The Dower Family

Love seems to be Ollie's word of the week. It has been in his vocabulary for quite sometime but this week it seems to be used for everything. Examples of things Ollie loves: - suncream (as in "I LOVE suncream") - Aunty Emma - Trees - the cooler (meaning the air-conditioner in the car) - Groceries - Ice cream - Dora (no surprise there) - Balloons - And of course mummy and daddy We made a return visit to Seaworld this week (our tickets get us in now until the end of financial year) along with Nanna Freddy. This gave us a chance to check out a few things we missed out on the trip before like the dolphin show which was just amazing. Obear kept saying "more more" throughout the show so he definitely got a kick out of it. He also enjoyed another visit to the penguin house where they were swimming in the underwater bit catching fish and doing the most unbelievable propulsions out of the water. He also sat still for 15 minutes watching a 3D version of Happy Feet w

Apologies for the lack of blog last week. We were lucky enough to be freeloading off Nanna Freddy & Poppy Mick down at the coast for the entire week. It was actually quite a full house of family and friends throughout the week with Alicia & Guy coming up from Sydney for the weekend, Peta, Zoe & Jackson joining us on the same weekend and dear friends Jean & Ian popping by for a couple of nights too. By far Ollie's favourite visitor was his uncle Guy and he talked for days in advance about how he was going to splash Guy in the pool. Of course he gave it a shot but Guy is in a slightly higher weight division that Obear so naturally Guy's splash packed a little more punch - you should have seen the "death stare" he through Guy's way, totally priceless. Luckily all was forgiven and much more tomfoolery was engaged in. Alicia and Guy endeared themselves even more so to Ollie by bringing him back presents from their recent Fiji trip. O's favourit

Ollie was lucky enough to have a visit from his Grandpa Peter on the weekend. All the sweeter because he brought Obear an awesome (and VERY noisy) police car. The two of them had a great time racing it up and down the hallway and worked up such an appetite that they had to demolish lots of pancakes with ice cream to rebuild their energy. Grandpa was very impressed with Ollie's language skills, particularly his many requests for "Grandpa come play me". This little line is getting trotted out a lot lately and is very adorable. Don't you just love the smell of commerce in the morning? Ollie does, he is quite the little capitalist since he got his own cash register at Christmas time. We've since filled it with Monopoly money (we can't use it to play the game as we always end up fighting - seems we were brought up on completely different rules - Nick is fiercely competitive while I don't care about the hotels and just want to drive my little silver car ar

It has been a reasonably uneventful week around here which is quite nice in light of all the drama of late. Ollie and I had a great playdate with our old mother's group at an indoor play centre which was just out of control in a really fun way. We had been to this play centre in the past but it just seemed like something really clicked for Obear and he was climbing up everything, scaling the second floor of the play equipment and totally loving sliding down the really steep slides. In the past I've had to go right into the equipment with him to supervise but this time we got to be really slummy mummies and just pulled up chairs at the front of the playground and let them run wild. Bunch of big two year olds that they are. More indoor play, this time on the weekend. Nick graduated Ollie's trike to the next level, taking off the back and side support and engaging the pedals. Ollie wasn't too sure about turning the pedals himself but after some encouragement from Nic