A New Friend

This guy came with the house. Every day, I take a shower and open the bathroom window and this snail appears on the inside of the window, racing across it. I thought snails were supposed to be slow. He's fast. I like him.

Drool: Action Shot

Max Laughing

Max decided to start giggling yesterday. Before that, his laugh was a mixture of cough and gurgle and it was one of the loveliest sounds either of us had ever heard. Yesterday, without warning, the cough/gurgle became a proper giggle and now we have a new favorite sound.

The View From Our Back Yard

And this was the view from our backyard tonight, as the sun went down over the hills and the ground grew cold and the sunlight struggled through the mist. It's quite a thing to be able to see from our window. At the foot of these hills, dotted with sheep, is the road I drive down to get to work every day.

The View From Our Living Room

I took this photo a few nights ago from inside our new living room, with the front door open. This is our view. The hill you can see to the right is Mount Cargill, the highest point in Dunedin. The bright strip of water in the middle of the frame is Otago harbor, which stretches south all the way from Port to Dunedin. There's a road that you can't see on this photo that twists and turns for about 8-miles and I drive it, or ride the bus along it every day.

Great Lines From Great Books #4

The other day, trapped inside by hail and relentless winds, which lasted for about three days and nights and howled around the corners of our little house, I read Max to sleep with a spirited performance of Othello: a one-man show, with different voices for all the characters. Not too shabby. Did he care? He was asleep about two minutes after this photo was taken.

But I read this line and I enjoyed it very much. Who can say anything better than Shakespeare anyway? Here, Brabantio is talking about his daughter, who has just brought shame upon him by having the nerve to marry a black man (times don't change much do they? This was 400-years ago.). And his words are so lovely ... although I'd be happy enough if Max married a black woman.

Brabantio: ... for my particular grief is of so flood-gate and o'erbearing nature that is engluts and swallows other sorrows and is still itself.

We *heart* Maria (our midwife).

(**Note: Max is actually almost 12 weeks old. This post is a little late ... but as you can imagine, I've been a bit busy and couldn't post it sooner!)

Max is officially 7 weeks old and today was the last day that Maria came to "officially" see Max as our midwife. 7 weeks postnatal, you say? Yes, it's postnatal week 7 and we are (were) still having visits from our midwife.

New Zealand, as I've said before, is a very funny place. There are many things that are strange and new to us, one of them being mandatory midwifery care for pregnant women. We first met Maria when I was 5 weeks pregnant. We were wide-eyed Americans, eager to start prenatal care for our first pregnancy. Maria thought we were silly for having booked so early with her. (But she didn't tell us this until further along in the pregnancy when we got to know her. :)) I was very anxious to have a midwife, as this was not how I knew it would have gone if we were still in America. Pregnancy to me was sterile, white walls, serious discussions, planned inductions, and a guess-who game of which doctor would show up at the labor. But now that I am in New Zealand, it became a whole new ball of wax ...

40+ weeks later and on the day of our discharge from Maria's care, I can look at midwives and the practice of midwifery with new (well, 40+ weeks old) eyes. Midwifery is certainly a calling and can sometimes be a thankless job. But I think that Maria is mainly in the business of midwifery not for the thanks, but for the blessing to bring beautiful new humans into this wonderful world. Maria was made to be a midwife. She is patient, compassionate, careful, respectful and loving. She cared about me during my pregnancy. She heard every complaint of my aches and pains, answered all of our silly and stupid questions, laughed at all of Chris's jokes and comforted me with every scared and anxious tear that I cried.

You can't make me believe that my gynecologist back in America (who would have been my obstetrician, too) would have done even half as good of a job as Maria. And I liked my Ob/Gyn in Cincinnati. At the time. But like I said before, she fit my idea of pregnancy - she was serious, sterile, humorless, emotionless and who knows if she would have been the one to birth Max.

But I realize that I'm lucky, too. Many kiwi women could tell you stories about a bad midwife. The system isn't flawless here. That's why I must sing the praises of Maria to let her know and for us to remember how special she is to our family. Every single visit (minus the scans and the actual labor), Maria traveled to our home. She was thorough with her check-ups, but not as invasive as it would have been in America (They prod you WAAAAY too much and really for no reason - trust me, ladies, it's not necessary.) We heard Max's heartbeat every visit and were reassured that he was healthy and happy all the time.

And although my labor was as smooth as any woman could hope for, Maria was amazing during the difficult times: at week 19 when we thought Max had a heart defect; when I thought Max had settled breech close to the end of the labor and Maria quickly arranged a scan to reassure us that Max was perfectly anterior; and most importantly, during our postnatal period. All I can say is breastfeeding wouldn't have gone so smoothly without Maria's patience and persistence.

It's obvious that I could go on about Maria and midwives. But I won't. I just need to say thanks to Maria for supporting us throughout this most important event in our lives. Being far away from family and friends, we needed someone like you. And I know you're just doing your job. But if everyone did their job as well as you, well ... I imagine we'd all be much happier.

Thanks for everything.

Maybe we'll see you again ... but not too soon.

(Support midwives everyone!!!) (ETK)

Photo 1: Maria taking care of a tired mom and a brand new son.
Photo 2: Maria checking all of Max's vitals.

Port Chalmers

Filthy Feral University of Otago Students

I've been meaning to post an entry about this year's toga parade for a week or so, but we've been so busy moving house I never got around to it until now. It's things like this that made us want to move out of the city and go north to Port Chalmers. Every year the new University of Otago students dress in togas for the annual toga parade through the city streets. In the past, alumni and locals have lined George Street to watch the parade. Friends have told me that even just 5-years ago it was a very fun event.

This year was different. We didn't even know about the parade before we found we were driving through it, with Max in the back of the car in his car seat. On one side of the road, we saw a column of hundreds of fresh-faced youngsters in togas and sandals. Then, on the other side of the road, we saw these thugs, carrying trays of eggs. Very Clockwork Orange. A right bunch of droogs.

A second or two later, a wall of eggs rained down, thrown from the roofs and balconies of the buildings along the other side of the street from the students. It was like the Norman Invasion. Thus began a few hours of chaos, violence and stupidity. Violence breeds violence, and alcohol is a great catalyst for the reaction. There was pitched battle in the streets for a while. City police stood and tried to maintain order and had traffic cones and bottles thrown at them. Students were throwing around buckets filled with vomit and feces.

No, you read it right: vomit and feces. Oh, future captains of industry! You come to Dunedin from the farms and little drowsy two-street towns of the south and you're barely evolved enough to cross the street.

By the end of the night, students had rampaged through the city, in a drunken riot, breaking store windows, even stopping a car that was being driven down George Street in the city center and breaking one of its windows. What if that had been our car? With a two-and-a-half-month-old baby in the back? The streets were filthy. The buildings were covered with egg yolk.

I must admit though, I do like the headline on the web edition of the Otago Daily Times: "I came, I saw, I chundered -- toga parade turns into drunken rampage."

The next morning, the building I work in was being cleaned with high-velocity water jets to remove the egg stains from the walls, and the whole street had a gross thick eggy smell hanging above it. Pigeons sat lazily fussing on the balconies, full of eggs. The kids here are gross dirty nasty feral disrespectful cretinous poorly-raised drunken little criminals. I've said it before and people leap to their defense. No. They're nasty little things with no respect for other people and no sense of the value of anything that doesn't belong to them. You can say what you want about the US, but these kids would have been clubbed in the head and thrown in jail to bleed on the floor for the night. They'd have left university with a diploma in one hand and a criminal record to show their prospective employers in the other.

That's an education that means something.

New Houses

We're in our new house now. Very tough weekend! Imagine having to move everything but also having to hold a baby at all times. Max doesn't sleep at all during the day (at all), so our options were either to move house at 4am in the dark, or for Emeline to hold him, at our old house or our new house, while I ran around moving things and driving between Dunedin and Port Chalmers; and then for me to hold Max while Emeline drove around and moved things.

Crazy. Impossible. Difficult. Challenging. Tiring. Chaotic.

And in the process, we almost forgot to stop and take the time to say goodbye to our old wonderful house, which we've been renting for a year. It was such a special place and a special time for us. We watched Emeline's belly get steadily larger and larger there; spent a wet and gray winter huddled under blankets there, shoving extra sheets against the curtains and the windows to stop the gusts of wind from billowing out the curtains like sails; we cooked a lot of great meals there; hosted friends and family there; we loved and laughed there an awful lot; and, of course, when he was a two-day-old little peanut, we took our brand new boy back from the hospital there, and rocked and shushed and cooed and sang to him in every room of the house at some point, at 3am, with his stubborn untired eyes shining in the almost dark.

Houses are just buildings. But they can be something more. And we managed to fill this one up with a lot of special things.

Goodbye, Hood Street!

We love you.