As I was methodically combing the shelves at the chemist, a muttered conversation drifted towards me, gradually becoming louder. “Give it to me so I can look in it. If you have nothing to hide, then let me have a look,” said a stern voice, sounding extremely exasperated, followed by child’s repeated “No! No, I deserve my pwivacy!” The stern voice belonged to a Suspicious Parent, who followed their young Potential Shoplifter through the aisles, stopping briefly to continue the argument then moving on as the child backed away from her.
There’s a feeling of slightly smug relief I get sometimes while observing other people’s parenting. Sometimes this is because I’ve passed the age they’re currently struggling with – there’s a quiet pleasure in contemplating the fact that you will never again be the one soothing the crying baby on the plane. At times like this, it’s more of an over-confident “well, my kid would never do that” feeling. I was contemplating this and trying to ignore them as the argument continued, the child keeping up a grating monotone of “No! I do not consent! You cannot invade my pwivacy!” at increasing volumes. Her chaperone insisted several times that she would call the police, no, that was it, she was calling them, she would definitely call the police – falling into the trap of making a Big Threat and then realising you don’t have anywhere to go from there, so you just have to repeat the Big Threat in different ways.
They came into my aisle, as the child started insisting that not even the police had the right to look in her bag and there was nothing anyone could do about it. I had become so sick of hearing about “my pwivacy!” at this point that I interjected with “You’re wrong, they can absolutely look in your bag”, and smiled sympathetically at the parent, thinking that perhaps the firm voice of a stranger might be helpful. This had no effect at all. As they got closer to the door, the caregiver made a swipe for the bag, the girl screamed and flung herself on the ground, and they ended up grimly wrestling each other on the floor, the girl keeping up her wailing scream. The staff and everyone around them pretended this wasn’t happening, which is always a strange phenomenon to observe. “It’s not there, it’s not there,” you can almost hear the mental murmurs. “If we don’t look at it for long enough, it will go away.” I joined in the collective turning away and stepped around them to exit the shop, leaving the pandemonium behind me.
In 2025, I read 88 books, missing my goal of 100 due to a bit of a TV-induced slump in the middle of the year.
I was perturbed the previous year to see my most-read genre as crime/thrillers (not thinking of myself as a “crime reader”), and was gratified to see fantasy dominating once again in 2025, with thrillers and sci-fi next in line. Self-image and reality are aligned once more.
Favourite series
I absolutely fell in love with Rachel Neumeier’s “Tuyo” series. I picked this up because I read a sci-fi novel by Neumeier, the excellent “No Foreign Sky”, and it doesn’t have a sequel. In the absence of a sequel, I wanted more Neumeier. I was initially a bit sceptical about Tuyo, but I absolutely loved it and all the other books I read in this series. It starts off with Ryo, a young warrior offered as a sacrifice to enemy soldiers, and expands into a large and sprawling story about two very different cultures (one nomadic, one agrarian), who must find a way to work together when they encounter various difficulties (sorcerers and such, it’s a fantasy series).
Most baffling re-read
I raced through three or four of the Wess’har series by Karen Traviss, which I initially read in 2010 and remember really enjoying at the time. I quite liked them for the nostalgia value, but whoof, they are very militaristic sci-fi and the main character, a woman, is so derisive of every other woman. Very “not like other girls” in a way that made me roll my eyes this time around.
Best cozy novel
Definitely Sangu Mandanna’s “A Witch’s Guide to Magical Innkeeping” which is an immensely pleasurable found-family fantasy novel. There’s a magically animated skeletal rooster! An author who can make a skeletal rooster cozy is one who deserves your time as a reader. Truly lovely.
Best annoying character
I think I’ve had this experience with a few of Meg Bignell’s novels – I always really enjoy them, but the main characters always drive me a bit nuts. In “The Good Losers”, our main character is tremendously frustrating but also very funny and a great narrator, which makes up for it. Such fantastic characterisation, black humour and a very Australian and specifically Tassie feel to the story.
Most beautiful writing
Tricky, but I think I would go with Robbie Arnott’s “The Rain Heron” which is a strange but gorgeous novel. A surreal dystopian fable. I’ve been meaning to read another book of Arnott’s, but keep putting it off because I want to really immerse myself in it – I don’t think his books are ones for casual reading.
Best children’s novel
You know that type of children’s novel that feature long sections on children laboriously learning some esoteric skill over a period of time? Like novels set in magic schools or novels where children are training to be knights or warriors? Monica Furlong wrote a couple of lovely books in the 80s centred around young girls taken in as apprentices and learning to spin, weave, make herbal medicines, and make a little magic. I loved these books as a kid – they have a very historical-novel feel, this beautifully evocative world full of the ordinary magic of making bread or cheese as well as the more otherworldly variety. I was thrilled to discover newly recorded audiobook copies of these books, and had a wonderful time listening to the first, “Wise Child”.
Best unexpected read
I sometimes get sent advance copies of books to read, and serendipitously received “Beth is Dead” just after watching an adaptation of Little Women. “Beth is Dead” is a modern reimagining of Little Women, in a world where the girls’ father has written a fictionalised story of their life and been heavily criticised for the direction it takes. It’s a murder mystery with characters that are both familiar and surprising. And what a fantastic cover.
This list of ideas is my encouragement to you to incorporate secondhand stuff into your Christmas gifting. Your local op shops (thrift shops / secondhand shops for non-Australians) are a glorious treasure trove of items that you can put together or repurpose into gifts your recipients will genuinely enjoy receiving. Going secondhand also adds a lot of fun creativity to the Christmas gift process. It’s impossible to plan precisely, as what you will find very much depends on your local op shop. However, below are some seeds of ideas. I have very helpfully bolded all the elements you can find in the op shop so you can use them as a rough shopping list.
Games
Op shops are a great way to find new board and card games to try, because if the game isn’t great, you haven’t lost much and you can just re-donate it. Often you can find new board games still in their packaging as well as secondhand ones. You will occasionally have a bummer result by opening up a secondhand game box to find some crucial piece missing, so if you’re going to gift a secondhand game, open it up and examine it first. If the box isn’t in great shape, you could repackage the game as suggested for the craft kit below, or alternatively you could redecorate the box by gluing on wrapping paper or collaged magazine pictures.
Face washers or dishclothes
Get the most colourful or interesting towels you can find at the op shop, and snip them into rectangles with pinking shears. This should (mostly) stop them fraying. You can then tie a mixed bundle of them up with ribbon, and add a tag explaining that they’re upcycled face washers or dishcloths or whatever your recipient will find most useful.
Plant in a mug
If you ever want to fill yourself with a queasy sense of horror, have a think about how many mugs must exist in the world. All the novelty, one-off, just for laughs mugs. The beautiful hand-made mugs, the personalised mugs with photos on. So. Many. Mugs. And so many of them are crowding the shelves of op shops, waiting for you to repurpose them into a cute little pot plant to give as a gift.
Your first step is to find a mug at an op shop. Depending on the recipient you have in mind, this could be something beautiful (depending on the eye of the beholder), awful (bad cartoons, jokes about farting), or so ugly it’s good (you’ll know it when you see it).
If you have a drill and a masonry bit, drill some holes in the bottom of the mug for drainage. If you don’t have a drill, immerse the mug upside down in a bucket or large bowl of water, and use a hammer and nail to carefully make a few holes. This method is not always successful, so ideally you’ll have a few mugs to work on so you’re not too disappointed when you accidentally destroy one. The crappier and cheaper the mug, the easier this will be to do. It’s quite difficult to hammer neat holes through more hefty and well-made mugs.
Stand back in satisfaction and admire your mugs-with-holes. Next, fill them with potting mix, poke a few seeds in, and keep watering them until they sprout. What to plant in them? Anything your heart desires. It doesn’t necessarily have to be something that will stay in your pot, if you know your recipient is capable enough to plant it out or re-pot it when necessary. If you’re in the subtropics at the end of the year, you could go with herbs (basil, chives), or flowers (dahlias, borage, daisies).
Repackage a craft kit
Op shops are always a good source of craft kits, but they’re often a bit battered or look obviously secondhand. I am all for normalising giving secondhand gifts, but recognising that your recipients aren’t always of this frame of mind, you can do some repackaging. Take out the components of the craft kit, and put them in a small cloth bag or tie a ribbon around them. Include the original instruction sheet, or if the instructions are sparse or boring, try writing up your own instructions, including some personalised suggestions about why you chose the kit for this particular person.
Stuff in a jar
Find a selection of nice or interesting jars of different shapes and sizes. Fill them with things like… mixed sweets. Homemade biscuits. Homemade granola. A homemade cake mix for the recipient to bake. Homemade hot chocolate mixture. Leave it empty and attach a collection of blank cards and a pen, and tell them it’s a gratitude jar for them to fill. Tie a secondhand ribbon around the lid, create some written instructions if you’ve made a mix, and pick up some card or scrapbooking paper from the craft section to make a tag.
Make up your own craft kit
Find some bits and pieces from the craft section to make up your own craft kit. Ideas! A skein or two of wool and a set of knitting needles, accompanied by some printed off basic instructions on how to cast on and how to do a knit stitch. Repeat this with a crochet hook instead of knitting needles (apparently amigurumi are a good place to start with crochet, rather than making chains). Get a collection of stamps and an ink pad (you might need to get a new ink pad, there’s always stamps at op-shops but rarely ink), and package it up with some sheets of cardboard as a card-making kit. Buy a jar of buttons or beads, add some yarn, and package it up as a necklace or bracelet making kit. You occasionally come across quite nice as-new notebooks that you could combine with a pen. Many op shops have sewing patterns and a selection of material, if you know someone who sews.
Jewellery
You might find some earrings or a necklace that’s the perfect gift as-is. If you happen across some very cheap blingy jewellery or something partly broken, you could make a bookmark with a length of wide ribbon and a hot glue gun, decorating one end of the ribbon with a brooch or single earring. Or you could buy some flexible magnets (probably not at the op shop, let’s be honest), and hot glue some jewellery bits to them to make some very flashy fridge magnets.
Wooden boards and bowls
Wooden bowls, boards and salad servers can all be refreshed and revived with a good coat of orange oil, a food safe oil that you can buy at Bunnings. These are nice gifts on their own, or bowls can be a good base for a collection of edible gifts, either homemade or not.
Wine or beer glasses
No wine or beer drinker would ever turn down a new glass. Find a lovely single or set of wine glasses – these could be classic and plain, or something themed (there’s always a few glittery 18th and 21st wine glasses hanging around). Hunt around for a box or basket that will fit them, and a scarf to cushion them in. I am a frequent destroyer of wine glasses, and always appreciate an addition to the glass cupboard.
Men’s t-shirts
Not just for blokes. Anyone who likes to wear a comfy oversized t-shirt around the house, the garden or to bed might enjoy a well-chosen t-shirt. I encourage you to dig right through the rack and enjoy the search. Amongst the very boring department store t-shirts you can find apparel options to thrill the gift recipient who revels in the niche or tacky or unexpected.
Christmas tat without consumerist guilt
Purchase ridiculous Christmas themed novelty junk with a clear conscience. Yes, it will probably only give minutes of merriment, yes it might break, yes it’s plastic rubbish – but it’s plastic rubbish from the op shop. All op shops have had full Christmas displays through most of November, and there’s all sorts of novelties and decorations to be found if you really want to lean into the festive spirit. Will the beard lights below even work? I don’t know, it’ll be exciting to find out when they’re opened on Christmas day.
There are a million other ideas that will occur to you as you wander the aisles. I encourage you to go forth into the op shop wilds and embrace a bit of sustainable consumption this Christmas.
Recently I’ve been more vigilant about scheduling things into my calendar in order to Get Things Done, and have been including regular maintenance-type tasks like cleaning the gutters as a monthly event. Our house is surrounded by eucalyptus trees constantly shedding leaves and bark, and if the gutters clog up, we either don’t gather much water when it rains, or the water we do collect is stained yellow from the leaves. It is slightly embarrassing serving a glass of water to someone and have them peer at it silently wondering why it’s yellow. Surprise yellow beverages are never a good thing.
We clean the gutters with a leaf-blower, which is noisy but effective. I am not very fond of heights, but once I’m up the ladder it’s rather fun striding around (carefully, along the lines of bolts) on the roof, blasting leaves away. During a recent cleaning effort, I had made my way towards what I think of as the “back” of the roof (because it is furthest from the ladder). A spiky tree has grown over the gutter in that section, and in order to keep my feet on the bolts I had to push my way through it, a rather unpleasant experience while wearing shorts. I was revving the leaf blower as I went, and came across what I thought was a particularly stubborn clump of leaves. I vroomed the blower loudly at the clump, until a bird suddenly flew away, revealing a nest with some tiny baby birds staring up at me. I immediately took my finger off the trigger, feeling terrible – the birds were awfully small and scrawny, although they did have feathers. I backed away and waited for a bit, but the mother didn’t immediately return. It didn’t seem ideal that there was a bird nest in the gutter, but there didn’t seem to be anything I could do about it – if I moved the nest, the mother might abandon it, and any place that I put the nest would no doubt make the babies vulnerable to predators.
I moved to the other side of the roof and cleared out the rest of the gutters, leaving the nest in place. During the process, I finally found the willie wagtail nest which has been causing the resident willie wagtails to aggressively and noisily attack every large bird in the vicinity of the house – it is perched precariously up on the TV antennae. (It’s still there, and the willie wagtails continue to be very territorial, including towards any humans who wish to use the washing line.)
Once I was off the roof, the mother bird returned to the nest, and I was relieved that all seemed to be well. I took some photos from the ground, and consulted our bird book to discover it was a common bronzewing (a -you will be surprised to hear this – very common pigeon).
Unfortunately a couple of weeks after I blasted the poor bronzewing, we had rather a lot of rain. The first couple of days, the bronzewing was bedraggled but still in place on the nest. However after that, the gutter was empty. It seems likely that the volume of water rushing along the gutter disintegrated the nest, and I need to get back up on the roof soon to check whether there’s any sad little corpses that need removal. Given that I was trying to avoid our water supply flowing over dead leaves on the way to the tank, stopping the water from flowing over any dead birds would also be a fine goal to achieve.
I tried this recipe as part of my “Lunchbox Treats with Something Extra” experiment – that is, baking sweet treats for the kids’ lunchboxes that aren’t too high in sugar and include veggies (or in this case, beans for extra protein) – and it was a resounding success. I know baked goods with beans sometimes have a slight bean flavour, but the cocoa in these brownies truly completely overwhelms the flavour of the black beans. My children were very sceptical when they helped me make them and saw the beans being whizzed up in the blender, but they loved the end result.
You can replace the coffee with any other liquid – water or milk or tea – but the coffee does help emphasise the chocolate flavour. I made a pot of coffee in the morning then made these brownies, adding a little coffee from the pot as I went. You could also make up a tiny bit of instant coffee if you’re not a brewed coffee drinker.
ingredients: 400g can black beans (these are often in the Mexican food section of the supermarket rather than the canned veggies section) 2 eggs 1/4 cup vegetable oil 2 tsps vanilla extract 2 tblsp coffee 3/4 cup cocoa powder 1/2 tsp baking soda pinch of salt 3/4 cup brown sugar 1/2 cup dark chocolate chips and a few extra for sprinkling on top
method: Grease and line a 20cm square cake tin with baking paper. Pre-heat your oven to 160C.
Drain and rinse the beans, then pop them into a blender or food processor. Add the eggs, oil, vanilla and coffee, then whizz away until reasonably smooth. You’ll look at the weird chopped up skins of the black beans and think “my kids are definitely going to notice those in the brownies.” But trust me! They won’t.
In a large bowl, whisk together the cocoa, baking soda, salt and brown sugar – the lazy/clever person’s version of sifting. Pour in your blended bean mixture and mix together until well combined. Stir in the chocolate chips, saving a few for sprinkling on top.
Pour the mixture into your lined cake tin, and sprinkle your remaining chocolate chips on the top. Bake for about 25 minutes, or until the top feels springy and a skewer comes out clean. Let cool completely before removing from the tin and slicing into squares (or fiddly little rectangles if you’re me and you have to try and fit things into the compartments of a Yumbox lunchbox – which I mostly love, but occasionally wish the snack compartments were a little wider).
One day last year, my son came home from school and said he’d had a relief teacher who had told the class all about her pet hermit crabs. He proceeded to tell me all about pet hermit crabs, and showed me a list he’d written down of the things you need to house pet hermit crabs. I said that was all very interesting and if he still felt strongly about the matter at his next birthday, we could get some hermit crabs to keep in his old fish tank. Months passed, his level of enthusiasm remained high, and for his birthday we took him to the pet shop to buy two hermit crabs (as they like company), and various branded hermit crab accoutrements.
Hermit crabs sold as pets in Australia are Coenobita variabilis, a native Australian land hermit crab. They live in northern tropical parts of Australia, so they like a warm habitat. Generally they’re kept in dry fish tanks, with containers of fresh water for them to drink, and salt water to splash in.
Above is a picture of our tank right after we bought the two crabs, Nippy and Scratcher. This is what tanks look like if you buy the pet shop basics – it’s a bit of a grim sight. After I took this photo, we added sticks and rocks for climbing on, and I made the bedding a bit deeper using “play sand” purchased from Bunnings. Every time we added something new to the tank, the crabs came over and thoroughly inspected it – they really enjoy exploring new additions to their environment, and it’s fun to rearrange items and occasionally add new things in to give them a bit of a thrill.
Nippy and Scratcher were fascinating little creatures, and it was really fun watching them exploring around their tank, burrowing in the sand and climbing out precariously on sticks. However, about a month after we got them, I inspected the tank and made a rather horrifying discovery – a lone crab leg was lying on the sand and Nippy was wandering around the tank looking suspiciously well and happy. I felt that ominous sinking sensation that occurs when you realise you’re going to have to tell your child that one of their pets has died. I poked around in the sand, uncovering a mostly empty shell with the remainder of Scratcher in it, and tried to think about the nicest way to tell Edward “I think one of your crabs ate the other one.”
If you google “why did my hermit crab die”, you get any number of results assuring you that your hermit crab is probably not dead, it’s just moulting, as moulting hermit crabs don’t move and appear to be dead. You should never on any account actually inspect your hermit crab to check if it’s dead, the websites said sternly, because you might hurt it. Does anything smell like it’s rotting? No? Well your hermit crab is probably just fine, and you should treat it as if it’s still alive. I decided a dismembered leg was good enough evidence that Scratcher was no longer alive, and removed the remnants of his corpse from the tank.
I broke the news of Scratcher’s death, and spent a few days doing a lot more reading about hermit crabs and all the ways they can die. I decided I’d done two things wrong that probably led to Scratcher’s untimely death. Firstly, hermit crabs can only breathe in high humidity – that’s part of the reason why they need dishes of water and a heat pad under their tank. We didn’t have any indicator of the humidity level in the tank, hadn’t been spraying it with water, and it’d been winter (albeit a sub-tropical winter). It was possible the humidity in the tank had been too low. Secondly, when hermit crabs moult they can’t move (hence the whole “are they dead/are they alive” dilemma that hermit crab owners face) and are unable to defend themselves – they bury themselves to protect themselves during the moulting process. While I’d added enough substrate for the crabs to fully cover themselves, it wouldn’t have been enough to defend Scratcher from a curious Nippy.
A possible thirdly was the fact that the branded crab accessories we had were all peeling – the brightly coloured shells and water containers were shedding paint, and I wondered if this might have been poisonous if ingested. I don’t think this is actually the case, however in future I avoided brightly painted accessories and shells to avoid more peeling paint.
Back to the drawing board for the tank (or “crabitat” as hermit crab owners very cutely call it). I made a much deeper substrate/bedding area, coming about a third of the way up the tank – this is a combination of the “play sand” and coconut coir. Bunnings (and other gardening stores) stock bricks of pure coconut coir – both this and the sand are much more cost effective than the tiny bags of “hermit crab bedding” sold at pet shops. You just need to ensure that you are buying pure coconut coir with no added fertiliser. (Bunnings sell bricks labelled as “garden soil”, which are fine to use – the bricks labelled “feed and mulch” have additives.) I broke off part of the block of coconut coir, soak it in water, then mixed it with the sand until I had a nice consistency – around 2/3 sand and 1/3 coir.
On top of the bedding, I put some new netting for climbing, a coconut shell house for hiding in, some more spare shells (unpainted ones this time), two gauges for temperature and humidity, and finally – and a new crab, Outy. A bit later, I put up a “moss pit” – this is a suction cup soap holder stuck to the tank, and filled with sphagnum moss (you can buy blocks of this at gardening shops). Nippy and Outy were thrilled with their new tank decor and had a lovely time thoroughly exploring, and hurling moss about the tank. (Well I presume that’s what they were doing at night when I’d find the moss pit emptied in the morning, and moss strewn around everywhere).
Everything went well for a couple of weeks, and then first Nippy, then Outy, disappeared. I confidently announced that they were taking advantage of their lovely deep substrate and were moulting. I kept changing the water and food, awaiting their return. After a couple of weeks, Outy reemerged for a few days, then disappeared again. More weeks went by. “They’re not very interesting pets, are they?” my brother commented, surveying the empty tank. I became convinced that both crabs were dead – around two months had passed since I’d seen Nippy, and there were no signs of life. Refreshing the water bowls began to feel like a bit of a pointless endeavour.
As the end of the year approached, I told Edward that after Christmas we should probably have a dig around to try and find the crabs, as I suspected they might be dead. He solemnly agreed. Nippy and Outy were apparently listening to me, and accordingly on Boxing Day they triumphantly re-emerged, back from the dead, clambering around the tank as if nothing had happened.
I am hoping that soon they may like to shift out of their garish painted and branded shells and move into some of the slightly larger natural shells scattered temptingly around their tank. It is nice to have them back from their long absence, and according to The Internet, they will probably not moult again for at least another year. Soon we shall rearrange their tank to keep their minds – although surely hermit crabs must have rather small brains – happily occupied with interesting new things.
What I want most from a lemon muffin, or cake, is plenty of bitey zesty lemon-ness, and these muffins are just perfect. They have a delightful zing from all the lemon zest, and then the addition of lemon syrup poured over the warm muffins gives them the perfect extra lemony twist. The recipe is mostly this one from the Kitchn.
ingredients: 2 1/2 cups plain flour 1/2 cup caster sugar 1 tablespoon baking powder 1/2 teaspoon salt 3 lemons 1 1/4 cups milk 1/2 cup vegetable oil, such as rice bran 1 large egg 1 teaspoon vanilla essence 1/2 cup caster sugar (for the syrup)
method: Zest the three lemons, then juice enough of them to get 1/2 cup of juice. Set the lemon juice aside.
Pre-heat your oven to 190C (or 170C fan-forced). Grease your muffin tin (as syrup get drizzled over the muffins at the end, it is better to bake them directly into a greased tin than use liners, as the liners will get soaked with syrup).
In a decent sized bowl, whisk together the flour, sugar, baking powder, salt and lemon zest. In a separate bowl, whisk together the egg, milk, oil and vanilla essence. Make a well in the flour bowl, pour in the wet mixture, and gently fold together until just combined.
Spoon the mixture into the muffin tin, and bake for 20 minutes, or until a skewer comes out clean.
While the muffins are baking, put the lemon juice and additional 1/2 cup of sugar into a small saucepan and boil briskly for 5 minutes, then take off the heat.
When the muffins come out of the oven, leave them in the tin and poke them all over with a skewer or fork. With a spoon, slowly drizzle the lemon syrup over the muffins – you’ll need to go quite slowly in order for the syrup to absorb, however if it pools a little in the muffin tin, it will soak into the sides perfectly well. Let the muffins cool in the tin, then remove and enjoy their delightful zestyness.
It is a very dry spring. Distant fires have burned for weeks, and each week I look eagerly at the weather forecast, hoping that a 20% chance of rain due in days might gradually increase.
The lower dam has dried up. Vivid green grasses and moss are growing in the damp dirt that remains, forming a circle around the bare patch where the last traces of water disappeared a week ago. Deep cracks have formed in the dry mud. The upper dam still holds a little water, but it is the lowest it has ever been in our 12 years living here.
Recently we have had evenings where the air has been thick with smoke from fires, the sun a violent and vivid orange as it approaches the horizon, glowering through the murky air. The humidity is low, the days so hot and dry that you can take washing in a couple of hours after hanging it out.
I saw this koala moving across the ground from the verandah. Squinting at it without my glasses on, I initially thought it was a small dog, but quickly realised my mistake. It climbed a small tree next to the lower dam, and stayed still as we tiptoed closer for a look. Later in the day it moved to a higher tree, comfortably nestled in a crook between two branches, and stayed for a couple of days before moving on during the night. I keep gazing up into the trees each morning to see if it has returned, but I suspect it was moving through the area looking for a mate, and has now journeyed onwards.
Frances is not what I would call a gifted sleeper, even though she is now over three and a half, an age at which I think children really should get the hang of sleeping on their own for long periods. It feels good! Why don’t they want to feel good! What apparently makes Frances feel good is lying on top of me on her stomach, her head pressed uncomfortably right up under my chin. She’s like a weighted blanket, if weighted blankets had limbs and tried to pinch the skin of your upper arms and sniffed loudly trying to clear their congested nose. Both the kids have had one of those mild yet irritating “runny nose for weeks” things. I’ve had so much more sleep since weaning Frances, but in the absence of breastfeeding it seems she’s just come up with any number of annoying “going to sleep” habits.
She finds pinching the skin of my upper arms soothing. I would personally love to know why she has chosen one of the most irritating fucking things in the world to do in order to feel soothed. She slowly and sneakily moves her fingers to the skin of my upper arms as she starts to fall asleep (to “roll” the skin, not pinch, she claims – “I’m just rolling it!”, like who could possibly object to that), and in response I clamp her hand underneath my arm and snarl “don’t touch my arm”, my version of a calming lullaby.
I roll her off me once she’s fallen asleep and sneak out of her room. Then later, if the moon is waxing and the wind is blowing from the east (that is, for any number of completely inconceivable reasons) she finds it hard to sleep, and she cries until I come into her room, and then occasionally wakes during the rest of the night to clamber on top of me in order to drop off to sleep again. This is, as you can imagine, not very conducive to a deep sleep on my part.
I recently went away and slept the entire night without interruption, which was just so gloriously restful. It eased my concern that the children had entirely broken my ability to sleep an entire 8 hours without waking up multiple times. I write this because I know that in several years, in my wonderful future full of nights of long deep sleeps, I will read it back and enjoy the feeling of marveling at my rotten daughter and her bedtime battles. “I’m just rolling it!”
A few weeks after writing this – Frances actually slept through the night a couple of nights ago. I am tamping down my near-hysterical joy at this development and hoping she does it again soon.
On a recent visit to Mum’s Daintree property, we spent some time in the afternoon sitting in the bird hide next to the main wetland watching the radjah shelducks go about their business. One of them stood guard, standing on the edge of the water looking outwards, while the ducklings stayed hidden in some reeds. The other duck joined the first, and off they flew together. Parental abandonment! The ducklings stayed well hidden for the twenty minutes their parents were away – occasionally standing up and getting themselves re-seated more comfortably, but mostly being the most well-behaved ducklings you could hope for. Mum and I were most fascinated by this, and speculated how on earth the parents impress upon the ducklings the importance of not emerging from the reeds until their return. If my children were ducklings they would no doubt get themselves eaten by an eel the minute my back was turned.
The adults flew back in, and then both stood around as the ducklings tidily trotted down and stood in a line on the water’s edge, poking about and finding things to nibble on. The adults stood watch, and when a magpie goose came over to bother them – quite unnecessarily and rudely, we thought – they loudly yelled and moved the ducklings away swiftly to another area. This impressive work is no doubt why they still have seven ducklings of their original eight hatchlings.
Meanwhile the magpie geese goslings were far more undisciplined. The little threesome moved across the pond cheeping away constantly – looking far too big and ungainly to still be cheep-cheep-cheeping in such a babyish way – and the various adults that make up their family group followed them, a couple posted around on other banks and up trees as look-outs. The goslings seemed to tootle along in a very carefree manner, while the adults puttered after them making sure all was well. There was none of the attentive discipline of the shelduck family. The benefits of sharing childcare responsibilities in a large family group. Cheep-cheep-cheeping without a care in the world.
o frabjous day! 