Domestic Observations:

Stuff I Cannot Teach My Wife To Do, Even Though She's Old Enough To Know Better

• Rinse her breakfast cereal bowls so I don't have to chisel the organic concrete she calls 'muesli' out of them later
• Stop abandoning her dressing gowns on top of the couch.
• Oh, and when she wants to find her dressing gown later, to LOOK ON TOP OF THE COUCH WHERE IT'S ALWAYS LYING!
• Take the time necessary to push the hi-tech super-groovy aeropress coffeemaker I got her all the way to the bottom and eject the nasty puck of coffee grounds, rather than leave the entire device sitting in the sink. Does coffee really taste that bad after an extra five seconds?
• occasionally remove some of her arsenal of jumpers, cardigans and jackets from the hanging spaces in the bathroom because there's no room left for towels and kids's gear.
• remember to look in the bathroom when she runs out of jumpers, cardigans and jackets.

Things My Wife Would Really Like The Kids To Learn

• Hang up their clothes on the hanging spaces in the bathroom when they climb in the bath.
• Not to abandon their pyjamas all over the lounge when they get dressed in the morning
• Remember to look for various toys, pyjamas and books in the last place they were summarily abandoned before calling in a statewide aerial search
• Put their used dishes on the sink, and maybe scrape them into the compost bucket

My Chances Of Subtly Pointing Out That Leading By Example Is A Great Way To Teach

• Buckley's
• None
• Have you seen the state of my study?

Taxonomy

A good day of home ed. yesterday. Elder Son's class at school have been looking at the concept of 'classification', and it kinda fits in with what we've been doing here at home... a bit of work on evolution, origin of species, and the wide, wide range of living organisms. Anyway, I found a rather good biological/taxonomic key on the web, and promptly snarfed it.

For those of you not of scientific bent, a Taxonomic Key is nothing more than a carefully constructed series of questions designed to help you identify some kind of living organism. You start at the beginning, and obey the instructions that follow your answer to each question, and eventually, you wind up with a name for your creature, or plant, or whatever.

Low-level taxonomy is a right bastard. Distinguishing between two closely related species of insect, for example, isn't just a job for experts... for some insects, it's a job for experts and a scanning electron microscope. I can manage a lot of stuff here at home, but sadly, I haven't managed to convince Natalie yet of our need for an electron microscope.

Anyway, this particular Taxonomic Key is nice. It's very broad: you can apply it to any living thing. Logically, therefore, it doesn't go very deep -- you get down as far as Order mostly. And with some organisms, not even that far. (The lowest taxon for anything fungal is "Kingdom Fungi". )

The lack of depth is no issue. For a beginner, it's perfect. All the biological differences that this particular Taxonomic Key relies on are very visual indeed, and pretty intuitive. Certainly, Elder Son had no trouble with it at all. A garden snail, for example: he made it all the way down to 'gastropoda' in no time flat, with no prompting from me whatsoever.

In fact, my only complaint is that whoever designed this key is clearly NOT an Australian. Why do I say this? It's simple: when you get to 'Class Mammalia', the next question is about hooves, or no-hooves. No questions about egg-laying. No questions about pouches. According to this particular taxo-key, echidnas are actually 'order insectivora', not 'order monotremata', as they should be.

What we call a glaring, stupid mistake that one. Anyway, I'll get around to rewriting the thing (it's only two pages of PDF) and I'll correct that little piece of stupidity. It's easy enough to alert the boy to it anyhow.

Point is, though, he absolutely loved the concept, and loved using it. I was going to get him to key out twenty different living things, but instead of just writing down his results, he was lovingly annotating every step of the classification process, so I stopped him at ten. He got all of them absolutely right, and enjoyed himself tremendously taking photos of his various creatures, etc.

I guess I'd forgotten how potent the act of naming can be. For a youngster, names are knowledge and power. Being able to provide scientific names for the cat, the dog, the rats - being able to investigate their relationship to other living creatures - really caught his interest, and as far as I'm concerned, that makes for an exceptionally powerful learning experience.

Of course, the other thing about this broad Taxonomic Key is that it necessarily focuses on some of the most important elements of structural biology. The questions are designed to divide up living organisms along taxonomic lines, and in general, those taxonomic features are also vital evolutionary and biological features. So in the process of messing with these two sheets of paper, Elder Son has learned to understand the distinction between autotrophs and heterotrophs, consumers and decomposers, backbone/no backbone, radial symmetry vs bilateral symmetry, etc. Fantastic day's work, really.

The Spanish has started to come along nicely too. We've been hampered in the past by the fact that Younger Son wasn't much on reading -- but he's in year 1 now, and his reading has (like his brothers at much the same age) leapt exponentially forward. So now, we're not limited to trying our halting conversational stuff -- we can actually read, and write, and since both boys are, like me, primarily visual learners, it's really coming along nicely.

We've found ourselves a nice little progressive text, in which we're learning all about Enrique Pereda and his friend Maria Jackson, and their monumentally dull lives at high school. But dull or not, we're moving along nicely. It's very cool watching the boys read and translate grade-school Spanish at a rate that equals or betters what you'd expect most kids their age to show on their English -- and I'm enjoying learning along with them. I think the time has come to start ordering a few kids' books in Spanish... wonder if there's an 'El Amazon' out there somewhere?

And Now, Illustrations.

Here are some photos. It took me a hella long time to get them into this stupid blog. You'd better appreciate them...

Here's the lads, immediately before the Great Orchestra Debacle (otherwise known as The Mau-Mau's Symphony in Ass Flat Minor) As you can see, the dignity and seriousness of the event have deeply affected Younger Son.

Anyway. This is meant to be mostly about the weekend that just passed. Yes, I know it's Wednesday. Monday was a pupil-free day at school, so we had Elder Son's long-awaited ninth birthday party. And yesterday? Oh, shit, I was good for nothing yesterday. Not a damned thing.

Here's a quick vision of the major hassle of the weekend:

Wish I'd thought to take photos of the initial goddam mountain of flatpacks. This is just a tiny, tiny fraction, although you can see the crawling chaos beginning to spread...

A disaster zone of cardboard, polystyrene, bits of timber, stray tools, children, cats, glue, and laundry. How did we get so far behind on the laundry?

More from Planet Flatpack... the Mau-Mau helps Natalie with a chest of drawers, while Younger Son stuffs YET MORE F___KING POLYSTYRENE into a garbage bag. You will note that Flatpack Hell has pretty much consumed the living space...

Sunday Afternoon was the first Kid's Party Event. Natalie being on call, I got the short straw. Naturally.
Naturally, the Saturday Kid's party was Fancy Dress. From right to left -- Elder Son is The Mad Scientist. He has gelled "crazy hair", a pair of welding goggles (the groovy flip-up kind), black vinyl gloves and an old white shirt belonging to his mother.

The Mau-Mau is wearing one of her favourite pink dresses, and an old cloak. She announced she was the Nightcrawler Wizard, but I believe that later morphed into some kind of princess. And of course, Younger Son was delighted when we found an old Wizard costume his brother had outgrown. That's a chopstick serving as a magic wand, there...

The party was mayhem. There were more than twenty kids, and it was brutally cold outside. Fortunately, Saturday Kid's Mum was organized -- she had 'em playing games in the rumpus room for an hour and a half. Then it was picnic food, sausages, lollies, and finally, The Birthday Cake and Awaaaaayyyyyy...
That's the birthday cake at the Saturday Kid Party. You see what I have to compete with? Poor Elder Son only got a plain chocolate mud cake... Good thing I planned a Tardis Pinata, eh?

Aaand back on Planet Flatpack...

For a wonder Natalie didn't get called out too often, and she plugged away at Flatpack Hell. Here's the boys' room with two assembled beds. No shelves, chests of drawers or cupboards in place yet, but getting there.

The final count? I did two beds, a two desks and a chest of drawers, but I also did the extra kid's party, and the prep for the 4th July party, plus extra kid-wrangling. Natalie did a bed, two chests of drawers, a desk and three bookshelves, and did a grand reduction of toys and clothes and crap.

I don't think either of us did a lot of sleeping.

Elder Son was pretty happy to climb into the newly assembled outcome of Flatpack Hell. It elicited approval from the cats, too -- they can jump up to mattress level, and being cats, they quite like having a bit of height to look down from.

Elder Son's official Doctor Who birthday party was really pretty much the last gasp... Nat and I spent the whole morning frantically racing around cleaning up the remnants of Flatpack Hell, distributing furnishings, collecting laundry, cleaning, prepping birthday cakes and party bags, and organising games, etc. Goddam nightmare. Somehow, by mid-day, we were ready to go.

Parenting Tip: to anybody with a little bit of space -- the Single Greatest Party Game Ever is without doubt the Scavenger Hunt. The list I handed to the two teams included a hazelnut, a walnut, a slater, a rubber tyre, something made of plastic, a feather, a piece of ripe fruit, and sundry other obscurities. It took 'em twenty whole glorious minutes of racing around outside, charging from location to location, shouting to each other, heaving at tyres, arguing over bugs (we got two millipedes and an earthworm before anybody actually managed to get a slater!). It was goddam fantastic -- a dozen kids outside, desperately engrossed, while exhausted parents got twenty minutes to themselves. Score!

Two Cybermen and a Dalek demonstrating what an "Axis of Evil" really looks like. Cop that, George Dubya!

"Oh, hey -- look at that bloke with the hat and the scarf and the coat... should we be doing something about him?"

The Doctor even came with jelly-babies. The cyberman is about to accept a peace overture...

"Doctor! The Tardis is under attack by some kind of gigantic blindfolded alien with a stick!"

"Not to worry, Rose. The idiot who built this pinata made it so goddam tough that there's no way any kid is going to get through with a stick."

Which was correct. The Tardis was built out of cardboard -- wonder where I got that from? -- and gaffer tape, and by Gallifrey it stood up to some serious thwacking. They annihilated two cheap walking-sticks in the process, and in the end, we had to lower the Tardis so they could jump on it, mob it, and disembowel it en masse.... it was spooky.

Yours truly, "The Master". (I took off my black gloves to deal with the Great Tardis Pinata)

The Marathon Coming

Here's a portrait of my weekend as it stands:

Friday afternoon -- immediately after school collect all children and drive hell-for-leather to Launceston. Boys have orchestra practice for an hour; use that hour (keeping the Mau-Mau out of the orchestra zone) to find a present for Wild Uncolonial Boy (see entry for Sunday.) Collect boys. Eat in town. Drive home ASAP (about forty minutes) to put tired and shirty children through the bedtime routine.

Saturday -- Natalie's on call. Prepare for local 4th of July party (produce epic quantities Flinthart Finest Potato Salad; ensure children are appropriately prepared and packed. ) Make preparations for Doctor Who party (see entry for Monday.) July 4th party is late afternoon/evening: stay until children become dysfunctional. Return home, put tired and shirty children through bedtime routine.

Sunday -- Natalie still on call. Prep children for Wild Uncolonial Boy's birthday party. (A family of recent Brit immigrants... lovely people. Their daughter has become a very effective and determined student of ju-jitsu, but their son, who is about to turn six, I think, is one of those super-energetic unstoppable little balls of excess. He's a great kid; just that little bit more over the top than it's feasible for parents to handle. Hence his nick - Wild Uncolonial Boy.) Party occurs in the mid-day-ish range, yay. That gives us time to get back home, so I can run through the dinner routine, make further preparation for the Doctor Who party (yes, see Monday) and try to catch up on various house chores.

Monday -- Elder Son's birthday party is today, with a Doctor Who theme. Elder Son loves his SF and Fantasy and Superherodom, but he has come to the sad realisation that most of his friends don't know what the pus he's talking about when he starts to enthuse about his favourites. Hence the Doctor Who thing: even if the kids don't know much about The Doctor, their parents surely will, and it won't be too difficult to cobble together some bits and pieces. I believe my sons want to be Cybermen... it will fall to me to organise outfits, of course. Not exactly sure when I'll do that. Probably Sunday afternoon, with silver spray paint and sheets of plastic cut into masks, and old ear-muffs that can be sprayed silver and later discarded... Anyway, the Doctor Who party runs for a few hours in the middle of the day, and once it's over

... well, if I'm not done with cooking and the rest of the shite, at least I'm not running from one party to the next.

Yeesh.

EDITED TO ADD:

Oh, fantastic. Natalie's furniture order arrives tomorrow. Three "middie" beds -- like bunk beds for kids, except it's top bunk only, and the underneath is full of cupboards and drawers, and shelves and desks. Um. Yes. They arrive as flatpacks. Not three, but multiple flatpacks per bed, because all the shelves and nonsense have to be independently assembled.

So. That's me and an Allen key developing a deep and meaningful relationship in between kids' parties this weekend.

Somebody shoot me.

Doldrums

Everybody knows Tasmania is supposed to be cold, wet and miserable. And for a few weeks every year -- let's be honest -- yes, you get that.

They're not weeks-on-end sort of weeks. They're more like two days here, three days there, a day or two of brightness in between, then another three days. That kind of thing.

But when they happen around now, in the darkest part of the year when the sun doesn't even show his bastard face until 0730 or so... yep. Doldrums.

Cold, wet, grey and miserable yesterday. Elder Son and I extended his studies of poetry and poetic technique by going over Edgar Poe's "The Raven", which fit the mood of the day nicely. Changed my opinion of the poem, too -- I always thought it was an extraordinary work in terms of rhyme, rhythm and structure, but going over it closely has made me recognize the alliteration, imagery and symbolism in the piece as well. It's very, very clever writing -- still too mannered to make me feel the grief and depression it is intended to embody -- but such a carefully structured, minutely thought-out piece of work is remarkable and admirable in its own right.

Couple of visitors in the evening -- a fine young medical student that the Mau-Mau instantly adopted as her Flirt Target for the evening (it's scary to watch a three-year-old do that. How instinctive is this stuff?) and Dr C. We killed the odd bottle of wine, ate a hearty tomato and veg soup with pasta and spiced meatballs, finished off with home-made profiteroles (chocolate and coffee liqueur sauce), played a few games...

... but it was still wet, cold, grey and miserable when it was time to get out of bed this morning. And I've got a long afternoon and evening of martial arts to come.

Only one thing for it: order another twenty litres of bulk port from Grant Burge Wineries!

(Hint: the trick is to order twenty litres for about a hundred bucks, then put it into your own oak cask with maybe a half-litre of brandy as a what-the-hell addition. Six months later, it's brilliant. Three years later, if your port consumption isn't too brutal, it's absolutely astonishing.)

Teeth And Stuff

Younger Son emerged from the schoolyard today clutching a ziploc plastic bag, and sporting a gappy kind of grin. Unlike his brother, who worried at his first loose tooth for at least a month, Younger Son tolerated this dental dereliction of duty about five days. Today he got sick of not being able to eat apples, and just yanked the thing out.

Of course, now he's planning to save all his baby teeth, put them under his pillow in one fell swoop, and score megabucks. I've suggested it's probably safer to put the teeth under the pillow as they happen, and then save the actual dollars... we'll see what he thinks of that.

Got some useful writing in today. It's hard going. The Mau-Mau is home on a Monday, and so is Natalie. She had an online fiddle lesson, so I couldn't just disappear into the study. And we had a visitor for a while too. Plus I had to dig up a chocolate chip biscuit recipe so Natalie could cook with the Mau-Mau. And there were phone calls. It all adds up.

And of course, there's the grocery shopping. I'm really crap at shopping for a week's worth of stuff at a time. I got into the habit of buying fresh fruit and veg daily well over ten years ago, and with three kids who power through the fruit like nobody's business, I don't really think there's much chance of changing that habit -- so I try to make a virtue of it, buying things when they come on special, trying to get local and seasonal stuff... you get the idea.

Thing is, that makes me a familiar sight to the staff of our local supermarket -- me and the kids. I think most of them, if not all, know us by sight now. And yet they're still friendly, kind and forbearing. How cool is that?

More seriously: I've seen enough badly behaved kids and stressed parents in supermarkets to know I never want to contribute to the statistics there. We've got solid rules. There's a bench at the front of the store which serves as our 'time-out' zone, but it's very rare I have to use it. On the other hand, it's not as though I'm marching the kids through there like death-row prisoners, either. We've been known to play pirate up and down the aisles, for example. And in winters past, on the long, dark days, Elder Son and I have had more than a few laser-tag gunbattles ranging from Fresh Produce down through Dairy into Tinned Goods.

I do ask for certain things from the kids. No shouting or screaming. None of this full-tilt running stuff. No pushing in front of people, bumping people to get past, and definitely hands off the merchandise at all times. I feel that's a reasonable minimum standard, and on the rare occasion the kids cross those lines, they get reined in quickly.

Nevertheless, the boys range the store pretty freely, and they play all sorts of let's-pretend games, and they talk with the staff and sometimes with other customers. And in the meantime, I'm not the easiest customer on the planet either. I tend to buy weird-ass fruit and veg that haven't yet been properly coded into the computer checkout system. And I'm never afraid to ask questions: what happened to the chorizo? Is the basil coming in this week? Is there any chance the store could get tamarind paste in stock?

And they're always good about it. Cheery, friendly, and helpful. Stuffed toys dropped by toddlers have been gathered up and held for our collection on return. Access has been granted to a toilet for a desperate two-year-old. Small things, but above and beyond the training of corporate culture.

It's nice. And the folk at the checkout... see, now, there's a job, eh? The one your parents always held up as a threat if you looked like cutting school: you'll grow up to run a checkout at the supermarket!

It can't be easy. I did my time in retail between finishing school and starting university. I'd rather not do it again -- and the place I worked didn't have a hundredth the turnover and throughput of a sizable regional supermarket. But the checkout folk 'round here are always cool, collected and friendly. A lot of 'em know the kids, and always have a nice word for them. And they wave and smile when we see them out in the streets, which is a part of the good side of country living...

...all of which was going through my head when the Mau-Mau resolutely refused to talk to one poor lass at the checkout today. I think they know each other from one of the daycare situations, and apparently, the Mau-Mau is only too happy to talk the young lady's ear off there. But at the supermarket? It's a silence so stony that it embarrassed the hell out of even me.

Ah well. A tip of the tricorn to the patient folks that let me cook a decent mee goreng for the clan tonight... and I'm sure the Mau-Mau will recover her voice sooner or later!

Music Criticism

Spare a thought for the parents of children who are learning music in one form or another. Tonight, I endured my first-ever "concert", and honestly, I wish my mother was still alive so I could prostrate myself at her feet and apologise from the bottom of my heart for every hour she ever spent at orchestra performances, concert band gigs, and all those endless rehearsals.

I mean... for fuck's sake. We buy or rent or whatever the instruments. We engage the teachers and pay for the lessons. We remind the little fuckers to practice, and then lean on them until they actually do it, and then we sit in on the practice to make sure they're actually going in the right direction. We drive them back and forth to lessons and rehearsals, and we sit around like suicidally bored garden gnomes while these go on, because there's never enough time to actually get anything done while they're in rehearsal or class, but it always takes longer than you think. And of course, we keep the other siblings in line through the whole process.

And then, of course, we have to go to the goddam concerts. Is there some weird, psyche-altering endorphin that comes into play when our little darlings play their hearts out up there on stage, making a collective noise not unlike a group of very unhappy cats in a rainstorm? No! There is not. That noise the Junior String Orchestra makes sounds just as fucked up to us parents as it does to you, casual listeners and unfortunate bystanders. Except that YOU can leave. We can't go anywhere until the fat kiddie sings. We sit there, rictuses frozen onto our aching faces, applauding politely at every pause, counting the minutes -- no, the seconds! -- until we get our lives back, and wondering what the fuck we did this for.

Indeed. Why? Because, of course, the kids are acquiring music -- one of the single most marvellous things about being human. For a few years they will practice, and struggle, and rehearse, and argue, and then inflict the most heinous performances on us -- all in the hope that one day, they'll realise just what a wonderful thing they've been given.

And then there's you, sniggering not-so-quietly at us long-suffering parents. You should take a step back, and think again. Because while ninety-nine out of a hundred of those kids will never be more than casual musicians, playing for the fun of it and for the appreciation of their friends (and even that is a very cool thing to be able to do!) the remaining one in a hundred will be part of the next generation of music and performance. And if parents like us didn't drag our sorry arses through the misery of practice and rehearsal and off-key, ear-grinding performances, the rest of you would be fucked for music and dance and the like in short order. Sure, some kids are self-motivated... but they still need encouragement and support, so spare a thought for those of us who have died that The Music May Live.

The concert tonight lasted an hour. It was... less bad than I feared. But the high point of the whole evening occurred in that breathless instant of silence, that penultimate moment of expectation as the conductor raised her arms just before the first note of the very first piece of music.

In that incredible stillness, there in the performance hall, the Mau-Mau squirmed briefly, and let fly a truly epic fart. I did not know a three-year-old's digestive tract was capable of producing such volume and tone without tearing itself to shreds. It was an eye-watering, sinus-searing, ripsnorting barbarian of a thing, and I swear it echoed around the entire hall, followed by a wave of giggles.

I have never before been so pleased that the Mau-Mau prefers to sit on her mother's lap.