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Time for the obligatory early winter post about light, sun and lack thereof - we're now full-on into the darkest time of the year, where the street lights are switched off when I'm dropping Tiss off to school at 8.30 (meaning that dawn is only breaking then), and it is pitch black night again by the time I am leaving work after 4pm to pick up Tiss from school. Other years I have had a more positive take on this period - see Let there be light, - but this year its hitting me hard. Perhaps it is...
Mikus was born on a drizzly night in April, 2005. The labour was fast and furious, 1.5 hours long, complete with a break-neck drive to the hospital and the actual birth in the Accidents and Emergencies department of the Royal Brisbane Hospital. As it turns out, it seems that the intensity and purpose with which my youngest son came into the world was also an indication of his temperament and purpose as a person!. In the pic above, Mikus is around 1/2 an hour old. He was well over...
Matiss had his first fencing competition last night and did extremely well for someone who has only been doing it for a few months. He won one bout ( fight, match ?? Ive got to learn the fencing lingo) and came home with a trophy. One very pleased little boy!....look for the fencer with blue trackpants, white piping...A small video (kid on the left)Some more pics...
Everyone is having babies at the moment: two of my sister-in-laws are pregnant or have newborns, friends are announcing their 2nd or 3rd pregnancies, cousins are busy picking baby names and buying strollers. Now I'm pretty sure that my time of pregnancy and newborns is over, but all this talk of breastfeeding and sleepy, milky bundles is making me a little nostalgic. So I looked through some of our baby photos the other night and thought I'd share a few. Here's a few pics of...
On Monday we marked a sigificant point in the reconstruction of our "renovators delight" by celebrating the traditional "spāres svētki", or roof-beam celebration. Apparently this tradition is not exclusive to Latvia, it is also celebrated in other countries in Europe and the US.Monday was a fairly cold day, but we had got to the stage where, after many months of preparation, the roof beams were finally completed. I took an old oak wreath from Midsummer's eve (I should have made a huge, fresh,...
This weekend we completed the first scene from Star Wars Uncut - Scene 105, Tusken Raiders ride a Bantha. The boys drew masks and got themselves dressed up whilst I had to crawl around in the mud with dodgy looking horns coming out of my head. They learnt alot about costuming, continuity and editing and hopefully our scene will get selected. We have to redo the audio during the week but you can hear in this version the original Star Wars audio. Mook wants the next scene to be the "Help me Obi-wan,...
It's becoming an autumn ritual for us - almost every year when the leaves turn golden we go to the Tērvetes nature park and go for a walk in the fairytale forest complete with wooden sculptures of Latvian storybook heroes, mushrooms, dwarves and elf-sized cubbyhouses. Kids love it. Every time....
Autumn fashion show at Mikus' ki...
A Latvian wedding tradition is for the bride and groom to choose a vedējpāris to acccompany them in their wedding ritual instead of a bridesmaid/groomsman: the vedēji are a couple who are already married, who the bride and groom are close to, and whose partnership they admire or respect to some degree. The vedējpāris traditionally do a lot of the organising of the wedding - MC functions, getting together parts of the ritual, pitch in with work and finances and whatever else is needed in the whole...
Had to write this down to remember it.....This morning, after sharply hitting my head on the corner of a window, I must have responded with a string of expletives. Whilst trying to rub the rising lump away Mikus came up and asked innocently, "Was that cheeses you wanted?" - ...
We have been impressed by some new stencils that have appeared on inner-city Rigan footpaths a few nights ago. The stencils are huge – about 1 metre x 1 metre, and feature a famous Latvian storybook character, Spriditis, a little boy who sets off into the world to search for luck and happiness, only to find that it has actually been at home all along. The slogans are very in-your-face and relate to the mass exodus from Latvia that is happening at the moment. This highly political subject matter,...
Now that the boys have started new schools/kindergartens our daily routine has changed considerably. I work in the mornings, and then around lunchtime race to pick up Mikus from kindergarten. The other kids stay there until around 5pm, but we did not want to leave him there that long - mostly because he's only four, and I think it is important for Mik to have more time at home with us for a little while longer. This has proved to be a great step - because Mik and I are spending a lot more time...
Tiss has started drawing cartoons - dunno if its an influence of the "Animation" interest group he's joined at school, or his appreciation for the "Boomerang" channel. Whatever it is, I love this pic, because of the sense of space it gives, with the tiny cars down below and the big high rise building in the foregrou...
