Small Child in Bed

One of the peculiar joys of going into the Small Child's bedroom of a night to check she's OK is seeing just what exactly she had chosen to wear. While you may very well put her to bed wearing orthodox pj's/nightie/knickers, if she can't sleep and gets hot, cold or bored, you can bet she'll be wearing something different when you check her a few hours later.

Last night she wanted to sleep "just in knickers, mum". I checked on her later, and lo and behold, she's in a pair of pyjamas. Other nights she'll start off in pyjamas and end up in a skirt and t-shirt. Or her nightie. Or a fleece, in the middle of summer.

One particularly funny night I heard a plaintive voice calling "mummy, I need help".  Turns out she had decided that leggings and a zipper jacket, with nothing underneath were the thing to wear that night. Except that the zipper on the jacket had got caught, and then split, and she could get neither wholly into it, or wholly out of it. To add to the humor, the jacket was purple, with sequins. She looked just like a mini glam rocker after a hard night, only minus the booze and fags.

Damn I wish I'd got a photo.

Big enormous bed

The Small Child is going through another stage of not really liking her bed. Tonight she followed me into our room, which currently has a pink duvet cover and where she pointed out that after she had another bad dream she would come in here and get into the beautiful enormous bed with the lovely big pillows.... because girls like pink beds, mum!

Err, right you are then, Ted!

Small Child World

The Small Child has been talking a lot about different worlds recently. There is the general one, Small Child World, and then there are others, depending on how she is feeling on any particular day. On Friday it was Small Child & Mummy World because we had adventures in the park. Another day it was decided that "today is going to be Tomorrow World". We've had Best Friends World, and, this afternoon, Pikelet World, in honour of the rather delicious pikelets we made for dessert.

And for posterity, here is the recipe, courtesy of The Guardian circa 2003.

250 grams SR Flour
100 grams castor sugar
2 eggs
125 mls natural yoghurt
250mls milk

Sift dry ingredients into a bowl. Whisk wet ingredients in another bowl until well combined. Make a well in the dry ingredients, poor in the wet ingredients and amalgamate well. Heat frypan,  put in a small amount of neutral oil and poor in appropriately pikelet sized amounts of batter. Turn when bubbles appear on surface, repeat process until all batter used,  then serve with jam and cream.

Elections

Had a (very) brief frisson of excitement today when I realised that there are actually four candidates in our electorate in the upcoming NSW elections. This electorate is generally boring, what with being the safest Liberal seat in the state and all. The ABC says it requires a 29.8% swing to unseat the Liberal Party

Unforntunately, the additional candidate is none other than a member of the Christian Democrats, Fred Nile's bunch, who are to the far right of Hitler, only religious. Funnily enough, it's not going to sway my vote.

Faithful Place

Am currently reading Faithful Place by Tana French.  It's another murder mystery, set in The Liberties in Dublin. I'm quite enjoying it, despite the problem I've had with this and the previous book The Likeness, which is that Dublin is fundamentally too small for the events to really occur. In The Likeness, we are asked to suspend our disbelief that there could be two identical women, unrelated, wandering around Dublin for years, and no one ever twigs, allowing the protagonist, an undercover cop, to assume the identity of a woman who looks exactly like her.

It's not going to happen. Dublin is a small city, where if you don't know someone, it's a fair call to say that you know of them, or you know someone that knows them. Six degrees of separation isn't in it, it's more like two, maybe three degrees at best. Put it this way, the very first day, of my very first job in Ireland, I discover that Himself had been to school, same year etc, as the boyfriend of the woman I sat next to. That's the kind of place Ireland is.  So the basic premise of The Likeness, or that of Faithful Place, in which the protagonist cuts ties with his family and never sees them, despite living maybe a mile away, on the same side of the Liffey, doesn't really wash. They would have been more successful had they been set in a larger, more disparate city, such as London, or Sydney.

But they're still well written, with an ear for dialogue, and so very much better than the psychopath-serial killer-murdering-young-blonde-professional-women that seems to be the hallmark of so much American crime fiction recently!

Gems

This afternoon, when I went to pick the small child up from creche:

SC- I'm boring.

BFF - I'm boring too.

This morning, Himself told me that last night in bed the Small Child while totally asleep kept running her fingers over his stubble and saying "I'm here! I'm here!"

Rainy Day

Well, actually it's been more of a rainy weekend, so we didn't get to picnic with the Small Child's BFF and the roof has sprung another leak in the bedroom. We've had several different varieties of rain these last few days, from tropical style rain so dense we can't see the far side of the park, to the current variety, a fine penetrating Irish style drizzle that looks innocuous until you come in 5 minutes later to realise you're soaked to the skin.  Even the brush turkeys are looking bedraggled and even more desponded than usual.

The Small Child has been in fine form, the other day she told Himself that "you have a lovely furry chest daddy, just like Hairy Maclary." She's a fine turn of phrase, so she has.  At the moment she's playing an  game involving herself as Dora, Himself as Swiper the Fox, and one of her friends as Boots. Thankfully for the sanity of all involved, it's not Strawberry Goat.

Out in the wider world, NSW Labor are heading for a pasting in 6 days time. Earth Hour is on the same night. They must be fecking joking if they think I'm going to turn off my TV for an hour during what promises to be a very amusing election night count. Apart from anything else, I could have every light on in our house for a week and not come close to the electricity consumption of some of the monster mansions along Middle Harbour in one night.

Lord, Lord, Lord I'm so bored.

Pretty much as the title says really. I've an hour to go before I pack up for the weekend, and I'm over it. The high from the elections is dissapating, and while the Irish walloping the Poms in cricket is good, it's not matching the elections for sheer joie de vivre and excitement. Not even close.

The office is freezing, as per usual. I've got Beyoncé's "Halo" going though my mind, and  it's giving me big irritations. REALLY big irritations. Just on that topic, I never realised until now just how gob-smackingly ugly that name actually is. It's really, really bad. It think it's the emphasis on "yonce" in the middle. As a friend once quipped about the Fianna Fáil politician Royston Brady "sounds like something he'd do to you", so it proves with Ms Knowles.

However, having just tried to open the Fianna Fáil homepage in order to copy and paste those pesky fothars, I have discovered that at least my esteemed employer is an equal opportunities politics-prohibitor. Yet another of the multitude of irritating things recently is the fact that all the political sites I frequent, including, bizarrely, Counterpunch, are blocked by the internet filter. I might add that this also includes Hossam El-Hamalwy's blog 3arabawy. It makes the lunchtime reading of Facebook a very frustrating experience.

However, at least it includes the right wing. This is definite, albeit fleeting, satisfaction. And I am heartened by Eamonn McCann's latest article about cuts to the Health Service in Northern Ireland. He quotes a phrase from Nye Bevin "Tories are Vermin". So pithy, so pointed, so true.

And now I've only another half an hour before I can depart. Now that is good news.