Right side up in New Zealand

if you're going to be close to a radio at 9am this thursday, tune into 88.3fm to hear kara-leah and myself talking about our prana flow classes! if you don't have a radio, don't worry - you can stream it online as well!

noodles are awesome!!

and you know what else is awesome? bedhead!

my good golly goodness it is COLD. it seems like every time the weekend rolls around we're greeted with rain, wind and the freeze. the winter solstice is tomorrow so hopefully the worst of it is behind us. we flitted from place to place today as our brave attempts to play outside were foiled by the low temperatures. we spent the afternoon at the baobab cafe which is run by our friends gabe and rachel. their son isiah is one month younger than nayou and they are good friends. today, however, nayou was all about this huge stick he found in a corner of the cafe. he dragged it up and down the street using it to bang on shop windows. i'm glad that people thought it was cute.

it was another cold ass week here in wellington, although this time the sunshine was out so it was bearable. its getting down to 3C (38F) here every night and the wind chill cuts right through to the bone. there was even frost this morning! craziness. lucky we had lots of things to keep us busy during the weekend to distract us from the freeze.

on saturday it was brenda's birthday! she kicked it off in style with a yoga class and wrapped it up with dinner at a japanese restaurant. i then took nayou home while wild mama b partied it up until 3am! its good to let your hair down sometimes, and even though she was a little worse for wear on sunday morning, the smile on her face said it was well worth it. i was a bad photographer of the whole proceedings, being too excited at seeing all these people who we hadn't seen in ages. and its telling that the photos i do have are mainly of the babies who were in attendance. i gotta start taking photos of things taller than a meter. at least there is one of the beautiful birthday girl.

one cool side effect of brenda's late night partying is that nayou and i ended up sleeping in the bed while she passed out on the couch. and nayou made it through the night without a single milk feed! granted he still did his thing where he sits up, sees one of us and promptly falls back asleep, but it was still a milestone. in fact, we repeated the same thing again last night and will do it for a third time tonight (hopefully). tomorrow we'll all sleep together again and we'll see how he does. overall he is sleeping so much better - he's still a restless little dude but gone are the days of screaming and resisting sleep. we're starting to get 4-5 hour stretches of sleep regularly which is nice. we are far from being in sleep nirvana, but i can see the light at the end of the tunnel. hallelujah!

adjusting to more sleep has been a bit of a challenge for nayou. its probably all that fatigue finally catching up with him - we've noticed that he is a lot more tired than usual, even though he is sleeping more (including much longer naps). he can get a bit needy and cranky when he is super tired (don't we all?), which is sad to see at 10am when he's only been up for four hours. he still is adorable even when he's all emo though.

sunday was another jam packed day. after nursing brenda's hangover with brunch, we headed up to paekakariki, which is this really cute town about 45 minutes north of wellington. we went up for our second yoga photo shoot. despite the freezing cold we managed to play on the beach for about an hour before the call of a warm house and dinner was too strong to resist.

i should mention that the sexy pants that nayou is wearing were made by his mama. i love that outfit on him. he looks like an old school pilot.

i don't actually have that many photos on my camera - i was too busy trying to keep my hands warm. i'll upload the cream of the crop once i get them from the others who were busy snapping away.

it was so much fun to be out near the ocean though. especially with good company. the yogis of wellington are a seriously awesome bunch and i am definitely going to miss them when we go!

brrrrrr. its is seriously cold in wellington right now, complete with biting winds and hail. HAIL. everyone on the street is walking around with cold face. today the high temperature was 6C (43F), which meant that with wind chill it was more like 2C (36F). by far the coldest day we've had in wellington since we got here! brenda and i are dreaming of sayulita every day, where the average temperature last week was around 30C (86F).

it was another busy weekend for the diaz/tanimura tribe. on saturday i led my first every yoga workshop with kara-leah. it was a five hour workshop aimed at giving people a solid understanding of sun salutations and what prana is and how to work with it. we had eight people which was the perfect size, and i had a blast teaching it! the time went by so quickly and afterwards kara-leah and i were both buzzing. i think that everyone there went away with a good foundation from which to build a home practice. it was a good learning experience for me as well because it made me think about the best way to talk about asanas, both individually and with in the context of a sequence. and also revisit some of the fundamentals from my teacher training which i realised had been fading away from my consciousness as other things crowded in. i'm hoping that i can teach the same workshop in mexico at the yoga studio in sayulita!

and speaking of sayulita, we did another cull of our stuff this afternoon while nayou slept. we only have seven more weeks before we leave (!!) so its high time to get serious about trimming our belongings. we figured doing it bit by bit is the least stressful way, both practically as well as sentimentally. we went through a lot of the smaller stuff this time which is good because that's the stuff that usually gets forgotten until the end. its funny how as you shed stuff you feel lighter too - i feel a nice sense of contentment as i look at our place and see all this extra space where there was clutter.

we have signed a lease and paid a deposit on a casita in sayulita, so things are getting very official! our home from september through february will be casa carmelita! its a tiny one bedroom house, but its super cute and has a fenced yard that nayou can play in. plus its a five minutes walk from the beach and even closer to town. i'm a bit worried about the roosters that apparently get up very early, but everyone tells me that you get used to them so i'm hoping that they are right. otherwise i might find an excuse to renounce vegetarianism. here are some photos of the house.

as luck would have it, the landlord happens to be a yoga teacher and he has this great little practice space setup at the back of the house!

this morning nayou's ladyfriend sienna came over for a visit with her mum mea. nayou and sienna (he calls her "zizi", she calls him "nawoo") are going through a bit of a rough patch at the moment. zizi is going through a bit of a hitting phase, and nayou isn't very keen on sharing his toys with her. so there was a fair amount of wailing and gnashing of teeth. sigh. i hope they work it out because we've practically married them off already. once we busted out the chickpeas everyone had a good munch and things settled down. thank you, chickpeas.

after the snack it was time to cruise around the house in the storage bin and make very important phone calls. nothing says young love like talking on the phone for hours and hours. even when you're sitting right on next to each other.

in the afternoon we went over to our friends clara and richard's house. they have two children, thomas and niko who are the most adorable, sweet kids you will ever meet. nayou (and myself) had an awesome time wrestling, being monkeys and roaring like tigers. brenda and clara got all zen with their crochet techniques.

i gotta say i'm pretty pleased with the way this photo of niko turned out. its so easy to get those money shots with the prime lens i'm using. why didn't i get one earlier?!?! niko is nice enough to stay still while i take photos of him, which is more than i can say about our little monkey ;)

and some other nice ones from our experiments with our new lens.

these two were taken this morning. nayou has almost straight hair on the top and side of his head, but the back is always this crazy rats nest that would make russell brand proud.

i've had my eye on this new 35mm prime lens that nikon released ever since it came out in february. i often find myself shooting in low light conditions, and the kit lenses that came with my d60 just weren't doing the trick (the best they could do was f3.5 at 18mm, but the prime lens can do f1.8 at 35mm). this week i bit the bullet and ordered the lens. it arrived this afternoon and its pretty awesome. i'm still trying to get the hang of things - its weird to make the transition from adjusting the lens to physically moving in order to frame your shot. but it responds much better in low light, and it takes nice photos too! here are a couple i snapped before we had to put nayou to bed. my experiments with my muse will continue at a later date...

and yeah, we know he needs a haircut.

after brenda and nayou recovered from their bout with the cold, i've come down with it and am feeling pretty crook. i don't feel like writing at all so here are three photos we took over the weekend.

i'm loving his hot combover look in this one. sexy!

brenda and nayou have come down with the flu so things have ground to a halt while we hunker down and get everyone back on track again. we're pretty sure its not swine flu, although nayou has been grunting more often than usual. but whatever it is, i really hope i don't get it. brenda never gets sick, so if it brought her down like this then its definitely bad news. not much else to report i'm afraid... so here's an assortment of footage from the last couple of months, fresh off our video camera!

earlier this year we came very, very close to buying a house. it was on a huge plot of land right in the middle of wellington - perfect for growing veggies and the most amazing playground for nayou. there were also many things wrong with the place. the house needed a major overhaul, so much so that we even considered demolishing and starting again. conservative estimates to turn the house into something we would be happy with ran well into the six figures and about ten months of our time. which wasn't that bad, but there were other legal and logistical hurdles to jump through and eventually the whole thing became too much so we walked away.

the nice thing about life is that when one door closes, another one opens right up. once the deal fell through brenda and i started seriously discussing what we wanted to do with our lives. and to cut a long story short we have decided to take off for a while and spend time together as a family! we will be leaving new zealand on july 25th to go to japan for a month. my parents are going to be in sydney visiting relatives there so they'll fly to wellington after that and we'll all go to osaka together. having the grandparents around on an eleven hour flight is a godsend... especially since the flight is in the middle of the day! i'm very excited about japan - brenda has never been there before and i know that nayou is going to have a blast!

after japan we will move onto... somewhere. currently the plan is to go to sayulita, mexico for 6+ months. we have everything sorted short of booking plane tickets and signing a lease. for obvious reasons, we're waiting a little longer to see whether we will actually travel there. i'm hoping that our little friend influenza a goes away soon because sayulita sounds like an amazing place! its a small fishing village of ~4,000 people, with average temperatures of 28C (82F) and great surf. not to mention a yoga studio as well! our contingency plan is to continue onto switzerland with my parents. we will hang out in europe for a little bit, maybe go to morocco (to see aya who will be working on the new chris nolan movie) and then finally to mexico. one way or another, its sayulita or bust!

the deal with the house turned out to be really good preparation for our travel plans because it made us consolidate our finances (yawn), even to the point of getting things like life insurance and wills sorted (double yawn). originally we were going to live off our savings and wing the financial part as we went, but as luck would have it my friend kamal called and offered me about a years' worth of freelance work! i love it when the universe works things out like that... for me its a pretty scary thing to be leaving the security of a steady income so this strikes the perfect middle ground.

so yep, we will be gone for at least six months, probably a year, maybe longer. we have vague plans to return to new zealand afterwards, but everything is open at this stage. you never know what's going to happen in a year! we are so sad to be leaving wellington... we have an awesome life here with really good friends. plus the yoga classes i started with kara-leah are just starting to take off. but the hours i'm working at weta make it just too hard to get the family time that we want, and after almost five years i am ready for something different. i'm hoping that we will have lots and lots of visitors, wherever we end up! we'll always have a bed ready for you!

i'll leave you with some photos we took in a random alleyway nayou was exploring this morning.