Happy Australia Day

It's Australia Day! January 26th is the day Australians celebrate being Australian (and some say the establishment of the first European settlement on the continent of Australia but that's a little controversial and not actually on the official website). We discovered the celebration aspect of it is most like our 4th of July. Festivities include lots of BBQ, beer, gatherings of friends, and culminate with fireworks. Music, especially live, also plays a large part. Monday is a holiday in Queensland (our state) so Travis gets a nice three day weekend for his birthday (which was Friday).

Today the young man of the house woke up from his nap all giggles. Every time he looked at me he howled with laughter. After I pulled the camera out he took it down a couple notches, but you still catch the drift.

And a still photo showing off the big grin.

View of the fireworks from our balcony. They were set off at South Bank park, literally in the river across the street from us."Sorting" the shapes from Aunt Suzie. Right now this pretty much means mixing them all up with both hands and then dumping them onto the floor :) Oh, this was so funny, this is the pool float that you may remember from Thanksgiving. It was sitting on the floor drying off and happened to be within arms reach. I was cooking dinner and it suddenly got suspiciously quiet. I turned around and this is what I saw:
then I scooted around to get a view from underneath. What a funny little guy, he was SO content!One of our expeditions this week was to the Brisbane City Botanic Gardens. Here's FFM in his stroller, complete with UV sun shade, in the mangrove trees. UV exposure is a big deal here, as the ozone layer is very thin over Australia. What this means is that there is less atmosphere to protect your skin and you will burn a lot more quickly. Being from Colorado we're used to this, we have the same effect being at high altitude. We just returned to our old habits of always, always putting on sunscreen, wearing hats and sunglasses, and FFM has a swim body suit that's sort of like a mini wet suit.