Jumping in 2007

Happy New Year loved ones! Hope you’re content with the fruits of 2006 and ready to leave it behind and move on to 2007. We sure are, 2006 was our first complete year as a family in Australia. 2007 will hopefully bring us a healthy new baby and a new house. We are still celebrating Christmas, funnily enough, receiving a few Christmas cards from beloved friends in America in the mail each day and even a few more gifts! Jess still carries around baby Jesus in her stroller, but now locked up in a tiny box, “so he won’t get dirty.” New Years Eve we celebrated with some friends at a park on the river. This gathering was filled with lovely food, as these friends were all healthy food lovers and cooks. Jess went straight to work in the sand with her shovel and bucket. All she needed to know was, “Where’s the sand?” Matt happily played with her on the swings and the “slippery slide,” marveling at how long she can now enjoy just swinging back and forth. We left just after dark for home so Jess and I could go to bed early. Party animals, yes.

Jacinta is a very confident little two and a half year old now. She’ll tell you anything you need to know and if you let her, she’ll tell you what to do, exactly how and when to do it. Sometimes after dinner Matt takes Jess out on a bike ride to the park, to town, to the river, or on a walk. One night this week before dinner she informed me that, “Daddy will take me to the park after dinner.” During dinner it was discovered that she had come up with this plan on her own, so she had to then ask him for an outing. Of course he happily obliged, after a monotonous day of fiddly tasks building the house going out with Jacinta is the best option for release. Last night they went down in the gully to play in the mud and also play some cricket. Matt says that she already shows a partiality towards fielding and bowling, leaving Matt to bat. He found it pretty funny that every single time he hit the ball, no matter how far or close it was to her she said, “Hang on…I’m going to get it.”

As she learns cricket from Matt, she has just begun “pano lessons” with me. My mom, the piano teacher, sent Jacinta this cute little piano book for little ones with Mozart Mouse and Beethoven Bear. Jacinta was very excited about this new idea and since the piano is out on the veranda, asks every few hours for a piano lesson. She is a lot like me in that she tries to tell me what to do rather than listen to instruction, as I did to my sweet mommy. Don’t get the wrong idea, we’re not trying to make her a Mozart. She is just learning about high and low notes, and soft and loud sounds. She composes her own pieces now, “Big Bears and Little Bears….big bears and little bears,” she chants over and over while playing a few random keys here and there. Her other song is, “Where’s my Bear?” She can only sing at one volume level, LOUD! She thinks about Grandma Shari as she practices and talks about how Grandma will teach her on her next visit. It’s fun for me to have my mom live through her in this way. She’ll be happy to see that my dad also plays the piano on our next visit to the States.

Besides cricket and piano, Jacinta has been keeping busy just playing. She loves to play with Pop and Grandma, and do whatever comes to mind. Her most common pass times these days are riding on the rocking horse and jumping. She can usually convince “Pop” to let her jump on their bed and giggles uncontrollably all the while. She loves jumping, she jumps off of steps, into your arms, on our bed with Matt, and on a little trampoline. I just moved the trampoline into our bedroom and she has a big jump every time she enters the room. Her animals jump with her, she sings songs while jumping, she talks about how high her friends with big trampolines can jump. “Helena jumps like this!” She shows me, and realizes that it should be higher, so she gets down on the ground and tries again. Cooking is not her favorite pass time, nor is gardening, but once she gets into it she surely enjoys herself and brings her imagination into the task. The only problem with cooking is that she wants to eat everything and it’s usually right before mealtime.

I haven’t had much energy for cooking either, but hopefully it will return once we have our own kitchen with counters made for short people and I am not so heavy on my feet. I do have that funny nesting energy though, I have been doing any task I can to help prepare the way for a new baby and a new living space. I just finished my first pseudo quilting project using the face of one of Jacinta’s baby quilts. I placed this little quilt in the middle of a large piece of fabric, edged it, laid some wool batting beneath it, and then an old sheet beneath that, quilted the whole thing together by tying string through the layers at regular intervals, then bound the whole thing together. I can now begin to understand the difficulty and satisfaction of quilting, and have gained a lot more respect for real quilters. Jacinta also has her first big girl blanket for her new bed, when we move in. Curtains are my new project, resizing old curtains, comparing hardware prices, measuring for curtains which we must make, trying to find affordable material and so on. Luckily we have Mary to help with the sewing, and Matt found a few huge bolts of decent fabric on Ebay, so we are on our way.

One fun task this week was sorting through boxes looking for newborn clothes to wash BEFORE the baby arrives. Last time I did it while I was in labor, but this time the clothes are not new. They are all lovingly stained with Jacinta’s dark yellow spit up, so this weekend Mary is helping me try to save them. Jacinta enjoyed seeing how tiny everything was and tried on a few hats and socks just for kicks. We were given a big gift certificate to the local kitchen shop for Christmas. This week Jess and I had a nice time spending “free money” on all of the random kitchen items we still needed, mostly utensils, baking pans, and little things which I should have saved from Michigan. I kick myself for leaving a lot of things behind, but what’s done is done. I never contemplated the blessing of living in a place with so much abundance. People around Detroit give away a lot of good quality items. Not here, anything free is often junk and everything else is for sale. Perhaps it’s the difference in economic status, or just a different way of life.

We’re surely living a different life than what we had in Detroit! Rather than hanging out with teenagers, Matt’s week was spent just trying to get through all of the annoying little tasks such as making window frames, door frames, hanging doors, putting in doorknobs, and putting up cornices (long, thin curved strips of drywall which cover up intersections of drywall sheets). He began the closet/bookshelf wall which separates the two bedrooms. He achieved quite a lot, but these are the kind of tasks which one might think would be quick and easy but they all take time, more time than we really want to spend. Jess and I didn’t help much on the house this week, but we did one thing. We painted Jacinta’s bedroom door. One side is blue and the other is creatively painted by Jess and I. It is quite a sight to behold, and this is why the interesting side is inside Jacinta’s room! The floor remains unfinished and will be the last thing we do, well, almost.

Rather than cooking for school children and taking Jacinta on walks through the nice flat suburban streets, I am huffing and puffing up our little hill with loads of tomatoes, cucumbers, and beans in a large basket. I am getting discouraged by the early morning calf that has broken into the terrace garden every morning this week and systematically eaten every corn stalk he could reach, leaving only the four which reach seven feet high. Keith tried his best to chase him out, and spent a lot of time trying to repair the fence and stop the naughty cow. Michelle and Rory came for a visit Wednesday. We all worked together to fence the garden African style, by stuffing branches and brambles into the chicken wire to pump it up and make it more of an obstacle. I didn’t do much fencing, some wedding though, but Keith and Michelle did great work! It felt great to actually do something to stop the problem rather than just feeling fat, pregnant and helpless and angry at the cow. Then the next day, and the next day, the calf found its way in through another hole. Oh well, we’re having a good tomato harvest, found four strawberries today, picked our first cantaloupe and can try planting more corn, again.

So here it is, the new year. What does it hold? We never know, hopefully a baby, a house, a trip to the US, some visitors from the US and a few ears of corn. I hope you all find what you hope for in the new year. I’m sure this is not one of your grand hopes and dreams, but for some entertainment from Matt, a new video, see our website, www.paintedguitar.com. Look on the blog for videos, it is the sanding video. It is exhilarating (:

I’ll leave you with a funny animal story. “New dog,” the visiting dog that never leaves was lying on his outdoor bed this morning, sleeping. He stinks so he is an outside dog. Mrs. Red, a hen, came up onto the veranda in search of a nice spot to lay an egg. Mary was sitting in a chair next to the dog, and curiously watched what the chicken would do. The hen snuck around to New dog’s bum and bit him. He jumped off the bed, squealed and went away. Mrs. Red took his place triumphantly and laid her egg.

Love and Peace,

Shana