Gone Bush

We had a curriculum day today so instead of heading to school, we headed bush. Out to Werribee Gorge State Park to be exact.

Look around... This place is awesome!

We went wandering along the river track for a few kilometers, making heaps of detours along the way to look at interesting things, to imagine what lived in the caves or to throw rocks across the river.

For one section if the track we had to scrabble along some rocks at the bottom of a rocky cliff. We had to hold on to the cable that was attached to the rocks to make sure we didn't slip and fall into the river.

The best (and the trickiest!) part of the walk

It really wasn't that tricky but nan would have freaked out just watching us!

Just past the scrabbly rock area we found a nice little beach area to rest.

A beautiful place to rest, if you have time for rest!

Well a nice area for mum to rest for a few seconds before we found boulders we could use as stepping stones to get us to the other side of the river! Mum decided to come and see what we were up to. I don't think she was worried about what we were doing, but she did have her camera out just in case one of us fell in!

Jumping from one side of the gorge to the other

Luckily we crossed over the river and back (a few times) and didn't even get wet feet.

We could have spent all day exploring the gorge, it was amazing but we had to head back to the city - we had a dentist appointment to go to. Really, who schedules a dentist appointment on a day off school? I guess we will just have to come back and explore some more of the gorge another day.

Love Princess George

PS - I think we walked about 3kms each direction, plus another k of wandering (and trying to round up some sheep), 7kms - not a bad effort for a day off!

Waking the (almost) neighbour

It just seemed crazy that we would be just around the corner from Ellen and not stop by to say hello.

Sure it was still early in the morning on a public holiday but it was worth checking to see if she was awake. We couldn't remember which apartment was hers so instead of waking all of her neighbours, we tweeted this to her!

When she saw our tweet, we were here...

Since it was so early in the morning and we knew that Ellen was awake, we went to get coffee. Well coffee for Ellen and hot chocolate for us!

I am pretty sure that Ellen was happy to see us, even if it was early.

Thanks for the hot choccy Ellen, I will be the delivery girl any time!
Love Princess George

Sunday Sport - Soccer is Back

Hooray, the soccer season has begun again.

I am obviously older than I was last year, so now I get to play in one of the Under 11s teams.

This morning I played with the Joeys.

We may have been beaten (3-0) but t was great to be back out on the pitch, running around with my friends.

Love Princess George

PS.  I will add a Flickr Guest Pass to all photos from each week to my Soccer Stars page if you want to see us in action.

Ice Ice Baby

I am so super excited, I have just come home from my very first private coaching at ice skating. My teacher, Amber, is awesome. She has given me a program (that is figure skating speak for a routine!) to practice and hopefully one day soon I will go in a figure skating competition. How exciting is that!

Well I have to go and practice some of my moves off ice!
Love Princess George

Hockey Camp in the Holidays

Now I had an awesome time hanging out in Yarrawonga but I had to come back last weekend because I had hockey camp.  I can almost hear you thinking, "What is hockey camp?"  Well it is a chance for me to hang out at Icehouse every day and play hours and hours and hours of hockey.  Pretty cool huh!

Ice time

I was there from before 9 in the morning until 5 in the afternoon.  When we weren't skating or playing hockey we would do all kinds of cool things like building parachutes for eggs, playing street hockey and even watch movies about hockey.  As a bonus, we kitted up and headed back out on to the ice for another game of hockey before we went home.  Not a bad way to spend my day!

Posing for a photo or stacks on the coaches?

I can't wait until next holidays when I can go to hockey camp again.

Love AJ Pickle

Good Friday or a Great Friday?

Every now and then, mum gets an email inviting her to go somewhere interesting.  Occasionally we get an invitation to go along and share in the fun too.  Good Friday was one of the days when we got to share the fun and go along to the Cadbury Easter Egg Hunt at Werribee Park Mansion thanks to some free tickets that were sent to us from Cadbury.

We packed up our picnic and headed out to Werribee Park to share in the fun.

I couldn't believe just how many people were there having fun.  Rather than pick out a picnic spot straight away we decided to do a lap of the entire place to see just what we could do.  We could have gone on the rides but seeing that I didn't go on the rides at the school fete the other day, I didn't think I would go on the rides here either.  Instead of getting ride tickets, I negotiated with mum and dad to go exploring inside Werribee Mansion.

After the tour, I could scope out most of the picnic from the mansion balcony.

The view from the balcony

After exploring the mansion, we still weren't ready for our picnic lunch so we went exploring along the sculpture walk instead.

Fun in the Meccano Truck

The walk, and climbing all of the sculpture, made us work up a thirst so we stopped for a drink.

Drink time

By then, we were starting to get a little peckish so we headed back to the main picnic area.  We had just enough time to scoff some delicious hot corn before it was time to line up ready for our Easter Egg Hunt.  Milla was up first and then finally, the final Easter Egg Hunt of the day, it was my turn.

Ready to run

Every time I thought that the hunt was over, the Oompa Loompas (that was the all the wonderful people who volunteered to help out at the Easter Egg Hunt) kept scattering more eggs out for us to find.   I'm in the middle of the madness, scooping up dozens of eggs!

Scrounging for eggs

The crawling around the ground was well worth it, I think I found a few million!

Chocolate goodness

It was an awesome day that was there to raise money for the Royal Children's Hospital.  I have been lucky enough to not have had to visit the new hospital, but I have been to the old RCH a few times (this was one of my visits) and I am happy to say that they did a fantastic job of fixing me.  They did such a great job that I took $20 out of my money box to help make some other kids feel better when they are stuck in hospital.

Giving back

Thanks for inviting me and my family to join in the fun of the Cadbury Easter Egg Hunt.
Love AJ Pickle


PS - Mum wanted me to let you all know that we were given free tickets to go to the Cadbury Easter Egg Hunt.  We didn't have to blog about our day there but I wanted everyone to know how much fun I had, and to brag about how many eggs I found!  Cadbury also sent us this delicious hamper that mum still won't let us eat yet.

Earth Hour

When I first found out about Earth Hour, I have to say that I thought it was completely insane. How in the world could we possibly last an entire hour without power? Sure when we are camping we can manage it, but when we are camping we are usually so exhausted after running wild all day that we are ready for bed as the sun goes down. An hour at home with no power would be a completely new challenge. No TV, no computer, no i-devices, no lights. It was going to be a challenge.

The first few minutes were spent running around finding all of the candles we could, than searching in the dark for a lot longer trying to find some matches to light the candles!  We gave up on the search for matches and we ended up using the stove top to light the candles, I hope that wasn't cheating - it is a gas cook top so I think it would have been OK!

Now that we had light, all we had to do was find some way to fill in the rest of the hour without power or technology. What to do... Play cards, a board game, create? AJ decided to use the opportunity to teach mum and dad how to make origami cranes.

Making Cranes by Candlelight

Before the hour was up we had created more than a dozen teeny tiny cranes, had fun together and realised that having power and technology is awesome but we don't really need it to have fun.

AJ and I have decided that we need to have an earth hour every month, to remember that fun isn't reliant upon technology to have fun.
Love Princess George

Wishes for Everyone

An amazing afternoon of exploring and we found not only a Labyrinth but a Wishing Tree.  

The Wishing Tree

The tree was covered in wishes from many different people.  It was beautiful.

... when I grow up

Love and Laughs

Contentedness, Beauty, Peace

Super Powers :-)

I wish for a Kitten too!

Happiness for all

The Labyrinth

A public holiday and with school about to go back, it was the last day we were all likely to be home together for a month or 2.  It was the perfect reason to get out and about.  Dad planned an adventure for us to go exploring around the Yarra, in the Fairfield area.  We jumped in the car and headed out to have some fun.

Dad's plans went out the window when we saw a signpost that said 'Labyrinth' with an arrow pointing in the opposite direction.  Naturally we ignored Dad's directions and headed off to find the Labyrinth.

Now I don't know about you, but until now, all I knew about a Labyrinth is that it is a movie that is kinda scary, where everyone gets lost in a ginormous maze.  (I probably should watch the movie again now that I am older, hopefully it won't be so scary!)

Luckily the Labyrinth we found was nothing like that Labyrinth.  This Labyrinth was made from rocks and was a single pathway that we followed around and around until we made it to the middle.

Follow the Path

I tried to relax and enjoying the slow wander through the Labyrinth, but I don't wander slowly very well.  We are kids so going slow really isn't what we do.  In fact, we went through the Labyrinth twice and still managed to get back to the start before mum!

Getting there

Almost to the middle

One of the biggest challenges was to stay in between the rock walls instead of jumping over them!

We had a great time exploring the Labyrinth.

The Wishing Tree and the Labyrinth

Sometimes it is great to change plans at the last minute, to see what surprises are just around the corner.
Happy exploring,

Love Princess George

Kids of Social Mums Say...

Every now and then mum will go off and meet up with some other bloggy folk and have a great time.  She will come home talking about all the cool people she met and the fun things that she got to do.  Well finally mum let us come along to a bloggy day - we went to Social Mums Say at Fed Square.

I overheard mum tell dad that if we thought it was lame that we could go hang out in the park and she would have fun with Milla.  Well I am happy to say that I had a great time and didn't want to escape at all, I could have stayed even longer!

The highlight of the day for me was hanging out and using all of the Micador products.  I decorated a folder that will look awesome in my new bedroom.  Who knew you could have so much fun with a folder and some washi tape!

Once I finished decorating my folder, it was time to try out the Clouds Modelling Foam.  I loved playing with the foam but because so many kids had played with it all morning, the colours were all mixed up.  I fixed that - I started to sort it out into colours so that the other kids could play with it properly.

OCD much?

Even Milla liked playing with the Cloud Foam and sorting it into proper colours!

It seems OCD may just be contagious!

Thanks for a great day Kids Business, I hope mum drags me along to another blog event soon!
Love AJ Pickle

PS - shhhhh, don't tell anyone but someone may just have smuggled home some Clouds modelling foam so the fun could continue!

I said not to tell anyone!

This is the life!

You know, I really could get used to this!
Love AJ Pickle

Sleep Out

It is no secret that we love camping, the only problem is that we are always so busy that we never make time to go camping. A few weeks ago we wanted to go camping in the backyard but it turns out that our tent is bigger, WAY bigger, than our backyard so that didn't work.

Well all of that has changed now and we are the proud new owners of a new tent that we can all fit in but still fits in our backyard. To celebrate, we went camping the very night we got the tent.

It was great camping in the backyard. The best thing was that we could quickly run inside to get anything we had forgotten.  And yes, you do need to have a cow with sunglasses when you go camping!

We tried to convince mum and dad to join us on our camping adventure but we had no luck.  Hopefully  our whole family we will get to go camping properly soon.
Love AJ and Milla

Loving the Beach

It is only the second day of the year and we are visiting our second beach of the year.

It was stinking hot today so we had a pretty quiet day with friends at home then mum surprised us and packed a dinner picnic to take to the beach!

Beach love

Perhaps 2013 is the year of beaches!
Love Princess George

A New Year and a New Beach

What better way to start the New Year than by driving to a 'new' beach.  OK, it isn't really a new beach but it was a part of the beach that was new to us, we stopped here to avoid the crowds on the main part of the beach.  Anyway, spending the day at the beach is always fun, there is so much to do.

Of course you can splash around in the water, go for a swim, search for sea creatures or find pretty rocks.

Enjoying the beach

You can also dig holes in the sand. We had this great idea to dig holes and bury ourselves in the sand to avoid the sun.

Almost buried

If you are lucky you can find some seaweed pom poms and pretend you are a cheerleader!

Ready, OK!

What a great way to spend New Years Day,
Love princess George and AJ Pickle

Making friends

I love having holidays with Nan and Pop, I get to go to the lake with my friends almost every day.  

Oh and speaking of friends, I have made even more new friends this holiday.  

I love hanging out with friends.

There were heaps of people at the lake today so it was a miracle that we found this little guy!

Leaping Lizards!

Love Princess George

Cute and Cuddly on a Girl's Day Out

We had huge plans that we would spend Boxing Day relaxing by the lake but it wasn't very warm.  All the grown up boys went to play golf so the grown up girls decided to go for a driving adventure.  They asked if I wanted to join them but I decided that it would be more fun hanging out around the house so I said no thanks. 

Now that they are back home (and bragging!) I really wish that I had joined them, they found koalas.

Apparently there is a koala up in this tree ->, it is up really high in the tree, close to the top of the photo.  

They must have found koalas that were closer to the ground to see one up close like this.

They even found a koala with a cute little baby that was hanging on tight.

 I can't believe that Judy has only been in Australia for a few days and already she has seen koalas in the wild.  Maybe next time that I am invited for a drive I will join them.  Even better, maybe nan and pop will take me on an adventure to koala-land next year!

Love Princess George

Might as well JUMP!

For some reason whenever mum sees these photos, she starts singing this 'Jump' song.  I don't know the song, I think it must be from the olden days, either that or mum is such an ordinary (that is a nice way of saying terrible) singer that it is unrecognisable!  Anyway, if you were about in the olden days, you probably have that song stuck in your head too :-)  

I guess if you are now singing or humming along to the tune, I might as well show you the photos.

Might as well JUMP!

Ed joined in the fun

Even Billy went for a jump!

Don't you wish you were relaxing on the banks of the lake watching us jump, better still jumping too?

Love Princess George