Australia Day 2011

Australia Day (January 26) took on some new significance for us this year, for two reasons: 1. Eli is now aware that we live in Australia, and 2. Eli is always excited about days off from daycare - I call them weekends and public holidays, he just calls them 'home days'.

To celebrate Australia Day this year, Eli declared that we should "eat pavlova, with strawberries and passionfruit, for breakfast". For those of you that don't know, pavlova is a dessert, so I had to negotiate with Eli on this matter and re-schedule our pavlova eating for later in the day. One of the sweeteners in my negotiating was that we could play some cricket in the backyard first - a very Australian thing to do - and Eli was more than happy to launch my bowling into the garden, and as you will see in the video, over the fence (which is 6 foot high) and into the neighbour's yard too!




After our cricket session (and the retrieval of balls hoisted into the neighbour's yard), we decided to take Zoomy and Swifty for a walk in the backyard. We ran the hose from our rain tank for a while and then let the turtles wander around while I kept a watchful eye out for kookaburras, butcherbirds and crows that would probably enjoy turtle for their breakfast. True to type, Swifty just sat in the water, all tucked into his shell. Zoomy, on the other hand, was keen to explore and I frequently had to catch him and return him to the same section of lawn as Swifty.



Around lunchtime we had a visit from Addie, Ashford and Uncle Jeff - and in addition to having an Australia Day bbq, Eli and Addie had a great cool down (it was a nice hot sunny day) running around and getting sprayed by Uncle Jeff!




True to my promise from earlier in the day, Eli enjoyed finishing off his Australia Day with a mini pavlova, with strawberries and passionfruit. Now I know that I'm a long way from being an executive chef, but I did try to keep it patriotic and on theme by a) representing the colours of the Australian flag using the bowl, the pavlova and the strawberries, and b) representing Australia's sporting colours using the green and gold of the passionfruit. A fiting end to a fun-filled day.

Zoomy and Swifty

I've been wanting to get some pets for Eli, of some sort or another, for a while now. Our tadpole rearing adventure towards the end of last year had postponed my plans a little, but by last weekend I'd run out of excuses and my enthusiasm was back, so Eli and I went off to our awesome local pet store. I'd primed Eli by telling him that we were going to get a couple of turles and he was very excited about it, although on the way there in the car he announced that "maybe we can get a couple of turtles and a dog!". I quickly defused that suggestion and we didn't even stop to look at the dogs when we arrived.

The pet store had lots of short neck turtles for us to choose from, and thankfully, we were able to pick two that look a little bit different (at least I think so). We also bought all of the other necessary bits and pieces to keep our new pets...I think getting a dog might have actually been cheaper!

Here's our new tank, all set up - the turtles are in there, but they're pretty small so you can't see them in this photo.



Once we had everything set up I asked Eli what he wanted to call our new pets. He said, calmly and confidently, "Sophie and Sally". Whilst they are perfectly fine names, I just didn't think they suited our turtles, so we discussed it some more and decided to name them a bit more descriptively, trying to capture their personalities. So, now we have a turtle called Zoomy (the lighter coloured one) who is a really fast swimmer and generally a bit more active, and one called Swifty (the darker coloured one), who swims more gracefully but is generally quite timid. In the photo below of Eli holding our new family members, Zoomy is the one with his legs out, while Swifty is tucked up into his shell.



Here are some photos of our new pets becoming familiar with their new home.




Feeding times are already really good fun to watch and I'm keen to try some feeder crayfish or feeder fish sometime soon - just to make these little guys work for their meals a little bit more!

Bait boy and the great fishing adventure!

On the morning of Grandad's birthday (January 4), we decided to try our hand at fishing. Eli has always been interested in catching fish (I blogged about it last summer) and he was pretty excited as we headed out in the boat towards North Shore.

It turns out that his excitement was well justified, because we got some big bites as soon as we cast in our two lines. In fact, Eli and I reeled in his line and found, to our surprise, that we'd caught a shovel-nosed ray (Aptychotrema rostrata). He (Eli, not the ray) was ecstatic - as you can tell from the look on his face in the second photo. I actually really like that photo, because Eli looks like a big game hunter, posing next to his latest prize.



Amid all of the commotion, we pulled in the other line (and another shovel-nosed ray) - two fish from two casts is a pretty good way to start a fishing trip! After taking our photos, we released our rays back into the water...




The bites were still coming and Grandad and I were losing a bit of bait (presumably to more shovel-nosed rays!), so Eli took on the role of 'Bait Boy' - he'd run between us with prawns for our hooks and aside from the occassional dropped prawn (and later a few that he wickedly threw into the water!) he kept us going with his supply of bait.

Just as we were about to leave North Shore, I pulled in a small whiting (Sillago ciliata), which Eli enjoyed holding and releasing.



As the tide was coming in pretty fast, we decided to leave North Shore and head to a quieter spot on the river for some boat fishing.



Before long we were getting some pretty good bites again and Eli started winding his line in. After struggling a little, he asked me to help and before we knew it, he'd landed his first ever yellow fin bream (Acanthopagrus australis). We landed a few more bream, like the one I'm holding here...but as you can see from the photo, Eli was starting to lose interest and we were all ready to head home for some breakfast, so we pulled up our anchor and headed for the beach house.



We landed a few more bream and a moses perch (Lutjanus russelli) in the canal - what a fantastic fishing adventure. Based on this experience Eli will certainly be keen for more fishing action down the track - I just hope that he's a good luck charm and that our success (with bites and catches) continues...

Into the waves...

You can't really go to Noosa without going to the beach. Having said that, it is sometimes a hard sell to get Eli to the surf beach because he often prefers to go to his 'favourite place' on the sandbank. So, to get us to the surf beach I really had to convince Eli that it would be worth it. Fortunately, in addition to the promise of some waves, there are a couple of other ways I can pitch the surf beach trip to Eli. First, we're always a chance of spotting a koala (one of Eli's favourite animals) on the short walk to Little Cove - here's one we saw (and pointed out to others, including Grandma and Grandad) on our first trip to the beach (the photo is particularly for Eli's Aunty Anne, who still has not seen a koala in the wild!). On yet another trip we saw a large goanna basking on the side of a tree - Noosa Heads is such a great spot for wildlife.



The other appealing feature of Little Cove are the sea squirts (also known as Cunjevoi, Pyura stolonifera) that Eli loves to touch and make squirt whenever he gets the chance. Even though the tide was a bit high and the waves occassionally smashed into us, Eli was desperate to do some 'squirting'...here are a few photos of me holding onto him while he happily squirted away.



Little Cove is great for kids, because the surf is never too wild, there are no troughs or rips and there are always some critters to look at around the rocks. It's been Grandma's favourite beach for a long time and after a visit or two on these holidays, Eli declared 'It's my favourite beach too'!




Despite the poor surf conditions for most of our holiday, I was still keen for Eli to try out the boogie board again. He was really into it, kicking with his legs and enjoying the small rides he had. Hopefully we'll have better surf conditions next time - I'm keen for Eli to have a really good ride (and the odd spill) - I'm sure he'll love it.



After a busy session of board riding and sea squirt squirting, here's Eli enjoying a snack on the rocks at Little Cove. Life is so tough...

One very full river.

Our Noosa trips are never complete without visits to the sandbank near the mouth of the river. Unfortunately, due to the high tides and high river flows (from all of the rain we've been having) there really wasn't much sandbank to enjoy on most of our visits. This photo shows Eli at his 'favourite place', a small depression between two banks of sand dune vegetation. He always races to this spot when we come to the sandbank (and declares that 'this is my favourite place') - I particularly like this photo because it makes him look like he's on his own little island, complete with a catamaran in the background.



The fact that there was so little exposed sand on most of our visits also led to some confrontations between some of the sandbank inhabitants, most notably the terns, seagulls and bar-tailed godwits that had taken up residence and the young upstart (Eli) that occasionally took great joy in making them take flight.



On several occasions, there was so little sand at Eli's favourite place that we had to bypass it and stop at the North Shore instead, right near the mouth of the river. Here Eli enjoyed the stingy sand (it was quite windy) and he even went for the windswept and wistful look whilst gazing out into the water...



We eventually made it out to the sandbank one day when the tide was low enough for us to have a good look around and to our delight, there were heaps of soldier crabs. Eli loves running into the middle of the 'clouds of crabs' and he picks as many up as he can. Alora is a little more reserved in her appreciation of them, but she's starting to come around to touching them.




These final two photos are from down along the river where we enjoy picnics and fish and chips in the park from time to time. We'd scheduled, and then cancelled and rescheduled, fish and chips in the park a number of times before the weather held off long enough for us to finally do it, towards the end of our holiday.