Two years old

In the last year, Poldy has learned to walk, talk, run, jump, dance, imagine, tell stories, kiss, cuddle...oh and throw a basketball through a hoop.


Any one of those achievements alone is staggering, but in the context of a list like that, it all just blurs into one extraordinary year. Other milestones have been his first interstate and international travel, his first experience at child care, his first solo trip down a slide, his first (proper) visit to a beach and to the zoo.

Poldy at two runs all the time (it's his default setting). His signature move is the 'spin-and-drop', but he has recently shown interest in learning to do a 'cart-and-wheel'. He vastly favours vehicles of flight - rockets, space ships and aeroplanes - to earthbound ones, and 'blast off' is his favourite phrase. He can count to ten, but says 'nine' instead of 'five'. He knows his own full name. He is quite a lot less shy than he used to be, but he is still eminently self-posessed. Yet he very rarely refuses his Mumma and Dadda a kiss and a cuddle, and sometimes offers the most precious ones unprompted. He has at least a dozen different voices, is almost impossible to sleep in a bed with, and is perhaps the funniest person on the planet.

A handful of our favourite moments:
Long past midnight, a wide-awake, jetlagged Poldy in bed with us in New York squeezes my nose repeatedly, saying 'Honk'.
Leaving his Nanna and Papa's place in the dark to get into the car, he commentates: 'Into the dark cave of mystery.'
He bolts laps of the house, repeating 'I'm a gingerbread man, I'm a gingerbread man!'; he does the same on tiptoes, and 'I'm a mermaid, I'm a mermaid!'; he starts to gallop: 'What are you now?' 'A camel!'
He showers his Dadda with kisses when meeting him at the airport after being apart for two weeks.

For anyone who's interested, Ive managed, by some miracle, to cull around 1300 photos from our US trip down to 32 highlights. For your viewing/procrastinating pleasure: http://www.flickr.com/photos/31303824@N03/sets/72157616014509982/ Enjoy!

Dodged a bullet

There were major lay-offs at my company this week. Ten percent of the workforce is gone. As foreshadowed earlier in this blog, this came as no surprise to me, though it did to some of my (perhaps naive?) colleagues. The only thing that did surprise me was that my whole department has come through it unscathed; neither I nor any of my friends have been directly affected. We are incredibly lucky. Some people who I thought were permanent fixtures of the company got the tap on the shoulder.

Though it was no surprise, it was still a shock: enough to make me realise that I am very fortunate to have a job at all, and that it is time for this period of vague disillusionment and apathy to come to an end - and I am not just talking about work. Soon after hearing the news, I felt a sudden urge to do more fiction writing (perhaps in anticipation of soon having a lot more time on my hands to write a novel?). I'll let you know how that plays out!

'Oh where have you been, my blue-eyed son? Oh where have you been, my darling young one?'

Those opening lines of Bob Dylan's song 'A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall' took us by surprise the first time we heard them in the car travelling around America. They moved us deeply then, and even moreso now. And I just wanted to make a little tribute to our darling blue-eyed son, the best, most adaptable, most tolerant, most engaged, most surprising and above all most fun travelling companion we could have asked for.

Hudson River, New York City, New York
Boston Common, Massachusetts
On a beach in Andrew Molera State Park, Big Sur, California
Grand Canyon South Rim, Arizona

Desert near Joshua Tree National Park, California
Hidden Valley, Joshua Tree National Park, California

Post-holiday blues

They've been very dark blue. In fact, I'd say a particularly melancholy shade of indigo (and we all know how melancholy indigo is at the best of times). I actually cry when I hear 'Girl from the North Country' (Freewheelin' Bob Dylan was one of our road-trip CDs). There must be a direct correlation between the joy experienced on a trip and the doomy depression that follows.

So, now is the time to ponder the worthiness of this life plan of ours. In the current economic climate, spending all one's money on travel seems a particularly foolhardy thing to do (although ironically, if everyone starts believing that, I will soon be out of a job/income). What's more, housing in these parts is apparently as affordable as it has been for five years, with interest rates looking pretty attractive. In fact, putting our money (and yes, we do have some left over) into a house would most likely be the thing a clever, astute person would do.

I admit, it's very tempting, and not something that I have ruled out. But the logic of our initial decision remains, and now it's backed up by the emotion that will always be attached to those precious memories: the best, easily, of my life as a parent so far, and in fact I think I can say without hyperbole, my entire life.

Who knows when the next trip will come - if I had my way it would be later this year, but it might not be until next year or the year after, or possibly in many years time. But my position essentially remains the same: screw astuteness. Every parent should travel with their child; in my opinion, those experiences are the most valuable things you could ever possess.

Things I miss

About travelling:
Err, fun? Every day was family fun day; all of us going out together to see something new. Days like that only happen once every couple of months in real life.
I see, I want, I purchase It's a holiday, the saving is over - all the money I have at my disposal is for SPENDING. And I must consume more, more, more!
Movement Has anyone else noticed that sitting in the same chair for eight hours a day, five days (or whatever) a week is really boring?
Little family Spending all day, every day with my husband and child. Gosh, I like them so much! Who knew?!
Not having to do any housework As opposed to normal life, when I never do any housework, but I feel really guilty about it.
Navigating I enjoyed pretending I had mad navigating skillz when actually I was merely able to read the detailed directions I had printed out from Google Maps.

About America:
Americans They're sort of human in a way that we just can't seem to manage here; they're actually considerate and pleasant to each other as a rule, and I think I was a better person when I was among them. Whereas here I find myself scowling at people for walking slowly on the footpath in front of me. Really, is that worth a scowl?
Root beer I'm just glad I tried it early on in the trip, so that I knew to get as much of it into me as I possibly could while I still had the chance. Reward (of a bottle of root beer) offered for anyone who can tell me where I can get it in Australia.
King-sized beds One of those would be pretty handy right about now, when it's 33 degrees C at 10pm.
24-hour rain A solid day's rain is not so great for travelling, but it's the stuff of fantasy back home.

Winter

A note about the weather, which was of such concern to me before we left. Most of the time we didn't know how cold we were, temperatures being Fahrenheit over there (although I do have one of those converter thingies in my phone), but the basic gist of it was: not very. We had one slightly horrifying morning in New York, our second or third day in the country, when we stepped out in 19 degrees F (-7 C) - the first time in my life I have experienced cold that is literally painful.
A certain person also was not terribly happy about the number of layers he was required to wear from day to day - so many in fact that he didn't quite bend in the middle.
We played and drove in the snow:

And Jerry's snow-bootless feet nearly blackened and fell off on our winter-wonderland day in Yosemite, which was otherwise fine and clear.But overall we were incredibly lucky - we had the right clothes, the weather never spoiled our sightseeing (one woman told us that on her first glimpse of the Grand Canyon, it was full to the brim of fog) and from all reports, bad weather chased us around the country, but never caught up to us.

Stuff that doesn't fit inside your head #3: New York City

It's ironic - while on the one hand, I will never again go to a city whose details are so familiar despite having never visited it before - its yellow cabs, the awnings of apartment buildings, the subway stairs - on the other hand I was not prepared for New York at all. Its sheer scale came as a shock to me, and even now it's hard to fully comprehend the bigness of it; you either see the city shrunk down to a mere pocket-sized island on a map or from the air, or you're in it, and too close to a thing so big you can't even see one of its edges.

We spent eight nights there, which, while clearly inadequate for a city with as much to offer as New York, is not nothing in travelling terms. Each day was pretty furiously paced, which was necessary due to the sun going down at 4.30pm, and we saw a lot, but probably not even half of the things on our list. When I think about the pace at which we would have had to have gone to see all the New York icons alone, I start to sweat.

Still, we saw our share of icons, and we saw our share of the intimate details that you don't see on 'Sex and the City': a farmers' market, a soul-food restaurant in Harlem, all the Obama/Biden posters in windows, a sneak peak through the windows into the Met from Central Park after closing time. And it's not a bad thing to leave a city knowing there is so much more to see; it's a good incentive to return one day.

In denial

As most of you already know, we arrived back home from the US several days ago... but, dammit, I'm going to keep blogging - partly because our internet access was so limited on our travels that I didn't get to blog everything I wanted to at the time, and partly because I'm in denial about it all being over, and want to perpetuate and savour the experience. OK? So I'm not pretending to y'all that I'm still over there, just to myself.

Returning to work today has been the biggest challenge to my delusion so far. I made it a dreadfully long, static, boring six-and-a-half hours before making my escape. However, as most of you also know, I work for a travel guidebook company, so I did make some good use of company time and resources starting to plan the next trip...

Stuff that doesn't fit inside your head #2: The Grand Canyon

What can you say? It's grand, yes.

We had only a few hours on the South Rim, having taken the shamelessly touristy Grand Canyon Railway from the town of Williams, returning the same day. It almost seemed the right thing to only get a relatively brief glimpse of it - how would you begin to go about exploring such a thing in depth, so to speak? The thing is 445km long, up to 29km wide, over 1500 metres deep and two billion years old.

Jerry described it as strangely oppressive, walking alongside it and having it always there, consuming half your field of vision. That one river could have scooped out such a stupendous chunk of the earth is really incomprehensible; you find yourself trying to imagine the time that work must have taken, but of course you try in vain.

Despite appearances, we had a crisp, clear, almost-warm day; perfect conditions for seeing such a wonder.

Poldy multitasking (one for the grandparents)

Stuff that doesn't fit in your head #1: Yosemite National Park

With many, many thanks to Veronica for a herculean feat of driving, and Tim for being tolerant and putting on the tyre chains :)

On the Road

Ola

We were incredibly lucky to be able to spend Christmas with some family in Calfornia, Jerry's Aunty Jola, Uncle Chris, and cousins Katherine, Desy, Veronica and Alicia. They made us very much at home, fed us enormously and deliciously, and embraced Poldy as much as he embraced them, despite his breaking I think at least four of their Christmas ornaments. Veronica and her fiance Tim were absolute champions, chaperoning (and chauffeuring) us to Yosemite National Park in less-than-ideal (snowy, icy, toddlery) conditions.

As previously mentioned, Poldy took to his extended family immediately (Aunty 'Ola' and Uncle 'Kiss'), particularly his great-aunty, (not least because of her resemblance to his nana, we think). But she really did make an impact on him: now, a week after we left their place, he still several times a day starts calling out 'Ola, Ola', and then, heart-breakingly, 'Ola, bye-bye'. The trip has been a long one, and we think he is starting to crave some stability, and some family other than us. We think he's going to be pretty thrilled to see his grandparents on the weekend, and we'll be pretty happy too.