You know those weekends that happen sometimes that are full to the brim of lunches and dinners and walks and house-guests and catch-ups with old friends, and you never stop talking or laughing or hugging or lining up for the shower or saying “I have really missed you!“… ?

I had one of those last weekend. We had a big charity ball on, organised by Mr B and his team at work (I’m talking 1300+ people), and a whole lot of our dear friends travelled down to Melbourne to dress up and party with us on Saturday night. Most of them stayed for the weekend and some extended their stays from Friday to Monday. It was wonderful and chaotic and all too short.

On the night of the ball, our family booked a room in the same hotel as the function, because we knew it would be such a late night. Neither of us got to sleep until after two-thirty in the morning, which would have been fine if Madeleine hadn’t been such an angelic sleeper, slumbering away in her little travel cot next to our bed (cuddled up with pink bunny and pink bunny blanket and looking like something you want to kiss forever and maybe eat), which meant she happily woke up ready to play at six. Welcome to parenthood, Naomi.

So there was nothing for it but to get up and play with her, then take it in turns having showers that never ran out of hot water (bliss!) and head downstairs to introduce Madeleine to the joys of the breakfast bar (she had scrambled eggs and honey on toast and water melon and banana and yoghurt and a sip of my tea).

By nine o’clock Madeleine was rubbing her eyes and ready for another nap. Oh, sweetheart. By that time Mr B and I could have told her a thing or two about being really tired. Mr B stayed behind at the hotel to meet up with some friends who were coming around a bit later, while I tucked little M into her pram under her polka-dot sleeping bag, and walked her home through Melbourne’s Sunday-morning streets.

All of a sudden, after the cacophony of crowds and friends and disco music (yes! and an ABBA tribute band!) and giggling babies and goodness knows what else, the solitude was tangible.

Madeleine was snoring before I made it across the road. The pavements were shiny from last night’s rain, and mist residue clung to the tops of the skyscrapers. The river was still as stone. And other than me, not a creature was stirring. Not even the proverbial mouse.

Other folks who spend their days and nights with little ones will know what I’m talking about when I say that I no longer experience solitude, not even for a moment (no, not even on the loo). Even when I walk Madeleine normally, it’s in busy areas or my own town where every second person knows my name. And I do love my community, but…

But to suddenly be alone in the big city with frost in the wind and my footsteps echoing on the pavement and everything washed clean and new… it was a precious gift. I walked slowly, ever so slowly. And I smiled.

Then the spell broke and we got home and Madeleine woke up and we raced to catch our friends to meet them for lunch and it was all chaos and laughter and joy all over again, and I just felt so lucky for my friendships and my solitude, and especially my family. After lunch they all packed off to the AFL but we headed across to the playground at the museum and something rather wonderful happened.

Madeleine walked! For the first time! And we just so happened to both be there to witness it, and I just so happened to have the phone out and so captured the exact moment on trusty Instagram. Insanely proud Mama moment.

A little while ago Mr B and I pushed a pram with a sleeping Madeleine through the Melbourne Cemetery on Lygon Street. It is old and sprawling and, as you would expect, wonderfully peaceful.

Some of the graves, especially those closest to the road, were shiny and beautifully kept, dust-free and with fresh flowers to show that those who lay beneath were remembered and loved, even 10, 20 and 30 years on.

But in other sections, old graves were crumbling back into the ground, broken headstones and rampant moss hiding almost all of what was once I’m sure meant to be a lasting memorial of someone deeply loved, then lost.

It got me thinking. Most of us will only be remembered and missed for two generations. Three tops. I will tell Madeleine about the friends and family I have loved and lost. Maybe we will visit their graves sometimes. But she never knew them, can’t really mourn them. I doubt she will tell her children about them.

And so they are forgotten.

Last weekend we returned to the cemetery and I took my camera into the forgotten corners. Along the dirt footpaths that had scarcely been trod for decades, probably more than a century, except for the odd visit from a groundskeeper.

I wanted to celebrate, together with you, all the mothers and fathers, the daughters and sons, the husbands and wives, the friends. Because once upon a time they were everything to someone. They deserved to be remembered again.

They are called Bridget and Victor and Edmund and Daisy and Giovanni. They are the public servant who is dearly missed by his friends. The Aboriginal elder who saved colonists from a pending massacre. The war heroes, the politicians and sailors.

They are Michael and Margaret Bulger, who moved out here from Kilkenny in Ireland and died in South Melbourne 100 years ago. They had three sons, new little Australians. Distant relatives, perhaps? We promised each other we would go back and leave flowers at Michael’s and Margaret’s grave.

They hail from Italy and England, China, Switzerland and Israel. So many of them came to Australia to start new lives. Many of them fell in love, started families. One grave is marked with heartbreaking simplicity: “MOTHER.” That is all.

I sent two little “thinking of you” boxes to friends last week, inspired by this post on B for Bel.

I do enjoy sending letters and packages to friends in the mail. We talk a lot about how email killed post, and say we long for the days of old-fashioned mail. But I’m starting to think that email may have actually saved post.

Once upon a time, letters were something almost depressing, consisting mostly of towering piles of paper bills. Now, most of those bills arrive via email. And in the mail, instead, we send and receive little surprises to and from friends! For me, it’s like the removal of those bills from my letterbox created the emotional space to rediscover and really enjoy the mail process.

Here is another adorable mail project. Two friends post one wooden box back and forth to each other, each time filling it with little gifts and notes and ephemera. Isn’t that a lovely idea?

Last night friends dropped around to visit and brought pizza with them, so we sat together outside as the sun went down and the twinkle-lights came on and the perfume from the dying first-blooms of jasmine thickened in the night air.

I spread the table with a piece of gloriously red Masai cloth that was given to Mr B when he worked in Africa, and filled old jars with tea-light candles for extra light. That was the sum total of my decorating efforts but it put us in a festive mood, so on went the music and out came the wine, and it was a thoroughly enjoyable way to finish up the weekend.

Around us, Ruby chased bugs in the ferns and tried to climb an olive-tree sapling that was much too slender for her weight. Oliver circumnavigated the table begging for pizza, appearing on hind legs beside one person or another like a floppy-eared meerkat.

Later, much later, we managed to get Ruby down from the top of the garden wall. (Can you see her in that bottom photo?)

I hope you are enjoying the change of seasons. I sure am! I confess I’m more than a little apprehensive about the onset of summer, winter-and-cold-loving weirdo that I am. But earlier this week Melbourne turned on spring in a major way, and I was undone. All that sunshine, and the scent of jasmine in the air, and tiny droplets of humidity on my skin, and birds going CRAZY, and pink buds on the fruit trees, and green buds on the big trees, and coconut cream on my skin, and fun summer hats, and and and…

Spring has seduced me.

Recently I discovered a footpath that wound all the way from the end of my street to the Melbourne Zoo. So on Tuesday Madeleine and I followed said path, and met some dear friends for a couple of hours of exploring among the beasties. We climbed elephant sculptures, hunted an elusive tiger, wolfed down fried rice and made wishes upon seahorses (ok that was just me. But people do that, right?). Madeleine attempted to blow raspberries but only succeeded in generating a river of drool. Points for trying, my darling. I possibly subjected my daughter to years of future therapy by dressing the both of us semi-matching, in polka dots, though I swear that wasn’t on purpose.

Just as we went to leave, I discovered my sweet friend had stashed a bag of home grown lemons into the bottom of Madeleine’s pram for us. What shall I make? Do you think this souffle recipe would be too tricky?

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ps. Have you missed me? It is entirely possible that I possess a completely unrealistic idea of my place in your online life. But you may or may not have noticed that this blog has been down for the past week. And for two weeks before that, all subscription links were lost. Thanks to the help of Brandi, things are almost back to normal. So in case you’re interested, here’s what you missed:

* Granted
* Lately, on instagram
* Made in Melbourne (Etsy!)
* Dear friend
* On dads and daughters
* Little thoughts

* And on iVillage: The truth about what future mothers should know
* And on Happiness Is: That day

In which I woke up at 4am because my body knew I had to get up at 5am. I flew from Melbourne to Sydney and, when I arrived, the sun was high just like I remember it always being in Sydney and I thought all those Wettest Season Ever claims must have been imagined.

In which I had toast and tea with my parents in a cafe in my old neighbourhood of Surry Hills, and it was oh so familiar but also not. I realised that yet another place no longer felt like home, but that I was ok with that.

In which my dad and I roamed around The Rocks taking photographs, and my mother exercised the patience of a saint. Also, on seeing the photograph of myself at the top of this post, I realised I really should invest in some actual maternity clothes.

My parents have just returned from China and they brought back a bounty of cute outfits for Baby B, and a hand-engraved ink stamp with Mr B’s and my name and the symbol for ‘love’ to celebrate our first anniversary. While opening these presents I devoured a Thai lemongrass and basil stir-fry for lunch, and the chilli gave Baby B the hiccups.

In the evening my friend Sarah and I met up in Chinatown for noodles and dumplings and green tea ice-cream. The owner of the noodles and dumpling place came outside and played his violin for the crowd while we waited for a table. Once inside, Sarah and I had one of those brilliant creative brainstorms during which everything fit into place. Don’t you love it when that happens?

Later that night I watched incredibly bad reality TV in bed in my hotel room, and it was an unspeakable luxury.
Morning. In which I caught a taxi out to Rozelle to meet my friend Cara, and the driver was friendly and actually knew the way. This being such a short visit, Cara and I sipped chai tea and fresh juice and shared our lives on fast-forward. It is amazing what you can get through in just an hour when you have to.

Cara and Sarah had booked a private room for all my friends at the 3 Weeds, but we arrived early and I had to submit to the indignity of being a pregnant woman loitering on a pub stoop until it opened. Once indoors, I proceeded to sit like a fat, round queen bee for the next five hours while my friends dropped in as the afternoon suited them, to say hi.

My mum made a black forest cake for Baby B and it was sublime (and very cute). I was thankful, not for the first time or even the 100th time, for the wonderful friendships I have, and that love trumps distance.

How was your weekend?

Have you ever met your hero? The closest I ever came was sipping a Bloody Mary in Bar Hemingway at The Ritz, Paris, thinking, “Ernest Hemingway probably sat right here. He looked out of that window onto that almost-unchanged view.”

If only time could have compressed, turned back in on itself, or simply rolled backward Midnight in Paris-style, I would have been sharing the same space, breathing the same air, as my greatest literary hero. What would I have said to him? What would he have said to me? Anything at all? Would it have been a glorious moment to treasure forever, or a bitter disappointment?

On Friday I was privileged to be part of DPCON12, a massive blogger conference in Melbourne hosted by Digital Parents. But the program wasn’t the least bit limited to parents: we covered topics from using blogs for social good (particularly by partnering with not-for-profit organisations) to the process of going from blog to book (with folks on the panel who had done just that), and workshops on how to use your blog to generate other paid writing work.

For me, this conference was also an amazing opportunity to meet new bloggers and, through them, to hear new voices. I haven’t been part of the Digital Parents community, so it was all very new to me: they are a cohesive, self-supporting unit bonded through familiar experiences (and regular reading), with their own language and subtle morays and behavioural expectations.

It could have been intimidating and by the eve of the conference, I confess I was feeling the fear. However, the reality was that I was warmly accepted into this world, and my relatively different life experiences and blogging style did not stop this lovely group from making me feel part of their family.
What really got me thinking was when a certain speaker would be called to the stage, or a certain blogger would stand up to ask a question, and the room would erupt with screams and cheers and applause.

Not having been part of this community, I rarely knew the one speaker or blogger from another. But almost everyone else seemed to, this close-knit family. And I realised that, for many people at this conference, they were meeting their heroes. Bloggers they had admired and sometimes even interacted with online were here in the flesh (or “IRL,” an acronym that I learned stood for “in real life,” but you probably knew that already).

And I thought, what if some of the big bloggers I’d known and admired in the past year had stood up there? People whose words I’d read and lives I’d watched through Internet windows, hearts that had opened to me, the anonymous stranger: how would I have felt if they then materialised, “IRL,” as part of a panel? What if they had been there to chat with me later over cake and tea? I’m pretty sure I’d have been cheering like the room was on Friday, for people I didn’t know. After all, it’d be a little bit like meeting my own heroes.

I guess that’s the crossover that blogging, blogger conferences and meet-ups offer: we are no longer just reading words, as we would in a book. On a blog, we are reading words, glimpsing lives, being invited into hearts… yet all the while we remain strangers. But a blogging conference – something entirely new to me until Friday – means stepping over what remains of the “stranger” boundary and into “friend” or, in some cases, “family.” It’s pretty special.

Do you remember your best friend in high school? I am going to share a little story about mine, and it’s a lot more personal than I usually get on this space, so I hope you bear with me.

Australian high school lasts six years, from Years 7 to 12 (you’re aged roughly around 12 to 18). Late in Year 7, we moved house so I moved high school. All the friendships and groups and cliques had already been formed, and I was more-or-less ‘placed’ in a social group by the Year Adviser who introduced me to my classes that day.

The kids were nice, and welcoming enough (although I did get called Sandra D because I was little, blonde and very innocent), and I made friends. Not close friends, but I was not alone.

Then on the bus I met a girl named Del. She lived on the same long, country road as me, so we would see each other on the bus to and from school every day. We became friends, and used to ride our horses together in the afternoons after school, and on weekends.

Del was intense, passionate and highly intelligent. We spent our nights reading all three Brontes, mixed up with a good dose of Anne of Green Gables and a teen-typical dollop of Tolkien. Del could draw beautifully, so we would sketch together, Del teaching me how to cross-hatch to create dimensions in the horse or faerie I was attempting (always badly) to bring to life in pencil. We would ride our horses for hour upon hour in the Australian bush, singing at the tops of our lungs, splashing and dancing in bushland creeks, creating ever-higher makeshift ‘jumps’ from logs and 44-gallon drums over which to leap our horses.

People at school teased Del like they never teased me. I had other friends, I was “mainstream.” Del was alone a lot of the time. The teasing hurt her, but she never gave up who she was or what she believed. I chose to conform. Del chose her own path, and in the country high school where we grew up, that hurt her. I tried to stick up for my friend, yelling at the people who teased her, but I only made matters worse. I blustered. I blundered. I missed the bigger point. Several of them, in fact. I was 14.

When I was in Year 9 or 10, I discovered a new group of friends. They were kind, funny, intelligent, and they accepted me for me. I didn’t need to conform. High school became at last an exercise in “finding myself” rather than “hiding myself.” (Those friends, incidentally, are still my friends. Some of us went to Paris together last year.) Around the same time, our family moved again. I didn’t have to change schools, but I no longer caught the bus with Del.

So happy was I in finding this acceptance with my new friends that I missed how I was isolating Del even further. My friends accepted her, too, but she was in a different year to us, and had different classes, so there could never be the same level of connection. I will never forget the day she approached me to tell me she was moving to a Steiner school in a month or so, and that she would spend her lunches with people from her own year until then. That was that. That night, at a sleepover at one of my new friends’ place, I cried the entire night while the other girls slept.

I barely saw Del again. I went to university and studied literature. I heard she went to university and studied fine art. I had news of a tragedy that had befallen her family so I went to visit, but it was painfully awkward. I bumbled again, and embarrassed myself. My social skills were inadequate to offer anything worth giving.

Fast forward several years. I’m in an art gallery in Sydney, and there’s an exhibition on. It is my old friend, and her work is beautiful. Challenging, confronting, but still so authentically and passionately Del.

I give my card to the gallery owner and ask if he would give it to Del. If she wanted to contact me, she could.

She never did. More time passed. Another friend, also a successful artist, told me that gallery owner would never have bothered to give her my card, but he could put me in contact through the owner of her new gallery. While I pondered whether I wanted to try, confidence waning, Del hit the news.

In 2008, Del won the Archibald Prize, the most important portraiture prize in Australia, for a self-portrait with her two children. I was beyond happy for her, and the painting, which of course I went to see, was glorious.

I felt I couldn’t try to contact Del now, it would be like I was trying to hitch my wagon to her star. I did, however, sneak in at the back of a lecture she gave at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, creeping out again at the end before I was seen. As if I would have been recognised.

I’ve never tried to contact Del since. But I am so proud of my childhood friend as I follow her career.

Then this morning I opened my Google Reader and found this wonderful video of Del made by Dumbo Feather. It brought back all the memories I have shared, and I guess now is as good a time as any to make them public. I must tell you I had a tiny twinge of nerves as I sat down to write this, thinking “What if Del saw it, how embarrassing.” But I can be fairly sure Del is not reading this blog.

So now you’ve seen inside me, a little. I hope you enjoy seeing the inner-workings of this wonderful artist, too.

We don’t do Thanksgiving in Australia and, before I moved to New York, I simply couldn’t understand the appeal. This is because the sum total of my Thanksgiving knowledge came from television sit-coms. To whit:

1. Family members were forced to come together and pretend to be happy, during which old arguments were invariably resurrected
2. Food preparation was exhausting, either resulting in the cook becoming mentally unstable, or frozen turkey being served up for dinner, or both

Then there was the cultural shame that stemmed from the realisation that I would be “giving thanks” for a land that had actually been stolen (a shame with which as an Aussie, I am already all too familiar).

It has been two years and one month since I left New York, although it feels like another lifetime ago. I have plenty to be thankful for and I wouldn’t change a thing, but it is true that I miss that place and deeply miss my friends in New York, every day.

And despite all of my misgivings, New York taught me the meaning of Thanksgiving. Or at least a meaning, one that resonated with me.

On Thanksgiving morning, my friend Misha (who I call my sister – she’s the one in the black & white apron) and I traipsed up to Wholefoods on Bowery for supplies. Mish could happily spend a day in Wholefoods, if I let her, and on other occasions I had been known to actually sit down in the aisles to take a load off while Mish perused baby beet salads to her heart’s content. But after a relatively brief (for Mish) two hours of shopping, balancing paper bags bulging with groceries, we trundled back home to cook up a friendly storm.

Outside the wind really picked up and the first snow was just around the corner, but inside was all warmth and happiness and friendship.

Mish and I lived in the same building, on Thompson Street in SoHo, and we had other friends also in our building, so we shared kitchens. All of us were travel-orphans: blow-ins from the mid-west, the south, the UK, the antipodes… and on that day we became each other’s family.

Our apartment doors stayed open and the building filled with our laughter and conversation, the music we played, and the many mingled smells of roasting turkey, mashed potato, sweet corn, green beans, pumpkin soup, cranberries, hot home-made apple cider, cinnamon and pie. My dog Oliver and Misha’s cat Mr Lee wove in and out of our legs all day, in food-scrap heaven.

When we finally uncorked our bottles of wine and sat down to eat, it was anywhere you could stake a spot. On the edge of the couch, on the floor, on the window sill, and we ate until bellies bulged and food comas threatened.

There was no bickering, the work and the food were all happily shared, and the thanks we gave were for one another and for our loved ones far away but close in our hearts. I was filled to the brim, as much with thanks as with food.

Thank you, America, for teaching me the absolute beauty of setting aside one day – just one special day – to do nothing but cook and eat and love.

And happy Thanksgiving, from me to you. xo

Image via fat owls

There’s a bit of a theme going on in my blog lately, about home and where to find it.