Letter To A Ten Month Old Nature Lover

Darling Tricky

You are TEN MONTHS OLD. TEN! Count ‘em, that’s all of your chubby brown fingers with the outrageously sharp fingernails! Now we go onto toes and we only get to do TWO of those and then you’re ONE WHOLE YEAR OLD and I spend the entire birthday kissing you all over and weeping with uncontrollable joy and avoiding photographs in case I have a snotty nose.

But let us not speak of that now because just now you are ten months and that in itself is cause for full body kissing and photographs and indeed also snot because you, me and your father have all caught some ghastly coughing, hacking, nose dripping chest heaving viral thing.

You have now officially Moved To The Country. In many ways, this is not dissimilar to your life in the city. You are still living in a share household, your parents are still ridiculously busy, they still get your meal times arse about (but less so) and you still have to gently remind them with your Screaming Tomato Impression.

You don’t have your cousins to knock about with and this is pretty sad really because you’re just getting old enough to really enjoy they’re company (although of course your love affair with Naughty Nephew the 3rd has pretty much continued unabated since…well since prebirth really when he was fascinated by your in-utero hijinks). But you do have the attention and adoration of our new house-mates, HRS and D. Both are in their early twenties so they’ve got all that… stuff, that…what do you call it, it seems so foreign to me now…oh yes. Energy.

You also have a backyard with that green pokey-out-the-ground stuff. You enjoy sitting and crawling and grabbing handfuls of the green pokey stuff. You also like very much to look at the birds. And the leaves.

In fact, You plus Nature. BFF.

I am less friendly with Nature since I encountered strange and enormous king hell moths in a public toilet at a railway station on our way to this new postcode. They looked like fat, blind, beakless sparrows. With feelers. They were also furry and motley and clinging silently to nearly every available surface which causes great unease as one tinkles and tries not to in any way disturb them. I suspect I was being punished for an evil moth destroying incident in my past. HRS took one look at them and got straight back in the car, and because she hasn’t given birth over a three day period and thus owns a Bladder Of Steel was able to wait for a service station loo at the next town along the highway.

This month I admit I have been (ahem) introducing you to television. I expect to read these words in five years time and regret them deeply but some mornings I put on a video of The Wiggles, or Teletubbies and I dance and smile and sing Hot Potato Hot Potato and Toot Toot Chugga Chugga Big Red Car next to the screen and you just look at me like I’m a fucking idiot.

You stand holding onto the table I have cunningly placed in front of the tv to stop you touching the buttons and sometimes you deign to watch some small snippet – TinkyWinky wandering around with a cloud on his head, Jeff – asleep, again! But then seconds later you will drop down and crawl off stalking human prey, D or HRS or Dada, living, breathing, bleeding entertainment slaves that do all the singing and dancing and oh oh-ing of those flat 2 dimensional characters on the small screen but also pick you up and read you stories and give you finger food and take you out to look at Nature. You do like sucking on the power cord of the video player, though, so perhaps that’s progress.

Ten months means you have taken to finger foods with all the zeal of a person who has sprouted four teeth! That’s two down the bottom and two big muthas at the top. I’d take a photo of them but it’s very hard to force you to reveal the big mutha teeth. Still, you enjoy peeled fruit and cold broccoli and pizza crusts and one particularly bad evening when we were driving back from Melbourne after seeing the opening of my play and had failed to pack enough food for your dinner, you enjoyed a damp chunk of old panini which I had wrapped in a napkin the previous night and shoved in my handbag. Why I would do this is anyone’s guess, it’s not like we were kipping in a gutter and this would be our last meal for the week, but thank god I did because it released us from the grip of the Screaming Tomato for at least five precious minutes and by that time I had discovered (you see, there really is a god) a sealed package of mashed pumpkin and corn which I was able to feed you reasonably soon after the panini dregs and then you fell asleep, although not before shrieking YOU PEOPLE WITH YOUR INABILITY TO PROPERLY PLAN MY MENUS, YOU SUCK ARSE in Screaming Tomatoese.

You now use your fingers to point at baby bunting and the little black cat in your new favourite book Peach Pie Pear Plum (or whatever the hell it’s called). I have also been reading “Hairy McLairy” to you rather a lot. This is a book I seem to have loved for a great many years and to some of the more critical in our new house it even seems my sole purpose for giving birth to you was to have a captive audience for my rendition of Hairy McLairy. Top of the pops is still “My body plays music…” which always ends with a lively cha cha cha on your new maracas. HRS has adapted this tune so that the beginning goes “My parents are mental…” but she’s one of those cruel young folk with exacting standards and I know you’ll take revenge on my behalf by, say, dragging one of those hell moths in from the back yard and leaving it in her bedroom.

Oh my sweet bubba. How many times a day do your father and I look at each other and say “I love him so much.” You seem so patient and so gracious and so incredibly good humoured about the whole New Home, No Regular Meal Times, Who Are These People, Why Can’t I Suck That Power Cord scenario. Time seems to move so fast, one minute you were a squashy soft bundle who snuggled into your father every morning for a few hours extra sleep, and now you seem to be half a minute off standing by yourself and then walking and then getting a tattoo. And every half smile is a blessing, every soft wet kiss is a glimpse of heaven, every snuffly snotty laugh is music to our ears.

HRS is right, we are mental, but that’s because we’re your parents and we’re seventy sorts of smitten with you, our darling tricky boy.

Happy ten months.

Your Very Own

Ova Girl
xxxxx