This week Dad had a Hebrew exam, and took a couple of days off. We went away on a holiday for the long weekend with some friends and family.
The first step was to buy some provisions for the long weekend. Puff is no longer happy to just walk around a shop, though he can occasionally be persuaded to sit in a trolley. Often, he’ll want to carry around his own basket. This is about as much as he can carry, though, and he’ll get annoyed with you if you try and put actual products into the basket.
On the trip down south, we stopped in Wollongong: Dad managed to grab a rare photo of Puff still holding onto Dad’s hand. This is a frequent source of contention at the moment – Puff generally wants to hold Dad’s hand when it’s safe for him to run around, and if he’s on – say – the footpath next to a busy street, then he’s not interested in holding Dad’s hand.
When we arrived at the national park where we’d spend the next three nights sleeping in a cabin, it was heading towards dusk. As soon as we left the car, we could see kangaroos, and a lot of them! Puff said “Puppies?”, but we soon set him straight.
The next day we drove further south to Mogo Zoo. There are a lot of different animals to see, some of which can get quite close to the visitors. Here’s Puff having a go at feeding the deer.
One of the best moments of the zoo trip was seeing Puff learn what sound an otter makes. Dad was holding him while Mum tool photos of the otters – he heard the sounds they were making, and with a big grin, copied the sounds. Even now, a few days later, he still smiles when answering the “what does an otter say” question.
Although brushing Puff’s teeth remains a nightly battle that requires great patience, when we need to take a photo of him, we can ask him to “show his teeth” and he’ll generally oblige. Here he is with Mum:
And here he is with Dad:
One last highlight of the trip away was playing on the sand at the beach. Dad managed to let him have some of the toys, and only built sandcastles about half the time that Puff was on the sand.
The trip wasn’t all smooth sailing, though. We had some serious problems with mosquitoes on the first night, and Puff spent most of the trip with a runny nose, and occasional coughing. For the first time ever, I let him lay down and listen to some of his music (on my iPhone), and he just lay still for a couple of songs. Later in the week we repeated this, and he lay still again!
With winter coming, our latest challenge is to work out how to keep him warm overnight. When putting him to bed last night, we tried to tuck him in under a blanket, but he found it too unfamiliar and stressful, so we had to wait until later in the evening, after he was asleep. Tonight, Dad introduced the blanket as a toy to play with, but when the critical time came, he wasn’t interested. Hopefully there will be some good news to announce on this next week!