Camping at Lucky Bay, WA
We’ve just returned from our family holiday. This year, we camped at Lucky Bay in Cape Le Grand National Park, about 800 km southeast of Perth. We’re experienced campers now, and I’ve come home recharged and refreshed. There’s also a few more...
Parenting Lessons Learned in 2014
All the calendars tell me it’s December, but I’m not ready for the end of another year. Time is not just marching on—it’s moving so fast, it’s exceeding the speed limit. I want it to slow down and return to the...
How to Become the Favourite Child
Some of you have already seen these when I posted them on my Facebook page (Louise Allan – Writer if you want to slip over and ‘Like’ my page). For anyone who didn’t see the Facebook posts, here they are. The story is, I gave my...
Bottling the Kids
There’s been a lot going on this year—mostly good, but not all of it. Normally, I cope. Normally, I feel good about the good things, but I’ve had trouble feeling good at all this year, about anything. I think I’ve worked out why: I don’t like...
Why Getting A New Dog Is Better Than Having Another Baby
As readers of this blog would already know, our eldest child moved out of home a few months ago leaving me feeling bereft and with empty arms. I wasn’t quite ready to move on to the next phase of our lives—the one where the children leave. I asked my...
Letter To My Daughter On Her Leaving Home
I sat on the plane feeling empty and bereft. It took off, up and westward, following the sun. The buildings below quickly became matchboxes, and the clouds drifted in and thickened into a matted carpet so I could no longer see the city below, the city where I’d...
Letting Go
Our daughter is leaving home in just over a week. She’s moving interstate to go to university. There’s a good uni ten minutes down the road, but she wants to experience a different city, live in a different part of Australia, and who knows where she’ll go...
Cradle Mountain
I’ve been off-line lately whilst we’ve been on holiday. Not that I would call what we’ve done ‘relaxing’. Far from it. But we completed something that we’ve always wanted to do: the Cradle Mountain – Lake St Clair Overland...
Bittersweet
It’s that time of the year, busy with Christmas preparations, end-of-school services, speech days, and a graduation: The spec family Our eldest has finished school. Hard to believe, really, as I still think of our family as looking like this: 2003 But no, this...
When a Pet Dies …
We knew the time had come, yet it was still hard to make the decision to let her go. Ending the life of anything goes against the grain — death is final. That’s it. The end. No going back. So we kept putting it off, until we couldn’t avoid the...