Family Traditions

My youngest son turned 13 recently. He's a teen! This is a good thing; really, it is ;-) and it's a milestone that needs acknowledging because he's entering a new phase of his life.

I'm big on celebrating significant events. Both my boys had 'naming' celebrations when they were born and every birthday is celebrated but this one, like 18 and 21, needs a bit more fanfare. I call them the 'rite of passage' birthdays. I'm also big on celebrating the little things and inventing little traditions that frame our lives. Like family games night and squish-on-the-couch movie night.

Our tradition for turning 13 is a meal at a silver-service restaurant- you know the type...no kids menu :-) We chose a restaurant in the country, nestled between a vineyard and an olive grove and where the art of the grounds and inside the restaurant is as amazing as the food. This suited Boy Wonder down to the ground as he's got a great eye art and he's especially loves buildings. He got a total kick out of the new wine-tasting building. Isn't it awesome? A building built on it's side, complete with stumps sticking out:-) 

Sculpture abounds and everywhere you turn you see something new that your gaze missed the first time; like the wire sculpture next to the water tank of the man fishing, complete with a fish on his hook and a glass of wine in his hand. Humor and whimsy is everywhere and after a three course lunch we enjoyed wandering around the gardens and walking off the food:-)

I guess because family traditions are important to me, it's why they often end up in my books. In Boomerang Bride, I gave tradition a bit of a wicked twist because in life, not all traditions are necessarily good!  Matilda grew up in a family where the tradition/belief was that the Geoffrey women travelled across the world for love. This ended up getting her in a bit of hot water and it's why the book opens with Matilda in small town Wisconsin, wearing a wedding dress, holding a cake, but missing a groom.

Do you have family traditions? Good ones, bad ones? I'm all ears.

Fiona Lowe writes stories set in small towns with big hearts. Whether they're set in small town USA or outback Australia, the one thing they have in common is a happy ever after that will make you sigh. For all the goss on her latest releases, and where to find her on the 'net, check out her website. Boomerang Bride and Career Girl in the Country are out now.

Fiona Lowe: I've Got to Go There!

OK, so I confess to watching 'A Farmer Wants a Wife' and last year one of the Aussie farmers was a pearl farmer living on the Western Australian coast, and the images of the area just blew me away.

The blue-green sea, water so clear you could see dugong, turtles, mantarays, massive schools of fish from the top of a cliff and the most amazing sight of red, outback dust suddenly changing to whiter than white sand are images that are burned into my brain. It was a place where the outback meets the ocean and the perfect place to take a French exchange student so he could experience both the outback and glorious beaches. I started planning a vacation!

We're just back from that holiday and it was spectacular. We were in the World Heritage listed Shark Bay and the recently listed Ningaloo reef and I got to swim with whale sharks, which was something I had never imagined myself doing. The experience will stay with me forever. There is something about swimming next to an 8 metre fish that makes you realise how tiny we really are!


Of course we wanted to visit this part of the world and we were open to everything, but it's different when you're 'told' you have to go somewhere or 'do' something. In my latest release, Career Girl In The Country, Poppy Stanfield is told she has to go to the outback and work in a mining town.

It isn't in a World Heritage area with amazing sceneary and it's a two hour flght from Perth. With the never-ending rest dust and the searing temperatures, Poppy feels like she's been sent to hell. She's determined to get out of town as soon as possible and back to her life in Perth, and her career dreams of being the head of surgery in a Perth hospital.

Nothing goes to plan and slowly, despite not wanting to, she starts to see beyond the moon-scape environment and starts to glimpse some positive attributes to the town; not to mention the gorgous but brooding ER doctor, Matt Albright.

So tell me, what situation have you been in where you were told to do something or told to go somewhere that you didn't wish to, but ultimately you realised it had been a good experience for you? Leave a comment and go into the draw to win a copy of Career Girl In The Country!

Fiona Lowe is an award-winning, multipublished author or romance fiction with Harlequin Mills & Boon and Carina Press. Whether her books are set in outback Australia or small-town USA they all feature small towns with big hearts fillled with warm, likeable characters that make you fall in love. When she's not writing stories, she's a weekend wife, mother of two boys who she's trying to instill in them heroic charcteristics like cooking and ironing. She's currently writing her 18th novel. She loves to hear from readers and you can find her on Facebook, Twitter and at her website.