More teeth and general news

It seems there will be a rush of new teeth over the coming week or two. Lucas already has his top four poking through and Sam's seem like they're about to pop through too. It is very cute, but it looks weird after getting used to Lucas' gummy open mouth smile.

Neither of the boys are rolling over or crawling yet, although Sam is looking like doing it first. We quiet often come into their room after a sleep and find Sam facing sideways or even completely rotated around in the bed. Lucas remains pretty much exactly as you left him. In fact there is generally a dent in the bed where his head was. Perhaps that is the issue, his head is too heavy! Once they're on their belly the are both fairly mobile although not in a crawling sense. Both boys rotate on their bellies and Lucas goes backwards, but no sign of getting up on their knees to crawl. Sam is getting better at moving from a sitting position onto his belly, but he always seems surprised when he does it!

Mitch starts at his new Pre-School next week 2 days a week (Monday and Tuesday). We're hoping he fits in well and enjoys it. He has been there for an orientation and enjoyed that, but I think he thinks that his friends from his old Day Care are going to be there. I hope he's not sad when they're not. Meeks is looking forward to having one less child to take care of for a couple of days a week, and we're hoping the little boys' sleeps will fit in to the Pre-School schedule.

Meeks and I are going to have a garage sale next Saturday afternoon to try to sell of some of the clutter in our house (think books, clothes, DVDs, CD, videos, high chair, platters, more platters, other stuff). There is just so much of it and we really don't have any room for it. We have just been putting more and more stuff up into the roof. So if you like garage sales come and visit us on Saturday afternoon.

Sandpit games

Lucas and Sam got a sandpit for Christmas. Mitch loves playing in it, but Lucas and Sam do get to have a play in it occasionally.

A different view

 

Little cutie boys!

Mitch the Tiger/Dinosaur!

Sometimes you have a conversation with Mitch that just has to be recorded or it will be forgotten. For Christmas Mitch got Ice Age 3 which he loves and has watched many, many times since then. He really would watch it a couple of times every day if we let him. Anyway, one of the characters is Diego the sabre toothed tiger. Mitch loves either pretending to be Diego or one of the dinosaurs. Today he decided he wanted to be a tiger or a dinosaur when he grew up. We asked him, how would he pay for food for his wife and children if he was a tiger? His reply that he would catch his food with his mouth and eat it with his paws and teeth! He said it with a completely straight face while crouched like a tiger and imitating how he would eat it. Hilarious!

Along with the acting like a tiger or a dinosaur is a habit of either bounding up and down the hall way on his hands and knees (in tiger mode) or stomping up and down the hall like a dinosaur. Very noisy when anyone is trying to sleep! It is also accompanied by loud roars which are amusing at first for the babies, but quickly become a bit scary. Mitch needs to reign in his inner dinosaur/tiger!

Reptile World

Well, for starters it's not really called Reptile World it is really the Australian Reptile Park. I go back to work tomorrow (boo hiss!) after almost three weeks off, so we decided, on the spur of the moment late Friday afternoon, to take Mitchy up to Reptile World near Gosford as we had been planning to do sometime while I was on holidays.

We got there at about 3:30pm and had missed most of the demonstrations (boo!) but as a result got a discount on the entry price (yay!). The first thing we did was watch a demonstration about spiders. The guy was playing around with a couple of Funnel Web spiders. You can see one here on the esky in front of him.

 The guy presenting was quite amusing and we learned some interesting things about funnel web spiders and how to avoid and/or capture them. I personally hope not to have a run in with them at all, but if it did happen I would know what to do - in this case apparently I'm supposed to get Meeks because the most commonly bitten people are young boys and men in the age group 25-40!

After the spider show we wandered to where there were a bunch of kangaroos sitting around waiting to be patted. Mitch loved it!

 

 

Mitch even stared down an emu!

After that we went and looked at the reptiles. They were in these large enclosures - lot's of lizards and snakes and turtles

 

Mitch loved it! Then inside the main building there was another reptile display with crocodiles and snakes and spiders! Here is the biggest, hairiest one I could find

Don't worry it's in a glass box, in a room with a viewing window.

All in all it was a really good afternoon and we were very impressed with the park and Mitch had a great time. We will have to go back again sometime earlier in the day to catch more of the presentations like the crocodile feeding.

Raspberries and cheeky smiles - A video!

Just before Christmas I ordered a new DSLR camera to replace the faithful and still very good Pentax K100D. It is the new middle of the range Pentax K-X. It has a number of advantages over the old camera. One of the fun things about it is that it does HD video as well as stills. I was playing around with it today and shot this little video of Lucas making raspberries (which he loves to do!) and Sam just being cute!



Enjoy!

Capturing the moment

One of the moments I love is when you manage to capture the essence of a personality in a single shot. Sam and Lucas although identical twins are developing quite different personalities. Lucas is more full on, where as Sam is a bit more quiet and perhaps thoughtful. Lucas gives you a wide open mouthed smile and Sam gives you a smaller, more cheeky smile. Lucas laughs out loud frequently and easily, Sam still laughs but you have to work a bit harder for it.

Here are a couple of pictures which capture moments which express those differences.

 

They're not perfect photos from a technical point of view. There is a bit of motion blur and noise, but one of the things I'm learning at the moment is that a picture doesn't have to be technically perfect to capture the moment perfectly.

Cousin Lilly's Party

The other day we went over to Mike and Mandy's house for Cousin Lilly's 4th Birthday Party.

Mike and Mandy's backyard has done a lot of growing. This is March 2008

And here it is now.

Meeks made another amazing cake. It is rare she gets to make a girly cake

Lilly loved it