Bump in Sydney

Not necessarily flattering, but recoded for posterity….week 21

Sydney!

Break time!

It’s just about 8.30 in the morning on a Saturday, and I’ve been awake for a good hour now, courtesy of Poddington and Toby, who will come in and demand breakfast at seven regardless of what day of the week it is. But also because today is the first day of a week-long break from work and I intend to enjoy every minute of it! So given I had to get up to feed the kitties anyway, I figured I’d make myself a nice cup of tea and catch up on a bit of blogging, leaving Marc to his slumber.

It’s been a busy month on the work front for both of us, and certainly in the science world, I can see (and have been told) that there is a definite changing up of gears as the year progresses. This seems to be partly due to the grants system. The big government grant applications are due in March, and because it is a well-established peer reviewed system, a lot of other funding bodies piggy back onto it, such that grant applications to them are peer reviewed and scored by the government system and the funding bodies then make decisions based on that. So naturally by the time October rolls around, you and everyone else around you is thinking about the next round of grant applications and realising that you’ve got about three months to gather all your preliminary data – queue frantic experimental planning. I haven’t decided if I’m a fan of the system yet. On the one hand, grant application deadlines don’t sneak up on you at various times during the year, on the other, the Christmas season is forever marked by stress…

Still, the weather is getting better, so when we’re not working away, we can start getting out and about more. The other day we went to the Tesselaar Tulip Festival, for example. Some Dutch folks came to Melbourne in the past and started a tulip farm and have a festival every year where you can come and admire the flowers. We naturally went during the “Dutch” weekend, and enjoyed a bit of old fashioned Dutch oohmpa music, ate some poffertjes, and bought a couple of bags of drop. Fun times!

And today we’re headed for Sydney! Very excited, as it’s my first trip there. Marc has been half a dozen times for work, and in fact is going to a conference on Wednesday and Thursday, but this is a chance to do the tourist thing. Although not sure if we’ll climb the Harbour Bridge yet – they don’t like you doing it after your 24th week of pregnancy and I’m at 21 at the mo, so maybe. On that note, we had our 20 week scan the other day and found out Oddington is a healthy little girl! It’s all getting real in here folks, and the bump is definitely making itself known (Marc is helpfully telling everyone who hasn’t seen me that I’m “enormous” – not sure what word he’ll use a couple of months down the line). Bump-in-Sydney pics will make an appearance shortly, no doubt!