Wyatt on Batteries...

Wyatt: Cooper needs new batteries. Where do Cooper's batteries go ?
Daddy: Cooper doesn't have batteries.
Wyatt: Then how does Cooper talk ?

Melbource UCI World Cup

I attended the latest round of the UCI Track Cycling World Cup this weekend. I have to say that it was probably the most entertaining sporting event I've been to in person. Obviously as a cyclist I'm a bit biased but I think even the non-cyclist would have found it pretty cool.

I went the final session on the final day of 3 days so I got to see the finals of the big events. The event was at the Hisense Arena which has a velodrome which was built for the commonwealth games that were here a few years back. The track is 250 metres around with a maximum banking of 42 degrees in the corners and about 12 degress on the flats.




The first event of the night was the men's madisen. This is a 40km race involving multple teams ( in this case 13 ) of 2 riders each. Basically there is a pack like in a road race, except only one rider needs to be in the pack at a time. Riders are able to swap out of the race by touching thier team mate who then rides in the pack. Except, they dont just touch, they grab hands and the faster rider slingshots the slower rider up into the pack. And all this is done while going about 50km per hour in a pack with a dozon other riders ! oh, and the bikes have no brakes and you can't stop pedalling. Sound like fun ? The australian team managed to finish in second while the team from Spain won the race. The Australians were only 18 and 19.

The next event was the keiren. This is an event where 6 - 8 riders are on the track at once, they follow a motorbike for the first several laps with the bike getting progressively faster and faster until it pulls off with 2.5 laps to go. Riders are not allowed to pass the motorbike or touch each other while it is on the track. This is huge in Japan where they get up to 70,000 people to watch keirin races . They gamble on the races so that adds some suspense I imagine.






There was a big crash in the women's keiren when one rider swerved in the final sprint and forced a girl from New Zealand to crash into an Australian girl. They both went down at 50 km per hour but both manages to get up and walk away. Ouch.




Other events over the night were the womens team pursuit (three riders per team trying to catch the other team over 5 km) ,




womens 500 metre time trial,



and men's sprints ( best of 3 one on one races over 3 laps).

In the women's team pursuit the australians finished second to the british women. The brits are olympic, world champions and hold the world record. They only lost by 3 tenths of a second and they were 18, 18 and 19.

An australian also won the Men's sprints.





Shame we don't have a velodrome like this in Canada....but hey, at least we have a biodome !

Santa in Oz

Perks of living in Australia include wearing shorts to the Santa Claus Parade. No dredging strollers through the snow, bundling the kids up in their Columbia snowsuits, no freezing your butts off waiting to see a bunch of people bundled up on floats. No, imagine Caribana with Santa as the grand finale…Okay, a slight exaggeration but it was definitely pleasant.
Only the second year that there has been a Santa Claus parade in Melbourne, and our only complaint was that it was a tad on the long side. We met Sam, Ben and Connor at their place in Southbank, parked there, then walked down to Starbucks for a Gingerbread latte (‘tis the season after all) and then headed to the parade. Heaps of characters in costume, a bunch of athletes we don’t know (and their very small babies), a few very elaborate floats, a good amount of spectators but nowhere near the crowds we would have back home. The kids did very well, they enjoyed calling out the names of the characters they knew – Bob the Builder, Elmo and the Sesame Street crew. In Australia, there is a character called Ollie. Same colour as Zoe but male. He is their Elmo, he has his own segments between most children’s shows every day, all day. He starts with “I’m awake. It’s a brand new lovely day.”, then moves on to “Do you know what day it is today?”, he has a few bedtime segments and a bunch of stuff in between. Maddy was very excited to see Elmo and Zoe (Ollie) and this was good since the parade wasn’t moving much by then and they were in front of us for a good 10 minutes.
After 90 minutes, we were itching for Santa to appear so that we could go home. Maddy was already asleep in the stroller, Cooper was close behind, Wyatt kept asking where Santa was…we made it to the conclusion and ended up with some mild sunburns – definitely a first for all of us!

Meet the Nippleman.

The other night at dinner, Wyatt was eating topless and discovered is nipples. “What are these called Mommy?” “Nipples honey.” “Do you have nipples mommy?” “Yes.” “Can you show me yours?” “Well, honey it isn’t really a good idea for women to show their nipples at the dinner table.” “Who is at the door? (the wind was knocking the door open)” “It’s the Nippleman.” “The Nippleman. He has 5 nipples and he has nipples on his eyes. He’s at the door again. Mommy are you going to let the Nippleman in?” Reading this, Jeff wishes his hours at work ended sooner so that we had less impact on their development.

No paparazzi!

One odd morning, Cooper sat in this corner by himself for a good 30 minutes. Maddy tried to join him. He shunned her. Wyatt tried to join him. He was also shunned. There was no moving him or socializing with him. He just sat there. (no he was not taking a dump). He is a very funny kid. He is very erratic in his movements, very random in his comments and very hooked on his latest obsessions.

He has a new obsession (other than being by himself) and that is “Peanut butter.” For breakfast, on toast for lunch, but most importantly, a pre-bedtime snack “Peanut Butter. Peanut Butter.” If you do not prepare toast with PB and place it on the ottoman, he will fetch the peanut butter for you, then point to where the toast should be placed until you make it happen. Another small obsession – his "people pyjamas". The kids have new summer pjs, his have people on them and he is IN LOVE with these pjs. He fights us to take them off, goes to find them in the laundry room if he can’t see them and walks around with them in his hands if you do manage to get them off of him. Our children are all a little OCD. No ideas why.

Maddy three three three meets the bug fly.

"Look at dat. Look at dat. Look at dat. My turn right now. My turn right now. My turn right now. Excuse table mommy. Excuse table mommy. Excuse table mommy. Sorry Wyatt. Sorry Wyatt. Sorry Wyatt. Me do dat. Me do dat. Me do dat. You kay Pooper? You kay Pooper? You kay Pooper? T.B. right now? T.B. right now? T.B. right now? Poo in potty right now. Poo in potty right now. Poo in potty right now." Everything is repeated. At least 3 times. Until she is acknowledged. Then she is thrilled and may even do a victory dance.

Bluezone German Beer Gardens

Kerri (from Winnipeg) told me to check out the beer gardens in St. Kilda on a Sunday afternoon as they have live music, picnic fare and her kids enjoyed the dance floor. Forgetting for a moment that neither Jeff nor I are really beer drinkers, we spontaneously decided to partake in a little action last Sunday. The crowd was a bit hipper than our caravan with 4 adults and 3 kids, but we decided to go in anyways. Cooper, Maddy and Wyatt were not interested in dancing, all they wanted to do was to walk on the road that runs parallel to the beer gardens. This was cute for a while, then got a bit tiring. The music was great, the food was good, the weather was beautiful, but we spent as much time in the empty lot next door as we did in the actual gardens. The highlight of the day for me was when Cooper took a large calamari, put it around his wrist and proceeded to nibble at it for the rest of the evening. The event itself is REALLY cool and I would love to go back without kids so that I could blend in a bit more and so my younger friends from Ultimate don’t say “I'm one of those people that looks at people that bring their kids and thinks "Don't bring your kids here, this is my space."”.

Bug Fly! Bug Fly! Go Way Bug Fly!

Melbourne has lots of flies. The tourist books intelligently leave this detail out. There are tons of them and they are not your typical Canadian flies that are so dumb you can kill them with a single swat. No. These flies are sticky, persistent, human loving, Superflies. They are everywhere. There are usually 3-4 buzzing around any of our light fixtures at any given time (one downfall of having the doors open so kids can come and go as they please). They probably love our garage too since we can accumulate quite the load of diapers in our rubbish can! You can swat all you like but they will remain attached to you until they have had their fill. At first the kids would scream bloody murder whenever a fly landed on them.












Now they will point and laugh at flies, all the while chanting “Bug Fly! Bug Fly! Go Way Bug Fly!” for a better portion of the day.

Forgetting this whole fly issue, we decided a trip to the Collingwood Children’s Farm was in order. Not sure what we were thinking…hot day, farm full of animals and manure…would you expect sticky flies???? The kids coped better than I did but it was not the dream daytrip we were hoping for.

The Farm is pretty centrally located – sort of like the Experimental Farm in Ottawa. It is just off of the bike-path Jeff has travelled a number of times so he was interested to see what it was all about. The animals were penned and you were able to get up close to the goats and sheep, hold some guinea pigs, see some barn cats, chickens roaming free, and the odd pig and cow. A tractor ride around some fields was well received, pony rides were available but the lines were pretty long and our kids weren’t too keen. True to Melbourne fashion however, there was a café on site with a pretty good menu. We had packed our own lunch, expecting the farm to entertain our kids for a bit longer than it did, but we ended up heading home for lunch to escape the flies. I imagine this would be a wonderful place for older kids in cooler weather, before the flies take over!!!

OFF TO THE RACES...

So Catty, Leslie and I decided we wanted to participate in the Racing Carnival Week known here as the Melbourne Cup. It is a week of races (Saturday is Derby Day, Tuesday is Cup Day, Thursday is Crown Oaks Day (unofficially ladies day) and the following Saturday is Stakes Day which is family day) with the biggest prize races on Cup day which is a local public holiday. The races are very prestigious, with horses from Ireland, the Middle East, Australia, etc… all competing for a few million in prize money. Over 100,000 spectators attend each of these major days, including many celebrities such as Rob Scheider, Chris Isaak and other random B-listers, that for unknown reasons are well loved here in the land down under. The event is formal, and for women a hat/hairpiece is “mandatory”. We made a few trips to various stores, finding new hats ranging from $100-$1000+ but we were unwilling to pay that kind of cash for something we might wear only once. Then we tried the op shops (Opportunity shops – which are the rough equivalent to consignment stores), with no luck. Next we tried dollar stores and some cheap accessories stores and eventually we all managed to find some cheap hair accessories that would do the trick.

We left the house by 9 am, Catty and Leslie had prepped for our outing by pouring horribly cheap wine (the colour of urine, the taste of super sweet slightly off fruit juice) into empty Coke bottles for drinking on the train. Flashbacks to younger days found me chugging from a bottle on the train, very reminiscent of Hope Volleyball tournaments and other stupid days in my past. I would come to regret this decision, but not for many hours.

From the train station on, the day was full of beautiful women in wonderfully stylish dresses with extraordinary hair pieces, updos and fancy hats, accompanied by stylish men in suits with metrosexual shoes. It was unlike anything I have ever experienced in person before. A giant prom from the set of Gossip Girl, a red carpet event for young adults…and I felt old and old. In any event, ladies – it was fun! There were also people that bucked the trend and went in groups with themed costumes…the superheroes, the jailbirds, and even a crew of Santas handing out presents like flipflops,

We met up with Jeff’s colleagues, Akiko, Steve O’Shea and his wife Adele, Tim and his roomate Nikki. Upon arrival, 3 bottles of Sparkling Wine were purchased. It was but 10:30am. We saw a few races from the edge of the rail which was interesting but the action passes by in a split second and since we were not at the finish line, our split second view meant nothing! Another guy that works with Jeff, Dale, is part owner of a horse that placed second in one of the early races on Cup Day (he also slipped up 2 passes to the Owner’s section where we slummed a little bit later in the day). Over the course of the day, we managed to finish a case worth of sparkling wine. With Tim chanting “Eating is cheating” and Steve and Tim refilling our glasses after each sip we were all enjoying ourselves, the sun, the races and our new neighbours. We placed bets on the final race but none of us managed to win anything with 3 outside hopes placing first, second and third. That was the most disappointing part of the day as I was hoping to pay off my ticket and boozing with my winnings. We left Flemington racecourse with the other 100,000 spectators taking the train back to the city. Very orderly, but mostly a big blur. Tim blared some Hip from his iPhone into my ear to try and keep me in the game, but the train was very hot and very crowded and I was DONE.

As per my usual self, I slipped away from our group and stumbled to the next platform to catch the next train home. The rest of the group went on to party some more in the CBD but I was in no condition to be social. I made it home safely but those of you that have ever been out drinking with me know how this evening ended … luckily there was no one around to witness my finale (at least no one I knew). I am thankful for the experience but more thankful for my husband for overlooking my poor tolerance of alcohol and childish ways.

And that was the celebration that stops a nation!

Movember Update

Well, I'm one week in and looking good...well, looking okay. There are better Mos at work, and there are worse so that is a relief.

I've passed the $50.00 mark for donations which yields me a Shick Shaving Kit which I will no doubt use to remove my Mo at my earliest opportunity.

Here is a pic of my fellow Mo growers at work.