Ben, Em, Diana, and Helen

So at Parent/Teacher conferences, Diana’s teacher told us that they would be sending home a booklet telling kids “how babies are born.”  I told her that Diana was already pretty well aware of the  ways a baby can get _out_, but that we hadn’t really explained how the baby got in.  This weekend at dinner, while looking at her new dinosaur book, she asked what a “mating display” was.  Ugh, it seemed like the right moment to have “the talk.”  She took it rather well, and I tried to be casual and medical, yet found myself wandering down long paths of metaphors before trailing off.  Then tonight at dinner, it came up again after a discussion about whether two girls who got married could have babies at the same time.  I reminded her about what was necessary to make a baby dinosaur, and Diana asked if they “did that for real?”  I said yes.  There was a pregnant pause, then she said, “did you do it?”  Little stinker.

Here is Diana’s triumphant performance in the Snowball Dance for her ballet class.  Notice the kiss to mom half way through.  The crowd went wild.

While we were in New Zealand, we made the very difficult decision for Ben to accept a position with a junior mining company out of Vancouver, Canada.  This would mean moving back to the US by June, and setting up in a new town, closer to family and friends, but not really near any, by North America standards.  Diana had been taking, and really ejoying swimming lessons, and we had just won a third consecutive Trivia Night, so we certainly had mixed feelings about leaving.  Em and the girls took a trip to Jakarta with Tati to try to get her a VISA so she could travel with us for one last vacation.  The trip was emotionally draining as we spent hours sitting at the embassy hoping, and didn’t get it.  Poor Tati was devastated.  But she got to bring a lot of things to Java for her family, and we got her a very nice flat screen TV while we were there (and picked up a bunch of teak furniture for ourselves).

We had a nice going-away lunch at our cafe and had a tearful farewell at the helipad before heading off on our new adventure, with a stop in Hawaii on the way.  More on that soon…

When we were in Brisbane at the Steve Irwin zoo, they had a walk-through kangaroo enclosure.  Diana was in her element.  She pranced around petting kangaroos, happy as a clam.

Helen has been transitioning away from needing her nap. It’s been mostly easy, but today this happened after we got home from the library:

In April, on our way home from New Zealand, we spent a week in Brisbane with Louise and met up with an old Tembagapura family. We enjoyed the sunny warm weather, and time at the beach. The Natural History museum had a fun kids interactive exhibit on dinosaurs, and Diana went full-on mommy mode collecting eggs and guarding them in the nest. Both girls were very cute with their little dino tales on. We also rented a car and drove to Steve Irwin’s CrocoLand (or whatever it was called), and got a special treat (I guess….) because it was school holiday, so Bindi, Terri, and the little boy were there running the croc show. It was a fun zoo, and we saw red pandas, elephants, and lots and lots of crocs. The girls were suitably tentative about the crocs. Brisbane has a wonderful urban pool and beach where we spent most of our time playing in the water and sand. The girls had a wonderful time.  Enjoy the pics! Hopefully this is the beginning of or regular blogging for us.

Well, we are settled in our new house in Washington state, and are going to try to get back into the swing of things and blogging again. Here are some recent pics of the girls.

We had a great trip to the South Island of New Zealand and lucked out with great weather. Queenstown is a great tourist town with lots to do and huge mountains. (The mountains played Mordor in Lord of the Rings.) Emily and the girls continued their vacation in Brisbane, Australia while I came back to work, so Emily isn’t here to make this blog post look good!

We finally had time to upload a bunch of photos from our trip and put a few words on paper. We were able to get a few good pics in December of the girls at home. Diana is quite the little ballerina and loves dancing and wearing dresses – although I don’t know how she can be such a tomboy and girlie girl at the same time. Helen has started to really love reading books, and loves seeing pictures of animals and is especially interested in elephants since our time Bali.

We started our vacation in Ann Arbor where we had a wonderful Christmas and New Years. We did end up getting pretty horrifically sick twice, but in between we managed to go to a few fun play places, and even remembered to take a few pictures. In Vermont we stayed at Naulakha, Rudyard Kipling’s house where we stayed when we were married 5 short years ago. We were a little disappointed that our trip hadn’t had much snow, but we got a lovely snowy day our second week, just in time for all of Em’s friends. That meant we got to do lots of sledding and snow angel making, and just in time too – I think everyone had read Diana dozens of stories and needed a little break. On the cold days the kids found all kinds of things to keep them occupied, like wearing mixing bowls for hats and playing with their many Christmas presents. We did have a minor tragedy in Vermont when Helen fell and knocked out a front tooth, but she recovered quickly, and we’re in to process of having the tooth gold-plated for her.

After Vermont we headed to Japan for a 4 day stay in Tokyo. The weather was a bit colder than we had anticipated, so we had to buy some extra scarves and gloves for Diana, which made her look like a little old Russian grandmother. The girls enjoyed some little trips we managed to an aquarium, the “Children’s Castle,” and a large toy store. Diana ate lots of sushi (although she only likes the rice and seaweed), and Helen discovered that she LOVES salmon roe. Our hotel looked out over the bay and had a very cute set up with a kid’s room and bathroom in our suite with kid slippers and toothbrushes, so the girls had fun just playing in the room.  After Tokyo we had an 8 hour layover in Cairns so we went to the lagoon pool for some sun and swimming. Then back home. Both girls seemed to realize we were almost home and had a wonderful time just playing on the bed at the Rimba hotel in Timika our last night of vacation.

Now we’re happy to be home at last!