Black and white

emoji rocks for mother's day

grace at the optometrist

nina playing the trumpet

ruby's 12th birthdya party

grace and lily at the underpass

Lil at my work

The kids have played a round robin of colds and flu.  This week was Lil's turn.  The first day she had a temperature and was miserable so I stayed home but the next day she was pretty chirpy so I took her into work with me.  How much did she love my whiteboard!  She's just hit that stage where she wants to write everything all the time.  This says Gols (girls) and, behind her head Bois (boys).  Sweet sweet sweet.

Nina gave up the piano and took up the trumpet.  I maintain that I don't care if they learn music or not, but that if they do they have to practice.  Piano practice with Nina was unbearable, for both of us.  As a child I was also an incredibly grumpy instrument practicer, but was blessed with a much more patient mother.   Nina is not so blessed and in the end it was not worth the insanely ridiculous levels of rage I would experience trying to get her to practice an instrument that she professed not to particularly care for.  The wonderful wonderful thing about the trumpet is that I know NOTHING about it.  I learned piano for about 15 years, but the trumpet I can't even blow.  I don't know how to make the notes and I can't help her, even should she want me to and I think this is a great thing for us both.  Because, however much I try, I am just not the sort of person who can listen to the piano being played without butting in with my ever-so-helpful suggestions and my little carping criticisms.  It's something I especially don't like about myself.  So when she plays the trumpet and calls out 'how did that sound?' I say 'great!' or 'much better', and when she says 'it sounds kind of wheezy' or 'the valves are sticking' I say 'oh dear' and 'remember to ask your teacher about that'.  Oh sweet relief of an absolution of responsibility.

Ruby turned 12. Twelve!  She got her ears pierced.  I took her to a crazy hipster tattoo parlour where her ears were expertly perforated by the most tattooeed and pierced person I have ever seen.  Even his eyelids were tattooed.  He had holes through his nose so you could see daylight from one side to the other.  He was an incredble looking man, with a gentle and professional manner and I would highly recommend getting ears pierced with a needle over a gun.  She has had not the slightest hint of redness, blood, infection or weeping from either ear in 4 weeks.  

Gracie (she wants to be Gracie now) got new glasses.  She wears a kilt with suspenders, a crocheted poncho and runners, like an escapee from the 70's.  Sweet sweet sweet.  Today in the car she asked me what a convertible was.  I remembered coming across that word in Nancy Drew book and never knowing what it was (but surmising it was some sort of car).  I explained and said, why do you ask?  'Well in my book, there's this girl called Nancy and her father gives her a convertible'.  Turns out she is reading Nancy Drew.  Ah the passing of time and all that. 

Canvas

by Ruby

by Grace

by Nina

by Lily

Over the Easter break Kim got the girls to do a painting on canvas.  Thank god for Kim.  Once I was that mother who got the paints out more or less daily, made playdough weekly, did endless craft projects with the kids, sat them on my knee letting them guide the fabric through the sewing machine, displayed their work in an endless rotation on walls and on this blog.  And I didn't do it out of matyrdom or because I thought I should. I really liked that stuff.  I loved nothing more than hauling all the craft stuff onto the kitchen table and getting all the kids involved in some messy project.  It was my number one way to pass an afternoon.  When other kids came for plays it wasn't unheard of to sew bags or make potato prints, or stick bits of pasta onto cardboard and paint them.

Now it seems all my kid-crafting mojo has left me.  After more than a decade of parenting I just cant be bothered.  Painting seems like a lot of mess and hassle, and then what do we do with the finished products?  The art work on the walls has remained unchanged all year.  The idea of sorting through it fills me with ennui.

Maybe that is just the way it is - we are moving onto a new stage and lingering in the last one isn't so interesting (for me).  Unfair on Lil, who is forced to listen to chapter books when I'm sure the others still got picture books every night at her age, and who doesn't even get to watch half the favourite movies of the others because they've all grown out of them.  Movie nights on the whole are more difficult now - the tastes of a 12 year old and a 5 year old rarely intersect.  Do we just abandon the idea of a family movie and run it over two nights instead - little kids and big kids? I dunno.

I think I peaked too early, went too hard, too fast and left nothing in reserve.  

Sherlie, Peter, Stella and Miranda, Katie, Mark, Richard and Lucy

Sherlie:  Kids, we have mail! From your fourth cousin twice removed daughter's daughter's son's wife!
Stella: Mail? Yay
Miranda: Mum! UR kidding!!! I haven't seen her since I was like 1!  Thats, err, 'news flash' 16! Years! Ago!

Dearest Sherlie and Family
Here are Katie and Mark's school portraits.  please enjoy.  Thanks for being such a great husbands mothers fourth cousin twice removed.  
Love Katie Mark, Richard and Lucy XOX

Miranda:  What is this crap?!
Sherlie:  It's so sweet

Sherlie: Maybe we sbould send them our school photos!
Miranda: Mum! I don't even know Katie or Mark. I look stupid in my pictures.  What if Katie things I'm an idiot!

Lucy: Looks like Sherlie replied to our letter and photos.
Katie: Who the hell is Sherlie?
Lucy: Just your very very distant husband's mother's mother's fourth cousin twice removed.
Katie: What!? You sent her our pictures?
Lucy: Not only her! Everyone else we know too!

Dear Lucy and Katie and Mark and Richard
We loved your pictures.  I have sent you Miranda and Stella's portrait.  We would love to catch up.
Love Sherlie, Peter, Stella and Miranda
Hey it's Miranda.  pls note that I look STUPID in my pic.  DON'T JUDGE

This is where Ruby is at lately  - somewhere between a graphic novel and a doodle.   She's always loved doing these little vignette's and has a great eye for detail and ear for language.   I love that she can convey so much with a few strokes of her pen.  I like the fill-in-the-blank on Lucy's form letter - 'thanks for being such a great _________________' (husband's mother's mother's fourth etc) .  And the look that Katie gives her mother when she realises her photo has been distributed far and wide is one I'm rather too familiar with.....

Cafe De Paris

Ruby turned eleven last month, but her birthday was during the school holidays and we didn't get ourselves organised until this past weekend to have a party.  Unwittingly I organised it on Mother's Day, but I like to think that I gave the other mothers the gift of a few hours alone while their off-spring pretended to be in Paris for the afternoon.

Ruby has long had a fascination for Paris.  I rashly promised to take her when she is sixteen and that won't be a terribly painful promise to keep.  I turned 18 in Paris and that is the last time I was there, sitting on the steps of Sacre Coeur, trying to smoke, trying to be cool, with my glamourous friend Susan who had moved there to study, and feeling like anything was possible.  Hard to believe that was 25 years ago.

Anyway, her party was 'afternoon tea at the Cafe de Paris'.  We had macarons and eclairs and 'champagne' and petit fours, as well as party pies and cocktail franks and entirely un-French party games, such as the new-to-me 'chubby bunny' (look it up, it is most decidedly not sophisticated), pin the mouth on the Mona Lisa and a blindfolded makeover which produced some hilarious results.  There is nothing quite like the excitement generated by a group of ten and eleven year old girls. 

The cake was the now traditional ice-cream number, hastily decorated with curly wurly bars, maltesers and strawberry and cream 'flowers' at the base.  It didn't look all that flash but it tasted delicious.  And the really lovely thing about kids this age is that they are old enough to appreciate the effort involved and young enough to still be thrilled by the lollies.

I was especially pleased at the costumes we managed to rustle up out of existing clothes and a bit of ribbon I already had.  We only had one beret which went to Ruby, but an old bowler hat, french braids and a moustache gave a frenchish air to the others.   Lily went as a mime.  Perhaps it was the mask of face paint, perhaps it was because she was meant to be silent, but she was suprisingly chatty and confident, playing all the games and even holding hands with some of the guests - very unusual for our Lil, master of the baleful stare, the dirty look and the pouty lip.

I'm getting these birthday parties down pat now.  I'm learning where it pays to expend energy (orgnise the games and activities, have yummy fod that will get eaten) and where it doesn't (decorations, fancily decorated cakes).  Even given that Ruby and Nina shared a party for the first 7 years, I've still hosted 25 birthday parties, with another one this weekend.  I guess I should have figured a few things out.

The Lesbian Wedding

Ruby started out drawing a conventional wedding but the groom looked a bit feminine, so she decided to make it a lesbian wedding. Ten-year-olds get it.

Things to Do When You are Bored in the School Holidays (Pt 6)

Line up your collection of mentos wrappers and take a lot of photos of them;

Make a billion pompoms;

Then teach your friend how to make them;

Have someone over for a play who is also the youngest of four and as sweet and stubborn as you;

Beg your mum to take you out for pho;

Take iPhone photos to compare eyes with your siblings.

Thank Goodness for Blogs

How else would I ever remember that tonight, while reading the final chapter of 'The Wolves of Willoughby Chase' to Ruby and Nina, they were so excited when Sir Willoughby returned after being shipwrecked that they got up and started jumping on their beds for joy. And after we'd finished they re-told other especially wonderful bits - when Miss Slighcarp pretends that she was only joking about locking Bonnie and Sylvia in the dungeon but Mrs Brisket gives the game away by mentioning that two children are already locked up, when James sees them again, how Simon is going to be a painter. Isn't a great book a truly marvellous thing?

The Amazing Adventures of Spencer and Spike

If Ruby had been a boy she would have been called Spencer. If her best friend Indigo had been a boy she would have been called Spike. They have a lot in common, these two, not least a love of drawing. This is the beginning of their alternative universe. So far they've only drawn Indigo's older brother, Nick, reimagined as a teenage girl.....

Amaya the Gluestick

Ruby's world is changing. Its all about friends and collaborations. I like the 'About the Authors' page especially.

The Jealousy

No idea what this is about but it's a story I'd read and a film I'd go to see.

Little Sheoak

We went for a walk this weekend, to the top of the ridgeline.

This was the view:

If I were a spiritual person, I would have something profound to say about this place. We made a campfire to toast marshmellows. Craig was enticed away by the surf and the girls and I spent the next few hours alone up on the ridge, watching the weather roll in, wondering if the spots of rain would become something more.  Craig took the car so we would have been stranded which added a slight air of excitement to our adventure.

Lily entertained herself by taking photos on my phone. It is about the only time a photo of me gets taken so I quite like it, though it also involves deleting a billion snaps of legs, floors and blurry toys.

I love the colours of the bush. We were hoping to spot a koala, which we know are in the area.


But contented ourselves with this fellow who was entirely unphased by us.

Check out the size of this fungus (toadstool? mushroom? I'm never clear on the distinction)

And right next to it, this tiny delicacy:

The girls played an elaborate game for nearly two hours: they were Clara, Jenna, Susie and Lucy, ages 13, 10, 6 and 4, taken in 'off the streets' by a wicked 'manager' who made them spend all day burning sticks which he would then use in some unspecified way in his charcoal business.  They were forced to sleep together with only one blanket between them and were woken at 4am to start work.  'Lucy' (Lily) contracted a fever and was given some dispensations from work.

The main point of the game seemed to be an excuse to burn sticks in the fire, but the plot became quite elaborate, with visits from 'matron', the slightly kinder wife of the manager, his sweet daughter, Michelle, and periodic inspections from the mayor, to whom they were forced to lie about the conditions of their employment. Transgressions were punishable by removal of supper and more hours of work ("15 without a break"). The manager didn't know their names but called them all 'rats', though when they performed well for the mayor, who was happy to let this sweatshop continue, he rewarded them by cutting 5 hours off their working day.  (Have Craig and I been modelling a good work/life balance?  Hmm)

The game was rather Dickensian, even a bit sinister, but as always I was intrigued by the way children play.  It really is a skill that completely disappears at some point (I'm not sure when.  I remember playing these sorts of games as a kid but cannot remember when I stopped).  The way that games evolve organically, the way that children can slip in and out of various characters without explanation or question, how compromises are reached, how plot suggestions are made, accepted or rejected are all quite mysterious to me now.  Of course this does not always, or necessarily, happen seamlessly but on this day it did.  I wandered around, collecting bits of wood, taking a few snaps, absorbing the view.