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Tag Archives: school holiday

Pick Your Own Cherries – Young, NSW

The annual National Cherry Picking Festival took place in Young, New South Wales on the first weekend of December. The drive from Canberra takes two hours, more or less. This was our second time of cherry picking. Kids always love to pluck fruits straight off the trees, that includes my children. So far we have been to blueberry, cherry, and apple orchards. And from experience I have learned that we, children and adults alike, tend to get carried away when it comes to how much we can/want/like to pick versus how much of the above mentioned fruit we can actually consume in the fruit-keeping-life period. I remember one summer when we had blueberry pancakes for almost 4 days straight (plus add blueberries on ANYTHING), and still had a bucket left.

Young has several orchards you can go to for cherry picking. The day when we were there, because it was the Festival of the year, there was a lot of merry making in the town center, so more surrounding streets were blocked, but there was plenty to do and to see. To get to the orchards, you need to drive 10-15 minutes from the town center. We stopped on the second orchard we found. This time, I was a bit more clever, I told friends that I was going cherry picking, and I actually took orders. And people do LOVE their cherries. No, I did not take any profits from the order, my kids enjoyment when I said “go nuts” as they took the bucket and got ready to do some picking was ‘profit’ enough for me. So you enter the orchard for free, and you pay for all the cherries you picked. Those you eat along the way are not counted. It was $10/kilo, which was half the price of what they sell at the supermarket.

We went to the town center after our cherry picking, and hung out there for a bit. A cherry pie eating contest was on, and I can tell you, the competition was fierce. They’ve got contestants from everywhere: apart from the  interstate contestants, even some overseas tourists put their best teeth forward. If you are ever around, this cherry picking can be a fun family activity during the school holiday. I believe the season continues until late January.

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up in the air

Do you remember when you were young kids and played so hard, you would run so very fast, or jump so high that your chest hurt and you had to stop to catch your breath just to do it again the whole day, and how happy that made you feel? Well, these shots of my son took me back to that time. There must be something joyful about keeping your body up in the air that he always try to bounce back up as soon as he landed. I love watching him go hard at it even when he had to stop a couple of times to catch his breath. It’s the joy of childhood, not yet  ‘play hard work hard’, it’s all about ‘play hard and go nuts’, until mum calls out for dinner.

Good times…

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Day 198 #Project365

198-365 playtime

The chatters and giggles and occasional shouts drew me to Mr 8’s room. This was how I found them playing together. Deep in their fantasy of pirate ship and snake monsters they have gone. One of the snake even had a split personality, I heard the snake’s tail always made a strong argument against its head. The room was dark, the blind was shut and they were up on the top bunk bed with only the bedside lamp as the source of light. Banning the use of electronic games always brought out their imagination, I should do it more often. Then the light was clicked shut and everything was dark because it was night time in that world. My cue to stop taking pictures and headed out of the room.

…6 more days before the school starts.

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Day 125 #Project365

126-365 Leia

It’s not enough that I felt quite disoriented and lost being out in public without an iPhone (my scatterbrain self accidentally left it at home), I suddenly found myself surrounded by intergalactic characters in mini sizes that caused further slip in my grip to reality. It was quite overwhelming.There were a couple of Leias, one really small Darth Vader, one not so scary Darth Maul, Storm Troopers and some alien breed of fairy princess Amadala (this little girl had that one red line thing happening on her lips while wearing a fairy princess dress and wings).

We were at Paper Chain in Manuka where they held an event celebrating May the 4th for the kids. As Mr 8 is a big fan, there were nowhere else he’d rather be. A grown up Princess Leia holding a bucket of lollies proved to be hard for intergalactic heroes (and villains) to resist. May the 4th be with us parents to handle bouncy kids who are flying sugar high this fine Friday night. What comes up will come down, and in this case more like come crashing down.

125-365 Yoda

Master Yoda was drawn by the store staff. Nicely done, don’t you think?

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Day 109 #Project365

109-365 lovebirds

Again we were woken up by the sound of rain this morning in Sydney. This week just reminded me of the wet week in Canberra a couple of months back. So wet. So long. But this morning I was very lucky. I had not one, but two very colourful visitors at my window! The Lorikeets!

To lighten the room a little bit I thought it’d best to open the blinds really wide. As I opened it, one bird flew and hopped onto the windowsill of our fourth floor apartment, then stayed just right there right in front of me. Then 5 seconds after, the second one flew in. Both tried to find shelter from the rain that was pouring hard. At first they kept to themselves, but then they started to walk a little closer and closer to each other, until they finally stood next to each other, body to body really, as if to seek warmth from each other.

Lucky me, I was there watching the whole thing. My camera was only at an arm’s length away, I quickly, and quietly -even though I was not sure whether they could be bothered by the noise that I made due to the loud rain and wind- prepared my camera and readied myself to take some birdy pictures.

Watching these two birds that close was so entertaining. Their colours are amazing, and their feathers even looked a bit more fluffed up than normal. Maybe like me they also suffered from frizzy hair thanks to the rain. The things that they did, the little synchronised tilt of their heads, those little hop hippety hop to move closer to the other for warmth, or a sudden peck from one bird for reason only they knew, it was just amazing to watch. Thirty centimeter was the mere distance between me and the birds. The kids were enjoying this live nature show as well next to me. I was not sure whether the birds could see me with the window closed, but I was glad they were facing me/window and not the other way. Or maybe they were watching us too and they were equally entertained by our behaviour, I wasn’t sure.

I took several pictures while keeping the window still closed. I did not want to shoo them away by opening it. But then I had to resort to manual focus, because with the auto focus my lens frequently got confused with the window glass; that it took the glass as the focus and not the Lorikeets behind it. Once I thought I had enough acceptable pictures with that window closed, I took a step further by opening the window bit by bit. Because I thought the bottom of the window was a bit dirty, maybe I could get better pictures without the glass between us. Surely enough, just one short slide up of the window startled them, so I continued opening it larger as quietly as I could. They did not stay longer after that. Probably just 5 more shots from me then they were gone. They did not sit together cosily like before, they were so aware of me they were nervously moving this way and that before they flew away. Good thing the rain eased up a bit. I hope they found a better shelter after that because the rain just did not want to quit. It’s going to be wet until the end of this week, unfortunately…

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