Monday, November 11, 2013

Frantic Friday

 
 Friday was busy.  Friday afternoons are quite a routine with us - it's a pick-up from school for Harriet, then a play in the playground at Stanmore until it's time to pop up and see Tori for Harriet's violin lesson.  Then it's off home for our weekly 'switch-off' dinner, where we switch on and watch an episode of The Amazing Race all together.  It's a lot of fun, we all laugh and talk about the countries they're visiting and which teams we like, and then everyone is usually exhausted and it's a reasonably early night in preparation for the upcoming weekend.

This Friday, however, we were out from the get-go.  And we stayed out.

During the day Ted and I met up with a woman and her son we met in a local playground one day.  We were doing our thing with the "last ten pushes on the swing before we go" and Ted elects to have those final ten in Japanese or English.  On this day he chose Japanese, and the woman nearly jumped out of her skin.  Turns out she is Japanese and is trying to encourage her son to speak it, because he insists on speaking only English.

So off we went to a local playcentre to have them play together.  By the end Ted did have him pointing to the different colours and saying them in Japanese, so we left there with new friends and second language encouragement in our wake.  Then on to our play and violin, and then it was a race over to the train station to head into the city to catch up with my gorgeous friend Jen, before she headed back to London. 

 
When we arrived, Ted was determined to head straight to the water play area, despite everyone already more than halfway through their dinner.  When one has mentioned water play, one must be prepared to follow through with water play!  

The dinner was pretty delicious too.  For those of us in the Inner West the idea of paying more than $10 for fresh, delicious Thai mains seems like a rort, but we did get a good dinner for it.  Jen was moved to photograph her plate in order to show how great the food is in Australia.  I forget just how miserable a lot of the eating experiences we had in London were.  *shudder*



These three were of a similar age and got down to some serious discussion at one point.  I love overhearing children of this age discussing life and the experiences it holds.  Obviously a lot of important topics being covered here.





Harriet decided to engage the drunken patrons of Darling Harbour in a little cultural enlightenment.  A sign was composed and the busking ensued.  James took a video of it I do believe, which I will try to unearth and upload.  Harriet corralled the children into acting as an audience, and in around fifteen minutes, managed to make over $22.
And what do you do with $22 in change?  Well if you're not making large portraits on tabletops, then you are a fool.  Because check out how great they look!




And the evening still wasn't over for me - I had my book club on so I had to hightail it back home around 8pm. leaving the children having an amazing time in the water playground.  They danced and ran and explored and enjoyed that water for the next two hours.  James told me they didn't get down into bed until 10pm - hot and damp and flushed and thrilled.

I was home about 12am in the same state.  My book club is pretty fun.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Dear Mama
i actally made $22.80 or thearabouts.I like how you included my moneydude!

Love

From

Hazzy xxoo

casso said...

Thanks for the detail Haz - it's this sort of thing that makes the blog all about you! xxxxx