Primary colours consecutively delayed

It's possible that this might not make much sense. That's me in the middle, chimping into my mobile. On the right, Eloise is split into time-delineated primary colours as she moves around.

It's much better when it's moving.

Cubed

After the delights of the Winter Festival, in search of a toilet, we visited QUT's The Cube, a genuinely enormous interactive screen thingy in a genuinely plush student building.

In a computer-generated coral reef, ocean life teemed. A prod of a fish yielded an information screen. Occasionally a whale shark would amble by.

Lyra danced in front of relayed images of herself, primary colours consecutively delayed, for hours while Nicole and Eloise looked on.

Winter Wonderland Leaves Us Cold

"Dress up warm," the website advised us, "because snow is cold and little feet and fingers can get chilly."

It sounded ever so glamorous, tobogganing down purpose-built slides of real snow at the enticingly named Winter Festival at the Riverstage with Genuine Bavarian Gastronomy to be had and everything.

We were a bit dubious, going down, not because we doubted the undoubtable awesomeness of the experience but because bookings for the day's sessions had closed and we didn't know if we would get to go on.

Still, with trepidation we parked at New Farm and caught the ferry up-river. As we glid down the reach past the Botanical Gardens, through the trees we could see snatches of huge snowmen, and a shiver of anticipation gently cupped the parts that other beers cannot reach.

We walked up to the ticket office to be told, to our relief, that plenty of tickets were in fact still available, and that there probably wouldn't be a problem with getting a go on the slides.

We were anticipating, from the admittedly heavily photoshopped images that the website had to offer, epic slides running from the top of the natural amphitheatre down to the stage where men in shorts would be playing the accordian while simultaneously juggling steins of Jarlsfrager, onlooked by amazed Brisbanites whose every need would be seen to by buxom Bavarian beauties, hair in pigtails.

Alas.

We were greeted, if that's the word, by a large-ish inflatable slide that wasn't as huge as it could have been, and although it was white, admittedly, it was made of plastic, not snow. It ran from halfway down the hill; the huge snowmen were in fact a large snowman, inflatable also, flanked by mysterious inflatable banks of inflatable not-snow, also white.

There was no snow to frolic in, to make the kiddies' gloves damp with glacid effort, no snowballs flying through the air, the winter tinkle of children's laughter completely absent, replaced by booming pop-hits of the type we are wearily familiar with. Although I do like the one that goes... oh, no, I've forgotten it.

We ascended the stage to sample the Bavarian delights but the serving wenches were absent, the mulled wine unavailable, the stein-jugglers rebranded as work-a-day students with no beer and no shorts.

Still, from the stage - on which were two stalls, one of which sold sausages, the other those Dutch mini-pancakes - we could now see that the actual sliding parts of the slide did have genuine snow upon them, so bolstered by this tepid consolation we embarked upon our Cresta run.

Actually Eloise and Lyra were quite excited as we climbed the short climb to Base Camp One, where we sat down upon our strangely circular plastic "toboggans" and, breathless with anticipation, got ourselves moving, paired up, using the Time Warp method.

And although the ride was far from rapid, after our "sledges" had ploughed into the snow on the way down, rotating gently as they built up speed, we did indeed end up with damp bottoms.

Lyra, at the bottom, being Lyra, decided that the snow deserved to be eaten. And so she ate it. And, even after Dutch mini-pancakes and some Bavarian sausage, she went back for seconds, and thirds.

Not Just Let It Go

Lyra got a Frozen motif painted onto her face to go with her Frozen dress. Or, she calls it, her "Let It Go."

Lyra and Ducks. Quack.

She Ain't No Ladybird

After swimming, we had some chores. A school application to deliver and some shopping. Lyra consistently refused to get into the car, which was frustrating but at the same time exasperating but - because she did it with a smile on her face and in a reasonably cute way - at the same time just sort of sighingly put-up-with-able.

Although when we decided to catch a train into town, and missed it because of her shenanigans, it did go back to being frustrating, but at the same time annoying.

All of which was also good fun because she had decided to wear her ladybird outfit, and would not be deterred.

So we trotted around the Sciencentre [sic] and played on all the thingummybobs for a couple of hours with her dressed as Gaston from Ben and Holly. Which was a real pain in the arse when it came to toilet time, at which point she decided normal clothes might be better.

Choral Fanfare Competition

Eloise is in the school choir, and seems to enjoy it, to the extent that she is prepared to go in before school to participate in it, assuming that she's telling me the truth about that and she's not up to illicit thing-taking behind the bike racks, which wouldn't be a very secret location to be doing illicit thing-taking in anyway.

She probably is doing choir, because she certainly seems to be in it, as evidenced by the Choral Fanfare Competition, a competition that is held between school choirs across Brisbane, perhaps Queensland even, maybe even across Australia or the World, who knows?

She attended some heats from Northside schools at Kedron State High School (which incidentally, by way of high school selection for attending in the future has been now judged as "too twisty-turny") which I could not find it in my heart to disrupt by dragging Lyra along. But by all (both) accounts the choir sang very nicely, and guess what? they got through to the regional finals.

The finals were held in the Old Museum building of a Tuesday evening, rather inconveniently just as ballet class was ending. Nicole picked Lyra up from Nursery - we found it our hearts to disrupt the finals, clearly - while I picked Eloise and Maya up from ballet.

Needless to say, ballet overran as it generally does and I had to over some encouragement in the punctuality department to young Miss Kristin, who after all had denied the girls an early exit, choosing to highlight their lack of dance commitment in the light of what was only the regional finals of a singing competition after all, and as clearly unrelated to dance therefore in no way important to anybody.

So she very obligingly called a halt to dance proceedings five minutes late after my gentle encouragement, whereupon we bundled into the car and drove very slowly to the choral thingummybob, first behind a very careful (and understandably so) learner driver and then behind a cyclist riding hell for leather but not hellishly leatherishly enough for us. However I have sympathy for cyclists, even hellish ones, and chose not to overtake on the three-lane highway that he was valiantly holding up completely.

Girls safely delivered with only minutes to spare, I parked the car nearby then hot-footed it down to the Old Museum, provisions in hand, to rendez-vous with Nicole and Lyra in the foyer.

The place was ram-packed with children and parents, children lining up all in their fancy choral costumes tailored for the hallowed halls of their fancy educational establishments, hair finely tuned, nervously donning their best sanctimonious choristers' expressions before their time in the limelight singing whatever they were going to sing, no doubt very nicely. As a sledging tactic we did set Lyra off on a few of them, but absorbed as they were in the event they were in the midst of they barely batted an eyelid.

Lyra of course, it being the evening and having spent a day at nursery was suffering the sort of emotional and moral crisis that she generally suffers around that time of the day. She managed to lock herself in a ladies' cubicle, which I understand Nicole resolved by scrambling underneath the door like a paratrooper travelling in mufti disguised as a professional student.

A game of hide-and-seek was disrupted when she spotted someone with the temerity to put some money in a vending machine and decided that they required some assistance with the buttons.

After a while, and some coffee, it became apparent that our lot would be on soon (last of course) and they filed through, dressed to the eights in their usual school uniform, putrid yellow and turgid brown, hair in disarray, expressions working their way up to sanctimonious chorister but still stuck on excited and mildly perplexed. Just to be fair I let Lyra loose on them as well.

It seemed that Eloise had landed herself in a spot of bother by disregarding the uniform rules and wearing trousers rather than a skirt, but I think as far as the judges were concerned any minor eccentricities would have been drowned out by the disgusting colour-splurge of the uniforms anyway.

We made our way into the hall and managed to secure ourselves a vantage point that wasn't too dreadful. Nicole let Lyra off the leash again and she found Jessica's family to go and sit with. And then she ran away and had to be chased down by Nicole before she did some real damage.

And then the Wilston Wonders (no, really) came on and began to sing their sings and I was very pleased to hear that they were actually pretty damned good, in tune and everything. The sang a song that went de-de-de-doo do-do-do-doo very nicely, then one that had something to do with singing with nice voices, and then some biblical thing about a bloke called Joshua. That one had hand actions and everything. All very nice.

A Mum thought that the uniform would probably be the clincher and send them tailspinning into the Nightmare of Failure, after a performance she deemed as "quite good" but how she had to eat her words, poor dear, when after an interminable speech from the judges about breathing technique they pronounced that the Wilston Wonders had in fact won, were officially the best choir in Greater Brisbane, and we all (even me) broke out into shrieks of frank flabberghastment and something bordering on joy (let's call it pride) at the amazing, yes amazing achievement of each of our children. In particular.

And so, onto the State Finals at some indeterminate point in the future! Brilliant!

Hide and Squeak

Oh the happy days of hide and seek with toddlers, to whom the act of hiding is so much more satisfying that the challenge of remaining hidden.

A Reasonably Decent - but Reasonably Distant - Slide

Welcome to Colmslie Beach Reserve, which boasts some pretty bizarre sculpture-cum-play-equipment in an aquatically themed playground next to the river. And a decent slide. It was good for an hour and a half of Lyratainment anyway, though she was mysteriously reluctant to sample the delights of the actual beach, with its bridge-mungous view of the Gateway Motorway.

Acrobatic Lyra

Lyra does like to copy Eloise's acrobatic moves. Eloise still hasn't achieved her aerial (that is a cartwheel with no hands) which may be a blessing in disguise.