Wind

According to the weatherman, this January has been extraordinarily windy. It's also been extraordinarily dry but the windy bit is more fun. I love the wind. I didn't love it so much when I was in Vegas and the wind caused what was equivalent to a sandstorm. Anyway, we're lapping it up. We drive with the car windows down, we sleep without the air-conditioning at night and we try to shoot the breeze when we can.

I heard that the Marina Barrage was the place to do it, so we packed up the family one Saturday evening to picnic there. In theory, a picnic in the open sounded like a grand idea. Open space for the kids to run while the adults lazed around and watched the kites being flown.
























But that was in theory. In reality, it was far too windy to feed the children anything. It was an effort trying to keep them from being blown away, what more the soup we were trying to spoon into their mouths. After a while, we gave up with the soup and just gave them the dry component of their dinner which was pasta. Even that had to be fed from a cup lest half of it ended up on an unsuspecting poor sod down wind from us.

























The twins loved the wind though. They loved being blown about even if they didn't love falling on the grass so much. The grandparents were paranoid that the winds would cause them to catch their death of cold and spent half the time chasing them to try to pull more clothes onto them. The twins took it as a "Catch me if you can!" moment and evaded capture most of the time. That in itself kept them quite warm.

























Packrat and I thought it was so cool to have somewhere this windy in Singapore. It reminded us windier places that we loved, like St Kilda Beach or Busselton Jetty where Packrat's lens cover got blown right out of his hand into the ocean.

























We liked it so much we went back on our own again, not quite learning our lesson as to how cold it was. T-shirts and shorts did not suffice. We ended up sitting behind a concrete wall just so that our hands wouldn't freeze. But it was great fun, lying on the grass, being able to pick out Orion, the North Star and the sliver of a crescent moon. That was until I started getting itchy on top of the cold.

The next time we do this, the kids are going to eat first, be dressed in pants so they don't scrap themselves when they get blown over and we're coming with blankets and jackets so that we can lie and gaze at the stars longer without turning hypothermic.


























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