On the 16th March, something amazing happened: Toby's story got picked up by the Sydney Morning Herald, and subsequently spent the week bouncing around "down under", hitting the New Zealand Herald on Friday 18th March. Lots of lovely people got in touch to help Toby find the "missing countries", and even more volunteered their addresses from Australia and New Zealand. Both are countries Toby would love to visit one day, so he was very keen to try and write to as many people as possible. He therefore declared Sunday, 20th March 2016 to be the:

Over the course of the day, a total of 23 letters got written - the most letters Toby has ever written in one day!

10 letters got written to New Zealand, to:
Lianne (Tauranga), Beryl (Manurewa), Savannah (Hamilton), Mr Quate's class at Tamatea Intermediate School (Napier), Jessica (Wellington), Jasmine (North Canterbury), Matthew (Auckland), Toby (Auckland), Di (Auckland) and Karen (New Plymouth).

​Over the course of the day, we read about the WOMAD Festival, we found out how Mauao / Mount Manganui got its name, found out about countless museums and beautiful landscapes, and Toby asked about school, toys and recipes.

13 letters got written to Australia, to:
Gisele (Ashfield), Emily (Fairy Meadow), Kirsty (Hobart), Nina (Victoria), Lily (Lilydale), Mrs Salter and Kingergarten Green (Summer Hill), Ariana (Sydney), Alex (Derby), Logan and Emerald (Cessnock), Laura (Lithgow), Angel (Morgan), Bigyan (Wollongong), Anita (Buderim).

​In Australia, Toby loved finding out more about the Puffing Billy Railway, fell in love with the Jenolan Caves, and tried to work out how he could get to Sculpture at Scenic World. 

​Since it's impossible to write 23 letters without breaks, we asked on Toby's Facebook Page to find authentic recipes to sustain us. We made a pavlova and Anzac biscuits (but we did eat some healthy food, too).

Thank you so much to everybody who helped us have such a fantastic day - we would love to do the same with different countries in the future!!

Toby says: Wombat lives in Australia. He lives underground in a deep burrow. He loses his Mummy, and he meets some animals and a little boy. They make fun of him because he only digs and thinks. Then, there was a forest fire, and he dug and dug and dug. All the animals and people he saw, they all went into his little tunnel, and they were saved. Then he told all the animals that he had lost his Mummy, and they all split up and found her.

Mummy says: This was our first reading around the world book that Toby read to me (with the others, he'd read the odd page, but not the whole book). The text is just repetitive enough to not be daunting, and you meet lots of creatures from Australia - kookaburra, wallaby, koala, and emu, for example. The book was a lot bigger than we expected, it's a proper big picture book, and a lovely addition to Toby's book shelf.

Well, not back from school, really, but "back from a school", as in, the first school Toby wrote to has responded, and it was a bit like Christmas! The Kindergarten class from Hunters Hill Public School, together with their teacher, Mme Benrimoj, have sent Toby a whole stack of drawings, of rainbow lorikeets, the Harbour Bridge, Sydney Opera House, kangaroos and other things. 

Toby says: "I liked all the pictures, and I liked what they wrote. My best pictures were the rainbow lorikeets, but I liked all the other ones, too. Thank you for all your letters, I love learning about the world! Bye, Toby"

This morning, we came across two countries with interesting flags. Apparently, the parrot on the flag of Dominica (left) is sometimes shown in blue, and sometimes in purple. And when it's purple, it's the only flag in the whole world to have purple on it! And the Papua New Guinea flag (right) was designed by a 15-year-old school girl, but that was in 1971, so she's a grown-up now. It shows a raggiana bird of paradise, and the Southern Cross. That's a star formation, but we can't see it, because we're north of the equator!

This morning, Toby hit the half way mark of his challenge - 97 out of 194 UN countries covered. He has, in fact, written 110 letters, doubling up on some countries, and adding a couple not on the list. Fittingly, the letter that took him to the half way mark did go "half way around the world", to Palau, where the Director of Education Administration, Emery Wenty, has already sent Toby some pictures - here's one of them. 

(As an aside, I think he's planning on taking up diving as soon as he's old enough!)