Christmas 2013

Long time between posts, but I haven't missed a Christmas post yet with this thing.

After a Christmas Day full of contentment we made our now traditional trip to the beach in the evening. It's a tough gig but someone's got to do it.



Happy Christmas wherever you are!

Nice Music

Listening to: Hauraki

So further to the observation of my girls dancing to Soundgarden, with the public holiday today I had my mp3 player hooked up to the stereo on random all afternoon. It was still going quietly in the background at dinnertime, when I noticed Sophie dancing in her seat to this track:

"Sophie dance?" I asked.
"Music nice daddy!"
She liked the next two tracks offered up as well


This is encouraging :).

Darlings vs Discs

Right now the mini-mes are winning. It's a delicate balance between trying to encourage my children to enjoy our CD and DVD collection, while ensuring the little monsters cherubs don't destroy them in the process. Charlotte has recently developed a fondness for Bohemian Rhapsody, and the other morning I discovered both sisters dancing away happily to this Soundgarden track, which is good. I like.

There have been casualties though, mostly due to the inherent difficulty factor for little fingers getting discs out of their cases, and associated leverage issues.

This Muppet Show DVD looks fine right?

Wrong. . .

It gets worse.

Much, much worse.

Having introduced Charlotte to the first Star Wars over the summer, (Ep IV, we do not talk about that other trilogy that happened)  we thought she was ready for Episode V, and the reveal of reveals contained therein. We even had a camera ready. Then we went to put the DVD in the player, and found this. Can you see the problem?

Luke's response to Vader's daddy revelation seemed appropriate at this point. Not that we could WATCH it.

Witness statements as to who jumped the gun (both adults being out of the room at the time) were inconclusive. . .

Charlotte still hasn't seen The Empire Strikes Back.

Two!

Laying on the cute two days in a row, but my awesome wee Sophie is two today. This is a typical pose for her :)

Odd couple

Slightly strange superhero/american gothic portrait of my two favourite wierdos at a little airshow we went to last weekend.

Umm, yeah

I know my daughter made it with love and enthusiasm at day care, but this unicorn/baby/reindeer/yoghurt pottle thing is now resident on my kitchen windowsill and generally creeping me the hell out.

Marokopa

January and February go by so fast. We ended 2012 by hitting the road for our annual summer camping trip, starting at Marokopa on the Waikato coast. We'd been there a while ago pre-children, and it wasn't a hugely long drive, even allowing for Marokopa being a long way from anywhere, but two under fives in the back have a habit of drawing the journey out. They compensated by cuting the place up wherever we stopped. Like Taihape:

And Taumaranui (yes my daughter is picnicking on the footpath. That's where she decided the party was at):

It was getting to late afternoon by the time we arrived at Marokopa, and started putting the tent up in 30+ degree heat.

 That done we had a wee explore. This is pretty much it, and I like that:

After tea we retired to the cabin/unexpectedly plush guest house our friends (whose idea it was to go here in the first place) were staying at to hang out and admire the view:

Marokopa is all about the fishing, and this was proved when the campground manager wandered over to give us one of the two crayfish he'd caught that day. Cooked and ready to eat and completely free of charge. I didn't ask how big the one he kept for himself was.

As I said the essence of Marokopa is fishing. It's at the end of the road and there isn't much else to do there. It is also the quietest camping ground we have ever stayed in (apart from the ubiquitous quad bikes used to travel the beach) , since most occupants are getting up pre-dawn to catch the morning tide. So the next morning we joined our friends on the black sand beach to see what could be caught.

Nothing as it turned out. The crayfish would have to do (disappointing, I know). Charlotte did find a starfish in a tree back at the campground though, because that is where you would expect to find them of course.

When not finding sea creatures in weird places Charlotte practiced her horse whispering skills.

And Sophie practiced her photobombing skills:

And once they were in bed I practiced my handheld moonlight river photography skills.

PS it's an Earthquake

So about this time last night, I'm sitting at my workbench in the study, Fi is pottering in the kitchen, and the kids are asleep upstairs. All is quiet when the model shelves beside me start rattling. They do that from time to time in response to low frequency noises like passing vehicles, the washing machine, or earthquakes. Whenever they start their noisemaking my earthquake spidey senses go all a-tingle, but they usually stop after a second or two and I go back to whatever I was doing. This time they don't stop.

After taking a second or two to tune in I notice that we are indeed rocking gently to and fro, and having an earthquake. After discussing this with friends later we'll figure out this was the P wave arriving and doing it's thing. The whole P and S wave (link) aspect of earthquakes is something I learned years ago but haven't thought about for a while and we're about to get a reminder of how they work.

I note the time for later reference, and that Fi hasn't said anything, so I calmly call out "earthquake" to the kitchen without leaving my seat. She doesn't hear me, so I call out again, and this time she responds by rushing to the doorway and urging me to do the same. That I have time to call out twice isn't something I notice at the time, but in hindsight it means the tremor has already gone on longer than usual. It hasn't got much worse yet and I'm thinking it's a pretty good nudge, (but not that bad) but it will probably end in a few seconds so I'll see what it does and ride it out. Fi is a little less blase, and getting insistent, so I get up and head to the doorway.

I've just gotten to the doorframe when the S waves start arriving and the shaking really kicks off, the worst we've ever experienced in this house. Fi suggests we head upstairs to get the kids, but I'm still thinking this will only go for a few more seconds (ignoring the fact that this is already one of the longest tremors I've ever experienced), so again suggest we ride it out. That's when the shaking kicks up another notch, we hear something glass fall over in the kitchen (later determined to be empty beer bottles in the recycling), the house starts creaking and we are both heading upstairs to rescue the little ones. Quite what we would do if the house started collapsing at this point I haven't figured out, especially having just left a spot of relative safety, but parental instinct is a great driver. We've just gotten to the top of the stairs and are about to go charging into the girl's bedroom to grab one each when the shaking eases and stops, followed by that wierd period when you aren't quite sure if the shaking really has stopped, or your adrenalised senses are tricking you into thinking it is still going.

Having determined that the land has returned to a state of quiescence, we look into the girl's room and immediately have to drop our voices as we calm each other down. The bebes slept through the whole thing. One of them may have rolled over, but that is all :).

It turns out to have been a deep magnitude 7.0, which is starting to get up there in terms of destructive potential, but luckily the depth mitigated it a bit. A much lesser magnitude, but many times shallower tremor wrought all the havoc in Christchurch last year.

There's a Geonet backgrounder here, with the Geonet quake report proper here.

And if you want to hear what it sounded like in a Wellington church, the earthquake was captured during a recording session here (lasting a lot longer than I realised at the time).

It was a doozy.

12 months of Soph

Sophie is one year old today. She has a lot of similarities to her older sister, but a lot of differences as well, and she is just as awesome; her journey so far has been just as rewarding. And since I did it for her sister, a trip through Soph's archive is in order (and it's interesting comparing the two!):

May 2011

June 2011

July 2011

August 2011

September 2011

October 2011

November 2011

December 2011

January 2012

February 2012

March 2012

April 2012

May 2012

Happy Birthday beautiful girl :)

RNZAF 75th Part 1: Good and Bad

Listening to: The NZ Breakers taking out a back to back championship win in the ANBL. Yeah!

So still playing catch-up with the blogging, mostly due to a heavy dose of REAL LIFE ^TM last week. So where were we? About three weeks back I think.

So three weeks ago, as March turned to April we all went up to Palmerston North for the weekend to go to the RNZAF 75th Annivesary Air Show at nearby RNZAF Base Ohakea. It was a fun trip.

Firstly though, since it probably needs addressing (and everyone I know who has asked me about the show mentions it), and to get it out of the way, the bad. A big part of the media coverage of the event was The Traffic.

It is a bit sad and disappointing that what should have been a great occasion (and was for those who got to attend) was spoiled for many by The Traffic. It was so bad that many didn’t get to the airfield, even those who had left ample time for the journey. The traffic management for getting to the show was a debacle, no other word for it. If there was a plan, there was no evidence of it, or it was executed incompetently. Certainly the flow was much worse than any other show I have been to at Ohakea. The arrival routes and detours were reasonably well advised in advance publicity (even if some of them made no sense at all, like routing traffic through choke points rather than around them), but at the time we arrived at least on the day there was no signposting or off-base direction whatsoever for air show traffic. Since I know the roads around there reasonably well I knew where to go anyway, but most of the people arriving didn’t know (and shouldn’t be expected to). Hence lots of traffic going where it wasn’t planned to, not helped by an accident on one of the inbound routes.

Compounding the problems was an apparent expectation from the Air Force that most show-goers would have pre-purchased tickets on-line (as a pre-show announcement that gate sales would in theory be limited suggests). Having a pre-bought ticket made for a very speedy entry; buying a ticket at the gate from the car window not so much. When we arrived the road to the entry was split into ticket holders and sales; the ticket holder queue was short to non-existent, while most vehicles were going into the purchase line. This would have further added to delays up the queue. Combining this with the Air Force possibly under-anticipating the number of people who wanted to attend, and some of those people (not all) naively assuming that they could plan to arrive just before the flying was scheduled to start, and the jam became inevitable. It got so epicly bad that the Air Force is not only refunding tickets, but formally reviewing what happened.

Experienced show goers know to get there as early as practical, as some traffic delay is part of the game, it just isn’t usually this fouled up. We left later than I had planned, sped past one already gridlocked road, and were only in slow moving traffic for half an hour or so, getting on site later than anticipated, but still before the show started. I griped about the traffic at the time, but in hindsight for us it was about average. We luckily missed the worst delays, and only heard about how bad it was getting as the day progressed. As it happens some members of a web forum I post on flew into the show while we were still on the road, and one of them took a picture of the queue. I remembered seeing the aircraft they were on, and had a closer look, and lo, there we were!

(Mumbles is my forum name, original image by P. Lewis)

 Adding to the the traffic issues was the parking direction on the field. The route to the carpark area crossed a closed runway where the food vendors and retailers were located, and no crowd control meant distracted pedestrians were often unaware of and moving in front of the still arriving cars, meaning more delays as cars had to stop. The filling of the carpark itself didn't help either. At every other airshow I can think of, the carparks are filled from the far side from the entry point first. This works; incoming cars have a clear idea of where to go, making the drive in easier, and it is safer since no-one has to drive past an unloading car to get to a park. Instead, the park was filled from the entry in, meaning more reliance on marshals to know where to go, driving down long lines of cars unloading people and gear, and because of that creating an unnecessary hazard. People getting out of cars, especially children, want to move around and stretch their legs, and at one point we came to a complete halt with young children moving about blocking the way, while their parents obliviously unloaded the car. You could argue that’s just bad parenting, but back-filling the carpark properly would have pretty much eliminated this kind of occurrence, which added up to even more delays for those still to arrive.

The programme for the show itself also caused a few gripes, mainly in that there wasn’t one published. No programme survives contact with the day generally, but it would have been nice to have some clue about what was flying when, so I could plan forays to the ground displays when things I wasn’t that interested in were flying. Not have a lunch break didn't help, so I missed out on seeing some things on the ground. The running order was also a bit weird, lacking continuity and focus even while the actual displays were cool. There were times when it seemed that the commentary team didn’t always know what was going on either.

Most disappointing though was the decision of display organisers to cancel the Ohakea based Spitfire's display for timing reasons after it was already airborne. Seeing it and the other Spitfire present in the air together was going to be one of the highlights of the day for me, and found it staggering that at an air show dedicated to celebrating the 75^th anniversary of the RNZAF, someone thought it appropriate to drop the display of one of the most historically significant aircraft there, while other gap-filling displays with nothing to do with the show's central theme went ahead. It was especially disappointing since I and some other members of the forum mentioned above had been privileged to enjoy an invite-only inspection of the Spitfire by it's owner the night before the show.

As a veteran show goer, while I had a great day, it was flawed by a definite lack of polish and things that have been done better by the same organisation in the past. At times there was a slightly puzzling feeling of inexperience on the part of the organisers, puzzling because usually they are pretty good. There was a sense of wheels perhaps being re-invented.

Anyway, these are the at length ramblings of someone who has been to a lot of air shows. We had a great time.The weather was good, the flying was great, and my girls had fun, including Sophie making her air show debut:

My memories of air shows at an early age are dominated by hating the noise (I love the noise now), so I made sure I got earmuffs for the babes. They came in handy for moments like this (FA/18 right over our heads in full afterburner. Niiice):

And while a lot of the media focus was negative, there were some good unintentional lols as well. This is a Spitfire (you can trust me on this):

 According to the NZ Herald Website though, these are Spitfires:

That gem pales though in comparison to the gold that was The Sunday Star Times' take on the show (notes mine):

Breast can't always be best

As a father, this whole Weepu bottle feeding thing gained my attention (as well as the breastfeeding on facebook thing, and the daycare is bad mmkay? thing).

Not sure if I should link the Herald since they kicked off the whole saga in the first place with a mix of accurate and not so accurate reporting, and the footage in question wasn't actually banned, just removed before the ad screened. As a father who bottle feeds a child, I thought the footage in question made Piri even more legendary, against guidelines or not. He is only doing what hundreds if not thousands of NZ fathers do every day, and positive male parenting images in advertising of this quality aren't that common. I think its undermining of breastfeeding promotion as arguable at best, since that undermining is based on assumptions about what the bottle actually contains, and the ad isn't about feeding at all; it is about being smoke-free (and some of the most odious responses to it I've seen have compared bottle feeding to smoking). It also makes significant assumptions about the intelligence of the viewer.

In all fairness to the groups consulted about the footage and reacting against it, they were bound to say what they did. "Breast is best" is the official Ministry of Health line, a catchy slogan and noble ideal, and granted breastfeeding rates in NZ need improvement, but of all the mothers amongst my peers I know, only one (that I know of) ever declared an intention never to breastfeed.

Breast feeding though does not work for all mums. Not because they are too lazy, are too busy, haven't tried hard enough, not persisted long enough, not had enough support, or not used the right technique. Sometimes it just doesn't work, for many reasons. You are not a bad mother if you can't breastfeed. Both Sophie and Charlotte were breastfed initially for some months. Charlotte was unintentionally weaned when Fi had to go back to work so we could keep a roof over our heads (not to live in frivolous luxury like the stay at home judgementalists would suggest), as expressing and teaching don't really mix, and Sophie was weaned when she simply began demanding more than Fi could provide. It isn't the way we planned or wanted it to be, it just is.

I'm pro-breastfeeding, but not at all costs, and there just doesn't seem to be any balance in promotion or support a la "Breast is best, but whatever keeps the baby thriving is good too". In our ante-natal group four years ago bottle feeding was the thing that shall not be named - I get the impression reading around that it still is. This is a noble ideal, but the flipside is that many that fail to sustain breastfeeding feel like parenting failures as a result, and are occasionally subjected to public judgement (as are breastfeeding mums - we have issues), or otherwise accused of not having their children's best interests at heart. Out of curiosity I had a look at one advocacy group's NZ facebook site. There are a lot of useful things on it, good advice, good support. And some not so useful opinions, like people openly advocating fathers not get involved in feeding their infant children at all if it involves a bottle, and not really being challenged in that by the faithful. As a father, this attitude I find alternately infuriating and depressing. Those quiet moments (often in the middle of the night) can be precious, as well as giving your partner a break. I don't have functioning breasts (short of hormone treatment at least); how else am I supposed to feed the babe?

The thing I find about parental criticism (and it is about the one absolute truism of parenting: no matter what you are doing with your child there will be someone to tell you you're doing it wrong), is that it most often comes from people who presume to know both your exact circumstances, and how they compare to their own equivalents, which then results in an attitude of whatever worked for them is the best way and will work for everyone else. It just isn't so, and if you are going to judge me or my partner (especially in public), just know I'm going to be judging you right back.

Mixed perceptions

One thing I've noticed about parenting, is that often people only see the bad stuff or comment on the negative aspects of having children.

The downsides do exist, but they go with the territory though; to borrow a phrase from the military, "if you can't take a joke you shouldn't have signed up".

And while the downsides can and do suck, they are generally outweighed by the upsides by about a million to one, which makes things worthwhile :)

Nativity Subjects

Charlotte re-arranged the nativity scene so everyone could watch The Lion King* with her.
By the looks of it just in time for them to be subjected to Simba's deranged REIGN OF TERROR...
*We are in a "Lion King" phase, after a long "Bambi" phase. I thought Bambi was bad, but this is worse. The "Finding Nemo" phase on the other hand wasn't so bad. That movie I actually enjoy :)

The Sophie can't fly...

she only wriggles about!

Been kind of crawling for the last few weeks now, and improving every day.

Apologies if you aren't one of the half dozen or so people in the world who get the above joke by the way :)