Max's Second Birthday !!

Max celebrated his second birthday last weekend. On the Saturday he had a small party with family at home with lots of food, presents and an awesome wiggles guitar cake. He even got to wear the special Batkin family birthday hat that you must wear on your birthday. He had lots of fun playing with his new presents and his cousins.

He enjoyed this years birthday so much more than his first birthday. He has been to several birthday parties for other people so he knew all the usual good things included in a party, like cake, presents, the birthday song, lollies, chocolate, chips, games, etc. He was so excited to see so many of his favourite family people at his party, and to share the excitement of the day with them. He loves to blow out any candles, especially on a cake, even more especially on his very own birthday cake, and he loves hearing and singing the birthday song afterwards, so I'm sure he loved that part. He had a great time unwrapping his presents and he is still enjoying playing with all of them. He also doesn't get party food very often and I know he loved the freedom of being able to eat as many jelly beans, maltesers, lollies, chips and cake as he could fit in.

All up I think his second birthday was a big success and that he enjoyed it immensely. I hope you all enjoy these photos from the day!

"How Long Have You Been Living Here?"

This is an excerpt from a conversation that Max and I had the other day. He loves to shut the screen door behind him and then knock on the day and say"helllloooo". I respond with "no thank you I already gave last week" and then walk away from the door. Being my son he does not get upset but chuckles his head off. Mostly because he knows I will run towards the door and open it and then tickle him. The other day when we played this game I changed it with "Oh, you say you live here?" "Oh you say it has been 2 years" What made it extra funny was that it was on Sunday on Max's birthday when he came into this world 2 years ago.

In the last year his character is becoming so apparent. The things that you hope he gets from his mother and the things that he develops from you so that he has the best of both worlds.

I am not sure if this is the same with all 2yr olds but Max seems to really value people and friendships. This has come out time and time again. Today we visited a dear friend of the family Marg Watson in Ipswich. Max has only seen Marg a handful of times but he so wanted to hold her hand in the park and when she went and got a cup of tea he got all upset and wanted to see Aunty Mark. After we got home from Ipswich and he had a sleep he got all upset that Marg was nowhere to be seen.

Tonight we were watching tv and an actors name Zoe came on the screen. I said to Jo when we have twins we could have Chloe and Zoe. Max then got excited and said "Zoe Party!" Jo then said "Wow, Max that's awesome". It had to be explained to me that Zoe was the name of the one year old girl whose party we went to at Boracay!

My favourite was when Max was around 20 months he and Jo went to the Park when Max got really excited and was dragging Jo over to another family and kept saying "Aiieee". Jo had no idea but it became clearly evident that he knew the toddler with the other family. It turns out that Aiieeee means Ali and they go to Daycare together.

Max has a cool sense of humour. When he was 18months old he was learning body parts and we would use his favourite soft toy leo the leo-pard as an example for eyes and ears. It is much safer than let an 18 moth old poke your eyes out. We would also point out Leo's tail. Max would say daddy tail? and the go and look for my tail and when he looks he then chuckles Daddy no tail. He has started doing this publicly. He has also done it most members of the family checking if they have a tail or not.

He also has a sense of slapstick he likes to run up and tackle people and then head butt them in the groin with his head. He loves to do it at weddings or church or somewhere else where there are crowds. The best was when he got confused and hit the wrong groin thinking it was mine but it belonged to the head of our church in Queensland. Max's face was priceless when I said Max daddy is over here. I think even at his age he realised that he had done something pretty funny.

He has developed a real palette for good food. He also loves to cook. He loves to help in the kitchen. He and Jo make biscuits together every couple of weeks. He enjoys cooking pasta with Jo. He can now clearly tell us what he wants to eat. This made dining in the Philipines pretty easy. He very rarely baulks at food. The last couple of nights he has been eating spinach and ricotta cannelloni with a tomato and white bean sauce. He has tried everything we feed him: olives, salt and peper calamari, fetta, hommus, blue cheese and raw capsicum. I once saw him favour raw capsicum over dessert. While in the Philippines he was very cultural sensitive and kept asking for rice. He pretty much stopped till we went to the local Asian supermarket and he then started to ask for rice it was quite strange.

Max loves music! Max has always settled him since he was very little. If he was tired and grumpy we would play the Living End and he would be asleep within a song or two. Max loves all sorts of intruments and his a great mimic. After seeing a violin on a wiggles dvd he grabbed his drum stick and started to use it across his guitar like it was a violin even resting it on his shoulder. But I think he had his pick he would pick the drums he loves watching the drums at church and plays his drum at home with great vigour. He plays along to drum solos on his knees when in the car. When he and I see a drum kit at a concert or after church he can point out the cymbals and the kick drum which i think is pretty good for a 2yr old.

I could write on and on about some great aspects of Max's personality but even the most ardent fan must be getting weary. We must thank you all that read this blog for your impact on our family and your prayers and generosity over the years are ver much welcomed and appreciated.

And to Max who will hopefully read this one day. Your Mum and I love you very much and hope that you will continue to develop into a strong, gracious, caring and respectful individual.

Manila - Boracay

I thought I better update you all as to what happened in our second week in the Philippines.

After the slowest commute of my life that was scheduled to take around 3hrs took 4.5hrs. It was just congestion and there is just so very little to get around it. I have never seen anything like it in my life and I have been to Tokyo, Sydney and even driven in Chicago in peak hour traffic. Manila won hands down. They have this interesting system where they have taken a lot of traffic lights out because they only slow things down. To replace them they have this little zones where you can do u-turns into oncoming traffic. The first time you do one you are petrified but as usual the speed is quite low and everyone is used to it anyway.

We got to our hotel which had run out of the room type we booked with a separate bedroom so Max could sleep and we could stay awake. So they downgraded us!! We eventually convinced them that we should in fact get an upgrade and then he expected us to pay for it! So that was not the start in Manila by ourselves that we needed. Once it was sorted we went to the nearby Mall of Asia (MOA) and got some nappies for the rest of the week and ate at a beautiful little Japanese restaurant. Max enjoyed his ripe mango shake and ate gyoza and his own rice and off our plates as well. He also enjoyed watching the fish in the tank and watching the Chef make sushi.

Early the next day we went to the Domestic airport for our flight to Boracay. It is a very basic airport but the new airport has been built for a couple of years but due to some legal wrangling and corruption accusations is not in use. The domestic airport did have a newstand/christian bookstore which is handy really. They also have bakeries so you can take pasulubong (small gifts) to where ever you are going. These range from small wrapped biscuits to like 3 ft long swiss rolls. They even had a cinnabon stand but seeing we had a packed breakfast from the hotel I resisted the urge. Max played in the playground and we also watched the local cartoons together. Some were Japanese dubbed in english or Japanese and dubbed in Tagalog. We also watched Jollitown together. Jollibee is a fast food outlet that is everywhere and there version of Ronald McDonald is a bee. He has friends and they have a bunch of adventures with kids. Sorta like Barney and all of the ads funnily enough are for Jollibee or Chowking which happens to be owned by you guessed it Jollibee. The other ad we saw a lot for was the Nestle milk drink called Chuckie. Which with our australian sense of humour thought it was strange to drink something called Chuckie.

We were on a 32 seater for our 35 minute flight which had been delayed 45 minutes. But Max did really well considering he was sitting on our laps the whole time. He also got given extra peanuts and juice from the cabin crew. He really got a taste for the peanuts with like a biscuit coating.

Once we got to the small rural airport we found that there was no one to pick us up. Thankfully our airline had free transfers to the island. Which basically meant they drove us the 500m to the ferry. We caught a trike up to the hotel which was to be our home for the next week.

They saw that we want you to be like Family. Not only did they upgrade us to the executive suite which had 4 beds and 2.5 bedrooms but they also sat us down and explained the outline of the island and briefed us on how to get breakfast delivered to our balcony every morning and how to get a free shuttle to where all the action happens.

There was a 1yr old having her birthday party which we got invited to with a great cake and a whole pig. Max had a wonderful time with the kids. We felt bad that we had no gifts and remembered we had brought about 30 of those small clip on koalas to give out if such a occasion arose. They went down so well.

that night we went down to Station 2 where a lot of the shops and restaurants are checked things out. We ended up at a small greek restaurant. It was here that Max decided to fill his nappy with the bad stuff. Of course we didn't think we would neep a nappy while ducking out for dinner. You can buy 2 nappies for under a buck at the pharmacy which are plentiful and some wipes for about 3 bucks so we got out of that mess nicely and they fitted in my camera bag so we had no more surprises.

Home again!

All 3 Batkins arrived home safe and sound a couple of days ago. We are still having issues with our home internet, so will post more details and photos later when we get that sorted.

We had an amazing holiday full of wonderful memories and are pleased to report that Max is quite a good little traveller. More info to come!