Monday, September 18, 2006

No Mum Weekend

Elf has been away all weekend, for a wedding in the Victorian high country, at Dinner Plain. Not a convenient place to get to from Hobart, or from anywhere really. Best wishes to Scott and Sally.

Elf left at 5am yesterday, and I will pick her up later tonight at the airport. Hopefully the boys will sleep through being loaded into and out of the car, and the drive out and back.

Coincidentally Anna is away all weekend too, so Nick and I hatched a plan to get together and cooperate in herding the children about. We started with a look at Goulds Lagoon bird sanctuary at Austin's Ferry. A good roll-up of ducks, herons, native hens and some geese who may have been local backyard bludgers. I don't know if you should throw bread to birds in a sanctuary but Nick thought it was OK, so we gave them a good serving of (still frozen) sliced white. Marcus and I will come back one day without Michael and have a better look.

We moved deeper into Austins Ferry to a pleasant playground next to a cricket ground, with a giant slide. We shared the playground with three brothers. The eldest sent text messages while advising the younger ones that if they $%#n wanted to go %$#n home they could just ^&%*n keep going the way they were. It made me think home must not be all that flash. Michael tumbled down the spiral slide blissfully unawares.

Lily asked if the boys could come to her house to play, so with no other plans at all for the day, we did. Lily's little sister Katherine is only about 15 months old, so Nick had a much tougher assignment than I to manage alone all weekend. I soaked up the sun and ate too much. The boys needed the occasional corrective barking-at, but were pretty good. I finally got them to come home, using time on the computer as bait.

Michael was fiddling with my radio during the afternoon, and turned it on as someone discussing the media in Indonesia said that after a journalist had stepped out of line the government "punished the paper". Marcus said "How can you punish paper?"

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