This will be the final post for the trip!!!! We stayed for another week after Janice was born. Most days we met up with friends and visited my bro and the family and of course, last min shopping! Ooo we also did one last trip to Harbourtown, Gold Coast the day before we left.

We spent Saturday at West End Market and Valley Markets. I loved West End - super fun! There was a lot to eat and see. The buskers were REALLY good.  My parents got this little walking butterfly at the markets for Sophie. How easy it is to satisfy a little one - a walking toy and a balloon, with lotsa space to venture… Other picture: My amazing daddy busying himself while we went shopping at the Valley Markets. Doesn’t he look stylo milo here with his new retro sunglasses I chose for him at the markets? Ray Ban k!

Sophie pretending to be Janice and cry.

On Monday, we met up with D & J. We’ve heard so much about little Issac who can drum!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! He’s not even 2. We watched him in action - it’s amazing coz his dad is a musician but he doesn’t play the drums. Issac learnt from watching the Hillsongs drum clinic CDs. WAH! D got him a baby drum set - real one! Don’t play play! Er…. most guy musicians are hard to hold on to…The last photo was taken when Soph was 7 mths with Issac. Hee Soph was so botak and she was trying to steal Issac’s hair! As usual poor girl trying to talk to the boy but he’s just ignoring her. Blah!

The last few days were spent shopping! James and I left Soph with my parents and went shopping in the city. Serious shopping. The kind that you walk until you can’t walk and your fingers wanna drop. YEP. It’s just that when things are on sale, it’s so much cheaper to get nice fashionable clothes here than back home. That’s James trying to catch me on a mission to complete Queen St.

The next day we went to Harbourtown in Gold Coast where the outlets were. Ok that’s a little (/big) story here where we got stopped by the traffic police for sitting more than 6 and not having a car seat for Sophie. We ended up having to borrow Issac’s car seat for the day trip to Gold Coast. It was a bummer but then, we were really thankful that our friends were all around to support. Thanks Mel, thanks D.

Yey! Pat on my back! I actually managed to blog a whole mth’s worth of holidaying! It was a great time. We all enjoyed ourselves very much

Mt Coot-tha is round the corner from Too Wong where we were lived. It’s got the best view of Brisbane city. We had lunch at the restaurant there. The food looked good but unfortunately tasted ok, was too little and too expensive.

After lunch, we dropped Rach off (poor girl was studying for her exams and trying to finish off her assignments) and headed off to the hospital to wait for the arrival of Janice!!!! (Btw, her middle name is not Missy, just that she took so long to come out so I called her little Missy! :))

She finally arrived that afternoon after almost 24 hrs of labor for her Mummy. We were all so excited!!!!!!!!!!!!!! She’s so sweet…….. love her full head of hair!!!!!! We were all glad to see that Sophie took so well to her and didn’t seem like she was aware that the attention has been shifted! Cool beans!

The next few days we went on and off to visit at the hospital so you’ll see less and less pictures of the trip. I’ll do one final post for the rest of the trip!

Ignore the buildings you see by the side and what you get is a real pretty view of the Roma St Parkland, a city garden.

There’s a lot to walk thru over here - lotsa green, lotsa flowers, and in my opinion one of the better playgrounds we’ve been to!

Sophie took off her shoes like the other aussie kids and played and played!

P/s you’ll notice that my entries about the trip are getting shorter and shorter. Two reasons, one, my memory is fast failing me and two, I’m almost done blogging abt the trip! I’ve finally uploaded the pictures on my flickr site.

During the trip, Sophie has lotsa good time to bond with Daddy!

Every other morning James would wake up earlier and take Sophie out for breakfast at the nearby bakery so that I can sleep in and spend time with the Lord. It was so good……..

I’m on a roll again. Finally got my act together and started crafting and learning with Sophie again!

This week our topic is rainbows.

I took the opportunity to teach her about colours too, of course! She’s finally getting her colours. So far she’s pretty confident with blue, red and yellow. Sometimes she gets orange, green and purple right.

Using whatever I already had, we made rainbows using coloured pipe cleaners! We were missing a violet but it’s as good as it gets! We also used the coloured ice cream sticks (super cheap for a bundle at Popular, great for craft and learning colours) to play a sorting game to emphasize on the colours. It so happened that it had all 6 colours too (no violet).

We attempted some potato printing. Supposed to print rainbows but it didn’t quite turn out like that! Sophie preferred to print her hands. Oh wells!

We read two books - Noah’s Ark and The Rainbow Fish. We also learnt the Rainbow song from Super Strong God CD.

Thank God I prepared a few things for us to do today coz it turned out, Sophie was having a cough and was running a slight fever in the morning. And of course, it’s been raining.

I showed Sophie a picture of a city. She caught on and started building her own cities. Look at that sky scraper!

P/s…….. finally Sophie’s into building blocks! It actually keeps her entertain for a bit. It’s very cute to see her being all focused on building cities.

Left: 25 mths old and Right: 7 mths old

The last time we went to Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary, Sophie was only 7 mths old. This time round we paid to take pictures with the koala and Sophie got to feed the kangaroos! And my parents came along too!

Our little one was SO brave! She was all gamed to carry the koala and take photos with her but unfortunately the koala was the same weight as her and it wasn’t safe. SOOOOO, James carried the koala for our $15 shoot and frame. And Sophie got to hug the koala and she got a kiss! So cute lah…..

It was really nice to hang out with my parents and Sophie enjoyed the time with them. Mum and esp Dad were pretty impressed with Sophie’s gung ho ness since Kel, Rach and I were such scaredy cats when it came to animals.

We are a typical Chinese family - must eat Chinese food. First thing we did when my parents arrived? YUM CHA at Sunnybank, the place to be for Asian food (btw, forget about Chinatown. The asian people in the know go to Sunnybank, not Chinatown. Chinatown is for the angmohs who like sweet and sour pork.)

People in the photo, from left: Mum, Dad, Bro, Sis in law, Sis in law’s mum, me and Soph. My sis couldn’t join us and James was taking the photo.

Ooooo I loved the weekends in Aus coz of the lovely markets! There were so many to go to! We managed two that day - Jan Power’s Farmers Markets at New Farm Park and the Valley Markets at Brunswick St. The former is somewhat like a farmers’ market with lotsa food and cheap fruits and veggies and the latter has more clothes, jewelery and handmade stuff.

We ended the day with a lovely dinner prepared by our friends at Hope Brisbane. HOME COOKED!!! YUMMS!

Together with James’ old friend, we took a road trip to Gold Coast. It’s only about a 45 mins drive from Brisbane.

We stopped at Sanctuary Cove, an uppity type of retirement village with a lovely marina, golf course and shopping and dining area, for lunch and drove past Surfers Paradise and stopped nearer to a beach near Coolangatta. We gave Surfers a miss coz we’ve been there a million times (ok maybe 5 times) and they happened to be having the Indy Car Race and it was madness, just imagine F1!

We promised Sophie that she’ll get to play with sand at the beach but it was colder and more windy than we had expected so…………………………….. we found a playground with sand! Hee… she was SO happy.

Sophie loooooves going to the museums. There are lots to see and all at her eye level. There are always lotsa children around and lots to learn.

She loves popping her head into these things and asking to see the picture later. Super funny! Sometimes she even has the correct expression for it! Like this picture!

The Brisbane museum is smaller than the Melbourne one and less extensive, of course. BUT still there were lots to see and it’s free. They had the usual dinosaur bones (they actually had a Dinosaur garden which we missed) display, transport section, wildlife section, sections to highlight the plight of sea turtles that were hunted and going extinct, etc…

Prior to the trip, James bought Sophie a book "Maisy Goes to the Museum" from ELC. Turns out, it was so appropriate for the trip coz we kept going to the museum.

After the museum, we went to ikea with my bro and sis in law. They had to run some errands for the new house so we just tagged along. Sophie got real cranky and kept needing to run around coz it was late. She was fussing and had a pee accident. We were planning to buy a towel and ended up using it to wrap her coz I ran out of change for her. Thank God ikea had a children’s corner with a TV so we sat there to wait for the rest. And I found out Nickelodeon has a lot of strange cartoons. Anyways, long days for a 2 year old is not a good idea.

Brisbane has a man-made beach at South Bank right smack in the city! We’ve always just walked pass it - I mean which tourist would go to the beach while shopping right?!? But this trip we were so free and with a super active toddler, we decided we must go!

Sophie was SO excited! She loves playing with sand and water so the beach is PERFECT. And the weather was great, part cloudy but no rain.

We spent the morning there and then met a friend for lunch. Yummy yummy Indian food - curry with naan. Oooo I love!!!!!! I had butter chicken and the garlic naan was so shiok.

Hee Sophie was so exhausted from playing, she fell asleep eating! (First time! Steph, hee like Luke!)

We had a nice quiet lunch while Soph napped in the stroller.

We took a walk back to P’s place in the city. James hung out with him and Sophie while I had a break at Borders. I actually read about 3/4 of a book while I was there. Nice little break for me.

I really like South Bank - during the trip we came back here a couple of times for the museum which was free, the markets on the weekend etc.