There’s only one way to end a day in which you spent the afternoon at meetings smelling of french onion and light sour cream dip (because you were in fact wearing some of the said dip down the front of your dry clean only ensemble)…

and that would be to take yourself to your local play ground, slip off your work pumps and give the rest of your outfit a reason to be at the dry cleaners.  Toddler SSG and I slid down slides (I’m just a smidge too wide for the slide these days but that didn’t stop my frock from accelerating me down the ramp with impressive effect), tramped on the in ground trampolines and drove the bouncing car for a good half hour before dinner last night.  We collected wood chips in our shoes and red dust on everything else.  It was very liberating and the French Onion dip incident was soon pushed back into the recesses of my work day memory bank.

It was also a day for the highly anticipated return of some Big Names into my fashion consciousness.  I dusted off this much loved Hermes and Mai Tai Collection arm party for my morning coffee run down to The Little Marionette.  Because, don’t we all like a bit of an arm party for the pre work walk down the road to a favourite cafe?  

I love the chance that walk gives me to see Darling Street wake up for the day.  Young families having breakfast out before a parent walks to the bus for the ride into the city.  Other fit parents are jogging pramming it to school with the older children as the toddlers stand on those special whleeled boards you can attach to the backs of prams these days.  The sound of children giggling and chatting at the daycare next to the car park for work gives a special lift to the morning.  It’s a glorious sound compared to the grinding of trucks or the hour long babble of crudeness on commercial breakfast radio.

The yogis are languidly walking down the street post morning class with the paper, a coffee or a bag of organic groceries as they ease into the rest of the day in a way that I’m a touch wistful for.  

Tradies and bus drivers go about their day with glimpses of the bridge every now and then.  It’s such a beautiful part of Sydney to have the privilege of working in.  And everyone here knows it.  Drivers give way to each other on the narrow winding back streets, buses pause to let you enter Darling Street at the Woolies and everyone keeps an eye out for the kids and the dogs.  

Somehow, to me, it would seem to be intrusive to take more exciting photos of a Balmain morning than what I’ve cobbled together for this post.

But back to fashion current affairs. Hansel and Zoolander, my favourite male super models walked at the close of Valentino’s Autumn Winter show at Paris Fashion Week.  It’s been 14 years since the pair made the world sit up and take notice of the plight of international male super models and in true super star style, the years have been so kind to them both.  

They’ve barely aged at all.  Instead, middle age has given their looks a detached and worldly edge and their walk a blase lope.  I’ll be there on February 12 2016 when Zoolander 2 premieres.  Will you?

Beyond the serenity of a workday morning in Balmain, we have been play dating and afternoon snacking.

And thanking the internet for this tip I learned from a parenting website.  Decanting a half cup or so of milk into a measuring cup in the morning makes breakfast a much less fraught and messy activity.  Toddler SSG loves to do everything for himself at the moment and we’ve lost numerous bowls of cereal and litres of milk to the floor as he knocks things off the table in his quest to lift a three litre bottle of milk high enough over his bowl to ‘tip’.  With the measuring cup, he does the job efficiently and neatly which pleases him no end.  Except that now he wants to fill the measuring cup himself as well….

Apologies for the panicked Instagrams earlier this week.  I was having domain issues and thought I’d lost the whole blog forever.  Sydney Shop Girl has been part of my life for 5 (!!) years now and to see her vanish without a trace (for a few hours) upset me more than I thought it would.  

The ups and downs and the mostly in betweens of my life that each post contains have been both a joy to write and a way of permanently recording moments of my life which I can then look back on whenever I wish.  I’ve made so many blogging friends, had so many experiences because of my blogging life and also, I hope, given the people who read regularly something worth reading when they click on over here.  Not the solutions to the atrocities and inequalities of our world, exactly, but a bit of something to read that wasn’t a waste of your time.

Oops.  Knew I forget something.  Didn’t you love the storm last night, Sydney?  Especially as it started just around dinner time after most of us survived the peak hour trek to get home?  The sky show was spectacular and the cool night afterwards was perfect for a comfortable sleep through the night.  I can’t wait for the cooler change I’m hoping this storm signalled the start of.