Gone fishing

Viriamu has just started renovating our traditional Polynesian oval-house. The plan is to move in there when baby number two arrives in july/august. It's a beautiful space, I love the Pandanus roof and the loose pebble floor. However, the bamboo walls are in a terrible state, they were never treated to be insect-proof and the wood-boring beetles have done a good number on them, over the last four years. So, Viriamu is busy preparing more bamboo to make some new woven wall panels. Here is the first step, cutting and flattening the dried bamboo, which will now be soaked in sea-water for a few days before being woven into panels.

Matotea wanted to join in too - she found herself a bamboo pole and when she discovered that it was forbidden to whack things with a stick or touch the large knife, she picked up her bamboo pole and insisted we go to the beach to catch fish!

I had yet another series of pre-natal blood tests today - and yet another glucose tolerance test. For those of you who've never had the pleasure, it's a test for gestational diabetes. You fast overnight and then your blood sugar is measured before and then an hour after drinking a cupful of partially dissolved glucose - it's pretty icky and I'm not quite sure why we have to do this at all, let alone twice, as I have no history of diabetes and no indications to suggest that I might have developed it since the first test two months ago! It's all rather weird, I never had to take the test when I was living in Moorea, they just checked my blood sugar with a finger-prick after an overnight fast. As I might already have mentioned I'm not at all enjoying the pre-natal checkups here in Rurutu...so I was more than ready to spend a few minutes decompressing on the beach with my daughter, the best therapist a mum could hope for!

'The foolish are like ripples on water, for whatsoever they do is quickly effaced'

-Horace