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The street at the back of our house has no through traffic. It is only used by residents to park at the back of their home (like us). This means many people use the street and nature strip for playing games. Piet loves playing football there. Emma sometimes joins in or otherwise likes being around. As a lot of boxes have been moved from the shed to the attic, much of our remaining junk has moved to the shed, making the car port look spacious.
Crawling
Juliana has started crawling this month. Within a week or so, she had built up speed and now she has so much
strength that she is occasionally pulls herself up to standing. She spends most of her day outside her playpen, being entertained by herself,
mum,
big sister or another family member.
Juliana is slightly slower with crawling than Piet, who crawled at just under eight months, and Emma, who did it at just over seven.
Since she can sit up straight, Juliana's baths take a lot longer and are still more enjoyable for all.
In our new neighbourhood, we have more friends with whom we can do school run pooling. On another sunny afternoon, we just met up with Michelle and Phoebe, who joined us for some fun on the beach after school. Piet and Emma enjoyed some craft with mum. In the hammock on the front veranda, they tolerated each others presence for a little while until the inevitable fighting broke out.
School holidays
In the school holidays, we took Piet to Canberra, where his grandparents picked him up for a week's sleepover in Bendoc on his own. He had a great time, continuously busy with something he liked and getting heaps of attention. His grandparents commented on his inexhaustible energy. When he came back, he looked older, more mature. Oma made this
about his stay.
Snow
As we had not been to the snow for years, we had decided to pick Piet up in Jindabyne, which is an hour and a half from Canberra and only half an hour from the snowfields. On Saturday night, we stayed in a hotel and were at the snowfields the new day around ten. As
Emma was now older than
Piet had been when we last went tobogganning (in
June 2011), the kids could
drag their toboggan up the hill themselves, quite a relief. Not the we had much
time off, as
Juliana was only occasionally happy sitting alone
in the grass and preferred to be
carried. Piet and Emma were able to
entertain themselves together for a while, but after a while Piet dropped out as his toboggan did not go fast enough (or possibly the sleighing was not as good as in his recollections or maybe he was still full of his very succesful stay at opa's and oma's). Fortunately, Emma kept
going and
going. Piet found some joy in making
snowballs and throwing them at the poor
cameraman.
