Mascots.
I was facilitating a meeting and had an icebreaker opener where I asked everyone to answer a few random questions. One of them was “what was your high school mascot?” Should be easy enough. The team consists of 3 Australians and a Mexican. Well, apparently a lot of schools in Australia and Mexico do not have school mascots. Mind. Blown. How do you have school spirit without a mascot? What kind of cheers do you do? I don’t even understand. One person said that their school used to have a mascot, but it beat up another mascot, so that was the end of that. I am proud to be a Bulldog, twice over. How sad that so many kids can’t say something similar.

Mt Tambourine.
Jeff and Rachel spent the day on a tour of Mt Tambourine. Their plans were unexpectedly changed when a tree decided to fall across the road they were supposed to use, 20 minutes before they got there. So unfortunately they didn’t get to do the Rainforest Skywalk, but they did get to see hundreds of giant fruit bats hanging from trees. Randomly, the past few days Ty has been making up songs on the way home from school. His inspiration comes from whatever he glances at – cars, butterflies, trees, broken trees… Hmmmm… Coincidence?

Movie World.
Jay took the day off on Friday, I took the kids to daycare and went to work, and the 3 big kids spent the day riding roller coasters at Movie World. I didn’t get too many stories out of them, except for “that one guy” who was always in their way, everywhere they went. To be continued…

Rugby.
Friday night we had a babysitter (yay!!) and the 4 of us went to our first professional rugby game – Brisbane Broncos vs Gold Coast Titans. We hopped on the train and rode about 15-20 minutes to the Cbus stadium. We got off the train with what seemed like thousands of other people and joined the sea of fans walking toward the stadium. It is kind of a genius infrastructure planning idea. There is almost no parking at the stadium, so everyone has to take public transport. Trains, buses, cabs all stop right next to the stadium. The amazing part is when everyone leaves after the game. 20,000 fans, cleared out in relatively no time. It is a lot easier to disperse 20,000 people instead of 10,000 cars.
So rugby is a pretty big deal in Australia. And this was their pro league. So I guess in my mind I was thinking the atmosphere would be like an NFL game in the US. But it felt pretty flat. The sound system was terrible – no thumping loud music, no chance of being able to understand what people were saying over the speakers. And it wasn’t because the crowd was too loud. Most of the game the only fan noise I heard was from this annoying dude behind us who wouldn’t stop talking about everything and nothing the whole game. At an NFL game, you can barely ask someone next to you if they want some nachos because it is so loud. But, aside from that, it was a neat experience. I won’t rush back to another game, but I am glad I did it once. Here are a couple pictures. The one that is the blurry picture if a dude running serves two purposes. One, the guy is the most memorable from the games I have watched in TV. Don’t know his name, but can’t forget that hair. Two, the picture doesn’t do it justice, but the size if these dudes is almost unbelievable. Their thighs are bigger than Rachel. Yes, she’s a tiny little thing, but these men’s legs are superhuman.

I just had to take a picture of this dude’s pants. Horrible shoes and tight rolled jeans…

Swim.
Saturday morning Rachel stayed home and cooked us biscuits and gravy while the rest of us went to swim lessons. Ty did really well. His teacher said he is so close to moving up to the next level. That darn back float has been tough for him. I think that after another lesson or two he will have it figured out. When we got home, brekky was ready – including special bikkies just for Ty.

Currumbin.
After we filled our bellies, we hopped in both cars and headed to Currumbin. I don’t think that place will ever get old. Jeff and Rachel got to hold a koala and pet kangaroos. Rachel and Ty held a baby crocodile. Cross that off the bucket list. They are both bird people, so they really enjoyed the free flight bird show. We watched a vulture break an egg by throwing a rock at it – pretty smart! And it was pretty awesome to have a Lorikeet join our table as we were sitting down for lunch.
And I had the pleasure of experiencing “that one guy” first hand, because as luck would have it, he was at Currumbin at the same time we were, trying to see the same things we were. And yep, he was annoying. We literally waited 10 minutes for him to finish taking 100 different pictures in the giant python. Jeff’s patience were put to the test.

Post.
When we were walking to the car, Ty saw a sign post that someone had hit. It was sort of laying down, sort of standing up. This was driving my little OCD son crazy, so he tried to straighten it up. He pulled and pulled, no luck. Jay and Jeff drove the wagon with the kids to Currumbin, so Rachel and I had to drive them back home. Jay had been thinking ahead and backed into a parking spot, so as I was pulling out of the spot I said, “it was nice of Jay to make it easy for me to pull out.” And just as I finished I heard a horrible awful sound. I thought I ran over a stroller or something. Nope. There was a pole on the passenger side of the parking spot. Not that it is an excuse, but it was barely above the height of the window. Unfortunately it dinged up both doors on the passenger side. :(. Jay and I spent our lunch hour on Monday visiting some “panel beaters” gathering quotes. Not something I wanted to do ever down under. Ugh. I think my son must be psychic…
As a random side note, we drove by the Hell’s Angels meeting site while searching for a repair shop… Yikes!

Swim.
It was a pretty hot day at Currumbin, so when we got home, I couldn’t wait to jump in the pool. And I did just that. Lily played with her toys and watched her brother do cannon balls into the big pool, and catch a basketball in mid-air. We figured out how to help Ty with his back float. “Look at my belly” is what he does when he sticks his gut way out. We told him to do that in the water. It worked!! Feeling pretty good about ringing the bell next lesson…I would give it a 75% likelihood.

Ramina.
Saturday night we went to the ramina for dinner. We were all pretty well beat from the long day.

Couran.
Sunday morning we were planning on getting up, loading the boat, and heading out to Couran Cove for the day. Mother Nature must have something against me because she decided to put some clouds in the sky and drop the temperature about 10 degrees on us. We got most things ready to go, keeping one eye on the sky, then decided to go to the grocery store and get things for dinner. That bought Mother Nature an hour or so to get over herself. Didn’t work. But we really wanted to get out on the water, and didn’t have a great backup plan, so off we went. I put Lily in her sweatshirt right away, and wished I had packed some for everyone.

We usually see the big boat used by Sea World to take people on tours of the coastline. I wasn’t surprised to see it headed our way on our way down the Coomera River. I was, however, shocked when I looked up to wave at the passengers on the boat and saw….can you guess???? THAT ONE GUY!!!!! Unbelievable. He’s like an annoying little gnat. In your face, everywhere. It’s a good thing we didn’t go to Sea World instead of a boat ride. I was just waiting for them to dock at Couran Cove for lunch – they sometimes do. Lucky for that one guy, they didn’t. 🙂

The rain held off until we got to Couran. Ty didn’t mind. He just wanted to swim. In he went, and after lunch he talked Jay into joining him. Not sure how he convinced Jay to get in, with his blue lips doing the talking.

We decided that it wouldn’t be fun to go to the surf side of the island in the rain, especially since they had seen a similar beach earlier in the week. So instead, Ty, Rachel and I went for a little walk to help get Ty warmed up. It had stopped raining for most of our walk. There is a raised deck walkway through the forest, which was pretty neat. Halfway through was a lookout tower that we climbed to the top of. Kind of fun!

So yeah, and then Mother Nature was like, you guys are having too much fun on this crappy day, and she unleashed her fury on us. The rain came, and wasn’t going to let up any time soon. We decided there was no time like the present and headed towards home. The kids were wrapped up in towels, and we tried to keep them under the biminy as much as possible. Ty didn’t mind – he fell asleep on Jay’s captain seat. Lily was content as ever. So we cranked up the radio and tried to make the most of a crummy situation. 30 years from now we will still be talking about that one time when we were on a boat ride in the rain in Australia. Making memories. 🙂

Fajitas.
Sunday evening Jeff and Rachel cooked us delicious steak and shrimp fajitas (had been marinating all day). Did I mention they were delicious? I could have probably eaten 10 of them. Rach and I have ourselves mini pedis on the patio, and then it was time for bed. I couldn’t even write a paragraph on my blog – was completely worn out from the busy weekend. So sorry for the delay!