Diggers and Dumpers and Trucks Oh MY!

Our little suburb is undergoing a LOT of changes at the moment. There's a big IKEA being built a few blocks up from us on the highway, Harry's Cafe de Wheels opened a franchise at the end of our street, local pubs have been undergoing gentrification and, most importantly, there is a bus depot being built two blocks up from the end of our street. It's always been a bus depot but it was more a place for old buses to die - the bus graveyard of the inner west. Now all the buses have been miraculously removed in some sort of bus Rapture, and in their place are....{prepare yourselves}...DIGGERS! And something that I've been meaning to do for a while is go up to the site with Ted and let him stand there watching the excavation action at his own pace (and not just in the twenty five odd minutes it takes for the lights to change at that street *sigh*).

So the other day we went for a walk up there after Ted could hear the drilling from our backyard and kept walking around mimicking their sound. So up we all trekked. Once there I'm not quite sure who was more excited - James or Teddy. I did only take video of Ted though, so you can at least see his interest being piqued. Not only that but whilst we were standing there a fire engine came barreling down the street with sirens a-blazing! Woot!



So we were all a bit down this weekend. About six months ago we booked in a camping trip with two other families. We *loved* our last camping experience and were all so looking forward to having fun again in the wilds of Greater Sydney. It can be a hairy place. But then two weeks ago Harriet was exposed to chicken pox at school and it seemed incredibly irresponsible to go and camp with close friends in close proximity during her potentially contagious period. So, with much regret (and, to be honest, more than a little anger and frustration) we had to cancel our trip.

So in light of our impending isolation, last week we went on a few little visits and adventures to keep ourselves riding on the coattails of those experiences. One of those was to one of our favourite homes - Jay's house! And how exciting for us to arrive and also find Jen and Saul there too! Harry had so much fun enticing large blue tongue lizards, drinking cups of tea, getting naked, building a creek, spraying each other with the hose (in about 18 degrees - I had on a hoodie at the time) and generally having so much fun that before we knew it it was after 5pm. There was even time for Lily, Remy and Jenna to have come home from school and for there to be some big races organised.


Ted, of course, was happier with much simple things. Like climbing on to Jay's lounge in a corner, piling every cushion he could find on himself, then having some fabric scraps thrown on top for good measure, until...Surprise! He'd pop out from beneath the material pile with that delicious big grin. Hard not to smile back, huh?

We're hoping to emerge from the other side of our exile without having had to scratch a blister. See you then!

ps - I had to change the layout of the blog to accommodate the width of the video links. Now that I have my spunky new video camera there will no doubt be many more videos peppered throughout the blog, so it seemed to silly to cut them in half.