Fun in the snow

We got the kids some snowsuits and went out this morning.  It was only ten degrees-- cold, yo. 

Amiri was way into it.

Arram was not.

Amiri explored the yard.  Arram wanted to stay right where he was, thank you.  We had fun throwing handfuls of snow around.  Amiri tasted it.  'Snow is cold water!'

The snow wasn't very packy because it was so cold.  So Arram, totally of his own volition, went for a snow angel.  He was not impressed.

Amiri ran through the snow and tried making snowballs.

Arram stayed behind and wailed.

We rumpused and played.  Amiri took a try at snow angelling too.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

So we ran back to rescue the little guy.

Then we all looked at the icicles that had formed on the dryer vent.

And then it was time to go back in and warm up.

Jet lag= no fun for toddlers

Auckland is 19 hours ahead of the Midwest.  (Yes, it's mental gymnastics every time we pick up the phone to call home.)   Functionally, though, it means dealing with a 5-hour backward time shift when we travel.

A regular bedtime here feels like it's the middle of the afternoon on New Zealand time.  Afternoon naps feel like they're coming at breakfast-time.  As a result our little guys merrily stayed up past midnight for the first few days had have steadfastly refused to take any naps at all.  Between that and our not letting them sleep until noon, the poor little things have become steadily more and more sleep-deprived.  Toddlers were not meant to subsist on eight hours of sleep a day!  Not surprisingly, this has resulted in some spectacular hyperwhining.

But it all caught up to them today.  We took them for a ride in the warm car right after lunch.  They zonked out in about two seconds.   Hopefully this indicates that their internal clocks have been adjusted.  Hopefully this also means that everyone else in the house will be treated to a quiet night.

Okay, so this is useful information.  It takes four days to shift toddlers over five hours.

For one, Costco kinda blew my mind

I'm really enjoying my time in the US.  After having been away for a year, I'm realising that there are a few things I'd forgotten about.

--How CHEAP things are.  I just meandered around in a CVS for like an hour, grinning like an idiot and trying to restrain myself from buying everything on the shelves.  That fluid for my contact lenses?  Half price here.  Drugstore-brand makeup?  One-fifth of what you can get it for in NZ.  Yesterday I bought a container of 300 Tylenol for what I'd pay for a 30-pack.  (Yes, we have a suitcase that's just for Bringing Back Some Deals.)

--Putting a full sink of dishes into the dishwasher and having plenty of room left over for the pots and pans.  What, the world doesn't subsist with Dishdrawers?

--Snow.  Awesome.  Happy child photos to follow.

--I totally ate some Taco Bell.  It tasted good-not-great, and I got a little grossed out with myself and a little sick.  Probably for the best.

--Big buildings.  Big houses.  Wide aisles in the stores.  Lots of space to stretch out wherever you are.  Big indoors.

--Wide ranges of selections and big items.  Gallon jugs of milk!  20-can cases of pop!  Bags of flour larger than 5 lbs!  It's a cornucopia of plenty!!!

--Insulation and efficient central heating.  Seriously, NZ, you really MUST get on board with this.
  

SSS on vacation

You may be wondering, Why no new posts in a week?  Where have all the baby pictures and kiwiana gone?  Well, it's kinda hard to post at 35,000 feet.  We've gone on vacation!

We departed Auckland at about noon the other day.  A few hours' flight, and check this out:  due to a scheduling irregularity, our few-hour layover in Fiji ended up turning into about 36 hours.

Bula indeed!  I've had unexpected overnights on long trips before, but usually it means I get waylaid, exhausted and grumpy, in some sketchy airport motel outside of DFW or something.   This, though.   This was not that.  No.  We were still fresh and happy and walked out the front door of the airport to see this:

For those of you who are unaware, our last trip to Fiji nearly five years ago was pretty great.  So we have a soft spot in our hearts for this place.

So, OK, we picked a hotel from one of the brochures in the airport and caught a shuttle to check in.  And yeah, there we were.  A surprise day in Fiji!  But packed for Chicago.  Chicago in December.  Yeah.

But we are resourceful and know how to make the best of things.  We went down to the shade by the pool and had some cold drinks...

 ...and sat there being all, Holy moly this sure beats the Fort Worth roach motel!

We slept well under the fans in our room.  The next morning, Arram and I took a walk in the early morning dew before the other boys woke up.  We liked the sunshine and the flowers. 

Our hotel was ringed by mango trees:  large, low, spreading, and easy to climb.  We watched a troop of ten-year-old boys systematically harvest the trees one by one, expertly tossing the mangoes down to their mates on the ground, and then departing with bulging plastic bags.  We sampled one and it was amazing.

Once it got too hot to think (you know, by 8:30 am), we spent the rest of the day swimming, playing in the playground, and rescuing the World's Tiniest Gecko that had gotten stuck in our kitchenette. 

We got a late check-out from our hotel and flew out late that night bound for LA.  What a wonderful surprise.  Bula Vinaka, Fiji.

Busted!

We put the boys down for their naps together in the same room.  We heard a big rumpus and lots of delight.  We walked in to find this.

Follicular characteristics

Amiri really took his time growing his hair, staying pretty much bald until his second birthday.  Even now, it's kind of sparse and his scalp shows through.  But what hair he does have is so curly!  It forms these great little springs after a bath, and turns into a fuzzy halo when it's messy.  Arram was a baldie baby too, but is now quickly growing a fine head of hair of his own.

Just look at this post-bath fluff!

U2 puts on a good show

We had a great experience when U2 came to town on Friday.  What a performance!  They do a great live show.  We had RedZone seats, which put us right up near the stage, and they had these walkways that extended out into the crowd and brought the music right out to us.  That is Bono on the left and The Edge on the right, and then Bono again up high.

They saw seven birds

Hey, let's go look at what there is to see outside!

Did you see that bird?  It was a big one!

Do you think Mom and Dad saw it?

The loquat

You know how I like to find interesting edibles and bring them home to try.  My excellent husband brought me a little basket of organic loquats from the farmer's market this weekend.

Loquats!  Even the name is fun.  They are a berry/fruit from China.  They grow on bushy trees.

I put them on a plate and surgically removed the stem end of one.  Big seeds are inside.  They remind me of a lychee seed-- so dark brown and smooth.

Then you remove the seeds and dig out the membranes.  Then you eat what's left, skin and all.  They're quite nice.  Kind of like.... an orangey peach?  An apricotish plum?

Errata

To address recent Error Reports:

Apparently yesterday's video didn't work. I re-loaded it, a slightly longer version this time.  Try it again.  It should be working now.

Also, for those of you with deep interest in both protein powder and Clear and Accurate Bloggery (TM), I will note that the 12 grams mentioned here is the mass of the protein content, and not the mass of the entire portion of the chocolate powder.  Total mass of powder consumed = 15.2 grams, +/- 10%.

Management regrets any inconvenience.  As compensation, here is a picture of a happy little boy on a seesaw.

Tragedies!

Arrams' vocabulary is starting to increase dramatically, but his most common words are still 'uh-oh' and 'oh no'.  And everything's an Uh Oh for this kid.  He sees catastrophe all around him.   A cluttered mess.  A tumbled-over toy box.  Some spilled water.  Or things that come apart unexpectedly.  He is acutely aware of a sense of disorder.  He must announce his horror with The Things That Should Not Be.

The results of all that good eating

As babies, both our kids used the Graco basket-style carseats. 

Here is a leaving-the-hospital picture of Amiri in the carseat.  Look how tiny.  He spent quite some time sleeping in that seat once we got him home.

And here he is about ten months later, monstering it up in the carseat during a plane ride.  Fills it out nicely, doesn't he?

He outgrew it not long after that picture was taken, and now of course Arram is too big for it too.  So we gave it away to someone who could use it.  But first we had to get an 'after' picture of Amiri in the old carseat.  He very gamely wedged himself in.

 

Wow, right?  His baby feet didn't even come close to reaching the edge, and now they're lapping over by like half a meter.  It seems like, oh, last month that the photo of that not-even-seven-pounds baby was taken, and he's now, what, like THIRTY FIVE pounds?

I'm probably going to be saying things like this for the rest of my life, aren't I?

Cool.

 

As if the fluorescent lights in the dressing room weren't bad enough

Clothes shopping here has been a little interesting.  The first time I ventured out to the department store, I got an armload of clothes in my usual size and took them into the dressing room.  And then dejectedly realised that NOTHING fit.  And not the 'oh, it doesn't look quite right' kind of not-fitting... I'm talking the not-fitting where the pants won't pull further up than mid-thigh and you wonder if somehow you'd been accidentally browsing in the children's section.

Although my first thought was horror at the 20 pounds I must surely have gained for this to have happened, investigation has told me that clothes here are usually measured in UK, Australian, or New Zealand's own sizing schemes.  A size 6 in the US (not that I owned anything that petite) would be anything from a size 8 to a size 12 here.  That would explain my problems.  It took a bit of work to adjust my attitude about sizing up, but my ego has recovered and I'm wearing appropriately-cut clothes now.

Alternate sizing algorithms also apply to shoes (I think I wear a size 39??) and women's undergarments (not gonna go any further there, but trust me that I spent half an hour just staring at the tags like they were the Rosetta stone). 
 

Updata

I have follow-up information on some past posts.

Remember the mystery ditch weed?  Today while the train was stopped at a signal in the middle of the domain, I noticed another example.  Turns out they grow into big bushy shrubs about ten feet tall, and have bluish-purple flowers.  That gave me the clues I needed and I was able to identify it as Wooly Nightshade, a noxious pest weed.  It crowds out other plants, and its berries are toxic.  It's all over the country after escaping from decorative gardens.

And remember how the sun is hotter here?  Kind of like snowy climates' Wind Chill Factor, here they have Burn Time.  It tells you, given the time of year and the cloud cover, how many minutes it will take for a fair-skinned person of European descent to get a sunburn.  Today was a beautiful day in Auckland... and the burn time was only ten minutes!  And given that I'm not just fair-skinned but more like pink-white... I now carry my sunscreen everywhere with me.
  

Eating machines

They're just good growing boys.  Working so hard at getting big and strong.  And tall.  To that end, before school this morning, each boy consumed:

A serving of oatmeal (1/2 cup dry), with a handful of blueberries and 12 grams of chocolate protein powder.

A slice of toast with butter.

Another serving of oatmeal with blueberries and protein powder.

Lots of milk.

Vitamins.

Then they waddled off to school where pasta was on the menu for lunch.  Their teachers reported that they were very hungry.  I guess so!

We were still finding streaks of chocolate on the walls a week later

After one dinner that was characterised by enthusiastic and voluminous consumption on the boys' part, they were given a great big hunk of chocolate.  They shared it nicely.

And of course then it got melty and went everywhere.  All over Mama's water bottle, for one.

And of course, all over their faces and clothes!

The big OE

A very Kiwi thing to do is the Overseas Experience.  This means more than just studying abroad for a semester.  It's more of an independent experience.  The typical scenario has a recent college grad living and working in London for a couple of years before returning back home.  It's almost assumed that everyone does an OE, even if it's just going to Australia for the summer.  I wonder if that's why Kiwis seem so much more aware of world current events-- because they feel more like a part of foreign countries?   Like they're more intentionally and acutely aware of the rest of the world outside the borders?

Daddy made us a fort!

Since it has been proven to be hazardous to monkey health, Daddy cleaned out the boys' closet.  It looked so roomy that he added a blanket and some pillows. 

OMG BEST IDEA EVER THEY LOVE IT SO MUCH.  They've carried armloads of books, animals, and some snacks in there.  They even have their own light switch inside their new house.

They've been totally entranced by playing with it.  They've been inside with the door closed for at least 45 minutes now (which is, you know, like a day and half in toddler years).  All that giggling and little-kid conversation sounds so sweet.

A musical interlude

Poi E is a classic NZ song.  Even though it's from the 1980s, the video still gets decent play on network TV. 

And it's just straight-up fun and catchy.  I DARE you to not smile while watching this.



The song's history is here, if you're interested.

If anyone knows how to pronounce 'Ieoceie', I'd love to hear it

We have been dealing with a bit of a tragedy at the house recently.  A missing-persons report.  Amiri's Little Tiny Baby Monkey (TM) did not report for bedtime entourage duty one evening a couple of weeks ago, and continued AWOL after many thorough searches.  Although we were sure he was still in the house, we just couldn't seem to find his hideyhole.  We invented stories about the monkey having gone on a vacation, but Amiri knew what was up and took it kind of hard.  He asked me once during a heart-to-heart talk whether I thought the monkey was cold and lonely, or if maybe a tiger had eaten him.

But that's all turned around now!  Ring the bells, LTBMonkey has been found!  Amiri was even the one to find him.  (In the boys' closet, behind the seldom-used ironing board, under the container of vacuum-cleaner bags.  Of course.)  So in the spirit of relief and reunion, I present a getting-reacquainted interview featuring the primate of the day.

Holiday celebrations

You may have noticed that I didn't make a Halloween post last week.   Lest you think that I am holding out on you with regard to cute costumed children, I'm not.  We didn't dress them up because Halloween is really not a holiday that's celebrated here.  Oh, sure, here and there you'll see some sad chintzy costumes lined up at the Warehouse or something, but there are basically no decorations, no organised dress-up events, and no trick or treating.   Kiwis don't have anything against Halloween; they just don't do it.

What they DO do is Guy Fawke's Night.  That is tonight.    There are fireworks, both a large professional display in the Harbour as well as people all over town lighting up small ones in their backyards and from their roofs.
  

Despite its effectiveness, this method is not endorsed by the Red Cross

In our house, we subscribe to the first aid technique of, 'Mama, kiss it.'

Little guy bumps his head?  He comes running to Mama for a kiss on the bump.  Other guy trips and bites his tongue?  I hear wailing and the thump-thump-thump of feet approaching from the other room as he hurries over for the remedy.  I kiss my fingers and transfer it.  It works for all but the most grievous of injuries.

Arram has begun to game the system, though, as a vehicle for attention.  Today he presented himself in front of me, all wound up and in an extremely complainy mood.  Points to his knee.  Kiss.  Points to his head.  Kiss.  Points to his cheek.  Kiss.  Points to his elbow.  Really?  I am beginning to doubt your sincerity.  No kiss.  Points to his finger.  Changes his mind and points to his chest.  You silly little monster.  Hug.  Now stop your noise and go play.  Safely.
  

Time for teeth brushing!!!

This announcement is always followed by delighted squealing in our house.  It's so easy to entertain him.

We like noodles!

We got the boys some kids' chopsticks so that they can eat like mommy and daddy.  Amiri is pretty good with them.

Arram gave it a shot too.  I'm so proud of how he feeds himself now.

But after a while he started to wonder if maybe there was an easier way.

And sure enough, here is how it all ended up.

From North Shore across the bridge and around to Mission Bay, and back to Victoria Park

Yesterday, I awoke to enthusiastic clapping and yelling.  The cheering persisted as I groggily got up and shambled over to find my glasses.  This is more like it, I thought.  OF COURSE I am a champion for besting sleep yet again and NATURALLY I deserve applause for throwing off those covers and setting feet to floor.

Then I guess I woke up sufficiently to realise that the cheering was coming from the street below and that it probably wasn't about me.  I peeked outside.  It was the marathon!  Right past our door.

I'll be down there next year.  Totally.