Father and Son

Amongst my favourite photos of the wee man is an ad hoc series taken with his dad. The first was taken when Mr M was only three months old. We were at the beach. The day was very grey. The sea was the colour of lead. But in the photo, taken in the days before we had a digital camera, there is J standing up to his knees in the water with a tiny, behatted boy peering over his shoulder.

This is the second in the series. It was taken on a visit to Adelaide on Father's Day 2006. We had just bought the hat Mr M is wearing as a Father's Day gift for J. I don't know who was proudest: Mr M to be wearing the hat or J to have a son who wanted to wear it.


And here is the third in the series. I took it last weekend at the Toy and Rail Museum in Leura in the Blue Mountains. The two boys are watching a pair of electric trains run around a little track. They are both entranced.

I think I'll keep taking photos of the two of them when they aren't looking. We'll see how long the hand-holding and arm slung casually around a shoulder lasts. And we'll see how long it takes for the wee man to tower over his dad.

Party Time

Every morning, Mr M asks 'Is it my birthday today?' He is, it seems, very keen to cease being three-and-a-bit and to celebrate being four. After months without any birthday parties to go to, April, then, is quite a challenge for a young man who is counting the days until he is a birthday boy again.

Here he is celebrating our friend Leo's second birthday in Yass a week ago (thanks to Leo's Uncle Sam for the photo). Leo missed out on his first birthday party - he was ill with chicken pox. But his mum and dad made up for it with a wonderful pirate party. Golden pirate coins were scattered on the ground for the treasure hunt. A treasure chest was discovered hiding beneath a tree, filled with pirate booty for the young pirates, including pirate eye patches and silky sashes. The pirate flag could be raised and lowered and raised and lowered and raised and ... by even the smallest of deck hands. And there was a park with the most enormous slippery slide! Pirate dreams were made of this.

This week we have celebrated a birthday closer to home. Mr M insisted on being the chief parcel unwrapper but has since graciously wrapped up all his Wiggle dolls and given them to me as gifts. And he's decided that really what I need most is a Shrek birthday cake (we might have to wait for the weekend for that).

At the end of the day, I thanked him for his gift and for being such a good boy on my birthday. His reply? 'It's my pleasure.' I guess he's learning something after all.

Footy Fever

Those of you who know us will be bemused by this week's title. We are not thought of as a 'sporty' family*. But today Mr M enjoyed his first session of 'footy training'. It wasn't planned. It was completely unexpected. But, boy, did he have a good time (and go to sleep without any trouble).

It came about because today was our day for collecting Jack and Charlie after school. And it was their first day of footy. After school we went to J and C's house to get ready for footy. (Aussie Rules, that is.) And at 4.30pm we all went down to the oval to kick a football around before training began. As the whistle blew and the coaches called the kids together, Mr M and I began to prepare to depart ... but then he was invited to stay and there was no hesitation, he wanted to train with the Under 8s.

For the next hour, as the evening got chillier and chillier, Mr M played 'Octupus' (a great game of tips I've never played before), practised kicking and passing and (this is what he did best of all) sitting on the ball listening to the coaches. He LOVED it. It's fair to say that his ball skills aren't very good. He has suffered from my illness last year by missing out on a lot of outdoor activity and so we are behind on gross motor skills. So it was pretty exciting to watch him enjoying training so much and getting a little bit better at throwing and catching a ball.

We now have to make a decision about whether to let him keep going. There's no pressure. He can go to training and not worry about things like playing games. And the timing is perfect being on a Monday evening when I'm not working. I guess we'll just wait and see how much he talks about it and asks to go again. And I'm loving the healthy exhaustion that meant he was deeply asleep by 8.15pm.

* What really makes someone 'sporty'? Do you just have to be devoted to a particular team - even if all you do is watch games? I hadn't really thought about sportiness until tonight. I'd gone along with the line that we weren't sporty. When I think back over my life, though, I've often been deeply interested in 'sport'. Frequently, it was disguised as dance. But there have been quite long periods of running, tennis lessons, aerobics and yoga classes, swimming. What I have never been is interested in 'team sports' - although even as I've typed that I've remembered that I've happily watched an awful lot of cricket and basketball over the years, and English football too. I guess 'sporty' is just another generalisation that hinders more than it helps us understand people.