Fish, birds and butterflies

Well the Jardines are finally fighting back against the strains of child-rearing. Slowly, steadily, we're gaining some sense of normalcy in our lives as Edie continues to improve following her surgery and Celia finally gets on top of her reflux/general malaise. Both are surprisingly pleasant these days, and although their sleep is still erratic, it is a million times more manageable than it was even a couple of months ago, when we were ready to cash in the chips and bail to a tropical island sans kids.

Speaking of tropical islands, we finally sucked it up and visited the Great Barrier Reef, ticking a big item off our things-you-must-do-when-you're-spending-any-amount-of-time-in-Australia list. All up it was a roaring success. The girls travelled well, we avoided seasickness despite some high winds and sea swells, and there was plenty of entertainment for us on the pontoon where we moored. It wasn't the best day to be out there, but we still got to see plenty of cool fish. The next day we drove up to Kuranda (a rainforest village) to spend the day. The highlight was a butterfly sanctuary that breeds and houses hundreds of species of tropical butterflies. A different experience to your average zoo. We also visited a koala gardens and an aviary - both were ok but no better than what you can get in Brisbane. Despite all those animal highlights, the best part of the trip for Edie was the resort where we stayed, specifically the giant jumping pillows. I'm not sure I've ever seen her so excited and entertained for as long a period as those jumping pillows provided. The best thing for her was the fact that so few of the other guests were using them, so she had them almost all to herself. Trip pics in the album below:

Cairns trip 2011

Given our pending return to Canada, we knew we had to do things like seeing the reef before setting sail for the Great White North. The longing for our homeland that we've felt in the past few years has wrestled with our dual feelings of love and frustration for our adopted home here. Despite all the perks about living here (the weather being at the top of the list), we always felt that a return to Canada was in store at some point. I came across a passage in a book recently (The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie) that I thought was very poignant. Rushdie, himself no stranger to living abroad (albeit under vastly different circumstances), writes:

"Who is he? An exile. Which must not be confused with, allowed to run into, all the other words that people throw around: emigre, refugee, immigrant,....Exile is a dream of glorious return. Exile is a vision of revolution: Elba, not St. Helena. It is an endless paradox: looking forward by always looking back. The exile is a ball hurled high into the air. He hangs there, frozen in time, translated into a photograph; denied motion, suspended impossibly above his native earth, he awaits the inevitable moment at which the photograph must move, and the earth reclaim its own.....His home is a rented flat. It is a waiting-room, a photograph, air.

I've jokingly referred to our time here as exile, if only because most people that move here arrive on a one-way ticket (and for good reason), but that was never our intention. We'll have mixed feelings about leaving Australia. On one hand it's been the most challenging three year period of our lives. On the other hand, we're going home with a suitcase full of great memories from this remarkable country. And that includes two little girls that were made in Australia.