Thursday, 06 February 2014

Today was a short day. Sarah is going down to Canberra for the weekend with Zoe, and wanted to pick her up after her Brazilian Jiu Jitsu class.

We got away a bit late on the bike and got to the class maybe 5 minutes late, but it was just us anyway, so it was all good. I know now it's best to make sure we're out the door no later than 9am.

The class was just as good as last time, and Sarah arrived halfway through to watch, so she got to see it for herself.

I biked home the scenic way again, but made a slight wrong turn somewhere, so I popped out further up Wynnum Road than I wanted to be, and so had to backtrack a bit to cross it.

After I got home, I decided to pop out to Jaycar again and get some more bits and pieces and do some grocery shopping.

I'd made some conductive play dough on Wednesday afternoon while Megan was here, and the girls just used it as standard play dough. Today I made some non-conductive play dough to go with it, and tested it all out. At Jaycar I bought a battery pack and some banana clips, so I soldered everything together and it works nicely. We can just jam the banana clips into the appropriate bits of play dough and make LEDs light up. I bought a bunch of LEDs from Jaycar as well. So we should be all set for next Friday.

After that I spent the rest of the afternoon tinkering around with my electronics project. There's nothing like learning by trial and error.

I was bracing myself for a rough night, but Zoe slept through until almost 6am.

Today was playgroup again, so we just took a slow start to the day and headed out on the bike a bit after 9am.

There was a mix of new faces and people from last week. I packed a lunchbox this time instead of relying on the snack collection in my "Dad Bag" backpack.

We worked on trying to approach other girls to get them to play. Unfortunately they're all that little bit younger and more shy, so we haven't had a huge success. Zoe's been pretty happy just playing with the various toys and playing with me. Parachute time was a big hit again.

I think there were about 25 adults there (I was the only Dad this week), with many with multiple children. The youngest baby I saw was a 7 week old.

Zoe had been asking me what a honeydew was, so after Playgroup we dropped by the Hawthorne Garage and grabbed half a honeydew and a couple of tomatoes and I made some fritters for lunch with leftover corned beef from dinner the other night. Zoe wasn't too impressed with them. I think she didn't like the diced tomato. She declared that the honeydew was just like rockmelon.

We read a story in the hammock and she went down pretty easily for nap after that.

I'd just started doing the dishes when my mate Steve gave me a call. He was in the area, and he dropped in. That worked out well, because I'd been meaning to pick his brain about my little electronics project. We geeked it up for a bit.

Zoe's mini lab coat arrived in the mail, and when she finally woke up after 3pm, I asked her if she wanted to go out to Bunnings to get a pair of kids-sized safety glasses, but she said she wanted to do something "fun" instead. When I asked her what she wanted to do, she initially wanted to go to Wet and Wild, but that's an all day outing and we're going next Wednesday, so she settled on going to Colmslie pool again instead.

So we quickly got organised and jumped on the bike and biked over to the pool. We started out in the kid's play area, which had a couple of small slides and some fountains and whatnot, and then we gravitated over to the 50 metre pool, where Zoe practised her diving for a bit and generally quite confidently navigated the 1.5m deep end of the pool. It was good, because at least I could just stand up instead of tread water while she practised diving in off the blocks.

We had a post-swim ice cream and biked home, and then I whipped up dinner and it was bathtime and bedtime.

I'm going to have to start tracking my weekly kilometres with Zoe on the bike, because I think it'll be a reasonable distance.