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July 21, 2014October 25, 2017

The Sydney Project: Luna Park

This year is my sonÂ’s last year before he begins full time schooling in 2015. Welcome to our year of child-focussed activities in Sydney.

Luna Park entrance — by Jan Smith, CC BY

Luna Park is, honestly, essentially cheating on this project. Do children like amusement parks? Yes. They do. There you go.

In addition, I think four years old is basically about the right age for them. It’s old enough that children are aware that a giant painted face, tinkly music, and carousels aren’t a completely normal day in the world, young enough that the carousel is still just as magical as the dodgem cars. And too young to have horror-film associations with amusement parks, I think that helps too.

Luna Park ferris wheel — by Kevin Gibbons, CC BY

It’s also more accessible to a four year old than some more thrill-oriented parks. V isn’t scared of heights or speed, so he loves the Coney Island slides, and was annoyed to find out that he was too short for the Ranger (the ship you sit in that gets spun upside down about ten stories in the air) and the free-fall ride. He is, however, apparently afraid of centrifugal force parallel to the ground, and refused to go on any “octopus” rides.

Even the four year old who wants to go on the free-fall ride is still young enough for, well, frankly dinky rides like the train that goes around about five times in a circle while you pretend to drive it, and the space shuttles that turn in gentle circles and which slowly go up and down when you press a button. His big draw is the ferris wheel, which I found fairly horrifying this time as I read the signs about keeping limbs inside to him and then had to answer a lot of questions about “why? why do I have to keep my limbs inside?” while giant pieces of metal calmly whirled past us with their comparatively infinite strength. In a similar vein, V also enjoys the roller coaster past all reason and sense, whereas Andrew and I react with “this seemsÂ… flimsyÂ…” (I love coasters, but I like them to look overengineered).

The only things V really didn’t like were the organised dancing groups who were encouraging children to learn their (cute!) 1930s-ish moves, and the process of choosing a child from a hat to press the lever to light up the park at night (he refused to let his name be entered), because there’s some specific types of performative attention that he really loathes. But there’s plenty of children gagging to dance along and to light up the park that an objector goes unnoticed. It’s not coercive fun.

Cost: entry is free. Rides aren’t, an unlimited rides pass for the day starts at $29.95 for a young child and goes to $49.95 for a tall child or an adult. There are discounts for buying online. (The entry is free thing sounds really useless, but it’s actually good if you have several adults, not all of whom are interested in the rides and/or are looking after babies.)

Recommended: indeed. We’ve considered getting an annual pass, in fact.

More information: Luna Park Sydney website.

Disclosure: because of a prior complaint to Luna Park about opening hours (we showed up several months ago at 2:15pm to find that an advertised 4pm closure had been moved to 3pm), we were admitted free this time. No reviews were requested or promised in return for our admission.

July 14, 2014January 16, 2017

The Sydney Project: Tyrannosaurs Big and Small at the Australian Museum

This year is my sonÂ’s last year before he begins full time schooling in 2015. Welcome to our year of child-focussed activities in Sydney.

The Australian Museum has two programs for kids: Tiny Tots and Mini Explorers, which are patterned something like Art Safari, with the children doing an activity themed to match a current exhibit.

V did Tyrannosaurs Big and Small, which went with the Tyrannosaurs: Meet the Family exhibit. The Tyrannosaurs Big and Small activities ended in June, although the Tyrannosaurs exhibit is continuing through to July 27.

This activity benefited compared to Art Safari in the amount of time available to the children. They started off in an education room with several activities. They first had a short talk about dinosaurs, specifically, working out how big dinosaurs are based on one or two bones. Honestly, this seemed to thoroughly lose most of the children, V included. Most of the remainder revolved around a very shallow imitation of archaeology: finding plastic dinosaurs hidden in sand, or in jars filled with dried lentils. V has not yet absorbed any awe of archeology and regarded this as an exercise in playing with sand rather than a moment of entering into the noblest profession a child can conceive of. The other activity was taking dinosaur shapes cut out of paper (necks, legs and such) and gluing them together into one’s very own dinosaur, which V got quite into.

So no great educational inroads were made, but fun was had. And it didn’t manage to trigger V’s perfectionist tendencies and cause a lot of flouncing and dramatic self-recriminations.

All the children were then given a dinosaur tail to wear Â— I appreciated the staff saying that wearing one was entirely up to the child, although V was perfectly willing Â— and a giant mass of children and parents headed down to the main exhibit. In theory we were supposed to be measuring the various tyrannosaurs and otherwise filling out an activity sheet, in practice we were mostly keeping tabs on our children and keeping the fossils safe from them. Or I was, anyway.

The exhibit itself is great, I’m intending to go back by myself before it’s up to properly appreciate it. The main attraction is Scotty. Andrew was very impressed by the faked shadow they’ve put behind Scotty, which moves and roars periodically. They’ve also done an amusing video which is mock security footage of the museum being invaded by dinosaurs, including live footage of the viewers themselves, surrounded by invading dinos. This took up a lot of V’s time. Less good for children Â— and what I’m going back for Â— is the bits about how, for example, the coloration of dinosaurs is being determined.

The sad thing about taking a young child to this sort of thing is that you cannot impress on them how unusual it is. Australian museums are not full of world-class T. rex skeletons! You won’t get to see this very often! Appreciate it while itÂ… oh never mind.

The only downside was that the ticketing was rather poorly integrated into the massive assembly line that is admittance to the main exhibit. Andrew arrived late and without a phone, and they had to page me down to the information desk to explain that he had a ticket to this workshop, not one of the timed tickets to Tyrannosaurs. We also didn’t know for sure if we were even going to see the main Tyrannosaurs exhibit and nearly bought separate tickets to it. Whoops.

Cost: $12 children and $24 adults, which was reduced a lot for museum members. The year-round equivalent is Mini-Explorers, which is $10 children and $15 adults.

The exhibit alone is $13 children and $22 adults. Odd.

Recommended (kids’ activity): cautiously. They’re well designed programs with a fair amount of thought put into them, but they are, basically, a craft activity and an “opportunity” to chase your child through a museum exhibit. It might be best saved for an exhibit that your child is likely to be unusually interested in.

Recommended (Tyrannosaurs exhibit): hell yes, circle July 27 on your calendar with danger signs and scary notation.

More information: Mini-Explorers and Tyrannosaurs: Meet the Family websites.

July 7, 2014January 16, 2017

The Sydney Project: Art Safari at the Museum of Contemporary Art

This year is my sonÂ’s last year before he begins full time schooling in 2015. Welcome to our year of child-focussed activities in Sydney.

Art Safari is one of the Museum of Contemporary Art’s kids’ activities: a program where pre-school children look at a few pieces of art in the galleries and do some related art of their own. I enjoyed the Art Baby tour a lot and was keen for V to have a go at Art Safari. We were joined by another four year old, AÂ—, and her family.

Starting in the cafe with an enormous chocolate milkshake was a non-core part of the experience but got things off to a good start, except that the cafe was a bit of a horror show of mothers’ groups and Mountain Buggy strollers (guilty as charged on the stroller) and my memory of it is of a fair bit of flurrying and crowdedness. We had some trouble getting V and AÂ— to say goodbye to their milkshake remnants and to go to the classroom for their exercise.

They started off with some circle time talking about colours and what things they could think of that had each colour. Which led me to discover that I have the shouty kid who wants to give every answer, specifically, who wants to bellow periodically every time a new colour word comes to mind. At this age, it’s a bit awkward to figure out the division of discipline: am I supposed to step in and tell him to quit it with the bellowing, or is that all under control? (I see this play out each week at swimming lessons too, with parents evenly divided between those hissing warnings to their children to pay attention and work hard, and those with their nose in a book.)

I think there’s a lot of scope for kids to interact with some contemporary art, and the art chosen for this was a good example: a whole coloured floor to pace and march around and to match their coloured pipe cleaners with. Good choice.

A less good choice was the security guard who came over and told me that there is a “no backpacks, no exceptions” rule. I assume this is because backpacks are so liable to knock over art works whichÂ… obviously is a problem, but it would have been really annoying if I’d had my baby in a front pack and then needed to, I guess, carry the backpack around in my hands, since I can’t dangle it off the baby. It’s just generally not the greatest thing in the world, to have no socially acceptable way to lump around the giant haul of nappies and wipes and changes of clothes and such that a young baby requires. I think I’m supposed to leave most of it in the car I don’t own. (Tangent: I wasn’t babywearing that day, but I often do, and it is quite common in babywearing discussions around this issue for it to emerge that many babywearers either are never far from their cars, or never far from their adult partners.) Probably the best way for the MCA to deal with this would have been for the instructor to mention it before we all left the classroom, so I could have left the bag there.

V found the first activity Â— making interlocking circles out of pipe cleaners Â— a bit frustrating (he couldn’t figure out how to twist the pipe cleaner around itself to close the circles), and I was disappointed that the session doesn’t allow enough time for the instructor to notice and help floundering children. That said, each child did have a parent with them, so of course I was able to help him out myself just before he vanished into a big pile of “I can’t, I can’t, it’s so haaaard, I can’t!”

Afterwards we went back to the classroom for an activity he found much more intuitive and fun, holding a texta against a piece of paper as it spun on an record player, so as to draw circles and spirals. I think the instructor tried to briefly mention that this was an older way of playing music, but V in particular, and I think children of this age generally, don’t really grasp that the past was noticeably different from the present and have no interest in cooing over more cumbersome ways of playing music that predate their parents’ era as well. (Although, that must have been fun, back when people got to play music with TEXTA MACHINES!)

Almost as an aside, the instructor pointed the children at lights that changed colour when you clapped near them, which is nearly as much fun as textas. This was a good microcosm of the whole experience; just slightly rushed. I feel like if each part of it had 10Â–15 more minutes, V would have had more fun. That said, he was very proud of the art he’d made.

Cost: concession is $16.85, general admission is $21.95. I’m honestly not sure if both parents and children are supposed to buy a ticket. I bought one for me and one for him.

Recommended: not for the price. It’s a fine activity, it was however slightly rushed throughout.

More information: Museum of Contemporary Art’s kids’ activities website.

June 13, 2014January 25, 2018

Australian passport lifehacks, the unpaid version

If Alex Kidman can get a Lifehacker article out of a last minute passport application, I can get a blog entry.

I’ve had cause to apply for too many Australian passports in the last couple of years (mine and both of my children), and lo, I come to share my wisdom.

The online form

The passport office has an online version of the application form you can fill in. My advice: unless you are eligible for an renewal, do not bother with the online passport form.

All the online form does is generate a document you need to print out and take to a post office and it’s almost impossible to get the printer settings right to the point where I’m yet to meet anyone who actually has done so (apparently the passport office is very picky about it being printed in exactly the right size, in a way that printer drivers just don’t support). Plus, as Ruth Ellison noted in 2008 (and it looks like the website has not been redone since), the user experience is dreadful. Instead, go to the post office, pick up a paper application form, take it away and fill it out. And this is coming from someone who hand-writes so seldom she can’t reliably replicate her own signature any more, so you know I’m serious.

Actually, grab two forms, because they’re also fussy about any mistakes you make on it and it might be better to just complete a second form if you make one. (When I say “they”, it’s actually not clear if the passport office is incredibly fussy or if the post offices are overcautious on their behalf. But it doesn’t matter to you, normally. Someone is fussy.)

If you are renewing, it generates a single page form for you to sign. This is more reasonable to print. Make sure when you print it that no part of the form has been cut off at the edges of the paper and this seems to suffice. The alternative is calling the passport office and they will print this form for you and mail it to you.

Passport timelines

The Australian Passport Office is pretty good about its timelines (10 working days for a normal application, 2 if you pay an additional priority fee of roughly 50% of the cost of a normal application), but the trick is they do not include Australia Post’s part of the process. That is, they do not include the time taken for the application to be transported to them, nor the time Australia Post takes to deliver it back to you. The delivery is especially tricky because they mail it to you registered post at your residential address. Registered post is delivered to people, not mailboxes, so unless you tend to be home all day, you will miss the delivery and need to pick up from a post office, probably the next day.

So, you can read their processing time something like this:

Normal application They say 10 working days or less. However, apply at least three weeks and ideally more before you need the document if you want to receive it in the post. If it’s a near thing, pay the priority fee or, if you live near a passport office, ask the post office to mark it as for collection at the passport office, and they ring you and you go and pick it up there the day it is ready rather than having it take multiple days in the post. (Source: my husband did a normal application with passport office pickup in March 2013.)

Priority application They say 2 days. But the post office’s part takes at least that long again. I can tell you from hard-won personal experience this week that the post office did not consider 5 business days enough time for me to get one through applying through them, and that’s in Sydney where it’s only one day to deliver it to the passport office. So this is really more “dammit, just missed the 10 days cutoff” option than the “I’m travelling within the week!” option.

“But I am travelling within the week!” You need to book a passport interview at a capital city passport office, where they will take your documents and start your 2 working day countdown that second. Ring the passport office, eventually if you are patient with their phone tree you get through to an operator who will make you an appointment. You will get a passport 2 working days after that appointment. (The Passport Office is quite strict with themselves about working days. I did a passport interview Thursday, I have a receipt saying my passport is due for completion at 11:44am Monday!) I was told if your appointment is within those 2 working days to spare you may get promised one faster at the discretion of the passport officer who interviews you, but no promises at the time of booking.

However, again from hard-won personal experience, they could have a two or three day wait for an appointment, which puts you pretty much back at the post office’s timeline. Call them back daily to see if a slot has opened up: I originally had an appointment on Friday afternoon having been assured that Wednesday and Thursday were booked solid, but when I rang on Thursday morning they had an appointment available within two hours.

“But I’m travelling within the day!” Read Alex Kidman’s article. It sounds like the process is to turn up sans appointment and have at least one of a very pressing need or a very apologetic approach to them, and they may give you a slot freed by a no-show and can produce a passport within the day in some cases. Whirlpool, which you can usually rely upon to contain a gloomy bunch of know-it-alls looking forward to explaining how you’ve stuffed it all up, also has largely positive stories.

Proving citizenship

There are no hacks, this is a total pain in the butt and seems capable of holding up passport applications for years or forever.

I luckily have the most clear-cut claim: I was born in Australia before 20 August 1986, I have citizenship by right of birth alone. But even one of my children, who has the super-normal case of citizenship by right of Australian birth combined with two citizen parents at the time of his birth, had one set of documents rejected (incorrectly, in my opinion, but I don’t award passports). Ruth Ellison, a naturalised citizen, writes that she needed to add time to get documentation that was in her parents’ possession. Chally Kacelnik, after digging up evidence of her mother’s permanent residency at the time of her birth, still faced pushback as to its status. A Whirlpool poster, estranged from their parents and therefore unable to get them to provide documents proving their citizenship, seemed unable to prove citizenship by descent as of the end of their thread despite living in Australia their whole life.

I have the very limited consolation of a slight acquaintance with other country’s processes fairly recently and can report that they are often just as reliant on hoping that someone in the family is the type of person who flees countries with a complete set of personal identity documents and someone else who keeps a stash of passports belonging to people who’ve since died, and so on. That is, no consolation.

Updates January 2018:

There is now a truly online passport application for adults, with the post office doing identity verification rather than accepting entire printed forms for lodgement. I have no experience of this application method, but expect it is an improvement.

The Department of Home Affairs provides a Evidence of Australian Citizenship document to those whose claim to Australian citizenship is not one of the more obvious routes.

May 12, 2014

Travel tip: Wentworth Falls Lake

I’ve frequently had cause to try and meet people in the Blue Mountains in a kid-friendly place, and I’ve found it surprisingly hard to do so. There’s teeny playgrounds of various types. There’s all the big tourist attractions which might work for older kids but about which mine couldn’t give a damn.

After poking at a map for a while, I discovered Wentworth Falls Lake, which seems to hit a decent amount of criteria for people with little kids. There’s two small but not uninteresting playgrounds, a number of fairly level and even paths, picnic tables scattered about, electric barbecues and a sheltered eating area, general space, and a decent-sized (albeit unfenced) bit of water to please the eye:

I’ve apparently managed to catch the train past this about 50 times without realising that it was a place worth remembering.

Note: it’s in the town of Wentworth Falls, it’s not at the actual falls. It’s on the north of the highway, the falls are on the south.

May 6, 2014January 16, 2017

Not the Sydney Project: Questacon

This year is my sonÂ’s last year before he begins full time schooling in 2015. Welcome to our year of child-focussed activities in SydneyÂ… only without the Sydney bit this once.

We rudely interrupt the Sydney Project to bring you a Canberra attraction: Questacon. In short, Questacon works nicely for V in a way that the Powerhouse did not, probably because it’s pretty shameless about catering entirely to children, complete with buttons, lights and hard hats.

We were there on a very busy day: the Saturday of the Easter weekend, the middle weekend of NSW school holidays. It was merely obnoxiously busy; I guess being used to Sydney crowds was helpful. That said, we did get there at 9:15, just after it opened. And as it was, the admission tickets to Mini-Q, the under 6 area, which is in limited numbers sessions on busy days, were only available from 11:30 onwards. I think they’d completely gone by about 10:30 in the morning. Go early, go often.

We’ve been once before, about a year ago, and Questacon was a hit to the point where for some time afterwards he asked to “see the science again!”. It took him longer to warm up to it this time. Much like last time, he shot through Measure Island without engaging. It took him a while to settle into Wonderworks, eventually getting interested in the Energy Machine and Frozen Shadow. Much to my disappointment, he’s never given a toss for my precious Harmonograph. (Much of Wonderworks has been there since I was a kid. Questacon’s exhibits are surprisingly timeless in their appeal.)

Andrew and I and his father were very taken with the Cloud Chamber, which is in its own little-visited room from the steps between Wonderworks and Awesome Earth (closed for renovations), in which subatomic particles leave continuous trails through a cloud of vaporised alcohol. Andrew is keen to bring a banana next time. V was not willing to stand still for a story about how all the time, everything is being hit with tiny tiny particles moving at high speeds. Perhaps not one for the littlies.

V’s favourite exhibit is pretty unique to him. He can roll ping pong balls down a ball rollercoaster for about an hour at a time. Other children come, roll five or ten balls and go. He stays. We only extracted him with a promise to return after.

Next up was one for the watching adults, Excite@Q. V was most naturally drawn to the blue tunnel, and he was one of several smaller children jostling under Whoosh to grab a scarf and stuff it back in the wind tunnels. But we were there for one thing: to see our four year old agree to do Free Fall. I wrote about this elsewhere:

It’s a horizontal bar suspended over a very steep slide. You hold the bar. You let go. You drop freely for three metres or so before hitting the slide and sliding to the floor of the room.

The ride is, as you’d hope, very into consent. You go to the top. You get a briefing about how it works. You are told, repeatedly, that it’s OK to say no. And the day we were there, about three quarters of children did say no. (It’s a bit of a study in gender performance actually. Adult men by and large grab the bar, drop themselves down to dangle, let go and are done. Everyone else takes far far longer.)

V loves slides and heights, and so we asked him if he wanted a go. He said yes. He was dressed in the safe suit for it (I guess no risk of catches or tears), he waited in the queue and watched child after child look at the drop and shake their head and walk back down the stairs with an adult for a hug. Andrew took him to the top. He got the chat about whether he wanted to say no. He gave them a puzzled look. He got his instructions. He took them very seriously.

He held the bar:

He dropped his weight from it:

He looked down:

And he let go:

He seemed to have fun, if a mystified about why this was such a very big deal.

After Free Fall, his ticketed time for Mini-Q came up. I didn’t go in, but apparently it was all construction all the time in there.

Finally, for bonus points, I put my camera down somewhere in Wonderworks, and someone found it and handed it into staff. “People who come to Questacon are generally very honest,” the information desk staffer told me, although somewhat spoiling the effect by saying she’d been tempted to keep the camera herself.

Cost: $23 adults, $17.50 children 4 and over, younger children free.

Recommended: yes, has something for the jaded adult radioactivity fans and the child who wants to drop from extraordinary heights, wear a hard hat in a playground, and roll ping pong balls down a slide for an hour alike. Try not to go on holiday weekends, and try not to leave your camera lying around.

More information: Questacon website.

April 16, 2014December 3, 2024

The Sydney Project: Powerhouse Museum

This year is my son’s last year before he begins full time schooling in 2015. Welcome to our year of child-focussed activities in Sydney.

This was our second visit to the Powerhouse Museum, both times on a Monday, a day on which it is extremely quiet.

The Powerhouse seems so promising. It’s a tech museum, and we’re nerd parents, which ought to make this a family paradise. But not so. Partly, it’s that V is not really a nerdy child. His favourite activities involve things like riding his bike downhill at considerable speeds and dancing. He is not especially interested in machinery, intricate steps of causation, or whimsy, which removes a lot of the interest of the Powerhouse. Museums are also a surprising challenge in conveying one fundamental fact about recent history: that the past was not like the present in significant ways. V doesn’t really seem to know this, nor is he especially interested in it, which removes a lot of the hooks one could use in explaining, eg, the steam powered machines exhibit.

We started at The Oopsatoreum, a fictional exhibition by Shaun Tan about the works of failed inventor Henry Mintox. This didn’t last long; given that V doesn’t understand the fundamental conceit of museums and is not especially interested in technology, an exhibit that relies on understanding museums and having affection for technology and tinkering was not going to hold his attention. He enjoyed the bendy mirrors and that’s about it.

I was hoping to spend a moment in The Oopsatoreum, but he dragged me straight back out to his single favourite exhibit: the steam train parked on the entrance level. But it quickly palled too, because he wanted to climb on and in it, and all the carriages have perspex covering their doors so you can see it but not get in. There’s a bigger exhibit of vehicles on the bottom floor, including — most interestingly to me — an old-fashioned departures board showing trains departing to places that don’t even have lines any more, but we didn’t spend long there because V’s seen it before. He also sped through the steam machines exhibit pretty quickly, mostly hitting the buttons that set off the machines and then getting grumpy at the amount of noise they make.

He was much more favourably struck with the old game tables that are near the steam train. He can’t read yet, and parenting him recently has been a constant exercise in learning exactly how many user interfaces assume literacy (TV remote controls, for example, and their UIs now as well). The games were like this to an extent too; he can’t read “Press 2 to start” and so forth, so I kept having to start the games for him. He didn’t do so well as he didn’t learn to operate the joystick and press a button to fire at the same time. He could only do one or the other. And whatever I was hoping V would get out of this visit, I don’t think marginally improved gaming skills were it, much as I think they’re probably going to be useful to him soon.

We spent the most time in the sinkhole of the Powerhouse, the long-running Wiggles exhibition. This begins with the annoying feature that prams must be left outside, presumably because on popular days one could hardly move in there for prams. But we were the only people in there and it was pretty irritating to pick up my two month old baby and all of V’s and her various assorted possessions and lump them all inside with me. I’m glad V is not much younger, or I would have been fruitlessly chasing him around in there with all that stuff in my arms.

It’s also, again, not really the stereotypical educational museum experience. There’s a lot of memorabilia that’s uninteresting to children, such as their (huge) collection of gold and platinum records and early cassette tapes and such. There’s also several screens showing Wiggles videos, which is what V gravitates to. If I wanted him to spend an hour watching TV, I can organise that without leaving my house. He did briefly “repair” a Wiggles car by holding a machine wrench against it.

Overall, I think we’re done with the Powerhouse for a few years.

Cost: $12 adults, $6 children 4 and over, younger children free.

Recommended: for my rather grounded four year old, no. Possibly more suited to somewhat older children, or children who have an interest in a specific exhibit. (If that interest is steam trains, I think Train Works at Thirlmere is a better bet, although we cheated last year by going to a Thomas-franchise focussed day.)

More information: Powerhouse website.

March 19, 2014January 16, 2017

The Sydney Project: Art Baby

This year is my son’s last year before he begins full time schooling in 2015. I’ve therefore decided to embark on a self-imposed challenge to go and do different child-focussed activities in Sydney and review them!

Art Baby is a preliminary Sydney Project entry, because it wasn’t an activity for preschoolers! Instead, it’s an activity for carers of babies, who tour the Museum of Contempoary Art with their babies.

Entrance to the Museum of Contemporary Art, nighttime — by Robert Montgomery

Mostly, it’s a short (45 minute) tour of one of the exhibitions (it was Volume One today), and the fact of having babies in tow is largely irrelevant. (Most of the babies today were two or three months old, much too young to do much touching or exploring.) I very much enjoyed our tour guide, who significantly contributed to the artworks with some background about each artist, and with her personal reactions to the art works. Fine art has really grown on me in recent years, as I’ve come to understand many genres — fine art in this case, but not it alone — as a conversation, and that you need to come at it with a cheat sheet that brings you up to speed on the conversation. A good tour or audio guide is the way to go with fine art museums, given that I’m unlikely to ever follow the conversation as a practitioner or serious student. Today’s tour, by an art educator and artist, was an excellent insider briefing.

The baby-relevant part of the tour is the conclusion in the Creative Learning room where the older children would do the Art Play (3yo and under) and Art Safari sessions (3–5yo). This includes a piece specifically commissioned for the children’s room, a child-safe and welcoming artwork for them to interact with. (Much of the museum is an attractive nuisance for children, with many bright, changing objects that they must not touch. It’s a shame. This adult would like a museum of fine art you can beat upon.) Afterwards, everyone has coffee (included in the price) and goes their separate way.

I’m keen to trial Art Safari with my 4yo now.

Cost: $20 plus booking fee.

Recommended: yes. It’s a good introduction to the MCA collection, and the timing is suitable for people with babies in tow. You could also just attend a normal tour, of course, but sometimes it’s fun to be part of a WITH BABY market segment.

More information: Art Baby website.

January 8, 2014January 9, 2021

A year with orthokeratology

A year ago, I did something that’s very rare for me, I made an expensive impulse purchase. Specifically, I was fitted for orthokeratology lenses. These are a vision correction technique: hard contact lens you wear while you sleep, that mold your cornea into a corrected shape so that you don’t need to use vision correction while you’re awake.

I have mild myopia (-1.75 left and -0.75 right, I think) and very mild right-eye astigmatism and I’ve had vision correction since I was about ten (initially only for my left eye, my right eye only became measurably myopic about 5 years after that). I’ve worn glasses and contact lens each about half the time. I like contacts better than glasses but still find them annoying when they are dry or one gets stuck to the wrong part of my eye. I have enough medical and surgical anxiety that I’m not going to be interested in surgical correction any time soon. So that was the appeal of orthokeratology.

To cut to the chase, while I’ll keep wearing them now I have a good fit, my recommendation is mixed at best.

The first few days and weeks were not promising. The problem with anything that’s supposed to be “uncomfortable” or “take some getting used to” is determining when something is actually wrong. So when I first put my lenses in in the optometrist’s office and my eyelids slammed shut in agony over the top, I figured it was par for the adjustment course. In addition, it took a while to achieve good correction, I think a week or more to be reasonable and another week or two until I tested as having an acceptably negligible prescription. During this time, in transition, I couldn’t use my glasses either. So in the evening, it was a question of putting them in and then immediately staggering upstairs feeling my way to bed while my husband probably cooed lovingly at his loyal un-painful glasses. It’s also, as you would think, not especially easy to get to sleep when your eyes are trying to alert you to their imminent death, although once I was asleep I tended to sleep well and wake up with them adhered to my eyeballs (once they seal on, it hurts less). The crisis in the mornings seemed to be more that they adhered too well, and the force required to get them off tended to flick them around the bathroom at random and I’d get stressed and need to get Andrew downstairs to help me find the lenses (replacement cost is multiple hundreds of dollars).

Which reminds me, these require touching your eyes a lot more than soft contact lenses do. Getting them on involves applying them straight to your pupil, and getting them off is done (most easily) with a little suction device, again, more or less applied to the lens over the pupil. Getting them off sounds like it should hurt, but it doesn’t, it’s just a slight pulling sensation. But a large number of people cannot bear to touch their eyes, or at least not very much. That is, at least, a caution to many people. This wasn’t something I was asked about or warned about at all; luckily I am very able to touch my eyes, but it seems like I should have been asked.

Once the teething pains, as it were, were over, I had a nice few weeks of naked daytime eyes. Even Andrew briefly expressed envy, swimming at Waikiki, that I could see everything and also not have to worry about losing a lens in the water. It wasn’t to last long, as on that same trip, one morning I woke up with my eyes in agony. The only relief I could get, even slight, was to keep them open behind very dark glasses for most of the morning. I put it down to bad cleaning and made a note to be extra careful.

But it kept happening, with increasing frequency. On the fourth or fifth time, back in Australia, I ended up at the optometrist. He couldn’t find anything wrong other than dryness… and that my vision correction was weakening badly to boot, so I wasn’t even getting much for the pain. He wanted me to stop wearing them. He doesn’t seem to be a terribly good communicator; all I could get out of him was a vague promise that I wouldn’t be out of pocket. I got a call a few weeks later to come and pick up new lenses. He wasn’t even around so I didn’t really know what the deal was until my next check up: it emerged he’d actually done a fair bit of work phoning different suppliers trying to find lenses big enough to cover my (of course) enormous corneas, thinking that probably the fit was actually the issue.

Sure enough, the bigger set of lenses have solved the problem of the mornings of extreme pain and dryness. They were also never as painful as the first set, despite several weeks break before starting to use them, which makes me wonder if the level of pain inserting the first set was always a bad sign. (But then, “may take some adjusting” and “may be uncomfortable” means “don’t complain for a while”, so they’ll never know.) I also don’t end up having to scan the bathroom inch by inch for them every morning. The correction is pretty good; I actually have to be careful with the right eye not to wear a lens every night because it’s easy to overcorrect. I wear the left one about three nights in four and the right one one or two nights in four. It’s more of an artform than I’d like, to be honest.

Given the initial pain and the lengthy adjustment period, I think with hindsight that I wouldn’t choose to start the process, which is why I am hesitant to recommend it to others. Most reviews I’ve read have had better experiences, although the only other person I know who tried it had to give it up entirely because it caused such bad night blindness it wasn’t safe for her to drive (not a problem I’ve had). Proceed with care.

Update January 2021: this remains one of my most popular blog posts, so here’s an update. I stopped using orthokeratology around 2016, returning to a mix of glasses (most days) and single-use contact lenses (for sports or nights out). I don’t miss the mild nightly discomfort and the care routine for the lenses.

I’ve idly considered laser correction, but I’m coming up on the age where I will get longsighted and I’m not sure that a mere couple of years break from glasses is worth it.

December 17, 2013April 18, 2017

The Alphabet Sufficiency: brief reflections

At the beginning of the year, I was indirectly responsible for the creation of the formidable Alphabet Supremacy project, which has just wrapped up. Jono and Bice have a few reflections on it at mid-year (Jono, Bice) and end-of-year (Jono).

I was frankly jealous, and, trying to know my limits, created a shorter project, the intended six week Alphabet Sufficiency. This resulted in five weeks worth of posts from me, and I think four from Martin Pool (who shared them in a non-public forum). Mine were:

Of these, my favourite by far is the acceleration one. I can remember writing it: well past the deadline, from a hotel room in Honolulu, while experiencing the second-worst case of jetlag I’ve ever had, with Andrew no doubt wondering about my priorities in reconstructing the web walks I’d been detailing to him for the month prior, rather than sleeping.

Priorities were generally a problem. At the beginning, I wrote:

If the amount of personal change and variability of energy levels I experienced in 2012 continues I will be living in a leper colony on the Moon by December 2013.

Not as it happens, but I will be wrapping up the year with one more degree and one more child than I started it with. Those entries are over February, March and April this year, during which time (on top of my job) I made the “minor corrections” needed to complete my PhD thesis (this resulted in 20 pages of additional text, about 10% of the length of the final document), took my hopefully one-and-only overnight long haul flight in sole charge of a distressed toddler, and visited California for a long and intense week of planning for the Ada Initiative. If Martin had given a prompt for the final week, it would have been due the week I found out I was pregnant again (a week which involved, I think, three sudden medical appointments to plan my pregnancy care in light of a pretty weird medical history).

If I recall, Martin suggested that we start the project ASAP because neither of us was going to get less busy. While this was perfectly true, from my end this probably suggested not starting the project at all, because I really didn’t have time for it.

I began the year feeling like “write more” was the resolution least suited to me of anything I could possibly resolve. I’m ending it feeling the opposite. The most obvious thing that founding a business, study, illness, pregnancy and parenting have taken from me in the last two years is writing. On the other hand, I don’t think that for me personally, resolutions or competition are the way to get it back. The only way out is through. When I have stability, I will pause for breath, and I will write. Ursula Le Guin says:

What inspired you to be a writer?

Learning to write, at five.

That is not quite true for me (in no respect do I claim to be comparable to Ursula Le Guin, which as a small benefit makes me a less testy interview subject) but my relationship with writing is something like that. If there is time and energy, writing is something I will do.

As for the specifics of the project, one-word prompts are surprisingly difficult. Over on Dreamwidth at the moment, some people are taking a prompt a day for the entire month (I am not, for reasons you can infer), and, looking at the prompts, I can easily imagine it would be easier by far for me to write a response to “tell me about a day you spent in your favourite city” than “City”. I found this just as bad for a word I chose: “Kin” was by far the hardest prompt. Having stumbled at the gate, “Acceleration” and “Favourite” were very deliberate pitches to something I was thinking a lot about at the time anyway (general relativity and the plot of Toy Story, respectively), in an attempt to construct a gimme for myself. Despite the superficial difficulty of never having been to Montreal, that was the easiest entry to write: I suspect that the more concrete the word, the easier the writing.

If I was to take on such a project again, it would be more like the interview meme or the December meme, with far more detailed prompting. One word prompts are a very hard place between writing about whatever the hell I feel like, and writing to a prompt. I’m waiting to see what the next baby is like before committing, but there’s always the possibility of the “parent to newborn pretends to be well-rounded” meme (results: one, two, three, four, five). Stand by.