Dinosaur Island

Dear Mum,
Well, that’s the first of the Christmas parties out of the way and, as you can see, it went pretty well.
However it’s late now so we’re going to sleep. Will tell you about it soon.
Love
Dan

The First Of Several

Dear Mum,
I’m still not quite used to this five days a week lark. I feel like I’ve been awake since Monday. On the bright side, it’s the weekend!
We don’t have a great deal planned, although it is my work Xmas party tomorrow night. Joshua is rather excited, and he doesn’t even know about the new part of the park, as per the first picture below.
In other exciting news Julie and Rick recently spent some time tidying up the fern bed in their back yard and, as you can see, the baby brachiosaurus finally turned up amongst the leaf litter.
Love
Dan

Wool

Dear Mum,
It’s bedtime but I thought I’d send you a picture of Joshua’s zip line. It’s different to the one you saw on Skype the other day because he’s been making a new one every morning.
Love
Dan

Young ‘N’ Old

Dear Mum,
Our trip to the Swan Valley yesterday was really good. We left after lunch, Bob drove, Josh slept most of the way.
The first place we stopped was Bells Rapids, a small river which apparently grows large enough for a famous kayaking competition to take place there. Joshua thought it was brilliant and didn’t want to leave.
However we had to, as we all needed a drink and a bite to eat. There are chocolate shops, nougat shops and cheese shops, along with wineries galore. We didn’t get to any wine sellers but had some nice sweeties and drinks.
Today we went to Penny’s party in the morning. Deanne and I chatted to Emma, Clayton, Kathy and Michelle while Josh played with Penny, Alice and Ella, oh yes and Danielle was there too, although her Mum didn’t stay. A good time was had by all and the boy seemed to be trying to eat all the food Emma had made.
After that we went to Deanne’s Great Aunt Chrissie’s party. A bit more subdued than Penny’s party, but not really surprising with an 85 year difference in birthday ages! We talked to Janice, Kody, Helen, Rick and a whole bunch of Dee’s slightly more distant relations. Julie is on holiday with some mates at the minute so she wasn’t there.
Back to the grind tomorrow. I’ve dropped a few pictures in ToF’s Dropbox, so get him to move them and get rid of them when he’s done.
Thought you’d appreciate the photo I took at one of the shops yesterday!
Love
Dan

I Survived

Dear Mum,
Well, I survived my first week on call! It was hard going at times, but I survived. So tonight I can turn the mobile off and just sleep, without worrying about having to answer a call at three in the morning. Not that it actually happened, but expecting that is quite stressful in itself!
Before breakfast this morning Joshua “found” a toy from a Kinder Egg, that Nana had bought him yesterday. He opened the plastic egg up, built it and started sticking on the stickers all by himself. I was very impressed, so I took a photo.
This weekend we have to shop, tomorrow afternoon we’re going to the Swan Valley to see what we can find. Sunday is Penny’s 5th birthday party and Deanne’s great great aunt Chrissie’s 90th. So that’ll be a busy one.
Love
Dan

Zoo Excursion

Dear Mum,

By all accounts all the kids were very well behaved on the kindy/pre-primary trip to the Zoo today. The little ‘uns went on a bus and Dee drove her car, taking a couple of the other Mums with her. Deanne got to look after Josh and one other boy. Joshy seemed to enjoy it, they even all sat for an hour in the afternoon and listened to a talk. Whether that was due to them being interested or being tired out after stomping round the Zoo for several hours I don’t know.

As for me, work was pretty good today, although I had to take a short lunch again, so I could pick up my box of infusion sets from the post office in Canning Vale. I then got a call, just before I’d finished making tea and had to help someone out who couldn’t get into the work systems on his new personal laptop. Sorted it just in time to say hello to you on the Skype and then we ate. Got Josh ready for bed, read him “how to unbounce a Tigger”, from The House at Pooh Corner, which he thought was funny, then did my ironing.

Nearly bedtime now, so I’ll sign off with a picture of Snuggles relaxing on one of the boxes we have in the sitting room at the moment while we’re sorting out the fourth bedroom.

Love

Dan

Snuggles on a Box

Fossil Maker

Dear Mum,

I had an early day today, partly because I’m on call this week and thought I’d make the most of the fact I was working anyway, more or less, but also so I could get home early enough to go to Joshy’s Gymnastics class with him and Deanne.

I arrived at about five o’clock, and got on with handling a bunch of jobs which had built up, while I was dealing with the network outage in Melbourne that I spent the better part of the weekend sorting out. The rest of the day was a mixed bag of new stuff and thing I’ve already encountered.

I got home in plenty of time to walk over to Joshua’s school and meet Dee as she arrived. Joshua is still doing dinosaurs at school and he brought out a fossil he had made of a stegosaurus skeleton, as you can see below.

Gymnastics was really good, he was the first of his group there and toddled off to sit down with the teacher while they were waiting to start. It was brilliant seeing him do the different exercises, like working on the bar, doing star jumps and attempting cartwheels. It made me feel quite emotional! He was very good.

It’s his day out tomorrow at kindy so I’ll find out how it went and try and write to you if I get a chance. Not quite such an early start for tomorrow, although I need to pick up some parcels from the sorting office (diabetes supplies), so I can’t leave too late in the afternoon.

Love

Dan

Fossil Stegosaurus

Housework

Dear Mum,
My first night on call last night, I got two calls, both from the same bloke. One was about a printer issue then, a couple of hours later, the sites whole network connection had gone down.
So far I’ve spent about three or four hours on getting it sorted, and it’s still not fixed!
Apart from that we went to the turning on of the City Xmas lights last night. There were people dressed up, singing and dancing. Joshua loved it, he had a look of stunned amazement on his face for the whole thing.
Today Deanne and I have been cleaning and tidying, with help from the boy. The house is starting to look almost presentable. Tomorrow we’re going to start on the spare room, which is still full of empty boxes, random things we haven’t unpacked and Joshy’s Xmas presents. It’s likely to take rather a long time!
Hope you like the picture of Santa in shorts!
Love
Dan

Park

Dear Mum,

Just having my lunch break at work so thought I’d write a few words.

The park we went to on Sunday was really good, it had a water play area and a few playgrounds. I don’t know if you can see from the attached picture but there was also a pond which had long necked turtles in it. Joshua had a great time running into and out of the water fountains and sprays, Deanne and I sat and watched him from a safe distance. We took a packed lunch which had salad, fruit, home-made biscuits (courtesy of Deanne) sausage rolls and fruit and chocolate rolls (courtesy of me), lots of water and a couple of cans of coke.

After Josh got changed we walked around the pond and went to a couple of other play areas, then walked back to the car (with Josh starting to say “my legs are getting tired”), then went to IKEA to get some cutlery to go with the outdoor crockery we bought a while back.

The temperature got up to about 39°, but thankfully we managed to stay in the shade for most of the day.

Deanne has put her name down to help with the Zoo trip planned by Josh’s school next week. Funnily enough most of her days off lately seem to have been spent at the zoo!

The other picture is of some of the trees in the park which I thought you and ToF might like to see.

Love

Dan

Long Necked Turtle

 

Spring Trees

Eating Out(side)

Dear Mum,

Thank goodness it’s the weekend! We had a slight lie in, getting up at about seven o’clock but had to get ready and go shopping first thing, as we were totally out of various things, not least of which was dishwasher tablets and ice cream.

We got home at about half ten but then had to race to Garden City as we had a date to meet up with Gemma, who is over, very briefly, from Sydney for her Big Nana’s 90th birthday party this weekend. We went to Miss Maud’s, a Swedish café selling various tasty cakes and sweets, including a chocolate éclair, which is exactly what I had. Josh had a marshmallow santa face, Deanne had a chocolate bombe thing and Gemma’s was a lemon cake. There was also a lot of talking and catching up to be done, Joshua was particularly well behaved, although towards the end of the time I did have to lend him my phone to allow him to amuse himself with the Cbeebies app.

Josh and I came home and had cheese sandwiches (I told him the old “why will you never be hungry at the beach – because of the sand-which-is there” joke, which he thought about for quite some time), but Deanne skipped lunch as the cake had been enough for her, she went out and picked her Mum up and they went back to Garden City together so Dee could choose her birthday presents and Julie could buy them. By all accounts they had quite a good time.

When she got back we put one of the chairs from our new table in the car to take back to Bunnings, it was broken when it arrived so we gave it back and took one of the ones which was on display. They did try to offer us one they had in the store room but it was a slightly different design and so we explained that it would be a bit weird to have nine identical chairs and one different one!

After that we tried to go to IKEA to get some cutlery to go with our plastic crockery (is that a misnomer?). However we arrived at five on the dot and discovered, much to our consternation, that five is when it shuts on a Saturday. Rubbish!

I took a picture of the table, from where I was sitting for tea tonight as I was digesting and Dee and Josh had popped inside the house. I made a cheesy tomato pasta which everyone seemed to enjoy. Joshy and I also had some of the aforesaid ice cream for pudding.

Tomorrow we’re going to do some Joshua things, as so far the weekend has been a bit adult oriented. We’ll probably try and Skype if we’re in at the right time.

Love

Dan

Our Outdoor Table