life and everything.
Its been a busy while!
Darby is crawling, cruising, eating (well, in that “I prefer mummy milk, but I wanna do what you are doing” fashion) and last week I caught him walking by pushing a chair across the room. He is all of 9.5mnths. He looks like Billy Corgan.
Zephyr is still totally phobic of washing machines, tumble dryers, showers, dishwashers, blenders, hair dryers and any mention of the above. He needs another haircut (his curls are getting quite Jewish, one friend commented!), and he is shooting everything with pretend guns. We have no idea where that came from, as we are a fairly strident anti-gun household (bar Dish Pig’s loopy thing about “relaxing” by slaughtering things in pc games. he is banned from owning playstation/wii). He also won’t eat anything. It is driving us nuts.
Willow is writing like crazy, singing beautifully and dancing. She write letters to people constantly, and makes picture books out of sketch pads. She illustrates and gets me to write down her stories to go with them. They are very good, and have a wonderful flow and even resolution at the end! This weekend she has been drawing pictures of people hang-gliding, and also crocodiles and elephants (with tusks! gotta have tusks!) We have been doing basic maths off and on and also getting into some of the tricker stuff like death (see below) and life and gardening.
I was prepping for a new and fab market in Sydney, refining some old garments and miracle-ing new ones. There was a deadline and lots of stress, but Dish Pig’s maternal grandma died on the 16th March, so we packed the car the following morning and, with a bit too much optimism, drove our 3 under-5’s to Adelaide for the funeral. I missed the market deadline, perhaps a blessing in disguise? Who knows! The trip there was good, with stops in Wagga Wagga and Mildura. It was hot (38C) but ok, if not hard for me, as Dish Pig can only drive for about 45mins when he starts drifting off to sleep. The funeral wasn’t too bad, bits of weirdo family politics we dodged, spent a huge deal of time with Dish Pig’s 92 year old grandpa, (who I lovelovelove to pieces, he is just such a human human and so commonsensical, and there are great moments of silence between us were we seem to communicate so much, and I learned much about roses and turf.) and then we drove home again. The children were ferocious in their misery. The baby began wailing every time we went back to the car, Willow and Zephyr spent hours baiting each other and screaming.
Near Picton, on the side of the freeway, we pulled up, turfed them out on a rock, and left them there to scream for a bit while we sat in the car. They then had some food and fell asleep, finally.
I don’t blame them really, 5 out of 6 days strapped in a car seat is pretty horrid, even with Mary Poppins playing on dad’s laptop.
Now we are home and happy, with mine and garth’s birthdays looming next week, me trying to find some way of sewing and cleaning the house at the same time and wincing our way through the financial crunch we are in.