September Rush

We're just emerging out from under a crazy few weeks, chock full of guests. It's always like this in september what with the whales being here combined with the school holidays in Tahiti, but this year with the added bonus of a young baby in the house and jealous sister, it's been quite a season! It's actually been a really good season for us and the house has been at max capacity for the past few weeks. We celebrated the end of the big rush with a ma'a tahiti (tahitian oven). It's been a while since we did one, so it was fun, I always enjoy the kind of festive side of entertaining a whole bunch of people (we were 18 at table yesterday) and the tahitian oven is a little bit like Christmas, the night before you bury all the food in the ground and hey presto the next day you get to dig it all up and unwrap it, then stuff yourself silly and get a bit tipsy on tropical punch! After all the excitement I'm looking forward to things calming down a little bit.....we all deserve a bit of a rest!

My beautiful daughter

Here is a lovely photo sent to us by one of our guests - how gorgeous is Matotea?

Surfacing

Heimana has her two month check-up tomorrow, she's not quite two months, but she's already grown up a lot and now little bubbles of personality have started to break to the surface. She has a beautiful smile (it shines through from the inside mostly, though she is mastering a reasonable grin)..

...she loves to play....watching people wiggle their fingers in front of her eyes makes her almost pass out with pleasure, her whole body shakes, we even got a few gurgles yesterday. It quite different than from with Matotea. I guess every baby is a bit different, or maybe it's just 'cause I've already done it once, but she seems much easier to read and more responsive. Looking back over Matotea's pictures it's amazing how similar they both look, Viriamu can hardly tell them apart!

Both of them are/were able to mimic facial expressions at this stage (it's a common phenomenon that I first read about in Dr. Sear's Baby Book - and it really is true!). I spent hours teaching Matotea to stick out her tongue when she was about two months, and she was able to do it, and I can see Heimana trying to copy me now too. It's so much fun having kids (in between all the sleepless nights and dirty nappies)!

Feeling better!

Well, we finally seem to have got the flu out of our systems here. Heimana remains the least effected by the whole business. Matotea is back in school and bright as a button again. I got a secondary bout of sinusitis after the flu, so was probably the sickest, but finally the sickness seems to have left us. The Medical Center is also remarkably quiet now, so finger-crossed that the wave has passed!