Imaginary friends

So I go to pick up Tricky from preschool and I'm delighted to find him running around, shouting and climbing just like all the other kids. 

He's a bit of a shy one, our Tricky, it takes him a while to warm up in large gatherings and seeing him standing quietly off to one side watching all the other children have fun or clinging to one of the teacher's hands is a weeny bit heartbreaking. Especially for his wussbag of a mother.

Hence, everytime I walk through the gates, I find myself becoming a horrendous blend of Mary Poppins and Julie from the Loveboat.

I pick up his orange backpack and sign him out and then he pulls at my hand and says I want to say bye bye to Henry.

I nearly clap my hands together with glee. At last, I inwardly squeal. A little friend!

I scan the roll but there's no 'Henry' on the list. No matter, I think. Tricky has made friends with one of the big boys from the other class. Nice.

We go out to find Henry, I can't wait to meet him, and Tricky can't see him, but then again - yes he can, no he's gone no he's there, no he's not.

I start to ask the other small children: Where is Henry? Tricky wants to say bye bye, and they give me the blank rolling eye stare so beloved of the teen of their species.

There is no Henry, a very young ladyperson informs me with barely concealed contempt and I laugh this off because remember Soren Lorenson? Lola's imaginary friend? He's darling and she's delightful and she totally has a wonderful life even though no one else can see him. 

Also, I have a friend who I recently learned was bff with an imaginary boy who lived in the gas meter box. He's now in his mid-forties with a lovely wife and children. (The friend, not the imaginary boy who was tragically abandoned when the family moved house and became fully electric.)

And anyway, Tricky has spied Henry now and is dragging me in for the kill. There he is!

I can't see Henry, I say, Is he wearing a blue hat? Has he got a green bag?

No,  says Tricky, exercising his right to speak gibberish; he's gnafferguldrtymf  

We're closing in on a pink moulded plastic cubby house and two small girls are squabbling over who should be allowed to ascend the moulded plastic staircase first.

There he is! Tricky's voice rings with triumph but I still can't see any boy, let alone a boy who's 

gnafferguldrtymf . 

Hello girls, I hear myself say in the ghastly faux-bright voice of the clueless adult; Is there a Henry here?

They look quizzically at each other and then glare ferociously at me. I hear Tricky murmur in my ear: There he is, there's Henry...

What's your name? I ask the girl closest to me and she tells me Mackenzie. Tricky is beaming away and nodding like yes, I said that all along, isn't she beautiful?

Tricky would really like to say bye bye to you I tell her and she nods. I get the distinct impression that small boys always want to say bye bye to her. Having got this far of course Tricky is completely tonguetied and nearly paralysed with shyness. He waves his eyelashes at her.

Oookay then! I smile like an idiot, Bye bye Mackenzie!

 

Byebyetricky she gives him a half wave and her friend takes the opportunity to nip past her and up the staircase. 

I drag Tricky away, it's never nice to hear the object of your affections consumed with rage and things are starting to get very heated indeed at the moulded plastic cubby house. Instead we walk hand in hand back up to the car, with Tricky giving me all sorts of useful besotted trivia about 'Henry'. After a few seconds of non stop Henryisms I am about ready to ask Tricky just how serious all this is when the local cat swishes up and stops just long enough for a pat. 

And when we continue on, all traces of 'Henry' seem to have gone and he doesn't mention her again.

Almost as if I'd imagined the whole thing.

Now Is The Winter, and it is cold in this tent.

So it's not, actually, Winter, but man it is cold. And outside the wind is blowing a gale.

I'm so cold I've got the heater on and  I'm wearing the stripy woollen jumper my sister AJ gave me from Noo Zillend, my sheepskin slippers I bought way back when C and I used to live with grumpy grandad (ooh yeah they were fun fun times) and my old black jeans with the hole in one knee. 

Helen saw me wearing these jeans once and she told me, very firmly, that I Must Stop wearing them outside the house. Those jeans, she told me, are for Doing The Housework Only.

Since I rarely Do Housework they hardly ever get a good wearing.  

Which means, on cold days when the washing has piled up, they're one of the few clean, ready to wear items in my wardrobe.

For a few weeks too, I've been feeling like the very Worst Parent In The World. Just about every parent feels that, I know, it gets passed around, that particular award - we hold it for a while, burn our fingers on the ice cold metal handles, engrave our name on it, and then one day it's gone. 

I think I got my award not long after the day both C and I forgot to pick up our son from preschool and our nephews from primary school - each thinking the other was going to do it. And I think it went just before the day I took Tricky for an outing to the Powerhouse Museum, one of our favourite haunts. That was the day he threw up in the car, just as I pulled into the carpark. He was saying "Stop the car Mummy, I need a cuddle, I don't feel very well," and I was calling over my shoulder "yes darling, not long now, of course I will give you a cuddle..."

Luckily I had brought the bag he uses for preschool, and in that bag we had put a spare change of clothes. And although I was prepared to just clean him up and drive straight back home, once he had chucked up he became remarkably cheery and quite eager to see the trains and indeed we ended up having a rather marvelous day.

 While at the museum we saw some 'children's theatre', not great writing but enthusiastic delivery. Tricky and I sat on the floor, or at least I sat and he was forcibly restrained by me. This was our first time at an event of this nature where he was old enough to express his displeasure (I WANT TO GOOOO!), some time earlier he came to see a production of one of my children's plays in Newcastle and was perfectly behaved. But then, he was also pre-verbal and probably breast feeding at the time. 

Tricky knows that I (and his father) go to see movies or theatre which he calls "cin-a-tar" as in "Mummy, where are you going? Are you going to the cin-a-tar? Who is looking after me? Pease don't go, pease, pease...I don't want daddy/Aunty N/babysitter/grandmother I want you..." This kind of emotional manipulation also adds a bit of shine to that crap parenting award I mentioned earlier.

So it's cold and the wind is blowing something awful around the house and through the cracks in the airvents but also, I just feel really really down. 

I think finding out about Emil, his sudden death, has really upset me, like not just made me upset but upset my balance, my sense of the way life has stacked up around me. 

Losing a friend and an artist, those two things entwined. 

Someone who started out when I did but who shot way ahead in his field and then fell. 

And a few more things have happened since Emil, things that impact on the way I see myself as a writer and an artist and as an Australian writer and artist. It feels like the whole of my industry could fit into a tent and I stepped outside to take a pee and there's no room for me anymore. And it's frigging cold out here and the wind is blowing and blowing and friends are dying.

Tricky enjoyed the show in the end, luckily, he sang and waved his hands and clapped at the right moment and later at home when I found him setting up his train station as a theatre; with his trains and miniature people as the audience, I felt a great wave of satisfaction. 

I had begun my offspring on that wonderful journey that is the arts; of appreciation, of story and spectacle and creativity, of self doubt and envy, of failure and almost success, of stress, not enough money, deadlines, messy desks and lost potential, opportunity and people.

It's the kind of thing I could get quite depressed about but now it's time to pick up Tricky (nephews on their holidays) and we stop in a park and slide on the slippery dip and play on the swings and the wobbly up down thing and we drive home and we look for strawberries and we find one that has survived the rain and the cold and then we go into the warm house and we eat cake and we drop crumbs all over the floor and I don't clean them up because we are far too busy building our new traintracks.

Emil Goh 1966 to 2009 is Too Frigging Short.

On Monday, my friend Emil Goh died.

I found this out on Twitter, while I was scrolling down through the arts snippets and parental tips and clues for better compost. 140 characters is not very much but the words Vale Emil Goh pretty much caught my eye and stuck in my gut and quite quickly I found the links.

I have argued with people over Twitter before and been given various arguments against - mainly involving the words “stupid” and “narcissism”, but I have to say  “you may discover a friend has died” is a fairly strong contender in the Reasons To Hate Twitter list.

There’s already a lot of stuff in the cybersphere about Emil, he created an extraordinary body of work over the past years. He exhibited in Australia and internationally, he curated, published, produced, photographed, documented,video-ed and basically lived a great life. He received an Australia Council residency for Seoul a few years back and he adored the place, there was no better place or time for making art and making friends-  possibly his two biggest skills-and the one went with the other, hand in hand. 

It is the making friends bit I want to celebrate here because everyone who knew Emil became a friend. Years ago I remember laughing that you couldn’t walk across Newcastle's Hunter Street Mall with Emil in under an hour – so many people would stop to chat with him. That was indeed years ago, before '94 when we still lived in Newcastle - but I bet people said the same thing about Emil in Seoul, London, Hong Kong, Melbourne, Sydney…

We met when we were both at Newcastle University, in the early 90's, and we clicked, apart from anything else because we had both lived in Malaysia (he was Malaysian and I was a RAAF brat) and we both loved the Nonya food. We could drool together over memories of makan cart banana fritters, peanut pancakes and char keoay teow although when it came to the shaved ice desserts, laced with coloured sugar syrup, evaporated milk and various beans, he was on his own. Emil loved these frozen confections, I loathed them. 

It wasn’t specifically Malaysian food, we decided once to do a project together about the best cafes in Newcastle; I would write the articles, Em would do the portraits. We never finished, but we drank a lot of free coffee and Em took a lot of shots of me in my black and white REMO shirt. And that was another thing he loved back in the early 90s: the REMO store near Taylor’s Square. And Seinfeld. He loved Seinfeld.

In 1994, the year my mother died, Emil and I were very close. I was attending the NIDA playwrights studio in Sydney and used to bunk on his couch in Commonwealth Street, Surry Hills, once a week. When Emil and his girlfriend broke up and my marriage broke up we were kind to each other and solicitous in the way that good mates are, both concerned about the other without sounding too concerned. Two other friends going through sad, strange breakups of their own joined us and there was this period of caring, bitter, unhappy yet happy companionship that we shared. I seem to think we drank a lot at that time but then probably not, because I don’t really remember Emil drinking more than a glass at openings. But I do remember the food.

The food and the art.

And Emil was always making art. Different kinds of photographs, playing with lomography and those funny plastic split lens cameras that let you take 4 shots in one. More than that, hanging out with Em involved holding equipment, recording a script or posing for him. You could be asked to sing an aria or run on the spot in the half light while his camera clicked and whirred, or just 'be yourself'.

 

When I moved to Sydney with my new partner C, Emil was at art college and living in a share house in Glebe. And in quick succession I remember him taking us to a series of great food places we had never been before: Barbeque King in Chinatown, Vietnamese in Marrickville, Frank’s Pizza on Parramatta Road, Prasits on Crown Street, Sailors Thai in the Rocks, Singapore Gourmet in Newtown (authentic char keoay teow at last!)  He took us and he took other friends and friends of friends, if you ate more than once with Emil you were pretty much a friend for life. These were all places we would return to again and again until finally we would forget that Emil had taken us there first, they would seem so ingrained in our Sydney lifestyles, we would bring new friends and enjoy their first-time enjoyment. We went with Emil to Tropfest for the first time, to night clubs in the Cross for the first time, to tiny galleries and night noodle markets and Sydney Festival events. It was all new, it was all exciting. Somehow Emil had discovered these things, these things to enjoy and now he was sharing them.

Singapore Gourmet was a tiny, grotty little place on King Street, unassuming, drab but inside such culinary delight! Emil became such a valued customer he had one of his birthday parties there; we had the place to ourselves. We arrived early so we could help him cover the window and tables with butchers paper and then the dishes began emerging from the kitchen… the tables were decorated with tea lights, glowing through simple lanterns of tracing paper with photocopied images of his childhood - his mother, his father, a tiny spiky haired toddler Emil on the sand. These were prototypes for creative works but until perfected they provided a beautiful, quirky and very Emil-like accompaniment to what was already a fabulously unusual birthday feast.

Then there was the infamous yum cha mornings. Enormous tables of people gathered under his instruction, to eat dumplings, to drink tea, to enjoy life. We would meet these people and then would see them again and again around the lazy susan, blinking the sleep from our eyes and clacking our chopsticks. Emil was strict, there were rules; be at the restaurant at 11am sharp or forget it, that’s when you have yum cha, it’s not lunch! Don’t poke at the food with your chopsticks! Turn the teapot lid over when the tea is gone… I got into big trouble from him when I confused the staff at our favourite restaurant, putting a fifty dollar bill on the table and then waiting for change. No, it wasn’t meant to be a massive tip! Cross waiters made Emil unhappy. It meant finding a new yum cha restaurant…

The yum cha/dim sum love wasn’t all about the food. He bought a dim sum trolley back to Australia with him…and made it into art, an enormous gleaming silver trolley with bamboo steamer baskets towering up to the ceiling.

We did an art piece with him when he was still living in Glebe. C and I recorded a telephone conversation and our friend Helen recorded an aria. The audience, each person clutching a portable radio to their ear, trooped after Emil as he led them along Bridge Road past his house. Along the way they stopped on a corner to watch and listen as C lurked in a phone box and attempted to lip synch his end of the conversation into the receiver. After some sort of dramatic gesture he sped from the box to become another character doing something else. I’m not sure what it was exactly because I was poised between a desklamp and the closed blinds, ready to throw open my arms and lipsynch to Helen’s aria as the audience trotted past, peering up at the window, their ears full of soprano magic.

It was fun, making art with Emil. It was always fun. And thinking back to those times it reminds me that making art should be fun. Should be joyous. Sometimes when I’m crushed down by deadlines or rejection letters or my own insecurities it doesn’t seem like very much fun at all. And that's not very Emil of me.

 We didn’t drift apart it was more like, as the years went by, we were all working on our own stuff, Emil on video now and me writing. We visited him when he was at Goldsmiths College, staying in Goodenough House in London, we met more of his friends, had a barbeque in the beautiful fenced garden in the square. We saw some of the work he was exploring, more video work, the camera on the lazy susan balanced precariously on a window sill to record inside/outside. More friends. More yum cha (or dim sum).

He came and stayed with us in Sydney, he and his Melbourne artist girlfriend, sleeping on the loungeroom floor of our one bedroom flat. 

He came to my family home in Newcastle for Christmas and swam in the pool with my younger sisters. They called him “Emil Emil Orange Peel!” 

For a few years we emailed sporadically, somewhere in there he went to Hong Kong, he spent time in Europe. C and I were having our own dramas, I was diagnosed with MS and suddenly I was on a strict diet and then we struggled to have a baby and went on an even stricter one. The days of Peking Duck to celebrate Chinese New Year or Frank's gelato or any other food adventuring with Emil seemed a long, long way away.

Emil went to Seoul on his Australia Council residency and then he stayed and stayed.

Where’s Emil? We would meet former yum cha compadres in cafes and Chinese restaurants. What’s the latest? Have you heard?

 I hadn't, no. There had been an argument, stupid. Rules had been broken and we both needed time to pass. C and I married in 2004 and I finally sent Emil a photo of my sisters and I in all our wedding finery. He was lovely, complimentary, happy and signed off Emmyxxx. Things were going well for both of us and we talked a bit about the art but mostly Emil sent me pictures of food and coffee and chairs and kisses and various very silly photographs “for your entertainment”. 

And we talked about Seinfeld, again, which he was reabsorbing in Seoul. He found for me a set of badges emblazoned with classic lines; ‘These pretzels are making me thirsty’. And NO SOUP FOR YOU!

It was nice hearing from him, it helped get my mind off the sad realities of infertility and then, when I was finally pregnant I emailed him the good news at fourteen weeks and then included him in my bog-standard I HAVE BIRTHED!!! email announcing my new son, five months later. (Yes, he did come early.)

Emil met up with mutual friends in Hong Kong, he met new friends, friends of ours when they went to Seoul for the first time and he showed them a good time as he showed everyone a good time, because Emil almost always had a good time. 

He loved life. He laughed lots. But we missed him when he was back in Sydney, I'm sorry!!!! he exclaimed in his email. And he never met up with us again. 

I’m still processing this loss of this dear friend, this talented artist, this lovely lovely man who was always smiling and fun and who delighted in meeting people and showing people around.

I regret not staying more in touch with him, not making more of an effort to see him when he was in town. But we always say this whenever anyone we care about dies. I should have…

What I do take solace in is Emil’s ability to live life to the fullest, to find the art in everything. The fun in everything. More than anyone else I know Emil knew how to maintain his curiosity, his sense of humour, his generosity of spirit. He was a great host, either in his own kitchen or the streets of a new city, he would take you under his wing, he would show you things. He adored popular culture, kitch, retro – he always seemed ahead of the pack, he found things first, shared them and then moved onto the next discovery.

In the report I read of his death, he was with his girlfriend. And that made me happier. That he wasn’t alone, that he loved someone and that someone loved him back.

But then, we all loved Emil. 

And the world seems darker, less fun, and certainly much less tasty without him.

Update: obit in Sydney Morning Herald here 

Diary Of A Really Prissy Teenager

For various reasons I have dug up my high school diary. 

It is a truly frightening document that begins at age 12 with the words:

"A few days ago I met v down at the Hostie. She seemed delighted to see me and told me that I was invited to her party. It was to be from 7.30 to 11.30 and C was coming too.

Judging from V's past social experience, I'd say there were boys coming..."

and ends at 17, the night before the HSC exams, with:

"Who's afraid of V Woolf?"

and in between: sheer undiluted ghastliness. 

I love  it!  

Anyone else want to share?

MOTHER'S LITTLE HELPER

"You see my problem."

I was talking to my pal Annie about the forthcoming BOOK WEEK demands. Pick a character, any character, and then dress your child up like them. Or suffer the consequences. Preschools are notable for being cold and hard like that.

"It's not fair," I whined. "The girls can come as princesses. They'll in be pink. They'll wear frocks and maybe a plastic tiara. It's easy for those parents." I was generalising but I didn't care. I had a scant few days to whip up Tricky's cozzie and the pressure was wearing heavily on me and my feminist ideals.

Despite his love of Charlie & Lola, Tricky had decided to be neither Charlie nor Lola, plumping instead for that cuddly feline denizen of the Hairy McClary books: SCARFACE CLAW aka TOUGHEST TOM IN TOWN. It was an unusual choice because Tricky was actually scared of Scarface Claw, insisting we not read the relevant pages when he cropped up in the 'Hairy' books. It made it hard to maintain the tension when Hairy McC and his doggy mates encounter a strange pair of eyes in the undergrowth and then...with a clatter of claws and a scatter of paws... suddenly and inexplicably decide to bugger off home.

I had already scoured the Big House dress-up box which contained the evidence of many a fine Halloween for the Naughty Nephews, not to mention the ghosts of Book Week past, but there was nothing to conjure up a mangy tomcat with a Very Bad Attitude. Nothing except the remains of Naughty Nephew 1's hairy black and white teddy bear suit. A rather rustic looking jacket and trousers as whipped up by my designer friend MarkyQ, one balmy summer evening, many Book Weeks ago.

Now, I found myself (as I so often did) in my hometown Newcastle wandering the aisles of a rather depleted Spotlight with my old theatre pal Annie. And whining. Lots of whining.

I had hoped that I'd find a fully formed tomcat costume, Pret A Porter, with minimal fuss (and obviously maximum cost but I was prepared to give up sustenance for a few days in return for peace of mind). I was wrong.

There was nothing left on the shelves except  a handful of 'Bubblebee' and 'Fifties Boy' outfits.

"This is like the Chernobyl Spotlight," I snarled. "I expect better from the city that gave us The Castanets and Yahoo Serious. All I want is a fecking cat. Where are all the decent costumes?"

 

As I spoke a harried looking woman marched past with three darling little girls in tow. 

"It doesn't matter, I can make them," she was feebly insisting,"three princess dresses. In Pink. Easy." 

"I have to be Belle," one of the darlings snapped.  

"They must have full skirts and fitted bodice," trilled another.

"And a twain," lisped the third who didn't look as if she was old enough to be out of nappies let alone into the traditional salmon tinted garb of the female minor royale.

"What about the tiaras?" the eldest darling called mercilessly as her mother rushed weeping towards the home welding section.

Book Week, it seemed, was not limited to one solitary Sydney preschool. At every fabric display, at each shelf of water soluble paint I could hear the same two words hissed between gritted teeth.

Annie clicked her clickable glasses together and regarded me with the wisdom born of both long term friendship and being producer/director/writer/actor/stage manager and, crucially, wardrobe department of her own theatre company.

"I have three words to say to you," she said firmly. "Hot. Glue. Gun."

Several hours later, back at my parents' house, it was done. 

Before us lay a cut-to-size hairy black and white coat, a long and satifyingly tomcatty tail and a pair of twitchily realistic Scarface Claw ears. These last were my own particular invention, cobbled up from triangles of the same faux fur fabric used to construct the tail and a "Sexy Red Devil" headband, snatched up from a Spotlight bargain bin, which featured demonic horns emerging, oddly enough, from a base of soft fuzzy black feathers. 

Costume construction had taken less than half an hour, most of the intervening time between Chernobyl Spotlight and Scarface Claw Central pleasantly spent sipping coffee and eating macaroons amidst the gourmands of Darby Street.

Once we set to it, Annie wielded the Hot Glue Gun (low temp) like a woman possessed.

Clicking her reading glasses together over her nose, she upended the Spotlight bag and rolled the faux fur like a pro. She sealed and glued and spot stuck the tail, she was a chick with a gun and she wasn't afraid to shoot. "I have put together whole productions with a Hot Glue Gun," she shouted happily, "Feathers, fur, braiding, leather...I've hot glued them all! I use it at home too! Soft furnishings! Decorative blinds! Whole sets of sequinned cushions!  All made up without a single stitch! lord knows I can never wash the things!"

At this point she had spotted the disaster that was Mach#1 of the Scarface Ears. "You've cut that fur exactly the way the shopgirl told you not to," she tutted. 

It was true and so they looked like a couple of neatly trimmed if slightly greying lady hedges, rather than a pair of scruffy feral cat ears. 

"Start again," Annie demanded and ruthlessly ripped the hairy triangles free. Luckily I could no longer be trusted with fur cutting and so Annie did them herself. They looked magnificent.

Book Week came twice for Tricky this year, the Preschool had scheduled parades on Monday and Friday-both days he attends. Scarface Claw had two performances. 

Each day he was shy and nervous, each day I had to hold his hand and walk alongside thirty knee high pirates and pink clad princesses with one little Miss Giggles, one Snow White and one Angelina Ballerina and two mermaids ("Because Ariel wears different clothes on different days".)

Each day his costume was stroked lovingly by Angelina, Belle, Snow or Ariel. 

Each day his face crumpled as we started to leave and he had to be hastily handed over to a Teacher for cuddles and reassuring words as we skulked out the gate.

And each day he had a completely fantastic time

I

Where The Wild Things Buy Their Book Week Costumes

Today, these words caused my heart to leap into my throat:

ON MONDAY AND FRIDAY THE CHILDREN CAN COME DRESSED UP AS THEIR FAVORITE BOOK CHARACTER

I am quoting above from Tricky's preschool newsletter which I will of course use in scrapbookish fashion or at very least keep shoved in memorial shoebox because it is our VERY FIRST PRESCHOOL NEWSLETTER EVER. 

In years to come we will look back with warm hearts and moistened eyes to see that one of the teachers is having a holiday! Lucky her! And, soon it will be Father and Grandfather's morning! Welcome all old blokes related to students! And, A Very Special Thankyou to the Mother who donated two CDs! No one likes a smug miss.

But, it is the can come dressed as fave book character that has me tapping my fingers in an anxious fashion. This of course is merely the latest in a whole series of Preschool related anxiety-tapping moments. He has attended less than ten times and already I have worried about him 'having no friends', 'playing all alone', 'wearing distinctively weird trousers' and 'Suzie ate my cheese.' This last came directly from Young Master when I asked if he enjoyed his snack box. Despite the fact that there appears to be no Suzie in his class I still feel slightly anxious because what if he's being bullied by an imaginary friend? 

We all know what happens to kids that are different, I told my husband. 

They grow up to be leaders and artists and imaginative thinkers, he responded. 

Perhaps, I  nodded, and perhaps the other kids peck their eyes out.

Re Book Week and dressing as fave character, it seems obvious to me that firstly there is no "can" there is only "will".  Tricky must go dressed as something bookish because otherwise he will be different and, as we know, different is dangerous.

Problem is, Tricky's fave books just now are The Gruffalo (orange eyes, black tongue, poisonous wart on end of his nose), The Waterhole (various non-extinct and extinct animals), The Very Hungry Caterpillar(two choices, caterpillar or butterfly) and various Charlie and Lola adventures.

I have a scant couple of weeks to solve this and while I am confident in the papier mache sphere I do not have stitching abilities. Butterfly wings for instance are probably right out.

If worst comes to worst, I told C, I could just write Charlie on a tee-shirt and he could go as "Charlie". 

C was unimpressed. "He likes Where The Wild Things Are," he said "why doesn't he go as Max? All he needs to do is wear that hoodie."

I stared at him. 

"Max wears a full body suit with hood and ears", I said. "We don't have anything that looks even vaguely like that."

"Yes we do", C insisted. "It's grey and sleeveless. There's a picture of a bear on the front."

"And...that looks nothing like Max in Where The Wild Things Are." 

"He could have gone really wild," C insisted, "and cut off his sleeves."

I gave him the patented Mother Knows Best frown. "And screenprinted a design on the front?"

C turned back to his computer, slightly offended. "Well," he said, "that's who I always think of when he wears that shirt."

Father proving himself no help at all, I am left pondering butterfly wings and Charlie tee-shirts. Oh and poisonous warts. I'm pretty sure I could papier mache one of those up, no trouble.

An Australian Girl In Paris

I need to write about Paris. I know that sort of comes from left field but it's always been in the back of my mind.

And I have a certain distance from it now.

I remembered this morning that I started a blog about it, years ago and it's still wheeling round the blogosphere. And sadly, I've forgotten the password so I can't change it or add to it or even delete it and start again. It's just...out there.

I need to write about Paris.

Soon.

The Sticking Point

Tricky's third day of preschool today. C is taking him in and also doing the schoolrun with the Nephews and I've stayed behind to do exciting stuff like write and de-ant the sultanas.

I went along on the second day and basically had to be dragged away by C who is now able to ascertain when the right moment to exit has occurred. Boy, isn't that a skill and wouldn't you think after a year at daycare, I'd have acquired it too? No, because in preschools, everything is bigger and there are a billion more kids and there are so many more shiny, glittery, moving, colourful things to look at. It's distracting! And also alluring! 

Me, I could have spent hours looking at the dinosaurs and the pirate ship and the plastic turtles and look there was a big couch with comfy cushions and some teeny tiny Ally McBeal toilets for everyone! Anytime! Gather round! Let's wee together! If they just put in an espresso machine I could be there all day.

Of course my biggest fear is that Tricky will be a lonely, grim faced child with no friends except for the plastic turtles and we will have ruined his life forever, because I'm neurotic like that.

Last night we put photos from his birthday party into a scrapbook and I realised he had gone quiet. It was not because he was overcome with delightful memories, nor was he stunned into silence by his mother's artful placement of pictures.

No. 

He was eating the glue stick.

Ahhhh! I shrieked at him and wrenched it out of his hand. Stop that! YOU WILL NOT BE THE TYPE OF CHILD WHO EATS PASTE.

 Tricky sucked on his fingers. I like it, he said thoughtfully.

At preschool, Day 2, Tricky already knew to put his bag into the locker marked with a koala and put his drinkbottle on the tray with all the other trays. His dad showed me where the fruit goes and where the lunchboxes go and where the Extra Snacks go. Tricky held my hand tightly until he saw his teacher and then he went and held hands with her. C gave me a nudge. There was a place for everything and everything has its place.

And now, for a few hours, my place wasn't with my baby boy anymore.