Moving and our First Aussie Christmas!

It has been a while since I last updated, but we have been very, very busy. We moved house and our now in a beautiful apartment on the beach. We've been taking advantage of walking across the street to the beach every weekend. It gets really hot, but it's dry heat and it feels surprisingly good. The water is so crystal clear and blue here, and the current is very strong. We haven't seen any dolphins, sharks, or jellyfish, so don't worry. We do frequently see fish swimming, though. The waves are so big and fun to play in. And because there is so much beach here, it's NEVER crowded. The closest people to you will be like 100 feet away. The water is warm but still refreshing--not like it was in the Caribbean where you would go in the water and it didn't seem much cooler than the hot, humid air. I love the dry heat here, and it hasn't been at all unbearable for us yet.

Our first Christmas here was nice, but it would have been good if we'd had some friends around. We skyped with our families for about 3 hours in the morning, then opened all of our presents. That was pretty fun because we had gifts from both sets of parents as well as to each other to open all at once! It felt like we were kids again. The amount of presents was overwhelming. I had a quick bout of homesickness, but we went and laid on the beach and tried to enjoy our time. It really was a nice first Christmas here, but knowing all of our friends from here were either home or with their families was kind of hard.

Here is a link to pictures of our new place and our first Aussie Christmas:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2375066&id=5800571&l=3589808097

Work is going well for the both of us. Ben got a permanent raise! Hopefully more work will be coming in soon so he can do more Engineering work. Although he hasn't done has much clerical work in the past few months as in the very beginning. I have been working as the Qualified in the Nursery on Thursdays and Fridays, which is really good money because I'm not on a contract. I really love the kids and have formed attachments with them and good relationships with their parents and families.

We've been hitting the gym pretty hard lately, trying to go 4-5 times a week. It feels good to be a little more settled now and to just live our lives and make some money. We are counting down the days to visiting home (Juneish) but won't be able to buy the plane tickets until February or March. It's so hard to wait!!

There are so.many.bugs here. UGHHHH. We have LOTS of earwigs which are disgusting, and seen about 3 cockroaches just at this new apartment. One was in the toilet room WHILE I was using the toilet. Sorry if that's too much information, but it was a very terrifying, scarring experience for me and talking about it helps :) We have yet to see a Hunstman here, which is the big furry spider that you are all talking and wondering about. I have seen some pretty ginormous spiders at work, and I usually make an Australian kill them because they are used to it. And every time they laugh at me and say, "Wait til you see a Hunstman!" They carry their babies on their backs, they're black and furry and HUGE. Here is a link so you can see:

http://t1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRsuQScA6_M8HPy5odOl5YnuaVCDGi8-1vCbYzj8kbk7-zGaVPI

That's all for now. Miss you all :)