Big brother

Although Gary’s a huge fan of Big Brother (which I watched for the first time ever this year), I’m referring to the fact that Benjamin met his big brother Cameron on the weekend for the first time – and liked what he saw judging by the smiles he gave him!

We drove out to Gippsland to watch Cam’s footy team Hill’s (Hill’s End) play the elimination final against Traf (Trafalgar to the uninitiated, i.e. me, a town near Traralgon). Cam played an excellent game and it was very close until the final quarter when they unfortunately lost.

Also unfortunate – although we did get to spend some time with Cam driving him to the Traralgon Hospital  – was that one of the opposition had collided with Cam in the final quarter so that his elbow rammed into Cam’s forearm, and he needed an x-ray to check whether it was broken. The poor thing was in a huge amount of pain but was very brave for the whole trip and as they put his arm in a sling. The x-ray came back clear but it could be a soft tissue injury, so he will need to go to the doctor again.

We also dropped in to see Myra, Edi and 8-month-old Nicholas. It was lovely to meet Nicholas who behaved perfectly – as opposed to Benjamin who turned into the screaming banshee at about 3:15pm (his haunting time for the last couple of days). We have become (sort of) inured to his ear splitting cries, but it was all new and exciting for Myra and Edi, and it freaked poor Nicholas out a bit as he decided he had better join in too!

 

After spending endless hours in the car, by the time we swung by Jessica’s house in Woori Yallock to pick her up on the way back, Benjamin was getting pretty shirty. So much so that we had to sing him his favourite song, ad nauseum, the whole hour home (‘Galumph’ said the little green frog one day…). We sang it fast. We sang it slow. We sang it soft. We sang it fast again. We sang it in a German accent. We sang it in an American accent (thanks John ‘Gary’ Wayne). The only thing we couldn’t do was change the words because Benjamin would start crying again! We would experiment every few goes because we were becoming mind numbingly bored with the song, and sure enough as soon as we changed the words a thin wail would start up from the back, quickly crescendoing until we went back to the proper words.

Boy were we glad to get home.

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