Last week my wife gave me the best present ever; our first child, a son.

Looking into his sweet face I am overwhelmed with love for this little person and can't help but think how much greater God's is for all of us. I pray that God equips us for the task of raising this little man to be a faithful child of God and a responsible citizen.

On the edge

The view of the ocean is so changeable here.

Some days you can see Cape Le Grand and the islands in the bay,

other days it looks like we live on the edge of the world.

What is the temperature at your place?

As you have seen from the photos so far there was big temperature difference from Ontario to Western Australia. The photos below are the evidence.

Clarksburg, Ontario, January 16, 2011

Lake Grace, Western Australia, January 22, 2011

An hour after this photo we drove through a thunderstorm and the temperature went from 42 to 29 in 7 minutes, then slowly climbed up to 40 again before we got home.

It was such a warm welcome back. People ask, "is it hard to adjust." No it's not, 42 is horrible no matter where you were the day before.

Sins, science and saints

Canadians struggle at times with the Aussie accent, especially if they are not used to it.

One day we were in a bookshop and I ask the lady,

"Do you have a book on the saints?"

She replied, "On sins?"

"No, on the saints," I repeated.

"Oh, on science," she said, and headed off in the direction of the science books.

Desperate to be understood I pulled out my fake North American accent, which had served me so well in the past in similar situations, and repeated my original question. To which she replied, "On the saints, I'm not sure. Let me check."

As an aside to this story, Bec asked another bookstore lady that same question two days later who thought she said science.

Oh Canada

Last Saturday we arrived home from our wonderful three and a half week vacation in you guessed it: Canada.

It was great spending time with family and friends we don't get to see very often. But we also had days where we did very little but hang out at home, eat food (including many Christmas goodies), fill in cross words and play games.

A few pictures from the trip.

I had to do it. Don't worry, it was only -6.

Rebecca aquatinting herself with the winter time animals.

Are they penguin footprints?

Could it be any prettier.

Our unwanted visitors

What is a hairy grey-brown noctuid?

Here's a clue. His mates are brown diamondback, nate and bogong.

If you said moth you are correct. Currently there are millions of them here. And that is just in our street! Today we flushed 40 of them out from the gap around our hatchback to stop them from flying into the car when we put in the groceries. Thankfully they are disappearing.

On other matters. The vege-garden is looking well. The broccoli has finished, the carrots are 10-12cm long, tomatoes are flowering and growing well, as are the onions, capsicums, leeks and parsley. Oh, and the poppies are beautiful.

My theory

I have a theory.

Pregnant women can smell with their eyes. Rebecca can just look at a piece of chicken from... O did I tell you that we are pregnant. Rebecca and I will welcome our little one into the world on April 22 next year. Yeah, as if Good Friday was not going to be busy enough.

So back to my theory, Rebecca only has to see a piece of chicken from 20 metres and she puts her hand over her nose and says, "that smells disgusting."

Ah, the joys of pregnancy.