Getting Underwater

Our dive trip to Nelson Bay was fantastic. It was great to get underwater again and the dive conditions at Broughton Island were almost as good as it gets - clear sky, not too hot, calm seas, little swell or surge underwater, reasonable viz esp. on the first day, and heaps to see. One of the great things about diving Nelson Bay is the boat journey out to the dive sites which takes about 50 minutes. We saw a pod of about twenty dolphins on the Saturday and they swam alongside the boat for a good while, much to our enjoyment. We dived The Looking Glass as our first dive on both days - it's a cutting that halves a huge rock bommie and you can swim through it and check out the fishlife who enjoy the surge and food. We saw countless Grey Nurse sharks cruising in and out of the cutting and we relaxed to the view of a massive school of yellowtail silhouetted by the sunlight above us. Gorgeous. I also had to chuckle when Luke, our first day divemaster, was signalling "shark" to me and I was looking around wondering where it was when it finally dawned on me that it was a wobbegong resting on the rock about half a metre away from me - another diver almost touched it with his hand.

Tom mentioned in his blog that he had a few probs on his first dive on Sunday at The Looking Glass. It was a really difficult dive to be doing first after five years of no diving. He coped really well and I was so pleased that he agreed to descend again and go along the wall with me and Cam, our dive master. Cam told us later on that a Grey Nurse shark came within about 30 cms of us when Tom and I had surfaced near the cutting with our legs and fins probably looking very much like seals. It was just curious but I'm glad it didn't decide to see if we tasted good! Our second dive at Cod Rock was just the thing to help Tom feel more comfortable underwater. We saw a couple of giant cuttlefish - need to be seen to be believed! And there were scores of wobbegong sharks, one of which scared the daylights out of Tom as it cruised past from behind him! By the end of the second day I felt elated and really comfortable underwater. I can't wait to do some diving at the Cook Islands at Easter. I'm hoping this will be the start of making diving a big part of our lives again as it was 15 years ago when I first got started. It's the most wonderful experience - like travelling to a foreign country every time you go under the ocean.

Good news

Friday was a good day. Our hopes that the doctors would be pleased with Barnaby's burn scar, and feel it was sufficiently healed to stop using the silicone and pressure suit, came true. Our son is free of that tightness around his torso after ten months of treatment. We are so thrilled. It's unusual for any person, baby or adult, to heal so quickly and be out of the pressure suit in under a year. So we are grateful that Barnaby's body has recovered so well. He's been particularly happy all week. I hadn't thought he could get any happier, but there it is. There's an outside chance the burn scar will worsen without the pressure suit so we need to keep an eye on it. Fingers crossed we can put the worst behind us. Neither tom or I will miss the suits and the rigmarole of getting Barney in and out of it. But I still get a bit teary at times when I speak about Barnaby's accident to others. I think that's part of my own journey and is to be expected. Sometimes it catches me off guard when I thought I could talk about it without getting emotional anymore. Perhaps I always will and that's ok. I'm just glad Barnaby is such a happy boy.

The way it is this Thursday....

I need to write down the adorable things beth and barney are doing before I completely forget them all... So here's a few that my addled brain can grasp for the mo.

Barnaby has been quite taken with different surfaces, especially hard surfaces, and he likes to stamp his feet on the tiles in our kitchen. He's started doing a little dance on the tiles when he's happy about something. This morning, just the sight of me making his breakfast got him performing his jolly jig - perhaps the fact that he'd been up for half an hour and not been fed had something to do with that.

Barney's main interests (in no particular order) are balls, throwing things like balls, kicking balls, hitting balls with toy golf clubs/hockey sticks, board books, remote controls, the large vanity mirror in the main bathroom which he hits, smears and chuckles at, chocolate (my fault), spades, digging, birds, dogs as long as they don't come too close, peekaboo, and Beth.

Of course there's loads more but it's too late at night to remember! He's on the verge of saying more than a few words and Beth and I spend a lot of our day saying the same word over and over to him. Our word today was BOOK and B2 managed to say the BOO part correctly but couldn't quite get the hard K at the end. I think his frustration at not being understood when he cries and points is spurring his language skills on. I'm glad too but it feels like the last part of him being a baby - ie. just babbling - is soon to be gone. Bittersweet moments really.

Beth is gorgeous as ever. She made "undie" beds for all her soft toys one night in her bedroom. these were made by slipping a book into a pair of undies, sliding the soft toy under the front of the undies and putting a pair of socks under it's head as a pillow. When I came into her room later in the night she'd made about ten of these beds - although she carefully explained to me that one was a singlet bed as the book was too large to fit over her undies. Bless!

Ok time for bed. We've got Barney's hospital appointment tomorrow and scuba diving up at Nelson Bay this weekend so I'm looking forward to posting again soon with news of both. x