First.

Hello and welcome to my first post - coming this evening from my kitchen benchtop in South Hobart!

The idea to start a blog manifested itself in my head on the mat during a Bikram Yoga class last week. Of course I wasn't meant to be listening to my monkey mind, yet I did. I came home and told my husband the news.  I have a track record of random 'idea visualisations' which arrive unannounced. The last one was five years ago when I was away at a course in Sydney - it resulted in the birth of Tobes, our third child. Before this I had quite vocally denounced, to anyone who would listen, ever having any more children than the two I already had. How lucky I was to have followed through, as children are such precious gifts.

Yesterday, our fourth child, Camelia,  celebrated her first birthday. What better timing to start a blog (have I mentioned yet that it's also the first day of the school holidays)?

Here is a photo of the early morning festivities yesterday:

And a close up of the cake for our little girl who shares a name with a flower - 3 layers, light pink, dark pink and mauve. I sprinkled the top with the petals of the only rose in my garden still in flower (David Austin's Sharifa Asma):

Surprising, as this was my back garden three weeks ago:

This time last year we weren't living at home in Hobart, we were living in France. Sigh. For eight months our family lived a dreamlike existence, outside our usual everyday reality, in the tiny village of Espondeilhan, in the Languedoc, South West France. 

The setting was a converted stone stable behind a chateau: 

set amongst vines as far as the eye could see:

After three years of fastidious planning - it was like a part time job organising children, houses, schools, cars, visas, language, kennels for beagles, new homes for chooks etc etc etc - we discovered three weeks before we got on the plane that we were having a surprise pregnancy with a due date scheduled for while we were away. Camelia was born in the Clinique Champeau Mediteranee in the nearby city of Beziers. My fourth caesarian was in French and, now that I've whetted your appetite, it might have to be a story for another day.  

So, as I've talked about living in France for most of last year it's time to bring up my other favourite topic of conversation - Bikram Yoga - to which I nurse an addiction and practice most days. And the other first, which was that today my eldest daughter Mimi, who is ten, didn't continue up the stairs to the child minding as she usually does, she came into the hot room to do the floor series for the first time!

Here she is out the front of Studio New Town before class:

Later, as we left she said that she felt 'amazing and light and floaty'. It really is an amazing feeling. 

R