Thinking Allowed: Farewell Sunshine coast

The last month has been our family’s first time living by the sea in Australia. Most evenings, we’d hastily stack dishes and scurry across the street to Mudjimba Beach, which is broad and largely empty and has gleaming waves crashing onto a shallow, soft sandbar. Aurora and Sophia would usually muster the courage to bodysurf if there were less than ten jellyfish washed up on the tideline, while Tova danced alone, spinning and bearjumping and kicking up sand. The girls would all run to a distant fire pit where they dug in the ashes while we plashed our feet in the waves and talked about anything and nothing. The beach was very different during the daytime. The sun is amazingly strong and we couldn’t last long in its glare. Nonetheless, we enjoyed more than our share of sand castles, diving amongst schools of fish, and getting sun- and sand-burned.

Living in a small-size town was really nice too - we learned a lot from the locals. When you lay your newborn baby down in the sand at dusk, people don’t look at you funny; instead they strike up a conversation. Many more people here seem to set up their lives the way they want, like the couple who arranged their workdays around the tidal schedule so they can hit every peak surfing time. Figure out what you’re passionate about and orient your life around it - lesson learned!

Mudjimba was rather the perfect sort of place and setup for a newborn family. Our little house had enough space for the girls to play endlessly while one of us dandled Zadie and the other snuck out for a speed-hike up Mt Coolum, the local workout mountain. We read an alternating mix of sad books (The Narrow Road to the Deep North; The Road) and light ones (Salmon Fishing in the Yemen; Curse of the Spellmans). We guzzled passionfruit and watermelon and finger limes, making the most of fruit season. We wish that all parents could get to spend a month in a beautiful location by a beach with their families; Tamar said she’d readily endure childbirth again to spend another month that way!

So it turns out we might be beach sort of people. Every one of us liked living right by the beach, and we were all sad to leave it. The last night a storm whipped the sand stinging around our legs, and lashed the waves into a froth. Aurora and Jakob rode the waves anyway until it was too dark to see, and all the girls yelled “BYE BEACH!” as they left. As we mull over where to live next, the beach will tug us a little harder thanks to our month in Mudjimba.