We are just back from our weekend break on Bird Island, and although the whole weekend long I had thought my Monday Older Parent Blog would be all about how parenting at my age differs from how I did this when I was much younger, an entirely different slant presented itself during the course of the trip.

First, a little history:

This was our second visit to Bird; our first was in 2003 when Sam was ten-months-old and Cj wasn't even a glimmer ... although I have to think that she was already writ in stone somewhere on our family future.

That was also a lovely couple of days with terrific weather and the obligatory millions of birds, and Sam, having always been a big baby, doing a great impression of a backpack of no small proportions.

The morning of our second day there, unprompted by anything within the awareness of either Mark or I, Sam decided to take his first step ... then another, and another ... and before we left the island he also popped out his third and fourth teeth.

We were pretty well convinced at the time that we'd just experienced something darned special that must have had something to do with that island's specific longitude, its gravitational positioning, the spiritual essence of guano ... or something.

For this trip Sam is a month short of turning five. Cj is a month more than two-and-a-half. Given that they're both fully toothed and ambulatory, we weren't expecting any huge leaps or bounds or firsts.

Well, silly us. Apparently the magic that is Bird continues to cast its spell.

The first of the firsts saw Sam happy as clam to go to bed, and stay in bed, in the special bed made up for him in the room. Sleeping on his own, happily, and all night was not an experience we'd had before, and it was quite the momentous step. That was our take, anyway, even though he was surprisingly nonchalant about it all both nights.

No doubt about it, the fact that our friends from Kenya who traveled with us have a 10-year-old boy Sam sees as the epitome of cool, his bed being exactly the same in their bungalow, had a lot to do with this turn of sleeping events, but we're still attributing the "Bird factor" to our first nights' sleep sans the boy equivalent of Bugs Bunny's buddy Tas in our bed.

Completely unrelated, however, is the fact that over the course of our stay Cj decided that the toilet is her friend. Yep, after one successful encounter of the potty kind my little girl 'gets it'. She's not had an accident yet, and although we are putting her in a diaper at night, her daytime habits seem to include telling someone when she feels an urge and relieving that in the appropriate, rather grown-up fashion.

Wow.

We're now planning trips to Bird Island when breakthroughs are needed, and I've been thinking a month there would be the perfect place to finish writing a book.

The photos are of us, and one of the many sooty terns pausing to say howdy.