Bedtime, laughingly so-called, has been hell on earth lately. Claire gets up and comes to find us, Jeremy puts her back in bed, together they wake the baby. Rinse, repeat.

Just now Claire emerged from her room with important news.

C: I want a new house.

R: But I love this house!

C: We need to pack up all these things and take them to a new house …in Africa.

Pause.

R and J, unison: What?

C (patiently): We need a house in Africa!

Another dry recounting of what passed. In Australia, dim sum is called yum cha. We lost Claire in Glebe; a wonderful woman found her and took her to the police station. I don’t want to talk about it. Picnic in Wahroonga. Jeremy to Tash: “I hear you’re full of people!” Mecca again. Met Tabitha, swam with Adrian and Korben. Swimming lessons have paid off – Claire took the purple noodle and jumped into the deep end! Drinkies with Neal and Tim, which was too short. Dinner with Pesce at Longgrain.

Sunday morning, Claire was assimilated into the Borg Collective that is Mike Lynch’s girls. It was ridiculously successful. We collected pine cones and took them to a pine cone show. Grace judged. She gave special mentions to Sasha and Clio but awarded first prize to Claire. That girl has a future in diplomacy. Roast lunch at Great Auntie Jan’s house, then a train ride home. Chatswood unrecognizeable. Question: is the giant soulsucker still lurking beneath?

Monday met Moira in Camperdown Park while Jeremy talked to accountant. Monday afternoon, made our wills: a strange and darkly funny pastime. Attorney Philip Crow tittered nervously every time we threatened to disinherit one another. Monday evening, Turkish pizza and a not-bad idea for a business. Tuesday progressive breakfast at Single Origin, then an amazing trip to Blakehurst to see the house Richard is building for cousin Rachel Fitzhardinge. Home to pick up the kids and whiz them down to Neilsen Park. Holding Claire’s hand and running full-pelt into the warm ocean. Diving under a wave, coming up spluttering and saying to Jeremy: “We are so moving back here.” J, serenely: “Of course.”

Wednesday morning Petit Creme. Wednesday afternoon girls behaved perfectly on flight home. Wednesday morning, again, airline lost yellow stroller that has been around world with us lo these many times. I was disproportionately upset. Patchy sleep and screaming children through second Wednesday and Thursday to Friday morning. Airline found stroller in New Zealand. J: “I hope it enjoyed its trip!” I have new glasses to replace the ones that broke, and Big is going to drop by the car rental place to see if he can find the CDs I left in the car.

A lossy trip, but good.

I resort to a terse and unsatisfying summary of the notable events. Julia, completely recovered, is having to be re-weaned, and this has sparked impressive temper tantrums. Claire rode Bellboy and trotted. Last night she woke up crying.

R: What’s wrong my honey?

C: I want to live with Thussy on the farm.

Sarcastor’s apartment is completely amazing! The balcony looks out on the Bat Superhighway, the Harbour Bridge and the end of the Mardi Gras parade. We went out for tapas. Bats flew from fig to fig.

C: What do bats eat?

R: The blood of the innocent.

Rach Honnery: Don’t listen to your mother! They’re fruit bats. They eat fruit.

R: Innocent fruit.

This morning I slept horrifically late. We had twenty minutes to get to Summer Hill, which used to take almost an hour, but which now, thanks to the reviled Cross-City Tunnel, takes… twenty minutes. Sydneysiders have been wondering what the expensive and under-utilized tunnel was even built for. Now we know. It’s for Claire to have playdates with Patrick.

Julia greatly improved: thanks to everyone who pinged. J and I snuck out yesterday for treats: Pan’s Labyrinth and new books by old friends Kate Crawford and Neal Drinnan!

Julia’s turn for the tummy bug. High fever made me take her to the GP. The GP was worried about her rash, and mentioned meningococcus. She told me to take her to hospital if she got any worse – vomiting, for example.

At the chemist, filling the prescription, she threw up all over me. I put her back in the car and drove straight to Emergency.

Nothing reorganizes your priorities like pure terror.

The staff at Sydney Childrens’ could not have been any kinder or more helpful. Julia enjoyed being examined, biting on the tongue depressers until I held her nose and made her open her mouth. The verdict is: weird viral thingy with vomiting, fever and rash. Almost certainly not meningococcus because the rash blanches when you rub it, and the Tylenol brings her fever down.

I was relieved to bring her home, but too frazzled to mount an organized campaign to get everyone to sleep. Bedtime last night dragged on till 1am, and there were tantrums and screaming and the kids didn’t behave well either. But this morning Jeremy tiptoed out to the American consulate, organized his visa and came back to wake me with a glass of orange juice. It was the first decent sleep I’d had since Friday. I feel almost human again.

Julia is still snoring, sprawled on the bed, pale and cool.

Symptoms include vomiting, diarrhea, headache, insomnia, emotional volatility, sense of impending doom and utter despair.

I dreamed I was walking back to the house on Eugenia Avenue, which faced a seawalled cove rather like La Paz or Howth. But the house wasn’t where it should have been. I stared from landmark to landmark in confusion before I realized that the village had been destroyed by a storm and saw my own books half-buried in the debris…

…and woke in an unfamiliar bed, thinking What time is it? And what country is this?

There was a TV show here I never saw, called Sea Change, about moving from the city to a remote beach. The title has entered the vernacular, so that the Herald’s real estate pages this week were all about “sea-changing.”

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.

It’s very appropriate that Australians should… um… appropriate… Shakespeare’s description of a father’s corpse for real-estate marketing jargon. In other great Sydney property news, a prophecy of mine has been fulfilled, and developers are trying to flog luxury condos at Little Bay, right next to Long Bay Gaol.

The girls were champions on the fifteen hour flight over, although I noticed as the sun rose over the Pacific that Julia had cut a new tooth. She screamed her head off in customs and immigration until a kind official lady took pity on us and sent us through a back door, skipping at least forty minutes of queuing. Thank you for ever, kind official lady.

Sydney is as beautiful and imponderable as ever. I woke before dawn and listened to cicadas, currawongs, crows, kookaburras and rosellas singing in the trees outside. What would my life have been like if I had never left? What would it be like if we came back? LP Hartley said “The past is a foreign country;” for expats this is the literal truth, and the longer you stay away, the more foreign your homeland becomes.

Last night was, unexpectedly, a delight. My mother and father came to dinner, so the girls feasted with both parents and all four grandparents. I quaffed champagne and was reminded, again, that it is a grave mistake to underestimate my mother. I confessed that I’d only just learned that Dad’s old rocking chair was a classic of mid-century design and that all their teak furniture, which I despised because it wasn’t ornate Victorian, was chosen with excellent taste.

Mum said: “What I really wanted was one of those fantastic project homes – you know the ones -”

Richard: “Pettit and Sevitt.”

“Exactly,” said Mum. “I loved those.”

“Well of course,” said Richard, “they were absolutely wonderful houses.”

For USonians, the parallel is with the gorgeous Eichlers. Let the record show that my mother has always been awesome, and that in the years when I thought otherwise I was an idiot.

I’m blogging from the airport, on his laptop, with its cell modem and wireless mouse. Yeesh. My husband lives in the future.

Sydneysiders might wanna bookmark Linux.conf.au Open Day. USonians, don’t call me on my cell, because I left it on the hall table. I will be checking mail.

C: Daddy daddy daddy! Bebe nearly bit me.

J: Really? Why is that?

C: Because I was chasing her.

J: So what do you think we should do?

C: …get a new cat?

Claire seems to be phasing out her long afternoon nap, which is more than somewhat alarming, as the long afternoon nap is what’s kept us sane lo these many years. On the other hand, it’s ten to nine and both girls are in bed. A reliable earlier bedtime would be a heckuva tradeoff, in the non-ironic, pre-Katrina sense of heckuva.

I had a run of good books in La Paz. Sky Coyote instantly became my favourite Kage Baker, because while I find her time-travel series engrossing, her usual protagonist annoys me. Mendoza, alas, is a Mary Sue. Everyone loves her, for no discernable reason. However idiotically she behaves, she always turns out to be right. She’s just like Harry Potter. I want to slap them both.

Sky Coyote is narrated by the series equivalent of Hermoine Grainger, and since I’m a sardonic supporting character myself, I find Joseph’s point of view much more to my taste. The book also has a wonderful double structure. Joseph is infiltrating a Chumash village in the Ventana wilderness with the goal of rescuing its material culture and inhabitants from the arrival of the Europeans. At the same time, the immortal operatives of the Dr Zeus company are studying the motives of their mortal masters from the future. Time travel, of course, is just another species of colonialism, just as any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology. This was a good book to read on my first trip to Mexico.

So was Transmission, which is also deeply concerned with the interplay of economics and human migration, and very funny. To my delight and Jeremy’s it is set in what is recognizeably our California and tech industry; author Hari Kunzru did his homework, nails the Valley and thanks Danny in the acknowledgements. One sardonic supporting character shares many of her good qualities with Quinn. Next came Black Swan Green, a genuinely beautiful literary retelling of The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole.

Right now I’m reading two books at once: Salome’s first edition of The Lathe of Heaven, with its accurately globally-warmed Mt Hood, and Quinn’s copy of The Years of Rice and Salt. It took me a while to get stuck into the latter but now I’m hooked on its clear-eyed unsentimentality, its inexorable tides of good fortune and tragedy. It’s not exactly escapist but it does help dispel some of my anxiety. The rest of it will not be dispelled. Bush is another Mary Sue. The USA has already lost the war in Iraq and this troop surge will only make matters worse.

Playa el Comitan

Originally uploaded by yatima.

The camera-that-got-lost-on-the-train is lovely. San Francisco is freezing cold. Claire and I want to go back to La Paz. “I like bumpy roads,” she says.

Sacrificial day was great. Bahia de los Muertos, the bay of the dead, is now Bahia de los Sueños, the bay of dreams. It was the most beautiful of all the gorgeous Baja beaches we visited, remote and pristine, filled with pelicans, herons and fishing eagles, yet with a restaurant serving decent piña coladas. Naturally developers are planning a championship golf course; hence the switch to a catchier name. Welcome to late capitalism.

Alternative title considered for this post: “No, Mr Bond, I expect you to DREAM.”

C (at breakfast): I told Frankie my dreams, and he told me his dreams.

We had French toast for breakfast.

R: My resolutions are as follows. One, yoga. Two, a chapter of the damn novel, every month.

J: How long do you think before you break them?

R: I won’t.

J: You always do. You should make sacrificial resolutions, so you can break those.

R: You should be more supportive.

J: I was going to be, but it turned out that was one of my sacrificial resolutions.

We trundled out to Playa Tesoro, a beach named for the pirate treasure supposedly found there. Trucks roar their air brakes down the highway behind it, and every now and then a giant silent ferry leaves the terminal around the headland, but between these two proofs of modernity lies a sheltered cove with shallow azure waters and white coral sand.

There’s a decent restaurant, its tables sheltered beneath individual palapas (a palapa is a sort of umbrella made of palm leaves) where we had pina colada and the by-now-obligatory tacos de pescado. While Julia played in the sand and Claire and Jeremy kayaked, I wandered on the rocks and looked up to find myself not twenty feet from an unperturbed Great Blue Heron. It craned its neck (hahaha) to look at me, then returned its attention to the water. I do not remember when I have ever seen anything so elegant. Its mate flew with slow wingbeats over the water near the kayakers.

We’re back at the Hacienda. After the sun set in pillows of peach and purple, a full moon rose. We’ve been having tremendous communal meals: t-bone steak, fish Frankie and Shaun caught at the beach a hundred feet away. Tonight is crab pasta. My New Years Eve apple pie met with great acclaim so I am making two more. Tomorrow is our last full day here, but there is no way it can top today, so I will regard it as a sacrificial day.

Cait points out that in Greece you don’t have to pay property taxes on unfinished buildings, so no one ever bothers to finish them. Seems eminently reasonable to assume that the same effect is at work in Turkey and Mexico. How did travel writers ever get anything right, before blogs and wikiality?

Other factoids I wanted to write down somewhere: 80% of visitors to La Paz are domestic, and only 20% international. Our silvery girls are slightly exotic oddities, and every little Leo and Sebastian on the Malecon wants to come and play with them, so we’ve had tons of very amicable near-conversations with the other parents in their decent English and our bad Spanish.

That’s about to change, with Alaska and Delta flying direct to the microaeropuerto and with remote Playa Tecolote slated for development into the new Los Cabos. Come and see La Paz now, while it’s still middle-class and Mexican! That way you too can be the agents of change, transforming the very unspoiledness you came to admire.

We’re not the only ones. Per Wikipedia, average wages in La Paz are in the US$27 per day range, compared with $4 or less elsewhere in Mexico. People come here to work and remit money to their families, so population growth is stratospheric – I’ve seen estimates up to 25%, and nothing less than 10% (yes, that’s per annum, thank you Dad.) There’s a severe labor housing shortage. Unskilled workers build tar-paper shacks, but skilled workers can’t rent the rooms that property owners want to let to tourists. So planners are breaking ground on satellite cities. Yeah, in a desert on a faultline.

But what if it works, what if the satellite cities are dense green hives rather than awful sprawl, what if we find some way to live amicably alongside the tarantulas and whales? Mexico is nothing like as poor as I’d feared; in some ways it’s doing better than San Francisco. We need to put all these people somewhere. What if there’s a way to think about the future where change isn’t automatically for the worse?

As I get older I feel more and more like a redwood tree (or a saguaro cactus, for that matter): my children flicker around my feet like timelapse photography of ants eating fruit, and I am acutely conscious of the waves eating the cliffs away one grain of sand at a time. The city of peace and I are works in progress. This is a postcard from the unfinished building of Baja.

Two thousand and bloody six is over, I am drinking pina coladas by the pool, Alex and Io are having a baby girl and I am crying with happiness.

About eighteen months ago, when we finally decided to call our second daughter Julia rather than Zoë, I admitted to Salome that my last remaining objection to this (gorgeous) name was that it shared an initial with Jeremy. How would I abbreviate her name in records of her witty remarks on this blog? Salome suggested using Ja, and so I will.

R: There’s Mary and Joseph and the baby Jesus and the shepherd and his sheep and the ox and the ass. Huh. There are only two wise men. We’re missing a wise man!

Ja: Uh-oh!

Baja continues beautiful and with the awesome food, although ask me sometime about the road to San Juan de la Costa. Uh-oh indeed.

It’s incredible that we can get on the Net here at all, so I can’t really complain about the limitations of our link (repeater won’t talk to my iBook, for some reason, so I have to sit right next to the satellite dish on top of Eberhard’s house. As this is a beautiful roof terrace with comfy chairs, a palapa for shade and a stunning view across Bahia La Paz, it’s a sacrifice I am willing to make.) Anyway, the real limitation is time, and I am taking advantage of a rare moment during which the girls are simultaneously napping (except that I think Julia has already woken up.) Blogging is a luxury and I appreciate it.

R: I have shared my views on Baja with the blogosphere!

Jonathan: Oh my God.

R: I’ve been here all of 48 hours. I should hire myself out as a consultant.

Jonathan (a consultant): Now you’re talking.

More news from La Paz, the city of peace: a chicken walking across the street downtown; an ugly tangle of power lines that would not disgrace San Francisco; SI VENDE signs everywhere; mangy, starry-eyed stray dogs waiting politely for the children to drop their food; fish tacos of a deliciousness that would make a gastronomically-inclined angel weep with delight. Dove-grey clouds have drawn a discreet veil over the relentless sun. Did I say that the Sea of Cortez is opal? It’s not, it’s more like blue topaz, lit from within.

Eberhard has loaned us his 1988 VW Fox, which I promptly christened Faustus (because he’s the fastest.)

Eberhard: How do you love my car?

R: I love him completely.

Today we drove out to the Playa Tecolote, a lonely Corona-ad beach facing the Isla Espiritu Santu with its red rock formations and sealion colony. There was a restaurant with a vaulted palapa roof, where we were sheltered from a boisterous wind. The ceviche was tart and juicy. People here seem to love children; even the waitrons are all smiles as the girls hurl tortillas y camarones to the floor.

Holidays are very different when you have kids. I can’t say I miss the before-time, because I never really miss it: I was unmedicated then, and desperately unhappy most of the time. But the work involved with children is endless – feeding them, washing them, washing their dishes, washing their clothes, changing them, playing with them, making sure they don’t drown or impale themselves or hurl themselves from great heights, answering their increasingly bewildering questions, tiring them out, getting them to sleep. And in case I haven’t made this perfectly clear, I am a very lazy woman. The big advantage of being here is that food, laundry, play and sleep are all within about thirty feet of each other, so we’re enjoying the change of scenery, and not having to walk quite as far.

But oh, the bewildering questions! Claire floored me yesterday.

C: Will the policemen in Mexico not kill us? Like the policemen in San Francisco want to kill us?

R: Whoa! Whoa. Whoa, back up a little. Jesus! Where did that come from?

J (peacefully): I’m guessing this is why people decide to homeschool.

Since the post-Thanksgiving Season of Death, or SOD as I have taken to calling it, I have been volatile in a way that recalls my pre-Zoloft mood swingalings. Thus, Jeremy leaves my present on the train: “That’s it! Christmas is cancelled!” The engine driver gives it back: “You’ve saved Christmas!” We miss the dawn flight to LAX: “That’s it! Christmas is cancelled!” We get on our standby flight, sprint across the terminal and make our connecting flight to La Paz by the barest skin of our teeth: “You’ve saved Christmas!”

I swarmed over the Web before we came, trying to get a sense of what to expect from this part of Mexico, and it’s a measure of my failure that I hoped before the holiday was over to see a big, old Saguaro cactus. I must have seen a million as our tiny jet banked into La Paz’s miniature international airport. Remember the sagebrush-and-cactus desert from Warner Bros cartoons? Baja is just like that. I keep expecting Wile E. Coyote to appear with an Acme grenade launcher and a cunning plan.

(Let the record show that Claire and Julia survived the very stressful nine-hour journey south with astonishing grace and tenacity; so much so that when we touched down in La Paz, they were both peacefully asleep. This presented me and Jeremy with something of a conundrum, as our stroller was checked baggage and we had slightly too many bags to carry two sleeping children as well. Julia neatly solved the puzzle by waking up and toddling intrepidly across the tarmac, attached to my finger. The kid is awesome. Jeremy got a picture.)

So here we are at the Hacienda del Sol in La Paz; the house of the sun in the city of peace. Weirdly, the closest analogue in my experience is Turkey, another fast-developing tourist destination filled with Northern European retirees. Like Turkey, Mexico is startlingly poor. A lot of the houses have unfinished second storeys, waiting for more money to turn up, giving them crazy hairdos of cement blocks and exposed rebar. Huge lots are filled with building rubble like upturned puddings baked in a bowl. It’s easy to tell the unharmed desert from the waste land. Like Australia’s ecosystem, Baja’s is old and arid and obviously takes a long time to heal.

Yet yet yet! The wealth of it, the hummingbirds and pelicans and cranes, the honeyeater that just came to frisk me over for nectar, the opal Sea of Cortez, the bougainvillea and palm trees beloved of the retirees, the cactus! Eberhardt and Renata, our hosts, respect their cactus and have built around them, so the Hacienda bends to accomodate its ancient citizens. There’s a pool with tile mosaics and a centuries-old cactus on an island in the middle. There’s another pool with a concrete waterfall concealing the laundry. Staying here with Jonathan and Re, Knoa and Avi, Frankie, Tina and Noelle feels a bit like having a Burning Man camp in the middle of a tiny Hearst Castle. With tequila. And insane midgets.

A warm wind is blowing the winter fog out of my brainpan.

We’ve been together almost eleven years. I can tell he’s upset as soon as I pick up the phone.

“I left your Christmas present on the train.”

“Oh no.”

“I know.”

This is what it is to be married: I drive through the rain to Fourth and King, furious because he has been absent-minded again, anxious because we were trying to have a frugal Christmas, upset because a gift he bought me is lost, distraught because he is probably more upset about it than I am, secretly rather proud that I am being a good sport, then on the edge of tears because I am tired and hungry and driving through the rain.

I park and walk circles around the station. The ticket seller wants nothing to do with me, and it takes ten minutes or more before I find the kindly station agent with the lazy eye.

“My husband left my Christmas present on the train.”

He takes a step back. “Gracious! Follow me!”

We charge through the train. We interrogate the cleaner. I slow down as we go through carriage after carriage empty-handed, and hope fades.

“We’re all out of train,” he says, looking sympathetically at me with one eye and compassionately off to the left with the other.

We walk back up the platform in the rain.

“I’m mostly sad because my husband will be sad,” I confess. “I should go to a camera store and buy a replacement and tell him I found it.”

The station agent is amused. “There’s a great camera store on Second.”

“Gasser.”

“That’s the one!”

As we’re leaving we pass the driver. The station agent says off-handedly, “You didn’t see a digital camera still in its bag, did you?”

“I was going to drop it off in San Jose,” says the driver.

It takes me a minute to process this. “You found it?”

He produces it from the engine room. I hold it in my hands and stare. I am dumbfounded, elated. My joy makes everyone laugh. “Thank you all so, so much! You’ve saved my Christmas!”