‘My little treasure’, I called him as I talked to his after school carer the other day. It had been an interesting day. I’d spoken to the deputy prinicipal earlier that day, as JJ spent most of the day in his office after being really disruptive in the classroom.

A year or so ago I’d have really taken this to heart but now I’m a lot more philosophical about it. The deputy told me that JJ’s really intelligent and he knows what he’s doing when he’s being disruptive like this but he does it anyway. He said that in 25 years time I’d look back and think, ‘gee he was a ratbag at school’. I hope he’s right but I hope it’s sooner than 25 years.

These days I take one day at a time. The day before this phone call JJ won a gold medal at after school care for excellent behaviour and he was the best kid to have around that night. When he’s being really nice to me, and polite it’s almost seems surreal but I do enjoy those moments because they don’t last.

The next morning he was very different and I knew that he’d be in for a bad day at school. Sure enough I was right. But then yesterday he was fine. I could be living in Topsy Turvy land because I don’t know which way it will be at any given time. One way of looking at this is that at least if it is bad at one time, then I know it won’t stay this way.

This is all a huge learning experience for me and I’m sure it’s making me a stronger and better person. Yes it is.

PS: I took the photo above in King’s Park when we had our recent Perth trip. I was standing around admiring the scenery, or sheltering from the rain, or both. JJ had disappeared then he appeared just above me in this tree. Don’t you just love the texture in the tree? I’ve got no idea what type it is but I love it.

During our Perth holiday my camera went with us and I took a few snaps - as you may have realised. One day we visited King’s Park and I took some photos of flowers. I love getting in close and taking photos of flowers but have always had trouble focusing on exactly what I want.

In a moment of inspiration I moved the focus setting from auto to manual and it made the world of difference.

I think this Kangaroo Paw shows some of my results perfectly and I’m really pleased with the way it turned out.

I used to use manual focus a bit back when I used a film SLR but I’d gotten so lazy with auto focus that I completely forgotten that my camera does have a manual focus setting. I’ll now be using manual focus a lot more. I can’t believe it took this long for some common sense to sink in.

Of course, sometimes there’s no time to line up the shot so auto focus is perfect, but for still life, manual focus is the go. If you can bear it, there’s some more photos below that I managed to take inbetween rain showers.

Photo Friday’s theme this week is spiral. I took this photo towards the top of the spiral staircase in the lighthouse at Port Adelaide during the summer school holidays.

It was a one way very narrow staircase and to get to the lookout bit at the top we had to climb through a little trapdoor. This was okay until I was coming down and there were people waiting a bit further down to climb up and I was wearing a skirt. I hope they didn’t get too much of an eyeful!

The world is a small place until you look up into the sky and realise there’s a whole lot more space out there.

I get lost looking at the clouds, especially when they look like this.

I’ve submitted this for this week’s Photo Friday.

I’ve written a post over on the Aussie bloggers blog about the popularity of photo blogs. Am interested to know what you think.

On Anzac Day last Friday JJ and I went to visit friends up in the Adelaide Hills and I took my camera. Normally when we head up that way we drive up the Freeway because it’s quicker and there’s two lanes in case someone is going slow you can overtake them. At Aldgate we veered off the freeway and I decided to take non-freeway route.

This was dangerous for me because I had no idea which way to go as I’ve never done it before. The reason I wanted to do it was because it does get monotonous going the same way all the time and I wasn’t in a huge hurry.

The reason I decided to go a new way was because I love autumn colours and wanted to have a look at the scenery on the way (as much as I could being the driver and all).

JJ snapped some pictures in the back seat of the car and they all turned out pretty blurry but on the outskirts of one town we stopped and I took a couple of photos.

For those non Australian readers I’ll explain a couple of things about this photo. We drive on the left side of the road here (you can see the little blue car on the left side of the road in the distance). When I nannied in England I remember my employer reiterating a few times that they drove on the left side of the road. I explained to her that Australians do also and she hadn’t known that.

The two signs on either side of the road tell motorists that when the lights are flashing (the lights are further down the road again) that they need to slow down to 25 kilometres per hour. These signs are typically out the front of a school, childcare centre or kindergarten and it appears as though this mystery town has a school on the left of this photo.

The last thing I’ll explain about this photo is that it was taken on 25 April and it’s autumn here. We call fall, autumn - don’t ask me why the same season is called different things in different parts of the world.

As it turned out it would have taken the same amount of time to go this back way as it did the supposedly quicker freeway route. Now I know which way to go I’ll be able to pick and choose.

The other night I went out for dinner minus the child and my sister looked after aforementioned child. When I got home she said there’s some stuff on the table that JJ might be interested in. One thing was a tiny little digital camera that can take 25 photos and has the resolution of about 1 pixel. It’s probably more than that, but not much. Apparently she got it with some catalogue shopping she did and it has no brand name on so I have no idea what type it is.

After I found a battery for it he snapped the 25 photos in about two minutes and they look kind of cool so I thought I’d share. First of all though, is a photo that I took of this little camera.

Here’s some photos that he took and they’re completely unprocessed. I just uploaded them to Flickr.