This last week Freya has started to string two words together, to our combined delight and amazement.
Whilst she has enunciated in such a way before, it has only become her standard method of communication these last few weeks. Most favoured “sentences” seem to start with “there”, and Freya can be heard regularly stating “there Mummy”, “there water” etc.
How wonderful it is to be a part of this developmental phase.
We had, for the first time last night, a rather strange looking dessert: A Kiwano.
Also known as the African Horned Cucumber, this horny melon-shaped fruit has a toxic-green coloured flesh, with a surprising taste of bananas. It didn’t really rock my boat (too many seeds to navigate my way around), though Freya found it intriguing enough.
Anyway, the Kiwano (like the Kiwi) is native to New Zealand, and it got me thinking about a possible etymological connection.
In my world, the prefix “ki” is Maori for “hanging in/from a tree”. Then, I reckon “wi” and “wano” are adjectival opposites, “small thing” and “big/ger thing”respectively. Thus we have kiwi, meaning “small thing hanging from a tree”, and kiwano, “bigger thing hanging from a tree”.
Wouldn’t that be top if it were the case?
Sadly, the kiwi(fruit) is native to China, and is often, to the annoyance of the inhabitants of New Zealand, confused with the small, brown, furry bird of the same name. To a New Zealander a kiwi is always the bird, the kiwifruit (or Chinese gooseberry) is the fruit.
Which, apparently means “arriving in Japan”. And that is what we shall be doing. Sometime.
Working for a travel agents, Jo found out about an industry competition she could enter to win two tickets to one of many global destinations. The competition involved getting in the top eight high-scores of a tetris-style game involving aeroplane seats.
Well, in a drunken stupor, I managed to rank joint seventh.
Whilst a certain amount of skill and persistence helped, because the awarded score was time-based over four levels, the wine I’d consumed decreased my levels of stress, and I obviously entered some kind of Zen zone.
So today Jo got notification that we had won, and Japan is the destination that both of us have wanted to go to since we moved away from France.
Jo’s birthday today. Despite taking Freya and letting her sleep in, she awake an hour after we did, possibly with excitement and expectation. She was not to be disappointed.
From me she got a Nintendo DS and Wario Ware Touched game, a fantastic, if not short, game.
Other presents from the family included a lawn-trimmer, paint-remover gun and a very long extension cable. Not the most conventional of gifts, but truly appreciated, especially since we’re renovating our house.
Since we received our new telephonenumber in Gröndal about 10 months ago we have against our will got a new friend named Mr. Beep.
Mr Beep has always been an early morning-, or a late night-caller, preferably on weekends and he has never given up calling us with the Beeeeeeeeeep….Beeeeeeeeeep….Beeeeeeeeep until we actually pulled the telephoneplug.
To finally find out who this mysterious person was I started an investigation and found out that he actually was an old faxnumber to a company called the Resource-team. After calling this company up for a “chat” Mr Beep have actually stopped calling us and guess what, now when he´s gone it HAS gone very very quiet. Have I just neglected a friend that really cared??