New Years Day 2012

When the Teen was little, we would sometimes sit outside blowing wish bubbles. Sometimes we'd make a wish for ourselves within the bubbles, sometimes we'd wish on behalf of our friends, and sometimes we'd really push bubble magic by wishing for the world as a whole. 

Fast forward to New Years Day 2012. All the elements came together this day. The Lad managed to swing the day off work, the weather was postcard perfect, Cheltenham beach was - surprisingly - not tooo packed, and the bubbles were flowing.... 

The Lily Bug revealed her wish to me as she stood at the water's edge.

To blow a really big bubble.  

And shortly after - she did. 

The girl is now a believer in the power of bubble magic. ;)

End note: This is a post dated entry. It's currently 3rd March 2013 as I write this and being that I've been completely slack about blogging this year, I figure I'll make up for lost time by uploading some of my fav pics from Jan & Feb with 'a few' accompanying sentences...

My Year In Status. And The Big Bad Smell.

There is something dead under the floorboards. It comes to me in fetid wafts. But no one else can smell it, or so they claim. Maybe it's all in my mind? Maybe it's the corpse of 2011, unwashed and forgotten in its shallow grave. Or - and this is slightly less morbid but a tad more horrific - maybe the Lad has tucked a pair of his work socks behind the computer desk as a way to deter me from whittling away New Years Eve on the computer, when we have family up from the 'Naki? (I'll be off the computer soon. I just need to finish writing this one last thing...)

This is what I am thinking to myself, as the New Year pulls up the zip on the body bag of the Old Year and bounces fresh and spry into its place. 

Once upon a time, a long long time ago, I welcomed in the New Year in style. The 'soo drunk on celebratory drinks that I have no idea why everyone's suddenly cheering and kissing.. what's the occasion?' kind of style.

That was a long time ago.

And prior to those kinds of New Years, I would spend the evening looking introspectively at my previous year, and meticulously write down resolutions for the next 365 days. Then never look at my list ever again.

This year, I said goodbye to the final hour of 2011 by throwing together a new banner for my blog.

Party hard dudes.

Scowled at the fireworks let off by the neighbours. If they wake the kids, by crickey... And when the Lad wandered by and asked if I'd made any resolutions, I could only think of one thing to say.

"Something in the vicinity of where I'm sitting smells really bad. Like, dead animal bad. It keeps coming to me in drifts. Can you smell it?"

The Lad looks at me blankly. Not the answer he was expecting.

 Remembering his original question, I share what vague New Year Resolution I've come up with. It's predictable, yes. But it's all I've got. Make this year really count with the kids - it's Bree's last year before she starts school. Indie's last year before he's on the list for kindy. Maybe even Char's last year before she starts formulating ways and means to go flatting with friends - gods forbid. So maybe I should make a resolution to teach her self-sufficiency. Better late than never, huh?

Then I think, I will reflect on this last year. But it's after midnight and I've turned back into a pumpkin.  Too tired to consider much else aside from how comfy my bed will be when I clamber into it, I reflect on my year the cheats way. Thank you handy facebook application.

I put together a photo montage of the year in review.

Once upon a time, I'd stay awake to see in the sunrise. Or at least try to. Now...

"Wait, is it your work socks?" I frown at his feet. No socks. Hmm... 

The Lad stands me up, sits in my place. Sniffs my bum. Undignified, I tell him to sniff his own. Still, the stench of carcass cannot be located. Maybe it's all in my head? The Lad can't even smell it, and insists I have a ghost living in my nostrils. Or words to that effect.

I resolve myself to check behind the computer desk in the morning (the later morning) and wander off to bed.

And this is the way we see in our New Year.

Happy New Year to you and yours :)

Wordless Sunday: A Childhood Memory Revisited

I realise the idea is meant to be 'wordless', but I have to explain. I just have to...

When I think of childhood memories (the happy kind) the first thing that springs to mind is Whangamata. My mum and dad had a piece of land down there, and that's where some of my most cherished childhood memories were spent.

Another childhood memory is that of horses. I was horse crazy. My mother alleges that they had to stop the car every time we drove past a horse, so I could get out and give it a pat. One time, they came across a drover on horseback, and asked if they could get a photo of me sitting on his horse. I was about two and a half, and the photo is one shown below (I'm sitting astride a cream horse).

I couldn't get the family to Whangamata this week, much as that would have been awesome, nor was I in the mood to visit any of the horses down the road, in today's bleak weather. But I've been scanning childhood photos and collecting vintagey papers & embellishments for an upcoming scrapbook project, and today seemed just the right kind of day to splay them all out...

And then there was the Mess picnic at Long Bay, and my huge (or so it seemed when I was 3) blue elephant which used to take me on magical journeys upon its back. Until my mother gave it to my nephews, and they trashed it. *sigh*

Linking up with The Memoirs of a Mother for this week's...

Letting Go

re·dun·dant/riˈdəndənt/Adjective

1. No longer needed or useful; superfluous.

2. (of words or data) Able to be omitted without loss of meaning or function.

This week has been a difficult one to blog about, to find words for. No particular reason, nothing to tilt the world on its axis and leave me speechless.  No reason to get my knickers in a twist (as my mother would - and often does -say).

Well, there was something. I suppose.

The Lily-Bug started Kindy.

I know, I know. So what? Right?

It's just that... I can count on one finger the number of times I've let her in the care of someone (other than immediate family) since the day she was born. And for the first two thirds of her three and a half years, she was the clingiest little thing in all the world - I never thought I'd send her off to kindy at all. I never thought she'd let me go.

But she did. Quite happily. Let me go.

 

Look at her charging off ahead of me; the little girl who is usually too scared of the road to help me check the mailbox.

She has been sooo excited about the prospect of kindy for weeks now. And I don't blame her one bit. My attempts to stave off cabin fever through the winter are failing. There are only so many times we can haul the spare mattress into the lounge and use it as a hut/crash pad/slide before the novelty of collecting bruises like they're stamps and sustaining moderate brain damage after repeat run ins with Guy Smiley's big boulder head begin to wear off. Painting, drawing, squishing play dough, rainy trips to the park, watching Little Einsteins over and over, tickle fights, straining mum's neck while using her as a human jungle gym.. It all gets a bit mundane.

No no don't stay Mummy! You drop me off here and pick me up later! I'm alright!

I fully expected her to enjoy Kindy. I just didn't expect her to declare "I don't wanna go home mummy!" when it was time for us to leave that first day. And I tell you (whoever you are - if anyone is there at all), that statement was like a wee knife to my gut.

A still small voice inside my head tried to counsel that it was nothing personal, and that the Lily Bug's eagerness to drag from home that spare mattress, stuff it in the bright yellow tunnel of Kindy's playground and bunk down for the night, was entirely expected given that she was crazy excited and fully willing to continue playing for at least another 18 hours.

The voice of reason is too damn quiet for me to hear at the best of times.

I bet myself up all night long, and all throughout the next day, questioning my entire parenting ability. Or lack of ability? Why didn't she want to come home? Is it because I lost my cool and yelled on the weekend when she was having that meltdown about the shower plughole? Am I a terrible mother because I use the computer while the kids are watching their morning kids programs? Am I failing as a parent because I let them watch tv at all? No, it's because I yelled on the weekend, isn't it? And, truth be told I think I yelled on Monday too... And probably the week before...

During Wednesday's Kindy session, I left her for the last hour, and throughout this time I fretted that she'd yell "go away mum! I wanna stay here!" upon my return. I knew if this scenario came true, I'd cry. In front of the teachers, in front of the parents picking up their kids, in front of my own children... I'd bawl my goddamned eyes out.  It was a scenario that played over and over in my head so clearly, the fear of it all but squeezed the air from my lungs.

Then it came to crunch time. 2.50pm. I walked through the Kindy doors with no small amount of trepidation, and found my little Lily-Bug sitting anxiously on a teacher's knee, waiting for mummy. She ran to me, threw her arms around me in a massive bear hug, all but squeezing the air from my lungs - and this time I welcomed the feeling.

“Some of us think holding on makes us strong, but sometimes it is letting go.” — Herman Hesse

Girl Loves Her Cars (but only if they're her own. Or yellow.)

 J arrived home from work this evening with a couple of Hot Wheels cars he'd spied on the grassy verge while walking from work. The Lily Bug's eyes lit, until she realised this meant another child had lost his toys. At first she was reassured that she could be the caretaker of the cars, but as much as she loved them, it wasn't long before she told her dad that he'd have to go and take them back. She wanted him to do it there and then "as long as it's not too far away daddy", but he promised to do so on his way to work in the morning. Except for the yellow one. She couldn't part with that.

I never expected something so conscientious to come out of a three and a half year old. She realised straightaway of her own accord that another child had lost his toys, and she didn't feel right keeping them because of this. Even though, chances are that some other random kid will end up with them anyway, but she doesn't realise this. She just feels the right thing to do is put them back where they came from and hopefully the Universe will see fit to reunite them to their original owners - or someone who doesn't already have two boxes full of Hot Wheels as our kids do anyway. :)

The Homeless Guy

While in the city with friends today, The Teen spotted a homeless guy shivering against the cold. She casually stood by him for a while and tried to block the wind a little, and wondered whether to talk to him and what/if anything she could do to help. Buy him a burger? Call mum to drive in and drop off a blanket? In the end she fished around her bag for some change. She told us he was so amazingly thankful when she gave it to him; it was just a couple of spare dollars to her, but meant a meal for him.

The Teen now wants to make a load of sandwiches and drop them around to all the homeless people she can find in the city. This of course led to a discussion about safety and how just because a person is homeless, it doesn't make them harmless.

I'm not sure if I convinced her; she has a beautiful tendency to want to save people. Some kids tote home abandoned animals and ask if they can look after them... Char asks if we can let Molly from Ireland come over and live with us, because she has a horrible home life. Or Samantha who's miserable since moving to England. I'll let her have my bed and I'll sleep on the floor. Could she just come and live with us for a little while mum, please?

She may not be doing a food drop off any time soon, but she's gonna make a fantastic career out of helping those who need it some day.

Time Keeps On Slipping...

The Teen has recently turned 16, and although she's still in the newbie stage of her 16th year, suddenly I am viewing of her as a 16 year old, especially in regards to decisions that make or break her social life. I'm not sure what it is about being 16 that makes a child seem so much older suddenly. Has she changed so much from who she was a couple of weeks ago, when she was 15? No... But a cosmic shift seems to have occurred nonetheless.

The Lily Bug starts kindy in a few weeks and likes to regularly remind me that she is three years old, and next year she will be four. She then sets about planning her fourth birthday party, and reminds me so much of her big sister who was also 4 once upon a time. Before she suddenly became 16. (She leapt from 4 to 16 in 0.12 seconds. Seconds, not years I tell you!) Soon I will have to surrender her to the likes of school. Time is slipping by too fast for my liking.

Guy Smiley has begun singing along to his favourite nursery rhymes. Sometimes he seems to croon in tune, or enough so that you can actually tell which song he is singing. While singing, some of the words come out plain as day even though he won't speak a word outside of 'ta' and 'mama' otherwise (I lie; recently he's begun saying 'dook' for 'look' and 'rah' for 'run'.). During Twinkle Twinkle he'll sing "wah-wah" for "wonder" and during Wheels on the Bus he'll say "rah-rah-rah" for "round and round".

My point to all of this (and I'm oh-so-quickly loosing the point as the time scoots closer to 2am) is that I would like to have moving pictures on a scrap page layout. Or a little doofer that plays for example, a soundbyte of Guy Smiley's singing when you open a flap on the page (like the card Nan bought The Teen for her 16th). Yes that's right, this is where all of my 1am ramblings have lead to. And I think I'm on to something here. Someone needs to make a chipboard-thin LCD screen that you can slot a memory card into, and stick to a scrapbook layout. Is that crazy 1am talk, or am I on to something profitable here? (If so, I have first dibs on the whole All Rights Reserved thing.)

So, at the same time that I'm wishing I could find a way to scrap the little videos I've made of Guy Smiley's singing sessions, The Lily Bug's rolly pollies and that section of time between coming home from school and sitting at the computer, where Char tells me about her day, I'm also painfully aware of how quickly my children are growing up. These cute idiosyncrasies that make them who they are today will change a little tomorrow, and a little more the day after. I will never be able to keep up with or remember them all, much as I try. Every day my children are born again. A little different from the children they were the day before. It is inevitable that unless I can write or scrap daily, I will forget all the many many daily precious moments I tell myself I will remember forever.

And on that note, I'm going to bed. I realise I'm literally squinting at the monitor and wondering why the letters have begun to dance a wee jig across the screen.