The Dower Family

  Firstly, let me thank our friend Glen for taking these beautiful photos of Obear today at Ned’s wonderful 4th birthday party.  Ollie and I joined a few of our friends and a whole bunch of other kids at a fantastic park to run around like crazy people and consume lots of sugar.  Ollie got a real kick out of it as he is pretty in awe of bigger kids at the moment and loves to mimic their behaviour.  He particularly loved being involved in the treasure hunt, as well as demolishing lots of fruit and just a few cakes and lollies. As for the title, well Ollie has added ‘um’ to his vocabulary.  He uses it perfectly, when you ask him something, he goes “um??” until he can tell you the answer.  Too too beautiful.  He also has so many other words each day that it amazes us.  You just have to say “can you say Sophie?” (the lovely little girl across the road that Ollie loves) and he repeats it.  He is also starting to connect words in an appropriate manner.  This week he grabbed Nick

Well it is finals week in Masterchef and Ollie has really taken this on board.  He is loving kitchen toys and recently I bought him a little toy kitchen which has been using to make me cups of tea and treats to feed his toy animals.  We had Nanna Freddy come to stay this week and she was so impressed by Ollie’s cooking skills that she bought him even more kitchen goods to add to his collection.   Stay tuned, we were talking about him getting a bigger and better play kitchen for Christmas. To further inspire Ollie to become a domestic Goddess, Nanna Freddy also got Ollie his very own little broom.  This was an absolute necessity as Obear has been quite insistent lately about using our broom to sweep the thousands of leaves that drop out on the deck.  Thankfully this little broom is less likely to smash windows, or inflict damage to Gus.  We hope. Saturday morning saw Obear and Nanna Freddy and I take a walk down to the patisserie we lurve around the corner.  Ollie and I

Well it is Monday night and we are back at home after our lovely five day loooong weekend in Victoria with Pa Chris and Nanna Kaye to celebrate Pa Chris turning 60.  We enjoyed spending the time with them and Luke & Fiona down at beautiful Ocean Grove – even though it was just a little bit freezing!!! Here are some shots of us at Pa’s birthday celebration with many many members of the Geelong of the side of the family.  Ollie had a great time catching up on his Chinese heritage.    After a while even the best behaved boys need a little escape so Nick and Ollie found a nearby alley to blow off some steam.  They grabbed me and we had an impromptu photo shoot in the alley with the post boxes and the autumn leaves. We were also lucky enough to catch up with our dear lovely friends Aman and Alice who are just back from way too many weeks in Europe.  Ollie showed them how baby proof their terrace is/isn’t by raiding their vege basket and throwing their onions, garlic

This week Ollie has come up with the most beautiful phrase - “mummy’s here”.  It initially started out as a ‘first thing in the morning’ thing when I’d go into his room and he would declare “mummy’s here”. But now he says it at various points throughout the day and it also works for “daddy’s here”.  The only time it doesn’t sound quite as gorgeous is at 4am when he calls it out.  Still cute but ever so slightly less so. Not a whole lot to report on this week.  A few more nights of average sleep with Obear still cutting at least 45 different teeth at once.  He is getting better though and is sleeping about 11 hours with only one wake up which is a huge improvement.  In loveliness this week, went to have a late breakfast with our friends Sam & Al and little Audrey & Henry on Friday.  The occasion was Audrey getting fitted for her first pair of ballet slippers.  Obear and Audrey were trashing the ballet store, pulling shoes off the displays and hugging the mannequins (Ollie