Passionate.

We are a family of extremists. When we are interested in something we don't hold back.

It's no secret that I am addicted to Bikram Yoga:

To the sceptics out there all I can say is that this posture is called 'Standing Separate Head Stretching' or to give it its correct title 'Dandayamana - Bibhaktapada - Paschimottanasana' and it is fantastic for.......getting rid of muffin tops. But it gets better....today, in class the teacher reminded us that two sets of 'Half Tortoise' pose is like having a mini facial AND the equivalent of eight hours sleep. I shudder to think what I would look like if I hadn't done this pose. And if that's not enough, over the holidays, when my children were at their zenith of bickering and carrying on, forcing them to drop and adopt 'Dead Body' pose or 'Savasana'.....sometimes even on the pavement....worked no end of wonders on miraculously bringing them back into line. Don't take my word for it, try it.

My husband is obsessed with his road bike. As soon he turned 45....virtually to the day..... he became a MAMIL....to the uninitiated that's a Middle Aged Man in Lycra. There's a whole parallel universe inhabited by MAMIL's in Hobart...so much so, that most days mine gets up hideously early to rendezvous with a pack of them down on a specific corner of Sandy Bay Road from whence they go and ride their little heats out up hill and down dale......for an hour and a half. He gets back in time to bring me a cup of fortifying tea in bed before we embark on the horror that is getting children to school on time.

Our eldest daughter eats, lives and breathes, of all things, Irish Dancing. To this day, I have no idea how this came about. On Sunday we took her out to the St Andrews Highland Festival which was held in the gorgeous country village of Richmond for  an opportunity to exhibit. Here's a dance she and her friends choreographed:

This is the year that she is hoping to actually set foot on Irish soil and to manage to convince us to squander more money than was spent on my wedding dress, buying her a special dress to perform in. Hmm, we'll see. She also has this habit of breaking into fast and fancy dancing feet.....with no prior warning. I am now somewhat used to this yet when she does it in public you can register the shock on people's faces.

After school and on weekends, our boys inhabit a world of immaginitis where they believe that they are Aquabats:

Over time they have also been Thunderbirds, the whole gamut of Star Wars characters, Harry Potter and Pirates of the Caribbean. Over the holidays there was some inexplicable connection that buzzed between them and 'The Aquabat Supershow'....a program very spasmodically shown on ABC3. This was enough to incite them to vacuum the entire house every second day, to keep their usual pig sty of a room immaculately neat and to complete a whole host of other odious chores so that they could save up the money....in increments of 50 cents....to buy the helmets and goggles. The rest of the costumes were acquired after a turn around the girls clothing department at Target and they leant on my mum to make them the super belts which she kindly obliged and then sent down in the post. Now, they spend most of their time trying to defeat the 'Floating Eye of Death'.

Our youngest daughter loves 'Maisy' mouse and dogmatically demands a 'Maisy' book to be read to her every night before she goes to bed. Most of our collection of 'Maisy' books belonged to her older sister and I remember being surprised then......as a recent convert to motherhood.....when I discovered that Tony, from that utterly dreadful show 'Men Behaving Badly', was the narrator on the TV version. That seemed somehow fundamentally WRONG to me....yet it wasn't as though it was a freak brief foray into children's voiceovers....he even scored the gig for 'Bob The Builder' too. How I wonder.

Rx