News in brief

Just a quick note and some crappy pictures (off my phone) with the recent events.

Jen and I took Callum, Hamish and Tom (Callum's cousin) for a trip into town for a ride on the CityCat (which Tom had been harping on at us for weeks about). Predictably the boys were well behaved until they started to get tired, but they all had a good time and went in a strop when it was time to go home.




Over the last few weeks there have been a few storms in SE Queensland (pretty normal for spring/early summer), which have mostly just filled our pool with a top up of water and a ton of leaves. The storms around here are very tropical - lots of thunder and lightning, hail, flash flooding, very heavy rain for brief periods. Much more impressive than their Brtish cousins.

As it's now warm enough to get into the pool, we have had the boys in most afternoons before naptime, and they both love it. Apparently so does this duck, which has taken to going for a swim and having a vigorous bath every afternoon about five o'clock. Haven't seen him the last few days though - maybe he's moved on.



I did some prehospital training with the graduating class of firemen up in their training centre at Whyte's Island (Out at the Port of Brisbane, towards the sea) which was essentially just role-play to make things a bit more realistic for them (i.e. having some medical staff giving directions and patients that needed cutting out of vehicles). There were six cars, all in various states of disarray (see below) in a simulated accident scene (you can only see two ot them here - the ones in the background are parked nearby). I basically had to tell them to cut the roofs/doors off so we could extract 'injured' patients on spinal boards. Entertaining but not particularly educational.



Callum and Hamish are now playing together a lot - Hamish has just got his first two teeth in rapid succession - he's crawling, standing, walking with his hands supported, and says 'mum', 'dad', and 'uck' which we think is 'truck' (Callum says 'uck' for truck at least a thousand times a day so that's where that came from). He also claps and waves.