The Kids have a 2 Week Holiday...

Wow, what a fabulous Spring Break we had!  Year round school has been a weird adjustment but I can see some pluses.  The kids go 10 weeks then get a break-- either 2 or 6 weeks.  This was a 2 week Spring Break and we crammed it as full as possible. It was so much fun, but I'll be honest by the time school started up again, I was breathing a sigh of relief. I have always loved Spring, but here in Brisby it just feels a little flipped.  It's October and we're celebrating "new life" and the beginnings of warmer (hot) weather.  So strange to mix Halloween (which is not really celebrated here) with the ideas of baby birds hatching and trees blossoming.  It makes me shake my head and scrunch my nose sometimes while I make the adjustment in my mind, but hey--Spring is great no matter where you are!  We kicked off the break with "Bottomless Slurpee Day"...that's right folks, I was in heaven!  I feel like having Slurpees here in Aussie (real 7-11 Slurpees) is a tender mercy from heaven!  We love having a

 7-11 here and very close by.  In fact, Park takes his bike and a $2 coin and $1 coin to get a slurpee every so often on his own.  So grown up!  Anyway, the 7-11 here literally hosted a Bottomless Slurpee day.  We paid our $3 for our cup and refilled it all day.  You had to bring your same cup in each time and they would give you a sticker for your fill.  We filled it 7 times...you know me-- I'm all about getting our monies worth!  And yah...we had some solid brain freezes to go along with it!  We love Slurpees!

We also visited Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary.  Oaks and I had been but the other 2 hadn't.  It's just too awesome to really even write about.  Parker and Birdy had so much fun lounging with the roos, petting koalas and making the cockatoos talk.  This is just such a fun place.  We got a couple shots of the joeys climbing in and out of the mama's pouches. Fascinating!

Feeding the roos never gets old.  They were hungry and so friendly!

Check out the size of the those paws!  That's Park's hand in the mix.

 Oaklee just LOVES animals.  She just snuggles right in and chats em up a little...or a lot!

Pucker up little guy!

The joeys were so adorable.  Their fur is soft and the kids couldn't get enough of them.

These black cockatoos were pretty cool.

Of course there were lots of friendly water dragons.  We shared our pears with them!

 There are so many cool things to see at Lone Pine.  Very Aussie...we watched the tazmanian devil prance around his pen.  They look as mean as they really are!!!  All I can think of when I see these rascally guys is...The Fire Swamp-- "Wesley, what about the R.O.U.S's?"

"Rodents of Unusual Size?  I don't believe they exist."  Well as we all remember from Princess Bride, Buttercup was right...they do exist.  And they live here in Australia under their pseudonym "Tazmanian Devils"...don't they look just like them?
 

Mom, Bird and Oaks had a couple "girls' days" when Park went to a friend's house.  We biked to a little corner cafe and ate yummy fancy food.  We went to see a movie (Turbo) at the South Bank Cinemas (not theaters here...always cinemas).  Southbank is a really fun area in downtown Brisby.  It's a couple miles long and it's just shopping, cinemas, tons of food and water play places.

This is the Southbank man-made beach.  Isn't it cool how it's right down town?  They have literally made a beach here.  Sandy banks and all.  They water is only about waist deep so it's a great place for the girls to play and swim...while mom holds the sand down!  :)

These 2 kill me.  Sorry to bug, but they are so stinkin cute! Notice Birdy's new missing tooth!
 Another Spring Break event!

 So much going on...we had to catch a few naps too!  I mean it is supposed to be a "break" right?

There were a lot of other really fabulous things we did over spring break, like our camping trip to Stradbroke Island and our experience at the amazing Riverfire firework show at the Brisbane City Festival but they were so big and awesome that they deserve their own posts.  So I will have to post on those later this week.  In between loads of laundry and sweeping sand out of our car...an impossible task I'm coming to learn!  I guess it's just a beachy car and people here live with a little grit on the floor at all times!  If it means more beach time...we can live with it too!