Tagitude

Cristina over at Little Wilds has tagged me for one of them meme thingies -- it's very sweet of you, Cristina, especially since I've essentially dropped out of sight for the past month. So without further ado, here is step one:

1. Link back to the person who tagged you (done).
2. Mention the rules on your blog (in progress).
3. Tell about 6 unspectacular quirks of yours (see below).
4. Tag 6 following bloggers by linking to them (am going to break this one because the only people I know who haven't already been tagged will just roll their eyes and move on).
5. Leave a comment on each of the tagged bloggers' blogs letting them know they've been tagged (see above).
   

The problem with completing step 3 is: Quirks? What quirks? I have no quirks. I'm just normal, me. OTHER people have quirks. But if you really insist:

1. I have a hatred bordering on the pathological for the word "utilized".
2. When embarrassed, caught out or otherwise feeling on the spot I spend the next couple of minutes humming nonchalantly to myself (I only noticed this one recently).
3. I make my tick marks backwards - it's the only sensible option for the lefthanded.
4. I genuinely like Bollywood movie tunes. When news and talk radio is seriously getting me down - which rarely takes more than five minutes in the car - Radio Lotus always cheers me up.
5. When a rat runs over my foot I scoop it up and cuddle it instead of shrieking and jumping on a chair (this will not apply in the case of rats I don't actually own).
6. My earring collection spans 20 years, during many of which my fashion sense was, shall we say, broken. But I can't bring myself to get rid of any of them; not even the dayglo wooden fish.
   

So there you go. Thanks for helping me break the drought, Cristina!

Two ways to make your dog die of embarrassment

You can visit the Yuppy Puppy pet shop and buy her a tutu:

or a little playful fetish gear:

The images are taken with my phone camera so excuse the quality, but I didn't think anybody would believe me without photographic evidence. And they they thought *I* was odd going there to buy rat food.

First you get the pets, then you bury the pets

We have just buried poor little Sniffle Rat in the back garden:


I wish I knew exactly what had happened; JJ and a friend were playing with him this morning and somehow I think his little neck got broken. JJ came running into my office mid-phonecall shouting that he'd gone all floppy. She is devastated; this was her first pet and she called him "my little baby". I will miss him too, he was a spirited young rat. We will have to get a new companion for poor Doodles who has lost his playmate. Sigh.

The timing is strange: the girls were questioning their dad carefully in the bath last night about death, what it meant and whether we were going to die. This is the first time they have really thought about this: one of their friends, our neighbour, has just lost her dad very suddenly to cancer. Sekkie's nursery school teacher has very lovingly and beautifully created a space in which the three- and four-year-olds can process this -- they are having a special goodbye Festival today -- and she has warned us to expect questions and concerns. So I guess JJ has quite a lot to think about right now. After all the morning's trauma I have parked her in front of Fantasia with the friend, because sometimes escapism is right.

And then, just because life is like that, this is how beautiful the walk to school was this morning:

A rat in my kitchen

For months before her sixth birthday, JJ was clear that she wanted two things: A party at Jimmy Jungles indoor playground, and a pet. For those of you who have no idea what Jimmy Jungles might be, count yourselves lucky. The rest will agree with me that it is one of the least adult-friendly places on the planet; but the kids love it, so Jimmy Jungles it was. I slept 12 hours that night (possibly the pizza restaurant afterwards was a mistake).

As for the pet, JJ's parents had a dilemma: neither of us like dogs (too needy, all that poo to pick up or step in) and L is allergic to cats. So, after much research, we decided on a rat. Or actually a pair of rats, because apparently it has to be a pair, which we got from a breeder in town. Their pedigree names (yes, rats have pedigrees) are Sammael and Boegiboe; JJ promptly renamed them Sniffle and Doodles. Here are the boys:


Doodles is the younger, more nervous blonde; Sniffle is the older, more adventurous brunette. After two weeks we are all more or less used to each other and the boys are happy to climb all over us in a tickly sort of way provided we don't move too suddenly. This and small children is not always possible (funny, that) and occasionally they have to be moved away when the hordes descend; but at night when the kids are asleep it's actually quite sweet to sit and play with them.

Last night was L's night out and my night in, which I planned to spend sitting with the boys, having hot drinks and knitting and maybe reading a bit and getting to bed early. Hah! (she said bitterly). Sniffle got a little too adventurous and discovered the washing machine -- or, to be more precise, the space *behind* the washing machine -- and I spent an hour sitting on the (cold) kitchen floor trying to tempt him out with chocolate-coated peanuts and bits of marshmallow. So my cuddly night in was spent remonstrating with a rat. THIS is probably why some people choose to remain childless.

On the other hand, there is this:

Sekkie with flowers for her teacher on the last day of school; and this:

Winter colour on the way to school with JJ this morning.

As of today they are both on holiday. Wish me luck.

My favourite author bio, ever

From the back flap of a picture book called Hog-Eye we got from the library today:

"Susan Meddaugh, gorgeous and younger than you are, has won the Newbery, the Caldecott, a Pulitzer, and the Nobel Prize for Literature, not to mention the Miss Teen America crown. She lives in Paris when she's not in Rome, with her twenty-three children all under the age of ten. A successful lawyer, she devotes her spare time to volunteer work for world peace, the Restore Wolves to the North Woods Foundation, and Free the Pigs. When she's not writing and illustrating children's books she is writing her dissertation for her Ph.D in Primatology.

And that's the truth.

Or is it?"

PS While looking for a site about her to link to, I stumbled on one called "unjobs.org". Imagine my disappointment when I discovered that the "un-" stands for "United Nations". She strikes me as just the sort of person who'd be proud to have an unjob.

More reasons to knit

My mother-in-law found an English version of Lana Grossa's latest pattern magazine and showed it to me yesterday; I don't think I've stopped drooling yet. It is astonishing what good design can do for knitting; there just is no comparison between this stuff and the ten- or twenty-year-old plain vanilla sweater patterns commonly available. Having just completed my first voluntary knitting project in 30-odd years, is it too soon to try lace, do you think?

The tooth fairy has a lot to answer for

JJ's teacher called me from school yesterday to say my child had knocked her two top front teeth out on a see-saw; I arrived to find her sobbing in the teacher's lap, an ice-cube pressed to her gums and her two little teeth in an envelope. It wrings my heart just writing about it... she calmed down once I'd got her home and cuddled up on my bed with a few stories, but didn't want anybody to see her; she was worried that she looked awful and couldn't talk properly. The dentist helped a lot by showing her the x-ray on which the new teeth were clearly visible, just waiting to come out. And by giving her a balloon, which I followed up with a visit to the toy shop. So all in all she was feeling much better by bedtime, and even more so this morning when she found the Tooth Fairy's letter and double dose of coins. She actually *asked* to go to school, which doesn't happen much at the moment.

But. My poor baby is far less winsome than she was yesterday morning. A gangly kid with a huge gap in the front of her mouth who talks funny is, let's face it, far less appealing than her cherubic peers, and she is not going to find quite such easy acceptance from the world for a while. Maybe never again. Sekkie, meanwhile, is at the height of her three-year-old charm, able to melt hearts just by putting her little chin in her hands and looking at people. She has taken to bringing me rolled-out bits of paper wrapped in sticky tape and saying "Here mama, here's a sceletope for you." I sometimes wonder whether she gets the word wrong deliberately because she knows we think it's cute.

JJ has been concentrating her gift-giving on the fairies, with gratifying results (for her). The Sleep Fairy, who's made a reappearance in our lives, has been outfitted with an entire wardrobe made of tinfoil and left on the plants outside overnight: skirts, ponchos, shoes, hats, a wand cover and several purses. This means Dad and I have to remember to go outside every night and collect them, leaving appropriate thank-you notes behind. Being a fairy is hard work.