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A Petra update because I haven't posted one for a while.

She'll be two on Sunday.  Already.  This time last year, she was a fat baby who'd just taken her first teetering steps.  Now she runs, jumps, balances on one foot, climbs stairs without holding on, climbs up onto everything she can, and yesterday rode her bike down the hill at Nanny's (much to Nanny's consternation).  Petra's very poised physically and very confident about her abilities - she's only to happy to give things a go.  She might just have some of her father's daredevilry in her.

She's also a big talker.  We have long conversations about things like the helicopters that fly over and the house truck that occasionally parks outside our house (she's having a toddler vehicle enthusiasm at the moment).  She tosses out her words and phrases - truck, copter, noise, look, etc, etc - and I translate them into whole sentences for her.  We then repeat and repeat until we've thoroughly canvassed the subject.  She has a few whole sentences at her disposal as well.  The things she's figured out how to say give a nice insight into the egocentric workings of the toddler mind - "I will do it."  "I don't want it." "I will get it." "Pick up, pick up," said with upraised arms and urgent hand gestures.  "Come here" and "in here," used as she leads us round the house.

This morning, I noticed that someone from Riyadh had looked at my latest blog post.  This is what the blog looks like for them.

That I am in fact still here.  I don't have an ergonomic computer setup at the moment so I'm not doing much typing, lots of surfing, but no typing.

In my virtual absence, life has been going along quietly here.  It's spring and the rhododendrons are blooming.  Petra and I walk round our garden most mornings looking at the flowers.  I haven't had a garden for 10 years and had forgotten the deep satisfaction to be had from pottering amongst the plants even in a garden as tiny and down at heel as ours.  70-odd years worth of over-ambitious gardeners have crammed it to bursting with too many, too big, too close together trees and shrubs.  Our gardening efforts so far have been very Costa Rican - we've taken to the bushes with saws, loppers, and secateurs, and have removed three trees so far.  And I plot further destruction in my walks with Petra - she smells flowers while I pick shrubs for the chop.  All the camellias and a couple of sad-looking rhododendrons are on my condemned list, and I plan to prune the hell out of the remaining rhododendrons next autumn.

    

This is the longest time between posts since I started blogging here in late 2006.  Back then I was newly-married and had just moved to Costa Rica.  Travis and I were on a kind of extended honeymoon.  We explored by day (when Travis wasn't working) and went out by night - the typical expat thing.  I miscarried and we went on a consolatory vacation to the Dominican Republic where I was charmed to have one of the local guides talk about "Sir Francis Drake, the English pirate."  In my anglo-centric history lessons, he appeared a great explorer.

Things are very different now.  We live in my home town in our very own house.  I've barely even left town, let alone the country since we got here.  I'm travelled out for the moment, although I'm still collecting places to go (Norway, Jordan, Tunisia, Greece, back to France and Spain...)  It's Saturday night and instead of going out I'm sitting in my dining room listening to spring rain hit the window.  I'm someone's mother, which still surprises and delights me after almost two years. 

Life is unexpected, but good.

When I point a camera at Petra these days, she makes faces at me or gives me big cheesy scrunch-faced photo grins before rushing over to look at the picture.  Natural photos are not easy to come by as a result.  I have to sneak up on her.

Here she is posing with a cart we borrowed from the toy library across the road.

Petra's gotten very enthusiastic about drawing and writing recently.  We bought her a little etch-a-sketch this afternoon so that she can practice without being tempted to draw on the furniture.  (I've been finding scribbles in unexpected places because she sneaks off to test out her skills on any available flat surface when no one's looking.)   She walked around the store with it, writing industriously and bumping into things because she wasn't watching where she was going.  And she kept on writing for the rest of the afternoon.

She came up to me waving the etch-a-sketch around and yelling "P P P".  She'd written a clearly recognisable letter P on the etch-a-sketch and was extremely pleased with herself.  Yay Petra!  She's been interested in how we write her name for a while now, getting us to write it for her over and over, and she's been producing Petra-like squiggles, but today's effort was by far the clearest so far.

I took a picture for posterity.

The weather has been fabulous, amazing, stunning - 20 degrees today and August is usually the coldest month in this part of the world.  Lambs frisk, our camellias and irises are in bloom and the rhododendrons and daffodils aren't far behind.  We've visited beaches and gardens, spotted albatross on the peninsula, and shown Petra around the town.  I'm loving it here.

Here are a few photos from our outings.

 

One of the pleasures of being in New Zealand again is settling back into the shared musical culture. 

In Canada, I didn't know the local music history at all.  I attended a wedding in Saskatchewan and had my "you're not from around these parts are you?" sensation reinforced by the music the dj played.  Every now and then he'd play something which I'd never heard before and which sounded completely unremarkable to me, but which would cause the whole party to stop what it was doing to rush onto the dance floor because it was a Canadian song and everyone knew it except me. 

But in Dunedin, I'm part of the shared pop culture again.  I've been coming over all nostalgic as I get reacquainted  

Here are a couple of NZ pop songs.  An old one. "Why Does Love Do This to Me?" by the Exponents - the quintessential New Zealand pub sing along song.

And the new. "You're On My Mind" by Luger Boa - a more alternative but still awfully catchy song.
 

Here's a video of the Dresden Dolls covering Science Fiction Double Feature from the Rocky Horror Picture Show.  I was singing Petra to sleep earlier tonight and this was the song that popped into my head.  (There's only so many times I can sing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star or Rockaby Baby before my brain revolts and insists on something, anything else.