Tis the season

As with every year this one seems to have passed too quickly, and I find myself once again lying to my children so that they may be surprised on Christmas Day.

You may remember last year we installed a fridge box in the family room and told them we were babysitting our friend's fridge. They believed this lie so completely that they never even touched the box, which was good because if they'd pushed it hard enough the aquarium inside could have gone crashing to the floor.

This year Supernerd is hard at work building a garden bed in the backyard. But it's not really a garden bed.

It's my fault, really.

Last year I wanted to buy them something big, something bouncy. But we didn't have the funds so we got the aquarium instead.

This year I got a part time job and raised the money myself, so the big bouncy thing has been in three boxes under some old sheets in the garage for a couple of weeks.

With thanks to X-Man's Dad and his Pop as well, Supernerd has dug trenches and installed a retaining wall so that we can have a level space in an otherwise sloping back yard. It's looking awesome and I can't wait until it's my turn to help dig.

Meanwhile we uphold the fiction that we're working on a garden bed. Even when we're alone we still refer to the project as the garden bed. 

I'm so looking forward to their expressions when they see their big bouncy present on Christmas Day, but I'm also looking forward to not having to lie to them about it. 

Too much noise!

The kids love to help me in the kitchen. They each grab a stool and they sit up at the bench and help with whatever they can. This is a good system because it keeps them within my reach, and away from the stove and oven.

Over time they have learned that only Mum is allowed to touch the sharp knives, we have to take turns with the sifting and the stirring, and sneezing into the mixing bowl is definitely not cool.

On one particular afternoon they each had grabbed a couple of spoons and were banging them on the bench and whatever else was handy, belting out that Play School children's classic "Singing in the kitchen" with the emphasis on lots of volume rather than getting the pitch or lyrics right.

While I would normally join in at the top of my voice, I must have been doing something fiddly because I just couldn't tune them out in order to read the recipe properly. 

I looked up and growled at them.

"Please can you stop making so much noise!"

In reply Venus immediately began waving her spoons up in the air so they made no sound and declared: 

"Look Mummy, I'm making lots of quiet".

At that point, all you can do is laugh. 

Could be worse

I started coming home from school at around age 16 complaining almost every day that I couldn't read the board in physics class.

It was a combination of factors, really. There were only four girls in the class, so we sat together near the back of a long classroom. Secondly, the physics teacher's handwriting was absolutely appalling. So for a long time I just assumed that nobody could read the board.

My Dad suspected that there might be a problem, and he was right. It turned out that I was a little short-sighted, and everybody else actually could read the board. That's when I got my first pair of glasses.

It's a good thing I have them too, because I'm sure I would have poked out one or the other of my eyes a dozen times since then. Not only do they help me see distant things in focus, they act a little like safety glasses too.

But every now and again, something gets past them.

Several months back I was in the kitchen crushing some garlic. I was using a garlic crusher that I wasn't entirely familiar with, so I leaned down to see what I was doing, squeezed the crusher, and filled my right eye with garlic juice.

How it got past my glasses I will never know, but I can tell you from experience that garlic juice in the eye, although not as bad as onion, is still pretty bad.

But the one time when my glasses really let me down was over breakfast one day. I was enjoying what's called an EBC muffin at our local cafe. It's an English muffin packed with egg, bacon and cheese and it's what we have for breakfast on Fridays.

I'm not entirely sure what happened, but there was this stretchy bit of bacon that kind of gave way at the worst possible second and I... well... I managed to flick myself in the eye with bacon.

It's very hard to get bacon grease off an eyeball.

To add insult to injury, about twenty seconds later a toddler at the next table threw a bit of his blueberry muffin at me and it landed in my hair.

Supernerd tried not to laugh. He failed.

So now what has happened to immortalise this epic effort is that a kind of adage has come into local use. It's the kind of thing you tell someone to make them feel better when something goes wrong.

Things could be worse. You could have flicked yourself in the eye with bacon.