just a little funny

Pete gets back from Manila on Friday and he’s telling me about it while we drink red wine and try to ignore the baby and I’m listening a bit like you do with half an ear, cause it’s work and blah blah blah blah but then I hear him say

‘….and so I’m staying at this hotel and it’s posh and you know it’s posh cause when you pull up in your car they take out a little mirror and check underneath for bombs…’

WHAT”?! I says,

what? he says.

and i have to laugh because that’s what denotes posh in Manila. They got the courtesy to check your car for bombs.

Again, I love you New Zealand.

Kelly is the Tarlton of Tarltons

Last week I was the happy recipient of the spoils of a relationship gone bad when Clare gave me one of those voucher books that you buy for  reasonable sum and then get thousands of food and entertainment vouchers with all sorts of crazy discounts in it. Long story short the fella she was seeing worked for the company that creates said voucher book and gave her one for free.

ANNNNNNNNNNNNNYWAY, she don’t want it, we so want it and this weekend used it to get one of us in for free to Kelly Tarltons Underwater World!!

When I was a kid we went to the Tarltons and it was phenomenal, you step onto a travelator that takes you through what I recalled to be a serious of underwater perspex tunnels while sharks, stingrays and some boring fish swim above you (I mean seriously compared to SHARKS). It was amazing. And now with Annie we have the perfect excuse to go back again, cause we went once as a couple before she was born and felt like pedophiles in the kiddy corner. So yey!

Now it’s even better with a whole snow cat ride through penguins (which made me think of that part in Happy Feet where he’s all trapped behind glass, trying to explain about everyone taking their fish, bad moment) but Annie thought it was super cool. And they’ve got an amazing area with all these beautiful seahorses, they are so weirdly beautiful.

So here’s Annie at the start meeting her first giant Stingray.

Below, Pete desperately tries to get Annie to look at the sharks swimming RIGHT OVER OUR HEADS and at the big black flesh eating eels, which at first he tries to get the attention of  by hanging his fingers over the lip of the water until I read out the ‘feeds on live birds, gulls,etc’ and yet….

 

…all Annie wants to look at is the travelator beneath our feet.

 

Doing the penguin head mask thang…

Driving the snow mobile. That’s not a grimace on my face, I’m making driving sounds….nnnnnnnnnnnrrrrrmmmmmmmmmm you know?

Pete holding back the jaws of death. Annie with an early look of mild apologetic embarrassment that she will learn to perfect as the years roll by…

Got my navel out for the boys.

And best of all at the end of the day the baby is very very very tired and that’s really what it’s all about for us parents some days.

Back to the Haven with Mum

Last weekend Annie and I spent the arvo with mum back down at Beach Haven wharf where I grew up. The thing that sets this beach apart from all others is that it was made with love and determination by a Mr Larking back in the 70’s and 80’s.  A lot of coastal Beach Haven is mud flats, which although provided the best arena to grow up in (crab hunting, mud walking, lots of lost jandels and sometimes screams of terror at getting sucked down by the bog), it was never pleasant to sit on with a picnic. Anyway, Mr Larking painstakingly brought  sand by the bucketful back ,20-30 buckets at a time on his little flat bottomed schooner from across the channel at Whenuapai. He built the beach we sit on below, incredible eh?

There were about 15 other families down there enjoying it on Sunday evening, we ate fish and chips, drank red wine, paddled, popped seaweed and watched the big kids climb up the banks and jump out on the rope swings. It was very peaceful.

 

boiled brocolli! oh boy oh boy.