The Cheeks Family

Hello dear family and friends and welcome to the Cheeks family blog! This is a long note to let you know what we have going on. Subsequent posts will be shorter and hopefully frequent.

As many of you know and a quick apology to the rest, we have moved to Sydney! Yes, in Australia. We are truly enjoying the change and absolutely love the city. I am being a 100% stay at home Mom for the first time and getting along very well. There are random moments of I could start this or that business, but then I remind myself that Jack will start Australian kindergarten in January of next year, 2009 – that is only eight months away! Not too long of time to devote myself 100% to the two of them!

We LOVE our Sydney apartment. Ben signed a short-term lease to make it convenient to be in the city while we found a more permanent location. We are on the 26th floor of a high-rise apartment building. The owner has it listed for other potential renters at the following address: Our Elan Apartment

There are incredible views of the harbour, the Opera House, marinas and all the city lights. There are fireworks in the harbour every week which makes it really seem like we are living the life.

Jack and Ella love to be able to see their Dad every night when he comes in from work. Well, Ella is generally already in bed, but she looks for him in the morning if she didn’t see him the night before.

Jack and Ben have their special time every evening when Ben comes home. They walk around the pool, get in the hot tub, read books, eat and talk about their day. Jack is planning a series of activities for just him and Dad for the next few weekends. Jack will be four on May 20th, so we are trying to figure out what he would like to do. The top contenders are a tour of a pirate ship, the theme park Loca Luna or the playground in Darling Harbour with a trip on the paddle boats. As I mentioned, Jack can go to Kindergarten in January, so we have our preschool session each morning when Ella takes her morning nap.

Ella is 17 months of age, so she is just happy with everything. She loves to eat, play at the park with a ball, and take whatever Jack has in his hands.

Yes, Ben does have to work over here. He takes the train to and from work everyday. He is enjoying the challenge of his new position. The facility is in Chester Hill, a little way outside the city.

Before heading over here we did the family tour in the states. We first visited my Mom, Dad, sister Karen, her husband Jason and daughter Lauren in Missouri. Jack and Lauren act like brother and sister and play at full throttle. Here are a few photos from that visit:

in Missouri

We then went to St. Louis to get ready to fly to Georgia. We visited one of my best friends in the world, Julia, her daughter Anisa, and sister Cheryl and her sons. It was wonderful to be able to catch up with Julia and see just how great she was doing. The kids had a great time playing together. Photos:

St. Louis

We flew from St. Louis to Jacksonville, Florida to meet Danny and Montine. We crammed a lot into the short time at their house – Grandma Bennett’s 90th birthday party, the zoo…

Other pictures from Georgia:

Brunswick - Star House

We then flew to LA to visit my brother Clay, his wife Donna and children, Hannah and Sean. We were able to spend four days and reconnect with Hannah and meet new nephew Sean. Here are the photos from the visit:

Bakersfield - April 2008

Mom and Dad drove to STL, flew to Denver, flew to LAX, and then all the way to Sydney with us. Thanks! It was a long journey with the kids for the 15 hour flight from LA to Sydney. As I have told some, we are now stuck here because I am not ready to do that again! And happily stuck by the way. So, Mom and Dad stayed for two weeks and we did many tourist activities, the Taronga zoo, mastered the train system, the aquarium, the ferries, a cable car, the Sydney harbour bridge, the National Maritime Museum, and much more. I will post pictures of these events later.

Again, thanks for reading if you have gotten this far and we’ll try to have frequent posts. If I have written a post it means that Ella took a good nap!

Love to everybody, Jill