Snapshot

Hello!!!!!!! I’ve missed you!!!!!!!!! To catch you up on life since the last post:

< Hazel in July | Hazel in October >

Moses and Hazel both suddenly matured after their birthdays, thus outdating almost everything I wrote in their birthday posts. Hazel now knows far more correct pronouns and tenses and is now chatting to anyone within earshot (my favourites from yesterday were “Excuse me? We having sparkling apple juice and pies for dinner” and “My daddy put my hair really up,” both of which were excitedly shared with a woman in a lift who could not have cared less about either piece of information). She demands that we leave her alone to put on her own shoes, and wishes she could dress herself without help, but isn’t quite there yet. Her face is looking older, too, although I can’t pinpoint how; I think her cheeks have deflated a bit, and she’s looking more like a little girl (our baby's growing up! Waaaaaaaaaaaah!). She’s also been regularly peeing on the loo, and I half-heartedly jumped on this opportunity to get her out of nappies; we bought her some undies and gave them a burl one morning, during which she innocently - but with alarming rapidity - doubled the amount of washing in the laundry basket. I gave up. This summer will last for a while – we’ll give toilet training another go early next year. She’s also realised she can say no, and sometimes calls out to us 15 minutes after we’ve put her to bed and tells us that Moses just woke her up, even though he’s quite obviously fast asleep in the bed opposite.

Moses has graduated from another swimming class and is now learning to breathe while doing freestyle, thus overtaking his father in swimming ability. He’s decided he’s desperate to start reading, and also that he doesn’t want to be a police officer when he grows up because they carry guns. (Swords are okay apparently; his philosophy on violence needs some tweaking before it’ll be completely consistent.) He also lost his first tooth! He bit into an apple last Wednesday and started shrieking that it had broken his tooth, which sent us all into a bit of a panic until Google reassured us that 5 was a perfectly normal age for the first tooth to fall out. After this, Alan and I both started getting a bit sniffly (Our babyyyyyyyy! etc., etc.) while Mo continued to bawl about the fact that something that was solidly stuck in his mouth an hour ago was now quite wrongly wobbling about and yet his mum and dad were looking at him with proud, teary eyes instead of treating the situation as the seriously dramatic dramafest it actually was. 

He calmed down upon realising the tooth fairy would bring a gift, and that this could be his last chance before Christmas to score the Ninja Turtle figurine he’d had his eye on. After some clarification (you only get a toy the first time you lose a tooth, after which the Fairy leaves a coin; maybe the Tooth Fairy actually exists, we’ll have to see!!!!; yes, she’ll still come despite the fact that you have no pillow), Mo went to bed excited, and then spent the next few days madly pushing the tooth this way and that, and asking me to do the same but with more force, and generally tried his darndest to get that stubborn tooth out of his face. Wednesday evening he was distraught over the fact that his tooth was going to fall out; Thursday evening he was distraught over the fact that his tooth hadn’t fallen out yet. Then on Monday morning he went and swallowed it while eating a pear.

Alan’s business is thriving, but he’s been kind enough to refrain from any smug “told you so”s (which I totally would have done if I were him). He’s moving up in the world – he no longer works from our bedroom but has shifted to a friend’s garage at the end of our street (ours has no mobile phone reception), and comes back here to make lunch/use the loo/take a break. It’s possible the heat will drive him into air-conditioned premises when summer officially arrives; we’ll see. He finishes work at 4pm and cooks dinner for us, so I can take the kids to the park after picking up Mo from preschool and return home to an already-cooked meal, which truly is as splendid as I imagined it must be last year when it was me doing the cooking and Alan doing the coming home.

As for me, I’ve just finished my fifth class of ten – I’m now halfway through my graduate diploma. This last class was incredibly intense and killed off all motivation to study anything ever again; I’m hoping the break over the next couple of weeks is refreshing and that my next subject restores some of my initial excitement about the course. Over the last six weeks I’ve read an entire textbook (~600 pages) as well as 50-or more journal articles on the topics of impulsivity and cross-cultural differences in self-esteem and self-presentation. I also read a novel (Life After Life by Kate Atkinson) and a memoir (The Anti-Cool Girl by Rosie Waterland), but I can only blame myself for those two; obviously I need to find a new, non-reading way to unwind.

Anyway, the reading was more brain-deadening than inspiring. At one point I switched on enough to realise that I’d just typed the following in my notes:

• Shared and non-shared environments
• shared: environments that are shared between two individuals
• non-shared: environments that are not shared between two individuals.

One would hope I’d have remembered that without any help. 

Anyway, after submitting my last assignment 2.5 minutes late thinking I was actually submitting it 2.5 minutes early (turns out the deadline was 11:55, not midnight), thereby immediately losing 10 marks, and after reading the wrong chapter of my textbook in order to prepare for my final exam, thereby wasting three hours of my precious time and adding an extra three hours of right-chapter-reading, I AM DONE. I’m officially on holidays, and am one subject closer to this course being over. I’m not thinking beyond that, or if I do I picture fields filled with unicorns and liquorice allsorts beyond the horizon, rather than three further years of study.

That pretty much brings you up to speed; I plan to be back soon to talk about cakes and Friday Night Lights and anxiety (three separate topics, although thinking about how they may be related will keep me entertained for a little while now).