Sensational Sydney

From work on Friday we zoomed up the Hume Highway to have a weekend of fun with Aoife, Cath and Eoin. Although we got to Aoife's house just before 9pm, all the girls were still wide awake with excitement! After much giggling and laughing coming from Aoife's bedroom, the girls finally bombed out around 10ish!

Saturday dawned with Eoin and Andy heading out cycling and running, while Cath and I got ready for a day at Taronga Zoo. It was all very novel for our girls to catch a train, ferry and then gondola into the zoo!

 

The view was great from the gondola ride, floating over various enclosures including the elephants!

First stop was the bird show. With various cockatoos, owls, falcon and even a condor, this performance was very cleverly done. The birds swooped low over the crowd and performed little tricks. At the end of the performance, the girls each donated a gold coin, which the cockatoo took from them and deposited into the money box!

We walked via the tigers, mountain goats, meerkats, elephants, gorillas to the fish 'n' chips cafe and then took our order over the grass near the dinosaur display. The day was warming up so we filled our tummies and enjoyed a rest in the shade.

Next on our list was the seal show. Again another wonderful performance by several different types of seals. The show highlighted different characteristics and behaviours of the seals as well as providing important take home messages about the environment.

Unfortunately we headed back to the farmyard only to discover much of it was under renovations, so we moved along to the wombat cave before stumbling upon a spider presentation. Another spectacular backdrop where the girls learnt about red backs, funnel webs and my all time favourite (not) huntsman. The zoo keeper had several live specimens in jars which he took around. The girls were quite funny because as the zoo keeper cam past them they would stand up and climb up another row to see the spiders come past again! I think they did this twice for each of the spiders.

We were all getting very weary by this stage (despite having an ice cream), so we peered in on the seals and penguins on our way back to the ferry.

As you can imagine, there was hardly a peep out of the girls at bedtime!

Before driving home on sunday we took the opportunity to cool off at Greenwich Baths, a little beach on the harbour. All up a lovely weekend - exciting times with special friends!

Almost There

It's been a hectic week, while Andy is enjoying the snowy conditions in Salt Lake City (he was invited to talk at a super computing conference.) Juggling the normal drop off, pick ups, cooking dinner is one thing but when you (stupidly) agreed to co organise the ACT School Orienteering Champs (next wednesday) as well as fit in after work meetings life gets a little tough.

As such, the girls have spent many hours in Grandpa's office as it has a computer which has OCAD (a special map drawing program), not to mention the big colour printer and the Orienteering ACT office is across the corridor. I'm pleased to say that most things are done - just need to print and laminate 276 certificates and visit the shed to check on equipment.

Today however made up for all that work. After spending a few hours in Grandpa's office in the morning, the rest of the day was spent partying. First was a combined 3 year old birthday party.  Slightly embarrassing moment occurred when, I'd assumed the little birthday boy (who I hadn't recognised)  was from Katy's Sundew's room. Apparently not! The parents of the birthday children are very good friends! Ooops anyhow a lovely party was had in a park with the children entertaining themselves mostly on the play equipment. The birthday cake was an impressive rocket lying on it's side with sparklers as the boosters.

In contrast, the next party, a 4 year old 'robot' party, was at the child's house with jumping castle and face painter! Even Katy who had previously refused to go on jumping castles joined in and was having a blast. More childcare families at this one. It was nice to chat and get to know the parents who I normally only say hi to as I'm rushing in or out of childcare.

By 4.30pm with two worn out children we headed home to recover and get excited about Andy arriving home at lunchtime tomorrow (assuming he makes his connection in Sydney.)

Cool Kangaroo and Joey

Last term Ella's preschool teacher Kelly introduced the class to Cool Kangaroo and Joey. This soft kangaroo with it's joey went home with students for a sleepover at their house. Students are encouraged to draw and write about Cool Kangaroo's experiences with them in a special book as well as talk about it at news time.

After a long wait, last week Ella finally was able to bring home Cool Kangaroo and as it was the Friday she had a whole week with them. Ella drew Cool Kangaroo and Joey jumping on the trampoline. Unfortunately it wasn't a very exciting week...Cool Kangaroo's highlights were going out to dinner on Friday night to a Dumpling House, dropping Andy off at the airport & going into Grandpa's office.

Regardless Ella loved the experience! I on the other hand was quite stressed that Cool Kangaroo would be left somewhere or worse still be attacked by Pippa who enjoys chewing and pulling out the hard eyes of soft toys. Thankfully Thursday came and Cool Kangaroo and Joey were returned in one piece back to Kelly.

Guthega Trig

Last weekend was spent at the lodge in Guthega with Andy's work colleagues (many of whom are from overseas). Travelling up after work on Friday night we converged at the Food Factory in Cooma for a bite to eat. We were the first of the group to arrived just after 6pm and were looking forward to some pizza only to be told the pizza oven took 40mins to warm up and the shop closed at 7pm!! What sort of takeaway shop closes by 7pm? Anyway after interrogating the menu again we settled for burgers (adults), toasted sandwiches and hot chips (girls).

Before driving again we changed the girls into their pj's hoping they'd drift off to sleep before we arrived at Guthega. No luck there. With the sun well below the horizon it was kangaroo, wallaby, wombat and rabbit time and boy were they out in force. For those who have been to Guthega before, the last 40km is quite windy road climbing through Kosciuszko National Park, with the last 10km on gravel. I lost count of the number of kangaroos and wallabies. By the end we were up to 6 wombats with 1 deciding to walk right up and around the car after we'd stopped (fantastic for our overseas friends.) The funniest incident though goes to one little rabbit who decided to run in our headlights for about 1km! It would start to head off to one side of the road only to change it's mind and veer to the other side! In the end we stopped and turned our lights off.

Saturday dawned a little foggy, but by the time we had finished breakfast the clouds had lifted and revealed the beautiful mountains. A group discussion on the day's activities suggested two walking options. 1. A 16km hike to Blue Lake (for the hard core group) and B. A hike up Guthega Trig (for the families, pregnant and injured). While the hard core group headed off along the valley towards Illawong and Mt Tywnam (to the left in the panaroma below), we ventured down to the dam. Guthega Trig is the first hilltop to the right of the dam.

At first the walking was easy - downhill and on a nice grass track. However once over the dam, we bush bashed for a little before finding the goat path! It was tough going especially for Katy and Ana who were both about as tall as the heath they were walking through.

After a short while we came across a patch of snow. This provided much relief from the hard yakka. We built a snowman, threw snow balls and had morning tea.

We continued but soon came to the realisation that Katy and Ana were getting very tired and would not make it to the top. So the group split - I ventured down with Katy, Ana and the rest of her family. The little girls made good progress on the way back making it down to the dam before we stopped again this time for lunch.

Meanwhile, Ella, Andy and 7 others headed up. Ella took every opportunity to climb trees and 'ski' on the snow patches. Towards the top, the walking turned to boulder hopping and was a little tricky however, the group reached the trig just in time for lunch!

At the top!

 Looking back to Guthega dam and village

Turns out that the walk is about 6km with 400m climb! An impressive effort especially by all the little people. Needless to say we had a fairly quiet afternoon.

With only a few hours for fun on Sunday, we walked down to Farm Creek. A bridge has been built across the creek since we were last here, with the now historical flying fox still there but locked up.

Time had come to pack up, clean the lodge and head home. We enjoyed showing our visitors the Australian mountains and hope they had as much fun as we did.

Slowly, Slowly

For Katy and myself, the plans for today included dropping Ella off at preschool then doing a multitude of errands involving lots of driving and getting in and out of the car. Our plans started well but things slowed down significantly....

Preschool drop off was smooth and efficient. Then off to our first stop - a new tube for the pram from the local bike shop. Easy. However when driving out from my street park, I discovered the steering wheel was pulling massively to the right. It seemed that the car decided to have some sympathy with the pram and the front right wheel was flat as a tack! After a 45 minute wait, the NRMA man swapped the tyre over and we were off again only now to include a trip to the mechanic on our list.

Next port of call was to fill the gas bottle up from camping world conveniently located around the corner from the bike shop and mechanic. Upon arriving the shop looked suspiciously closed and a sign on the front door revealed they'd moved. Re juggling of the order of the list saw us do another errand prior to arriving at the newly located camping world. While the gas bottle was being filled we thought we'd have a coffee break at the little coffee shop next-door.

Then we were off again, crossing off various tasks on our list without any major hiccups. Katy by this stage was sick of getting in and out of the car (don't blame her). Luckily at the last stop we found these oversized snails to lay on. We arrived back home just around 1ish, enough time to finish cleaning the house before picking up Ella and the fixed tyre. I'm glad though the tyre had it's moment today as we are off (after work) to the mountains tomorrow for a weekend away with a group of Andy's colleagues. Now off to do some packing....