Friday Walks

One luxury I have as a stay at home mom is that I do not have to stay inside on beautiful Friday afternoons.  Aubrey actually goes to an Occasional Care place on Fridays to give her a little "preschool time" and gives me a little time to myself.  It has been a win/win situation so far.  The icing on the cake is that some of my American friends get together on every other Friday to go for various walks in the area.  I have only been on a few of these walks so far, but I really enjoy them.  Most of the walks follow the coastline on paths built through the bush.  I look forward to these walks as it involves good company, awesome views, great exercise (have I mentioned the massive hills around here?), and new experiences.  I wanted to share a few pictures from some of the Friday walks.   A little warning: they are all taken with an iPhone, which doesn't always do the best with views into the distance. 

The first four pictures are when we went exploring some rock formations on the north side of Balmoral Beach (the local beach in our suburb of Mosman). 

The next set of pictures are taken from Middle Head after doing a rather challenging set of stairs from Balmoral Beach.  But, the view was worth it.

As we have been having more turbulent weather over the past few weeks, the rest of the pictures show a much cloudier sky.  The next couple of pictures are from when my friend, Diane, and I just took off walking down some of the smaller streets in Mosman and came upon Little Sirius Cove looking down toward the city.

Lastly, is a picture of me and my favorite walking buddies on our last walk from the Taronga Zoo to Georges Heights. It's not the best picture of us and it was a really cool, windy, overcast day.  But, we had a great time and treated ourselves to a fantastic lunch at Ripples at Chowder Bay after the walk (our post-walk food is sometimes the highlight).

 

I am definitely looking forward to more of these walks in the future.  But, as of today, the kids are officially on "school holidays" until July 16th.  So, I will have both kids for the next three Fridays. Plus, we are headed out of town next week.  We are driving up to check out the Gold Coast (about a 10 hour drive from here).  There will probably not be any updates on the blog until after we get back.  One complaint I do have about Australia is the absence of Wi-Fi in public places.  And, if there actually is Wi-Fi, I can only get it to work about half the time.  So, I will have to catch up the following week.  Hopefully, we will have many fun stories to tell.  I will keep my fingers crossed there are no bad ones!

Latest happenings

Sorry for no post last week.  The past week and a half have been busy, but there haven't been any huge, amazing events.  We mainly have just been living life with its ups and downs.  The first notable event was that Aubrey finished her term of preschool soccer with Soccajoeys on Thursday, June 14th.  She has really enjoyed soccer.  However, we are going to have to cut out one of her many activities, so I think her soccer career will have to be put on hold for now.  It was hard to decide which activity to cut out at this time since she seems to enjoy everything we put her in.  The deciding factor was that soccer is the activity for which we travel the furthest.  (We ride a bus 15 minutes to get to soccer.  All the other activities are only about a 5 minute walk from our apartment.)

Aubrey waiting for them to call her name at the last session

Okay, so she covered her face, but she got an awesome medal and certificate.

The week of June 10-16 was incredibly gray, windy, and rainy.  Even though the temperatures still got into at least the mid to upper 50's during the day, everyone felt chilled.  Especially when Aubrey and I walk at least 2 miles on a weekday to/from Carter's school for drop off and pick up.  We had been enjoying all the walking until the weather got miserable and stayed that way.

So, on Saturday, June 16th, no one wanted to leave our apartment except me.  It was yet another dreary, rainy day.  Sean stayed at home with the kids and I took a bus to Manly Beach.  My main reason for going was to visit the library and spend a little alone time.  Even though it was still soggy outside, I could not resist a walk along the beach (with an umbrella, rain coat, and rain boots on, of course).

I had to blow these pics up a little bit to show that even in that yucky weather there were tons of surfers.  Every little black dot in the ocean is a surfer's head.  They just could not resist the large waves the nasty weather was bringing in.  I know it is an adreniline rush for them, but I much preferred being bundled up on the shoreline.  

Finally, on Sunday the sun came back out.  We had really, really missed it.  Plus, Carter had gotten a new bike recently and the kids had not had a chance to go bike riding since we arrived to Australia.  So, we set off across town to the best park we have found yet, Centennial Park.  We hadn't visited it since we moved to the Northern Shores of Sydney, but we had the perfect reason on this day, the park is huge and offers wide open spaces for riding bikes.  It was a fabulous day at the park. 

Aubrey demonstrating her awesome bike skills.

Carter showing off his new bike-it's almost as tall as him!  He did really well on it though!

View of them leaving me in the dust since I chose to run instead of getting a bike myself.

Everything was great, until we were leaving the park.  We were sitting at an intersection waiting to pull onto a road heading out of the park.  We were all happily tired and ready for a rest.  Then, 2 cars collided in the intersection in front of us and we were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.  One of the cars spun around and bumped the front of the car.  It really wasn't too bad of a bump, but it still did quite a bit of damage to the front of our 2 month old car.  Instead of the original plan of slowly driving home while the kids napped in the car, we had to wait around for an hour and a half so that we could talk to the police and get everything wrapped up.  Not a perfect end of the day, but of course, it always could have been worse.  One of those moments when we were inconvenienced, but it is a good reminder of how lucky we are.    

The sun has continued to shine this past week.  After the previous week of constant rain, I will not be taking the sun for granted any time soon.  Since we had gotten a yearly membership to the zoo, and it is so close, Aubrey and I went down for a couple of hours on Monday.  Aubrey had a chance to pet a black headed python.  I was surprised when she decided to pet the tail.  I was SHOCKED when after a minute, she decided the pet the head of the snake.  After this, I redirected her away from the snake.  There is no reason to encourage her to get friendly with snakes when we are living in a country with 11 of the 15 most deadliest snakes.

Later in the week, Carter lost his first tooth since we moved to Australia.  He was pretty excited.  He was even more excited when he found the gold $1 coin the tooth fairy left him the next morning.  She really is magic!!

The weekend is now over as it is Sunday night.  We didn't head out for any major exploring this weekend.  We were in need of a weekend of rest and relaxation and our car is in the shop being fixed from the accident.  We don't need the car to go out exploring, but it helps.  We did find a new coffee shop today that is close to us and is now on our "favorites" list.  It is called Esquires Coffee House and it is on Military Road in Mosman.  We liked the atmosphere of it as soon as we walked in.  It had good coffee and good food.  When we talked to the waitress about how much we liked it, we found out that it is the first Australian branch of a Canadian company.  At this point, we consider anything from North America as being "close to home".  

After eating lunch at the coffee shop, we headed down to the zoo for the third time in 2 weeks.  It was a beautiful day and we had no other plans.  This was the first time we WALKED the entire way there.  I am still reveling that we can walk there in about 20-30 minutes (depending on how tired the kids are) mostly on quiet streets through a gorgeous, upscale suburb.  It is such a breathtakingly beautiful zoo.  We bribed the kids to walk back home by offering to buy gelato on the way.  It was a good end to the weekend and the kids were exhausted.  It was an early bedtime tonight, which no one complained about.

Australian Museum by Carter

 On June 11th 2012 it was the queen's birthday so I got a day off school! So we went to the Australian museum. When we got to the Australian museum dad dropped us off at the front of the Australian museum. When we got in the Australian museum we had to wait for dad to come in for a long time because he had to park the car. So before dad  got in the Australian museum mum started to sign a piece of paper from the front of the Australian museum office.  Then dad came in the front door of the Australian museum. The next thing we did was go into the Australian museum's museum part. When we got into the museum part I needed to go to the bathroom. And so we went to two bath rooms and they were closed for cleaning. The next one we looked was open so I went in it. When I got out we found mum and my little sister Aubrey in kidspace. Kidspace is a place in the museum where little kids play. Then I asked mum and dad if we could play in there and Dad said five mins. So we played in the for five mins.  My favorite thing I did in kidspace was when I dressed up in a room made out of mirrors! The next thing we did was look at bugs and birds. I found one bug I don't like and it is a stink bug and I found the funnel web spider that I know no one likes. Then we went on to the dinosaurs. We saw a lot of dinosaurs in the dinosaurs exhibit! One dinosaur I put my head in it's mouth I was really, really scared when I did it and I even saw a pretend dinosaur pretending to walk on to the path! The next place we went was skeletons there were some skeletons but not a lot of skeletons. Last we looked at the shop and then we went home! The End! 

Carter being quite brave

Aubrey was not willing to put her head actually in the dinosaur's mouth.

We all agreed that this little creature scared us more than than the big dinosaurs.  Description is below.

Carter being brave once again, even if the animal is fake.  Description of the animal is below.

Fish skeletons

Interesting scene of a human skeleton reading with his dog next to him, the cat in the corner, and the bird in the cage.

Taronga Zoo

We are enjoying a 3 day weekend right now as Monday is the observance of the Queen's Birthday.  When I looked at the forecast on Friday, I saw that Saturday was going to be beautiful with full sun and temps in the mid-60's Fahrenheit.  Then, the rest of the weekend would be rainy.  So, we decided to make the most of Saturday.

We woke up and headed to our favorite breakfast spot, Cafe Preggo.  Sean loves it because it has banana pancakes.  Then, we went on our next adventure to explore Taronga Zoo.  Once again, we are pinching ourselves that we get to live in this beautiful city.  It is a delightful zoo and we can get there by an 11 minute bus ride.  Actually, we could even walk there since it is less than 1 1/2 miles away.  But, since we knew we would walk quite a bit once we got there, we opted to catch the bus.  Since the zoo is located so close to us, we got a family annual pass and we are already looking forward to future visits!

The main entrance to the zoo

Not many zoos can give you these kind of views!

We have been in Australia 2 1/2 months now and we finally saw kangaroos!!

The famous Tasmanian Devil

We did an Australian walkabout at the zoo.  This was an emu we walked right next to with no fence between us.

A wallaby

The kids' favorite; the cuddly koala

Aww....

Our monkeys getting a closeup view of the other monkeys

I tried to figure out what this bird is once I got home, but to no avail.  (After I initially wrote this I found out it is a rose crowned fruit dove.) I have never really been into bird-watching, but there are some fascinating birds in Australia.

View from the sky safari

The Bridge from the sky safari

The elephants from the sky safari

This is the entrance to the zoo at the bottom of the sky safari.

Lastly, I will include a picture of the exotic turkey.  They have been known to be found in North America......

After spending several hours at the zoo, we went home and rested.  Aubrey and I took a nice little nap curled up together.  Then, we went to dinner at an awesome hamburger place called Ribs and Burgers.  It was the best hamburger I have had in 2 1/2 months.  My mouth is watering right now thinking about it.  Even though the restaurant is technically 2 suburbs away, it is only a mile from our home.  So, after dinner we got some gelato and walked home basking in our perfect day.
  
Now, we are just hanging out at home, hibernating from the rain.  Sometimes, that can feel pretty good too.  

Sydney Aquarium

This past weekend was extremely rainy and overall pretty miserable outside.  We had high hopes to go to an outdoor wine and food festival at Manly Beach on Saturday and then see the Taronga Zoo on Sunday.  But, the weather had other plans and it was not a good weekend to go out exploring.  So, we decided to check out an indoor attraction; the Sydney Aquarium.  

Purple crayfish

I'm not sure what these little guys are, but they are pretty fascinating.

The poisonous stonefish

Carter and Aubrey standing next to the Japanese Spider Crab a.k.a. Crabzilla.  The crab in this picture has not even grown to its full size.

This is a closeup.  Yikes!

Moon jellyfish

Closeup of a Little Penguin; the only penguin species to live on the mainland of Australia.  Supposedly, there is a population of these penguins on the north side of Sydney Harbour.

Tunnel under the sharks and stingrays

Saw shark swimming overhead

I'm not sure what kind of stingray this is, but love the polkadots!

There were also lots of cool Lego creations located around the aquarium.  The kids enjoyed the Legos as much as the animals.

Whale tail made of Legos

And the grand finale of the aquarium.  The whale is made with Legos, as well as the wall behind the whale.