Nanny and Gramps stayed in their caravan, parked in our driveway, and Uncle Michael, Aunty Nat and Saskia stayed in our house. Aunty Shani and her family live near by. And so we had a Becker family Christmas gathering.
The kids swam in the pool.
We ate the other half of our giant Christmas ham. This time Gramps cooked it on the Weber BBQ.
George's birthday party was held the weekend after his birthday.
We all sang Happy Birthday and we used the guinea pig cage as a table to cut up the birthday cake.
We were invited to Piama's birthday party the following week. Uncle Kim did a fabulous job on the birthday cake in the form of an artist's palette.
George likes me to read him a bedtime story in french sometimes. We are reading La Vie de Madame Souris. He has informed many of our Australian friends about the meaning of the word "mange" and has asked to learn more words.
We have a puppy! His name is Sooty. He is a Kelpie - Jack Russell cross and he is as cute as a button.
Max is a good dog owner. He takes Sooty for walks, feeds him, gives him baths and shampoos and conditions his fur. He has taught Sooty to sit, lie down and we are working on "stay" and "come here". Aunty Shani's dog magnets have come in handy!
Sooty is very interested in our guinea pigs and derives hours of entertainment from terrorising them.
Every single day of these summer holidays, Max and George have been playing with friends. It is simply unacceptable for a day to pass without a play date of some kind.
We have mostly been swimming in the backyard pool. We tried to go down to the river to swim at the rope swing where we were last year. The river is too full and too fast in this location for kids to swim in this year.
Shoes have been worn very infrequently over the past months, and the soles of their feet have become tough and leathery.
Our veggie garden is coming along. Here Max and George are pulling out weeds. Then planting radish seeds.
Here we are posing with our first home grown vegetable: a cucumber.
At the deep end of the Bairnsdale outdoor pool, in water that is 1.53m deep, George is comfortable swimming in water that is over his head. He swims underwater, until he needs to pop up for air. I didn't get a photo of it, because I was ready to dive in and rescue him if necessary.
George on his first day of 4 year old Kindergarten. This year he goes for 2 days per week, 6 hours at a time.
The day before school went back, we and everybody else in the region had the idea to get the kids hair cut. So after a long wait, Max and George went from mop tops to faux hawks.
