This weekend has been a hit

This weekend we didn’t hit the sand and surf; instead we hit a few tennis balls. Yesterday and today we went down to the local tennis courts where we have a family membership and I tried to coach Lani and the kids. It was a bit difficult because they are all at different levels of ability. At first I tried to hit balls with all of them together but it just wasn’t working, so I changed the strategy and got them to take turns hitting a bucket of balls one on one with me. The change worked and we actually made some progress.

In the beginning Jasmine was doing mostly air swings. She keeps swinging for the ball too late. But slowly she started to hit a few more balls and is making some progress. James on the other hand kept taking wild swings and wasn’t watching the ball onto the racquet. I worked on trying to get him to control his swing and he started to make some improvement. Lani was the most improved of the trio. I decided to play a type of mini tennis with her, where we are only trying to hit the ball within the service box area. The focus was to just gently hit through the ball with a controlled swing and it made a huge difference. As Lani gets stronger and more fluent in her strokes we will push back little by little until we are playing full court.

Yesterday I had a funny experience. I was walking past a shed in a plant nursery at Oxenford when someone said hello to me. I had a bit of a look around and at first didn’t notice anyone near me then realised that the voice was no ordinary voice. It was a cockatoo in an aviary (which I originally thought was a shed). He said hello to me again and said, “scratch” and bent his head forward. So will a little apprehension I gave him a quick scratch. When I pulled my hand away he said “scratch cocky”. So I gave him another scratch. The process went on for another 5 times or so. Every time I pulled my hand away he asked for another scratch and offered different parts of his neck and back for a scratch. He was such a beautiful bird and really made the trip to the nursery that much better, plus the plants I was looking for were almost half price, so it was an especially pleasant visit.