17 posts tagged “me”

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.

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.

 

In the past week we've had birthdays and Mother's Day, immigration wrangling, and visits with friends and family.

In honour of Travis's birthday, Travis and I went out for lunch by ourselves and then spent a very pleasant hour or so wandering around the Dunedin Art Gallery (or Art Museum as they call themselves).  For a small city Dunedin is well-served for galleries and museums.  The Art Gallery is particularly good.  The exhibitions change regularly and are well-curated and very varied.  We looked at photo collages of gorgeous, in-your-face nudes by a contemporary Dunedin artist, a disturbing installation that evoked a hospital complete with waiting room, bed, and breast implants by a woman who had recently faced breast cancer, 19th century watercolours from Japan, and some of the highlights of the permanent collection.

A date without Petra is a wonderful and slightly disconcerting thing.  We got to relax and eat at our leisure, but we both missed Petra.

I got another change to break out of my Petra-centric world later in the week.  My friend Nicola and I went to see the new Star Trek movie.  I haven't been out at night alone since Petra was born and I was surprisingly tense about leaving, even though I was excited to go and Travis was home to take care of Petra.  Petra and Travis were, of course, fine.  I enjoyed the movie, although I felt that the plot was pretty flimsy and the relentless cockiness of the young Kirk got a bit wearing.  Simon Pegg and Karl Urban were great as Scotty and Bone respectively.  And J J Abrahms did a good job of capturing the excitement and hopefulness of the original series. 

We finally submitted Travis's immigration application at the end of last week.  Now we just wait for them to process it and return his passport with a shiny new stamp or two.  I'm still working on renewing Petra's Canadian passport but that only requires a letter and a copy of her birth certificate - much easier than the 20+ page form Travis had to fill in.

In honour of my birthday, which was on Tuesday, here's a song by the Phoenix Foundation.

The guitar and vocal are very characteristic of the slightly alternative pop music produced in New Zealand.  And the video is great - lots of odd goings-on on a beautiful Wellington beach.

My birthday was most pleasant.  It was lovely to have a family-filled birthday after 10 years away.  I had a grown-up girls' lunch - no Petra, good food, and even a little wine.  It's been so long since I've had anything to drink that a few sips was all I needed to feel a bit tipsy.  And we all had dinner at my mum's place.  I got to see a cousin I haven't seen for seven or eight years and hang out with all my other Dunedin rellies.

My books have been stored in my mother's basement since I left New Zealand in 1999.  I went through them last time I was here and sold a heap, but five or six or seven or....boxes remained.  Travis and I (Travis really - I held Petra while he lugged boxes) hauled them to our house recently because I was eager to finally have everything in one place.  Alas, sometime between my last visit to the basement and my move home, the basement had gotten damper and we were assaulted by the smell of must and mould when we opened the boxes.  Some hundreds of books no longer readable.  I put the books I really really want to keep on the deck to dry out in the sun, then sprinkled baking soda through their pages before sliding them into ziplock bags.  I hope that the baking soda will eat enough of the smell that I can store them away in a cupboard somewhere without givng us all allergy attacks.  The rest will have to be thrown or given away.

I'm very sad about the loss, especially the loss of the books I loved as a child, many of which are no longer in print.  Replacing them will be a painstaking and expensive task.  Even if I can track down the books, shipping them to New Zealand will be ruinously pricy.

But I've had one good find already - a complete set of Trixie Belden books at Bookfever.com.  I don't know if anyone else enjoyed them as a kid, but I thought they were great and read and reread them, especially the first six.  I'm particularly pleased to have found the set because replacing all 34 of the books I owned one at a time would have been a difficult and expensive task, one I didn't like my chances of doing.  So I took the plunge and placed an order yesterday.  A huge pile of books will turn up on my doorstep at some point in the not-to-distant future.  Yay! 

Petra did a couple of new things yesterday.

When I'm feeding Petra with a spoon, I give her a spoon to hold as well.  It gives her a chance to practice and distracts her so that I can slip food into her mouth.  She dips it into the bowl and sloshes around, flicking food all over us both and the high chair and anything else in range.  She gets it in her mouth occasionally and is very impressed.  Mostly she holds it by the bowl and puts the handle end in her mouth - whatever works, I say.  As I gave her breakfast she held the spoon up to her ear, said "la, la, la" and handed it to me.  I held it to my ear and said "hola, it's for you," and gave it back to her, which pleased her.  And with that, we'd had our first real game of pretend.

After breakfast, I offered her milk.  But when I got the pillow and sat down on the special red armchair, she turned me down, choosing to wander off and play instead.  She's never done that before.  I've been moaning about Petra's enthusiasm for the breast and telling all and sundry about my fear that I'll be breastfeeding until Petra's 50, but I know that I'll be sad as well as relieved when she stops.  It's such a lovely, cuddly, close thing to do.

Our lawn hasn't been mowed for a couple of weeks so it's covered with daisies and dandelions.  It's pretty in an unruly way and makes a good backdrop for pictures, especially when the subject is a little girl wearing her best fairy dress.

We also took a few pictures of us more ordinary folk.  I have yet another cold and look pretty battered - everyone else is fine.  Petra insisted on wearing her woolly hat even though it was over 30 degrees here today.  She's very proud indeed that she can pull it on and off herself and wears it every chance she gets.

I'm sitting at the kitchen table in the sun.  The dog's nearby, draped over the doorstep snoring gently.  Apart from her I'm on my own, for the first time in weeks and weeks, or months even.  Carla and Olivia have gone to play with friends, Travis has braved the vagaries of Dunedin's topography and the difficulties of right-hand driving to go look at cars, Petra's napping.

It's lovely to have some alone time.  I haven't written or read anything or had much of a chance to catch up with myself since we arrived in New Zealand and I'm getting a little stir-crazy as a result.  I'm more of an introvert than an extrovert so I get uncomfortable when I don't get to be by myself regularly.  That lack of space is one of the toughest parts of being a parent.  I now hanker after time by myself doing nothing in particular the way I hankered after sleep when Petra was first born.  We co-sleep with Petra and I have only been away from her for more than an hour or so a handful of times since she was born.  As she gets bigger and more independent that will change (and I'll miss her as she moves away from me), but to this point we've had very intensive mother-daughter time.  I'm grateful that I've been able to be with her so much, but there's no denying that it's a huge change from my former life.

The dog has snuck in through the door and curled up on the other side of the table, just out of my line of sight.  I think she thinks she's fooled me.  Because I'm a soft touch, I'll leave her be for the moment.

We had a wee party for Petra yesterday afternoon.  Olivia was very excited about it all.  She had trouble sleeping the night before because she knew party-day was coming.  And she was a very eager helper when it came to unwrapping the gifts.  Petra was a blase one-year-old, however.  She sucked on her gifts, played with the boxes they came in, hung out with her rellies, and was generally a mellow baby.  She's tired today though.  As am I.  Both girls had trouble settling to sleep after all the excitement.  We were all out driving around Dunedin at 10 last night, trying unsuccessfully to knock them out.  Petra finally passed out around 11 and Olivia (who is usually the world's best sleeper) wasn't much earlier.

Petra's just woken up - time to go. 

I'm not quite sure which way is up yet, and it feels absolutely freezing, but we're here.

Petra flew very well.  She slept for most of the long flight from Vancouver to Auckland.  She didn't like the bassinet they gave us, preferring to sleep against our chests, which made for some stiff parental arms and shoulders.  Travis and I got enough sleep even so, arriving in Auckland in a mostly functional state.

The flight from Auckland to Christchurch was filled with Japanese tourists on some kind of tour.  As they passed Petra each of them paused to talk to her and touch her hands - it was like we'd formed an impromptu receiving line.  And one woman spoke to me very earnestly in Japanese (a language I know nothing about).  She was so earnest that I thought I'd left something behind and rushed back to check, but I think she was trying to impress on me how lovely Petra is.

Petra slept from Christchurch to Dunedin, so she arrived in better condition than Travis and me.  We were beginning to fade badly by then.  As we stood up to leave the plane, I made eye-contact with the woman in front of me.  We stared at each other for a bit and then I said, "I know you."  She knew me too but wasn't sure how.  We worked out though that her ex-husband used to work with me at the university and was friends with one of my ex-boyfriends.  We'd been casual friends - we had some dinners together, I babysat their toddlers (who are now teenagers) a couple of times, that sort of thing.  And we hadn't seen each other for more than a decade, but there we were on the same plane.  Dunedin, it's a small place.

We arrived into a party.  Six people in three cars turned up to collect us from the airport and drive us and our enormous pile of luggage into town.  Then we went to my visit my cousin and his little girl (who's two weeks older than Petra) - who just happened to be in town for the week.  We hung out in a room full of people for a while.  Petra has gotten very outgoing all of a sudden (A developmental phase maybe?) and worked the crowd even though she didn't know anyone.  Travis and I weren't quite so lively - we don't have Petra's stamina.

Specially for Karen.