Annals of parental mendacity Vol 17,856

So tonight, I got Sekkie to eat green beans by secretly inserting them into her penne pasta when she wasn't looking. She didn't notice a thing.

Putting me in my place

Over dinner this evening:

"Mama, you're the best cook in the world!"

"Ah, thank you JJ. That really makes me happy."

"But not the best mother."

"Oh. Hmm."

"'Cos sometimes you shout at me and you never come out of your office."

"But... [feebly] I DO come out of my office. I'm here more than Dad is."

"Yes, but he's the best daddy in the world."

If I didn't already have more usernames than I knew what to do with...

... I'd use the one JJ came up with today. Meet Thinkerbell:

That's her big sister Appleblossom at upper right. Both new additions to the family as a result of maternal sleeplessness and a moment of weakness at the nursery this morning when I was supposed to be buying new flowerpots.

And I know it's waaaay after Easter now, but I did sort of promise egg pictures, so here is Sekkie's egg tree from the lovely nursery school, with our more prosaic home-made one in the background:

And purely for the sake of random thingyness, here is JJ's "Three Two Blind Mice House". I'm not sure what the heart-shaped aerial is for; I think it's a consequence of having pipecleaners and lolly sticks and wondering what to do with them.

We were supposed to be going on a camping trip tomorrow but Sekkie has bronchitis & is a very unhappy pup; the prospect of four hours in the car for a one-night tent experience is not very appealing. So instead, given that both girls have been looking forward to this "little holiday" for days and have indeed had their bags (very idiosyncratically) packed since Wednesday, we are going to take them for breakfast somewhere near Stellenbosch and then a picnic in Jonkershoek. Or something.

Today is also our tenth wedding anniversary and what with bronchitis and three nights of crappy sleep I have been struggling to summon much enthusiasm for the occasion; however I see there is a new box of Lindor balls by my monitor, so things are looking up :-)

Mama, you're lying in my forest

Quite often when listening to pregnant-for-the-first-time friends detailing their plans I find myself thinking "should I tell them? Or is it kinder to let them enjoy the fantasy?" This usually happens in the context of supremely in-control people explaining how the baby really isn't going to change their lives that much, the child is going to fit in with them rather than the other way around, they will not change their habits, etc. etc. I usually resolve the dilemma by reminding myself that it wouldn't make any difference if I did tell them because they wouldn't believe me anyway. From *that* side of the parent-nonparent divide (I remember, having been there once) it's only the inexplicable spinelessness of some parents that leads to them being so in thrall to their offspring.

So there's a whole bunch of stuff we don't bother to communicate across the gulf; we just have to wait with tea and sympathy ready for the day they arrive all wide-eyed and gibbering on this side.

Not all the stuff we neglect to talk about is horrible, though. For some reason I hardly ever mention in public quite how delicious it can be to have my sleep disrupted at 5:30am by a wriggly three-year-old saying "cuddle me, Mama!", throwing her little arms around my neck and breathing loudly into my face. When did she get the "d" sound right and stop saying "cuggle"? I didn't notice... and part of the reason I don't mind being woken at 5:30 is that someday I'll realise it hasn't happened for a while and then I will miss it. Even now those fiercely possessive little cuddles don't last long before she's off on a new tangent. By 6am I was being ordered out of the middle of the bed -- "you lying in my forest!" -- so she could burrow down under the duvet and have a long conversation with the elves who apparently live somewhere near my feet.

Last Thursday night her big sister lost her first tooth and started on the final stage of the journey out of infancy. She's got so tall and skinny; she's still wearing trousers that fit her three years ago, except now they're very short and tend to fall off if she jumps up and down. I keep wishing I could fix them in time, just for a few moments to get a clear bearing, but they're always way ahead of me, accelerating. Sometime next week she'll start rolling her eyes at me and being embarrassed; in the meantime, I'll take every cuddle I can get.

Shock, horror, tartrazine!

I've been sadly neglecting this blog under the twin pressures of work and a new obsession with Twitter and a whole bunch of other social-media stuff (warning: don't go there). Every morning on the walk to school I think "Damn, I forgot the camera again!" -- usually shortly after "Aagh, we're going to be late again!". I think I made a resolution about not doing any of this, but it's not been massively successful so far.

Anyway, random surprise of my day yesterday: in the supermarket, stocking up on baking supplies and Easter eggs for the long weekend. I don't normally buy yellow sugar -- apparently it's used in pickles -- but was brought up short by this large announcement on the packet: "Now Tartrazine Free!" They put tartrazine? In sugar? Dear heavens above preserve us...

Stay tuned for pictures of Sekkie's Easter egg tree...

Reasons to be cheerful, part 4*

My Barberton daisy (gerbera to most people, I guess) has bloomed again, entirely without encouragement or prompting from me. These always remind me of my ouma, who had them in her garden when I was a very little girl; I was pleased when they suddenly became fashionable and available again.


*"Reasons to be Cheerful, Part 3" is a song by Ian Dury and the Blockheads that's been popping into my head at inopportune moments for, oh, the past 20 years or so. Maybe this will exorcise it.

Scary book

JJ spent most of her day at school today making a Scary Book (her idea, apparently). The question for each page is "Are you scared of a......?" This one is my favourite:

This counts as her first book, I think. I know it's icky to gush over my kids, but I'm feeling gushy about this one.

Geeky book-person's laugh-out-loud of the evening

From the New York Times:

IN a scandal that’s sending shock waves through both the publishing industry and academia, the author Franz Kafka has been revealed to be a fraud.

“‘The Metamorphosis’ — purported to be the fictional account of a man who turns into a large cockroach — is actually non-fiction,” according to a statement released by Mr. Kafka’s editor, who spoke only on the condition that he be identified as E.

“The story is true. Kafka simply wrote a completely verifiable, journalistic account of a neighbor by the name of Gregor Samsa who, because of some bizarre medical condition, turned into a ‘monstrous vermin.’ Kafka assured us that he’d made the whole thing up. We now know that to be completely false. The account is 100 percent true.”

In the wake of recent revelations concerning Margaret B. Jones’s memoir “Love and Consequences” and Misha Defonseca’s “Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years,” the disclosure that Mr. Kafka’s work was based on reality has embarrassed editors and scholars.

Words and pictures good enough to eat

Library visits often deliver serendipity, and Saturday's delivery was more than usually pleasing. Here is The Incredible Book Eating Boy by Oliver Jeffers:


The illustrations are all mashed up from obsolete encyclopedias and discarded files and old school exercise books (you can practically smell them), painted on and reassembled into an utterly gorgeous book about books. I want to own this one, and everything else he's done.

Podcasts for kids

I've somewhat belatedly discovered the wonders of audio books, thanks to the actress Natasha Gostwick and Storynory, a source of free children's literature podcasts. Right now JJ is lying quietly on her bed (it's an insanely hot day and she had too little sleep last night) listening to Natasha read The Happy Prince; recently we've listened to the whole of Alice in Wonderland (unabridged) and the fact that Alice Through the Looking Glass is currently being released only one chapter a month is causing daily queries. There are over 100 stories on the site, some written by its founders but mostly classic fairy stories (Anderson, Perrault and the brothers Grimm all represented), Greek myths, a few animal stories, some Bible stories, etc.

My original intention of using the stories as a way to help JJ get to sleep has been undermined by the fact that she finds them utterly gripping and won't close her eyes until they're done; so we have to time things carefully. She speaks of Natasha quite familiarly and just staged a mock phone conversation : "Dear Natasha, thank you for reading us these lovely stories." I think I may have to email an audio file.

Making stuff

The girls made a lot of stuff last week. First JJ was inspired to make a supper of "an egg in a nest on a tree", so I set them to work making shortcrust pastry for the nests:

The pastry cases par-baked in muffin pans turned out delicious, but far too crumbly to survive rough handling, so we went back to JJ's original idea of making nests out of spaghetti:


The tomato fruits were my idea, the chive grass and parsley leaves were hers. The carrots are our default food-sculpture tool.

Then on Thursday she finished her bag at craft class:

And Sekkie made a tortoise:

This one is cute, its head emerges and retracts on a kebab stick which doubles as the tail. Sekkie loves it and has shown it to every visitor. Her nursery school is great for this sort of thing, she is now busy with a pompom and I am getting near-daily progress updates.

The best question I've been asked all year

On Sunday night I went to Talking Heads, an event which was part of the Spier Performing Arts Festival's infection of the city. Brett Bailey and Jay Pather found 40 interesting people who were experts in various fields, put them at tables in the Centre for the Book and randomly allocated them to 100 paying participants, two at a time for 20 minutes of conversation, four or five times over. A kind of speed dating with direction -- excellently curated and put together, and most of the speakers were well prepared. I was initially disappointed to see the laptops, notepads and other evidence of preparation -- I thought it would be more fun to chat at random -- but it turned out to be far more satisfying to engage with people around their real areas of expertise; things might have turned aimless otherwise.

My random draw pulled up Anne Schlebusch from the provincial department of education, Zayd Minty talking about Goemarati!, Annelie Rabie of Business Against Crime, and Dave Duarte, whom I'd been hoping to meet anyway, with a high-speed tour of the attention economy. The best question of the evening, though, came from Peter Becker, whose table I joined, also at random, when I should have been on a break (they didn't sell all 100 tickets --how sad is that?).

Anyway, this was his question: Imagine you're the victim of a freak medical accident which means you're going to live for a thousand years. Just you. How will that change what you do?

Think about it. It's a great question. We're all used to being challenged about what we'd do if we had only ten days or whatever left to live, but this one was new to me. Working on a time horizon of 1,000 years instead of a few months can make a dramatic difference.