By the second day in Shenzhen we'd lost a blue toy car, a yellow car and a spoon between us, which felt about right for the state of things generally. Nappies, jook, a video call where Lou lit up and said Mommy, and somewhere in there a whole set of small objects just stopped existing.
I had Lou to myself for most of that week, which meant negotiating stroller space on Shenzhen trains, watching my card get declined at a bakery until strangers offered to pay for my onion cakes, and standing in a border queue distracting a two-year-old with a bag of chips we'd started calling customs food. Lou caught a cockroach at the herbalist's and turned it into a game that ran the rest of the day, and then the rest of the trip: an invisible bug pinched between two fingers, held up to whoever was nearest, nothing there, everyone told to look anyway — and then eaten, with enormous ceremony. He caught them all over Hong Kong. He still does it sometimes, months later, and I still look. I got cupping and moxa on a foot that had swollen up for no reason a month earlier. Later, at a bar at home, I told the story shorter than it deserved: I literally said I'm going to go to Hong Kong and find a wizard, and I found a wizard. It worked. It's over now, which after a month like this felt almost suspicious.
The flight home with Lou alone was its own thing entirely, twenty minutes of sleep on my end, a stranger named Kay telling me two-year-olds were occasional nightmares, me telling Fox I felt like a zombie at the arrivals gate and meaning it literally.
Mid-month my brother had a call that scared everyone, a stretch where the work and the place he was living had both stopped fitting him. He moved in with us not long after, needing a change of scene and, underneath that, a change of career. What I didn't expect was how completely he became part of the household. The kids loved having him there, and he was wiping benches, doing school runs, learning n8n and Lovable off me at a cafe table while I built him a coach persona meaner than the one I run for myself. His dog went to a new family with an older Labrador at the end of the month, and we toasted him, cheers to Toby, half funny, half not.
My own job search, which had gone quiet enough in the last few months to assume dead, came back changed shape. An interview for a role at a company recently sold to private equity went well enough that the interviewer would probably have hired me on the spot if there was no process. A different opportunity turned into a three-hour timed coding test I resented enough to run the same task on my own tools in parallel, just to prove I could do it four times faster my way. Neither closed clean. By New Year's Eve, with the whole extended family in the garden and fireworks going off once the dogs were confirmed shut in, I told someone I hadn't gotten the role, but the process had rolled me into another one instead. Pretty interesting the way it works. The studio kept ticking underneath all of that, and a good stretch of the month went into Storymate with Dan — his idea crossed with one of mine I'd been calling Metablob — five thousand lines of backend I finally handed over to be taken apart and put back properly. It is still the most interesting thing I don't spend enough time on.
The house in Kapiti still hasn't sold. We argued the numbers on the beach one Sunday and I called the broker's fee robbery before landing on sell rather than hold. My dad's heart came up again too, a TIA this time, mostly resolving into the same routine as always: sore eyes, an early night, hummus he won't eat.
What I keep from December isn't any one fix. It's Matt at the table learning to build a website. It's a two-year-old holding up an empty hand and making you look anyway.
