Do you know, Mr Sun?

Hello there. “Another Saturday night and I ain’t got nobody,” a good song although not entirely true for me. I may be gearing up for another three hours of solitude on the computer, but I could join Matt and Keith watching football if I really wanted some company. I often think of that song when I sit down for my Saturday night ritual, laughing at my old expectations of a Saturday night. All I ask of each day are a few accomplishments besides fun with my girls, cooking meals and cleaning up messes. I expect no less on a Saturday than I do a Monday. It was our first dry day in a while, certainly a laundry day. I also worked with Keith down in the garden for a few hours while Matt played with Evie and Jacinta went to morning tea with Mary. We cleaned up and planted out half of the teepee garden with green mulch: lucerne, mustard, clover and oats. Later on Matt, Jess, Genevieve and I went to visit some friends who just started pig farming. To say the least, pigs are amazing creatures. Watching those piglets attack the sow for milk makes me grateful for my one little baby, but they sure are cute. The pigs make mud by tearing up the ground with their snouts, our boots got stuck in the mud while walking. With these few extra events outside of the daily routine, I feel I did the day justice.

Matt is also very conscious of using his days efficiently. Not having a job presently makes him feel even more of a need to use every hour on productivity. This week he enrolled in a counselling course, received the class materials and began studying the first subject. He applied for a few jobs, and contacted a few more schools about substitute teaching. He is preparing for his court case, getting ready to plead not guilty for having hit the kangaroo back in February. He called around gathering statements and evidence on the insanity of the police charging him $300 for “reckless driving,” all because he called wildlife rescue to check on the kangaroo’s welfare. We can only hope the judge will see a problem in the police’s handling of these unfortunate situations. Matt spent some wet days digging out space for a new root cellar/brewing cellar below our house. He finished making all of the movies with the summer’s photos. Jacinta loves sitting on his lap watching the picture movies. Matt is also looking into music publishing and trying to find a way to make a small income off of some of his songs. He spent a lot of time writing too, although I can’t tell you what. Matt is a bit funny about sharing his writing, or any half-baked thoughts before they are fully cooked, even with me. After nine years of marriage, we can laugh about it now.

We can laugh about a lot of things now, I suppose that’s what starts to happen over the years in a relationship. You slowly learn that you can’t change each other, but that you just have to learn to love and/or deal with each other’s idiosyncrasies. Matt will never love the fact that I lose damn near everything, but he can laugh about it now. Perhaps not at the moment I lose the wallet at the airport, but later. I can’t say I love his silence and reticence to share every little detail about what he thinks and does, but it is familiar, it is him. Rather than feeling left out and injured by it, I just understand and know it has nothing to do with me. We can chuckle at our extreme differences, I suppose that’s appreciation, maybe acceptance. We spend quite a bit of time laughing with our little girls too.

Jacinta has learned the beauty of indoor tents, not how to make them herself but how to play in them. “Mommy will you make me and Genevieve a tent in her crib?” They play under the blankets, peek a boo, roll around and play with toys. Evie enjoys it as much as Jacinta, for a while at least. But even while Evie is elsewhere, Jacinta wants to get in the tent alone. The other day Matt asked her if she was going to have a rest in her tent. Of course not! Jacinta? Nap? “You can just daydream,” Matt suggested. Any suggestion of sleep to Jacinta is a blasphemy. After he explained what daydreaming was, he covered her back up in the tent. As she was in the tent, she felt quite alone and began conversing with herself. I was feeding Evie three steps away, feeling bad for eavesdropping, but lucky. “Daydreaming…what is that? It’s good, day dreaming. You can do it while you are awake. Daydreaming…what is that? I don’t know. Do you know Mr. Sun?” She went on and on, playfully asking herself the same questions, eventually turning it into a song. She sings a lot these days. Although I wanted to hate Raffi, I just couldn’t do it. We have been listening to Raffi, yes, a real children’s singer who sings catchy little tunes which get terribly stuck in your head. His songs make us laugh. Matt’s mum even likes him. I used to pride myself on influencing Jacinta’s music taste and filling her ears only with complex melodies and harmonies from the Indigo Girls, great African rhythms, or French lullabies. In my recent efforts to chill out in food, I have let in a little mainstream kids music. It’s not so bad after all.

The night chill has just hit me, it is now ten o’clock. The rain has started up again. It lasted about one minute. You can hear the rain tapping on our tin roof, so it’s easy to tell how much water is coming without even looking out the window. Keith has kept the fire burning ever morning and every night. I just went out to feel the warmth of the fire for a minute and get a snack to wake me up. Poor Matt is out there watching his team, the Sydney Swans lose pretty badly to a Melbourne team. He is sincerely very sad. Sports empathy is something I lack, but try to understand.

Empathy for my loved ones and their feelings of happiness is something I feel very strongly. Belonging, being loved and accepted is something I thrive on, I need. This is who I am. Jacinta is coming of the age when she is consciously encountering inclusion and exclusion in social situations. Today I witnessed for the first time my daughter being intentionally excluded from other children playing. It was heartbreaking for me. I don’t know how she felt or if she understood what the two little girls were doing as they both repeatedly moved away from her on the trampoline. She giggled with them and followed them as they moved away. This would lead me to believe that she didn’t understand the meanness, and that the cushion of love we have created for her is still intact. Later on, Matt asked her if she had fun playing with the girls and she said that she had played “just with myself.” She did not sound disappointed, but specified that she had not played with one girl at all, but had played with the other in the sandbox. It’s interesting because she was near both girls quite a bit. She somehow knew though, that playing with and playing nearby are two very different things. I hope that she does not thrive on acceptance as much as I, because it’s all about to begin, the joy and the pain of school children. As parents, I suppose all we can do is stuff her love cushion as fat as we can and hope she loves herself enough to deal with the exclusion that can happen in children’s games.

She sure is proud enough of herself at this point in life. She’ll comment on how pretty her hair looks, how well she can jump, or how strong she is to be able to carry a heavy book. For now, she just hears all of us telling her how well she does things. Like fetching eggs, she can now fetch the eggs out of the chicken pen on her own. She’ll count up to fourteen …… “ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, eleventeen, sixteen, eleventeen, twelve, ten, eleventeen, twenty!” Eventually she’ll learn that you can’t gloat like this to your friends, especially if you’re using the number eleventeen to get to twenty.

We have twenty chickens now, including the two new black ones. They are already roosting on the top rung. I suppose this means pecking order is based on size, age and experience, rather than time spent in a specific group of hens. The number twenty also includes two chicks that were hatched just before we returned to Australia from their small black mummy hen, who was just born herself last December. These little chicks peep outside our windows every morning as they live underneath our house and not in the chook pen. Little Mister, the old little rooster passed away while we were in America. Thus we have one remaining rooster, Ulysses who seems to crow just when Genevieve is falling asleep.

Evie is still not a sleeper, but we have accepted it. She’s fun to have around, good thing because she is always with us. She’ll fuss once in a while, lately though it’s because she wants to get down on the floor and play or join us at the table and eat some type of orange vegetable. Pumpkin, sweet potato or carrot, just cook it up, add cinnamon, smash it and she’s happy, and messy! She doesn’t seem to like grains yet, and won’t fall for the mixing trick. Pumpkin and rice? No, just plain pumpkin, thank you. Eating makes her happy, yes. She’s also happy out in the garden, army crawling to the edge, or watching us play the guitar. She’ll always stop fussing for live music.
Who wouldn’t?

I’ve had a reasonably slow week given the rain and a sore throat. I always get a sore throat if I get sick, probably because it’s my most used body part. Sometimes I’ll catch it early enough and it can’t take hold. Luckily it worked this time: sage, lemon, licorice root, honey, chamomile, vitamin C, Echinacea, soup and sleep made it a two day sickness. Nonetheless, I was a bit housebound due to this and the rain. I made it out to choir one night and to my friend Michelle’s one day. I cooked a lot, made curtains with Mary, read my book and enjoyed being home. I can’t say I relaxed much, I really wanted to be outside planting. I actually brought in compost soil, pots and planting boxes and planted seeds inside out of desperation. Jacinta enjoyed the novelty of playing with dirt inside, as did I. Genevieve would have liked to join us, but she was actually napping both times! She does sleep, just not like Jess did.

Between the rain, we did make it out to the garden enough this week to plant onions, potatoes, and carrots in the terrace garden. I transplanted many herbs, flowers, a rosebush, a native flowering bush and a huge lavender bush into our new little house garden. Jacinta likes the word “transplant,” and figured out what it meant when she asked if she could do it. Strawberries! We brought up about ten extra strawberry plants from other garden beds. She lovingly planted them outside our window and made little rock circles around each plant. She actually ate two red strawberries this week. It’s fun having plants that she loves so close to our front door. Soon she’ll be able to go outside and check for berries every hour!

There you have it, another Henry week. I hope you had a productive, yet peaceful week too. As for the silly Shana advice: plant something you love right outside your bedroom window, nurture it, watch it, and love it to life. It’s fall, try a fruit tree!