Easter 2015

This Easter long weekend Alan and I have been “experiencing tummy issues,” and I won’t get more specific than that because I care about you. Suffice it to say, a large proportion of our too-regular toilet visits have been immediately preceded by a panicked look and sprinting. We also all have colds, which I was calling The Colds That Wouldn’t Go Away until I realised they’d only been around for a week and I was probably getting too impatient with them too soon. Moses and Hazel don’t seem bothered by theirs, whereas Alan and I have been totally wiped out and have wanted nothing more than to stay in bed and not have children this weekend. Alas.

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On Friday I worked on my uni assignment, while Alan and Mo and Hazel did stuff.

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I remember when I went overseas with my family as an 11-ish year old, my siblings and I spent a lot of the time wanting to eat something and my parents spent a lot of time trying to tell us how lucky we were to be overseas and to stop whinging about food. And when we got back people were like, “How was overseas, was it totally amazing?!” and I was like, “I was hungry a lot, and my little sister is annoying.”

We went to the aquarium on Saturday, which was something I’ve wanted to do since Moses randomly developed a fascination with sting rays. It was a rainy day, and we had to queue for a while to get in, and we were wondering whether going on that particular day was the worst decision ever until we walked into the first room and saw a platypus, after which at least Alan and I were totally enthralled. Hazel kept excitedly saying “FISH!” while wondering why it was dark and there were so many people. And Moses spent nearly the whole time thinking and asking and complaining about food, while I told him to instead recognise the fact that we were at the aquarium! With dugongs calmly swimming by! And sharks and sting rays! I wanted him to be in the moment and completely forget about the fact that we had chips stashed in the pram in case of emergency. He could not. 

We went to get lunch after the aquarium, and then on our way back to the car Moses spotted a play area which he wanted to check out. We explained that we needed to rush home to get Hazel in bed, and that we’d already done fun things that morning, to which Moses replied huffily, “Like WHAT?!” 

My point is two-fold: Children are obsessed with food, and do not appreciate things.

I loved the aquarium, especially the jelly blubber and the dugongs. And the platypuses. And sting rays have eyes that look like they’ve been drawn on with coloured pencils! It’s weird, but amazing. I wish I could’ve spent more time there, or the same amount of time minus my children/husband. I took my camera in order to get lots of artsy photos of Moses and Hazel captivated by various marine creatures:

You see nothing, because my camera battery died as I figured out the appropriate settings with which to take my first brilliant photo. Instead, here are the two I took on Alan’s camera before it, too, threatened to die:

On Sunday we turned our clocks back and had an egg hunt in the garden with our neighbours and did lots of cleaning of things we wouldn’t normally clean (I vacuumed beside the washing machine, which hadn’t been done at all in the year-or-so we’ve lived here, and Alan cleaned the vacuum cleaner head, which hadn’t been done at all in the 4-or-so years we’ve owned it), and then spent the afternoon at the beach.

And this is Hazel at the same beach on Easter Sunday last year:

Today (Monday) I went to the gym after a terribly long break from exercise (originally my gym said they were closing to renovate but then it turned out they’d actually sold the business and my membership had been transferred to a different gym which takes 10 minutes to drive to, which is still close but not quite as easy as a 5-minute walk. Plus I’ve had very little motivation to do anything I don’t have to do, and by “very little” I mean “absolutely none,” and by “anything I don’t have to do” I most certainly mean “going to new places and jumping around and/or lifting heavy things.” But I read a particularly good article about depression which basically told me off for not exercising, so I decided I really should, especially given it was only a few months ago that I embraced ‘action’ as this year’s theme). It nearly killed me.

In the afternoon, Hazel started “experiencing tummy issues,” and, inspired by our friends who were making a similar move this weekend, as well as the fact that we were stuck indoors thanks to the rain, we finally took the toys out of Hazel’s room and moved Mo’s bed in. It’s for that reason both children are still awake, 45 minutes after we said goodnight to them. Let’s hope they get bored of each other soon.

And that was our Easter. THE END.