Last night we had dinner at the local pub.  Ginger and Peta loved the beer garden and let me know in no uncertain terms that they would be having fish’n'chips.

I indulged in a wine.  It was totally necesary once I read the description of the shiraz on the board (smells like the inside of a lady’s handbag; tastes like a man’s wallet).  My meal of swordish was a bit salty with its bed of mash and olives so I wanted a glass of lime and soda to refresh the palate.

Ginger wanted to order me the drink at the bar.  She and Peta excitedly made their way with babbo at hand.  She practised her order “lime and soda, lime and soda, lime and soda….”

The bar staff asked for her order but she was very low comapred to the bar height and babbo had to raise her.  She then propmpty requested a “slime and loda”.  You should have some next time you order the fish meal.

Our friends who had children prior to us speak convincingly and knowingly of “the second child”.  Part cliche, part experiential, they explain that their second child is, well, different.  This is conveyed by descriptions such as crazy and energetic but my favourite is “mad as a cut snake.”

Peta really tests this second child thing.

Last night she danced like mad to the first two tracks of the FooFighters’ The Colour and the Shape.  The songs are the slow Doll followed by the rambunctious Monkey Wrench.  At this shifting moment of vibratory sensation, Peta arcs up in a wonderful display of thrashing and jumping.  She is smiling with pure adrenalin and says out loud with attitude :  “Funken”.  Err, what was that Peta?  She tells me it is language.  She learnt it herself apparently.  Not sure what to make of that.

She tells me many times over the course of a week: “I so excited!”  Especially for haircuts and staying at nonna’s house.

She wakes up during the night with acute altertness and makes claims or strident requests for water, stories or finger-pointing.  I am blamed for not reading enough to her or for not letting her have her stash of part bag lollies.  At three in the morning.  We respond with “Okay” which cues her up for automatic head-hitting -pillow to resume her slumber again.  It’s truly Pavlovian.

She lies down in the middle of the Vic Market deli and screams for a carrot or apricot slice, refusing to budge.

She has a night terror that lasts for close  to an hour and is unable to recognise us.  She hides behind a laundry basket and I fear what her young mind must be seeing to react with such anguish.  We try to cuddle her and keep her warm until this fear subsides.

She pinches the skin webbing between forefinger and thumb of anyone that she loves and trusts including her carers and grandparents and aunts.  It is her comforter and she refuses to give it up. When asked by her babbo why she pinches like this she responds with such obviousness: “building a city”.  There is no rejoinder to that.  She is urban planning and she cannot stop it.

Before turning three she made the following claim: “When I am 8, after 7, I won’t be naughty anymore.”  Something to aspire to. I’ll remind her when next we visit the market and I find her sprawled in front of the organics section.

At her creche, a carer read the story of  Snow White to her.  Those main characters abide by fairytale stereotype and live happily ever after and kiss.  Peta says: “Just like my mum and dad.  My dad fell in love with my mum, they kissed this morning.”  (Fairytales should be deconstructed and reappropriated for modern day relationships with  added some tension, argumentative discourse and slamming of doors. )

I love my possum and she loves me.   She tells me every day.

She's laughing at this one

Still laughing

We went on a road trip.  We left the night before Ginger’s birthday and stayed in Bengigo en route to Mildura, followed by a motoring segue (probably not entirely sensible from a mileage point of view) to Jerilderie to check out the sheep at our friends’ farm in southern New South Wales.

The motel at Bendigo was a basic set-up but Peta and Ginger were beyond gleeful.  I won’t forget the constant trampolining across the typical motel beds. Boing, boing, boing. Nothing special in the world of beds but they acted as if we had deprived them of bouncy beds.

Some intense investigation of the bedding brought up exclamtory wonder and awe: “There’s wool here, mamma!” upon discovering a fairly ordinary fleece blanket on each bed.  Ah, the little things obviously go a long way too. The clincher of course was the real find: “These beds have got wheels!!!!!!”  Joy.  Their squeals were set at full throttle.  Fleece, in a beige sort of tone, and dodgy castor wheels.  That’s all it took to get us into hyperreal motel excitement.

Mildura was low-key mostly by our choice.  We walked along the Murray with an an incredible amount of skylarking, played at the big playground, swam at the local pool, treated ourselves to scrumptious pastries while checking out the Botanical Gardens, ate at the pub with all its brewing machinery, breakfasted in the Chandelier Room at the Grand where we resided for a couple of nights, and checked out some second-hand shops.

Let's tangle up our legs

Jerilderie was a chance to see a working farm and spend time with our host who are long time friends.  There were horses and sheep and dogs and chooks.  The shearing shed and all its shearing pens was a wonderful adventure playground.

This road trip told us that Peta and Ginger will eat multiple courses at breakfast if they are seated in a grand environs and given buffet choices.  They will joyously submit to showers and hair-drying if they are allowed to fool around on hotel beds.  They will walk a fair distance without complaining if they can rustle up other kids they have never met at a playground kilometres and hours away from their own stomping gound.

Perfect.

We are now preparing for a holiday to Liverpool and Chester in England.  We follow it up with a week in Paris.  J will be working in a town between Liverpool and Chester so we will spend a week in each location. I will endeavour to preoccupy a three and five-year old with Beatles memorabilia and old Roman walls.

Hotels with dodgy beds and jaded buffets, here we come.  (And Paris.)

Don't mind me; just planning the next holiday

I parent a five year old.

Her birth was documented by her father, her uncle and his wife.  The abundant photos show tears of happiness, tiredness and newborn limbs, all  from a July afternoon on a wintery Friday five years ago.

The miracle of who this baby is astounds me.  She has her own preferences; she experiences her own significant traumas as well as soaring highs; she nurtures her own relationships with family, carers and friends; and she conjures amazing worlds and theories tested by constant inquiring and observing and testing.

This July bunny rabbit was thrown a party that I agonised over.  There were lists rewritten many times over and party food tested many nights over.  Ridiculous I know.

The party was held in a wonderful old railway station house with a park nearby and shared with the bunny rabbit’s close five year old comrade.  The scene was set for Creatures Under the Sea which dutifully called up mermaids, stingrays, octpuses, coral, sharks, dolphins,pirates and fishy friends.  The bunny rabbit transformed into a shark (although there was a wilful reluctance to fully enage her shark self on the day) and her party partner transformed into an enchanting mermaid.

The sea creatures gobbled up fish biscuits and choclate crackles biscuits, sushi sandwiches, seaweed jellies, fish fingers and starfish fairy bread.  Seashells and swaying blue waves set the tone too.

I know Ginger loved her party.  There were games and clown fish accessories to be won.  Sausage rolls were consumed en masse.  The Under the Sea cake was to be admired. Her father MC’d a superb round of “Freeze”.  So why is it that when I watch her little face in the rearview mirror of the car, she spots me staring and pipes up:  “Stop staring.  Leave me be.  Concentrate on driving!”

From a sleepy breast feeding ball of breath and curled fingers to a put-me-in-my-place pre-schooler. The way she grows with words and changing limbs marks time and shapes our little family. She makes me realise anything is possible.

The one gimmick cake idea: Blue icing

Note to parents who slave over party food: photograph ALL party food in detail to validate all that effort

Found this link out of the blue.  Dioramas.  Dames.  Deadpan.

What more could you ask for on a Sunday afternoon?

Ginger made up a  great joke today.  We were discussing oak trees while she was having a hard-boiled egg, courtesy of Nellie (or perhaps Ivy).  She said:  “A yoak is a tree that grows eggs.”

The other day she walked into the room and spied something she really loved and claimed:  “That is delightful!”  I love hearing her talk like a woman of 82.

1.  New haircuts for little girl, big girl and very very big girl (but no need to show off about that last one).  Little girl about to turn three, makes her way to the hair salon with handbag, sunnies and hat for this special milestone.  She squeals:  “Mamma, I so excited!”  Rat’s tales from babyhood are finally cut off.  Big girl loves the whole process just like her little sister.  She now looks like a child of the 30s with her new bob.  Very cute.  She celebrated by making pretend ’stew’ all afternoon.

It's a fine bob, Ginger

Let go of me

Ingredients for stew

2.  Little girl turns big girl 3 on Anzac Day and smiles all day.

3.  I bake my first real birthday cake for little girl turning big girl 3.   It’s a lion cake.  Both little girls pretend to be scared of the lion.  It’s the best reaction I could have had.

My first real birthday cake

Giggles, not tears, this time

More birthday afternoon tea treats

Blowing out number three

They are actually scared of lions.  Once, at the zoo, we were watching the lion pride.  The lions were sort of lolling about when a zoo official made a public announcement on the PA system.  One of the males stood up with arched back and fanned mane, and roared a ginormous roar.  RAAAAAAAAAAAA!  Impressive.

I commented out loud on the thrill of it all.   Problem was there was no one there beside me to respond to my harmless banter.  The two little girls who had been beside me were about 500m away crying effusively and screaming about lions coming to eat them up, refusing to go anywhere near the lion enclosure.  It took about 20 minutes to calm them down.

They don’t like lions.  Who would have thought it?

Ginger and Peta attended their first punk gig today at an anarchist collective.  They lasted two songs.

The girls were jacked up on vanilla and chocolate milkshakes, padded with earplugs and brimming with nervous excitement (in Peta’s case) and noise-induced anxiety (in Ginger’s case).

Mostly, we went to see Adele in a frontline role as singer for the band The Hatchets along with Kelly and Tara (I think, forgive me if I have the name wrong).  Three raucous women singing, one woman playing drums, blokes on guitars at the rear.

It was too hot inside this Thornbury shopfront.  So we left.  Gingerpops and Petapops are still taking about it.

They were two fine songs.

I love a surprise.

Especially musical surprises.

Last Wednesday was warm. The night before I had unexpectedly been offered a ticket to see Lucinda Williams (thank you B—).  It was still warm on the night of her concert at Hamer Hall in Melbourne.   J—- and the girls took me out to pizza and then dropped me off in town.  I walked a few streets and met a friend.  We trammed it to the Arts Centre  among a middle aged crowd of concert goers. We waited for other friends and family while sipping cold beers.

Lucinda’s songs, in that venue, with her band Buick 6, and her voice, all evidence of life’s riches,  lifted me into a couple of hours of  enjoyable and distractionless fun.

I’ve always been familiar with Lucinda’s songs but wouldn’t call myself a huge fan.  That fact isn’t really out of  informed choice, just the lucky-dip of what hits your turntable when you can only discover so much. Or maybe I thought she was a contrived Nashville cowgirl.   I wish I’d followed through on the search for Townes Van Zandt’s and Gram Parsons’ contemporary lineage.  I would have uncovered her body of work earlier, especially her earlier songs.

The gig was a surprise on so many levels.  I have hardly ever listened to lyrics.  J—- and many of my friends can retell song lyrics with the most extraordinary precision.  The words, for them, make the song.  I have always been hit harder by the the way a song ‘feels’: its music, its arrangement, and the tone of the singing.  In short, the way a song makes me feel viscerally through its sound.  At this concert, I listened to the lyrics, even those of  some of the earlier country-folky songs I’d heard many times before, and it made a difference.  Hard to explain.

I also loved how far removed the whole experience was from my daily existence as a mother immersed in pre-school life.  Hard to explain this too. Perhaps it was the way Lucinda’s voice acted like a shape-shifter for each song. Perhaps it was Lucinda’s banter with references to all sorts of musical connections I don’t hear much about anymore.  Perhaps it was the songwriting, almost coming from another time and place.  Yeah, it was definitely the singing and songwriting.

I learned that Drunken Angel was about her friend and poet Blaze Foley.  I learned of Lucinda’s own favourite songs (or at least ones that she liked to perform in her own way at encore): Disgusted by Lil’ Son Jackson, I lived my Life by Fats Domino, Things I Used To Do by Guitar Slim, Every Picture Tells a Story by Faces, and Long Way to The Top by ACDC.  It’s not a collection I’d think to put on my playlist everyday but it was fun.  It was cool and foot-tapping without being intense. Confused anecdotes about EmmyLou Harris might have been due to jet-lag but I loved the overly-familiar referencing of Harris and the likes of Willie Nelson.

My only (small) criticism would be that the band was somewhat over-polished at times.  Guitar solos aren’t my thing.  Neither are drum solos (did I clap?).  No matter; it was still alot of fun.

Coldplay are a really huge band, aren’t they?  I don’t know any of their songs.  Perhaps I’m a hermit when it comes to popular music.  On the other hand, I like to think I have an inbuilt radar about the sort of bands I might like and I get the feeling this band would make my eyes glaze over.

This ‘feeling’ is most certainly confirmed by the headline I’ve just read: