Christmas is coming, the lamb is getting fat!

We're just over a month away from Christmas. Can you believe it? Every year I fantasize about having my house tastefully decked out in fairy lights and holly, having a perfectly symmetrical, natural tree, gracefully bedecked in matching, colour-coordinated baubles and beads, and hosting a festive, multi-coursed meal consisting of all of the traditional fare plus quirky trendy things that look and taste fabulous. There will be snow flakes gracefully falling outside, and a roaring open fire with a perfect row of perfect stockings hanging from the perfect mantel **sighs contentedly**

Then I remember that I live in New Zealand, so:
a) The fairy lights will have been purchased in last year's Boxing Day sale from The Warehouse for $3.99, and won't go, no matter how much I twist the bulbs or shake them. They are also mysteriously tangled beyond reasonable possibility, indicating that someone returned them last Christmas due to being faulty, and some lazy Warehouse employee snuck them back on the shelves rather than bin them. Or whatever they do with faulty stuff.

b) The tree will not be symmetrical. It will be some sad, insipid-looking specimen of Pinus Radiata purchased from a roadside stall, or whacked down from an unsuspecting farmer's shelterbelt, minus the top which was topped off by the tree-topper machine a little too recently. If desperation strikes, the trusty old artificial number, purchased during The Warehouse's 2002 Boxing Day sale for $18 will suffice, despite balding in some areas due to the cat gnawing off the tinselly bits.

c)The decorations will not match, neither in variety or colour. Prior to the days of children crafting, it may have. But now, how can I possibly NOT hang the multicoloured, glittered contraption dangling of a piece of bright orange yarn that they have slaved over for the past 90 seconds? Besides this, due to my refusal to gate off the tree, I tend to spend so much time redecorating the fecking tree after it has been stripped by children that by the time Christmas rocks around, I'm just throwing baubles back in its general direction and leaving them where they fall.

d)The food will be delicious, but cooked my my mother, as I decide with a week to come that I can't be bothered hosting and she'd do a better job. Bless her :D

e) It is theoretically summer, so it won't snow. Though being New Zealand, it could well be anything from 7 degrees and dreary to 35 degrees, windy and sweltering. Or both within the course of a 30 minute period.

Ahhhh, I love Christmas!

Minty the Mental One loses her tail

Today we finally bit the bullet and got Minty tailed. It had to be done, or she could end up fly-blown with a horrible poo-ey tail stuck to her nether regions. Still made me a bit sick though, even though I've probably had the great fortune of helping tail thousands of lambs in my time.

She's probably a week or so over the ideal age, so her tail required a fairly solid push with the hot iron, but it doesn't seem to bother her. I keep likening it to having a finger seared off, and I'm sure I wouldn't be interested in eating immediately after that **wince** Does she have a high pain threshold, or are sheep really stupid? Who knows.

Actually, she is crazy, so possibly the latter is the case. She does that skippy-hoppy-frolicking thing that lambs do in books all. the. time. She runs inside and does it down the hallway, hooves skating about on the timber flooring like a giraffe on roller skates. The kids have taken to leading her about on a leash, but in reality, she decides where they'll go and the kids just follow her.

Here's the killing blow...


Caleb seems a tad confued, but Soph finds it all hilarious.


"Put it back on!"


Who needs a tail anyway?

Colour mixing fun

The kids couldn't decide which colour of food colouring they wanted in their bath tonight (a wee treat after a long hot day) so rather than referee yet another altercation, I decided to put both yellow and blue in. They were fascinated with watching the colours merge to make green, so I bunged some paint in snaplock bags to let them play with before bed.

I blatantly stole the idea from their preschool, where a window display shows what they did using cling film and different colours of paint. I don't have copious amounts of acrylic paint that I am willing to share with my children, so I wasn't as generous as they were, but the few blobs I used were plenty for the task at hand and can be used later to paint with anyway.

The snaplock bags did a great job of containing mess, and will keep the paint fresh too. Win-win!

Sophie and Caleb now know that blue and yellow make green, blue and red make purple, and white makes colours less intense. Though they might struggle to verbalise that one...

Fun!







We've had a few hot air balloons land in nearby lately, and yesterday they were so close that they inspired an early morning mission in our PJs to get a closer look!



That's all for now :D

More crafty fun - Puppets!

Sophie has a real passion for all things crafty, a bit like her mother. Nothing makes her happier than making a good old mess with glue, paint, sticky bits and pieces and stuff that I would really rather stayed in the recyling bin.

This week, unassisted my me, she's made:
A computer, that also doubles as a cash register, depending on the need at the time. Actually, I guess most cash registers ARE computers these days - Great observation skills, Sophie!

Sadly, we lost many of the foam and ice cream stick buttons, but it had lots to begin with.

Ice creams, by tracing around Shape-o shapes and colouring. These have a special song that accompany them that talks about a baker's shop and cherries on top, but I can't seem to get the words right and it incenses Sophie when I even try, so I won't say any more about it.


And the best thing of all - puppets! These, however, required a LOT of parental input.


We used socks, that had narrowly escaped being binned due to my 'unmatched socks need to find buddies within a fortnight" rule. They were pretty old and ratty, but they served the purpose well enough.

My first intention was to write a story together and use the puppets to tell it, but we never got further than inventing the characters: Girl, Sister (later renamed 'Mum') and Cat. We discussed the necessary body parts at length, and how we would make them. Then, using a hot glue gun (yeah, I know - call CYPFS on me!) we carefully added googly eyes, noses, hair and clothing.

The cat was Sophie's idea, and aside from me attaching the ears and whiskers, she did the work. I love it, even though she managed to sacrifice a pair of scissors in the process by cutting pipe cleaners!

Probably an activity better suited to older children due to the hot glue, though you can get cold melt glue guns, which would be safer. Sophie didn't seem too bothered by the melted glue she managed to get on her toe but it could have been worse if I wasn't such a safety conscious mother (**ahem**).

Lots of play left in them too! We played puppets all afternoon (the highlight of which being the comment "No, cat. You can't catch mice, because you haven't got any arms!") and we may yet write our story and bore someone to tears with it.

No more nappies???

Firstly, some sad news - the baby rabbits all succumbed to some unknown baby rabbit illness and died the other night. The kids were totally unmoved by their passing - Soph gave one of them a swift poke with a stick and declared that they should go on the compost heap with the dead magpie, and that was that. Probably another litter on it's way anyway - apparently they can conceive immediately after birth. Mother Nature, you're a cruel mistress!

So today was Day Number One on Caleb's journey as an Undies Wearing Boy. Scary stuff. I wasn't particularly motivated, he being just 25 months and all that. We have been getting fairly regular poos and wees where they should go, and he obviously has a fair bit of control, but really, he just gets so focused on the business of playing that we end up with puddles on the floor quite often, and I'm not a fan of cleaning floors. Besides, he's just a baby!

I'm not such a fan of cleaning nappies either though, which is one reason I decided to bite the bullet. Every few days, I manage to unwittingly poison the poor wee monkey with gluten or too much dairy, and those stinky, smeary nastinesses would be enough to drive even the most fervent believer in child-led toilet-training to kick the nappy bucket into touch and get them using the porcelain.

Yesterday we introduced a reward chart, whereby he earned a stamp for every successful trip to the toilet. He ignored it for the first part of the day, then something clicked, and he knocked out five separate wees in an hour. I use the term 'separate' loosely, as in reality, the little tike was dashing to the loo, releasing a miniscule dribble of urine, cutting off the flow, hopping off and repeating the exercise every 10 minutes until the chart was full. I think I may have been outsmarted by a two year old.

Today, he was in fine form until after lunch, when he dropped the ball and soiled a few pairs of undies. He ran around starkers for a few hours - I was REALLY worried about Minty the lamb and her sharp, nibbly teeth near his nether regions, but all parts seem to be in working order still, thankfully!

Some would say it's been a good first day. Certainly significantly more successes than failures, but it still seems like I'm doing a lot of the work. I'm reminding him to go, I'm taking him there when he gets distracted on the way (honestly, this child has the attention span of a goldfish, bless his heart!) I'm helping him take his pants off, and I'm helping him wash his hands. I used to get a bit eye-rolly at the middle aged and beyond mothers who would regale me with tales of their spawn being toilet trained before they hit 18 months etc, because really, it was THEM who were trained, dashing after their toddlers, watching for every grimace and grunt and generally making their lives stressful. The children involved seemed to do very little, except sit on the potty where they were unceremoniously plonked for hours at a time until they did something. But here I am, 'training' my child, whilst tearing my hair out and stressing over counting bowel movements and ensuring we have a plastic bag and at least 5 pairs of clean dry undies on hand wherever we go. And that Caleb is sitting on a plastic supermarket bag in his carseat so that he doesn't get the cover wet.

We had it so easy with Sophie. At 2 and a half, she started to show some control, and I told her that she was going to use the toilet from now on instead of nappies. She told me that actually, she was too busy playing with her Barbies to possibly remember to go to the toilet, which was exactly the wrong thing to say to a mother that just loves drawin' those ol' lines in the sand **tumbleweed rolls by**

The battle was on and Sophie lost. I think we had three accidents in total (and I do apologise to the lovely Hannah at preschool who was peed on during this process) but she was trained day and night in a matter of 2 days. Piece of cake. Helps that she has a bladder the size of Texas and only needs to go twice a day, despite downing litres of milk and water on any given day. Incidentally, the first time she sat on the potty and peed, she nearly overflowed it - if I wasn't so busy doing the 'My-Baby-Just-Peed-On-The-Potty' dance of rapture, I would have gagged, or at least choked laughing.

So the picture above, of my lovely nappies hanging on the line (with unmatching pegs **twitch** - I was running short after hanging my third load this particular day and was close to using paperclips or string to tie them on - beggars can't be choosers in such circumstances) may soon be a thing of the past. Or maybe I'll waver and bung him in his nappies because they're just so cute. And he is my baby, after all...

Here's a recent pic of Minty and Caleb sharing a tender moment.

And then there were 6!

A few months ago, we got two rabbits. Apparently female, though it seems they were too young to be sexed accurately. They have already had a few more adventures than most of their hopping kind, after getting out and making their way up the road to the village where one of them was house-trained and lived the life of a king, while the other had a near-death-experience while being bailed up under a BBQ by a snarling dog. Both survived and were returned a few days later after we managed to track down their whereabouts.

Yesterday, I was doing my usual afternoon animal feed, and lifted the lid of the rabbit hutch to replace the hay in their sleeping quarters. I recoiled when I saw a huge pile of fur bundled in the corner. I moved it aside, and recoiled again when I saw 4 squirming little bundles of pink and black writing about in the fur. Brand new baby rabbits really aren't cute!



Sophie was THRILLED to see that two are pink, and remains resolute in her convictions that they will stay that way, despite obviously being bald at this stage.

I keep half expecting them to succumb to something dreadful, but so far they seem strong and healthy. I haven't picked them up, as everything I've read says that you shouldn't, but I'm dying to have a closer look - they really are HIDEOUS looking things! Must set appropriate example to the kids though, or they'll be all over them and then they will certainly die :(

And for the sake of sharing more photos, I found these on the camera too:
A butterfly Soph drew a few weeks ago...


I took this pic the other night while the kids were playing (I mean LEARNING ;) ) on starfall.com It's a great wee phonics site that keeps my kids happy for hours and is actually a reasonable quality literacy resource. I even allow it in my classroom! Great for developing pre-reading skills (eg letter and blend sound knowledge) as well as extending children already reading. Of course if I had a PC, I'd be wary of letting my kids loose on it, for fear that it would crash itself into a crashing thing, but as I have a Mac, I know it is child-friendly and almost totally crash-proof. But lets not get into that old argument...



Not much else happening here. Busy doing assessment stuff for school and gardening - of which I really will post a picture soon - it's looking good!

Camping!

With a late spring holiday weekend approaching, we decided to flee the demands of a bleating pet lamb and an unfinished vege garden (oh the STRESS of this country-living thing!) and rough it for a few days.

Generally, we take the rotisserie camping, and have a flat, mowed and very tidy powered site situated in an endless line-up of identical 3-roomed tents owned by the rest of the fair folk we share our city with and cursed while overtaking on the 6 hour journey to our destination. There are hot showers and even kitchens for the poor souls who didn't bring their own.

This time though, we were REALLY camping. There were kitchens and hot showers, but the water had to be boiled before drinking, and the sites had trees and pinecones. And lots of noisy birds at dawn. And though we bought the 2 burner gas stove, we left the rotisserie at home.

I was feeling all rustic and earthy about the whole thing, until the incredulous reaction to our spacious tent by our Irish friends (who were bunking up under a handkerchief next door) made me wonder if Kiwis over-do this camping thing a tad. Personally, however, not having a freshly brewed coffee in the morning smacks of a slum, not a holiday!

All silliness aside, we had a great time. The kids waded about in the estuary, poking at all manner of sea life with sticks and learning a huge amount about our rocky shore creatures in the process. There was a fabulous playground, a bike track, and even a wee surf break - funny that! All of this was within a stone's throw from our tent.

Caleb did his best to escape to the beach whenever the opportunity arose, but aside from a brief 2am tantrum (such timing, that child) he was far too busy having fun to get into too much mischief. Sophie was a darling, and also had a blast, though by the haste at which she tore inside and festooned herself in 2 tutus, a pair of fairy wings, a pink fascinator and some plastic high heels when we got home, the endless gumboot-wearing and adventuring had taken its toll and she was in dire need of some glam.

Next time we'll pack a tiara with the rotisserie.