Lunch date at Matvilla Beach

Somebody loves Baba!  And somebody loves his baby, too. :-)

This guy was fishing on a small wooden boat - you know your fish is fresh when you're watching fishermen while eating!

Zarya wore shoes for the first time a couple days ago and now loves them.  Just seeing me get her shoes out of her bag to put them on her made her wiggle and giggle with anticipation. We kind of hope she grows out of her shoe obsession!

A couple of weaver birds were playing around where we ate, and this one paused for a moment to pose

Lunch!

Not the most flattering picture of me, but Zarya reaching out to grab herself a chip (which I did not allow her to eat, for the record), is pretty cute.  It's annoying to have a baby with such long arms - she can reach way too many things!  Where did she get such long arm genes from, anyway?!

Today we went out to lunch at our favorite spot, Matvilla Beach.  It was kind of a date, because Zarya doesn't talk yet, so Andrew and I could have a really nice conversation without her interrupting or understanding.  That'll end someday, but in the meantime it's fun to be able to go on a date and still get to take her along.  It's the best of both worlds!

Zarya got to eat her first fried food - not the attempted steal of a chip, but pieces of my fish.  I am happy to say she loved it.  I packed her lunch and brought it with us, since I didn't want to share too much of my fish, and a good thing I did, because otherwise she really would have kept right on chowing that tilapia down, like a true Musoma girl.

We love the breeze and the view at Matvilla, and there are always a lot of birds around.  Since coming to Tanzania, Andrew has gotten into bird watching (a little bit; he's not like a total nerd about it).  The birds here are just so beautiful and interesting.  I wasn't into bird songs until moving to our current house, which sometimes feels like an aviary in the mornings.  When I Skype with my parents, they can always hear the birds before I even say "hello" when we first connect and that's how they know if the sound is working or not and if the volume is right.

Sometimes it feels like there is just nowhere to go and nothing to do in Musoma, so it really is a treat to head out to Matvilla and enjoy our fish and chips there.  I came back this afternoon feeling like I'd been away on a two-hour vacation!