Perth post-Christmas trip: staying there

Boy it was good to settle in and eat home-cooked food again. We'd been surviving on pasta with stir-through sauce for our dinners and either takeaway or chips and fruit for lunch, and Deb put on a wonderful spread for Shakey's birthday dinner. It was also good to sit down at a proper table with good company.

We stayed till late then drove down the hill to Graham's mum's place, where we shifted our bedding (king-size latex mattress, pillows and doonas) to the rug in the living room. It was very comfortable.

During our stay we visited Deb and Mark, Bruce and Josie, and Leonie and Tom, and Eddie and Jola, with rarely a couple of hours to ourselves. Louka has changed quite a bit in the past year: previously she preferred to play with me, or at least have me involved in her games with other children, but now she loves to go off and play without me. So she had a great time with Shakey and Samantha, Kofi, Tom and Dylan and Alice and Peter. In fact she enjoyed Alice's company (making another monster-repellent potion) so much we arranged a museum trip with her (and family). The Perth museum is smaller than the one in Sydney, but I think more interesting in some ways: the exhibits are arranged so that geology, paleontology and biology are all related to one another. It made the lumps of rock much more interesting to the girls.

As usual we drove to Hillary's Boat Harbour, not because the weather was so hot away from the sea - it was actually very pleasant weather. A pontoon was moored away from the beach, with a slide into the water. I took Louka and Kofi out to it and both had a slide, but after lunch when Kofi wanted another go, the slide had broken and was being removed from the pontoon. But we made a lot of sand sculptures on the beach, and paddled in the water, then did the usual tour of the aquarium.

Graham's dad had been to China (cheap trip for people of Chinese origin) and brought back a cheongsam for Louka. She looks lovely in it.

John and Steph seem to have decided to live in Perth (at least for a while) and are in the process of buying a house close to Deb's and Bruce's houses. We climbed the fence and explored the land while Louka played with her cousins. It is huge and rather steep, but they see it as a great place to bring up the kids they intend to have in a few years time.

In the meantime, John has been building a multi-storey cubby house for Shakey. It's not quite finished, but the lower levels are available for playing in.

Other pleasant outings included taking pastries from the Gooseberry Hill café to Mundaring Weir for lunch. Louka found a large Morton Bay fig tree and tried to build a "wild girl house" among its buttresses.

Another was lunch at the Core Cider House at an apple orchard. The kids were given lunch packs and pictures of apples and pears to colour in. The food was delicious and the view very pleasant.


And any time all the grandchildren got together, we tried taking a group photo: