More mind your language

We were driving in the car today. Rowan was annoying Nathan and Nathan called him stupid.
"MUMMY!" Goes the cry. "Nathan called me the s.h. word!"
I enquire if this is the same word that he has used other times when Rowan has complained.
And the answer was yes.
I told Rowan that that particular word was spelt with an s.t.
"Oh," he replied. Pause of 1 second. "MUMMY! Nathan called me the s.t. word!"
At least he's learning to spell.

He has also improved on his dramatics. They both went to work with Brett last Thursday/Friday for a good part of the day while I was working and were good little helpers and didn't use the bored word once. We then had a weekend of being very lazy and they were ok with that.

So, some improvements.
And back to school tomorrow!

more mountain escaping

I told you I had a lot of photos from our few days away.

If you recognise it as O'Reilleys then you are correct.

As a day tripper to the mountain I never realised all the things that you could do staying at the guest house.

The boys enjoyed the kid's club. They had gone for a walk and collected some things from the bush (from the ground of course - it being part of a National Park and all) and made some bush creatures with them. Nathan's is a bird with a rock face and fern wings. Rowan's is another bird made of an interestingly shaped stick and some leaves.

I am always impressed with Mum-me's sunset photos. The first night we were there, the sunset was fantastic! You couldn't get a bad picture. Awe inspiring.

We have quite a few bird feeding pictures. I think the Rosellas were Rowan's favourite. I think Nathan liked seeing the pademelons.

Mountain escape

I came home from work today to find Brett had bought my computer lots and lots of RAM and an external hard drive to save our backlog of photos to. Love the man! My computer has been running slow forever but he just tells me I'm running too much on it. Maybe sometimes... but man was it slow even just starting up!

Actually, (the boys favourite adverb!) I remember when the world wide web first made an impression on me. I was working at my first job about 15 years ago and as part of the new machine we purchased they gave us internet access. It was a great way to spend late shifts. But I soon grew tired of it and thought what's the point of this. It took FOREVER to upload a site and then you would quickly realise there was nothing of interest on the site. People were still working out how to use it. My, how things have changed. Even at its slowest, my computer was faster than back then.

But at the beginning of the week I was happily without a computer and the kids were happily without a TV.

We went about 90 minutes away up a mountain to have a mini break.

It was a fantastic short break. We had been there lots of times before on day trips before children, but not lately. It was really good to go there for longer.

As part of the guest house they had children's activities and guided bush walks amongst other things. We went on a pre-breakfast walk one morning and I think we saw more than 15 different type of birds! It was good to have it all explained and be able to pick out the different calls.

The boys loved the Wishing Tree track walk and raced all the way down and back again.

Rowan had been so proud of himself climbing up the ladder to 30 m above the rainforest floor. I was still climbing to the first landing when I could hear him talking to himself. "Come on Rowan, there's no need to be scared. Let's do this!" So cute!

Brett and Nathan somehow managed to have food poisoning (?) but we had wonderful meals in the restaurant. We got to watch a possum feeding while we had dinner one night and then watched Regent Bower Birds eating breakfast the next day.

Brett had wanted to see an owl on the night walks. The boys did but we didn't. He had also wanted to see a Lyre bird. I have previously. (My dad used to love photographing fungi when I was younger. We spent ALOT of time wandering about rainforests looking for mushrooms. Not exciting for small children. Especially be made to be a pack horse)

We did see the Whip bird doing his famous whip whistle, which was pretty cool. You hear them much more often than you get to see them.

We also saw a bandicoot and some fancy pigeons and thankfully it was too cold to see any snakes.
The best bit was the bird feeding. Being mobbed by Rosellas and King Parrots is pretty cool.

I am rambling on a bit but we had such a good time. There are more photos but I'll save them up for another time.

It was good to take time out and marvel at the intricacies of the rainforest and all the Australian flora and fauna.

Hope you had a good holiday too!

Mind your language!

Just to be fair...

We have had a few discussions with Nathan lately about reports of useage of certain words. We aren't entirely sure what was said because Rowan would call out from the other end of the house "MumMY, Nathan said the s word". But after some interrogation we found that only meant he was calling Rowan stupid. Not nice, not what we want but not what we thought.

In his prep class, however I have heard some of his classmates swearing within hearing range of Nathan so I guess he was going to get exposed to it. Not that I'm happy about that. Hence, the discussions.

Nathan says its hard cause the words are in his head now. We haven't heard him swear yet (and please not anytime soon) but Rowan has made allegations.

Any advice?

Rowan has worked out that he doesn't want to use swear words (so far) and it hasn't been a problem for him. Nathan can get a bit angrier than Rowan and as a toddler used his teeth as a means of venting his anger, and more recently sometimes his fists on his brother.

Brett wants to deal with it quite firmly and I do too but I think we need to teach him other ways to work through his anger as well so he can make better choices.

And then last night, after his shower he was singing away to himself a merry tune.

And then I listened a bit closer.

It's to the tune of Bye, Bye Blue Bird.

I've lost me underwear,

I don't care,

I'll go bare,

Bye bye me long johns.

It was a song the substitute music teacher taught the class a few weeks ago. What chance do I have?

(lots of prayer should do the trick, I think :>)

I'm bored

Rowan was very distressed yesterday. We had had two big days out and I thought a lazy day was in order. I think unstructured play and free time are good for little people. And for big people too, come to think of it.
Rowan does not agree with me this week.
He stayed in his pjs till quite late and watched far too much tv and was busy picking on his brother when he decided to come and whinge at me.
"What are we going to do today? We HAVE to go out today. I NEED something exciting to do every day of my life." He is now sobbing because I am denying him the excitement that he needs. I think the subtext was that his life wasn't worth living with out going out.
I tell him that boring is good and will help him appreciate the special things more.
He gets more distressed.
I tell him to go and get the mail.
OH JOY! This is an exciting job. He cheers up and I shake my head.
Thankfully this is a new thing for him and hopefully it won't last.
Well... this afternoon after a big exciting morning out with friends again we were travelling home by car. He asked if the friends were coming over to ours now. I said no. He asked when he would see them again. Soon, I thought.
Slight pause and then, how long till we get home Mummy? This was said with such sadness and pain I asked him if he was feeling OK. No, he was fine. 15 minutes I said. What? That's too long, I need to be home NOW. Why? Because I'm bored.
He didn't die of boredom in the next 15 minutes and had a nice quiet afternoon entertaining himself while I did some things outside.
Please may he change his mind set soon!

Terrific Tashi

You may not be familiar with the Tashi books by Anna Fienberg. We are just beginning to get into them. We had really liked the Minton series by the same author for younger readers and now have entered the magical world of Tashi.

Today was a very exciting day. We went into town and visited with Super Max and his entourage (my mum and Auntie H). The boys took turns fighting over who could walk him when in reality he was pulling them all over the place. Only 8 kg but he is all muscle and all Alpha Dog.

In the off-lead area he was chasing a beautiful pup. She was all of 4 months old but already weighs 20 kgs and is thought to reach 70 kg when fully grown. She was half ridge back, half Great Dane. But Max thought he was dog enough for her and ran around and around nipping at her heels. She took good care of herself just keeping out of reach.

You can feel the love can't you? (I found an old reference to Auntie H - Row used to call her Ah-Ah before he could get his tongue around her name)

But all this was only the prelude to the main event of going to see a play about Tashi. Tashi is daring and clever, brave and bold and tells the best stories. There was a packed theatre full of enthusiastic and appreciative little kids. It was a really good performance. Even though some of the story line is a little bit scary (Tashi is lost and then gets locked up by a stranger to be sold into slavery, but Tashi is brave and clever and escapes) they lapped it all up. And the actors were all so good with the children. All this and much more was on offer at the PowerKidz festival in Brisvegas.

Outside was the very appealing rock climbing wall. Seeing other tiny children having a go, I relented and up they went. They didn't get up that high, they have their own inbuilt height restriction so far, so it was all good. But they certainly enjoyed it.

So much so that we're going back tomorrow to do another activity with a friend!

Summer memories to warm your winter

For Christmas 2 years ago we gave the boys a cheap ($10) underwater camera that I found at Aldi. It got trotted out everytime we had people over. And it was great entertainment them being allowed a camera and allowed to use it under water. But boy, did that roll of film go on forever! I think we finally finished the roll of film about Easter time and then it sat in my handbag for a while waiting for me to take it to get processed.

I thought, gee, we'll have lots of photos to share of our friends children so I'll get doubles. And then I found out why it took so long to get through the film. The kids weren't used to a camera that required winding on. Thankfully, there are not hundreds of images all on top of each other. Just lots of times they thought they took a picture but didn't. So we only ended up with 2 photos of their friends out of the whole roll.

And lots of photos of bits of them.

So, the processing was dearer than the camera and it shows. I've tweaked the images slightly to improve them but I think all those hot summers and the age and quality of the film made for poor quality.

But I do like some of the effects. And I do like how incredibly happy they look.

Nathan looked at the photos while I was scanning them and asked if he could go and have a swim. When I said no, he said why not? He felt hot. (Nathan also looked at the previous post and said - HEY! How did you get those photos? - I told you he was very sound asleep)

Hope these memories of summer warm you up this afternoon.