Twice Mice

We had a fantastic day at the zoo yesterday. Although we arrived during a huge tropical downpour and walked through buckets of warm rain in the first 15 minutes, it was fine for the rest of the day. We started with a jungle breakfast with macaws, snakes, tamarins, and a beautiful family of urang utans. This place has the world’s largest number of urang utans in any zoo, and there have been thirty six baby urang utans born here. We were able to watch two of these youngsters play with their parents while we ate our breakfast, including a cute little tantrum that resulted in the little one falling off the platform.

I also introduced Hayden to Mira the Mexican milk snake.

Singapore zoo has a very successful breeding program, with around 300 births and hatchings of 44 species in the last year, including Hamadryas Baboons, cotton-top tamarins, pygmy hippopotamus, Douc langurs, proboscis monkeys, meerkats, manatees, komodo dragons, spotted mousedeer, oriental small-clawed otters, Chinese stripe-necked turtles and Linne’s two-toed sloths. There were zoo-borns everywhere, it was so delightful to see so many different species flourishing in lush and spacious enclosures.

I wandered through the local supermarket a few days ago. Firstly, I was astonished by its size – easily four times the size of our Supermarché. Secondly, it was astonishing to see the abundance of items that we pay a fortune for at the Australia Store in London. The rows of cordial (grenadine in all the flavours of the rainbow), Milo (malted powder that never properly dissolves in cold milk), Weet-Bix (vastly superior to Weetabix breakfast bricks), and the wide array of TimTam chocolate biscuits.

I bought Hayden a small jar of “my first Vegemite” to try on his first birthday. Though Adrian says that the reduced salt will detract from the true Australian experience.

There are some downsides to shopping in Australia, though. This is the extent of the foreign beer selection:

And if one takes a close look at a bottle of Stella:

It’s made by Fosters.

Last week Hayden flew up to Newcastle to meet his grandmother and great-grandmother for the first time. In the home where I had spent many of my holidays as a child, we relaxed to the sounds of kookaburras, tawny frogmouths, and chirping frogs. He was the first baby in the house for ten years, so he was showered with attention, spending the whole day moving from one lap to another.

Every morning, mum and I would take a walk to the beach, strolling along the boulevard and watching the fierce waves crash against the shore. With oil tankers dotted across the horizon, the surf lifesavers would scout the tides every morning to determine the safest place to swim – “always swim between the flags” was one of the anthems of my childhood.

We were also able to spend some time with my Nana, Hayden’s great-grandmother. Hayden loved to watch her clap her hands, and I was able to hear her stories of raising five children while working as a journalist. With a single wriggling baby in my hands, I have no idea how she managed to balance it all, especially back in the day of cloth nappies and no dishwashers. It was so fantastic to be able to spend a week relaxing with mum Nana and Hayden playing together, and to show them our adorable baby boy.