photo of the month

Tim's current favourite thing is reading in bed - our bed.  He loves to bunch the doona up around himself, even on warm days.

slow gardening

Just documenting the (slow) progress of our Veggie Box Garden.  Despite conscientious watering, the carrots and tomatoes have not grown very much.

As we're going away for ten days or so (for Christmas), I'm wondering should I just pull up the carrots now, to show Tim what's been growing underground?  There may not be anything at all to come back to if the weather's hot while we are away.

Gosh, gardening is so much fun to do, but so boring to talk about!  I wonder why that is?

playgroup

Yesterday, Tim was playing outside completely naked when I realised that if we didn't leave right that second, we were going to be late for playgroup.  I approached him with a nappy, shorts and a t-shirt in hand, but he wasn't having a bar of it.

Me:  do you want to put some clothes on?
Tim: [shakes head No]
Me:  if you don't put clothes on, we won't be able to go to playgroup.  Do you want to go to playgroup?
Tim:  [big nod Yes]
Me:  do you want to put on clothes?
Tim:  [shakes head No]

But:

I only had to repeat the bit about how we can't go to playgroup without clothes once or perhaps twice more. Then, avoiding all the tears and screaming tantrums I had anticipated, he let me dress him and we got into the car.

He does love that playgroup.

[nb, playgroup shown here without all the other children who make it what it is.]

fish. or rabbit.

OK, well I'm starting off badly here because this blog is meant to be a journal of my photographic efforts as well as my daily life with Tim.  And here it is, my first phone camera shot.  Bad.

But what it is of, I wanted to document before it got lost, or forgotten, or passed over.  I feel that quite keenly these days, that each new word, or each new accomplishment, if it's not recorded in the moment will quickly be swallowed up, and soon it will be difficult to remember that there was a time before he could say "moon" or, in this example, make a drawing of a fish (or a rabbit). This is his first representational drawing, I believe, and that's why I want to record it here.

See that green splodge, in the upper right hand corner?  I started it.  Then Tim took the green felt-tip off me, and gave it some more colour and more shape, and when he had finished he pointed to it and made his sound for fish: opening and closing his mouth so his lips give a soft little pop.  A fish!  He drew a fish! I thought excitedly.  So I grabbed the orange pen and drew a couple more - and he decorated them a bit with the green pen he was still holding.

Then I remembered that his sound for fish is pretty much the same as his sound for rabbit (you see, it's based on the sound of a rabbit twitching his nose and munching on a carrot, but in Tim's mouth it comes out pretty much the same as the fish).  And I began to wonder if perhaps his green drawing had been of a rabbit, not a fish? So I attempted to draw in some rabbits, to see if they got a bigger reaction from him.  They didn't.

Fish or rabbit, rabbit or fish, it's definitely a drawing.

loves working in the kitchen

...though it is sometimes hard to push the drawer closed, past one's post-lunch tummy.

swings

I love these photos.  They're the kind that I love, loud and proud, while people I show them to just smile and nod politely.  There are a few in that category (this is another one) but it doesn't bother me at all.  It's just curious.  I am glad I can post them here for myself, where I can just enjoy looking at them.  

garden grows

One thing I like about hanging out with kids - Tim in particular - is that not everything we do needs to be on an enormous scale.  Our activities can stay on the small side and stay fun for anyone with a short attention span, yet still be a great opportunity for learning new skills and new things about the world.  

This, for example, is our new Veggie Box Garden.  The old wooden box was sitting in a neglected corner of the yard, filled with old dirt from past gardening experiments and beginning to attract a load of springtime weeds.  I wanted to keep the box, but I was sick of looking at the weeds, so with a very small amount of digging and raking and some (oldish) seeds from my stash, it has become Tim's very first, tiny, veggie garden.  

We planted a row each of carrots and tomatoes.
Conveniently, the two kinds of seeds I had on hand are two of the veggies he can readily identify in pictures and in the flesh.
Not that he likes eating either of them (yet).

Planting a seed really is an act of hope, isn't it? I don't suppose that Tim understands what any of this is for, and of course it may not eventuate into anything - those seeds were rather old, after all.  But Tim loves to water our garden box every day, and he'll bring me the watering can if it's slipped my mind or if I'm even contemplating skipping it.  It's the first long-term project we've started together.

And you never know, one day soon we might see some little green shoots pointing up out of the earth.

first cake

Tim's first effort at baking turned out pretty well!  It was a chocolate birthday cake for Hayden, decorated with jelly beans and a little doggy or two (a "woof-woof" as Timmy says, in his tiny careful voice.  For someone who's babbled all day long ever since we can remember, he is surprisingly cautious about using actual words).

out-takes

Hayden (and Timmy) and I did a little photoshoot for S and her lovely family.  Amongst quite a few good ones, which she will actually be able to use and send to family and friends, I also loved these two out-takes.  They show kind of what I was going for - the fun, relaxed, beachy/surfy sort of vibe of her family, filled with love and laughter.

sunday morning

Amid the snuffles and coughs there have been some lovely moments.

This was taken on Sunday, Fathers' Day morning.

Is there a word for that thing where you plan all sorts of lovely activities and adventures for your holiday but then everyone gets sick?
And in the end you say, well, OK, cancel the adventures. And it's lucky, really, that we've got this time off to rest up and take care of each other.

Would we call that a Carecation?  A Sickcation?

I dunno what to call it, but this is the second time it's happened this year.

world's greatest Dad

           

We'll be celebrating Father's Week here when Hayden takes a week off work to hang out with us, starting Sunday.

It will be so lovely to have a little holiday, just the three of us.

Even if we're not going anywhere new.

I am reading Anne Lamott's Operating Instructions and Elizabeth Pantley's No Cry Sleep Solution concurrently.

Together they're helping me to feel ever so slightly less alone in my approach to mothering Timmy.
I hope to gain the courage to start talking a little bit more about that here.

Upright

morning sunshine

Happy to be blogging again.  But how do I get the text to align with the bottom of the photo?

Practicing B&W