Holiday

Sophie, Liam and myself returned from 11 days in Queensland on Sunday. The impetus for travelling there was Sophie's cousin Katie's 21st birthday party, but we decided to take a side trip to Noosa while we were there.

We stayed with Kathy and Les (Sophie's Aunt and Uncle) in their enormous house in Samford. Samford is rural(ish) community just outside of Brisbane, where there's space for big houses on bigger properties! And they certainly needed a big house with all the family coming and going - I think there was a different combination of people every night we stayed! We had a nice relaxing time for a few days, enjoying doing absolutely nothing at all.

We needed to hire a car to get to Noosa, but this turned out to be more difficult than we expected. Just before we left we received a letter from our credit card company to say that our card may have been compromised, and to ring them immediately. We didn't want our card to be cancelled while we were away so I rang up the day after we arrived. However I was told that we had to get new credit cards, and our old ones would be instantly cancelled. Our new cards were being sent out to us... to our house back in Canberra. So we were left without credit cards for the rest of our holiday. We still had EFTPOS, but you need a credit card to hire a car. Luckily Kathy was willing to use her card (and go along with me when I picked it up) so it ended up OK, but was still extremely inconvenient. On the plus side, the car we picked up (a Mitsubishi Outlander Wagon) was so new that it only had 11km on the odometer, so it's the newest car I've ever driven!

We entered our Noosa apartment into the GPS device I had borrowed from my parents, and we headed off. It absolutely poured most of the way there, which wasn't a good sign for our beach holiday, but had stopped by the time we arrived. After some shopping at a lovely shopping centre in Maroochydore we checked in to our massive apartment - for some reason the best deal for us was to take a 3 bedroom apartment. Liam had his own wing!

While in Noosa Liam had his first paddle in the ocean, and his first swim in a pool (although it was actually a spa). He didn't particularly enjoy either experience, but didn't hate it either - he mostly just seemed a little worried. We also took a ferry trip up the Noosa river which was lovely. We had our first dinner out since Liam was only a week old at a lovely restaurant directly on the beach. Liam behaved himself wonderfully - he didn't stir from the moment we left the apartment to well after we had returned.

After returning to Samford we relaxed a bit more, with lots of swimming in their pool, and a trip out to Southbank with Amy and Bella (my sister-in-law and niece), who along with Pauline and Christopher (my mother-in-law and nephew) had also travelled up from Canberra for the party.

The party on Saturday night was brilliant - Les runs a hire shop so everything was laid on - a massive marquee, a jukebox/karaoke machine, and a slushy machine which served alcoholic slushies! I met many, many members of Soph's family for the first time, and played a lot of pool on the snooker table. And drank a lot of mango slushies of course!

Liam was, in general, really wonderful for the whole holiday. We had one terrible night, our second night in Noosa, where he got us up virtually every hour from 12:30am to 7am, but that was the exception. His behaviour noticeably changed over the course of the holiday, he seemed to become happier and more interactive each day. He has started to laugh a lot more for us (especially when naked - he loves his naked time!) and he began to show signs of deliberately reaching out and holding things. On the day of Katie's party, he reached out and held the string of a helium balloon, before promptly sticking it in his mouth. By the time we came home he really seemed less baby-like and more child-like.

Unfortunately for me, I was back at work the next day after returning home. I'm lucky it's only a four day week!