Silvermine

Silvermine is an incredibly accessible bit of wildness not all that far from where I live, and yet I haven't been there for years. Big mistake, which I intend to make up for in future. My brother and I took our girls there on Saturday, on a misty moisty sort of afternoon which looked not promising at all, and turned out beautiful. I was amazed by the lush growth around the dam -- it was wiped out by a huge fire in early 2000 but it's come back with a vengeance, as fynbos is supposed to. This queen protea was the size of a large dinner plate:

In the category of general coolness, we found a golden orb spider with a freshly caught dragonfly, right by the path:

And just in case we forget how vulnerable all this would be to too-frequent fires, someone has left a reminder by the trail marker:

Finished objects, thick and fast

This is me completely and utterly surrendering to my deepest, darkest domestic instincts and making something for a friend's soon-to-be baby:

In the process I have discovered that baby stuff is incredibly satisfying to make: not only did I knock this off in a week thanks to four hours on a plane to Johannesburg and back, it also just feels very good to give away. The lace bit is from a vintage pattern here, the yoke from a more mundane but useful pattern here. There's a fresh outbreak of breeding frenzy among my friends and family so I get to make a few more of these in the near future.

In the long run, Vibracrete doesn't stand a chance

I don't like garden walls. I understand the need and the desire for them, but I still don't like them; I think they're ever so slightly antisocial. I like Vibracrete walls least of all because they're also ugly as all hell. But life always finds a way:


Provided the wall owner doesn't notice, which is entirely possible given that this bit of wall is around the corner from the garage door, come spring this wall will be a riot...

Last requests

"Mom! I want to be buried with my teddy."

"Ah... okay. Sure, that's fine. But go to sleep now, angel."

"My teddy AND my sticker book!"

"Uh-huh".

I'm beginning to regret that sticker book.

At last, a finished object

Actually there have been a few which I've not got around to photographing, but here is something that has been incubating for several months, a skirt for JJ:

I haven't blocked it yet or done the drawstring, hence her dodgy choice of belt, but she discovered it finished this morning and that was that. I'm quite proud of this :-) It was inspired by this dress a friend of hers wore to school last year:

Apparently this is Benetton but I couldn't find it anywhere on the web; whatever it is, it's gorgeous. I abandoned the dress idea when it became clear that it was a) going to be very heavy and b) take forever, but I think it works as a skirt. We do even possess shirts that match, although as far as JJ is concerned "they both have stripes" is matching.

Guerilla Gardening

Our neighbour's grenadilla vine has provided lots of good eating in the past few weeks, but we haven't got to all the fallen fruit in time. During this morning's cleaning binge (amazing what impending lunch with in-laws can do) I found a very wrinkly specimen lurking in the fruit bowl; on opening it turned out to be almost completely dried out and inedible. So the girls and I, armed with miniature yoghurt tubs full of seeds and pointy sticks for hole-digging, went to the neighbourhood park this afternoon and planted hopefully all the way along the fence. The park doesn't get watered so it's a long shot, but I'm hoping that a good wet winter and the natural resilience (weediness, even) of the grenadilla will see at least one or two vines snaking along the fence come next summer. We like the idea of providing free refreshments at the bus stop. Plus, the sheer gorgeous unlikeliness of the flowers demands that they be planted frequently:

Measuring out my life in tablespoons

Why do Americans insist on using such bizarre and arcane measurements in their recipes? I mean, ounces, for heaven's sake. But most of all, how the hell do you measure out butter by the tablespoon?

Shiny happy smiley

L discovered this relic of the past during a brief spurt of tidy-up activity last night. It's now JJ's new sticker album, hugged to her chest with every appearance of delight. Isn't it gorgeous? I always loved that kind of hair; and the trousers!

Symphony of musical beds

Illness and lost teeth lead to slightly needy children, which last night led to this circus which is best expressed graphically (sorry about the crappy graphic, too late to get the sizing right now):



Iterate the last frame several times as Sekkie moved back and forth trying to convince one or other of her parents that it was time to get up and read stories. *She* was able to sleep late; the rest of us were up specially early after Jess went to say good morning to her Dad and found the tooth fairy's letter. I am going to recaffeinate myself now...

Interesting questions posed by five-year-olds

JJ has a knack for framing acute and frequently challenging questions (this ability is of course unique to her alone and possessed by no other five-year-old ever). They range from the merely sweet:

"Mom, what's the difference between 'blah, blah, blah' and 'tra-la-la-la-la'"?

To the cosmological (and borderline incomprehensible):

"Mom, if the tooth fairy uses the teeth to build her castle or her house or whatever... then the old teeth will go all brown and rotten!"
"Yeah, that's why she's always collecting new ones."
"But.... at the end of the world, I mean when the world breaks into halves... or the world and the moon break into quarters... and there are no people any more... there will still be fairies..."

To the classical:

"Dad, where did the first person come from? 'Cos they didn't have a mummy or a daddy!"

To the painful:

"Why do all the brown people live in ugly houses?"

It's not easy to explain apartheid to a five-year-old.

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.