By popular demand...

Here are some more pictures of Oscar, lying on the ground, and heading out for a walk with his new blue hat on.

Often he only goes to sleep (when there is a bit of light in the room) with a hand over his eyes. As you can see he's getting too big for the bassinette, he's 7.3kg and 64cm long! We're getting a cot very soon.

Matt loves reading to him, here he's reading the rhyming bible that we were given - which we love reading, and Oscar likes hearing. He's just learned how to smile in the last few weeks, and so so whenever we chat to him, he gives us a big smile and starts "chatting" back. So far his "talking" consist of lots of strange and not-so-strange vowel sounds, and the odd "ga".

Oscar relaxing

Oscar!

Our baby son Oscar was born on Tuesday the 13th March by casarian section after a long labor.



The three of us meeting for the first time on the operating table.



Leaving the hospital after a three day / two night stay.



Some quality father son time. 

It's a foot! This one of our ultrasound pictures - we're expecting a baby in early March! We've had a great time studying in Sydney in 2006 and we look forward to more study next year, in preparation for going back to South Asia. And of course we look forward to meeting our little one as well! We don't know if it's a boy or a girl, we'll keep it a suprise.

This is Matt and a church elder handing out sweets on our last day of church - we also gave them our guitar which they were glad to receive since they didn't have one. 

This is the day we said goodbye to our house help. She and Donna were both very sad - we had seen her six days a week when we were at home. 

Up close with a baby elephant

Yes, this elephant was a baby, it was only about 5 feet high! It shakes the grass around first before putting it into its mouth. 

Getting some language survey work done

Matt getting some survey work done with some of our colleagues. They actually just finished about three weeks of hard work - hence the big smiles!

The lighter side

I am yet to find out if this cow paid the two rupees for the parking space. 

The Himalayas

This was taken from near our house, on one of the few days in the year that you can see the mountain from the plains. And no they're not clouds . . .

This is me in front of the Himalayas - we were in Darjeeling for 3 days, and it was fogged in the first two days, but on the third it was very exciting to look out the window and see this!
On the way up the hills, there were various warnings of the dangers of driving too fast along the winding road. This was one of our favorites.

 

The view that some never got to see. . .

This is the view from the youth hostel that sells the really yummy Tibetan Bread. Mmmmm.... Mike, Kate, Liz, Clare and "Auntie" this is the view that you never got to see.

The festival of Diwali

During Diwali festival, people light firecrackers all over the place. On night I went outside to see what all the noise was, and to watch the firecrackers and I found that three candles had been lit outside my door, one on the doorstep and two on the fence, on either side of the gate. I was unknowingly joining in the celebrations as well. It must have been my landlady . . .

Holiday

Jo, Penny and I, with very pretty mountains in the background.

Christmas 2004

This is one of the Christmas feasts we were invited to. It's rice and pork, you can just see, in the black wok, the large pieces of fat which the small pieces of meat are attached to (at first I thought it was cut-up potato the bits of fat were so big). It's the absolute favorite of people in this area - it tasted really good too, though all that fat can't be good for us.

This is the church that we go to, we all sit on the floor, gents on the left ladies on the right. Here its decorated for Christmas. Unlike Australia where many Christmas activities are centred around the home, here almost all Christmas activities are at the church, celebrating together, eating together, and sometimes distributing food to those families who are less fortunate.

These are some of the friends that we hung out with on the 25th evening. In the absence of a Christmas tree, you can see an exercise bike in the background all strung up with Christmas lights.