at the going down of the sun and in the morning

We went to the ANZAC dawn service this morning. It was a surreal experience getting up at 2.15am (yes you read that right) to catch the train at 3.11am.
There were not many on the train but by the time the service started at 4.30am, Martin Place was packed.

Jacob was very good but after about an hour of standing around he was pretty restless so Luke took him off to find some food. They then spent the next hour looking at shoes (his current obsession) and riding the escalators up and down.

I enjoyed the service, loudly sang the New Zealand national anthem and even knew most of the words to the Australian anthem.

I met up with my boys and we caught the train home. I caught sight of the sun rising as we sped away from the city and my son fell asleep on my lap.

Photo; Martin Place Dawn Service 2008 ABC.net.au

Start them young

Can you believe Jacob had a tantrum until I organised for him to wash the dishes. It's a shame I can't leave him unattended and come back to a pile of sparkling clean crockery :-)

A bit joy to brighten Good Friday

Apparently this is actually an ad campaign for a reality TV show but I like to think it's just a random musical number in the Central train station in Antwerp, Belgium.

March Book Club Book

so I'm a few days late, what's new?

Extremely loud and incredibly close / Jonathan Safran Foer
Synopsis
Nine-year-old Oskar Schell is an inventor, amateur entomologist, Francophile, letter writer, pacifist, natural historian, percussionist, romantic, Great Explorer, jeweller, detective, vegan, and collector of butterflies, Beatles memorabilia, state quarters, miniature cacti and coral. When his father is killed in the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center, his inward journey towards some kind of peace takes him on an odyssey through the five boroughs of New York, as he attempts to solve the mystery of a key he discovers in his father's closet. ~from the blurb

Did you like/dislike the book?
I really could not get into this book at all. I persevered for a while and ended up dipping in and out. I found both stories; that of Oskar's search across New York and of his grandparents, disjointed and confusing. For me a novel is all about the story, the narrative and it was hard to follow here. I also found the pictures, that others have commented on, off-putting because they disrupted the narrative. I find it difficult to read graphic novels or comics so obviously this is a personal quirk.
The book this reminded me of was 'The curious incident of the dog in the night time' by Mark Haddon. Oskar seemed to display some behaviour on the autistic scale and his 'voice' was similar to that of Christopher's.

Our next book is 'In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto' by Michael Pollan. I hope I enjoy this more.

Where the Wild Things are

I'm so excited about this movie