What is it?

Yesterday at the park, while collecting gumnuts, we found one with a white membrane covering the opening. We conjectured that some creature, such as an insect, may have constructed the covering.

Today we took our gumnut to the museum to see if anyone there would know. At Search and Discover, naturalist Martyn Robinson looked at it through a little hand lens and said we were right: it was probably either a spider or a caterpillar. The spider would have an egg sac in there, and the caterpillar would have eaten the contents of the gumnut and stayed in there using it as a cocoon. He said he'd never before seen a gumnut used this way, and to let the museum know what emerged.

Of course, we also looked at other parts of the museum. The "alive" exhibition had a big craft table for making "beasties", and Search and Discover had bones, turtle shell, drawing materials and toy animals.

Lizard at the playground

It's cold at the moment, but at least the last couple of days have been sunny. Must be hard for reptiles: at the playground a blue-tongue lizard was sunning itself on the rocks for at least a couple of hours, undisturbed by all the little kids gathered round, staring and occasionally trying to pat it.

Trishy's birthday

For Trishy's birthday the family had dinner at my parents' local Indian restaurant. Louka opened the present she had made and wrapped for Trishy.

After dinner we all repaired to their place for cake.

Flowers for Daddy

Inspired by a Play School episode, Louka wanted to buy some flowers and surprise Daddy in the office with them. On Play School the flowers came from a market, but fortunately there is a small flower shop on the ground floor of Daddy's office building. The choice of flowers was based on Daddy's favourite colour, yellow.

Because of security, Daddy had to let us in from the lift lobby, but Louka held the flowers behind her back and told him to go back to his desk. When we got there she brought out the flowers, and Daddy was appropriately surprised and delighted. He cleaned his whiteboard for Louka to draw on for a while, then took us out to lunch at David Jones Grill Bar.

Pony riding

Today turned out unexpectedly fine, so the pony riding I'd enquired about was possible. The riding school seemed to be out in the wilds of Belrose, and we had to drive across a flooded road to get there, which all added to the experience.

The pony's name was Ziggy, and he was much larger than the fairground ride ponies Louka's ridden before. She was a bit nervous at first.


But soon she was waving happily.


She learned to lean back to go downhill and forward to go up.


And to sit nice and straight on the level ground.


Next time, she wants mum to ride too.

Kindy is great!

Louka is at last happy at kindergarten. She has a new partner this term, and this girl is happy to go along with Louka's pretend games - the other day they were pretending to be dinosaurs crossing the road, and "dinosaurs always hold hands crossing the road". Things are going so well that we're trialling full days instead of half days. Yesterday was the first time and it was good.

No kindy photos, but a couple of recent ones of Louka:

playing with blocks at my parents' place


at Stony Range Botanical Garden