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"A portrait of my children, once a week, every week, in 2014."

Harrison: Prisoner at the Trial Bay Gaol! You loved exploring the ruins of the old jail.

Amelie: Loving the gondola ride over Sea World at the end of a very exciting day, you're pointing at the dolphins below us.

Finley: Peek a boo! A favourite game of yours right now whether you hide your face in my chest or are lying on the floor.  I love how you play this with me.

We had such an awesome week away on our holiday.  It was great to have the time to relax as a family around the pool as well as do some more exploring which we also love to do when travelling.

Our days by the pool were fantastic, up early with the kids and we were down to the pool by 7.30am! this allowed us to be there in enough time to get one of the huge lounge chairs under an umbrella and we set up camp for the day! The kids are such water babies and pretty much stayed in the water all day, once they got a bit cold from the swimming pool, they'd head to the spa to warm up again.  We found that Amelie's confidence grew tremendously and by the end of the holiday she was swimming by herself with a float on her back on her tummy with doggy paddle and floating on her back to make a starfish and jumping into the water and putting her under, something she would never do before.

Our days exploring were spent checking out Byron Bay which had a very relaxed, trendy vibe.  The lighthouse and view over the Byron Bay Marine Park was awesome, we were amazed how from up the top of the cliff we spotted a shark, giant sea turtles, manta rays and a large pod of dolphins swimming below us.

We drove up to the Gold Coast which was only about 40 minutes away from  where we were staying and visited Movie World and Sea World over two different days.  The kids loved the rides, seeing the characters and the animal, movie stunt and Dora shows.  There was a huge aquarium at Sea World that had an amazing selection of animals, it was fantastic for the kids to see the animals up close and personal that we had seen from a distance a few days before in the marine park.

One of the animal highlights of the trip had to have been when we were walking back from the beach one evening just on dusk and Matt spotted a huge snake curled up asleep under a tree just metres from the path.  We were all super excited as we haven't seen one over the three years that we have lived in Australia.  We have always wanted to but only from a distance so this was perfect.  Thankfully I had my lens with reasonable zoom and we were able to get a great shot and check out what we thought it was when we got back to the hotel, we think it was a diamond python.

Finley has more noticeably started to inch forward a little bit more with his bum shuffling and he can reach so far for things now.  He's getting the hang of putting his hands out in front of him but can't quite get onto his knees and ends up face planting!

Harrison has had fun all week wiggling his top tooth and it's getting more wiggly by the day.  It's been over a year since his last tooth fell out so he's pretty excited.  Won't be long now!