Being a Monkey Child

So although she may be a real peach, Harriet is more than capable of raising a few eyebrows when we go out thanks to her high vocal volume. On one such occasion we had innocently thought to ourselves "Hmm, let's go out and enjoy this beautiful morning with a quiet breakfast on the beach down at Bronte". Harriet of course perked up her ears and thought MWAHAHA! We knew things were going to be difficult when, on descent into the hill where the Bronte cafes lie, Harry's squeals started to reach a rather annoying pitch. Thinking that just getting out and into the world may distract her enough to ease the squeals, we popped out of the car, set up her booster seat and ordered food. NO WAY JOSE! Harriet was absolutely determined to make the whole event a trial. *sigh* Sure she looks cute here trying to undo my wallet (which takes her all of about 1 second) but it must have been the only millisecond when she wasn't screaming down the place. Just to compound matters, there was a cafe dog that loved to hang around Harriet, making the squealing issue just that little more difficult to control. The cafe personnel were very happy to see the backs of us.
But then to counter balance that experience here's another of that cheeky monkey grin! Goodness knows what on earth she was actually grinning about, but it was obviously something very funny.

The next best thing to grinning at home is...grinning in the pool of course! Well any water will do, but the pool is especially fun since it's big and we tend to stay there longer than we do in the bath. Harriet here is walking down the ramp into the hydrotherapy pool at Cook & Phillip Park where she has her swimming lessons for now. She gets so excited that we have to try and hold her back from leaping into the water and finding out that she can't swim just yet.

Another look I tend to receive is this one; unfortunately I wasn't close enough to capture it full frame, but I think you can get the gist of it. It's as if to say "What in the world are you DOING?" and also a tad of "I don't really like it either, whatever it is". But you may be able to tell by the background stuff in this shot that we had finally moved into our new house. Yay! Unpacking is proving a new challenge, and what would normally take us about 2-3 days has now stretched out into a couple of weeks, but as of writing this entry we have got everything (mostly) under control. With Harriet around most things stay in a semi-chaotic state.

And finally Harriet doing her favourite thing in the whole world - muck arounds on the bed. She gets thrown in the air, plonked back down with force on to the mattress and rolled all around. She *loves* it. Papa is getting a bit of a face squash here which is just one of the physicla demands of parenthood.

I was just thinking the other night about all of the nicknames Harriet has:
Harry, Hazza, Hazzamaphone, Hazzinator, Squealie, The Squealinator, Trips, Crazy, Crazybaby, Tub o' Guts.
And they do tend to follow the theme of her personality.