The putt-putt prodigy.

Eli has wanted to play putt-putt for a very long time. I must confess that I had held him back because he hasn't always been great at regulating his power when it comes to ball sports, but as we wondered past our local driving range the other day, I thought "Why not?" As you might imagine, he was very excited (and a bit miffed that there was a putt-putt course so close to our house that he didn't know about!).

As for his playing, well he was more timid than I had expected he might be (no signs at all of wild swings and flying golf balls!) and not unsurprisingly, he was really good at it! It really only took him a couple of holes to get the hang of it and before long he was slotting some amazing shots, including an awesome hole-in-one that I miraculously managed to capture on video! I really like his facial expressions in this video - it goes from concentration, to shock, to elation.




All in all it was a great little outing. On the way home I made the mistake of telling Eli about the more complex course designs that I've seen - including water features and lots of tunnels and moving obstacles - so it should have come as no surprise to me when he woke up this morning demanding that we find a harder course to tackle! Thankfully I distracted him today, but I'm sure we'll be heading to the coast sometime soon to try out our luck on new courses...

The experiment.

"What happens when food is left on the ground?" That is the question that I posed to Eli when we were thinking of a Science Fair project for him. Being well trained, Eli confidently declared "The ants come out and clean it all up". This then prompted some follow up questions for us to ponder, like "do ants like everything equally?" and "are the same ants everywhere?". Since neither of us really new the answers to these questions, we set about designing an experiment to find out. The plan was to see who came to clean up when we left ham, a chocolate biscuit and some pear out for them. To see if the same ants did the same thing everywhere, we decided to run the experiment three times, once in our front yard, once at school and once in the forest behind our house.

We ran the experiment at home first - here are some photos of our set up - with roughly equivalent amounts of ham, biscuit and pear placed out on our front lawn. We stepped back to watch what would happen and then recorded what we found every 10 minutes for a bit of an hour. Eli and I both kept records - his were quite a bit more artistic and creative than mine were!











What we learnt from our front yard was that ants just love ham! We had the occasional visitor to the biscuit (a green ant) and pear (some flies and a spider!), but the ham was constantly attacked by some very hungry looking tufted tyrant ants!

Armed with our knowledge of what happened at home, we stayed behind after school one day to run the experiment in a very different environment. We expected to see lots of ants arriving and maybe to all three foods since the daily activities of kids are likely to make the school grounds a very rich hunting ground for scavengers. What we didn't expect, was for a very hungry skink to show up! As you can see in these photos and the video, this little guy stalked his prey (the flies), but was also happy making off with ham.

 Eli continued with his colourful recording of the results and he was even keen to present his findings in a video or two as well...

Overall, we had only one species of ant (coastal brown ant) visit at school, with at least a couple present at each of the three food types on most of our recording occasions. Once again the ham was the most popular food though, with in excess of 50 ants trying to drag it back to the nest by the end of the experiment. The other difference from the test at home was the large number of flies present (including house flies and vinegar flies) and these were very much to the liking of our friendly little skink.

The final test was deep in the bushland behind our house. Here we expected to find more diversity in the ants that showed up and once again we saw a different mix of species arrive to feast on our ham! These ants were by far the largest and the most colourful of any we had seen and even though they didn't come in large numbers, it was great to watch them. That being said, we did have some late arrivals in large numbers and there were quite a few flies around too - not the same ones as at school though.

Now all that remains is a bit of work for Eli and I to turn all of our data into a poster for the Science Fair. Fortunately we have quite a bit of time before that needs to happen, but stay tuned for a Science Fair post in a few months time.

Scooting!

Eli has had a scooter for a while now and after some serious practice in recent times he's getting more and more accomplished and, as Grandma recently found out, much faster too. To address the dual challenges of keeping up with him and getting me some exercise, I decided that I'd get a scooter too, so Eli and I can explore the local pathways together. So, after making my purchase Eli and I headed down to the bay for a scoot. It was a beautiful day, just perfect for scooting our way alongside the water.















Some distance into our adventure we came across a really interesting little harbour which houses some pretty dilapidated old boats that Eli was keen on investigating. Many of them aren't seaworthy anymore, especially the semi-submerged one with the rocking chair in it!






We ended up scooting for a touch over 1.5 hours, so we both were pretty tired by the time we got back to the car. Eli was a little bit sore too, because we went down one pretty steep section of the track (which also had a lot of rocks and sticks on it) and Eli started going way too fast - his solution (which worked well in terms of slowing him down) was to basically launch himself over the front of his scooter and come down hard on the path at full stretch. Not surprisingly, he got back up with a few tears and some new gravel rash on his hands and hip. Thankfully he regained his composure pretty quickly (I told him it was ok and that I have had gravel rash on my hip probably 1000 times in my life and that it is all just a part of growing up) and was back on the scooter (and braving the steeper sections again) in no time at all. We've since done a few more scooter adventures too, both in our neighbourhood and along the Brisbane River, so I think I'll have to do some more homework to find where all of the best paths are... 

Party time

In addition to the fun and games we had with family on his actual birthday, we decided that we'd also host a party so Eli could celebrate with his friends. I'd agreed to this task on the proviso that Eli would help out in getting everything ready and to his credit he was very helpful, especially when it came to tidying the place up (ie tidying up his toys!) and loading up the party bags. This year we went for colourful noodle boxes, with a couple of glow sticks sticking out the top (I thought that they looked great like chop sticks - aren't I clever? - although I'm not sure that anyone else made the connection).

Regardless, we were ready to party! We had about a dozen of Eli's friends over, mostly from school, and Eli loved it. We played a few games - first was dancing statues which was a closely run thing with Eli just being edged out from top spot (thankfully he didn't cry or even complain about not winning, which is surely a sign that he is getting older!).







...statues...

 ...not statues

After dancing statues we had a mintie hunt outside - I'd hid two packets of them throughout the garden. This time Eli came in third (second if you count the fact that he found some extras the following day), with one of his friends filling his pockets with 26 minties!

The final party game was a new creation of mine, sort of a slightly more grown up take on 'pin the tail on the donkey'. Here the kids used a nerf gun to shoot three darts at a target, with the closest to the target taking home the sharp shooters trophy. Eli had suggested that this game would be best if they still wore a blindfold, but in the interests of safety I decided that it would be best if they could see where they were shooting. All of the kids enjoyed this game and Eli came in second again - which, as he pointed out, meant that in the overall scheme of things he would have won the party games gold medal (yes, he is still just a little bit competitive).

After the games it was time for Cake #2 from Grandma and boy did she deliver the goods with this effort!

And here's Eli ready to blow out the candles (thankfully not the re-igniting type this time)!

The highlight of the party (for me at least) was when Eli gave his speech after cutting the cake. I'd asked him the day before to practice what he wanted to say, to make sure that could remember it all on the day. And here's pretty much what he said "Thank you everyone for coming and thank you for your presents. Thank you to Grandma and Grandad for making the cake and thank you to Grandma and Grandad for helping out. And thank you Dad for ...doing good things (insert chuckle from all of the parents here). And I hope you all have a great rest of your day." Given that six year olds never give speeches at birthday parties I was pretty impressed and very proud of Eli's effort. What a great big six year old I have! 

Six of the best

Eli is six. That means we're now only seven short years (and a bottle or two of mutagen) away from him living his dream of becoming a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle. Yes, he is obsessed with the Ninja Turtles. As a result, he was totally thrilled when most of his birthday gifts were Ninja Turtle themed. Not only did he get the Leonardo sword and mask that he'd been asking for over the past few months (thanks Grandma Susan!), but he also got Ninja Turtle books, games and even undies (I couldn't resist!). He also got a very large playset from me, so now he has a great place to play with his Ninja Turtle toys.

Here he is with his freshly assembled Ninja Turtle playset - it is almost as big as he is!















Given that he'd been waiting so long, I guess I shouldn't have been surprised that he wanted to wear his mask all morning and practice his Leonardo moves with his katanas. This is serious stuff!

After a busy morning of Ninja Turtling, we headed over to see Eli's cousins - Eli was very excited to share his birthday with them and gave each cousin a nice big cuddle to celebrate his gift (some Ninja Turtle lego!).

Here are Eli and Alora...

...and Eli and Harrison...

...and Eli and Charlie...

 ...and Eli and Oliver...

...and then I went for the totally impossible group shot...

After a crazy runaround in the afternoon, we had dinner with the whole family, including Grandma and Grandad. Eli was very happy being the centre of attention and was very excited to blow out six candles! It took him quite a while to get them all out though, because Grandma had unwittingly bought some re-lighting candles, so everytime they were blown out they'd light themselves up again. Eli's big puffs eventually won out and we all thought that it was very funny.

And then Eli cut the cake and made a wish - what a big (and very happy) boy he is now!

On the boat with Captain Eli...yarrrgghh!

For reasons that are not entirely clear, but are obviously linked to the fact that he's a five year old boy, Eli often becomes a pirate when he's on our boat. On a recent trip down to the beach for a surf, Captain Eli was the first on board and here he is, ready to go, with his hands on his hips and his crooked pirate 'smile'.


He even kept is pirate smile on whilst driving the boat...

...and here he is navigating his way across Weyba Creek with First Mate (Uncle Tyden) watching on. He did a really good job (not too much oversteer!) and I think he looked very much at home behind the wheel.


After much prompting from me, he eventually dropped the pirate smile for one more typical of a landlubber (I think his cheeks were starting to get sore)...

Easter feaster

The Easter Bunny has a hard job. For our family he even does it harder than Santa, because we have an easter egg hunt and the poor rabbit has to place way-too-many eggs throughout the garden. If that's not enough, he has to contend with the threat of rain and the risks posed by curious birds or other animals that might feast on the booty before the kids emerge. In addition, the eggs need to be evenly, or at least fairly, distributed across all of the kids - five of them - to make sure that nobody misses out (I can just imagine the tears and chaos if Eli raced around collecting every single egg, or worse still if ended up with none at all!).

To the Easter Bunny's credit he came up with a very clever scheme to avoid the aforementioned Easter disaster this year, by laying out streamers that served as a guide (and a barrier) for each of the kids. Eli and Alora had no trouble chasing their trails, but the younger boys needed a bit of coaching, as you can see in the photo.  

At the end of the trail lay the 'grand egg prizes' for each child and as you can see, all of the kids were pretty happy with their lot. And Eli certainly wasted no time at all in feasting on the spoils of his hunt.

Later in the day we gave each other our Easter gifts - I gave Eli a toy instead of chocolate (I had a feeling he'd get a lot of it from the Easter Bunny!) and as you can see from the photo, he was pretty happy.

Another Easter down and it will be interesting to see what the Easter Bunny comes up with next year...I imagine that his planning should commence shortly.