time for Christmas and the fun of an Australian summer.
We are returning to somewhat of a sea change rather than Melbourne and a change in roles of sorts. Naz is returning to work with Fire Brigade and I will be continuing my project role here in Dubai but working from home for a little while.

I am going to work backwards and get some post and photos up of the last few missing months. In amongst the craziness there have been some fun times, trips to Paris, and Sri Lanka, an amazing effort by Naz in the Dubai Half Ironman and other triathlons, and lots of fun sister moments.
I have decided to get these up and more of our final weeks in Dubai to close out our blog of our Middle East adventures, a nice little memory the girls can read and see one day.

Below are some pics of our Frankie Lulu on her 1st birthday.

Moving house and a sand storm

We moved house over the weekend, although we had removalists pack and relocate our furniture and goods it was still exhausting work.

The weather over the past week has been hot, hot, hot.... there is still no sign of winters arrival at all and this combined with a bored 4 year old, 7 and a 1/2 month pregnant me and stairs almost killed us.

But as you can see below, two kids quickly settled into their new surroundings. Who would of thought having grass would make us all so happy. Looking at our yard you would hardly believe we are now living out in the desert (my water bill will certainly reflect it next month though)

We are almost settled in and fully unpacked, with the exception of a nasty sand storm yesterday afternoon everything has gone well. I will write a blog post soon about our new community with some more pics of our new home.

Helping Dad build Ikea furniture



The sand storm hit from nowhere as Naz and I were driving home yesterday, thankfully Piper was at home with our nanny who had the good sense to get everybody indoors quickly.



Interesting drive home - this is just near the entrance to our community

This morning as we drove to school and work Piper commented 'did they just put the trees back up?',  we laughed before looking out the window and realising that in fact all 3 trees that had been blown over the previous afternoon were now standing back upright. I don't even know whether to laugh or cry at this stupidity, but given sand storms are predicted for the next two afternoons I will be staying well away from the roads and trees!
There are just some things that the words 'only in Dubai' describe all too perfectly.

Life lately in happy snaps

Things have certainly been busy around here and this blog has suffered over recent weeks but the important things is Piper hasn't.
She is happy at school, has made friends she meets with every afternoon at the playground near home and has become a pro at Skyping her Dad and cousin Stella.
If I leave my phone lying around or computer on she has worked out what the Skype symbols mean and demands to call whoever is online.

Her independent streak is continuing to grow (so is she quite frankly, we need to do some shopping). She now insists on having alone time to Skype Naz in the mornings. She sends me off for my shower and perches herself up in my bed and chats away until I start shouting we are going to be late for school!

Here are a few snaps from our Nazless days recently.

Thanks Naz for the goodbye gift - DJ Piper plays morning, noon and night!

Everybody should craft naked, right?

Choosing her first ever Barbie, a reward for a very brave week. You do not want to know how long this took and how many changes were made.... and somehow we left with a Barbie pool too

The change in weather brought about fierce morning fog and sea mist last week. This photo is from our balcony right before we got in the car to drive on a 7 lane highway with zero visibility!

This is normally our view of the community and Burj Khalifa

Rocking out on the piano with Brett during our dinner party on the weekend. We have been so lucky with friends like this to help out. Brett has also been helping with school pick-up when I have meeting clashes. Brett will go down in history as Piper's first love!

Making chocolate crackles

Piper has been learning about growing things. Meet Dennis and his first haircut! Dennis has some serious ear and nose hair issues.

The big fella has left the building

Naz has left and is now back working in Australia until the end of the month. There were lots of tears, stress and a heart broken little girl but we are slowly finding our feet and settling onto our new routines.

I guess our loss is your gain as I suspect it is only our Mum's and close friends who read this blog anyway, well at least they are the only ones who tell me off for not updating enough.

Over the past month we haved moved house, employed a full-time live in nanny, started pre-school and waved off Naz. It has been a big month.

We are now living in a fabulous part of Dubai, 'Old Town'. This is still part of the central Downtown area and in reality straight over the boulevard from our old home. But it is very different.
Old Town is built to reflect the traditional Arabic architecture and instead of high rises is made up of clusters of low rise villas and meandering lane ways, water features and lots of little childrens playgrounds and pools scattered throughout. In our community we have the choice of four swimming pool areas with another two in the community over the road which is still part of Old Town.

I will get around to taking some interior photographs but in the meantime here are a few from around our new little community.







View from our dining and living room out over the Old Town community. The towers in the background are our old home and the large building in the distance is the Burj Khalifa, world's tallest building.

View from my bedroom - I would of been mortified by this 12 months ago but now I have learnt to just roll with it and embrace Dubai and its quirks.



The trees and gardens in the lanes around Old Town deceive you of the fact you are in the middle of the desert.



One of our new pools (you can spy Piper playing on the steps)


If you see Naz about town please give him big hugs from us x





Life lately in happy snaps

There is so much going at the moment it a bit hard to keep up.

The past month of house hunting has been beyond stressful and horribly time consuming. We have to move out by mid October (landlord is returning to Dubai and wants to live in this apartment). Due to Naz's departure back to Australia in two weeks we wanted to move before he left to ease my stress.
 I am happy to report that today we secured our new home and received a contract, we have been outbid on more properties than I can count. Although we have been happy in our apartment and have made full use of our amazing facilities we are very happy to be moving just over the road but to an entirely different sort of housing area. I will update more on that next week when we move.

Unfortunately we still have not employed a full-time nanny and with Naz leaving very soon it is becoming quite a problem. The trials and tribulations of the nanny hunt are enough for its own post another day.

Piper has her first day of pre school tomorrow, we packed her bag tonight and got her organised. I am going to try very hard not to cry tomorrow. She was starting the equivalent of Australian 3 year old kinder but after her interview and orientation day they are trialling her in the 4 year old class, her language skills and confidence were better matched but we will see how it goes.

Below are a few pics of life lately. I will update later this week with tales of Piper's first week of pre school.

1. Naz's birthday cake decorated by Piper with his favourite things maltesers, kit kats, jelly beans and sprinkles

2. Best coffee home delivery service in Dubai

3. A wonderful night out with 4 of my Granny's friends who were passing through Dubai

4. Swimming pool fun

5. Piper parading around in Naz's basketball shorts

6. Sushi train lunch date

7. This is what Naz gets up to while I work ;)

8. Finger painting fun - Naz looked away for 5 minutes and this is what I came home from work to find

9. Foyer of our new home - very traditional Arabic style building

We have arrived!!

We have arrived safe and sound! Piper was an angel and slept for 10 hours on the plane, in fact she was asleep straight after take-off and I wasn't far behind.

After the horrific Melbourne weather that farewelled us on Thursday it was somewhat of a shock to the system to be greeted in Dubai by 37 degrees at 5am in the morning. Overnight lows at the moment are low 30's with mid 40's during the day.

We are slowly finding our feet. We all woke yesterday morning at 4am and couldn't get back to sleep so we decided to beat the heat and take a nice long walk around the Burj Kahlifa and Old Town at 5am to start our day.
Of course Piper was not going to let her first day pass without a big swim in the pool. She causes somewhat of a scene as she is so confident in the water she happily swims around the pool with her life vest on without holding on to one of us. Then when she thinks she is losing the attention of the crowd she clambers onto the edge of the pool to loudly sing Humpty Dumpty and jump in the pool!

Thank you again to everybody for your farewell wishes and apologies to those we did not get to see in person to say goodbye xo

This time in 2 weeks......

We will be in Dubai!! Hopefully having slept beautifully on the plane we will be well rested and on our way to house hunting.... I think I am dreaming but that is the plan!

I finished up at work in Australia today and the goodbye's have started.
We had our final mothers group play date this morning.... and I shed my first tears. Piper and Paras were having so much fun playing catch and on the slide togther it broke my heart to be taking her away from her little buddies she has known since she was 6 weeks old.

Our storage boxes arrived this afternoon (they are very cool we just pack them and they pick-up, store and deliver back to us when we return)and now we have 3 days to finish packing the house, final farewells in Melbourne and we are off to the country for a week.

For those aware of my extreme paranoia of our shipping container falling off the ship and sinking on its way to Dubai (it happened to somebody we know - honest)I am happy to report that it's little tracker code indicates it is still happily bobbing across the ocean after a brief stop in Hong Kong!

Below are some photo's of Piper playing at her last play date. Note the outfit - aqua tulle 'party' dress with spotted tights and pink converses were all chosen by Piper, she has developed the need to choose her own outfits and this usally results in her looking like a modern day Punky Brewster!

New favourite game is to sit on top of the slide and make mumma think you are not going to come down then as poor mum get to the top of the awkward inflatable slide you push off really fast laughing!

No turning back now...

Well we finally finished the packing and all of our furniture, clothes and loved items have left the country!
It was a tiring week but we got there with little drama..... hmmm there was one incident with a black crayon someone left on the floor that 4 removalists managed to walk through the carpet before anybody realised!
Thanks to everybody who helped, offered help or lent us bits to get through the next 4 weeks.

Piper quite liked the packing boxes experience, they make great tunnels and cubby houses as you can see below....

So now the shipping container has left we move on to all the mundane tasks.. changing addresses on everything, chasing bills, insurance, visa forms... more forms and more forms!

Welcome to our first ever blog!

Thank you for taking the time in your day to read our blog! We are looking forward to sharing our adventures with our loved ones.
It is an extremely crazy and busy time for us right now but exciting at the same time and impossible to keep everyone up to speed on our plans and dates etc so let me get the formalities out of the way first!

Timeline and plans until departure:

• Our shipping container is leaving for Dubai on Friday 26th August (Yes, that is this Friday and I am freaking out). We are going to continue to live in our home until 22nd September, not sure if living is the right description I think it will be more like camping!
• I am continuing to work until the 20th September in Melbourne and will then be taking leave until I start in Dubai. Naz is working up until th 24th September (no, just realised we will need to look at that one because I think we have a special nephew's birthday party!)
• We will be staying with my Mum and Dad from the 22nd until we depart on Thursday 29th September!
• We have then allowed ourselves 1 week to find a house and move in before I start work on the 9th October (Yup a Sunday! The United Arab Emirates (UAE) week is Sunday to Thursday)
• Don't worry we haven't forgotten the dog - Lily will be flying over to join us from late October

Whist we would like to think we are going to have time for a nice big farewell party, the reality is we are probably just too busy so hopefully we can organise a dinner in Melbourne and a big family dinner in the country during our last week!

Piper is very excited although she thinks life will be one big holiday and is convinved her days are going to be spent on waterslides, shopping at Dubai Mall and watching the fishes and sharks at the aquarium!

Ok I best get back to the packing..... our home is looking a little like this at the moment

Hoepfully you enjoy our stories and photographs and this blog closes the distance a little over the next 2 years - but this blog is in no way a substitute for not taking a holiday to Dubai to come stay with us. We are moving into an area close to the beach, 5 minutes from the world's largest shopping Mall and close to all the main attractions. We will have spare rooms so our home is open to all!