25th of January

 

Harriet had an all-day playdate booked in for Friday, so she was very excited to head on over in the morning. Ted was, unfortunately, in a rather grumpy and demanding mood which did wear on Harriet somewhat.  And me.  But on we travelled, eventually making it the entire 200m from where we parked the car to the apartment that was our destination.  

How wonderful is it to arrive somewhere and almost immediately decide upon making 'maple snow'?  This was the delight thrown upon my children and here the recipe for this and other wonderful 'meals' was being read out while the ice was being transformed into snow by the magic of the hand processor.

After I had a lovely rejuvenating chat, Ted and I went out for a wander.  As I mentioned he was in an unusually demanding mood. In fact he wasn't really acting like his normal self - leading me across the road to places unknown (he had no idea where he was and where he was going), crossing roads without a care in the world (despite his normally high level of traffic safety awareness) and generally being quite the urban renegade. 

We had a conversation where he asked how he could become an orphan.  I told him both Papa and I would have to die, to which he replied "Do you know when you're going to die?".  I told him I didn't, but never fear, we had plans in place and Lisa was going to look after him if he did, in fact, end up an orphan.  The response to this news was that Ted threw his head back and wailed, proclaiming that he didn't want Lisa, he wanted to live in an orphanage.

We arrived at a compromise - once we've died and he's made an orphan, Lisa is to drive him to the orphanage.  Lis - you're on notice.  Feel the love.

Ted has been asking some pretty detailed questions while lying in bed waiting to be overtaken by sleep of late.  They have included:

* Where does the Earth get its energy from to spin around the sun?

* When did people first become alive?

* Is the space we are in spinning around the sun as well?

* Why is there gravity?

* Where does gravity come from?

And my favourite, as he screams about how he doesn't want to go to sleep because it's so BORING and how he's not at ALL tired:

*When will the Earth turn so that Australia faces the sun again?

There have been many, many more but they're just the ones I happened to text to James while he was at trivia one night straight after I came out from putting him down, so I happened to remember by reading back over our texts.

 

So we wandered around the little village of Summer Hill for a while more.  Ted demanded the requisite stopover in Monkey Puzzle and, given the heat, I was more than happy to acquiesce to their air-conditioned comfort and free entertainment.

After we picked Harriet back up it was time for us to move on to our dinner out with another family.  It was an attempt to catch up prior to school starting back, but the fractious nature of our two younger ones made it a tricky evening, so before we had a chance to talk each other's ears off it was time to whisk them all up, bundle them out and drive away.  Of course when we got home and I suggested they have a run around under the sprinkler to cool off before heading into their bedroom for bed, the children whooped with joy and ran out at speed.

They then proceeded to get themselves so worked up that it took them about two hours to get to sleep.  What on earth was I thinking?  I'm a woman who has just discovered the series Girls - I need some serious viewing time free!