Five things

1. It's a glorious day here in our glorious city. After weeks of storms and rain and hail and lightning and general ew-ness, it's nice to be squinting into the sun again. The harbour looks radiant.
2. I despair at people sometimes. We're capable of incredible kindness, generosity, creativity and love. And then something like the balloon boy hoax happens.
3. Sweeney came and stayed at our place on Saturday night and gave me some insight into how children are crafty and will avoid going to bed with all manner of techniques, including quibbling over the distance the bedside lamp should be from the actual bed. I can remember my Nana and I having songs and stories in bed when I was little, and how I never wanted her to leave. Just one more Amazing Grace? I also loved getting into bed with her on cold mornings and snuggling up to her Oil of Ulan-smelling skin.
4. As part of Sween's staying over, we watched Finding Nemo. I hadn't seen it before. My new motto in life is keep swimming.
5. Only one week and two days before we move out of the cul-de-sac. I will be glad to not have to listen to our downstair neighbour doing his housecleaning at 2am anymore. Not to mention his other nocturnal activities.

Eating with my homies

Ange and Sweeney joined us at the cul-de-sac for a feast on Saturday night. And as I was putting the food on the table, I realised most of the meal was made from scratch. There was homemade pita bread, homemade hummus, homemade tztsaki made with homemade yogurt and homegrown mint, and the chicken was marinated in homemade souvlaki sauce. If we weren't in the process of finding a new house to live in, I would expect that come summer there would be homegrown tomatoes and lettuce to stuff the souvlakis with.

*super pleased*

we can't say cheese, our mouths are full

I need to sleep

The final track on Pavement's Crooked Rain Crooked Rain, Fillmore Jive, has been running through my head all morning. It features a rather desperate sounding Steve Malkmus singing:


I need to sleep why don't you let me
I need to sleep why don't you
I need to sleep
I need to sleep
I need to sleep
I need to sleep, why won't you let me
I need to sleep
I need to sleep
I need to sleep
Why won't you, why won't you let me sleep?


He sounds so distraught and plaintive and his voice rises and soars like a little boy begging his parents. He sounds much like all of us in the cul-de-sac last night. Of course Malkmus is singing about coming down after a huge drug binge, not having a 17-month-old in the house who won't sleep anywhere but parked on Mum or Dad.
It's all come rather out of the blue. Harper's been ill for a little while with a cough and an ear infection, but after starting anti-biotics, he slept through the night just great for two nights. As he usually does. But Wednesday night after the funeral, he woke at 4am inconsolable. Not even a little bit sleepy, wanting to snuggle into us. After an hour of throwing our hands in the air not knowing what to do as Harper bawls his wee head off, I took him into bed with me and lay there with his bowling ball heavy head on my chest. He slept. I didn't.
Next night, same thing. He sleeps till 2am. Perplexed, we take him into bed again. Seeing a pattern here?
Next night. Won't go to bed. The boy who formally loved getting into bed with his special blanket and Mr Snuffy, now wants to sleep with us. Chaos ensues. He comes into bed with me. He sleeps. I don't.
Uh-oh. We've broken our formally good sleeper. And I have eye bags the size of suitcases.
So last night, after taking him to the doctor and making sure there is nothing actually wrong with him, we did what Plunket suggested - we put him in bed and let him try to get to sleep by himself. We took turns sitting in the rocking chair by his bed, and though he did get to sleep about 11pm, he woke at 2.15am and after an hour and a half of crying the Postie broke down and let Harper sleep with him on the chair. Even when I did manage some sleep, all I dreamt about were crying babies. And I spent a lot of time when H was asleep lying awake anticipating his next wake up call.
Man. This. Sucks. I want my good baby back.
Today I am as stupid as Stupid McStupidstupid's big brother Moron.

Blowing in the wind

Today is very, very windy. So windy, I can see rain being blown horizontally, as if a 747 engine is pushing it along. It's so windy, the neighbour's roof started to come off and some hunky firemen had to be called.

The Birds

Yesterday as H and I were walking to Island Bay I noticed a large swarm of seagulls hovering over the hills by the wind turbine. Usually I would expect seagulls to hover over the tip a little further south, but I had never seen them in this spot before or in such vast quantities. It was a bright sunny morning but a large cloud came over from the South Island and I supposed the birds were moving in from the sea ahead of the front.

Then this morning I step outside to hang washing and there they are.

They all started squawking at once, or I would probably not have noticed them. As I type this, more are arriving.

Creepy.

Weta are taking over our house ...

No, not the highly acclaimed animation company, but actual living breathing creepy crawlie weta. Earlier this week, I was feeding Harper at some hour in the morning when I happened to spy a pair of antennae waving around in one of the cubby hole things running alongside the change table. Closer inspection revealed a ginormous weta having a sip of gripewater from around the lid of the bottle. I duly woke the Postie to get rid of it.

Next night, after a rather terrible day of Harper getting zero sleep but still having the energy to scream the house down, the cat woke me up scratching at something amongst the piles of stuff in the spare room. What it was scratching at? A weta. I duly woke the Postie who chased it under the spare bed.

And then last night, as I lay dozing at some hour of the morning, wondering if the noises Harper was making were going to rev up to full blown hunger, I heard a scratching noise that I thought was Charlie coming in for the night. Then the unmistakable feel of legs skittering over my bare arm, then the revelation of a weta sitting quite calmly on the pillow next to me. I duly woke the Postie, who though he didn't have his glasses on and was in the middle of a rare deep sleep, managed to scoop it up in a towel and fling it outside.

There are only two other occasions I have been in the presence of weta. One clung to my leg as I showered in my Kilbirnie flat in 1998, last seen surfing towards the plughole. The other time was just last year when I interviewed weta expert George Gibbs at his Eastbourne house where he had weta 'hotels' nailed to various trees. They creeped me out big time. I just hope our house isn't becoming a weta hotel too.

A Walk With Harper

Yesterday I fired up the stroller and Harper and I went for a wee walk about the burbs. I tucked him up in his cave with a blanket and hat and within seconds he was asleep, there must be something about being jostled about in a dark space that he likes, something womb-like perhaps. We walked. I haven't quite recovered fully from Harper's entrance into the world, so really we ambled. We moseyed. We strolled. In the weeks leading up to his birth, the Postie would drag me out for a walk around our neighbourhood, discovering little spaces and gardens and views over the gullies and hills. He would walk in tiny little steps to give the impression that we weren't going at a snail's pace. Sometimes on the way back we'd swing by the dairy and get marshmallows for hot chocolate. We'd inspect people's gardens and paintwork and peek in the windows of houses for sale. Clouds would tear over the hills, chopped up by the wind turbine, while it stayed clear over our heads. Sometimes tui sang in trees.
Yesterday walking with Harper, I saw my future. I saw kids having tennis lessons at the local club, saw parents parked outside the community hall waiting for classes to end, saw parents picking up their kids from the local school. I saw kids playing softball in t-shirts and shorts, barefeet on brown grass, just like when I grew up. I saw my mumsy haircut reflected in the windows of a landcruiser parked on the footpath that I had to go off-road to get around.
Later the Postie put Harper under his play gym and we sat just staring at him for a little while.
I used to look after my nephew, the most excellent Sweeney, and walk around town with him in his stroller before pushing him up the hill to our old flat. I used to feel like some sort of wannabe mother feeding him in cafes and doing those things that mothers do. I caught a glimpse of myself yesterday and saw that person again, only this time, I'm not an imposter at all. Still, I can't shake the feeling that Harper has been lent to me by someone, that I'm not his mum but just a full-time babysitter who happens to think he's extremely awesome.

In da hood

We've been in our new place a week, and it's bonne. We get all day sun, starting with the master bedroom, and it swings around the lounge into the dining room and kitchen, ending with the spare room and Tiny's room. It's glorious and just what I wanted.

There's a lot about the new place that reminds me of where I grew up - in Glorious Tokoroa. If you don't know where or what Tokoroa is, let me give you a little lesson. It's roughly half way between Hamilton and Taupo, and is a timber town. It smells bad because of the mill a few kms out of town where most people work, but I couldn't smell it until well into my 20s. It's small and built mainly in the 1950s, so there are no lovely old villas or much history to the place at all. I lived in two houses that I can remember - Arthur Street and Kent Street. Arthur Street was a lovely apricot state house with a massive backyard that I traipsed around in, where I watered the beans for hours and hours and where Dad taught me how to grow pumpkins. When I was 11 we moved to Kent Street which was just down the road from the Tautaris - a rather impressive collection of beneficiaries and pregnant girls who seemed to have visitors night and day and when I look back on it, the martiarch of the household who had a squillion grandchildren, was probably only about the age I am now. In both streets, one of my main hobbies was riding around aimlessly on my bike with the neighbourhood kids, climbing front fences and trees, rollerskating down what seemed like steep driveways, and using clothes-lines like jungle gyms. We would truck around the streets till it got dark in the summer, then our mothers would call us from back door steps like they were calling their cats.

Our new street, which is a cul-de-sac, has that feeling to it. The first evening I came home from work, the last of the sun was still warming the asphalt and the kids from number 17 were roaring around the end of the street on bikes. I don't know how many there are, but there were lots of sizes. Yesterday, as Ange was leaving, I had the car door open to put Sweeney into his car seat when one of them sidled up. I'm guessing he was about three.

"Is that your house?" he said, pointing to next door.
"No, that's my house," I said.
"Oh. Where's your mum?"
"My mum doesn't live here."
"Oh. Is that your baby?"
"No, this is my nephew Sweeney."
"Oh."

A few seconds while he looks Sweeney, who is holding out his hand to the boy.

"Is that your house?" he says, pointing to our house.
"Yep."

He and Sweeney lock eyes and talk baby for a little while. It's very cute, but Ange has to go, so she says see you later to the wee boy. As he walks off, he points to the house next door and says "Is that your house?"

His said his name was Say, or something, I dunno, and he was very cute. The postie has already made pals with a Chinese man across the road called Ving who built his own shed out of concrete, and a ginger cat has been frequenting Charlie's food bowl via our catflap. It reminded me of how everyone's yard was everyone's, fences meant nothing, and neighbourhoods were for exploring.