Meet Zelta - Tiss' first real friend.
Before this, Tiss has been playing cooperatively with other kids, but he has been equally friendly/ equally indifferent to all of them. No matter how hard we parents have tried to push our various offspring together, ultimately, the kids themselves are the ones who decide about friendship. Which is the way it should be!

Zelta is also an Australian born Latvian kid living in Riga. She is three. Tiss and Zelta go to the same kindy but Larisa (Zelta's mum) and I have started sending them on alternate days - because those two are inseparable! A good thing in most ways, but at kindy they tend to hold hands and run off, whispering together in English and making up their own games with 'secrets' and 'magical coats' and superheroes etc. According to the director, Tiss gets very little work done on the days Zelta is at kindy . And he's meant to be learning the alphabet!! Important work. The pic above shows the carneval masks that Tiss and Zelta made a couple of weeks back. When we were in Thailand, Tiss pretended to write emails to Zelta, and most mornings Zelta kicks up a stink if she finds out Tiss won't be at kindy too. They share jokes, talk about tv programmes together, organise for each other to come over and play, and bicker in the car. All a part of the 'rich tapestry of life', as my uncle would say.