Shopping with Dad

I went to Coles with Louka. After getting the milk, I asked if she wanted a treat. 'No' she said. I took her down the chocolate / lolly aisle. I asked her if she was tempted. She looked, yawned and then put her head on to my arm and fell asleep.

Birthday cake for Daddy

Decorating the cake:

Ready to blow out the candles:

Louka drinking water from a wine glass

Trumpeting

A while ago*, Louka being interested in music, Johnny got out his old trumpet and showed Louka how to use it. First she simply blew into it, with no result, then second try she did the raspberry sound and got a beautiful trumpet note.

*last October

In quarantine

Trish and John celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary by treating the entire family to a night's accommodation and dinner at the former quarantine station at Manly - now Q Station.

I set off with Louka a bit after 2pm and arrived before 3. We were the first to check in, and at first Louka just wanted to sit in the cottage and draw.

After a while I enticed her to go for an explore, and we almost made it to the beach when she discovered a flight of stairs that replaced a funicular railway to carry goods from the jetty up the hill. It was such a long flight she had to try it, and it took us nearly back to our cottage. Trish and John were just arriving so we settled in a little while Louka explored the banksia tree out the front.

Dinner at the in-house restaurant was very nice, and my parents had bought vintage champagne to celebrate. My dessert of cardamom and palm sugar creme brulee was particularly good. Louka ate all her chips and bread and some of her burger, and was pretty good on the whole - Trish thanked her afterwards for being so well-behaved, which pleased her.

Breakfast was a vast smorgasbord, of which Louka most enjoyed the machine-made pancakes. You pushed a button on the machine, and the display showed how far along your two pancakes had gone before they emerged from the roller at the end. After breakfast we got ready to leave, packed the cars and checked out, then headed back down to the beach for a while. Of course the swimming togs were in the car but that didn't stop Louka.

Manly Dam

Louka loves Manly Dam. I first took her there to feed the ducks, but now she mainly wants to go in the water. She wanted to introduce Trishy and Johnny to the dam, so today we took a picnic lunch there.

Louka spent most of lunch time chasing away the crows that were interested in our picnic. Then she fed the leftover cherry tomatoes to the ducks and geese. I was surprised they liked them. One duck kept diving for all the dropped tomato seeds.

After lunch Louka had a brief play in the playground while we packed away the picnic stuff, then we all walked across the dam wall and for a brief bushwalk. In the dam we saw a large tortoise, which turned out to be dead. Sad. Among the lilies we saw a waterhen on a nest of reeds, with two tiny fluffy black chicks. Later we saw the chicks running around with their dad on the opposite bank.

Up the hill there were masses of flannel flowers, as well as plenty of other flowers to interest Trish and John.

We walked till we got to a rock plateau from which we could see across the dam to the picnic areas. It was starting to rain a little so we headed back. On the way back we saw a water dragon on a rock. It kept moving a little way along the path, until we stopped taking photos and left it in peace. We saw two more below the dam wall when we were nearly back to the picnic area.

After that it was time to head home for afternoon tea.