Iola's First Birthday!

Some quickie captions:
1) Yoke took these images from the blog and got her brother to photoshop them up. The result, framed with faux chocolate, was her birthday present to Iola. The little monkey has taken a real shine to it, and walks around the house clutching it to her chest!

2) Tash, Ness and Iola playing with the tiger cubs at Taman Safari. They've gotten so big since the last time we were there!

3) Ness taking it easy in a Yogya becak. She popped down there for a few days while she was here to catch up with some old friends.

4) Tash and Ness enjoying one of the many varieties of Indonesian deserts for which Tash has developed a fondness...

5) Tash, Iola and Pam kicking back at the Hotel Equator.

6) Iola checking out her new dolls' house. We decided to stretch her birthday out over a week or so and give her a present or two every day rather than flood her with booty on just one day--especially since we were planning to spend her actual birthday on the train to Yogya. This was her first birthday present from her mum and dad!

7) Iola likes ice-cream. A lot.

8) Iola creating great art. She has a good grasp of colour theory, but a distressing (to me, at least) obsession with abstract impressionism. I'm hoping to beat this out of her and get her excited by pop surrealism any day now...

9) Iola trying to get into her new dolls' house!

10) Sussing out how things come in and out of the house.

11) Iola rockin' out with Jemima Puddleduck, her first birthday present from her paternal great-grandparents Alice and Bob.

12) Chowing down on bananas and yoghurt in her spanking new high-chair.

13) Trying to get a little closer to the Bananas in Pyjamas--one of her presents from her paternal grandparents.

14) Iola having a bit of a cuddle with Imelda at her birthday lunch. In the end, we decided to have lunch in at the school for everyone, because we couldn't find another time or place that didn't clash with someone's schedule! We got an enormous platter of food, and Wayne and Emily organised a spectacular princess cake (Peter's got some great photos of Iola just after my attention strayed and she got into the icing. Stay tuned...). Iola had a ball, and got way too many presents!!!
She's so spoilt.

15) Wayne and Emily's cake ;-)

16) Iola 'helping' Helmi and Aunty Nia on the front desk.

Animal Crackers

Another day at the zoo!
Iola loves it, it's just down the road, and it costs all of rp10000 to get in (ie a little over a dollar!)--so we're becoming quite regular visitors (Tash and Iola even more so than me: Surabaya's a little short on green spaces to go walking, but the zoo fits the bill nicely, so they often wander down there of an afternoon while I'm at work).

This photo of Iola sleeping reminds me of photos of either Kate or Megan (my sisters) sleeping when they were babies. I can't remember off the top of my head which one; maybe it was both!

Speaking of the little monkey, she is changing and developing on literally a daily basis. She practices standing and sitting down again from a sitting start over and over again (and looks pretty damn proud of herself when she does it too!). She's quite comfortable walking if you hold her hand, but so far has only taken one or two fumbling steps without the safety net of feeling Tash or me holding on. Her newest game is quite good for my cardiovascular fitness (and for tiring her out). She throws one of her plastic balls across the room, and I chase after it and kick it back to her for her to catch. They bounce a long way, so if she misses it she has to scuttle like a demon to get to it before I do.

We're very grateful for the fact that all our floors are tiled, because while she's been using her three new chompers to feed herself, quite a lot of her food tends to end up on the floor. And what an amazing variety of food it is, too... She's a fiend for her victuals, and I don't think we've found anything she won't eat yet (oh yeah--except some particularly spicy urap-urap that she swiped off Tash's plate, and a lime that I still feel guilty about. She grabbed it off Tash's plate and made a hilarious face when she shoved it in her mouth, so I grabbed the camera to film her trying it again. This was all very funny right up to the bit where she threw up everywhere. Oops). Her favourites are: oatmeal with banana and yoghurt, tofu, mie goreng, frozen camomile tea, broccoli, mushrooms, corn flakes, french toast and pretty much anything she can get away with snatching off our plates...

Anyway, we're off to Supermall so she can have a play in the adventure playground there. The plan (which has worked before) is to tire her out with playing so she falls asleep and we can go to the movies...

Sleep is for the Weak

This is what happens when you don't get enough sleep because someone's teething:

Tash: "There's a mozzie in the room! Quick, get it!"

Fergal (nearly seizing his electrified tennis-racket-style mozzie destroyer by the wrong end and doing himself a serious injury: "Where?:"

Tash (pointing): "Over there!"

Fergal: "You can't say 'over there'."

Tash: "Why not?"

Fergal: "Because you have to get in character. You have to put on a british accent and say something like 'Tally Ho! Jerry at 5 o'clock high!'"

Tash: "Why???"

Fergal: "Because that's what you do. Do you think we'd have won the Battle of Britain by saying 'I think that ME109 you were worried about earlier might be just over there somewhere.'? Just picture it: some poor sod's cruising along in his spitfire, wondering whether someone's going to try and kill him, when a voice comes over his radio. 'Hi there Sebastian, I think there might be a heavily armed flying chunk of german steel floating about that wants to do you some damage.' 'Really Clarence? And where is he exactly?' 'Oh, you know. Just over there.'"

Tash: "Whatever. Hey look--there's one of those little black moths on the wall. Maybe we should kill that so we don't think it's another mozzie."

Fergal (casually and skilfully whipping the towel from round his waist and, in one deft and fluid movement, making a swift end to the short and bitter life of a Javanese sewer moth): "Done."

Tash: "Did you just kill a sewer moth with a clean towel? The clean towel? The only clean towel?"

Fergal: "Well, yeah. But I had to!"

Tash: "Why?"

Fergal: "For the pun!"

Tash: "What?"

Fergal (slowly collapsing to the floor as he's overcome by waves of fatigue-induced hysterical laughter): "Well, now instead of having a moth-eaten towel, we've got a towel-eaten moth!!!"

Tash: "Does anyone actually like you?"