Nanna Cuddles

Last Saturday, my parents and grandparents visited. I just love these two photos that were taken of my Nan during the day...

I just love how happy she looks as she gives our little girl a cuddle.

It's such a precious moment captured.

My Baby

Our friends who recently visited have a little baby. Now our daughter is OBSESSED with babies (to put it mildly) and spent the entire weekend kissing her, trying to cuddle her, patting her, talking to her - you get the picture...

One time we let her "hold" the baby. At which point she cuddled her and said "My baby".

Pretty quickly, baby's older sister jumped in and said "No, she's my baby."

Aren't kids adorable!!!

We've Been To The Zoo - How About You?

The weekend before last, we had some really good friends staying with us. We planned to do a trip to Australia Zoo while they were visiting.

In the lead-up to their stay however, Mummy was required to sing numerous renditions of "We're going to the zoo, how about you, you can come too, we're going to the zoo" (Mummy's taking us to the zoo tomorrow...), as well as listing out the many animals we may (or may not) get the chance to see.

A good friend of mine from mums group came along as well with her beautiful little girl, so all up we had three little girls under three (and a baby). It was a great experience and our daughter just had a blast! She loves animals but has never really seen any of them up close.

So on the Saturday morning we headed off to Beerwah and embarked on a wildlife adventure.

This is a bit of a dark photo but here's our little girl patting a koala...

Feeding an elephant...

Feeding the kangaroos and wallabies...

Patting a baby alligator...

Checking out the giant turtles...

Hanging out with Daddy...

And spending time with a friend.

Our one disappointment was that the one and only tiger on view at the time, was sleeping along the back wall. Honestly it didn't really look too different to our little Amir at home - just bigger (and fiercer)...

By early afternoon, the kids were exhausted (and so were we!) but a great time was had by all.

Busy, busy, busy...

Well as you can see, I've been incredibly slack at blogging, so here's an update from the last month/s...

Dakota did the transition to her bed rather nicely, and still (mostly) stays there. Having said that, we have had the occasional daytime experience that began with playing in (or should I say destroying!) her room for an hour, followed by extremely strong (incredibly loud so the whole neighbourhood can hear) objections to sleeping, resulting in a very cranky girl later in the day. There have also been a couple of incidents of falling asleep on the floor behind the door. As far as we know, she's only fallen out of bed about four times (onto another mattress on the floor). So on the whole, the new bed thing has been quite the success!

We've had family visiting - Dave's parents came down from Mackay recently and his brother Tim returned from London to live. His sister also moves back from London in January, which will be excellent! Now we just need them to move to the Sunny Coast...

Below are some shots of Grandpa trying to teach Dakota what to do on Uncle Tim's skateboard.

I've been trying to cross a number of "jobs" off my to do list - things that I've been wanting to do for ages but kept procrastinating over - such as stripping back and repainting Dakota's little kiddie table and chairs (that were mine when I was little), spring cleaning the house (YUK! - still working on that slowly) and finally getting around to printing out some photos of our almost two-year old daughter - just to name a few.

On the healthier side, I'm endeavouring to walk from our place and back a few times a week, to either Mooloolaba beach / or Alex beach (depending on the mood). So far, I'm mostly achieving that goal so I'm gradually getting fit again.

We're also trying to increase our "family time" as much as is possible with Dave's work being so busy. He's been working most weekends for a long time, so recently I decided that regardless of what work he had on, we needed to take some time out on the weekend even if just for a few hours. So one of the mornings, we walk to the beach for a paddle, and then have brekkie or coffee before coming home. It's been wonderful! We also decided that one night every fortnight, we will have dinner out somewhere - nothing flash but just to get out and be together as a family. Last week was our first time, and having dinner out with a toddler is quite interesting (dare I say challenging), but I'm sure once we start doing it regularly it will be fine.

Other than that, life is pretty much the same. Swimming lessons, playgroup, play dates, etc. The usual Mum stuff... I hosted a Melbourne Cup lunch at our place yesterday with eight of the mums from our group and the kids, including two new babies. Have I mentioned how obsessed our daughter is with babies!!!! She's very gentle with them, but becomes quite a handful when they spit their dummy out - she seems to feel it's her duty to put the dummy back in the baby's mouth, and we literally have to physically move her away from them before she'll eventually stop. We currently have on loan from the toy library a little baby pram which she's loving putting her little baby dolls in and carrying them around. She's recently started trying to feed her babies food from her little toy kitchen as well. It's all very cute!

Dakota is LOVING reading at the moment. She always has but now she's starting to remember how certain stories go, so she "reads" along with you. Here's a beautiful shot taken one night of Dave reading to Dakota and her little cousin, Isabella.


She's also mastered the ABC's and can count to 14. Our neighbours (who have been teaching her Italian since she was born) can get her to count to 5 in Italian, but she only does it for them. She also completely understands what they are saying and responds when they ask her questions. It's incredible!