Western Picnics and Vegan Lunches

With yet more incredibly gorgeous weather gracing our path, Saturday was picnic day! We went out to the wild (north)west to visit Michelle and Erik and Rachel came along as well on her groovy new motorbike.

We all went and sat across the road where the local high school has a cow and a sheep fenced up. Harriet didn't seem too taken with the rural livestock, but boy, give this girl a nipple ball and she's in heaven! In fact, give her the option of two nipple balls and she doesn't quite know what to do with herself. Freud would have had a field day on this picnic because not only was she playing with two large balls covered in nipples, she was also quite fond of holding aloft the large foam rocket that Jimbo took to play with. Hmmm...large foam phallus between two balls anyone?

And again with the drum. Oh boy, the drum is great fun. This photo was more to show the mayhem lying in her wake behind her here. The recycling box regularly gets upturned and thrown around a lot. You'd think that would make us empty it frequently wouldn't you? Well sure, you keep thinking that. Meanwhile Harriet will enjoy picking up large empty 2L bottles of soda water and seeing how far she can carry them down the house with her. What's the fascination with carrying things that can't be comfortably carried I wonder?

The next day held more food wonderment - we met with Scott and Damien at Bodhi, a vegan yum cha place in Hyde Park in the city. For those in Perth yum cha = dim sum. And I can hear the meat eaters exclaiming about how horrible a vegan yum cha must be but people, people, calm down. This place has incredible food - it is packed out on the weekends with vegans and vegetarians and meat eaters alike. Harriet ate like a champion, chowing down into some greens and dumplings nad red bean buns but I think she loved the sticky rice the most. There was a little plastic ride on car that another child had there and it took everything in our power to try and steer her clear of riding away with this child's car at every opportunity. She also enjoyed sipping my water so much that I asked James to go and ask for a straw so that she could sip some easily. Yeah well, things are nice in theory. The straw incident left me with a puddle underneath my seat that caused James to remark "Hey Cass, you've wet yourself". Yeah, thanks for that.

Her other favourite activity for the afternoon was trying to talk to Scott and give him the occasional half-eaten morsel she had, or her little Swedish man (aka Mr Orgen Borgen). She was actually rather smitten with Scott (well, who isn't) and we have a few very cute photos of her looking up adoringly at him,

Oh and speaking of adorable photos, here's one of her giving her monkey grin. It's where she flicks her lower jaw over to one side and grins away - I love it!