I thought I had a few more months before Ethan’s scaffolding stage began.  I was wrong.

He pushes the kids chairs around the whole house to get to anything we usually don’t want him to get into.   How can you get cross at that face.  Too cute.

When in Darwin and you feel like feeding some fish instead of catching them, then aqua scene is the place to go.  This was a  few months ago, but better late than never.

Will enjoyed it, but Xavier preferred the swing. Ethan was just hot.

Waiting for high tide

Terry and William getting their toes nibbled on

The ugly fish

Xavier having more fun on the swing than feeding the fish

William is home sick from school this week.  To fill in the morning, Xavier decided he wanted to be a tiger and Will, always wanting to challenge me, wanted to be a Dragon.

Xavier was a difficult as a real tiger to photograph. 

Yes the Dragon looks a bit ‘Special’, but how else would you do it?  The red is flames coming from his mouth.

I think it’ll be a few more months until Ethan gets in on the act.

Sorry it has been so long between blogs, Terry is always on Facebook.

I cant believe it, Ethan has been in the world for 12 months already.  The year has flown by.  We kept the day pretty low key.  As with most first birthdays, there is more fascination with the paper and boxes, than with the presents themselves.  The day bought more excitement to William and Xavier than to Ethan.  Ethan got a blow up Pirate ship that Will and Xavier spent half the day in and managed to turn our pathetic excuse for a lawn, into mud.  Ethan played in it for a little bit, but Will and Xavier were a little too active for his liking.  The girls from next door came over in her afternoon.  We had to drag all of them out of the ship to get them to eat dinner.  The cake turned out ok, it was supposed to be Smurf inspired.  It could have been better, but that didn’t stop anyone from eating a piece or two.  Ethan enjoyed it.

William has been attending a holiday block of swimming lessons, during the 3 weeks he learns about as much as he would in a term. Anyway part of the training is putting your head underwater and holding your breath. During his lessons he hardly even gets his head under the water, but the other day we went to the swimming pool for our neighbours daughters birthday party and William was swimming and keeping his head under the water for a good 10 seconds at times. The video shows him by the edge of the pool but he was doing it out in the middle, he just would not get away from the edge when I had the camera.

Our next door neighbours bought there two older girls electric scooters for Xmas, On Sat afternoon William decided that he will have a turn. Took him about 5 minutes to master. To get it started you have to push it like a normal scooter, once it gets to about 3 kph the motor will start working. It has a accelerator like a motor bike and only has the brake on the handle bars and has a top speed of about 16 kph. Will now wants his own one to ride so he doesn’t have to use the Girls anymore.

About a two weeks ago we took the boys to visit Santa as you can see by the photo William was happy, Xavier still unsure and Ethan the scream says it all. We hope to get a better one next year fingers crossed.

On Friday 14 Nov 08, Terry was in charge of a recovery task to recover a overturned Excavator at the bottom  of a nine metre hole in the ground. The attached Video is the ABC news report from the 7pm news that night.

With a pool installed at the new house over the back fence and questionable fencing regulations in NT,

I have finally got my butt into gear and have all the kids in swimming lessons.    Its only been one week

and it seems all ok.  Ethan doesn’t wear goggles, purely photographic opportunity.

With the build up here and he wet season looming, our weekends will soon revolve around time spent

at the water park.   That’s one positive of the wet season.

This was at the end of Xavier having lunch.  He only made it half way off his chair before falling asleep.  This was not staged. 

He has been found in the climbing onto/off his bed position and often crashed out on the tiles, even on the tall stools at the

bench.  I don’t know how he hasn’t hurt himself.  Its always gives us a good chuckle though.

Cheeky Chops in awake mode.  Currently he is working on expanding his vocabulary, or as we call it, in Parrot mode.