Bring on the Fairy

Eloise's incisor has been wobbling for months. Ever since she stacked it in the playground and face-butted a wooden platform.

The wobble has increased as time has gone by and for weeks now the tooth has been hanging by a thread. She's been wibbling it with her tongue and twisting it around but it has held on for dear life.

Until this evening, when it finally let go.

What's the going rate for the Tooth Fairy?

En Famille

Nicole is back and everything is jolly again, although housework has had to become a priority.

Eloise has a tooth that is on the point of attaining its freedom.

Matilda's foot is healing nicely in the absence of bandages. She is back on walks, on the lead.

All is busy-ish.

Cooking remains repetetive and unoriginal.

We had a parent-teacher interview. Mostly Eloise is doing fine but was criticised mildly for flighty indifference and a tendency to inappropriate (although not in the newly misappropriated sense) helping.

Domestically her flighty indifference (read non-listening) is becoming quite irritating.

One down for the week

In Nicole's absence we've been kind of busy... dance on Monday, tidying on Tuesday, swimming on Wednesday, yoga on Thursday. A class playground get-together today.

Matilda's foot is sufficiently healed for her to go back out again. I think she was going a bot crazy being cooped up all the time.

It's been warm and humid here. I've been escaping into the mountains and discovering new places.

Missing Mum

Poor old Eloise has been missing her Mum.

When she goes to bed, after books have been read and fruit eaten and Milo drunk and songs sung, generally she knocks around for a while reading more books and missing around.

Yesterday when she woke up in the morning she was sporting biro tattoos. She's obviously been knocking around with teenagers.

When I asked her what the tattoos were of, she said they were of Mum (on her arm), and Isla (on her leg).

Blessed Are the Cakemakers

Nicole has gone away again on business, this time to Melbourne to do something shifty with the Cochrane people, and she'll be away for a week.

All this is a little distressing for Eloise, and she was a bit upset yesterday.

I tried to cheer her up with an offer of playground fun, but instead she said she wanted to make some cupcakes.

So we went off and made a list of the things we needed, went shopping, and when we returned home, she went next door to play with Ben and Mikey.

After I'd extricated her from that, we made the cakes. They were chocolate cupcakes with a ganache topping.

They were reasonably disastrous.

Multiple Laceration

No sooner are the stitches out and Matilda back in full wicked effect, than does she herself another mischief.

This time she has trodden on something sharp and lacerated the pad of one of her paws.

Imagine the sinking of my heart when she returned to me after a two-minute sojourn leaving a monopad trail of blood in her wake.

A short trip to the vet to fetch bandage resulted in the announcement that she needed a visit so that they could demonstrate bandaging technique.

Needless to say a sales attempt was made for general anaesthetic and stitching, but I resisted that opting for natural healing processes supported by bandages.

She has bitten and/or licked and/or teased off four bandages in the three days since then so Nature, it's Over to You.

Unholy Trinity

Glorious.

Hallowe'en

A couple of weeks ago Eloise was introduced to the concept of fancy dress when one of her little chums had a birthday party with a Hawaiian theme.

It was a trial attempting to get across the concept of fancy dress parties. Not that she's doesn't like dressing up and all that, but the mental leap to dressing up as a particular thing and everybody doing it and the whole turning up with normal clothes when everybody else is... you've got to love peer pressure by proxy haven't you.

Anyway this weekend, you may have noticed, if it hasn't been banned where you live - which of course it should - was Hallowe'en and fancy dress once again was in order.

We were invited to a friend's house for a party, which neatly got us out of the potentially execrable school disco.

This meant shopping for Hallowe'en stuff. I'm sure you can imagine the ructions.

Nicole had procured some skeleton costumes for herself and me, easy peasy. Eloise had decided to go as a witch, A Good Witch. A Pink Good Witch. Her requirements were certainly atomic and testable.

And unmeetable.

Still in the end it was all good, and a she got a pink wig and a red hat and a red cape. There was lots of kids at the party, all older than her but she held her own excellently. We were treated to the spectacle of grown women facebooking each other on their iphones.

But the garden graveyard, huge spider-webs and other assorted paraphernalia with which the house was bedecked were very impressive.

The next day rather than trick-or-treating Jessica's parents had a ToT station at the front of their house. We hung out there for a while, admiring the enormous pumpkin.

Next year we'll cover off Hallowe'en from the philosophical and historical perspectives, I expect.

Sundown

I slept the sleep of the untroubled soul in the back of the Ute punctuated every three to seven seconds by the tocking of an unseen frog somewhere down by the waterhole.

The stream trickled away all night, white noise competing against the crackling of the fire.

It was cold.

My mobile phone, switched off, nevertheless sang out its techno alarm at 4.30am, swiftly silenced, and I awoke around the six o'clock mark, crawling out to find Will tending the burgeoning fire ready for baked beans and leftover snausages.

The plan was to go into uncharted territory the next day. We embarked on the 4-wheel drive from hell in Sundown National Park, bouncing over the most uneven stony ground imaginable, to arrive at a camping ground where there wasn't anything much then attempting to drive down to a lookout point only to find we'd been following the instructions from the wrong place and the lookout point as where we had been. Hmmm.

It was kind of fun, in a masochistic way.

We cut our losses and exited, opting instead to take a drive through deepest darkest New South Wales whilst rain clouds roiled around us.

We climbed down to the Rocky River on the slippery rocks, with some trepidation.

We saw a storm brewing over the Border Ranges and followed it under greying skies. Up in Brisbane it produced 35mm of rain in 20 minutes or something but we didn't see any of that. In Rathdowney the sun broke through.

We made it back around seven o'clock. Knackered.