Ben, Em, Diana, and Helen

Greetings from the Northwest!

Trivia Night Champs!

by

After a long week, Ben and I got to go out for the Trivia Night fundraiser for the elementary school last night. We had gotten a babysitter and everything, so it was a big deal. There was a Mexican buffet dinner and we were on a team with two other couples who are friends. Since our partners were Australian and Chilean, we were feeling like a diversified team. We also purchased tickets for the raffle drawing, so we were hopeful that we wouldn’t leave empty-handed. There were some good questions in the 10 (!) rounds of trivia and we were able to sneak up from behind and win despite not being in the top three previously. We each got a bottle of wine for winning, and our raffle tickets won us a case of beer, which we gave away to the second place team as a peace offering. We didn’t get home until 11, and Diana was sound asleep with no signs of missing us.

She’s been busy walking this week and can do about a half lap around our block before she needs a little rest. She’s also eating a lot more these days and would gorge herself on rice every meal if she could. At her 14-month weigh-in she was 19lbs which puts her just above the 5th percentile. Since she’s got such a chubby face and chunky legs I never think of her as small until she is dwarfed by children weeks (or even 2 or 3 months) younger than her. We had a play date this week with an 18 month old girl, and while they didn’t really play “together” they did share some toys and Diana was definitely interested.

Diana has also made some progress with the one sign that she knows – “more.” She uses it fairly regularly with food especially crackers. She also knows the word “diaper” and will head to her changing table when we say it, so hopefully we’ll make some more progress with potty training in the next few months.

Here are some pictures of our adventures in the last week.

Old Testament Baby

by

It’s late Saturday night and I’ve spent all night posting some rock pictures on the “Geology” page, so just one picture for this page.  It takes about two hours to upload 12 pictures one at a time, so I’m tired out!

The Internet Works Again!

by

It hasn’t been a good week for our Internet Service Provider, but service was restored this morning.  They have some competition in town now from the telephone company, so maybe the competition will help things improve.

Diana has been walking a lot as long as somebody holds her hand.  She has walked on her own once so far and made it about five steps before she gave up and went back to crawling.  She has actually been too tired walk much in the evenings for the past two days.  Her legs are a bit rubbery after about 5PM, but she is sleeping well!  Tomorrow Diana will get to go to the Halloween Kid’s Fun Day as a bee.  I hope we remember to take some pictures!  Emily made some beautiful chocolate chip cookies for the “Cakewalk” school-fundraiser and put some cute orange and black ribbons on the bags.

We’ve also been helping Diana to brush her teeth even though we haven’t let her have any Halloween candy yet.  She usually just chews on her toothbrush for a bit and then drops it, but it is a start.  She also go her first pig-tails this week.  Her new piano has been fun for all of us, but she can spend the most time playing with her books by herself.  She often has pulled all of the books off theshelves by bedtime and sits on them to read whichever one is on top.

Lastly, we bought some macaroni and cheese for dinner last week, but we just made sandwiches instead.  As you can see from the picture, it was just too complicated.  Bonus: in Indonesia macaroni and cheese comes with a packet of chili sauce.

Walkin’ Tall

by

It’s been a busy week for us since we’ve started up with language classes in the evenings again and Diana has been more active in the day. One thing we learned about this week was pronunciation of the letters, and we’re having a bit of trouble with the vowels. A is “aah,” E is “aye,” and I is “eee.” But Y is “yay” so that’s fun, which is nice. It doesn’t really make it any easier though!
Diana may have walked a little too much on Monday night since she slept terribly and didn’t want to walk much the next day. But she’s really loving her books these days and loves “reading” and pulling all of her books off of the bookshelf. She can sit surrounded by books happily reading for quite a while so Em can get dishes done or tidy up a bit. Em and Diana have also started using the backpack for their morning walks around the neighborhood. Diana seems to like being up high and being able to kick her legs and wave her arms more. She’s also been trying more grown-up foods and really loves getting the chance to practice with her spoon. She hasn’t made much progress there, but knows what the spoon is for and tries to scoop things up. She doesn’t seem too disappointed to get an empty spoonful in her mouth, so she’s happy.

Diana might be close to her first words as well. Whenever we give her a cracker or say cracker she parrots “caacaa,” with great enthusiasm. She’s been babbling more and more, and loves to have us help her walk around while “talking” about everything she sees. She’s been sleeping very well lately too. Occasionally the call to prayer will wake her up, and she cries until it stops, but other than that she’s still happily taking two naps and going to bed by 7:00.

The next few weeks will be fun for us all as there’s a bunch going on in town. The Halloween Carnival is next week, and there’s also a big celebration for the Melbourne Cup (Australia’s Kentucky Derby), and a number of other holiday-type things going on that should keep us busy. We’re also going to try to do the hike up the hill from Tembagapura to Hidden Valley this weekend.

A little cross-cultural anecdote: we had our Chilean friends over for dinner and dessert was chocolate chip cookies. They both remarked on how tasty they were, but since chocolate chip cookies are Em’s specialty, so we didn’t really think anything of it. Then Manuel said “…and the chocolate is INSIDE the cookie!” We realized that not only had they never had chocolate chip cookies before, but they had NO IDEA what they were!

One small step for baby…

by

One giant leap for parentkind!  Diana took her first steps this week, and we got some video of a few of her attemps today.  The first time we didn’t have the video camera on and last night we filmed in high-def, so it was too large to upload!  But here’s Diana walking tonight:

walking

A walk around the neighborhood

by

Diana and Ben took a walk on Saturday while Emily baked bread.  It was a usual foggy afternoon in Hidden Valley, but they took lots of pictures anyways.  There is a nice loop from the house, up the hill to the swimming pool at Rainbow Ridge, through the container yard and then back through Hidden Valley by the lower road.  Diana enjoys riding in her baby-backpack as long as you keep walking.  Stopping to take pictures gets some quiet complaints.

The container yard is always interesting in the fog, although it can get muddy from the trucks.  The trucks load and unload and gather into the twice-daily convoys down to the Lowlands.  (The main geology offices are just up the road from the container yard, but Ben works at the Underground offices which are close to the mine.)  All the electircal poles & boxes in town are painted orange to comply with the mining regulations which can make for fun colors in some of the more drab areas of the mine.  The last picture is of the playground and the cafe/market/gym across the road from our house.

100% Earthquake Free

by

In celebration of being nowhere near yesterday’s earthquake, we thought we would post a couple of pictures from Em and Diana’s return trip home and one movie from earlier in the summer. Diana had a fun helicopter ride from Timika (in the Lowlands) to Tembagapura (home up in the mountains). We had to rely on another passenger for the photography, so it took a couple of weeks to get the pictures. The other good news is that the new 25-passenger helicopter is now flying which means much easier travel to and from the Lowlands for more people.

The short movie is title “I Know Why The Caged Baby Sings”. She actually sounds more like a pterodactyl, but we’ll pretend she’s a song-bird! Diana likes to watch what’s going on in the neighborhood from our front porch. She gets the most excited about other kids playing in the street. Of course, Ben was up there with her so don’t call social services!

caged-bird

The other big milestone is that Diana went 2-for-2 pointing to “mommy” and “daddy” during her bath last night. So, we’ve moved up from “food-provider 1” and “food-provider 2”, which is good news.

More Pictures!

by

Oh my gosh!  We took more pictures this week!  We were very busy last weekend with socializing.  It was Idul Fitri (aka Eid al Fitri) which is the end of Ramadan and the biggest holiday of the year.  Everyone cooks food and opens their doors to visitors for two days.  We had fun and got to try some new Indonesian food.

This weekend has started off sunny and warm and Diana and Ben went for a walk around the neighborhood and visited with a few friends while Emily took a trip to Family Shopping to buy some groceries for the week. Later today we are all going to a 7th birthday party for the daughter of one of Ben’s coworkers.  We plan to stay as long as we can – which will probably be around 30 minutes!  We also have plans to go to Brunch at the Lupa Lelah Club tomorrow with another of Ben’s coworkers and his wife who are both engineers at the mine.

The pictures this week highlight the differences between what Emily sees on a normal day and what Ben sees on a normal day.  (Although, there are no pictures of Emily changing diapers and Ben really likes working underground.)