October Favorites – PLAYWORKEATREPEAT

Hello friends! I hope you all had an amazing week. I’m excited to be back to share some of my October favorites. It’s a October Favorites edition! Which seems perfect, since (can you believe it?) it’s the last day of the month. Oh, and by the way, Happy Halloween!

I’m pretty sure I say this all the time, but whoa, didn’t the month go by so quickly!

We greeted the first day of October with a delicious snack of salami, crackers and halloumi.

Spring school holidays

In October I had a relaxing school break and enjoyed the beautiful spring weather.

The first item on the holiday agenda was a fun meeting with friends for lunch.

The Royal Botanic Gardens of Sydney

I also took a day trip to the Royal Botanic Garden in Sydney, where my funny friend and I admitted we didn’t have a great sense of direction. To be honest, the garden is huge!

We ended up using my phone to guide us where we wanted to go. My iPhone has this feature where you hold it up and giant blue arrows appear to show you which direction to walk. They reminded me of the arrows from a Mario Kart game, hehe.

Here are some photos of the beautiful gardens.

Pamela Allen Exhibition

After the botanical gardens, we went to see the Pamela Allen exhibition.

Pamela Allen is a New Zealand children’s author who has made a name for herself in Australia. She wrote Who sank the boat? And Alexander’s exit. We read his books to kindergartners all the time. Such classics!

After a long day, you really can’t go wrong with a chicken and leek pie. It was so nice to sit and eat and chat.

Cousin Connect

In October, my aunt hosted Cousin Connect. Most of us managed to get together before some of our traveling cousins ​​went overseas.

October is birthday month

Our youngest son turned 21! We were lucky and all five of us, plus my oldest son and his fiancée, had some free time during the day. At the request of the birthday boy, we went to see a movie and then had burgers and fries at a place called Mister Gee.

We saw the Leonardo DiCaprio film One battle after anotherand it was so good that I didn’t fall asleep once!

In October, my oldest son turned 32. He came to our house with his fiancée and we had dinner at a Chinese restaurant, Lilong. Then we went home for cake. Let me tell you about the funny cake incident.

Since Luke moved, he still comes over for his birthday dinner – but this year we weren’t all very good at communicating. I didn’t want to assume he would come in case he had other plans, and he thought I would automatically know he was coming.

So when he called me while I was at work and said, “Hey Mom, I’ll come over at 7,” I was of course super excited…but we hadn’t really planned on dinner or cake. I called my husband and he had a plan: we would go out to dinner, and he would frost and decorate a banana bread he had baked and pass it off as a birthday cake. No one would ever know.

Well…everyone figured it out immediately. From the first bite: “Hey, isn’t this Dad’s usual banana bread? He just put lollipops and chocolate chips on it!” Hahahahaha!!! “He thought we wouldn’t notice!!”

It was a lot of fun, and now we’ve made it official, Luke will come every year for his birthday dinner, and next time he’ll get a spectacular birthday cake!

A day of action

In October, some of my work colleagues and I went to a day of action in the city. We’re standing up for fair pay for nursery school staff and against NSW Premier Chris Minns’ proposal to turn community nurseries like the one I work in into long-term childcare.

If this comes to fruition, I know I would seriously consider my options.

Community preschools are different from long-term day care. They operate primarily during school hours and only during school terms, focusing on a year or two before school.

They offer more structured play-based learning, are non-profit, usually run by a parent committee, and have small groups with long-standing staff. One of the reasons we have less staff turnover is that we have school holidays. I can’t work in such a demanding environment without these precious breaks. I really don’t understand why the Prime Minister wants to ruin something that works so well.

Some of the signs I saw at the rally were very clever!

Mochi ran away

Last weekend, Mochi, our indoor cat, ran away! She went out into the yard and hid behind some potted plants. We didn’t notice and accidentally left her outside, giving her the perfect opportunity to jump into the neighbor’s garage and disappear into the neighborhood. We walked down our street, knocked on doors, but she was gone and we were so sad.

I googled “how to get your runaway cat back”, and it suggested going out late at night or early in the morning when everything is quiet and calling his name. So at 2 a.m. I went out and did just that, and she appeared. I waited for her to come to me and then gently picked her up. Well, maybe I caught it gently because my heart was racing! Phew, what a relief to see her home.

And that was a preview of some of the things from our October. Thank you very much for stopping by today. I hope you have a wonderful weekend.