Holiday at Parkes

John, granma and granpa and I are up at the Parkes telescope this week which is good fun. I am observing at night, and John is entertaining granma and granpa during the day! John is having a lovely time running around in the open spaces, and stomping up and down on the wooden floor boards. He is very spotty though, a little bug attacked him and ran all over his face leaving a trail of bite marks! Tomorrow granma, granpa and john are off to the dubbo zoo - sounds like fun!

Swimming starts...

John had his first swimming lesson on friday night, it was great! He is in a class with one other girl, and they are so cute! Both with their little swimming caps and goggles. John was slightly tentative to begin with, but by the end of the 1/2 hour class was trusting the teacher and he and the other girl practiced dog paddle while floating on top of a large floaty mat thing. We chatted with the mother of the little girl, I don't know if she appreciated the wit of dicky and I calculating whether John would be old enough to make it to the london olympics!

Liz and the kids down for the weekend

Liz, Lachie and Holly came down to visit for the weekend which was great, if not totally exhausting! We took the kids out for tea on friday night to Taco Bills - lovely food, but John and Lachie were more interested in looking out the window and taking all the take-away menus from their holder and running around with them! Decided eat-in was definately the go for saturday night...
We went to the botanical gardens on saturday, it was a beautiful day and the kids just ran and ran non stop. We went to the childrens garden too, which has lots of touchy-feely things for kids. We walked back to southgate for lunch, and ran into my cousin Kim who we haven't seen for over 5 years! Very bizaar, hopefully we'll catch up with her again soon. After lunch we caught the train back to Hawthorn, and had a quick play in rocket park before coming home, the kids were a bit cranky and exhausted.
On sunday we just went to rocket park for an hour or so, the kids were still exhausted. Liz left around lunch time, and John was pretty tired all afternoon, but didn't go to sleep till 7:30pm.
The photos here are from the botanic gardens....

Weekend at the beach

I took friday off last week and we headed down to anglesea for the weekend which was fun. The weather was pretty good - sunny, not too windy. John tried out his new wetsuit, there is a piccy of him in it at Anglesea beach above. Unfortunately we all were coming down with colds, and John had a bad cough so we didn't spend as much time as we would have liked at the actual beach. But its nice just getting away from it all. We watched only the last 10 minutes of the grand final - very exciting for once, and I was barracking for Sydney (for some unknown reason), who won in the end so that was good.
John woke up at 4am on sunday, bright as a button and ready to play.... mum and dad were not quite as enthusiastic at that time of day!! So we put a dvd on for him, and went back to bed, and like a good boy he watched the whole thing and came to get us at 6am which was slightly more respectable, but not for a sunday morning!

A house for us... (weekend cont)

Forgot to say in the last post - we went to see a house on saturday morning, in Clifton Hill. Its an eighties sort of townhouse - quite ugly, but big, and has heaps of potential for improvement. Best of all its located just 1 block from the park, and a <10 min walk to the train station and local primary school. We have an appointment with the bank manager on weds to discuss finance... unfortunately its up for auction, which is a bit of a stress.

A fun weekend at Granma and Granpas

We went up to Ballarat for the weekend, leaving after John's music class on Saturday morning. It was really raining heavily for a lot of saturday morning, but cleared up in the afternoon luckily. John had a good play with lachie and holly, and they watched the newly released 'Robots' at lizzies house. They were all pretty tired sat night, John was asleep by about 8pm.

On sunday we had Ken Mayberry's 60th birthday party, that was quite fun, lots of kids for our lot to play with, and caught up with all the Mayberry goss. John fell over about 10 times though while we were there, I guess from a mixture of excitement and exhaustion from a hard weekend of playing!

We had yummy La Porchetta pizza for dinner, then drove back home to melbourne. John was asleep about 5 mins after we left mum and dads, and didn't wake the whole trip back.

Extra-curricular activities for a toddler...

Its quite daunting the amount of classes/activities available for a 3 year old - John goes to music (mini maestros ), and has done so since the start of last year, apart from a brief trip to a different music class at the start of this year which we left after we were sent out of the class! It was their fault for having the class in a large church hall with wooden floorboards... it was much more fun for John to run crazily around the hall making stomping sounds than sitting on the mat and listening! It was the first time I've ever been sent out of class I think (I was a good girl at school!!), quite traumatic.

Anyway, I have just booked John into swimming lessons, just in time for summer. We also had a brief foray into 'toddler gym' which John loved, but it was a 45 min drive to get to the place, way to far for a weekly thing.

We're off to see a house to possibly buy tomorrow, in Carlton north... I'm very excited...

Posting pictures

Looks like it works! This is John with his little Japanese friends Rio and Sana.

M.A.S.H.

MASH is one of John's favourite TV shows - we are lucky enough to own series 1-5 on DVD (thanks Liz!), and last night John demanded we watch MASH. Fine by us!! I think the main thing he likes about the show is the theme song, we all sit there and la la la to it at the tops of our voices (what do the neighbors think!).

Starting again

Here we go again... lets see if I can get this blogging thing happening.
Gee its rainy and cold today, got caught in the rain on the way to daycare and had to take shelter under the verandah of the bottleshop. John poking his nose on the window to look at the model cars inside.

First Post

Well, here we go... we are blogging, baby!