Vacances

School Holidays are behind us now.

Week one was punctuated by daily swimming classes, at the end of which Eloise was pronounced to have achieved a level of competence commensurate with elevation from Fish to Little Dolphin, or something.

Which means she's not doing too badly for a little nipper; she needs to work on keeping her body straight whilst doing freestyle and the arms could be less windmilly. Sometimes it all comes together and she swims like a fish - erm, little dolphin - but mostly it doesn't, quite.

We went to see Justine Clarke in concert, which was chaotic. The little girl sitting on my left kept prodding me. Eloise was a bit non-plussed I think. The performance was very far away.

Eloise has spent a lot of time with her friend Jessica. She went over there for a sleepover whilst Nicole and I ate ourselves silly for her birthday. We were going to see a film too but Nicole contrived some flimsy excuse to go home so she could burn stuff in the chimenea that Josie (et al) got for her.

In the second week, we didn't do much, or did we... bike riding, science museum, other stuff... the zoo...

We went to the Zoo with the intention of meeting up with Jessica and her folks. Eloise was very keen, I not so much so. Australia Zoo is a bit ghastly if you go to the wrong places. It's a bit un-Australian to say it probably but last time we went the whole Steve Irwin thing was a bit ghoulish, the exortations to shout "Crikey!" in the "Crocoseum" embarrassing.

To be confronted at the entrance by a life-size bronze of the whole Irwin family was a little disheartening then, but trading messages to found out where Jessica's folks were soon led us away, thankfully, from the heart of darkness and towards the Elephants.

I was flummoxed by the map and came to the conclusion that we should catch a train to the Elephant Area on the far side of the zoo. I became mentally discombobulated! And confused the Elephant Zone with the African Zone! And we got on the wrong train! Without hope of return!

The extremely distant African Zone was quite entertaining, if not for the animals then for the drums.