MWNews 74

William is three now. Last Tuesday. He seems to have not taken any notice of it. If you asked him before hand what Tuesday was, he would tell you it is the day he gets presents.

We had a party for him. None of his friends were there, but then again, I am not so sure he has any friends. He goes to daycare, but he never mentions any of the names of the people there and we do not know anyone who has kids his age. So the party was mostly adults and a couple of older kids and one of Maeghan's friends. Since I am not having a party for Juanita's birthday, maybe we can call it a joint birthday party. IN any case, it went well.

William got a lot of presents. We got him a Cars doona (blanket for the US) and some Cars pictures for his walls. He got at least four Cars cars, mostly Lightning McQueen. In case you did not realize it, he loves Cars. Everything he owns has something to do with the movie or has some cars theme. You will rarely see him when he does not have some kind of car in his hand. One of the ones he got for his birthday is rather large. It is too big to carry in his hand so he carries it under his arm. Everywhere. When we have to get out of the car at the shops or for anything, you have to tell him to leave his car in the car and the first thing he says when he gets back is where is my car. You have to give it to him before he will get in just so he knows it is still in there. Otherwise, he is going to go look for it until he finds it.

He has lots and lots of cars. Not just from the movie, but about a hundred hotwheels, faux hotwheels and any other type of car that exist. As I said, he carries them everywhere and we find them everywhere. The other day, someone borrowed our trailer for something. It is normally kept in the garage and the kids play in the garage all the time. When the friend drove off with the trailor, a trail of cars fell out all the way up the street. William had put them in the gaps behind the lights and handles and anywhere he could stuff or hide them. We collected about twelve of them up the rode and are not sure if there were more lost further along the path of the trailer.

Anytime anyone passes one of these big bins that have all the hotwheel type cars in them, they get one for William. They are usually only two dollars or less, so you can just pick them up as you leave the store or checkout. We have tried to stop doing it but when they are less than two dollars, it is hard to pass them up and not get one. It is a simple gift and he really loves it. Maeghan gets a little jealous sometimes but we try to get her a present whenever we can. Lots of little dolls or other stuff she likes. She likes makeup and there are usually bins of these things in the same place that have the cars so we sometimes, not often, get her something she can use. She has a lot of those now that have never been used so we have basically stopped doing that, but she still gets the urge to put it on occasionally.

The party was nice. Of course, I did all the cooking for it. Sausages, honey-soy wings, onion dip and hot sauce, and lots of other things. No one actually ate the hot sauce but I mostly made that for me anyway. Woolworths, the big grocery store chain here, along with Coles, had all their jalapenos at a special price. Normally, they are $12 a kilo, but they had them for $1.98 the other day, so I bought all they had. Woolworths is normally the only place I can find them and they are usually very poor quality. I expected them to be old and useless but there were perfectly ok. Now I have to figure out how to use them all before they go bad. I made the hot sauce but I still have a lot of them left. Probably need to make something soon. I think I have a way to make jalapeno poppers and then freeze them, but I have never done that, so I am not sure if that will work out.

But back to the party. We had, I think, fifteen people over, plus kids. I was cooking, so I did not get any of the good sausages or the chicken wings. I didn't have a lot to begin with but they were gone as soon as I set them out. Two kilos of wings and two kilos of sausages. They were the small chicken wings they have on sale sometimes so they did not have lot of meet on them anyway. But the sausages were really, really good ones. Something called a Kranski over here. I am not sure what they would relate to in the US but they are good and I got them from an actual butcher, or actually a vegetable shop that now has a deli. They had these sausages on sale for $4.95 a kilo for about two weeks. I bought at least ten kilos during that time and they are all gone now. They have gone back up to the normal price which is $12.95 a kilo. I think they were old or something but they were really good. I might still have one in the fridge that I can have for breakfast, now that I am thinking about it. Good sausage. Or maybe it is so good because the normal everyday sausages you get over here are just so bad. Mushy, meatless things that are not really worth cooking. I cook them for the kids but rarely eat them myself. Even the kids are tired of them and they request a cabanossi sausage these days. They are kind of like smoked sausage but not really. They are ok and are the cheapest of the real sausages we get. Anything after that, and you are paying at least $8 a kilo.

So how did this turn into a food and cooking entry again. Seems I do that a lot. Back to the kids and Williams birthday. He got lots of presents. In addition to all the cars stuff, we got him his second favorite cars themed toy. There is a new cartoon on called Roary. I am not sure where it is made or if it is anywhere else in the world. The shows have just been starting over here. He got hooked on it when one of Juanita's friend gave him a DVD that he downloaded from the UK. We had never heard of the show but it is about a little racing car called Roary and there are other cars and people and things that all talk and have adventures. I went and looked for it on the internet and downloaded a complete version of all the shows, but as far as I know, there has only been one season of the show and it is just now coming to AU.

Anyway, William loves this show, mainly because it has something to do with cars. They have started selling some of the toys in the stores, although very few stores have them. As far as I can tell, they sell out as soon as they get them, so the show must be really popular. Maybe there will be a big push for Christmas but we never see advertisement or anything about the show or the toys. We found them by accident when we were in Kmart one day. They had a car that talked but there was an add that said there were a lot of other toys that were coming. So far, we have not seen any of them in Kmart but we did find a racing track in Big W. Big W is sort of a mini version of Walmart, same advertising logos, same themes and I am not totally sure it is not owned by the same people. But, a lot of people are against having Walmart over here, so maybe they just changed the name and did this in secret. There are rumors all the time about Walmart opening a store somewhere in AU, but it has not happened yet.

The race track we saw is a very short track with very big cars, which is perfect for a 3 year old. Everyone loved it. Not only William, but the kids that were here and most of the adults. All it does is have the cars race around the track. You have no control of them and they do not do anything except run around the track. There is a speaker box that gives random comments on the cars, it is very loud, and I am not sure how it gets triggered but it will say about ten or so phrases in any random order. You have no control over that either. So, basically, you start the cars, by pressing down on the helmets of the drivers, and then set them on the track and they race around. You sit back and watch the go around and around the track with some voice making strange commets on the action. Things like 'it looks like a win for Roary', or 'the race has started' and other things like that.

There is one major flaw with these cars and track. They use batteries. And when I say they use batteries, they use a lot of batteries. Each car has two AAA batteries in it. They last about 20 minutes. I have no idea why they only last that long, but we have used three different brands and the longest was about 25 minutes before the cars just stopped moving. During the party, we went through a package of twelve that I had bought, thinking that was a lot of batteries and William would be able to play with the toy for a long time. Now we have bought batteries everyday since his birthday and they continue to run out after 20 minutes or so. I am planning on getting rechargable ones, but they will have to be constantly in the charger and they will probably wear out pretty fast also. I am not sure if they were designed this way, or it is just a bad design that uses a lot of power, but it makes the cars almost no fun to play with.

William loves playing with them when they are working and will immediately run them until the batteries run out as soon as we get new ones, but I am not sure how long he will keep that up. I think he will get frustrated with it after a while. In fact, he just came in here asking for new batteries for his cars. He brought me some AA batteries and said to put them in there. I had to tell him we will get some more today.

I did have a lot of things to say today and was going to type a lot, but it seems I am being called away to make breakfast and play with the kids. So I will have to cut this off at this point. I was going to talk about the picture and where it was taken and some things that Maeghan and William have started doing, but it will just have to wait. Something to look forward to I suppose.

So, until next time

Talk to you later

Ok, one more note. I just ran spellchecker on this and it did not report one single problem. So if there are a lot of mispelled words or incorrect usage of things, it is not my fault. I tried to check it and nothing was found. I must be getting used to this keyboard or I am just and exceptional speller today.

Talk to you later