A quick trip away

We made a quick trip up to my parents' place this weekend. We left Friday evening, only about 40 minutes after we'd intended, after feeding and bathing both of the the kids. We went via Bells line of road, about a 110 km, which we did in about an hour and 45 minutes. Isaac slept most of the way.

Elissa had a combination things to keep her amused. Firstly, she had a few stories that I downloaded to Susanne's portable music player. I gave them a quick preview, and trimmed a bit of extra stuff off the intro/end that I thought would be confusing. I also learnt that apparently, the original version of "Little Red Riding Hood" does not have the woodcutter cutting open the wolf and retrieving grandma at the end. I suppose it reduces the violence, but isn't quite the happy ending kids are used to. The three stories she had were Goldilocks, The Frog Prince (which I later read more carefully and found a little lame) and "The Three Billy Goats Gruff". This last one is pretty similar to the book version we've been reading on and off reasonably regularly lately.

Saturday was a little cool in Lithgow, so we spent most of the day inside, the kids being mostly entertained by Nan & Pop and the never ending supply of stuff to play with. Isaac really liked standing up and pushing along a plastic roller coaster carriage. There's quite a long run,, so he'd get up quite a bit of speed and go for a relatively long time before he had to turn around and come back. The video below (from 10 months ago!) shows Elissa on the roller coaster outside. I'm not sure why, but I seem to have been pretty slack with the camera this weekend. Maybe it's because my eyes were in pretty poor shape. Susanne, Isaac and myself all seem to have had a bout of some sort of conjunctivitis.



Susanne managed a quick solo shopping trip to Bathurst without a pram, stroller or nappy bag, which must have been a nice change. A 125 km round trip is a bit further than the normal shopping trip, but such are the sacrifices demanded by the shopping gods. Besides, 125km on a Saturday between Lithgow and Bathurst probably takes about as long as it does me to go about 40km most days.

We came home after dinner Sunday night, as while the kids had a great time, Isaac was a little unsettled at night, and we figured a mostly-normal Sunday would probably be a good idea. I didn't think we'd have as good a trip home as we had up, but Isaac was asleep pretty quickly, and Elissa not that much longer afterwards.


This picture was taken when we stopped for petrol around Springwood. They were both pretty grumpy being moved into bed when we got home, but I'll take that over 2 hours of in-car screaming or crying anytime.

My eyes were about as bad as they got on the trip home. I had a choice between using both eyes, with oncoming headlights being transformed into lovely star bursts, or going for one eye, but next to no depth perception. I generally went with the former. I actually took some pictures of my eye when we got home, but I won't post them here, as they're a bit, "Gray's Anantomy" (no, not the TV show, the real Gray's Anatomy). I originally thought they might make a good substitute for the pictures on the wikipedia entry for conjunctivitis, but as I haven't had a proper diagnosis, I probably shouldn't post them, even if mine are more picturesque.

Sunday was pretty quiet from memory, although I've been a bit slack finishing off this post, so who knows what I've forgotten. I really should at least get my text written straight away, before my dementia has it's way with me. We did catch a skink inside, which originally had Elissa a bit squeamish. However, we caught it and took it outside, and I got her to happily hold it in her palm for a while before she released it into the garden.

I would've given Isaac a turn too, but I'm not sure that him eating it would have been a particularly favourable outcome for either Isaac or the skink.