Recent Happenings

After a lot of knitting, a lot of baking, a new nephew, a new computer, and a whole lot of laziness, I'm finally back with an update. Here is a selection of the past couple of months, in photo collage form. 

A walk around the beaches just north of where we live. Not such a lovely day! But BB seemed to enjoy his rain cover.

A day of work in the garden of the southern house. 

A new nephew! For now, his name will be Owl, because he likes to open his eyes really wide and look around, and he likes to be awake at night.

A walk over the Sea Cliff Bridge.

Another walk where we caught the train a couple of stops north and walked back.

Naughty things the Bad Baby likes to do.

Non-naughty things the Bad Baby likes to do. 

A Day Without a Baby

My parents and my sister had been planning a long bushwalk up in the Blue Mountains, a couple of hours west of Sydney. It was definitely not baby-friendly, so I asked the dad if my Mother's Day present could be me going on the walk. He would have to look after BB for the whole day, about 12 hours. The longest I had been away from BB before that was probably about 4 hours! So it was a new experience for everyone. 

We left about 7am to drive out to Katoomba to start the walk. It was freeeeezing at the beginning (well, freezing compared to my ideal temperature - really about 5 degrees) so we were all wearing lots of clothes. It had warmed up even by the time we got to the bottom of the first hill, about half an hour walking down. 

Basically we walked down, across, up, down, across, and up. That was on the way there. Here is a view of where we walked to taken from about halfway down the first hill. And yes, it did look as far away when we were actually there. Ruined Castle is a rock formation at the top of a small hill. We stopped for some food there and then continued on to Mt Solitary. The end of the walk might be a little scary for some people, because it consisted of clambering up almost-vertical rocks. It wasn't a problem for me because I'm pretty much as nimble as a mountain goat. I also run like a baby giraffe, but that's another story altogether. 

The views were great from many places on the walk, so I made another excellent collage because I'm so talented.

And some other little snippets:

A view of some of the vertical rock clambering that I mentioned before

A banksia man (from this book, explained more here)

The only photo of BB from that day, sitting in Grandma's toy basket

After we finished the walk, we went to get some tea and scones at a nearby restaurant. A nice reward. Some might say it's the only reason for going on a walk like that. It was a fun day, and I only got made fun of a little for talking about BB all the time. 

My New Friend Instagram Part 2 - The Sticks

Sometimes as I look back at my photos it seems that approximately 80% of them contain some type of stick. Here's a snippet of them: 

Walking with a stick

Stick-fighting with Daddy

A new kind of branchy-stick

A stick near the beach

A stick in the park

My New Friend Instagram (plus a babycino)

 I have recently discovered Instagram, along with some other online photo editing software. And I realised that most people didn't have super-amazing photo skills, they just knew how to click a button to make a photo look better. I'm not actually going to edit my photos, but it is fun to play with. Instagram filters are fun too. So here's a snippet of some things we've done in the past couple of weeks. 

Put up a new washing line

Play in the park

Wear a container-hat in the bath

Have lots of fun in the sun

Drink a babycino like a real boy!

No Leeches, Just a Deadly Snake

Okay, I take that back. It's apparently 'not generally fatal'. Which seems to me the same as 'sometimes fatal'...

Let's return to the beginning of the story. After the leech walk, we were inclined to not go on any walks for a while. But then during the next week was a public holiday, and it was such a nice day that we didn't want to waste it sitting around the house. Grandma and Granddad (Grandad? both of those look weird) told us they were going for a walk in the Royal National Park, about 45 minutes north of where we live. After assurances of rocky terrain that was highly unsuitable for leeches, we decided to go along. At the beginning of the walk was this sign:




In case you can't see, the pictures are various ways to get horribly injured, such as falling off a cliff or being swept away by large unexpected waves. It never mentioned anything about sometimes-fatal snake bites.

The walk was actually very nice, with great views and interesting rocky terrain.

I know how to make a collage! And also, what beautiful views.

 But then, right in the middle of our path... 

Ahhh! 

It really wasn't bad at all, unless you're deathly afraid of snakes. We watched it for a second and then it crawled away. We even let BB out of the backpack to walk by himself not long after that (see below). 

 We also saw this giant marshmallow.*

*It's not actually a marshmallow. It's a rock. 

And also, no leeches!

Just Another Bad Baby Day

I'll start my day with a little wine...

then proceed to some good quality drawer time... 

and finish with some sweeping of the countertops. 

A Lovely Story about a Lovely Walk

It has now been long enough that I can talk about the horror that took place a couple of weeks ago on one of our walks. Either that or we just watched the whole series of Game of Thrones and I didn't have time to write about it.

Anyway, the dad and I had planned to go on a walk up the top of the escarpment. Later on in the morning Aunty Von called and asked if we wanted to go on a walk with them instead. So they drove up to our house and we decided to do a much harder walk from close to where we live all the way up the escarpment.

Side note: If you look on this map you might think that the freeway just northwest of where we live is very close to us. But what you can't see on the map is the escarpment that rises straight up about 400m from behind our little town. Actually that's a general rule in pretty much any map from around here - there is probably some kind of enormous hill that you can't see on the map. 


We got all ready and drove up to the beginning of the walk. Here is a map of what the walk was supposed to be. Along a road left of where we parked, then along a trail looping around to the right, up the escarpment, and back down to our car. So we started off, laughing, joking, generally having a good time. The first part of the walk was road, then what used to be a very small dirt road.

Oh, isn't this fun...

I'm a really good photographer.

Still having fun...

It was when we reached a clearing full of grass that we discovered the leeches. Now, I've known some leeches in my time, but this was like nothing I've ever seen. If you stood still for 20 seconds there would be approximately 30-100 leeches on your shoes. I marked that point as a helicopter on the map because that's what I really really would have liked to come and pick me up. Looking back, the smart thing to do would have been to turn around right then. But no, we continued. And so did the leeches. Eventually we were almost running down the track while desperately flicking any leeches off that we could see on our legs. It was no use stopping to pull them off because (as I said before) 20 more would climb on. The sight of houses and then road was one of the greatest moments of my life.

Picey was right in front of me most of the time, saying every now and then, 'I think there's a leech under my sleeve.' Well I didn't believe him because who has a leech on their arm? Leeches are on the ground, right? Not so much. As soon as we reached the road he took his shirt off and I removed no less than five leeches off his back, stomach, and arms. Loo had some right up near his diaper. Even now I shudder at the thought of it all.

It's hard to see in this photo, but if you know what
you're looking for, there are at least 8 or 9 that I can see.

The bloody aftermath.

We went down to the beach after that to eat the lunches we had packed and to spend some time on the sand, which doesn't contain any leeches. 

Phew, that was a rough time.

BB loves sticks and Chick-Fil-A!

Babycino time!

Yep, that's right, BB had his first babycino the other day! As a little reminder, here are what the cousins looked like having theirs: 

Picey, 2 years old

Loo, 2 years old

BB, 14 months old

Might have gotten a little on his shirt...

So obviously he has a long way to go before he looks as sophisticated as the other two, but I'm sure we'll get there. He did love it though.

Walking with sticks

A couple of weekends ago it was a beautiful day so we set out for a walk. There is a lot of bushland relatively near where we live, but we don't really know what walks there are. I googled some and found one called the Wodi-Wodi track. It looked good, however one page I looked at said '2 hours, hard' and one said '3 hours, medium'. Does that mean that some people make it harder by going faster? I have no idea. But we went anyway, thinking that we would probably not do the whole thing. It was only about a 15 minute drive north of where we live. We parked on the side of the highway and started off on a little track that led up some stairs away from the road. Right after we started, we passed a couple of people coming the other way. As they passed us, one of them said, 'Good luck' in a way that didn't really mean 'good luck' but more 'I highly doubt you will enjoy this/get anywhere.' Interesting. We kept going and walked for about 30 minutes up the track. The first part was in scrub-ish land near the ocean, and then it went up into the gum trees. It was a really nice walk but we ended up turning around because BB had to sleep/we needed food. 

Scrub land in the beginning

In the gum trees

Daddy and baby with their walking sticks*

View through the trees down to the beach below

I definitely want to go back and do the whole thing. If it stops raining at some point this year, maybe we will. And maybe we will find out why we were wished 'good luck'.

This walk spurred me into action to buy this book about walking in our area. My parents have this one which is about the area down near their holiday house and that's where we learned about some of the walks we've done (Drawing Room Rocks, Ben's walk).

*About 2 minutes after this photo was taken, the dad threw his stick off the side of the path. Four seconds after that, BB did too. 

Easter

For Easter Sunday we went down to Aunty Von's house for lunch and an Easter egg hunt. Here in Australia, most people hide real eggs. And by 'real eggs' I mean real chocolate eggs, not actual real eggs that you fry up and eat (like some people thought when I said that). The plastic kind that you put candy in don't really exist here. People just eat chocolate eggs and bunnies and other delicious chocolate things. So anyway, we all had a bucket to put our eggs in. Mine was big because I wanted lots of eggs. And I found lots of eggs (see photo below). I was only made fun of a little for taking the chocolate away from the children. They don't need much though. I was saving them from feeling very ill. Or something like that.

Waiting for the signal to begin the hunt

I'll take that, thank you very much.

Quick, run BB, or your mother might steal your egg.

Where can I hide this thing? And how do I open it?

Mmm delicious.

My Easter stash.