Auntie 'Shell is coming to town

Christmas came and went, with toys, wrapping paper and lots to eat and drink. As is the happy fortune of the festive season in Australia, it was all over by Boxing Day, when a nation settles down to watch the cricket, sit on the beach and...um...clean the house. The mercury hit 30+ on 26th December and Alice hit the terrible twos for the day. Ever the last minute Larries, Stu frantically got on with the hoovering and bedroom clearing before Auntie Shell landed at 8pm that night and I resorted to driving Alice about the Eastern suburbs in the airconditioning of the car, since she is still scared of the hoover and just wouldn't sleep.

Boxing Day also saw the start of a rather odd phase, where Alice would literally scweam and scweam and scweam until she was sick, when put to bed at night, which thankfully seems to have passed. It was all a bit messy. Probably just recovering from the excitement of Christmas and then not wanting to miss out on all the fun when Auntie Shell was here, she soon gave up the projectile vomitting and concentrated instead, on learning to clap, continuing to wave and all her lovely new toys.

Loving the percussion table from Uncle Arnold and Auntie Cynthia

Mystified by the talking bear before putting her finger in its mouth to see if it would kiss her finger (she does this to all strangers - her own version of a freemasons handshake)

After New Year, Auntie Shell and I did the unthinkable and exitted stage left for two nights in the Hunter Valley for wine, facials, cheese and more cheese and wine. The poor wee motherless bairn and her father remained carless and probably trouser-less for much of two days, but had managed to keep themselves in two pieces for the duration, despite a 3am text deploring the lack of the car and the fact that they needed to be driving around the ^*&* ing Eastern suburbs right now. For me (as Craig Foster would say), the two days were all about the fact that someone else was having food thrown at them and I very much enjoyed my days away at the times when I knew that Alice was supposed to be eating or being put to sleep. I missed her enormously in the intervening periods and woke at 5am on the final day, too excited to sleep because we were going home. Auntie Shell was really delighted when I also woke her to see a family of kangaroos outside the window and then announced that we were leaving.


We returned to a baby who was addicted to toast and porridge (every second day only, of course) and who had learned to put balls into a funnel, without the funnel attachment to make it easier for her, so therefore into the tiny neck of the toy. This child - I am seriously expecting her to get up and run across the park one day - she will not entertain performing a new skill unless she can demonstrate mastery. I wonder if she has inherited any useful traits from either of us, rather than all our annoying ones?

Note that computer is on blog not Facebook in the background...

Alice had a lovely time getting to know her godmother and we both had withdrawal symptoms when she left. Now there is no one to play with Alice while I hose down the kitchen three times a day and she must amuse herself with suitable reading material.