#Children

jdettmann

Mar 21, 2017
3 min

I Am A Lego Detective

But I’m confused, because although I think that’s what I said, what he seems to have heard is, ‘I am a Lego Detective. I can find any piece of Lego, anywhere in our house or car. I only need three seconds to do this. ‘I am also the repository of knowledge of the whereabouts of everything else we own. I keep track, at all times, of where the extra lid to your new water bottle is, which I last saw when you took it out of the room I was in five days ago. I am a tracking system f

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jdettmann

Sep 8, 2016
3 min

Psycho Killer: Qu’est-ce que c’est?

And well might you ask, Talking Heads, well might you ask. Is a psycho killer a killer of psychos, or a psycho who kills? It’s a crucial distinction. We’ve been dealing with this particular grammatical point at home today. This morning May Blossom realised her face was covered with mosquito bites. The rest of the family already knew, but we’d decided not to mention it because we could do without the drama. But you can’t stop the drama, because mirrors exist. Once she caught s

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In The End, It Was The Odd Socks That Finished Her Off

jdettmann

Jul 20, 2016
4 min

In The End, It Was The Odd Socks That Finished Her Off

Garnet searching for his socks. We’ve been on a holiday. A driving holiday, and while I’ll try to write about that soon, and tell you all about the long car trip to Melbourne and the long car trip back and all the in-between parts that involved snow, alpacas, honey prawns and a new tyre, today I can only write about socks. Because I have realised that it’s not the pram in the hall that is the enemy of creativity. It’s the fact that as designated Chief of Socks in this family,

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jdettmann

Jun 15, 2016
4 min

Sticker Shock

Part of a Lego exhibition we saw on the weekend and in no way a freakishly accurate representation of our bedroom when it’s my morning to get up at dawn with Garnet. The last few weeks have involved a lot of of autopilot mornings. The kind where everyone has played musical beds all night, and when you realise there is finally a crack of dawn in the sky and there is no point hoping for sleep any longer, you get up. In this house, H and I alternately get up with the earliest ri

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jdettmann

Mar 8, 2016
3 min

Good Spider, Bad Spider

Dumbledore (left) and Huntsman Who Did Not Heed Me (right) Sydney’s in the middle of a plague of spiders. Summer forgot to end and for weeks the weather has been like a skipping CD: humid, 30 degrees, sunny – every single day. Mostly people have been enjoying this, except for the fact that you cannot walk anywhere without charging face first into a spiderweb. For safety, you have to walk with one arm flailing in front of you, like a Dalek at a Donald Trump rally. Apparently b

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jdettmann

Mar 1, 2016
3 min

Tropical with No Chance of Orang-utans

How I cope with this is to put aside what I should be doing (perhaps preparing my keynote speech for the International Conference on First-World Problems) and spend a lot of time researching where to go on holiday later in the year. I am looking exclusively at places where the weather is exactly like the weather I hate so much here. I’ll admit it doesn’t make much sense. We have been exceedingly fortunate to be able to travel overseas a fair bit, both before our kids were bor

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I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud Whose Kids Are Both At School

jdettmann

Feb 15, 2016
3 min

I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud Whose Kids Are Both At School

Garnet’s preschool curriculum focuses on how to induce guilt. The slow process of settling the kids into school and preschool continues to be the main focus of life for us. Every morning, May Blossom still says she doesn’t want to go to school, but it seems to be becoming more of a formality now. She goes through the process of putting on her uniform, having her hair plaited and getting lathered up with sunscreen with less resistance every day, and while there are still tears

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7 Reasons My Five Year Old Shouldn’t Have to Go to School, According to Her

jdettmann

Feb 5, 2016
2 min

7 Reasons My Five Year Old Shouldn’t Have to Go to School, According to Her

I have already been to school. For five whole days. What do you mean, five days isn’t enough? How long is this ridiculousness supposed to last? Eight more weeks? Then what? All this again three more times? How many times do I have to do all that? FOR THIRTEEN YEARS? NEARLY THREE TIMES AS LONG AS I HAVE BEEN ALIVE? I do not accept that. I did not sign up for this. No. School is boring. This week we coloured in a picture of Jack and Jill and we cut out a picture of Humpty Dumpt

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The First Rule of the Best Start Interview is Don’t Talk About the Best Start Interview

jdettmann

Jan 29, 2016
3 min

The First Rule of the Best Start Interview is Don’t Talk About the Best Start Interview

I was hoping the test hadn’t started yet. May Blossom has just been for her pre-starting-school chat with a kindy teacher, which is called the Best Start Interview. I presume the point of this is to help decide which class to put the kids into, based on how smart they are and how high they can count, but we didn’t want to admit that to her so we told May Blossom it was so they didn’t put all the shy boys or all the kids called Gavin or all the redheads into the same class and

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jdettmann

Nov 16, 2015
3 min

Ignorance Is Bliss

Apocalypse now, or have we time for another coffee before the end of days? ‘Why do I still have to go to kindy?’ May Blossom moaned to me yesterday. ‘I already know so much stuff.’ ‘You don’t know everything,’ I told her. ‘There’s still lots for you to learn, and that’s why you get to go to school next year.’ ‘I know enough. I know redback spiders are poisonous.’ She might be right. That might be enough. After a weekend of bombing and shooting and earthquakes and their atten

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jdettmann

Oct 19, 2015
4 min

A Very Peter Pan Birthday

Three weeks out she started saying, ‘I don’t want to hear it’s anyone else’s birthday before mine.’ Now we’re down to four days and she is crying each morning because FOR THE LOVE OF PETE WHY ISN’T IT FRIDAY YET? I think the thing she is most looking forward to is breakfast in bed. She’s been begging me for it for months, and I finally capitulated and said that on the morning she turns five I will serve her breakfast in bed. Then I asked what she would like. Leek and potato s

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jdettmann

Oct 14, 2015
3 min

My Head Is A Compost Bin

Hiding in the corner, not doing its job well. Come on, compost bin, lean in. Hello! Well, Mental Health Week came and went last week, and with it my intentions to write a really great post about mental health. I didn’t, because my mental health got in the way. What a jape! Mental health, you trickster, you. The last few weeks my mood has been, like the Sydney weather these days, running very hot and cold, with a side of near constant anxiety. I’ve been anxious about my little

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jdettmann

Sep 14, 2015
4 min

Follow Your Arrow

I think I’ve figured out why smart parents make their kids listen to kids’ music. It’s so you can have conversations about how yes, the Wiggles are right, fruit salad is yummy yummy, instead of conversations like we had the other night. We were listening to the Smiths while the kids ate fifty bowls of soba noodles and pushed their tofu around, before declaring it ‘Not to my taste’ (May Blossom) and ‘Plurgh yuck! (Garnet). I sat there silently willing them to eat the tofu so H

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jdettmann

Aug 24, 2015
2 min

Nine Lies

It turns out my kids are lying liars who lie. On Saturday night, my brother, SuperChief, babysat Garnet and May Blossom. They totally saw him coming. Here are nine lies they told him. He wrote them down and presented them to H and me on our return and I have transcribed them here. Anything in quotation marks is a direct quote from the child in question. Lies Garnet Told He is allowed to play the ukulele every night while falling asleep. Gusto is a secret tiger. Garnet can onl

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jdettmann

Feb 18, 2015
3 min

Shut Up, If You Please

One night I let things escalate horribly. I was so tired of being shouted at and told I was very, very mean, when really I am only a bit mean. I shouldn’t have let it get to me but I did. I told her that it was not acceptable to speak to me like that. I said that I too missed Daddy, and he would not agree I was mean, and he would not like her speaking to me like that either. She disputed this again, so we rang him. Because there’s nothing like being in the wilds of Africa and

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jdettmann

Feb 11, 2015
3 min

Train Travel For The Out-Of-Practice

Train for illustrative purposes only. Not a Tangara. When my train pulled into the station this morning, I thought ‘Ooh, fancy: a Tangara.’ Crossing the Harbour Bridge we passed several more trains. They were Tangaras too. I’m beginning to suspect that these days all Sydney trains might be Tangaras. And that maybe we don’t even call them that any more. That’s when I realised it has been a while since I was last a regular train commuter in Sydney. Before I went on maternity le

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jdettmann

Feb 5, 2015
5 min

A Bit of Stair Trouble

This morning was officially the second day I was to leave the house and come here to work on the blog and other self-directed (aka not-yet-existent) writing projects, but I didn’t make it yesterday. I had some very important life admin to attend to yesterday, namely getting my hair and my face sorted out. And Garnet needed a new scooter helmet. He wanted one that was orange and had an elephant on it, but the best I could manage was yellow with monkeys. He took it well, the li

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jdettmann

Aug 18, 2014
2 min

Spread Joy Up To The Maximum

While Garnet was sick all he has wanted to do was have me read him books while he languished in my lap. Once day I dragged out a Play School book of nursery rhymes and started singing them, and lo and behold, he joined in. Now as far as I know, the only music that kid has been exposed to in the last six months is the soundtrack to Frozen, the soundtrack to Cats, and the theme tune to the TV shows Peter Rabbit, Peppa Pig and Octonauts. So how does he know ‘Incy Wincy Spider’?

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jdettmann

May 27, 2014
2 min

Cross

It took half an hour to even upload this far-too-small image, due to iPhoto (or iFighto as my Dad has long called it) deciding that nothing has happened in my life since 2012, which may be a bit true, but still, it’s not my laptop’s place to judge and rather rude for it to say so. I can see all the photos since then but they won’t appear when I search to select them for the blog. If there’s anything more boring than your own computer troubles it’s hearing about someone else’s

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jdettmann

Mar 5, 2014
2 min

Games for Rainy Days

Others are more prosaic. Take ‘Molly Drops Her Phone’. In this game, May Blossom is Molly. Molly takes my phone, puts it in her handbag and leaves the room for a moment. Then she comes back with an empty handbag and exclaims ‘Oh no, I’ve dropped my phone in a shop!’ I then make all kinds of helpful suggestions about how we might get it back, and like so many clay pigeons, May Blossom shoots them down with deadly accuracy. ‘Well,’ I say energetically. ‘Let’s go back and see if

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