There is a certain Small Boy who resides in this house who has a magic ability to drive me insane, crack me up and melt my heart all at once. How do they do that?

The end of the school week, yay for that. I don’t have to haul the girls out of bed for a whole two days, though of course they’ll get up at the crack of dawn all on their own over the weekend I bet!

Sunshine is back gracing out part of the world and my washing basket is so relieved! Now I have piles and piles of clean dry clothes to fold and put away…. joy!

We have eggs, three of them today alone!

I spent a lovely hour just swinging in the hammock thinking while the boy child played in the sandpit and chattered away. There are so many other things I could have been doing this afternoon, but I’m so glad I didn’t.

It has been decided…. Dash will meet our dinner table on Wednesday. I wonder if any of us are really ready for this no matter how many books we’ve read?

Happy Weekend everyone.

Two weekends back I took a deep breath and did a brave thing. I bought four young hens from the farmers market.

It might not sound like a very brave thing but since we’ve been loosing chooks to the dreaded chicken plague (aka mereks disease), slowly, one after the other, over the past eighteen months, to begin replacing them is a little scary. We were down to just four laying hens, and between the old age and the broodiness we’ve had long long patches with no eggs at all. So it was time.

We decided on four 10 week old hens from the lovely young girls with their organic chook business, figuring that since their blood line has not been vaccinated for Mereks that they hopefully have some genetic resistance. Being young they didn’t cost us much either, so if they do succumb, while it will be frustrating, we won’t be throwing away piles of money.

Naming rights were shared around… one for Zoe, one for Izzy, one for Muski and one for me. Which seemed fair until the girl’s began to slowly but surely work at influencing all of us to name them what they wanted. They went with Midnight (the black one) and Star (the white one) and then lobbied for two more names that worked with their current night sky theme…. Sparkles and Moon. Not so horrific after all.. though Muski is still calls his ‘Rose Dinosaur’ when the big girls are not around.

So far they are settling in well, at the bottom of the back yard pecking order. They are yet to be introduced to Hamlet the rooster and the two old layers. I think they might need a bit more size on them before running with the big girls. Fingers crossed they grow up to be good strong layers and we can begin to replenish our stock from their fertile eggs.

Plague be gone!

The brush attachment for the vacuum is missing and the sucking machine is not merely aimed at the floors but also the walls, ceiling and every corner, nook or cranny she can find. In her eye is the glint of a challenge. She will find her prey and dispatch it swiftly up the sucking tube, every last one of them.

She is not hunting dust, oh no, dust is the least of her problems.

She is on a mission.

A mission to rid her domain of this autumn pest. A monster who invades her home by the hundreds. Who crawls up walls and into cupboards. Who drops from the ceiling into your bed in the middle of the night without warning.

The stinking, many legged millipede!

(image from Mick E Talbot via flickr)

It is the same every year.

Every year she taps out a desperate, somewhat demented blog post about these nasty little beasts. Every year she scours the interwebs looking for an answer, a hint, a clue on how to stop this black plague entering her house. Every year she comes up empty handed and heads back to the twice daily hunt, vacuum in hand, glint in her eye.

I am a fair weather gardener. I don’t like the cold, and I certainly don’t like to be outside in the garden when it’s cold or wet. But spurred on by reading Animal Vegetable Miracle (finally) and by a little something Jackie French said in her Backyard Sustainability book, for the first time ever, I am looking at seed catalogues and planning an Autumn planting.

I’m only half way through reading Animal Vegetable Miracle, but I am already struck by how short their growing season is. I have always whined about how difficult our climate can be here with crazy late frosts then scorching summers, but that is nothing to the months of snow and frozen earth that this family is coping with. The shear volume of food they seem to be able to grow in such a short period made me feel kind of guilty, and quite a bit inspired.

Our winters are cold, but not so cold that we can’t grow things.

Then there is Jackie French’s idea that just made so much darn sense to me- “When you harvest something, plant something else in it’s place.” Not only does that take care of dealing with weeds that grow on any patch of bare dirt around here, but it also means there will always be something growing and something to eat, hopefully.

So here I am, going through the seeds we already have, and those we have saved, to see what I can plant now. Trying to remember where I put the left over seed raising mix and trying to clear a space on the window sill to start a few seeds.

It seems kind of crazy since at the moment we are finally seeing some abundance from our spring/summer crops. We have tomatoes (no matter how early put them in they never fruit till March!?!?) and zucchinis a plenty, plus spring onions, radishes, potatoes and maybe even our first popping corn!

At the same time I am planting silver beet, spinach, broccoli, peas, carrots, parsnips and some other bits and pieces. It’s not a lot and who knows if they will grow, since I’ve never attempted this in autumn before, but hopefully we’ll get something back for our efforts!

Is anyone else planting an Autumn garden? What are you putting in?
And for those of you on the other side of the world, what are you planning for spring??

Cleaning my desk I discover the following;

1 detached Barbie leg
1 half eaten chocolate cup cake
Art made from several millipedes squashed between two layers of coloured paper.

While I am cleaning my desk I respond to the following incidents;
Muski coming inside covered from head to two in mud.
Izzy getting her belt stuck in the bathroom door.
A Guinea Pig weeing on the bean bag.

The bizarre thing is…. this is pretty normal for a Sunday afternoon.

Some days it helps to remember the little things that make you smile….

* Watching the school playground empty of kids as soon as the ‘pre-bell music’ starts to play.

* The fact that Muski insists on calling Winnie the Pooh “Wee and Poo”.

* Sunshine on the mountain in the morning.

* Watching Muski’s eyes as he sits on the toilet. They go from intense concentration to delight and pride as he begins to wee!

* Having Zoe wander in out of the blue and say “Hey Mum…. I love you. That’s all”.

* Skipping!

* Being served morning tea of tomato, butter and half a bread roll. (See photo above)

* Good News!

*Izzy still attempting to convince me we should call the baby Ophira.

What’s making you smile today?

Every now and then I get to thinking about the whole ‘twin thing’.

Out of the blue it struck me the other day… our girls are very rarely alone.

They spend probably 90% or more of their time together. They share a bedroom. They are in the same class at school. They play together. Often they even bath or shower together.

We work at making time for them to do things ‘apart’…. but even then they are not usually alone. They are with their brother or me or their father.

This is their choice. When given the chance to do something on their own they usually choose not to, though I admit they don’t often get the opportunity to be alone, even if they wanted to.

Is this normal for a six year old?
Is this just how it is when you are part of a family of five (soon to be six)?

I really quite like to spend time on my own. I relish an evening when The Baldy Boy is on night shift and the kids are all asleep and I can just be alone and do whatever. As a child I remember relishing the sanctuary of my bedroom, somewhere that was just mine, somewhere to be alone.

But I am not my children and my childhood is not their childhood, and most importantly, I am not a twin. I have no idea what it is like to be a twin. To have someone who is so much like you, who has always been there, who you know so well and who knows you back. I only have one sibling and I can’t say my brother and I have ever been close….

Maybe not being alone is normal for my girls?
Maybe being alone is not something they feel they need to do?
Maybe being alone is a completely alien concept to my girls?
When I broach the subject of them no longer sharing a room they burst into tears.

Of course this is just another version of the ‘together/apart’ debate which seems to constantly haunt me. There are ‘professionals’, not to mention a heap of books, that all push the line that they need to spend time apart. That we have to really encourage them to be individuals and to separate, that they have to be able to cope ‘on their own’.

While I think that learning to cope in the world on their own is important, I am not convinced that it is the be all and end all. I don’t feel that we have the right to choose when, where or how they separate, or to push them into doing it if they don’t want to. Sure, there are times when they have no choice but to be apart, and we are working on helping them deal with that, but I am not sure they need to be apart to be ‘normal’ or to be ‘happy’.

But is having some ‘alone’ time the same thing?
Do they need time alone to unwind? de-stress?

I find all of this so tricky. I have no idea what it’s like to be a twin and most books and professionals who spout advice about this don’t either. Child development and parenting books and theories are based on your average singleton child. Being a twin, an identical twin, is different. It stands to reasons that twins would be different in some ways, especially socially and emotionally, but are those differences bad? Or is it reasonable and healthy to expect children who are genetically the same (98.9 % the same in our case) and have had pretty much the same life experiences to be pretty much the same and to not need the same ‘apart/alone time’ that others do?

As usual I come up with way more questions than answers.
Why oh why isn’t there some magical book that will tell me how to figure out this tricky stuff, because really I have no darn idea!

(Image above is of the girls their first week at home – they were 11 weeks)

Threading can be a big ask for a two and a half year old, but my boy has had enough practice trying to copy his big sisters that I thought he’d probably enjoy having a go.

To make threading activities less frustrating for little fingers make sure you have a stiff ’string’. We used those lengths of plastic string that you can use to braid and tie fancy things with, but a cheap roll of thin whipper snipper cord works fabulously too. Make sure the items you offer to thread with have big holes and are not too big, so that it is easy to put the strong through the hole and grab the other end to pull it out.

Some things you could thread…
Large beads. (We had foam beads the girls were given as a gift)
Drinking straws cut into short lengths.
Patty pans with holes punched in the middle.
Paper streamers with holes punched in one end
Rolled Paper Beads you make yourself
Scrap paper, card board, recycled materials with holes punched in them.
Anything else you can find that has a hole or could easily be given a hole!

I am paying the price a little this afternoon for my late night reading caper last night, but it actually felt fabulous to be reading something for me. Not reading a book to one of the kids, not helping the girls read their readers, not quickly flipping through and article or magazine… reading a real book, and adult book, a fiction book, just for the heck of it.

Ok so technically the book I was reading is teenage fiction, not adult fiction, but it is was a bloody big book and I enjoyed every minute of it.

I am reading books by Isobelle Carmody. The girls were given her Little Fur Series which we have all really enjoyed and when I was searching for some fiction that might entice me back into reading for pleasure I decided I’d look her up and see if she’d written anything a little more grown up. No ‘adult’ books at our library, but lots of teenage books and trilogies and series.

At first I was a bit put off by the fact that they are classified as ‘teenage fiction’ but apart from the fact that the main characters are teenagers, there is not much else ‘un-adult’ about them. Fabulous, intricate stories with a fantasy/science fiction slant to them. And heck, I was a teenager once. I can even remember most of my teenage years so I can still relate to her characters.

Last night I finished Alyzon Whitesar and last week I read Billy Thunder and the Night Gate.

My only gripe is that our library doesn’t seem to have all the books in any of the series. That drives me nuts… I can’t read just one book and leave it at that, and I can’t read them out of order or start at book two! So now I have to see if I can get my hands on the next book in the Gateway Trilogy somehow!

So what are you reading?

The Small Boy misses his sisters when they are at school. He asks me every few minutes “We going to get get the girls now??”. He doesn’t want to do anything during the day, though he will be swayed for a little while by an activity or two.

Every little thing brings him to tears.

No you can’t eat the whole packet of dried apricots – tears
Please sit on your chair while you eat – tears
Daddy is sleeping/at work/out/busy – tears
Draw on the paper – tears
Are you finished playing/eating/doing? – tears
Please hold my hand while we cross the road – tears
Wait one second – tears
Get in the car – tears
Get out of the car – tears

When it’s finally time to go and get the girls, he doesn’t want to go. He doesn’t want to get out of the car. He doesn’t want to walk with me to the prep courtyard and he doesn’t want to wait for the bell to ring.

He wants to play with the girls when they get home, but he doesn’t want to play by their rules. They yell at him, he bursts into inconsolable tears.

So many tears.
Angry tears.
Sad, broken hearted tears.
Lonely tears.
Frustrated, “it’s not fair” tears.

On the upside there are occasional moments of pure joy.

His sense of humour is bizarre but spot on.
“Monkey says giddy-up giddy-up” – “A monkey says giddy-up???” – “Yes when he’s riding a horse!”.

He sings constantly.
“Widia oh widia oh have you met Widia? Widia the tatooooed lady”
“Old Mc Donald had a farm – e-oh-e-oh-aaaaaaaaaah”

He says he loves me like he’s had one too many beers…
“I wuuuuuuv you mama…. I wuv you soooooooooo much!”

He’s putting himself to sleep almost every night – no need for someone to sit with him, no arm… he rolls over and says “I’m ok you, come back in a bit”…by the time I come back he is out like a light.

Oh the but the tears….
Some days the tears well out number the joys.
Most days the tears well out number the joys.
But the joys save me, save us.

It is normal, so I’m told. But it is so good to be reminded of that as I read Parenting Passageway’s post The Typical Ages of Disequilibrium…

“2 1/2 years – a peak age of disequilibrium typically, typically rigid and inflexible, wants everything done according to what they want, when they want it, domineering and demanding, violent emotions, no ability to choose between alternatives or make a choice and stick to it”

Oh yes we have that, all of that, in large doses.

He won’t be two and a half forever though.

Following the wise words of Motherhood Uncensored – soon two will be 12 and 12 will be 22 and he won’t be around to sing about tatooed ladies and tell me he ‘wuvs me soooooo much’….. and I try so hard to remember that.