Tuesday 4th April

 This morning I woke at about 6am to the sound of sobbing outside my window, Rory had walked over to our bedroom and wasn’t feeling well.  She hopped in bed with me (Liza was already with Phoenix), and felt wet.  Told me it was sweat, but after a while I could smell it was not.  Phoenix had vomited last night at some point as well, hopefully not sick, but he did seem pretty lethargic.  We threw both kids in the bath and gave Rory some Panadol or similar.  After a short while she started feeling better, and I checked her temperature which was 36°C.  Much better, but possibly all the result of the medicine.  She had some breakfast at least, and continued to stay happy throughout the morning.

As the day wore on, it appeared (to me) that Phoenix was the sick one, and Rory had recovered.  She had the occasional whinge, but it was the little bloke who was mostly unhappy unless he was being held, and for the most part he demanded Lizl too.  We ended up giving him some Panadol or similar before lunch, but it didn’t seem to help much.  Lunch involved some sashimi again 😍 along with a chicken curry dish and a thai beef style salad.  It was OK, but not my favourite.  Romina heard that Rory was feeling sick and made her a special lunch – French toast with cinnamon and sugar.  Rory had a decent amount, but stopped due to a tummy ache.  I sat with her for a bit, and she had a little bit more, but I didn’t push it.  Even so, she continued to maintain sufficient levels of happiness.  After lunch Lizl thought the little guy was a bit hot, so (kicking and screaming) put him in his swimmers and then plopped him in the pool.  He’s starting to get pretty good at navigating the pool steps, will happily go up and down, and will even get out the pool completely and go for a crawl, before turning around, coming back, and getting back in the pool backwards.  Rory convinced Lizl to let her go in as well, and while I’m still a big gun shy of the sun, I got in too with plans to stay in the shade.  

We tried to get a plan going to go back to the beach the others went to yesterday, but Romina told us that they couldn’t get hold of the people who owned the beach property, and without their blessing it was a no-go.  Shortly after Bill separately backed up Romina’s position, which put an end to my conspiracy theory.  Instead, we thought we might visit the neighbouring property where we found a cool little beach in an inlet.  Spoke to Bill and confirmed he was happy with us borrowing a ute.  At this point Rory felt hard done by due to Elle and Finn getting 2 biscuits when she only got 1 or something, and this mood continued for the side-trip.  We had to stop the ute outside the property, and walk through some very overgrown brush.  Rory started complaining that she was getting scratched, which – to be fair – was probably true.  I picked her up and got her through the worst of it.  At the beach place she wasn’t happy complained about rocks in her shoes.  We got them out.  She complained the water (30°C at least) was too cold.  I forced her to walk with me up the inlet to see what was there, she complained the whole way, so I took her back and said she could stay on the beach until I got back.  I went up again on my own (following everyone else at this point), and had a look where it opened out to the sea – very picturesque.  Lizl gave Phoenix to a nanny and he was yelling blue murder, so I relieved her of him on my way back to see how Rory was doing.  She was standing on the beach crying.  I took her up the beach steps and sat with her and Phoenix until everyone filtered back.  This seemed to be the last of her unhappy behaviour.  Back at the house Lizl and Lisa (with Elle) went for a stand-up paddle.  Rob, Rory, and Finn hopped in the pool, I sat nearby with Phoenix and had a pina colada.

Things of note:

 

• My lip has started peeling.  Not looking forward to this stage.  Eating is annoying at the moment because it’s easy to stretch my lips too wide and crack them.
• I haven’t spoken about the nannies much.  They’re all local girls who’s real job is to help cook, clean, serve, etc.  All of them are very nice, seem willing to try and keep the little kids from crying, if nothing else.  I wouldn’t say they go out of their way to actually entertain the little ones, more just keep them away from us so we can relax, and will feed them lunch/dinner.  They’re all teenagers, or early 20s.  Most of them seem to have pretty bad BO,  I think it’s just not something they worry about.
• I think it was my favourite dinner tonight – same beef cutlet things as the second night, the yummy cooked fish from the other day, simple salad and some AMAZING mashed potato thing (with no pepper). So very good.