Incipient teenager

Declan is completely unjetlagged now. In fact, he seems to be working his way around the clock again, waking this morning at 8.15.

Yesterday, I had to wake him at 7 to get up for robotics before school. It was not a pleasant experience, as he tried hard to ignore me, and put his head under the doona for about five minutes. It ended up with me giving him a friction burn in a juvenile tussle for his blankie which I am not proud of.

The teenager within doesn't seem that far away at times.

Whale watching

For some time, we've realized that Declan and I are probably the only ones in the family suited to sea based whale watching, due to motion sickness. But we haven't done anything about it.

So when whales were spotted off Bondi recently, Declan and I decided to go, and take Declan's friend Dan, as his (very delayed) birthday present.

This morning we took a whale watching cruise, and spotted three humpback whales - mother, calf and escort, as well as a pod of dolphins. Photos aren't great, because it is much more fun watching than taking photos!

It was great, although after about an hour, Dan and Declan got a bit sick of it and started playing with their toys.

Are holidays good for eczema?

We were quite disciplined about cream on Callum's eczema while we were away. Possibly coincidentally, this is the first time in at least four years that he has no eczema on either foot. He's still got it on his wrist, but I'm wondering if going to a more polluted environment is actually good for him.

Jetlag

The experience of jet lag for the boys on the way back has been quite interesting. The first night we managed to keep them up to 7 ish and they slept the night through (Callum pointed out that waking at 5.30 was normal for him).

But the second night they both woke at 2 ish. Amazingly, given that was their first day back at school, they stayed awake until bedtime.

We're hoping they are over it now. It is pretty amazing to see Declan in particular awake and functioning so early.


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Shorn

Callum's hair got quite wild while we were on holidays. So when we got back we decided to cut it shorter than we had for a while.

He's practically unrecognizable. I think it will be a while before we cut it that short again.

Museum reprise

On our final day in London, we went back to our two favourite museums - natural history and science. Hopefully walking there and back from our hotel (around 2km each way) has worn the boys out for the journey home.

The boys both managed to find something in the science museum shop to spend the £10 Granny gave them for London.

Now everyone is looking forward to being home.

Last full day of the playground tour of Europe

For our last full day in London, we went to see the War Cabinet rooms and Churchill's museum. Declan is a bit over museums, and so it took him a while to warm up to the whole thing. There was a fabulous long table with an interactive timeline of Churchill's life, though, in which he spent a lot of time looking up family birthdays each year. He was thrilled to find that Churchill became prime minister in 1940 on 9 May.

Callum enjoyed it more, but particularly the part of the war rooms where he got to try on various hats - bowler, army, navy and the latest 1940s fashion for the modern typist.

In the afternoon, after a brief stop in a bookshop, we went to London's best playground (according to the websites) - the Princess Diana memorial playground near Kensington palace. There, we ran into Ella from Declan's class again, which was a fairly astonishing coincidence. It was lovely for both of them to have a non sibling playmate again.

Callum thought that the playground was the best of the whole trip - Declan wasn't so sure, with a soft spot for the other London playground (Coram's fields) where they found some local playmates.

Continuing the playground tour

Today we are in Greenwich, to see the observatory and take the opportunity to stand in the eastern and western hemispheres simultaneously.

But the boys unanimously voted for the playground over the planetarium.



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Locals

We caught up with friends from our time in London - John, Margaret and their son Joey. We had first met Joey when he was younger than Callum and Declan are now so it was lovely to see him as a 20 year old playing with them.

We had lunch in a Greek restaurant in which the boys, as usual, just ate bread. They are getting quite short on any kind of vitamins on this trip!

Hamleys

Granny gave the boys £10 each to spend as they wished in London. So we took them to Hamleys, with its six floors of toys to choose from. Callum couldn't decide, but Declan chose a Ben 10 action figure for £7, hoping to find something else later.

Here is a picture of Callum with a Lego Indiana Jones.

Legoland

All through this holiday, we've been promising the boys an unspecified but amazing treat if they were both good, and learned their times tables. They've been pretty good, and Declan is getting close to knowing his times tables (Callum does, properly, but Declan can recite them if he does it slowly enough to work out the next number).

So Monday was the treat - a trip to Legoland UK. It is a theme park with a lego theme - rollercoasters, various other rides, a driving school, decorated at every turn with lego figures - dinosaurs, a safari full of african animals, lots of Indiana Jones, etc etc.

Amazingly, at the front gate, we ran into Ella, from Declan's class. Although we had known they would be here at the same time, it was an extraordinary coincidence, nonetheless.

We spent a full seven hours there, and as designated rollercoaster parent, I got to go on a fair few of the rides. The boys had a wonderful time, and enjoyed every minute, as far as I could see.








I couldn't get Ella and Declan to stand still for a photo together.

British museum

This morning after a fairly leisurely start (it is Sunday after all) we ventured forth to the British museum. In a pretty successful hour and a half we managed to hit a fair proportion of the high points; Rosetta stone, the mummy room, ancient Mesopotamia, roman Britain (including the Mildenhall treasure) and the Lewis chessman.

Here are the boys posing in front of a gold sarcophagus - reluctantly in Declan's case, as he found the mummies a bit spooky.

Soccer in the park

This morning we decided to try some sport - soccer in the park. We went across to green park and kicked a ball around. We got almost all the way to Buckingham palace and then back.




When Callum got tired he had a bit of fun taking pictures.

Science museum

On our second trip to the science museum I'm two days, we found the launch pad- which is the Questacon part.

Here's some pictures of everyone. First, Evan breaks the record:



Then Declan runs the machine.



And Callum checks out the Archimedes screw.

Injury time

Continuing the museum theme, today we visited the Science museum - specifically their Wallace and Gromit Cracking Ideas exhibit. The part both boys enjoyed the most was the chance to submit their own inventions to a Britain wide competition for best invention - I didn't have the heart to tell them that they wouldn't be eligible, being Australian.

Then in the afternoon we went to see Horrible Histories at the theatre. That would have been a great success had Callum not squashed his finger in the seat just before the show started. It was bad enough that Evan took him to a (NHS) doctor, luckily next door, where the nurse bandaged him with an impressive looking bandage that he has been proudly showing off ever since. It's not life (or finger) threatening, but he may end up losing a fingernail. The surgery couldn't work out how to charge them, so they just did it for free (that's socialized medicine for you!).

Then a quick whiz around some famous outdoor monuments (Buckingham Palace, the Houses of Parliament, Big Ben) and that was a fairly full day.

Bathrobes

We're staying in a ludicrously expensive hotel in London. They gave the boys their own bathrobes.

Final day

Our last full day in Paris saw us visiting yet another art gallery at Declan's request.

We went to the Musee d'Orsay and gorged ourselves on the Impressionists, mostly Monet. Declan had committed quite a few facts and paintings to memory from the book we bought him the day before and brought them out at every opportunity. He was particularly excited to see one of Monet's early paintings in which Monet's wife, Camille, posed for all four women in the picture.

For the afternoon, we took a boat trip along the Seine, and then found a square near the Sorbonne with space for the boys to run around while we had dinner.

Next stop London!

Museums, museums, everywhere

On arrival in London, we paused only to drop our bags at our hotel (and visit a small playground en route) before arriving at the Natural History Museum. Callum was momentarily disappointed that we didn't start with the Science museum, but joined in Declan's excitement at the dinosaur gallery, which was pretty amazing. We also spotted two stuffed dodos, an enormous ammonite fossil, and a gallery about our impact on the planet (well a British family of four, but close enough).

We consider ourselves museum connoisseurs, and we were very impressed.

Journals

Callum and Declan are each keeping journals on this trip. This picture shows them writing away in our Paris apartment. Fortunately the picture doesn't show the constant bickering while they write.




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Art day

Today was our designated Art museum day - lucky, because it was raining when we woke up this morning. At 10, we met our guide for a tour of the Louvre, cleverly disguised (for the boys) as a Treasure Hunt. We saw Mesopotamian sculptures, an Egyptian sphinx, the ruins of a mediaeval castle that is under the Louvre's basement, learned about the development of perspective in Italian renaissance painting, as well as seeing the compulsory Venus de Milo and Mona Lisa.

The treasure was a children's game book all about Paris, culminating in a choose your own adventure game about the theft of the Mona Lisa in 1911. A great way to see the Louvre, and the boys enjoyed every minute, even though they were quite tired by the end.

After lunch, we saw the Musee de l'Orangerie, which is famous for Monet's final, enormous, paintings of his waterlily garden. Declan was initially disappointed, because they weren't the paintings he was expecting (which have the bridge in the Giverny garden), but in the end enjoyed it, including the other Impressionist painters in that gallery. It's a great size gallery - you can see every painting without feeling like you have run a marathon. Callum enjoyed it also, but mostly for Declan's sake. Declan got a book about Monet from the shop, which he has already read about half of (before the call of television was too much).

Parc de Villette

We are in the parc de villette, which has another great playground for the boys to let off some steam.


Here are Cal and Dec on the bouncy bit.

Bonjour Paris

Two years ago, the highlight of today would have been the TGV from Strasbourg to Paris, with a top speed of 350km/h. Today, however, the highlight of our first day in Paris was the toy boat hire in Jardin du Luxembourg. For 2 Euros, each boy got a toy sailboat (with working sails) and a stick to push it around the octagonal lake (Grand Bassin) in the Jardin du Luxembourg.

The boat hire (and nearby fabulous playground) were so good that we've deferred the Eiffel Tower until tomorrow. Fortunately for Evan and me, there was a cafe with nice coffee near the playground, so we got a very leisurely afternoon of peoplewatching, coffee and chat while the boys had an afternoon of playing, with no cultural activities.

Queues

On our first full day in Paris, we decided we had to see the Eiffel Tower. That meant lots of queues. The queue to have our bags checked, the queue to buy tickets, the queue for the first lift, the lift to the top... The view from the top was pretty good, as was the exciting ride to the summit, but by the time we got there, we had two tired and hungry boys on our hands. So our stay was short. Except for a short delay for emergency pain au chocolat on the second floor we went down as fast as we could.

So after that, we needed to find some open space, so went to the Parc de Villette for some running around.

After a touristy dinner (best way to find pizza) we had a short visit to the Notre Dame, which was in the middle of Sunday evening service, so we didn't stay long.

Strasbourg

This morning we all got up bright and early to move to the next phase of our holiday. With enormous personal sacrifice, Bob got up with us to see us off on the 8.02am train from Wengen.

Four trains later, we arrived at Strasbourg train station. A beautiful town with lots of half timbered houses and canals, one of which we were staying on.

We did a boat trip, looked in the cathedral (13th century stained glass!) and marvelled that the coffee was suddenly much better now we were in France.

Declan found us a lovely restaurant (it had pizza) and impressed the waiter with his excellent french accent. Callum and Declan are both very interested in Napoleon as we pass through parts of Europe that have had multiple wars, so we had a lovely dinner conversation covering as much napoleonic history as Evan and I could remember.

More public transport

Today, on our final full day in the mountains, we decided to go on a slightly longer walk - from the top of a cable car (First) to an Alpine lake (Bachalpsee). It was, once again, a glorious day, with clear skies, and little wind. We were walking above the treeline, which felt quite different from our previous forest walks. Most of the way we had a point blank view of the Eiger, with the Jungfrau in the background - quite spectacular.

With judicious application of chocolate and marzipan, the boys enjoyed every minute, and had a great time at the lake giving each other tours of the most interesting points, and making their way around the rocks of the mountain streams without getting their feet wet.

We caught the cable car most of the way down to a way station - Bort, which had a wonderful children's playground right next to a cafe. The boys whiled away an hour or so there, managing to play with some other children without a common language. Then we tried some new transport - scooters. We hired scooters to take us the 4.5km remaining back to the bottom of the cable car at Grindelwald. The boys were in front of Evan and Bob, and had a wonderful time (although their attempts to steer were a little distracting for their co-drivers).

A stop at the chocolate shop in Grindelwald gave us some chocolate fondue for dessert, a very Swiss way to finish off the week in the Alps.

Flying

Bob and. I were determined to have an Alpine adventure, so we decided to go paragliding. We ran down the hillside 1489m above sea level, and then spent 15 minutes floating in the air past several waterfalls in the Lauterbrunnen valley, before landing nearly 500m below.

Evan and the boys watched us in the air, but just missed our landing, having been lured away by some parachutists. Declan was desparate to try it, but luckily our pilot told him that Declan would have to be as high as the pilot's chin before he was allowed.

In the afternoon, we took a boat to a set of caves. Local legend has it that an Irish saint managed to defeat a dragon that was living there, forcing it to the bottom of the lake with his pilgrim's staff. In the reenactment sound and light show (inside the cave) the staff bore a close resemblance to a light saber, which meant that the boys weren't particularly scared by the show.

The caves had been a 20 minute schlep up the hillside from the boat (before lunch), so there was a fair bit of complaining from Declan, who has been living up to his HungryBoy nickname so far.

While we were waiting for the ferry, Evan livened up the scene by starting a waterfight, using the remainder of our water bottles, with Callum and Declan. By some clever paternal sleight of hand, he managed to transfer the fight to Uncle Bob, with Uncle Bob ending up very wet. It was the highlight of Callum and Declan's day - not sure about Uncle Bob, though.

In the evening, Callum decided to play his nightly prank - force some unsuspecting grown up to run ahead of everyone else (up a steep hill) to our apartment so he can hide somewhere after having called the lift away. He seems to spend most of the day planning the prank out - oddly enough, it is always the same.