What Harriet's bottom can tell you about the state of the nation

Quite a lot actually... So here is the posterior in question:

and yes, Harriet is indeed 'backing black'. Literally. I think you have to be a complete hermit not to realise that, in New Zealand, anything with the word 'black' in it is rugby related.
I had one of those 'ooh that's weird' moments as I confronted cultural differences a few weeks ago, when I bought a new box of nappies for Harriet and saw they had switched from Hairy Maclary (from Donaldson's Dairy as anyone with under fives knows well) to All Blacks branding. Somehow I can't imagine Pampers getting the FA to approve usage of three lions on a nappy.

And if I needed further proof that this country takes its national sport extremely seriously, a quick stroll around the supermarket would suffice. If I'd felt like it, I could have bought All Blacks chocolate, breakfast cereal,

Yes, it is called Weet-Bix here. Don't know where the '-a-' went!

and milk. And the bottles are numbered 1-15 so you can even choose whether to slosh Richie McCaw or Ma'a Nonu on your Weet-Bix of a morning. I wonder how they feel about that?

Away from the supermarket shelves, there's even a national petition to push the start of the working day back to 10am for the duration of the World Cup to allow all decent Kiwis to watch the matches, which have kick-off times of between 3:45am and 8am here. I don't know how many signatures it's got, but I imagine it's doing quite well!

Back in August, Harriet and the All Blacks combined forces to defeat our plans to be cultural one evening. A friend had offered to babysit for us one Saturday.  Woohoo!  Spend some time digging around for something to do.  Don't want to go to the cinema because that's a bit boring, went to the theatre last time we had a babysitter - let's go to a concert.  But was there anything musical happening in Auckland on Saturday evening?  Nope.  Ok, opera?  Nope.  Ballet?  (Dave has traumatic memories of vomiting in a flowerbed in Buxton when we went there to the ballet, due to some dodgy seafood consumed the night before, but he was prepared to put that behind him.) Even that - nope.  How is it possible that there is nothing cultural to do in Auckland on a Saturday evening we mutter?  Oh well, let's just go out to dinner.

Later the penny drops.  The ABs were playing Australia for the Bledisloe Cup at Eden Park that Saturday evening and the entire nation has dropped everything to watch.  People planning concerts and other events know that there's no point even trying to compete so they just block out the match days in their programming.  I imagine it would have been a very quiet evening to go out for dinner, as every right-thinking person would have been watching the match, but thanks to Harriet giving us a run of bad nights for no good reason we were both too knackered. No culture and no dinner, darn it.

But back to Harriet's bottom. To bring you completely up to date, we have momentous happenings to report. As of Saturday, nappies - even of the very special backing black variety - have been relegated to a minor role. Yay for toilet training! So far, one accident per day, which is pretty good considering that Monday and Tuesday she was at daycare, where there is clearly a lot of very interesting stuff going on around her. We told the staff they need to listen out for the cry of 'Wee wee is coming!' as they have about 15 seconds to get her to the loo.

Reuben, once he'd worked out where to put his big boy pants,

Sadly, Superman style is rather impractical

Toddler dining in comfort...

...and entertainment too

turned out to be very happy to spend time on the potty. Tilly spurned it from the beginning and went straight for the toilet, and Harriet, so far, swings both ways, potty at home, teeny weeny toilet at daycare. Here she is demonstrating an alternative and unusual use for the frog toilet seat.