Australia Day
We don’t tend to do anything big  (aside from the occasional picnic at the beach) for Australia Day in our family and this year was not much different than previous ones. I went out in the morning to take G, a family friend, to his aqua aerobics class. Normally we go in the evening but the pool closed early for the holiday and that class was cancelled. The Scientist had a cricket match to entertain him much of the day although it doesn’t seem to have been as entertaining as he’d like since Australia played so poorly. For the kids, it wasn’t particularly different than most summer days…just hanging around and doing usual things.
When I returned home I put potatoes on to boil for the potato salad requested by Game Fanatic. Once those had cooked, I left them to cool and went  to bed to read and/or nap. I’ve had a habit of waking up a bit too early lately and never quite get enough sleep. Maybe my body is making up for all the sleep I had post-surgery? Anyway, the nap never happened but I did finish a big book that had been demanding my attention. I then set about preparing most of the rest of the food. The kids had requested peri-peri chicken since we’d had that last week and both boys had enjoyed it. Even Lego Lover liked it despite it being really hot. Game Fanatic seems to have a standing request of cornbread, whether it’s Independence Day, Thanksgiving or Australia Day.
When I went to get started, I found that our refrigerator was a bit too full of foodstuffs that shouldn’t be there. There was no space to put the potato salad to cool or anything else, for that matter. I spent an hour or so clearing out things and emptying jars and filling a couple garbage bags. There comes a point where you don’t even know you have certain foods because you can’t get to them and that’s where we were. There is still a shelf with sauces, pastes, etc. that needs to be sorted out but most of the rest looks pretty decent now. Once that was cleared, preparing the rest was a lot more straightforward. Eating time ended up pushed back to 6:30 because the food only got finished around 6pm and we had stopped to watch a favorite program at 6pm. So we had our picnic in the backyard and it was quite pleasant, especially as the temperature was unusually cool for this time of year. We finished off with store bought lamingtons which only just filled the requirements as they were bite-sized and not terribly fresh, but were not bad either. Next year we will plan a bit better and either buy from the bakery ahead of time, or make our own.
