We have had school holidays here in the first week of October, and as this co-incided with Nick spending three days in Sydney, I thought I'd better get out and about with the kids in order to stave off insanity...First we went off to the Hatching The Past exhibition at the Wool Museum in Geelong where we learned all about dinosaur eggs and babies. It isn't a big exhibition, but was pretty hands-on with the kids excavating eggs and bones and messing about in dino suits....
Raaaarrrrr!!! Didn't actually kill enough time with the dinos, so went round the Wool Museum too. Geelong apparently has a big wool/weaving history and the Wool Museum was surprisingly interesting, or at least it would have been if not for the screaming (mine) and running (kids)...So in order to calm them down (ha ha), and as a birthday treat for James, we went for large quantities of chocolate at The Chocolate Room We have one just near the end of our street - 20 flavours of Italian hot chocolate , chocolate fondues, chocolate melting pots, chocolate cakes - the kids always have a chocolate fondue with strawberries, bananas and marshmallows for dipping and in spite of its generous proportions, it lasts about 20 seconds.
The next day (scorching) we packed a big picnic and headed off to Jirrahlinga Wildlife Sanctuary about half an hour outside Geelong to see some real Australian animals. Now, I should point out that I did take pictures of dingoes, emu and a wombat called Sebastian, but they weren't being hugely co-operative, so I won't bore 
you with the dull pictures. But you can see the koalas (the one the kids are petting is called Billy), kangaroos and an echidna which is basically a big hedgehog.... except for having that whole egg-laying-mammal-mutant-freaky-marsupial-only-in-Australia thing going on. I did laugh when I read on Wikipedia that a young echidna is called a puggle and spends 45 - 50 days in its mother's pouch until it starts to develop spines at which point she deposits it in a burrow. No kidding. If only we could all deposit our children in a burrow when they become problematic!
After Jirrahlinga, we made an unscheduled trip to the beach at Barwon Heads for a little paddle which ended in the usual head-to-toe soaking.... Hence the 'drookit weans', which for those of you not fortunate enough to be Scottish, means 'soaked children'. This is a really lovely little safe beach running along the side of the mouth of the Barwon River just as it meets the sea and I'm sure we'll be there many times over the coming months.
The kids had a great time throwing water over each other with their newly-acquired dollar-shop buckets, and then proceeded to trek half the beach back into my car. But then, I am driving a Kia Carnival and I don't really care. It's very liberating driving something which is so trashed that it's hard to see how you could make it worse... though the kids are trying!
Headed back to Geelong West, stopped at the new ice cream shop for yummy cones, did a quick mental calculation of the increase in my hip size likely to be attributable to said shop over the next few months... and vowed to walk to the shop from now on in a kind of calorie-offsetting exercise! Children exhausted from all the fresh air , mother exhausted from all the children... Job done!
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