The Patrick Family: A new year

Dear Family and Friends,

Happy New Year!!

Well 2010 has arrived and we hope, seriously, that this year will be quieter and not quite so full of surprises!!

Although 2009 was a great year and we welcomed Cameron to our family, our plans were thrown into disarray somewhat when I was made redundant from my job at Lifeplan while I was on maternity leave.

Initially it was a shock but as always happens, one door closes and a more interesting one opens and with my new job with Bendigo and Adelaide Bank, my working life has returned to being challenging and extremely good fun!! And hopefully a little more stable! So Iain was still able to take off his planned 4 months of leave to look after the kids which he is thoroughly enjoying.

Cameron is becoming more and more curious and has started to roll over and assert his little personality. He is just adorable.

Amelia is a smart, cheeky little thing and loves her brother dearly. We fall about laughing when we hear some of the things that come out of her mouth that we recognise as being our expressions

“Actually mama this dinner is tasty”
“It certainly is”
And this one never fails to make us smile “don’t talk to me like that, go to bed”

She’s got a strong personality that’s for sure but how can we complain – we both do too!

We had a very enjoyable Christmas and New Year. As has become our traditional Christmas, Kevin comes to stay with us and James and Zoe and the kids come in the afternoon for prawns by the pool and a later dinner.

We enjoyed some hot hot weather over Christmas so spent most of our time in our swimming togs around the pool and in the garden eating leftovers and drinking wine! It was super.

I worked through but it was very quiet at work and not a great deal to do which being new was ideal for me because I could take some time to learn about my new company and meet people.

I took a trip to the head office in Bendigo in December for the Marketing Department Christmas Party and met the rest of the marketing team, then last week spent a few days in Sydney meeting the people who work in the margin lending division which is another area of the business I look after from a marketing point of view. It was very interesting as margin lending can be quite complex and I enjoy learning about new things. I was astonished though at some of the systems they have built to measure market risks and exposures post GFC. There are some insanely clever people about. Way over my head! But interesting all the same.

I’ve started on my post babies weight loss regime and I’m telling you all so you can keep me honest and encourage me to plough forward on this project of mine. I’m only at the beginning but I have bought a great exercise DVD which I am enjoying doing, once I’d got over the “oh my god how unfit am I???” moment.

And some exciting news for us – we finally decided to shed ourselves of the last vestiges of Iain’s single man about town lifestyle and the BMW has been traded in for a Subaru. We’ve been so pleased with our Subaru Outback and being without it following the car accident in November for about 8 weeks really forced us to make a decision (plus it was hard to resist the offer they made of a free family pass to the Zoo if we had a trade in evaluation - the pandas are finally here!). It was very hard transporting 2 kids in car seats about in a 2 door BMW. People must have thought we were mad, I really wanted to put a sticker in the back window saying “our other car is much more practical, honest, it’s just in the garage being fixed”

Poor Cameron was manhandled in and out of the car at some funny angles and getting his pram into the boot- well that’s another story!

So here’s to 2010. Let’s hope you all have a great year and the year brings you much happiness. Peace and quiet for us? We’ll see 

Lots of love
Caroline, Iain, Amelia and Cameron

xxxxx