2021 made me give up on having a Theme of the year! Reviewing the last twelve months though has surprised me about how much did happen, given 106 days of the year were without activities and events. For that almost third of the year we were All. At. Home. Together….All. The. Time…..
I do joke about how much time we spent together, and like to tease Ross about how exciting he found it to leave home to go to work occasionally (where if there were no emergencies he was in lockdown at the station with his crew for weeks on end). But I really do appreciate the opportunity we had to spend so much time together, especially now the world has opened up and we are back to activities. Everyone is coming and going more regularly and we are seeing less of them.
Thankfully everyone stayed healthy this year. Sam broke a finger at school sport within two weeks of school starting for the year, and Isaac broke a toe which required a serious moon boot, but they were the only times we had to visit a doctor until later in the year when we were eligible for vaccinations. Isaac continued to enjoy tennis comps and baseball, and was a year 10 rep on the SRC. He also continued with band, percussion lessons and percussion ensembles, and guitar lessons. He obtained his L’s in May and now hassles us to drive EVERYwhere. He discovered home learning gave him better results because he wasn’t distracted by the social aspect of school.
Sam gave up band and music lessons so he could focus on more sport. He was a year 9 leader, but apart from welcoming the new year 7 students (which included his sister), did not get to do a lot in that role. He continued with soccer, baseball, Oztag, acting and began tennis lessons. Sam made it not only to Zone Cross Country, but also to CSSA State Cross Country, and successfully trialled for representative soccer. He will play in the Australian Youth League for the Sutherland Shire Football Association next year – for which training three times a week has already begun!
Belle started high school, made some lovely friends, and adopted very nerdy behaviour and attention to her schoolwork, her results putting Zac and Sam to shame regularly! She has just started playing girls’ cricket and is continuing with Oztag to provide weekly catchups with her primary school friends that she misses. She was very excited to be chosen for the soccer club’s Encouragement Award and has started training with Sam to be ready for next year’s soccer season. When we can’t find Belle, we can usually hear her singing somewhere, and more often than not singing musical theatre tunes. She was able to see Frozen live on stage with Abi and Nik, but we are yet to see Hamilton – after cancelling our Broadway tickets when we couldn’t travel in December 2020, our tickets for the Sydney show in July were also cancelled, but hopefully we can see it before it leaves Sydney in March.
Abi has just completed her first year of her Bachelor of Music Education at the Conservatorium of Music, and we were able to attend the Con to watch a couple of performances in the first half of the year. She has begun with a few tutoring students, mainly tutoring Maths, remains an after school tutor at the school’s tutoring program, and picked up a casual job at Betty’s Burgers. Within a month of working there, they promoted her to shift supervisor which sounded exciting until it became many nights of closing the store alone and not finishing until 11.30pm. She stuck it out and has just finished up there ready for a new job in retail (and much better hours) from December.
Tim completed his Bachelor’s degree in Business at UTS, and was heavily involved in Credo (the uni’s Christian community), fulfilling the role of Treasurer. He supported himself with some Maths tutoring students and many shifts at Rebel. He was working fulltime hours at Rebel in the first half of the year (while apparently being a fulltime uni student), and being third year had a wide choice of electives, so he included subjects from a variety of faculties like Law and Science into his program. Having done a lot of his second and third years at home and online, he is not quite ready to finish uni, so has enrolled in a Graduate Certificate in Human Resources Management, the first half of a Masters degree. He has just been elected as President of Credo at UTS for 2022, and is hoping for the opportunity to conduct his role in person instead of over Zoom.
As Tim is about to begin his postgrad studies, Jarrod completed his last year and was actually able to graduate in person at the Great Hall at Sydney Uni. While his grad ceremony for his Bachelors degree in Commerce was on Zoom, Ross and Nik were able to attend the ceremony for his Graduate Certificate in Data Science in May, 25 years and one day after Nik’s graduation in the same place. Jarrod spent a lot of this year working full-time at Sydney Uni in the Data Analysis team on a 12 month contract, as well as tutoring privately many Maths students (most doing HSC) and also tutoring a few uni classes (including teaching a Masters unit) after hours at uni. He decided not to continue with his Masters once he started tutoring uni students completing it! He has worked very long hours for very many weeks without many breaks, even working 35 days straight at one point. He’s perfectly fine though, back to socialising a lot now that the HSC is done, and planning interstate travel with friends after Christmas, before he begins a new fulltime Data Science job at the Kings School in January.
Our biggest news of the year was the sale of our holiday park, Kings Point Retreat. After a difficult 2020 in business, we had an extremely busy period from October 2020 to April 2021 as people emerged ready to holiday and do so locally. We were starting to make plans for capital improvements and future projects when we were made a few offers we could not ignore. While it was not our intention to sell, we felt the timing was right, and the only disappointment was that it happened during this year’s lockdown so the children didn’t get to say a proper goodbye.
While this sale freed up some of Ross’ time, it didn’t change a lot for the rest of us day-to-day – although we are painfully aware we do not have our very own holiday destination for these Christmas holidays! The biggest change for Nik was a change in employer. After working for Shedden & Green for 17 years, my bosses retired and I was briefly unemployed. While daydreaming about my next move, another accounting firm at nearby Taren Point headhunted me and I agreed to start with them on a trial basis. My hesitation in working for them was due to them never having had any employees work from home. Then I started the same week lockdown began – most of their staff went to work from home and I still haven’t met some of them except over Zoom meetings or behind masks when in the office!
As I write this and reflect on the year, we are still uncertain about what the future holds. But that is ok – we’ve survived another year of the pandemic! We are still healthy and looking forward to a restful summer break at home. We hope you too are able to enjoy time with loved ones this season, and wish you a beautiful Christmas.
