Early wake up and straight to building his lego chain reaction! We got the first part complete, and it worked!
We headed to a wetlands reserve near the Maribyrnong with friends. Alex recognised the street, we’d been there maybe twice ever and not for over a year! So he led us along the river to the pirate ship park! To our surprise, Alex’s cousins, Aunt, and grandmother were all there! Alex played there for a short while, but similar to previous visits the interest was short-lived and he started collecting fallen branches and building a shelter. The kids spent quite some time on this, and it was a nice little space for them to hide in. We headed for lunch at another park – chips! Yum. After it was gymnastics. Daniel had a great session, lots of smiles and laughter. I wish I could watch Alex too! At the park afterwards, the kids were playing a game where Alex was the leader – superheroes I think. Karate, dinner and TV, as well as some more lego chain reaction building!
Alex had his first gala day of the season this week. He was very excited, and spent the day before inviting everyone to come and attend! He scored some goals, I forget how many. But he was happy with his day. Back home, more lego chain reactions whilst Daniel played duplo. Alex got a new iPad game – RescueBots and has been watching a lot of marble runs on youtube, especially lego ones. I set up some science demo, as Alex is wanting to do more, but they weren’t particularly great. I also strewed a children’s encyclopedia, open on a page about gemstones/rocks/minerals. Alex saw and was interested but didn’t want to read it. So I put it away.
We visited a new park with the tallest of slides! it was a pretty cold and windy day, though sunny and we couldn’t stick it out for much more than an hour. Whilst Daniel slept i did a few more sciencey things with Alex. Walking water, which he was not impressed by, and then melting wax crayons with a hair dryer. That was sufficiently messy for him to be happy 🙂
I also walked in on this :Â 
On Sunday we had a family dinner – we went out to a lovely woodfire pizza restaurant nearby with Vio’s parents and sister too. It was nice. We have delicious pizza, followed by chocolate cheesecake. Vio’s actual birthday was on Tuesday. Alex gave Vio a picture of them playing football together and wrote “happy birthday Daddy”. It took a few goes to get the writing right, but I noticed that he coloured in the sky all the way to the ground – no one has told him to do this (I remember being corrected to do this at school when I was in upper infants, and there are signs in the art room at my local school telling kids as much, along with lots of other art rules!) Vio took the day off of work and we headed to the city on the train (Alex checked out the progress on St Albans station). My brother got us a pass to the Eureka Tower for Christmas so we headed there. It was quite an experience! The elevator was really fast, and the views were spectacular! Alex recognised so much, and the whole thing looked like a model city. We went on ‘the edge’ experience, but Daniel got quite upset, he was frightened. We went down again and headed to Chinatown for dumplings. Alex ate so much, greedy piggy! He loves dumplings.
