Card Making

I wanted to make a special card for Cherub's Prep Teacher, because she is so wonderful and the kids have had the most beautiful year with her. So in my capacity as Grade Parent, I sent home a little kit to all the families. I made little colourful envelopes and asked each child to write a note or do a drawing to put in the envelope, and to stick a small photo of themselves on the front. Those families that wanted to could also put in for a gift voucher. Most of the parents got their act together pretty well; I had only a few dramas, worst of which was thinking I'd lost 2 envelopes when in fact they'd never been handed to me in the first place.

I waited until Saturday to put the card together, secure in the knowledge that Nell would be at our house and could help me. Well, when I say help, what I really mean is, I said I've got all these envelopes and I want to make a card and I thought they could hang or something, and Nell had a think about it and suggested a Christmas Tree and we went to Officeworks for equipment, and then she took charge of making templates and cutting and folding and assembling.

And when we'd finished it looked like this:



and I said If that doesn't make the teacher cry then I don't know what will...



...and today after Cherub's class' adorable Puppet Show we handed it to her and I can report with great satisfaction that it did make her cry.

End of Year Tap Christmas Party

Last year I put on the Tap School Christmas Party and Performance with parvovirus and a bad disc in my neck. Surprisingly it went well and I think I even had fun, but this year I was in perfect health and enjoyed the proceedings much more.



I think I am the luckiest tap teacher around, because I have such gorgeous students. And they come from the loveliest families.





I am also very lucky and thankful to have Mister Fixit supporting me. Although occasionally he mutters that he would like my school to earn more money than it does, he is always there helping me set up and pack up, and the Christmas Party was no exception. The whole family went to the Tap Hall on Friday night where we ate pizza and set up furniture. Then, at home, while I got together all my bits and bobs (tinsel, tablecloths, tickets etc) Fixit funneled cordial in through the tap of the 12-litre dispenser that had been designed for just one use and no refills - take that water-sellers!! Next morning he repaired Tap Hall doors and my tap shoes, fetched the coffees, and drove home-and-back 20 minutes before the performance began because the Climber only had one tap shoe. He also stood on a chair at the back and took photographs for me. He is ace.



I am also eternally grateful to the gorgeous Nell, who week after week collects the fees, hands out stamps & stickers, sells merchandise and disseminates information for me; all for the beggarly wage of 2 sausage rolls per week. She is also my Production Manager at all gigs - we used to call her The Tech-ie but some (tech-ie) guy at the last fete we did gave her ideas and she quickly adopted the fancier moniker. I am lucky to have a friend like her! Thank you Nell.

Is it Wednesday again already?

What's Hot, What's Not, playing along with Loobylu.

What's Hot.

• Cherub and Climber doing magic shows for us. Totally cute.
• Our rent not going up by as much as they initially threatened (a rise of $15 per week instead of $20), thanks to me being a cranky-pants. I am Wheel, hear me Squeak.
• Fixit's never-ending job application being nearly over. He had the final interview today and he thinks it went well. We hope to hear next week. Thanks to everyone who wished him luck, you are all ace and kind and lovely. He says if he gets the job he will take me out to dinner and wear his suit, oohlala.
  
• The Millennium Trilogy books. Finished the Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest this afternoon and loved it like mad. Have been putting all my friends on to it.
• Getting extra funds because of the search for the Melbourne Mary Poppins. They can't find a girl who can sing, dance and act the part and have opened up the casting call. Suddenly I was inundated (well there were 4 of them anyway!, felt like inundation) by classical singers needing private tap classes in order to master a triple timestep.
  

What's Not.

Me being too old to audition for Mary Poppins. I've totally got the triple timesteps covered, I've probably got the High C in my vocal range (if I did a few scales) and I am also bossy and old-fashioned, not to mention practically perfect in every way. Sadly they are looking for someone 22-30 and I am thirty-twelve. *sulks*

Letters to Santa Claus

Climber always writes a lovely letter to his benefactors,



...whereas this chap just wanted to state the basics, and had to be nagged into the niceties. Meanwhile, in his quest for the crystal sweeper, Cherub has written an average of 2 notes per day for the last week or so which are all variations on the same theme:


Not sure if he plans to keep up the bombardment all the way to Christmas.


They both carried their letters for the whole tram ride into the city...


...and sent them safely on their way to the North Pole.


Then they had a bit of a look at the giant Christmas tree in City Square..









... and when they'd had enough of that they had a bit of a play. Then we headed off for coffees, soft drinks and sushi, and the tram ride home.



See how his feet don't touch the ground?

Wobbly

The Cherub is one of the last 2 children in his prep class yet to lose a baby tooth. No little gaps in his perfect smile yet. So when he announced yesterday that he thought he had a wobbly tooth, Fixit and I said Ooh really, let us look, wow! thinking that he would be equally excited.

We were therefore surprised when he burst into tears and quavered I don't want to have a wobbly tooth. When we asked why he said I don't want there to be bloo-o-o-d, so of course we hastened to reassure him that there was hardly any blood. To no avail. He was sad and scared and rapidly dropping his bundle.



Because although we had forgotten the great trampoline head-and-wobbly-tooth-collision of 2008, the Cherub had not...


... and there was a lot of blood involved in the loss of that particular wobbly tooth, and a very distraught Climber, and looking back I don't think we properly took on how traumatised the Cherub felt, being the accidental cause of the carnage. He cried, I remember, and I comforted and reassured him that it wasn't his fault (although from memory Climber might have been casting aspersions) but mostly I was dealing with a bloodied, and slightly hysterical big brother.

So meanwhile the 4 year old Cherub had imprinted this wobbly tooth episode - and only this one; there have been at least 7 other incidences in his big brother's life - on to his little psyche. No wonder he fears the wobbly tooth. And the more he thought about it, the more his fear grew. He started to insist that he wouldn't be able to jump on the trampoline any more or eat apples and it was all getting very pathetic.

However, an imaginary conversation between Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy bumping into each other on Christmas Eve Hohoho Tooth Fairy I haven't seen you for a while, how's business? Good thanks Santa, that's some nice looking presents you've got there, fancy young Cherub losing his first tooth just before Christmas etc raised a small smile, and a story session that evening featuring Charlie and Lola's My Wobbly Tooth Must Never, Ever Fall Out and Climber and the Tooth Fairy made him feel a bit better.

Ce qui est chaud, ce qui n'est pas

Playing along with Loobylu

N'est pas:

• Internet being shaped to dial-up speed for nearly 2 weeks. I was of course blaming the children for overdoing it on Club Penguin but turns out when I looked at my usage stats my blowout day is Monday when the blameless children are safely at school. And the activity eating most of my bytes? Catch-up blog reading after the weekends. So it's your fault, bloggers. You and your fancy pictures.
• Rent going up, due to "market forces". I think "market forces" is a mean reason to up the rent. Especially when the real estate market in Melbourne is so massively inflated anyway. There's this unstated power-play thing going on which is that people NEED somewhere to live so we keep letting it be inflated. And, renters in Australia are treated like second-class citizens and can't get long leases like you do in Europe so landlords are allowed to put the rent up every 6 months if they want, by as much as they feel like. We aren't even supposed to put blue-tack on the walls. I know I'm acting like a baby about this in many regards because I chose not to be a wage slave and our rent is actually very cheap comparatively but I don't care. Market Forces my arse. Our rent is not cheap to us.
• The Corolla's alternator dying, causing 2 flat batteries in 2 days and then making us carless over the weekend. What was even more NOT-HOT was that when we had the flat battery at the pool after swimming lessons, the 2 young boofheads in the shmancy yellow convertible initially refused to give me a jump-start because they were in a massive hurry to get to A HAIRCUT APPOINTMENT. I tell this to people and they say youth of today I'm not surprised but I WAS surprised. I seriously thought they'd be glad to help. In the end, they thought better of it and came over and gave me the jump and I quietly put up with the high levels of patronising that accompanied it and said thanks, have a nice haircut as I left.
• Getting myself an internet filter thingo to make sure the kids don't stumble onto anything nasty and then finding I couldn't upload anything to Flickr or weigh in on Facebook. I've fixed the facebook side of things, but the only solution to the photo problem is turning it off while I upload. Apparently it's a known Mac /K9 problem.
  

Well, that was quite a lot of whinging wasn't it? Now for...


Chaud.

• Being unfazeable in the face of mini-crisis. The first flat battery was at 8am in the morning just as were leaving for Climber's dental check-up (no cavities!) and it takes 2 months to get a new appointment. So I ran next door and asked my neighbours if I could use their car for a jumpstart, and as he was baby-wrangling at that moment, I took his keys, drove the car down our skinny driveway, squeezed out the 2 inch gap between cardoor and house, rang Fixit and he talked me through doing the whole palaver on my own. Backed the neighbour's car back out the driveway without incident (have I mentioned I hate reversing?) thanked them profusely (we have lovely neighbours, both sides) and got to the dentist on time. Left the car unlocked and running the whole time (Fixit couldn't believe I did that but it had to recharge for 30 minutes, it was on a quiet street off a noisy main street and I could see it from the waiting room) and then got the kids to school at 5 minutes after the bell which meant we didn't even have to sign the late book. And my battery was fully charged again. Let me tell you that I swaggered into coffee with Elda feeling pretty impressed with myself.
• Having a Mister Fixit for a boyfriend. He took the day off Monday, took the busted alternator out of the car, dropped it into an auto-electrician's, picked up a working alternator at 3.30 and had the car ready for me to drive to tap that night. Which was a good thing, because I wasn't really keen on coming home in the dark on the tram with my stereo equipment and my takings, call me crazy.
  
• Fixit getting through to the last round of the Epic Never-Ending Job Application. They rang him today. His final step is the face to face interview (out comes that suit again) which will be next Wednesday. Last week I was completely confident that he'd make it through, but when the phone stayed silent so long we both (separately and tacitly) gave up hope. When he texted me this morning I was Christmas shopping at ToysRUs and I was so relieved I all but burst into tears. Fortunately I was able to pull myself together, because otherwise it would have been me and the thwarted 2 year olds carrying on like pork chops, and that just would have been embarrassing.
  

I Can't Believe it's Nearly CHRISTMAS!!!

While all the adults of my acquaintance heave a collective groan about the onslaught of the Festive Season, there is one small person I know who is so excited about Christmas that he can hardly bear it.



Christmas is now a daily conversation topic, usually along the lines of I can't believe its nearly *Christmas* (imagine that last word said in high-pitched excitement) or I really wish it was Christmas tomorrow, which gives me a mini-nervous attack as I picture all the things I still have to do before the Big Day.



He decided, as is his wont, that he urgently needed a new tick-off calendar, despite my telling him that I had an advent calendar ready for December. There was no way he could wait until December, so off I went to print a calendar for him (thinking that was what he wanted) only to find that he had grabbed a ruler and was halfway through making his own. However he ditched the hand-drawn attempt when he saw that mine had a Christmas Sticker system.



(At around this point both boys insisted that they needed to have a look at the advent calendars. Cherub was so pleased with his that he would have carried it round all day had I not insisted that it needed to go away until December 1st. Don't want the crappy chocolate treats melting.)

And then there's the letter to Santa. Whereas Climber would write lovely sweet letters which often included telling Santa (quite unprompted) that he loved him, the Cherub is far more inclined to cut straight to business. In fact, immediately he realised there were only 40 odd days to go he scurried off and put a letter into an envelope before I even knew what was happening. Dear Santa, it said, can I hav a crytal sweeper please. So then we had to have a chat about not asking Santa for very expensive stuff (The Crystal Sweeper is a Lego set that costs around $100). To which he replied but I really really want a crystal sweeper and so I had to say it was okay to ask us, his parents, for a big present but that Santa has to provide presents for all the kids in the world and it's selfish to ask for expensive stuff. (Aren't you glad I'm not your mother?) Once he'd ascertained that there was a good chance that a Crystal Sweeper would soon supplement our already healthy stocks of Lego, he was happy to ask Santa for a more modest item. Once more he wrote and sealed the letter before I knew what was going on, but he'd addressed his envelope all wrong, giving me the perfect excuse to open it up. Which is when I had to speak to him about injecting a little bit more charm and courtesy into his original billet because heaven knows I don't want Santa thinking I haven't brought my child up right.