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.

Nametag

This morning I was going out to do a bit of work, so I put my nametag on so as to look all official.

Venus came up to me and began the following conversation.

"Mummy, why are you wearing a nametag?"

"Because I'm going to work today."

"Oh." There was a short pause. "Why are you wearing your nametag on your left boob?"

I was taken aback.

"I'm not. It's on my chest."

She reaches up to pat my left boob and says slowly, reassuringly, as if I was stupid:

"Mummy, that IS your left boob."

In her defence she was pretty much right, and at the time I just wanted her to get her hand off my boob. She doesn't quite get that it's not okay to go poking around there.

But as I think about it now I realise that she knew it was my left side, so that means she can tell left from right. I have to say I'm pretty proud of her.

Now all I have to do is teach her not to fondle people.

Supernerd minus whiskers equals weird

For a long time, almost as long as I've known him, Supernerd has sported a beard. It's one of those ginger brown beards, with a moustache, longer on his chin and shorter on his cheeks.

He outsources the maintenance of his beard to Sam, his barber. Actually, he should properly be referred to as Sam-the-barber, as in our household following an ancient tradition, his name describes his occupation.

So for nearly twenty years his naked chin had not seen the light of day. Until yesterday.

He would never have shaved it off unless he had to. But he had to.

Why?

Because he landed himself a part in a short film in which he is required to play no less than five different characters, and those characters are to be differentiated by their relative amounts of facial hair.

On Friday morning he was a disgruntled slob with his entire beard intact, and clothed completely in carefully selected items from his own wardrobe, about which he is disturbingly proud.

On Friday afternoon he was a bullying boss with his cheek whiskers gone, in his own suit and a brand new business shirt. We still laugh when we remember how once Supernerd hung his suit jacket up near the front door and our children refused to believe that it was his, claiming it must belong to our friend Martin who sometimes comes to visit straight from work.

Then yesterday morning the chin whiskers came off leaving a moustache down to his jawline and he was a horrible dad, and then after one last shave he was the clean-shaven mate of the main character.

Now we've known for a bit over a week that this was going to happen, but I don't think I was really prepared and I'm just amazed at how much of a difference shaving off those whiskers has made.

In two days Supernerd has transformed from himself into someone who looked a lot like his uncle, and then into someone I've never seen before, and that's very very weird.

When he first grew his whiskers I complained. They were scratchy and went up my nose when he kissed me. But now, oh my goodness, I can't wait until they grow back.

Yellow

I love yellow. It's one of my happy colours, and when I say that what I mean is I wear yellow when I feel happy, and sometimes I wear yellow to cheer myself up.

Happy colour.

It sounds like a Japanese slogan for some kind of small jube, but it's true.

Yellow is my happy colour and that's why I have yellow shoes, yellow tops, a yellow cardigan and most recently, a yellow skirt.

But nobody, and I mean nobody, looks as good in yellow as this kid.

Singin' in the rain

So spring has finally sprung in this part of the world, for which we are all grateful, and with it spring has brought all the glorious symptoms of hayfever, about which none of us are pleased.

But today was different. Today we had some ripper thunderstorms with fantastic lightning and buckets of rain.

We just got home from my In-laws' house and did the mad dash from the car to the house in the pouring rain. As per instructions Mars was taking off his shoes before heading upstairs for bed, when he began to sing Singin' in the rain.

His Nana has been continuing his education in the classics, so he's seen the movie recently and now insists on singing show tunes whenever his father feels irritable, or perhaps I've got cause and effect confused there.

Anyway, as is his wont, he was changing the words around and came up with these lyrics:

I'm pimping in the rain,

Just pimping in the rain,

What a glorious feeling,

I'm pimping again.

So we told him to stop because that's a grown up word that we weren't prepared to explain. He was astonished that it turned out to be a real word, but he understands that some words are not for children to use. So he took off his other shoe singing these words:

I'm not doing it in the rain,

Not doing it in the rain,

What a glorious feeling,

I'm not doing it again.

Then he asked me if I could make a video of him singing his new lyrics, but I said no. I really think blogging about it is enough.