Congratulations to all our "New Australians" who receive their Citizenship Certificates in Australia Day ceremonies across the country today.  We had the pleasure of attending such a ceremony in our nation's capital, Canberra, in 2009 - it was such a buzz!  (or maybe that was the 21 canon salute, or the FA-18 flyover!!).

To celebrate today, I have gone hunting through some OLD photos and dug up a favourite project I did in 2005.  I was working on lots of Altered Book projects at the time, and this one had the theme favourite places.  The month's project had to include "windows" in the page, so I embedded acetate sheets between several pages and created some windows which I stamped one of our favourite national emblems onto - yes, the kangaroo!

Anyway, here's what it looked like!

The words are just a couple of verses from the very moving Dorothea Mackellar Poem, My Country, one of my all-time favourites.

Don't you love that last line . . . I know to which brown country my homing thoughts will fly . . . ?

It's like when you walk down those long corridors at Heathrow after a month in Europe and suddenly you see row upon row of flying kangaroos - yes the tails of dozens of Qantas jets, and with tears in your eyes, you realise . . . you're going HOME!!  Home to the best country on earth! 

Have a great day - enjoy this beautiful fresh air and sunshine and I hope your day is blessed with beautiful happy family memories!