They grow up so fast

On hatching, they were tiny specks clinging to the wall of their tub. We lost count but when there didn't seem to be any more in the spawn-jelly we think we had over sixty - not moving, not eating, just like little sticks. Sometimes, when we peered into the tub casting a shadow, they would dart briefly, but never very far and never of their own accord. We put lots of pondweed in to give them oxygen and fretted about what to feed them.

After several weeks of thawed chopped frozen lettuce (yum) we started feeding them a little bit of plant-based fish food for protein. It must have worked. They became very fat. Now when you looked at them, they would swim about in rapid panic, dive to the bottom of the tub and hide, then totally forget why they were down there and slowly, rather elegantly float to the surface to see if any food had rained down. You could see their little mouths opening and closing as they foraged and see their tiny hearts beating.

Then some grew hind legs. The kids were so excited!

And one day - a froglet. This one objected to being scooped up and hopped onto the tub wall, so it was clearly ready to leave the water. It's hard to see in the first photo, but it still has a tail trailing behind it.

The tail was almost completely absorbed after two days out of the tub.









We fretted some more about what to feed them. The kids and I made a habitat of leaves and mulch and bark hideyholes and caught the tiniest buggy things we could for their food. The froglets didn't seem to take much notice of even the crawliest bugs. I convinced myself the older froglets were getting thin and weak, so we bought a box of small crickets at a pet shop. The crickets hopped about and escaped even more than the frogs, and the frogs were terrified of them. Each time a cricket came near, the froglet would scramble away.

Yesterday Cheekus Weekus helped me release ten metamorphlings at the nursery they came from as spawn. (We checked first that this was OK.) Each one was a tiny, perfect frog with beady little golden eyes. a pretty eye-stripe and greatly varied dorsal stripes or colouration, white belly & throat and sun-sparkled greenbrown skin. We think somewhere between two and five more adventurous siblings got out the night before (my fault, I didn't secure the muslin cover well enough). Luckily they were on top of the dead dishwasher on the front porch so had a good chance of making it to the fishpond. When taken out of their travel box each of the released babies paused on CW's hand - to his great delight, because he hadn't been allowed to handle them - then hopped away into a permanent garden bed next to the water plants section of the nursery. One jump, two jumps and we couldn't see them any more.

Goodbye and good luck...and only another forty-odd to go...

Happy New Year 2010

Not a big night for us - we'd planned to picnic in the King's Domain Gardens then see the family fireworks in town. But the weather was too hot for movement of any kind, so I put together a salady dinner which we finished just before the rain hit. This was about the time we would have been in our possie waiting for the fireworks so we were pretty glad we'd stayed at home. The CFO fell asleep about 10 pm and didn't emerge until dawn 2010, but the kids managed to stay up to see in the New Year (Cheekus Weekus fell asleep 2 nanoseconds past midnight and had to be carried to bed; at 11:50 Running Boy announced that he was going to spend "the rest of the year" lying on the sofa and appeared to be trying not to get caught shutting his eyes. Princess Pea was very sensible about the whole thing - at five-to she said she was going to bed because she was tired, but changed her mind when she found out how close it was to the next year.)

The four of us watched the Sydney fireworks on TV - yah boo sucks Channel 9 for not televising anything local - ate chocolates, played Junior Scrabble, squabbled, all the usual.

This year I did a symbolic or token or propitiatory sample of all of the things I hope I will manage to do well, or at least do, in 2010. I cleaned one bathroom; mended a pair of trousers; knitted a bit; tidied up a little; texted friends; drank good champagne; did some situps and pushups; had an idea for a work project; played games with the kids; handfed a guinea pig; put up the Christmas tinsel (again) after it fell down (again); invented a salad; and found a cyclamen, which I thought had been killed when the new fence went up, putting out new leaves. May 2010 allow you to do all the things you hope to do.

Excuses, excuses

On the one hand, the oven has been repaired and I tracked down almond meal at the nuts-and-pulses stall at Prahran Market. (Does anyone know anywhere else it's available?) On the other hand, the forecast is for 38 degrees and it took several attempts to make Toll House Cookies rather than Toll House Cookie Slice Sort of Baked Stuff Totally Filling the Baking Tray.

If we baked, Cheekus Weekus would help rather than playing on the Wii and Running Boy would probably help too, if running electrical appliances was involved. Princess Pea would drift in to reality from being lost-in-a-book, currently New Moon. But then they all like to play Sport Resort together and surely that's good sibling togetherness that should be encouraged while it lasts?

It would give me a chance to show my best friends, who are superb cooks, that I am not a total loss to baking. It would also give me a chance to prove conclusively that I should stick to soup.

I would gain the high moral ground by involving everyone in a Good Family Activity while the CFO is out having the pool pump repaired (the latest appliance to fail), so that I can then lecture him, or at least know that I could lecture him, about putting the kids in front of the TV while I am at work/out doing needful things. They might just all look at me blankly and whine about the Wii turning off.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained...I will try a flourless orange cake!

Oh and by the way - a post or so ago I said the guinea-pigs loved hiding under the pool blanket. They're not aquapiggies: the pool blanket is spread out over the back lawn for cleaning and ariing before we install it.

Christmas-tree cake

Christmas is done for another year. Very little socialising, partly becuase we're tired and partly because we're not terribly good at it. Cheekus Weekus and Running Boy found Santa's stash under our bed but RB had the good sense not to make any comments and CW accepted my explanation that they were toys "for other people". Princess Pea got a Ripstik and can more or less use it. The guinea-pigs got a pot of grass that Running Boy grew for them. They're free-range by day which means that they spend a lot of time under the pool blanket we just bought from friends. (The pigs wriggle little ruffles up into a tunnel network and scutter about.) The tads got extra lettuce. Fred kept on sleeping in his/her coccoon. Our tree looked wonderful, we bought new tinsel and brought out all the special decorations the kids have made.

It took three separate Christmas meals to see all of the various sides of family on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Boxing Day and today was just for blobbing.

We are also eating our famous icecream cake, an adaptation of a recipe by John Lethlean. Buy a paper Christmas-tree baking mould - we get ours from The Essential Ingredient. Let a small tub of vanilla icecream go all runny. Chop Toblerone into small pieces. Previously we've used about two-thirds of a large block but this year almost all of it went into the mix. Cheekus Weekus was in charge of chopping and got a bit carried away, although he was canny enough to save one triangle for himself. Add roughly chopped pistachios - about half a cupful - and a cup or so of raspberries. You can also use mixed berries, just don't put too many in. Really large boysenberries don't work too well. Stir everything into gloppy icecream, place the mould on a baking tray to catch leaks and pour it all in. Allow to set overnight. This year we added chopped jelly snakes, which the kids loved but I didn't. We all agreed that very large pieces of Toblerone aren't the good idea one might expect them to be.

Season's Greetings to you all!

GO!!!!!

Running Boy's Medley relay team made the Little Athletics State Championships on time results, by a squeak. He's been very excited for weeks. It was on this afternoon at Olympic Park.

He went to the Crystal Creek aths camp to prepare and came back happy, exhausted and lobster red. I have never had a child peel from sunburn so we were horrified, but eventually accepted his tearful protests that he really had put sunblock on and that the kids weren't allowed outside without sunblock. (We think he must have waved a finger's worth of block at himself first thing in the morning no repeats. He's since been terrified enough with tales of skin cancer that he now seems to be doing the job properly.)

After long delays - the timer was off meaning lots and lots of false starts - he ran his heart out. I was at the final straight and I shouted. My voice is a rasp now. Running Boy was fourth (last) runner up in their heat. He chased them down from fourth to second, he cleared by a metre and was moving up to take the leader. His leg twisted fifteen metres out from the finish! Thank God he didn't fall. They missed the finals by half a second.

The Moz

Possibly I was very naughty in a previous life, or perhaps I have been poor at assisting old ladies across the road.

In the year we have lived at this house, the dishwasher failed (on its second use), and was so bad that the repair-man wouldn't even take a callout fee. He told us to junk it. The tumble-dryer died. The (two year-old) washing machine danced its death across the laundry floor. An electric heater (new that winter) decided that "off" was discretionary. A pipe burst in the solar pool heater, sending a glorious waterfall down a bedroom wall. Two notebooks and a desktop computer stopped working for no particular reason, and a new laptop never worked at all. The DVD player would only operate in black-and-white. After two repairs, the mechanic conceded that possibly our ice-cream really was like concrete, rather than me being a silly fussy woman, given that the freezer insisted on setting to minus thirty degrees. (To compensate, the fridge section was keeping meat and dairy nice and warm.)

The door fell off the oven one night while I was hosting bookgoup. This really didn't bother me too much as it was so filthy that I had refused ever to use it. (The vendor appeared not to have cleaned the house at all between auction and settlement. More on this another day.) It did bother me though that the inner heatproof door on the new oven shattered into tiny pieces two months after purchase.

But worst of all? On Saturday morning I found that a kamikazi woodbeetle had self-immolated in the water-level window of the electric kettle.

Etiquette

On Monday I walked past the King's Domain gardens woolgathering. There was something odd about a man ahead of me, but I couldn't think why. He was medium-tallish, wearing a red-and-black rainjacket, monk's-tonsure bald, unremarkable.

Something small and white in the middle of his head bobbed gently up and down in time with his walk. It wasn't so small as to be hard to see. Once you saw it, it was impossible not to keep on seeing it.

Should I have run up to tell him he had a fluffy white feather stuck to his scalp?