To Petra. She's two today. And now I have to make cake.....
For the past couple of months, Travis and I have watched "The Seven Ages of Rock", a BBC music documentary in seven parts (oddly enough), every Monday night. It finished up this week with a look at Britain's indie scene and the Brit Pop explosion of the late 90's. While I'm not sure that a scene that boasts Oasis and Blur as its best moments merits a whole episode, I came over all nostalgic at the footage of The Smiths (the godfathers of indie cool) performing This Charming Man on Top of the Pops some time in the early 80's. The quiffs, the droopy unbuttoned shirt, the waving gladioli (Morrisey's protest about having to lipsynch - he held flowers instead of a microphone), Morrisey's voice, Marr's guitar, the seedy sexy lyrics, and the general air of dissipation, - fabulous stuff.
As a teenager, I loved The Smiths for their campy over-the-top angst. Morrisey might be the gloomy king of adolescent loneliness and awkwardness, but he's also knowing and witty and wordy, which is just my thing.
I'd post a video but I can't get at Youtube. Vox is having trouble with its connections it would seem.
I thought that babies changed a lot in their first year, but I think now that the difference from 1 to 2 is even more dramatic. A 1-year-old is still a baby, while a 2-year-old is a little girl. Petra's baby fat has given way to a much more upright and sleek child build. She's beginning to look the way she will for the next few years, until the ravages of puberty hit.
Here she is then - November 2008.
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.
My Groups
-
Photography Updated: 10 minutes ago
-
Photographers Updated: 32 minutes ago
-
Life and Photos Updated: 32 minutes ago
Neighborhood
Explore friends, family, friends & family, or entire neighborhood.
