Amy is sitting beside me trying on dress-up hats and singing, “Check it out now, hunk ol bugger, check it out now, hunk of bugger, check it out now, hunk of butter.” (For those not in the know, that’s Fat Boy Slim’s “Rockefeller Skank” — check it out now, the funk soul brother.)
Oh, now it’s Bob the Builder: “Ba-ba builder, can ‘e hix it?”
The things I have witnessed from my purple fleecy blanket on the couch:
* The kids’ morning tea consists of crackers and chicken-flavoured chips
* Fish and chips for dinner one night, Chinese the next
* Ethan getting to wear his only decent (brand new) jeans to daycare
* Amy learning to squeal
* Ethan reading a whole book to me
* Mike washing dishes and vacuuming!!!
It’s been like a holiday for me (an achy, fatigued, hot-and-cold sort of holiday) and it’s been amazing to see how capably Mike has run the household while I’ve been able to step back and only intervene when necessary. I sort of expected to wake up from my napping spot in the sun to find mountains of dirty nappies and clothes, maimed children and divorce papers scattered through the house.
So yes, Ethan read a book to us the other night. I brought a big book home to take along to a school visit the next day, and he was interested in it. I knew he could tell me the small words, so I asked him to read a bit. With a fair degree of confidence, he read the title: I…L-like…t-t-the Rain. He went on to read the whole book, with a little help here and there. It was nice and repetitive (I like the rain…I like the snow…I like the wind) so by the end he could read it at quite a fast pace.
After the recent sadness over Ethan’s friends’ disappearance, he’s recovered well. We have a new problem: the original threesome is now down to two. Before, there was always one cast-off kid, who was often Ethan the newbie, and he was sad about it but coped well enough. Now that one is gone, Ethan has all the time in the world to spend with P, who is a bit of a problem child. In the last week we’ve had three reports of Ethan and P going around kicking random objects, anything from buildings to toys to Amy’s scooter when she was riding it. So we had a big gang-up-on-Ethan session last night and reminded him that going around trying to break stuff isn’t really too cool. He and Amy are both pretty jaded lately; this time last semester I got a two-week break and so did the kiddies, but I don’t get that break this time so they are stuck in daycare for ten solid full-time weeks.
Oh! And I thought I’d broken my finger, but it turns out I haven’t. Given how painful it was, I’m disappointed. It turns out it’s only badly jarred (I went to take a fast netball pass and was pushed forward at the same time, and my finger was jammed end-on into the ball), but I have some pretty purple bruises that run right down both sides of my ring finger, into the palm of my hand and up to the first joint of my middle finger. It hurts, but I think only because the bruises are across the joints. Cool!
Amy and I are taking a sick day today. She threw up twice last night, first in her bed, and then when we were too lazy to change her sheets beyond soaking the dirty ones, in Ethan’s bottom bunk (at least the second time it was only the pillow, which we dumped in the washing machine in our zombified state). We’re actually quite lucky in that we rarely get woken in the night by the kids except when Ethan goes through occasional bursts of “I need to pee at 5am and now I’m wide awake”.
So anyway, nothing much new around here. Ethan is having some social anxiety because his friends are all LEAVING HIM FOREVER. One friend moved away last week and another is starting school today, and Ethan feels a bit lonely and abandoned and confused by it all. It’s been a little bit heartbreaking watching him come to terms with the loss of predictability in his day. I can’t just tell him to suck it up, it happens to all of us, because that would be mean. Really mean. Their worlds are so damn small at that age that a change like this is almost epochal. Like the comet that killed the dinosaurs.
Otherwise, he’s doing great. I see him reading small words now like he or is or and or but by mouthing the sounds to himself and verifying them in his little mental catalogue. It’s like watching a news ticker the way his face shows what his brain is doing. tick-tick-tick He’s learning to kick a ball properly, to catch with two hands (he can catch a frisbee or a balloon, but not a ball yet). He’s thinking about days of the week, which ones are weekend days and which are daycare days. He’s putting numbers together by counting on his fingers. If you ask him his age, he’ll say Two-and-two! We went for a walk around Torpedo Bay and Corsair Bay last weekend and he counted steps up to the ridge in Maori: tahi-tua-toru-wha all the way to 26.
Amy, despite being sick, is thriving vocally. She tried to tell Mike a story about how she got a plaster on her hand at daycare: Hurt. Hand! Plaster. Door, hurt my hand! Blood! She tells us what she WANTS or NEEDS. The other night she wanted to take a book to bed, which Ethan does every night. So she took her book and trundled off to her room where I heard her exclaiming Light on Daddy, I need it.
She counts to four without having a clue what the words mean, and says the alphabet a-b-c-b-e-a-beee! She says ka pai! when we say good job! and when I ask if her tummy is full, she lifts her shirt to check. She is so, so independent still. Today her slipper came off and she was struggling to put it on. I reached to help her and she firmly said, “No, Mummy, I do it.” She never did, but damned if she was going to accept any help.
(It seems, as usual, like these moments of humour and sadness and frustration pass by more quickly than we want, and we don’t take the time to write them down. There have been so many laughs, tears, arguments, hugs and kisses lately that I want to record, but by the time I remember, they’re gone again.)
College is going great, although I haven’t felt as in control of my schedule and assignments this semester compared to last. Partly it’s because we are a really tight group, Group B (we had our first netball game last night and won), and so I have been doing more group work which is never as productive. I’ve been easing up and spending more time studying alone to make up for it. Tomorrow we’re also going on a Group B skiing trip — weather permitting — and next week an art gallery trip. I swear I’m getting my work done…
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