Tidbinbilla

Another week, another place! We certainly get around. This time we could resist our craving for Max, so we took advantage of the ANZAC day long weekend to fly to Canberra to be with Max, and of course Beck and Rob.

He's a lovely kid - so active and inquiring at the advanced age of 3.75 - and rather large with it too. And we are regarded as a kind of perpetual Santa Claus. So, when we first went round to his home in the Canberra suburb of Waramanga on the Friday evening, his first greeting was "what have got me?". As it happened, the answer was quite a lot. In fact, we presented him with three robots: a fearsome looking character who looked like something our of starwars; a dinosaur; and a dog. All three items walked around the room on their own after a fashion, and Max was very taken with all of them, taking great delight in trying to get the dinosaur to bite em.

On Saturday morning, we went with Max to a friend's birthday party at a special kid's party room, called Kidszone, at the Belconnen shopping centre. The room contained lots of climbing equipment, slides, pits full of foam balls, and - most important tables where the kids could eat. He had a wonderful time with all the cake, fairy bread, and chips, and with the play equipment where he battled full-bore against his pre-school friends. The picture shows him with his best friend, Callan, who's the same age, but several sizes smaller.

After that we went shopping at the Belconnen Centre and had lunch ... well, Max wasn't too excited about lunch after all that fairy bread. He had a lovely time in "Socrates", which sells games for intelligent youngsters, trying out the various toys which he wanted to buy. In the end I bought him a flower garden where one sets up a cardboard landscape and pour in a chemical. After about 10 hours (overnight), the card soaks up the liquid and sprouds coloured crystals, much to Max's interest. He also tried out the plasma screens in the David Jones department store.

The following morning, we took Max to see Beck play her first soccer game of the season in the Canberra league. They lost 2-1 against a good side, so her team was not disgraced. Max spent to time watching the match, though Rob takes him to watch the Canberra Raiders (in the national Rugby League competition) and the ACT Brumbies (in the southern hemisphere's very very strong Union competition). The latter has teams from South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand ... and possibly next year Argentina. To put this in perpsective, it would be a bit like Ireland, Wales, and Scotland playing teams from Vladivostok, Chicago, and Tehran in a northern hemisphere equivalent.

Anyway, back to soccer in Canberra. Max had a great time rolling down a grassy slope, kicking a full-sized ball between me, Rob and himself, building a nest of twigs, and playing with a dog. In the afternoon, we took him out to the Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve to look at a new wetland they had recently opened. It was very good, which is more than you can say for the weather. After a while, it poured, blew a gale, and the temperature plummeted 10 degrees. Snow was forecast for the Snowy Mountains further south and no doubt they got it. Anyway, Max had lots of fun and is convinced that he's seen a live dinosaur. Rob told him that a very large water bird called a Brolga was in fact a dinosaur. He was also fascinated by a black swan hatching eggs on a nest - which seems strange going into winter! Finally, we ended up at the Hog's Breath restaurant for en evening meal, which was a bit of a disaster. They forgot Max's meal ... which he eventually received free of charge!

Max now knows that he's going to see Aunt Emily in 10 days time. The excitement is mounting, though he has no idea that he's travelling in a very big plane for a very long period of time (the best part of a day). Still less does he know that he's heading to Disneyland on the way, stopping over at Anaheim in Los Angeles for a couple of days. I'd love to be there to see his response to all those challenges.

AS