It's the most glorious feeling. To have endured months of darkness and cold, bundling yourself up everytime you walk out the door, all the windows in the apartment closed, the ground outside hard and frozen. And suddenly the snow and ice have melted away and spring is upon you. It's the most amazing thing - especially to a girl who grew up in sub-tropical Brisbane, where the change of seasons is almost indiscernible.

I have never enjoyed 7 degrees so much before in my life! In Brissie it would be a record-breaking cold day, but here it feels like the world has just awoken from a long sleep. The air feels soft and sweet, you can smell the earth and moisture. The sunlight is blinding and everyone around seems so happy - the kids in the park have got out all of their sandpit stuff and are madly digging the recently defrosted sand. You can actually hear birds again - and you realise that for the months of winter everything in nature was so QUIET. There are no buds on the trees yet, no grass in the park, but everything has this feeling of promise and excitement. Easter makes sense now, all that talk about new life. A celebration of the return of the sun and the waking of nature.

On the weekend we had a "welcome to spring" bbq on a friend's back deck. It had a lazy aussie feel with beers in the sun and the charcoal smell of meat on the barbeque. The kids went crazy running around playing hide and seek and screaming as loud as they could. We went for a walk in the forest and cut some branches of willow and did some more jumping and screaming, and spring was truly here, and all was good.