Ethan: “You can’t see through pots. They’re not glass. You can see through them while they’re cooking, though.”
Me: But the lids are glass.
Ethan: Yes, and if you stand on them they break! Pots are metal. Dogs aren’t metal though. I can touch my nose with my tongue!
The best thing about Ethan using my entire box of tampons as bath toys this afternoon while he was bored was the call I just got from Mike at the supermarket:
“So what do you need me to get?”
“Uh, what do you mean?” I knew perfectly well within a second or two of his asking, but I. couldn’t. resist.
“You know, the things that Ethan destroyed in the bathroom. The Feminine. Hygiene. Products.” Through gritted teeth, I could tell.
“Oh, riiiiight. Carefree brand. Cream box, green lid.”
Snicker, snicker, snicker.
Now that Easter is over and I am no longer giving up buying jeans from Glassons for Lent, I bought some jeans from Glassons last night. Size TEN! Woo!
Now I need to get into a fitness routine which involves a) ten thousand crunches per day, b) magical removal of the flabby bits at the sides of my thighs, and c) burning enough calories to negate the king-size block of chocolate I’m currently devouring.
Ethan found a red felt-tip pen and has been using it to practice writing his Es. Thus far this morning I have found his initial written, in red pen, on the back of his hand, his pillowcase, an attempt on his own naked back (under his pyjamas) and on Amy’s back (over her pyjamas).
They’re pretty good Es too. From now on I’ve told him that if he writes his name on something it belongs to him and is his responsibility for ever. He looked at me, then at Amy, and promised to stop writing on stuff.
Yesterday while kidlets were being daycared I dashed off to the library and grabbed books at random. I thought Mike would like a couple of volumes of Captain America so I grabbed Volumes 1 and 2 for him. Ethan has been looking at them off and on and asked me what the books were called. I told him they were called Captain America. He flicked through a few pages and asked me who various characters were, but I was distracted and said I didn’t know. So Ethan named them Captain Australia and Captain Wellington.
Yesterday was his last day at daycare, no different to any other day for him except that he got a card from the kids and he took his Special Biscuits. He doesn’t really understand yet that he won’t be going back there except to pick Amy up. Amy has to write a story about what she did for Easter. I wonder if she can learn to write in two weeks. I may have to help her along.
Today she is going in for her final meningococcal shot, poor wee thing. I think I’ve made about four appointments and missed them, partly because I just don’t want to put her through what is, I believe, a pointless exercise. I’m all for immunisation for MMR, polio, all those ones, even the ‘flu vaccine I get every winter, but the MeNZB jab just bugs me, and it’s not helped by pushy doctors who all but force it on everyone. If only they were as forceful with the Tamiflu medication, which may be as useless as the MeNZB shot but at least bird flu is more of a threat to a middle-class young European-heritage family in Christchurch than meningococcal disease is (which is to say not much).
I forgot something funny: Ethan’s first church service.
Mike’s parents and Mike went to Easter Mass on Sunday. Ethan adores his Nana and Grandad and asked — nay, demanded — to go too, and they said yes (to which I winced quite conspicuously as I imagined the carnage that could ensue). To prepare him I told him about five times in as many minutes that he would have to SIT STILL. For AN HOUR. And there would be a man talking and he would have to be quiet the whole time and it would probably not be very interesting for him and I made him take books and a quiet toy and promise to sit quietly and be good for everyone. And then I gave him the five-second summary of what Easter was about so he was prepared in case they quizzed him at the door to see if he was qualified to attend. (”Yeah, so there was this guy called Jesus, and he died, but then he got better. Okay? Okay.”)
Turned out the Mass was a children’s Mass run for kids with the kids’ band and lots of action songs, and Ethan had a blast AND got an Easter egg at the end. He spent the rest of the day singing GLOOOOO-RI-A [clap, clap, clap] GLOOOOOOOOOO-RIII-AAA! Every once in a while he’d bust out with some weird comment, like how the old man died because nobody liked him. Or how Jesus was a dinosaur because he went to Caveland which is where dinosaurs live.
Amy and I broke several laws yesterday while being driven around Mike’s uncle’s farm by his cousin Kirsten: I sat Amy on my lap and fastened my seatbelt over the two of us and we bumped and bounced around the countryside, Amy keeping one vigilant hand on the gearknob in case we needed to downshift in a hurry.
We spent the Easter break in Blenheim, taking things easy and spending a couple of half-days “working” out at the vineyard. They’re in a hurry to get the guards off the vines before the frosts arrive and we volunteered to pick up the discarded covers and bale them up. Ethan was a great help — when he was in the mood — and would pick up covers and throw them in the hopper, then dash back to the house in case something more exciting was happening, then back to us. He would get confused by all the wires and posts and would run full-speed down the row until he was parallel to the house, then FREAK OUT when he couldn’t work out how to negotiate the wires to go across the rows. Twice I had to make the marathon sprint to calm his screams, twisting to avoid all the evil, evil river rocks. Amy slept in the portacot oblivious to everything, and when she woke up she crawled around exploring until the knees on her pants were the colour of the dirt outside.
I’m having a hard time concentrating on this entry because all I can hear and all I have heard for the past two hours is Amy’s screams of utter, utter rage. She is absolutely exhausted (and has been since 9:30) but she has learned to pull herself up on furniture in the past few days and now can’t sleep, because she is compelled to kneel and shake the bars of the cot, and once she’s up the only way down is to fall, and falling just sucks. And if I go in there to pick her off the bars, she thinks I’m picking her up and then screams even louder when I just put her down again. It’s doing my head in quite nicely, and I am looking forward (SO. MUCH.) to taking her to daycare this afternoon.
I also got up early this morning to bake biscuits (not just plain biscuits, but Completely Peanut-Trace-Free Marbled Chocolate And Orange Biscuits) for Ethan’s last day at daycare. And I just remembered that thanks to Amy I’ve had no coffee yet today. Damn.
The trip back yesterday from Blenheim was amazing punctuated by HELL. We stopped, as I said, at Mike’s uncle’s new farm which is near Lake Rotoiti, and stayed for a few hours by the time we got the tour of the farmhouse and the farm itself and Mike made some token efforts at helping with the new workshed they’re building (he wasn’t dressed for putting up large buildings in the rain and mud), and had a quick lunch and gossip with the extended family. Kirsten took us around the farm and Ethan asked her where the cafe was — oh my God, city kid, get him on a farm STAT — and Amy tripped out on the rain falling on her head.
We left the farm at about 2 and came home via Lewis Pass. Mike and I drove from Blenheim to Westport via the Buller Gorge years ago so we’d seen some of it, but not the area between Murchison and Hanmer Springs. It was too wet to stop at the Maruia Falls (so said Mike, pfft!) but we stopped at Maruia Springs for a coffee and I took over driving over the Pass, which was fine. By the time we got to the Hanmer turnoff the kids were cranky and bored and I was getting a headache and Mike was getting a sore neck from twisting around in his seat to hand their cast-off toys back every two seconds, and we talked seriously about whether Mike really needed to be at work the next day (he did) and could we just stay somewhere overnight (we couldn’t). We grabbed some Burger King in Belfast at 6:45 and got the kids in bed half an hour later, with dramatic sighs of relief. Mike and I crashed at about nine — which was a good thing because Ethan woke up crying at 3am and Amy woke up crying at 5:30.
Ethan is trying desperately to be a grownup. Mike’s dad’s cousin and his wife came to visit on Sunday evening and we all sat around chatting, Ethan parked up on Grandad’s knee. Lloyd would tell a fairly long story and I watched Ethan listening, nodding and saying, “Yeah? Uh-huh. Yeah,” every few seconds. When Lloyd had finished speaking, someone else said something but I heard Ethan try to join in with, “Yeah. And when you do poos, you do them in the toilet and then you flush them away.” Fortunately I don’t think anyone heard him. However, he did the same thing later at the dinner table, and pretty much everyone heard him that time. Mike’s mum was telling me about a textbook she had for a Child Development course that documented Freud’s theories on child development, and the fascination with the body that hits at…oh, about Ethan’s age. Say what you like about Freud’s cluelessness about women, he seems to have been spot on with kids.
I’m surprised we are still married: every night Mike and I watch the channel 3 news and the coverage of the Birgit Brauer murder trial, and every time TV3’s reporters pronounce Birgit’s surname as “Broyer” I want to throw things and shout. IT IS GODDAMN BROWER, PEOPLE. Channel one has had it right from the beginning, and that funny little grammarian guy in the Weekend Press even had a go at them months ago. I hope if I’m tragically killed, the newsreaders don’t call me “Track-eye Hoppy”.
We’re off to Blenheim this afternoon and Mike has downloaded all of Ethan’s TMBG CD and his Wiggles songs to the iPod Shuffle so Ethan can mellow out in the backseat with his tunes. Ethan worked this out about half an hour ago and keeps a running commentary going on what song is playing. Of course, the volume is up and he has headphones on, so I get: “MUM! HEY MUM! NOW IT’S THE WIGGLES! NOW IT’S THE OMNIDROID SONG! MUM! MUM! HEY MUM! NOW IT’S BIG RED CAR!”
Our next-door neighbour came over this morning to tell us her house was egged last night. Just in time for us to leave town for a long weekend. We talked about it outside in hushed whispers in case our neighbourhood juvenile delinquent happened to be listening. Probably just kids, but hey, if we come home to a house-shaped omelette at least we’ll know why.
Last night Ethan woke up crying. I went in to give him a cuddle and he told me he’d seen a boat with a pencil and when you wrote with the pencil, rubbish came out. “Isn’t that strange?” he added.
The next morning we talked about it some more. Ethan apparently was surprised: “I just closed my eyes and there was a boat!” Yeah, honey, you just had a dream. Welcome to the big leagues, kid.
Amy has now been crawling properly for two days. She started shuffling herself forward on Monday: lurch-lurch flop, lurch-lurch flop. On Tuesday she could manage a lurch-shuffle-lurch flop, and on Wednesday she crawled into Ethan’s room and closed the door on us.
She is thus far demonstrating a desire to go back into the womb, as manifested by her ability to wedge herself headfirst in small spaces (behind the couch, between the bar stools, between the TV and the wall) and then cry heartbrokenly when said spaces aren’t warm and snuggly. Her knees are red and hot because she doesn’t lift them off the ground, and she had almost a permanent red mark on her forehead from bumping into walls and the coffee table (and yes, I have moved the table, but she heads for it anyway).
But she is so much happier than, say, this time last week when she had two teeth coming through, wasn’t sleeping through the night, and was waking up rocking back and forth on hands and knees. The crawling wipes her out so she sleeps right through, twelve non-stop hours, and she’s looking like she needs a nap already despite not even being up for two hours yet this morning. If I leave the room, she calls me — “Ah! AH!” — until I respond, then follows my voice. We play a grunted version of Marco Polo until she works out where I am.
Yesterday Ethan went to the park with a friend and her mum. Amy and I went to the gate to wave goodbye and as we watched them cross the street and walk away, Amy called out “Eh!”, looking at Ethan. She calls me “Um,” or sometimes “Mumumum,” when she’s tired or hungry, and looks at Mike and says “Dadadadad.”
Yesterday morning, Ethan put his arms around Amy for a hug and told her he loved her. Amy responded by grabbing huge handfuls of his hair and making him cry.
TwitterBad Behavior has blocked 26 access attempts in the last 7 days.