Flashback: Timmy's Little Kitchen (Sept 2012)

This was the day that Timmy received his little kitchen.  It was instant love - well, instant engagement anyway.

I remember that he played with it so long and so intently that Hayden and I were able to sit down and have a cup of coffee together - and our first conversation in months. That year, 2012, between Timmy's first and second birthdays, was tough. Maybe even our toughest. The fun, and lets be honest the success of this gift to Timmy was like a little burst of sunshine between dark clouds.

cold mornings

Although the mornings are still cold, Tim and I have been tracking some new growth and new colours in the garden.  There's not much winter left for us.  Indeed, it's just a couple of weeks before we leave winter behind nearly forever and resume our life in the tropics.

morning snail arrangement

These days everything Tim touches gets formed into a line or, as I'm sure he thinks of it, a 'train' (even the snails we find in the front garden in the morning after we wave Daddy off to work).

play ground

This has been the summer of playgrounds.  We've found that Tim naps better, and sleeps better and is generally much happier with not one but at least TWO visits to the playground each day.  We built our summer days around it - especially on the really hot days, when we would head out to the slides and swings as early as possible (6:30am? 7am?) to get in a good play before the day got too hot.

Now that the weather is starting to cool, we're finding a new rhythm with lots of lovely crafty play inside.  But I didn't want to forget our summer days in the playground.

he's two!

Can't quite believe it!

australia day weekend, 2013

finalmente

This is kind of the conclusion of our Veggie Box Garden.

It was a warm day, and Tim and I were out in the back yard.  With great ceremony, I led him over to the Veggie Box Garden and demonstrated what happens when we pull a carrot out of the ground.  He was quite awestruck, which was great cos that exactly the reaction I was going for - as in, Wow! This is where our food comes from!

Then we tasted the thing, and it -

it -

it ....

it wasn't nice!  It was small, hard, and bitter!

Not what I was going for at all.

new year's eve

Hayden and I took Tim down to the beach to see the sun set on 2012, and at first I was bummed cos it looked like a bit of a fizzer (not the spectacular sunset I had been hoping for).  Then I looked around a bit, and I realised that this new year's eve was everything I wanted it to be.  It was the quietest and calmest moment at the end of a long hot day.  The locals were out fishing as usual - no big deal - and as we stood there a bunch of dolphins swam by.  Nice.

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.]

loves working in the kitchen

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

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.

dewy

The roses responded beautifully to my autumn pruning, and they are blooming again. Is this normal in winter?? I love looking out at them from my study window, especially when they are damp and dewy on gloomy days like today.

rise

With winter, the sunrises have swept back around to the north again and we can see them from the front porch. In the morning when I wave Hayden off to work, I often think of photographing the glorious colour. This morning, though, I actually did it.