Most people write themselves some very sensible goals for the New Year, such as, “Put 10% of my income into savings”, or “Read more non-fiction books”, or, “Eat less meatloaf”. Well, I’m certainly no different from most people, and this year, my list of goals has (so far) topped out at the grand total of seven. Goal number one on that list is: “Learn to juggle”.

I know that by this point, you’re probably thinking one of two things; either, “Hey, awesome idea! You’re awesome!”, or, “Why? You’re a dork!”. Likely it’s the first one, but for the haters in camp two, let me answer your question with another question: “Why not?”. Kristy also agreed that at least one of us should know how to juggle, just in case such a skill should one day be needed to save our lives, and to this effect, she bought me a set of juggling balls for Christmas.

You may think that a handsome young father of a toddler (such as myself) would be somewhat short on time for juggling practice, but as it turns out, it’s completely the opposite! You see, said toddler has never been motivated by food – something we really should have seen coming – and as such, we’d do pretty much anything to get him to eat. And now, with juggling practice on the books, we have one extra distraction to use while the other person quietly encourages food into his mouth in the background.

Actually, his comprehension is getting amazingly good, to the point where eating has now become a negotiation. “Oscar, if you eat that quarter of ravioli, Daddy will juggle for you”. Yes, we realise that negotiating a child to eat probably isn’t something you’ll see on Supernanny, but since Oscar would be pretty happy to skip solid foods entirely, we don’t feel like we have much of a choice. Worse, I fear that we could be setting him up for long term disaster in his adult life, whereby every time he sees someone juggling, he feels a sudden urge to eat pasta.

Worse still, it’s not even the juggling that entertains him; it’s the failure at juggling that really makes him laugh. The whole time I’m delicately managing three balls in the air, he’s staring at me, just willing one of them to go astray. Thankfully though, he’s such a lovely, helpful little boy, that when he’s not strapped into his high-chair, he’s only too happy to go and fetch the fallen ball on my behalf.

Ahh, service with a smile!

Blood is totally awesome – just ask Dracula! And as it turns out, it’s transferable too – and it doesn’t even have to be via the fangs-in-neck method that our favourite vampire is so fond of. (Is Dracula our favourite vampire anymore? Who would win in a fight to the death between him and those Twilight hipsters? Twilight is about vampires, isn’t it?)

In support of this transferability, the Red Cross blood van was inconveniently parked right along our path from work to Nandos, and try as we might, we just couldn’t not notice it. It’s huge!

If I were the type of guy who was into pimping out caravans, I’d definitely be stealing some ideas from these guys; their air-conditioning is the hammer!

Anyway – they didn’t appear too busy, so after filling up on chicken and chips, Ben and I signed up to bleed. I’ve tried to donate blood in the past – once, and it was way back when I was working for Compaq down the Goldie. They turned me down! There was too much iron in my blood, so they were worried that I might have haemochromatosis – a disease which causes you to have too much iron in your blood.

Now however, many years later and haemochromatosis free, the Red Cross was only too happy to harvest my goods. Of course, donating blood isn’t a competitive sport, and yet somehow they managed to turn it in to one by equipping the van with a leaderboard for fast bleeders! Apparently anything under six minutes is fast, and I managed to bleed out in 5:52. Yeah! My name and time is now written onto that board for the rest of eternity, or at least until someone wipes it off at the end of the day. If only there was a trophy that I could have unlocked.

I ride past Teralba Park at Mitchelton every time I ride the treadly to work. From the road, it looks like it has quite a large-sized play area for the little ‘uns. And so on Saturday, we went down to check it out with Karl, Sibylle, and their two boys Anton and Ferdi.

Now, I’m certainly not going to be one to complain about a free park – in fact, quite the opposite; I think it’s remarkable how many awesome parks the council provides/maintains around Brisbane. We love the little park at the bottom of our street, and we can get to at least two others that are equally awesome in under 10 minutes walk!

However, Teralba Park did not live up to my expectations (though perhaps my expectations were a little unfair). As I said, from the road, the play equipment for the kids looked huge, so I was expecting a closer-to-home version of Arthur Davis park at Sandgate. But actually, there isn’t all that much there, especially given that the park is always so busy – there was easily a hundred other kids around while we were there. The slides with the steps next to them were a bit hit with Oscar, but overall, there wasn’t too much for a little boy of his age!

Of course, we still made our own fun, mostly just chasing after kids who decided to run in every direction they could. Poor Oscar didn’t have much luck running through the various lengths of grass over uneven ground, though his frequent falls didn’t seem to dampen his spirit at all. We had one very dirty little boy by the time we got home!

One of our goals for 2012 is to spend more time enjoying our beautiful Australian beaches. It’s only 1 hour 10 minutes from our door to one of my favourite beaches up the coast – Mudjimba – which is just about the maximum length of time that Oscar can tolerate a car seat whilst awake.

I’m very lucky to have a workplace that is very flexible with hours, so we’re going to try and start making regular mid-week trips, probably on a Wednesday morning. We figure that if we leave home by 6 AM, we’re at the beach just after 7 AM, which means even with a good hour-and-a-half of beach time, I can be at work a little after 10 AM.

So far in January, we’ve managed two trips in 15 days (one weekend and one midweek), which I think is a decent enough ratio. If we could hit three to five trips a month I think we’d be doing well!

The right-hand side of our herb garden was looking a bit spent by the end of 2011. Our parsley and chives – which had both been very good to us – had gone to seed. Our sage was being eaten by something-or-other, and our original basil plant had never done too well in the soil.

Since digging up and replanting everything on the left-hand side of the garden, the plants there have been growing amazingly well. The basil grows faster than we can consume it (clearly we need more uses for basil!), and our cherry tomatoes have just started fruiting.

Given how well the left-hand side of the garden is now doing, we figured that the right-hand side should be treated to a little bit of replanting love as well. And so, we went through and dug up all of the dodgy old soil, and replaced it with about 150 litres of fresh new potting mix. The stuff that ended up on top was pretty loose, so we all had a go at stomping around to try and compact it a bit.

We’ve put in some new parsley and chives, and replanted the sage, oregano, plus the original basil plant. Only a few days on, the chives are already looking bigger and stronger – hopefully the same will be true for all the other plants soon too!

Because we’ve been a bit more organised about the position that the herbs are planted, we’ve got a decent chunk of space left over – I think we could easily fit another two plants in there. Any suggestions? We’d love to grow some coriander, but every time we try to, it dies! And we already have mint (growing very well in a pot), some lemongrass, and two chili plants (one which is doing exceptionally well this year). What are we missing?

After last year’s dismal attempt to see midnight on New Year’s Eve/Day, I have to admit that I wasn’t feeling too optimistic about seeing 12 AM on the 1st of January, 2012. But I’m proud to report that not only did we surpass our expectations, but we made it there without any napping required! Huzzah!

New Year’s Eve 2011 was once again spent at BaM’s house, and we had Micah and Sarah, Ian, and Mel and Ben join us for the journey. And a good thing too, as everyone played a vital role in preventing the house from burning down! We’re still not entirely sure why the BBQ’s gas bottle suddenly erupted with flames, but thankfully we managed to get the situation under control – admittedly with a little bit of help from two fire trucks, an ambulance, and an army of emergency workers.

More photos and write up of the story on the newly redesigned stickfly.com.

Anyway – everyone was on a bit of an adrenaline high after the fire crew left, so staying up until midnight suddenly became a whole lot easier. In fact, it was after 1 AM by the time we actually got to bed – easily the latest night we’ve had since I can’t even remember when! What troopers we are!

Many thanks to Nonni and Poppi who hosted a slumber party for Oscar, which allowed us a sleep-in in the morning!

Happy 2012, everyone!

As far as Christmases go, 2011 will probably not be going down in our books as “The one to be beaten”. No, I think for now the Christmas ski trip of 2007 remains unchallenged at the top of the list for me!

On paper, Christmas 2011 sounded like it was going to be a corker – four nights at Mom and Dad’s unit at Grand Florida, and no Christmas Day running around required. But sadly, things didn’t turn out quite so well; instead, a large part of my celebrations were spent resting in bed, trying to sleep off various sicknesses. It started out with back pain and stomach cramps on Christmas eve, which moved to fairly severe indigestion on Christmas day. Kristy shot up to reception to ask if they knew where she could buy some antacid, to which the 10 year-old boy manning the desk responded with, “Have you been bitten by an ant?”. As it turns out, the convenience store across the road had plenty in stock.

Boxing day wasn’t much better; my vision started going blurry early in the afternoon, which I’ve since learnt is an early warning sign for an incoming migraine. Unfortunately, this lesson was learnt the hard way, so most of Boxing Day afternoon was once again spent resting in bed. Oh, how the sunlight hurts the eyes!

In between my sickness and general feeling sorry for myself, the other troops did their best to enjoy their holiday – which is understandably difficult without me operating at full capacity. The opening of presents yielded quite a nice bounty – especially for Oscar, whose presents were so many (or more accurately – his opening technique was so slow) that he still hasn’t opened everything he was given.

All of the beaches were closed for most of our stay, due to the cyclone sitting off the coast. The swells were huge, and by Dad’s estimate, waves were breaking continuously for a few hundred metres back from the shore. By Tuesday afternoon, things had started to calm down. The lifesavers re-opened the beaches, and a few people ventured cautiously into the water.

Since we had to stay off the beach, we played mainly back at the resort. Oscar really loves the water, so he especially enjoyed swimming in the heated pool. We even had the pleasure of swimming with Al and Suz, and their cohort of kids on Tuesday morning!

As luck would have it, by Wednesday I was feeling right as rain, but sadly, our accommodation had expired. Worse still, the beaches were fully open again, and the waves looked amazing! Talk about a terrible time to leave!

Despite the sickness, it’s always nice to “get away” for a few days, and I’m very thankful for all my family members that were there to care for me. Hopefully I’l be a bit more sprightly on our next trip!

Christmas season is in full swing in Australia, and we already have two-and-a-half parties under our belts!

The first – and the half party – was at the Dahl residence last week. I’m only calling this “half” a party because it was actually a birthday party for Chellsie; however, given that its the last time we’ll be seeing the Dahls for a month (due to an amazing long overseas holiday on their part!), there was a bit of Christmas action going on there as well. The kids were all the big winners with lots of presents to start their holidays off right!

Party number two was my work Christmas party, with the venue this year being The Doomben Races. Although it was nice to spend some time with the workmates outside of the office, I don’t think I’ll become a regular race-goer. It didn’t help that half-way through the meal my stomach started feeling a bit dodgy, so that was the end of both food and drink for me!

I completely forgot to take any photos from the day, and all I’ve ended up with for memorabilia is this “awesome” shot that Rob took on his phone.

Classy, eh?

Finally, party number three came in the form of the Harvey family Christmas celebration, which was held on Sunday. I had to hit up the gastro stop in preparation, and thankfully, things were feeling a bit more solid down south come party time. Good thing too, as there was plenty of delicious food to be eaten!

Once again, the kids were the big winners with lots of new toys for them all. The light up super-bouncy balls were especially a winner with the Harvey circus! We did our best to try and get a photo featuring all four kids with Mia and Pa, but suffice to say, it is not an easy task. Believe it or not, this was the best one:

And, this is probably a close second. Not exactly a great example of Oscar’s best work, though.

Besides our lingering sicknesses, it’s been a great start to Christmas 2011, and there’s still plenty more food and presents (not to mention time off work!) to come!

After a week of doing as little as possible – save for recovering from uber-gastro, of course – we were pretty keen to get out of the house, just to check that the world outside was still trolleying along without us. Conveniently, Matthew and Emily were in town on a holiday from the UK, and we managed to convince them to join us on a journey to Natural Arch.

Sadly for them, my skills at programming DougDoug on the fly aren’t too crash hot, and before we knew it, we’d driven most of the way to Murwillumbah! Oscar by this point was politely asking for a temporary reprieve from his carseat, at around the same time we saw signs towards Tumbulgum – which Mom and Dad had recommended in the past – so we pulled over for some lunch.

Actually, it’s a lovely little spot – quiet, off the beaten track, and right on the Tweed River. We sat on the deck at the Tavern and enjoyed a hearty lunch, but by far the highlight (for Oscar at least) was all the fans on the ceiling! He spotted about 15 and was going absolutely mental pointing them all out to us. Kristy and I were a little surprised that he was completely nonplussed at the dig-dig-digger out the front!

Between Kristy and Matthew, we worked out where Natural Arch actually was and managed to get DougDoug to give us some revised directions, so we made our way back via the very scenic route through the mountains. Eventually we arrived at Natural Bridge national park, and made the short walk down to Natural Arch. It’s beautiful!

If you visit in the evenings, the cave fills with glow-worms, and walking into it brought back a faint memory from childhood of doing exactly that – though I’m hard pressed to remember exactly when that may have been. Anyway – definitely sounds like an activity to put onto the “to do” list for when Oscar is a bit older!

Although our day was a bit haphazard in the end, it was lovely to spend so much time just catching up with Matthew and Emily! And also to see so much beautiful scenery, just a short drive out of Brisbane – I think some more day/weekend trips through that area are in order for this summer.

As 2011 draws to a close, I’ve looked back over what Oscar’s been up to this year and made a few notes here as reminders.

Friends
Oscar’s spent a fair bit of time in the company of his little friends, with at least one play date a week. In addition to the cast of characters that we previously saw regularly, he’s also struck up great friendships with Amelie J, and little Lily who I met at the hospital. Amelie dotes on Oscar and shows amazing maturity and understanding of what he is and isn’t capable of at his tender age. Lily just lights up when she see’s Oscar and is one of the most social babies I’ve ever met!

Unfortunately our Qld Health Mother’s Group never quite got off the ground, so we haven’t spent time with those little people for ages.

Adventures
Oscar’s bigger adventures have obviously been this year’s travel, including his first flight (Melbourne) and his first overseas trip (Fiji). He’s also hit the beach a few times with trips to the Gold Coast, Mudjimba and Kingscliff.

Smaller adventures have included: sleepy bushwalks around Mt Tambourine and Noosa, safely strapped to Daddy’s back; regular riverside walks between New Farm Park and Teneriffe; and a visit to Debbie’s backyard menagerie!

Culture
Oscar’s a big fan of music and continues to bop along whenever he hears music. He’ll often sit beside a musical toy, tap it to make it start, then turn to play with something else. As soon as the music stops, he’ll turn back to restore his backing track. Maybe he thinks he should have theme music?

We’ve seen a few musical performances (Pineapple Productions at Paddington, and Katie Noonan performing Cradle Songs), and watched a puppet show. Surprisingly, the puppets seemed to be the favourite.

Playtime
Oscar loves walking down to the park at the bottom of our street and helpfully points out directions to us, to ensure we don’t miss his favourite destination. Swings and slides are met with squeals of delight, and there’s a new rule that you must sit on the adult swing beside him, rather than stand and push him. Walks about the neighbourhood are good fun, provided we go by the dog park and see who’s playing.

Reading is a favourite pasttime, especially Dig Dig Digging (thanks Meegan!). Oscar loves to turn the pages, point out clocks and things in the background, and make hand gestures and try words to “read along”, eg. the crane goes “up up up” as do Oscar’s little hands. Visits to the library are great and Oscar’s starting to help me pick out books rather than just play with the toys there.

Activities
Kids activities are expensive. Super expensive. So we’ve tried to strike a balance of free, discounted and paid activities. He’s loving his swimming lessons and so far they’ve made family beach holidays lots more fun, knowing that he’ll be keen at any time of day to jump in the pool.

Gymboree seems a bit overpriced, but I’m hoping that the padded flooring and equipment will encourage him to be a bit more daring (he’s a cautious soul!).

And indoor play centres are a fun rainy day play date, especially if you have a two for one coupon to the Strathpine centre.

Other than swimming, our most frequent activity has been free library Rhyme Time which was fun for Oscar and a great help to me in remembering some nursery rhyme lyrics! I’ll be keen to see what Toddler Time is like, now that he’s graduated to the next age group.

It’s hard to find activities that are aimed at this age group, but I keep reading about things that are fun to do with slightly older kids. Next year I’m hoping to join a playgroup (it’s been difficult to fit these morning sessions around his sleep time), and head on out for some more new experiences. Model boats and kite flying anyone?