06 February 2006
Hello! Welcome to my 67th Update. Today I am exactly 3 years and 9 months old! Isn’t it crazy to think that I’m almost 4 years old already?
Before beginning my monologue all about me, there are a few birthdays that I’ve missed announcing in the six months since I last Updated you:
Grand-Annette, Grandpa and Granddad all celebrated birthdays in October. Paige had a birthday in November, Grandma Ross was the birthday girl in December, Grandma Maiden had fifty-something reasons to celebrate in January and it was Canadian Nanna’s birthday less than a week ago. I have spoken with most of you since then, and I know each of you enjoyed your special day. Also, it’s Doffy’s birthday in just over a week, so… HAPPY BIRTHDAY, DOFFY!
As most of you know, life has been quite eventful for me and my family in the last few months…
We were due to leave Australia at the end of August and move here to Hidden Valley in Indonesia. However, at the very (very!) last minute, we were told that Daddy’s cholesterol levels were a bit too high, and that we couldn’t go! That made for an interesting few days. But, Daddy worked hard at improving his lifestyle, I got to have some more playtime with my buddies, and Mummy got to attend yet more "farewell" functions. (I think people were beginning to think that we’d made up a story about moving overseas just so that we could get a few parties thrown in our honour because it certainly started looking that way!)
Eventually, though, in mid-November we got the all-clear and proceeded to kiss everyone for the final time. We had a ‘last supper’ with the Tipton-Akers crew on the Central Coast, got a s-t-r-e-t-c-h limo down to the airport in Sydney where we were fondly farewelled by Nanna & Granddad, spent a day and a half in Brisbane where we got to hug Grandma and Soss, as well as catch up with the Queensland arm of the Maiden/ McIntosh family, then we spent a night in Cairns before boarding a charter flight to Timika, West Papua, Indonesia. Because our flight got in so late at night, we had to spend that first night in a hotel in Timika, but drove up the rocky, bumpy, windy dirt road the next morning to our new home in Hidden Valley.
We’re now well and truly ensconced in our new home in West Papua, Indonesia, and I’m having an absolute whale of a time. I go to Mt Zaghaam International School three mornings each week where I’m in the youngest class – the "Pre-3’s" – with four other children (Insos, Dylan, Natasha & Daniel). The five of us three year olds have a full-time, fully-qualified teacher (Mrs Jody), plus a full-time, part-qualified assistant teacher (Mrs Pam). So, as you can imagine, I’m thriving on all the attention! This year (which is actually the middle of the school year here because we’re on a northern hemisphere timetable), we’ve started learning the phonetic alphabet. I already know the ‘normal’ alphabet – and can sing it fairly proficiently – but apparently that’s not how reading and writing is taught these days. Each week we’re learning about a different phonetic letter. So far we’ve done Annie apple, bouncy Ben, clever cat and this week we’re doing dippy duck. I was very excited on the first week because, of course, my name starts with Annie apple! Grandma made me an "’A’ Album" for my 3rd birthday, so I already knew a lot of ‘A’ words, but I’m enjoying learning about ‘B’, ‘C’ and ‘D’ words and I’m always looking out for words that start with the letter-of-the-week. My class goes to the library every Monday, we do cooking each Wednesday, and on Fridays we learn Indonesian. I’m learning lots of Indonesian words; in Indonesian I can name all my body parts, name a few animals and greet people.
Eventually, though, in mid-November we got the all-clear and proceeded to kiss everyone for the final time. We had a ‘last supper’ with the Tipton-Akers crew on the Central Coast, got a s-t-r-e-t-c-h limo down to the airport in Sydney where we were fondly farewelled by Nanna & Granddad, spent a day and a half in Brisbane where we got to hug Grandma and Soss, as well as catch up with the Queensland arm of the Maiden/ McIntosh family, then we spent a night in Cairns before boarding a charter flight to Timika, West Papua, Indonesia. Because our flight got in so late at night, we had to spend that first night in a hotel in Timika, but drove up the rocky, bumpy, windy dirt road the next morning to our new home in Hidden Valley.
We’re now well and truly ensconced in our new home in West Papua, Indonesia, and I’m having an absolute whale of a time. I go to Mt Zaghaam International School three mornings each week where I’m in the youngest class – the "Pre-3’s" – with four other children (Insos, Dylan, Natasha & Daniel). The five of us three year olds have a full-time, fully-qualified teacher (Mrs Jody), plus a full-time, part-qualified assistant teacher (Mrs Pam). So, as you can imagine, I’m thriving on all the attention! This year (which is actually the middle of the school year here because we’re on a northern hemisphere timetable), we’ve started learning the phonetic alphabet. I already know the ‘normal’ alphabet – and can sing it fairly proficiently – but apparently that’s not how reading and writing is taught these days. Each week we’re learning about a different phonetic letter. So far we’ve done Annie apple, bouncy Ben, clever cat and this week we’re doing dippy duck. I was very excited on the first week because, of course, my name starts with Annie apple! Grandma made me an "’A’ Album" for my 3rd birthday, so I already knew a lot of ‘A’ words, but I’m enjoying learning about ‘B’, ‘C’ and ‘D’ words and I’m always looking out for words that start with the letter-of-the-week. My class goes to the library every Monday, we do cooking each Wednesday, and on Fridays we learn Indonesian. I’m learning lots of Indonesian words; in Indonesian I can name all my body parts, name a few animals and greet people.
And although I’ve been super-good at Indonesian, my behaviour has been anything but good. In fact, I’ve been really naughty! Not at school, of course. Oh no, at school I’m the prodigal child and can do no wrong. No no no. I save up all my rude and naughty behaviour for my dear beloved mother! Aren’t I a sweetheart? As a consequence, however, I’ve now found myself on a fairly short rein with not much wriggling room. I’ve seen the inside of my bedroom quite a lot lately, and some of my favourite toys have been holidaying on top of cupboards etc. Very strange. I’m certainly baffling my parents with my uncharacteristic behaviour and they’re hoping I’ll tire of being in trouble very soon.
But, I’ve kept my sense of humour! I’m a happy, bubbly, charming, energetic, exuberant and vivacious little boy. And I’m as sharp as a tack. You probably all know that I’ve been ‘into’ planets, the sun and the moon in the last six or eight months, but my ever-inquisitive mind has meant that my planet obsession has grown to include the atmosphere – and I hope you can all name the three layers of the ‘at-os-phere’ like I can ("there’s no "mo" in at-os-phere, Daddy") – the clouds and their formation and what each cloud means weather-wise, and the weather – specifically how thunder is created and what lightening is, and what electricity is and how it works. This has meant that my poor parents have been up late scouring the internet for information on clouds and my teachers have been raiding the MZIS school library. Each week my interest is fed and therefore grows, which my parents realise is a good thing, but by golly are they sick of reading weather and planetary text books to me! For a long time now – six or more months – I’ve been able to name all the planets, in order, starting from Mercury closest to the sun. But now I can also tell you which planets are made of rock & liquid, and which ones are made of gas & liquid. I can tell you how many moons each planet has (although the two new moons recently discovered orbiting Uranus have thrown me a bit), which planet spins backwards, why the ‘red planet’ is red, which planets are hot and which ones are cold and why, why Venus is hotter than Mercury, despite being further from the sun, and with what the sun provides the earth and the planets. I get a bit confused when talking about clouds because there are a few big words and sometimes you can string a couple of them together, but sometimes not. I did manage to convince one of my teachers, though, that there was a cloud called a "cumulonimbistratus" because I gave her such an accurate-sounding description of what the cloud looks like and what kind of weather is indicated by that particular (fictional) cloud! My Mum has managed to stay one step ahead of me in the cloud fiasco, though, but only because of where we’re living. She can – quite accurately – tell me that the clouds I ask about EVERY morning mean that "it’s a lovely sunny day now, but there will be a lot of rain this afternoon". As soon as I realise that she’s saying the same thing every day – because we have the exact same weather every day – then she’ll be in hot water.
While I’m wowing you with my wisdom, let my awe you with my athletic ability. I think I told you in my last Update that I enjoyed hopping on one leg, but that I didn’t think my parents were quite as convinced about my fantastic hopping ability, but you’ll be pleased to know that I really can now hop on either leg. And I do it often. I’m really very full of beans and have lots of energy, physical confidence and balance, so I’m good at running, jumping, climbing, doing somersaults etc. My ‘athletic prowess’ has landed me in a pickle a few times, though, and I’m always sporting some kind of scrape or bruise or bump, but – touch wood! – nothing yet too serious.
It’s strange that I’ve got so much energy because I still don’t really eat very much. Or, more to the point, I don’t eat a very wide variety of foods. I have cooked oats (porridge?) for breakfast most mornings, with either stewed and pureed apples (if the shop has had apples) or mashed banana (if the store has had banana). I ALWAYS have vegemite & cheese on some sort of bread (my parents try to vary the bread type so that I am actually getting some variety in my diet – no matter how small!) for lunch, and for dinner I usually have mashed veggies (but they’ve got to be orange so that I think it’s pumpkin) with a fish finger (or “fish toe” which my mother has conned me into – what I don’t know is that it’s actually either chicken or prawn). I started eating fish fingers because Jonty does, but that logic only worked the once. I have, though started eating hash browns (I was told they were giant hot chips) and muesli bars (which I was tricked into eating because Mum called them “choc-chip oat biscuits”!). And just tonight I was talked into eating some apple custard.
Actually, there’s a story about that apple custard. I used to eat a tin of glob at home which was a combination of pureed apple and oats. Mum has been stewing and pureeing apples here, mixing them with oats and an egg, and I’ve been eating it, believing it to have been out of a tin from Australia. Tonight, however, Mum – for some unknown reason – decided to come clean and admit that she’d made some apple & oat custard. I refused to eat it, point blank. I said I didn’t like it, that I hated it and that I was NOT going to eat it. Mum got really cross with me and said I’d have to go straight to bed and stay there until tomorrow morning if I didn’t try some of the custard she’d made. I, very reluctantly, tasted a tiny bit, and despite still pulling yucky-food faces and howling like a werewolf, my Mum could tell that as soon as the custard was in my mouth, I actually enjoyed it. She said to me, "Look at you! You actually like it! Why are you still carrying on? I can tell by your face that you like it?!" And because I have the "courage of my convictions", I replied, "Because I’d already told you that I didn’t like it"!!!!! (Note from Mum: Could all those people who contributed so generously to Alex’s "stubborn gene" please step forward to assist with the mind games required for the raising of him?)
Guess what? I’ve had a visitor! Grandma came to visit me (and the rest of my family, I guess) for a week at the end of January. I was ever so excited to see her and gave her the most enthusiastic welcome I’m guessing she’s seen in a long time. My Dad drove me, Baby Jess and Mummy down the mountain late at night in heavy fog to meet Grandma’s plane at Timika. I was excited just to be up so late at night, but the bonus of having Grandma arrive was almost too much for me to bear; I could barely contain myself! Because the flight arrived so late at night, we couldn’t drive back up the mountain, so had to stay at the hotel in Timika. I was bouncing around on the beds so much that I broke one of them! And of course, when Grandma started dishing out presents and mine was a science book on "things that live and work under the ground", I knew she was my friend for life. That’s not to say that I didn’t give her a bit of a hard time occasionally after I got used to her being here, but I wouldn’t have wanted Mum to think I was giving Grandma preferential treatment…
There’s a lovely lady who lives in the room next door to mine. Her name is Tati and she comes into our house every day to help around the house and to look after Baby Jess and me sometimes. I made it my duty to induct her – and the induction process has been long and tedious – but I’m getting more and more used to her being here, so I’m relenting a bit. She’s very nice and is very good to me. She helps me eat my dinner when Mum has long since given up, she lets me steal her comb and eat her biscuits and jump on her bed and "teach" her Indonesian (despite Tati being Indonesian!!).
I probably told you in my last Update that I had some weird sores/ spots on my face. They disappeared for a while but have recently returned and are baffling the doctors here just as they did the doctors in Australia. At the moment I’ve got two on my left cheek and one on my forehead. They’ve very strange and – perhaps like me – very stubborn. I’ve taken a variety of medicines which were thought to have cleared the spots up, and have had all manner of creams and ointments rubbed into my face, but all apparently to no avail. They don’t bother me at all because they don’t itch, but I don’t assist their recovery because I tend to scratch and pick at them during the night while I’m sleeping. If anybody has any brilliant ideas, my parents would be really keen to hear them. My parents are getting worried that my little face will start scarring.
And I think I’m getting close to finishing up now. Know that I’m VERY excited about going home in late March to visit everyone. I’m talking about that – and about planning my 4th birthday party [!!!] – all the time and asking if it’s time to go back to Australia to visit everyone yet.
I hope this Update finds everyone happy and healthy, and I’m really, really looking forward to seeing a lot of you in about six(ish) weeks! Yay!
Lots and lots of love,
Alexander
xxx
PS: I do have another little "funny" for you. Each night after Daddy has read me a couple of books, Mummy comes to snuggle me into bed and I ask her to sing to me while she scratches my back. She has always sung me "The Sleeping Song", but recently I have begun requesting two songs: The Sleeping Song AND The Brady Bunch TV show theme song!!!
But, I’ve kept my sense of humour! I’m a happy, bubbly, charming, energetic, exuberant and vivacious little boy. And I’m as sharp as a tack. You probably all know that I’ve been ‘into’ planets, the sun and the moon in the last six or eight months, but my ever-inquisitive mind has meant that my planet obsession has grown to include the atmosphere – and I hope you can all name the three layers of the ‘at-os-phere’ like I can ("there’s no "mo" in at-os-phere, Daddy") – the clouds and their formation and what each cloud means weather-wise, and the weather – specifically how thunder is created and what lightening is, and what electricity is and how it works. This has meant that my poor parents have been up late scouring the internet for information on clouds and my teachers have been raiding the MZIS school library. Each week my interest is fed and therefore grows, which my parents realise is a good thing, but by golly are they sick of reading weather and planetary text books to me! For a long time now – six or more months – I’ve been able to name all the planets, in order, starting from Mercury closest to the sun. But now I can also tell you which planets are made of rock & liquid, and which ones are made of gas & liquid. I can tell you how many moons each planet has (although the two new moons recently discovered orbiting Uranus have thrown me a bit), which planet spins backwards, why the ‘red planet’ is red, which planets are hot and which ones are cold and why, why Venus is hotter than Mercury, despite being further from the sun, and with what the sun provides the earth and the planets. I get a bit confused when talking about clouds because there are a few big words and sometimes you can string a couple of them together, but sometimes not. I did manage to convince one of my teachers, though, that there was a cloud called a "cumulonimbistratus" because I gave her such an accurate-sounding description of what the cloud looks like and what kind of weather is indicated by that particular (fictional) cloud! My Mum has managed to stay one step ahead of me in the cloud fiasco, though, but only because of where we’re living. She can – quite accurately – tell me that the clouds I ask about EVERY morning mean that "it’s a lovely sunny day now, but there will be a lot of rain this afternoon". As soon as I realise that she’s saying the same thing every day – because we have the exact same weather every day – then she’ll be in hot water.
While I’m wowing you with my wisdom, let my awe you with my athletic ability. I think I told you in my last Update that I enjoyed hopping on one leg, but that I didn’t think my parents were quite as convinced about my fantastic hopping ability, but you’ll be pleased to know that I really can now hop on either leg. And I do it often. I’m really very full of beans and have lots of energy, physical confidence and balance, so I’m good at running, jumping, climbing, doing somersaults etc. My ‘athletic prowess’ has landed me in a pickle a few times, though, and I’m always sporting some kind of scrape or bruise or bump, but – touch wood! – nothing yet too serious.
It’s strange that I’ve got so much energy because I still don’t really eat very much. Or, more to the point, I don’t eat a very wide variety of foods. I have cooked oats (porridge?) for breakfast most mornings, with either stewed and pureed apples (if the shop has had apples) or mashed banana (if the store has had banana). I ALWAYS have vegemite & cheese on some sort of bread (my parents try to vary the bread type so that I am actually getting some variety in my diet – no matter how small!) for lunch, and for dinner I usually have mashed veggies (but they’ve got to be orange so that I think it’s pumpkin) with a fish finger (or “fish toe” which my mother has conned me into – what I don’t know is that it’s actually either chicken or prawn). I started eating fish fingers because Jonty does, but that logic only worked the once. I have, though started eating hash browns (I was told they were giant hot chips) and muesli bars (which I was tricked into eating because Mum called them “choc-chip oat biscuits”!). And just tonight I was talked into eating some apple custard.
Actually, there’s a story about that apple custard. I used to eat a tin of glob at home which was a combination of pureed apple and oats. Mum has been stewing and pureeing apples here, mixing them with oats and an egg, and I’ve been eating it, believing it to have been out of a tin from Australia. Tonight, however, Mum – for some unknown reason – decided to come clean and admit that she’d made some apple & oat custard. I refused to eat it, point blank. I said I didn’t like it, that I hated it and that I was NOT going to eat it. Mum got really cross with me and said I’d have to go straight to bed and stay there until tomorrow morning if I didn’t try some of the custard she’d made. I, very reluctantly, tasted a tiny bit, and despite still pulling yucky-food faces and howling like a werewolf, my Mum could tell that as soon as the custard was in my mouth, I actually enjoyed it. She said to me, "Look at you! You actually like it! Why are you still carrying on? I can tell by your face that you like it?!" And because I have the "courage of my convictions", I replied, "Because I’d already told you that I didn’t like it"!!!!! (Note from Mum: Could all those people who contributed so generously to Alex’s "stubborn gene" please step forward to assist with the mind games required for the raising of him?)
Guess what? I’ve had a visitor! Grandma came to visit me (and the rest of my family, I guess) for a week at the end of January. I was ever so excited to see her and gave her the most enthusiastic welcome I’m guessing she’s seen in a long time. My Dad drove me, Baby Jess and Mummy down the mountain late at night in heavy fog to meet Grandma’s plane at Timika. I was excited just to be up so late at night, but the bonus of having Grandma arrive was almost too much for me to bear; I could barely contain myself! Because the flight arrived so late at night, we couldn’t drive back up the mountain, so had to stay at the hotel in Timika. I was bouncing around on the beds so much that I broke one of them! And of course, when Grandma started dishing out presents and mine was a science book on "things that live and work under the ground", I knew she was my friend for life. That’s not to say that I didn’t give her a bit of a hard time occasionally after I got used to her being here, but I wouldn’t have wanted Mum to think I was giving Grandma preferential treatment…
There’s a lovely lady who lives in the room next door to mine. Her name is Tati and she comes into our house every day to help around the house and to look after Baby Jess and me sometimes. I made it my duty to induct her – and the induction process has been long and tedious – but I’m getting more and more used to her being here, so I’m relenting a bit. She’s very nice and is very good to me. She helps me eat my dinner when Mum has long since given up, she lets me steal her comb and eat her biscuits and jump on her bed and "teach" her Indonesian (despite Tati being Indonesian!!).
I probably told you in my last Update that I had some weird sores/ spots on my face. They disappeared for a while but have recently returned and are baffling the doctors here just as they did the doctors in Australia. At the moment I’ve got two on my left cheek and one on my forehead. They’ve very strange and – perhaps like me – very stubborn. I’ve taken a variety of medicines which were thought to have cleared the spots up, and have had all manner of creams and ointments rubbed into my face, but all apparently to no avail. They don’t bother me at all because they don’t itch, but I don’t assist their recovery because I tend to scratch and pick at them during the night while I’m sleeping. If anybody has any brilliant ideas, my parents would be really keen to hear them. My parents are getting worried that my little face will start scarring.
And I think I’m getting close to finishing up now. Know that I’m VERY excited about going home in late March to visit everyone. I’m talking about that – and about planning my 4th birthday party [!!!] – all the time and asking if it’s time to go back to Australia to visit everyone yet.
I hope this Update finds everyone happy and healthy, and I’m really, really looking forward to seeing a lot of you in about six(ish) weeks! Yay!
Lots and lots of love,
Alexander
xxx
PS: I do have another little "funny" for you. Each night after Daddy has read me a couple of books, Mummy comes to snuggle me into bed and I ask her to sing to me while she scratches my back. She has always sung me "The Sleeping Song", but recently I have begun requesting two songs: The Sleeping Song AND The Brady Bunch TV show theme song!!!
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