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:
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.
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.
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.
Miss Armstrong is the person who taught me how to knit, when I was seven and new in town. I was delivered to her class by the principal halfway through the school year, with the words "She's skipped a year, so she might be a bit slow." Off to a flying start, then, with suspicion and resentment on both sides, and things never really got any better. I remember her as small, blond, and sharp in all dimensions; my mother, with whom I checked this memory, says "She was a pretty little thing, but she shouldn't have been teaching little ones".
When it came time for our first needlework class, I didn't have any knitting to work on; and when I confessed that actually, I didn't know how to knit, Miss Armstrong was incredulous and angry in a "what's wrong with you?!?" sort of way. So she taught me how to knit, not in a manner which suggested this might ever be a fun thing to do -- and right-handed to boot, which for a very left-handed child didn't make things any easier. My first project, a purple square, finished as a lopsided purple rhomboid of sorts with a large hole in the middle. Our term project was to knit a toy; I spent weeks poring over magazine pictures of lovely and utterly unattainable knitted toys before resorting to my mother in tears at 6pm on the night before the project was due. We made a pink square, rolled it up and stuffed it, sewed two eyes on it and called it a worm (my mother still has it somewhere).
All of which goes some way towards explaining why I've always associated knitting with failure and incompetence on my part: "Oh, I can't knit". I made one oversized and never-worn fisherman's sweater when I was 14 and everyone was knitting, a baby jersey when I was pregnant with JJ and awash in hormones... and that's about it. Until now. Thanks to a lot of crocheting, Ravelry and the world of knit blogs, it has slowly dawned on me that this knitting business is worth another try. I realised it would be fun to experiment with a different kind of fabric to the one made by crochet, and even more fun to try combining both in the same project. It would be cool to learn some new stuff: circular needles? cabling? socks? lace? Mmm.
So, here is the first thing I have knit in 30 years without thinking "thank god I never have to do that again":
It's not perfect -- my measurement skills leave something to be desired so the two front panels came out slightly different lengths and they don't match up properly-- but there are no holes in it and all the bits fit together more or less as they should. I have (re)taught myself how to cast on with one needle, knit, purl, increase (two different ways) and decrease, cast off, pick up stitches to knit an edging and make buttonholes. I consider that a very satisfying learning curve (she said, smugly). Back to crochet next because I have some yarn left over and I really want to make the Boteh scarf, but consider me a convert.
I have been sucked into the publicity machine surrounding the release of the wonderful Richard Reynolds' new book On Guerrilla Gardening, and will be doing an interview with Jenny Crwys-Williams on 702 this afternoon. For those who are finding this blog via the show, there is regrettably little about guerrilla gardening on it (so far), but here are a few other resources to get you started:
It's been a frenetic couple of weeks since that last update, including an intense three-day course, a holiday in Sedgefield interrupted by bits of work, and several flights to and from Johannesburg including one unplanned night in a hotel because I missed my flight due to the death of a dog (not mine). Last Wednesday, which was pretty much the last time I turned my computer on before the blessed four-day weekend, included a 6am flight for a 9am meeting in Joburg, then a lunchtime flight home for a 4pm meeting in Cape Town and finally a quick stop-off at the lovely Krishna's for takeaway food so I could feed the dinner guests due at 6:30. It's bizarre that two meetings can account for an entire (long) day; the rest of the time just gets sucked into that dead zone peculiar to aeroplane journeys.
On a less whiny note, I have been knitting! For the first time in 25 years or so, not counting the teeny sweater I made for JJ in some sort of hormonal nesting pregnant-type state. Next time, I shall reveal all about the exorcised ghost of Miss Armstrong...
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:
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...
"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.
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.
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:
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?
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...
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.
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.
