Things May Not Be as they Seem

Corn flour  - prepared from wheat? 

I started this blog as a way of recording the things I make and the endless creations of my daughters.   When I began it seemed that these things were the most likely to be overlooked in the normal documentation of our lives, which inevitably celebrates the special over the mundane.

Creating is such a constant part of the life of any child that it becomes impossible to actually keep everything.  I wanted to be able to look back at those early leanings towards form, the choice of colour, the eclectic subject matter. This blog serves as a way to catalogue the development of skills that aren't necessarily evident in the school reports and birthday cards.  My own creations don't usually dwell long in this house  - given away as gifts or sold at the fete  - so I wanted to remember those as well.

When I browse through my blog, I am grateful that I have recorded it  - I'm sure I would otherwise  have forgotten The Chip Band, and The Jibber Jabber Sisters, and Rapunzel

But the danger with recording part of something, especially part of a life, is that it starts to look like the whole.  Browsing through my blog, one might believe that our days are all lovely walks and ocean swims, interspersed with quiet sewing and scribbling.

And of course our life is not like that at all.  Or at least, it is not only like that.  Every so often I put in a post, just to remind myself of how things are in the 90% of my life that is not stitching felt pumpkins and admiring my children's creations.

Occasionally friends make comments to me which indicate that, even though they well know the noisy, bickering, chaotic, messy reality of our lives, the 'blog truth' somehow prevails.  I've seen these posts on other people's blogs quite often  - the 'my life isn't perfect, you should see my messy house' posts, and I've always thought 'well yes of course, isn't it obvious?'

It occurs to me though that, some years from now, I may well have forgotten the noisy, bickering, chaotic mess of it all too, and may start to believe that our lives, circa  May 2013, were pretty much fetes and quilts.  So here is an anthropological record of an entirely normal morning that one day may provoke wistful nostalgia but which currently provokes me to near insanity:

someone is singing, someone is telling the singer to stop singing, someone is asking for something over and over again, someone is playing on the piano, someone pokes someone, someone howls, someone says 'for goodness sake, put your shoes on' and 'NINA WHAT ARE YOU DOING?' and 'no I can't peel your banana, you can see I'm buttering toast', someone has to get changed immediately because they have spilt milk all down their front and someone is asking 'can we go now? can we go now? why can't we just go now?' and is also saying 'you're going to make us late as usual' and someone else is saying 'don't look at me like that' and 'MAMA WHERE ARE YOU?'  eleventy bajillion times.  Someone is distracted halfway through putting on a sock, someone is brushing her hair or looking for the hairbrush or arguing over the preferred hairbrush, or insisting they have done their hair when the evidence is clearly otherwise, someone is saying they haven't had breakfast yet just when everyone else is ready to leave, someone is trying to find their reading diary, someone is trying to find their chess homework, someone is looking for fruit for kinder, someone has no leggings/tights/clean tops at all, someone can't find their shoes, someone tells them that are where they left them, someone finds that response very annoying, someone says 'Mama can I just hug you?' and someone else might say 'Oh Grace, in a minute' and someone might scream 'no I don't want that banana, why did you get me that banana?' and someone will say 'I don't ever want a cheese sandwich for lunch again, just so you know'.
It will be someones turn to unpack the dishwasher and someone wont want to do it and will want to return to the days where everyone unpacked the dishwasher together and someone will get exasperated by this discussion.  Someone will make their bed and someone will not make their bed and someone will be highly likely to end up making five beds.  Someone won't put their pyjamas away or won't get out of their pyjamas because it is too cold, and someone will ask if they can have raw sugar on their vita brits and someone is really not hungry and really only wants toast but the rye bread, not the chia. Someone's hair is crazy and unmanageable and someone doesn't understand because they never had curly hair and don't know what it is like and someone does not want to wear leggings or tights at all even though it is cold and someone will basically never wear trousers of any description, even super sonic trousers, and someone will be asking whether they can read their reader and someone will be told 'Not now Grace' and someone will be singing and someone will be asking the singer to please stop singing that really annoying song.

That's our morning, every morning.