Gifts for a first birthday

Our friend's daughter is turning one next week, and it has got me thinking about the sorts of gifts to buy for this birthday. It's always a tricky one. The parents are SO PROUD, and rightly so. They have made it through a whole year with their new baby and managed to keep them alive. One year is a massive turning-point in all the good things and exhausting things about being a parent.

Plenty of derogatory words have been said about first birthdays being more for the parents than the child, to which I say DUH. Of course they are! And rightly so because frankly, the parents have done the lion's share of the work to get to this point! (Don't get me wrong, babies are awesome. I wish I had started having them earlier because I seriously would have like about eight. And I get that they are adjusting to, you know, Earth, for the first time, and that's not something to be sniffed at. But let's be honest: there's not a whole of exhaustion to be found in the sleep-feed-cry-cuddle-poo-play cycle, when played on repeat for 12 months).

Anyway, back to the point of this post(!)

So you have been invited to a first birthday party. What present do you buy? They're too little for you to have any helpful idea about their likes and dislikes. You don't want to get anything too young, because they'll grow out of them so quickly. But you don't want to give them something totally inappropriate.

What you see here is a short list of gifts that our children were given when they turned one, that have stood the test of time in terms of popularity and durability. My children are now aged two and three-and-a-half, and both of them still play with all of these. When I think about it, most of these toys are the types that can grow with the child, so that they play with them very differently now to the way they played with them when they were little... but they DO still play with them!

Onward to the list.

Stacking building blocks

These typically come in sets of ten, and are made out of sturdy cardboard. They are five-sided cubes that stack away neatly inside each other. When Ralph was one, his favourite game was for one of us to build a "tower" and then he would knock it down. Now he is two and I watch him building his own towers, carefully figuring out which sized 'block' is big enough to support the next. (And yes, he and his sister still like to knock those towers down).

Doctor's kit

We bought this kit (why yes it IS Peppa Pig themed. Don't judge!) when Scout was about one. Thanks to a stable but regularly-checked heart condition she has had from birth, plus a nasty bout of septicaemia when she was 11 months old, Scout developed a devout fear of doctors, and all kinds of medical intervention (even bandaids!). She loves role-play, so we thought a doctor's kit might help to remove some of the stigma. It maybe helped that situation a quarter of a fraction so in that sense it was a fail, but in every other sense, it has been a fantastic toy. The children both still play with it regularly. The other day I saw Ralph performing a "check-up" on Scout, using all the different instruments appropriately. Except that he listened to her heart through her leg.

Things on wheels

Scout has a green car she was given on her first birthday and she and Ralph still love to play with it. Anything (safe) on wheels is a long-term winner. I've pictured the bus here because it is extra popular, for a number of reasons. I bought this for Ralph when he was one. He loved "brooming" it around the room, but also loved that the roof opened up (there are little wooden people in there - I just kept those confiscated until he became big enough for them not to be a choking hazard). One of his favourite games (other than brooming) is to put little things into big things, so he uses this bus to hold all his matchbox cars. Also, he and Scout two days ago spent almost an hour with this bus and another big truck, racing them at top speed up and down the length of the house. I don't know. They both just love things on wheels.

Ride-on things on wheels

Here is another great toy. This bumble-bee, a gift for Scout I think when she was about one, is a perennial favourite, not only with my kids but also with visitors. Before Ralph could walk, he would hold onto the bee's antlers and move around on his knees (the wheels went too fast for it to double as a 'walker'). He used it to transport things on its back and, as he grew older, started to ride on it. This one is still so popular that they fight over having turns.

A stroller

When Scout turned one, a friend of ours gave her this stroller*, to cart around the dolly she had also been given from another friend (we were deep into "second baby on the way" mode and coming up with all kinds of schemes to help her adjust to life with a baby). Once Scout learned to walk, she would push that stroller all the way up to the post office or shops, it helped her balance and focus in those early walking days. We had no idea it would be as perennially popular as it has been, but both children still really love to play with it. Ralph likes to stack his cars inside the stroller and call them "my babies." Both children take turns - one with the stroller and one with the bus from above - to put their favourite toys inside and race up and down the house and into the garden.

* About a week ago after MUCH use, this stroller finally bit the dust, so I've had to dig out an old photo to use instead. This is Scout at about 16 months, pushing her stroller to the post office. Aagh too much cute!

A doll's house

I use this term loosely. What you see here is Ralph's rocket ship, complete with stairs and a ramp and a lift, and it is very popular around here. It was given to him recently, when he turned two. But I've included it because we also have a similar structure that is more of a traditional "doll house" (Peppa Pig themed - I'm serious don't judge!) which was given to Scout when she turned one, so I know this kind of play is also popular with one-year-olds. House or rocket ship, it doesn't really make a difference: this is all about accessible play-spaces to encourage imagination. My children play with both "doll structures" frequently and in the same way. I rotate the two structures, and the rocket ship happens to be out now. The kids role-play like champions with this thing and, now that they can talk, they even do voices! The other day I overheard Ralph narrating this conversation to himself, complete with voices, between astronauts and some anthropomorphised (by Ralph) cars:

"It isn't a problem" says the astronaut "It IS a problem" says the car, "I can't get up high!" "I will help you" says the astronaut, "It is magic" UP UP UP (and Ralph sent the car up the lift)

Also... we first came across the Peppa Pig house at the office of my obstetrician when I fell pregnant with Ralph (Scout was nine months old). She instantly took to it, and the obstetrician noted that it was universally popular with every child who came into her office. "Even six-year-olds," she said. Point being, kids love to role-play, and it is SO good for them!

Musical instruments

Full disclosure, these instruments come and go in popularity. They are not as consistently used as some of the others included here, but they have definitely survived the age test. This wooden set was a present for Ralph when he turned one: he loved banging things and making noise, so, hey! He played with it pretty consistently for about six months, and still returns to it semi-regularly. Add in a tambourine, and one of the children's favourite games these days is to grab an instrument and march around the house singing "We're in a marching band, we're in a marching band," one following the other. It's pretty cute!

Books

You know what? Books are always great. I'll do a proper post on some good books for one-year-olds (that seem to stay popular for longer) shortly. In the meantime, we bought the book above for the family friend I told you about at the start of this post, who is turning one. It is a little bit old for her, but she will quickly grow into it. It's a book with no words, so you can make up a story to go with the pictures. These books are great for growing with children, and fostering imagination. When they are little like this one, the reader can make up a story for them, according to their interests. As they get older, they can make up their own stories... and the stories will change as the child grows.

Two final tips:

1. If you're buying a present for a child and this is a new activity for you, treat those "age recommendations" with a fair bit of flexibility. If a toy says "suitable 2-4 years" that's most likely a safety recommendation in terms of choking hazards and the size of the equipment etc, it's not necessarily a sign that a four-year-old will enjoy the toy. Get it for the two-year old. My rule of thumb is to "buy up" when it comes to age, unless it's a safety issue. Assume the kids you're buying for are a lot brighter than the box would have you believe. They almost always are.

2. One-year-old is a funny time in a child's development to be buying most toys. In my experience, they REALLY start to get into serious, imaginative play at around the 18 month mark... but of course that's not a birthday so they don't have lots of people buying them toys. Most of the toys I've recommended here will be kind of liked at one, but will probably (hopefully!) become really popular at around 18 months.

How about you? What are/were some of the most popular toys for the one-year-olds in your life?

ps. I just discovered this mess-free finger-painting activity last week. The kids had fun even now but, seriously, this would have been a LIFE CHANGER if I'd known about it when my guys were one!

Back to food trucks

Today I'm dipping back into an old, semi-regular kind of post I used to do: a celebration of food trucks. If you're interested, here are all the food trucks I visited back then.

For me it all started when we moved here from Interstate four years ago. It was late summer, I was about two-thirds through my first pregnancy, and it was the sixth interstate or international move we'd made in 18 months. When you move to a completely new city that many times, you get pretty good at learning how to turn "a place" into "a home." I'm not just talking about your house or apartment here, I'm talking about your neighbourhood. I have worked from home for the past 15 years, so I don't have the opportunity to make friends and learn about my city through co-workers. I've got to do the legwork myself and, since we only have one car and Mr B needs that for work, it is literally legwork.

A friend told us, "I've heard that if you walk all the way to the end of your street, there's a taco truck that parks up there at night." I became a little obsessed with this promise. I mean I like tacos (who doesn't?), but I fixated on the mysterious taco truck to a probably overly-excessive degree. To me it represented the first entry in my mental collection of "Stuff I Like About My Neighbourhood," which is a very important collection to start when you move somewhere new.

I think my daughter was about six weeks old when I finally caught up with the taco truck, although it wasn't at the end of our street (those darned things have wheels, and it's harder than you think to track them down in the right place at the right time). I had made a new friend and she and I pushed our prams (her son was about two) north along Lygon Street for several kilometres. The traffic was loud and there were all kinds of building works going on so we walked single file and couldn't chat. The truck location was a lot further than I'd anticipated. Scout started crying for a feed, my friend's son was wiggling and fidgeting and decidedly over being strapped into a pram, and still we were walking.

But when finally, finally we made it to the dingy little park outside of which the truck was parked, there were pockets of people milling around. Eating, chatting, lining up for more. Picnic rugs covering dubious patches of grass. Plastic wine glasses and soda bottles with striped straws. People in suits perched on a low wall, bending over their little cardboard plates so that taco juice wouldn't drip onto their nice clothes. Someone somewhere was playing a guitar. Oh and the tacos were really good (especially the fish ones).

It was the sense of "instant community" that got me hooked on food trucks that day, even more than the food itself. The fact that they can roll up there somewhere not particularly pretty, most often a car park or the side of a nondescript street, and can, by way of a colourful awning and a great-smelling kitchen-on-wheels, create community. And so it started for me.

My food truck hunt slowed down somewhat (alright it pretty much stopped) after I had Ralph. It gets a whole lot harder to schlep around town when you have not only a newborn, but also an 18-month-old who only recently started walking. Double prams are not the most mobile of beasts, and timing long outings around competing nap times and feed times and little legs wanting to run just got too hard. This also coincided with Yarra Council (the area where I live) making it increasingly difficult for food trucks to operate in our area, so I tended to have to travel further afield to find them. I visited a few food truck parks, and even the street food festival last year, and it's kind of great having all the trucks gathered together, but that's a) a different kind of community, and b) even I can only sample just so many types of foods in the one meal (especially if I have to individually line up for each one).

But then a few months ago we ducked into a shopping centre to visit the Apple store and, lo and behold, there was a veritable food truck bonanza parked out behind the supermarkets and greengrocers. I left my family waiting inside with the air conditioning (it was 39 degrees that day) and temporarily dipped back into Food Truck Land just for that one afternoon.

What we ate:

* From Wingster's Grilled Chicken: a burger with buttermilk chicken (because the wings weren't ready yet) and a spicy sauce I can't remember (but it was good), and fries * From the Real Burgers: a classic weiner (because I am a rebel and also it looked and tasted so good) and fries * From the Refresher Truck: a (virgin) piña colada, and a "green power"

Ah, I'd missed the smoky deliciousness in the air, and the comforting rumble of those generators.

Pre-dawn

I had already been awake for at least an hour.

The hotel bed was one of those lumpy ones that felt like it was bruising my spine, no matter how I twisted and turned. The room was hot and stuffy, even with the AC on as high as it could go, possibly because it was 35 degrees outside and the seal around the windows wasn't great (as evidenced by the fact that the closed blinds had flapped and rattled against the sills all night, waking me out of uneasy slumber with every gust of summer wind).

It was so hot that both children slept only in nappies. Their bare little bodies made time roll backwards: they seemed impossibly young and vulnerable, still my babies for this night, at least.

When at long last the dark weakened under those flapping, banging blinds and the pre-dawn sneaked into the hotel room in stripes of grey, watery light, I took in a giant breath of relief.

To my right, tucked tightly into a ball on his belly, I could see my little boy asleep with his thumb in his mouth and his curly hair wild on the pillow.

Two today.

How am I even a mother? And I started that self-indulgent thing that mothers like to do, thinking to myself: this time last year... this time two years ago... now...

The way he giggles when I tickle him: big, throaty, hearty chuckles. His current obsession with everything vehicular, our days punctuated with "chug" and "zoom" and "broom" and "beep beep beep." Chasing his sister, arm raised, and when I say "No hitting!" he responds "Just kissing, Mummy," and resumes the chase, baby-lips pursed. How he still sucks his thumb and curls his hair when he's tired. How everything new is "lovely" and "beautiful" and "I lub it!" At night when I tuck him in he sits straight back up and tries to make me laugh. "Lie down Ralph," I say, hiding my smile behind my hand. But when I leave the room he calls out, repetitively until I respond. "I lub you Mummy! I lub you more! Lub you por eba!"

The wind rattled again and on the other side of the room, Scout opened her eyes and looked straight at me. I crooked my finger at her and she leaped out of bed and tip-toed as fast as she could over to ours. I lifted her into the lumpy bed, in between me and a still-sleeping Mr B, and she wrapped her arms around my neck and kissed my cheek.

Then I heard a thump. Ralph had climbed out of his own bed, and thudded over to ours, all puffy-eyed and wild-haired, and I helped him climb into bed, too.

"What doing Mummy?" he asked, voice croaky with sleep.

"Shh," I said, "lie down."

So he simply lay down, half on the bed and half snuggled on top of me, thumb back in mouth. Scout lay down next to him and reached her little hand out to his curls, softly stroking them.

"Is that lovely Ralph?" she asked softly.

He let his thumb out of his mouth for only a second. "Yes," he whispered. And then, "Do my ear?"

So Scout tickled his ear, then his back, and then his hair again.

"It lovely," he breathed.

Then Mr B woke up and rolled over. "Happy birthday Ralph!" he announced, and both children sat up.  Ralph pulled his thumb out of his mouth and said "Yeah!" and the birthday began.

Home delivery coffee

Dear entrepreneurs and cafe-owners of Melbourne, here is a business idea. Consider it a gift from me to you.

Home delivery coffee.

Allow me to put my case.

Imagine, if you will, the thousands upon thousands of parents, grandparents, friends and nannies in Melbourne right now who have spent all day chasing after babies and toddlers. Anyone who has done this knows how BEHOND EXHAUSTING it is to do. And now imagine this occurring on the back of a night of little or at best broken sleep. Make that THREE AND A HALF YEARS of little or at best broken sleep, night after night.

And now imagine that at around two o’clock in the afternoon, by some happy confluence of hard work, planning, and sheer dumb luck, those babies and toddlers actually fall asleep for a nap. In their own beds. At the same time.

And so all those thousands upon thousands of parents, grandparents, friends and nannies who have spent all day chasing after all those babies and toddlers FINALLY get a chance to sit down. They know they should be cleaning, or working, or folding washing, or calling their mothers. But they are just so mind-numbingly exhausted that all they can do is sit and stare at that stain on the lounge-room rug left over from the Great Banana Mush Incident of ’13.

Do you know what they would love right now? Coffee. They would really, really love a nap-time coffee. Some might even kill for it, and most would probably pay through the nose for it.

But - and here’s the kicker - even if they had the energy to walk, they couldn't leave the house to buy it. The babies and toddlers are asleep, remember?

Now if someone was to develop an app via which all those people could ORDER a coffee, and have a barista with a coffee cart rock up at their home a few minutes later... Well, that person may well be in line to make their first million.

Just a suggestion.

Image credit: Lesly Juarez, licensed for unlimited use under Creative Commons

A lot of words about not having words

Lately the words haven't seemed to be coming. And I'm not unhappy, in fact, quite the opposite, but I think I am maybe just replete with my simple family life. I have moments, flashes of something so real and powerful, through the day, and I want to share them with you, but the words don't come.

I look at Scout's face as she bends over the toy train-tracks she is fixing for her brother and there is so much human intelligence inside that furrowed brow, I can't even explain. She's just SO REAL, this little girl who was once just a fantasy (like, I am back in my home town of Sydney and I just so happen to bump into somebody from my past and here, by my side, little hand clasped in mine, is a tiny blonde angel. And I say to this person from my past, so matter-of-factly, "Oh, this is my daughter..." And that scenario has never played out but my point is that once it was a fantasy because I never expected to have children and nobody who knew me ever expected me to have children but now, if I happened to TAKE Scout with me to Sydney, it could absolutely be a reality. And that... well, that blows my mind!). Here she is, loving me, challenging me, negotiating with me, making me laugh, this bright and affectionate little humanoid supernova dressed head-to-toe in pink, and the full comprehension of her very existence makes me dizzy.

I'm not telling this very well. I don't have the words.

Ralph wakes up in the morning and calls out for me from his cot. When I go into the children's room and open the curtains to let the early sunshine in, he launches into action. "Hide! Hide!" Still standing up in the cot, he grabs a blanket and throws it over his head, often staggering backwards because he can no longer see: a strange, teddy-bear-patchwork-quilt ghost in his sister's hand-me-down Peppa Pig leggings, missing one sock.

Ralph runs his entire life at 100 percent. From that first, ghostly moment until lights' out, Ralph plays, laughs, runs, kisses, talks, jokes, sings, rages, laments, eats and even sleeps at 100 percent. Again, language fails me. I want to tell you how substantial he is, with his meaty little paws and chubby, bare feet like bricks. Funny faces pulled to make me laugh, and a constant, foot-thumping, shadowy presence in my life as I go about the house: "What doing Mummy?" I feel like I can't do justice his adorable nonchalance when it comes to cheerful disobedience.

Me: "Ralph, turn off the television please." Ralph (not lifting a finger): "Just watching, Mummy."

Me: "Ralph, you can keep that car in bed but it's only to cuddle, not play." Ralph: "Not for playing, just cuddle?" Me: "That's right. It's sleepy time." Ralph: "Broom broom! I playing with my car!" Me: "No Ralph, only for cuddling, or I have to take it away." Ralph: "Alright Mummy. Just playing. Broom broom!"

Me: "Ralph, where are your shoes?" Ralph (with a grin): "Maybe in water?" (In case you are wondering, sandles do not float)

Ralph (in my arms, spotting the cat): "Ruby! Ruby!" Me: "You can pat her Ralph, but you must be gentle." Ralph: "Pat her very gentle?" Me: "That's right, Ruby likes you to be very gentle. You mustn't chase her." Ralph (leaping out of my arms and diving for the cat, who races under a chair): "Ruby! Ruby! AAAAAAAH!" Me: "No Ralph! You mustn't frighten the cat." Ralph (with an angelic smile and a demeanour as though he is reasoning with a dullard): "Very gentle Mummy. Just CHASING her Mummy."

I dunno. These aren't the best exchanges. I can't remember the really good ones because I'm just IN them and not remembering to record them, but I guess what I'm trying to say is just how much I love being a mother to these two incredible, opinionated, emotional, intelligent, loving little balls of electricity.

And how much I am learning from it all. Like, learning about how OTHER people learn.

Scout has been doing some little reading exercises. I show her the sentence "I am Sam." I ask her, "Where is AM?" and she points to it instantly. "Where is I?" Where is SAM?" and she points to each of them in turn. So then I point to AM and ask, "What's that word?" Scout pauses, one finger goes to her mouth. "Um, I don't know." She looks to me for reassurance. It's the same word, the word she just picked out without hesitation only a moment ago. But her brain hasn't learned yet how to make the connection between sight and sound, when it comes to reading. She's great at recognising letters but struggles when I try to get her to think about sounds."Where is M," I'll ask, pointing to a page of text, and she can pick them all out. But then I'll ask, "Which word starts with an M sound, mouse or baby?" And she'll say "Baby!" because she likes babies better than mice.

Anyway, this is all probably very boring for you and I promise to change direction the next time I post on this blog, but honestly I find it all FASCINATING and I don't know how to write about this motherhood thing properly, so instead, I'm blithering on in a fairly pointless overflow of words.

Oh, this is Ralph *not* chasing the cat.

A video posted by Naomi Bulger (@naomibulger) on Sep 21, 2015 at 3:07pm PDT

Fairy snail-mail

Look what arrived in the mail for Scout and Ralph last week! The tiniest envelope you've ever seen, complete with a minuscule stamp (of a snail, because snail-mail, natch), and an adorable wax seal.

Inside was a teeny tiny card, with a letter to the children written inside. The letter was from the Elves and Fairies, who confessed that they had secretly been playing in the children's garden every night, and particularly enjoyed the new cubby house. They hoped that this was ok, and promised to put all the toys back exactly where they had found them so nothing would get lost.

The Elves and Fairies also promised that if the children left them a letter in their toy postbox, they would write back. And would Ralph and Scout like the Elves and Fairies to send them a present? They would be happy to do that, as long as the children understood that the present would have to be very, very small (or else it would be too heavy to post).

This was an adorable little letter, with attention paid even to the tiniest detail. It came in a little glassine envelope (with its own wax seal) alongside a magnifying glass for reading the letter. I ordered it from Leafcutter Designs, and the whole thing cost $US9.75 plus postage, which I think was quite the bargain.

Birthdays

It was my birthday on the weekend. I was up before everyone else, as I often am. I let the cat out, and surveyed the still-dark garden in my socks. I love our garden in the early morning. Beyond the garden walls are the rustlings of pre-dawn morning; birds, stretching and yawning. But inside my little oasis, all is still and silent. The daisies are shut-tight, fast asleep.

My socks left a trail of wet footprints through the playroom as I came back inside, because the grass had been wet from overnight rain and I hadn't noticed. I filled the kettle and flipped it on, then unpacked the dishwasher and tidied the kitchen a bit while I waited for it to boil. Poured a cup of tea and carried it into my office, then sat down to work on my book. After about an hour of typing, I realised my cup of tea was empty and I couldn't think who might have drunk it. I took the empty cup back into the kitchen, flipped the kettle on, and waited for it to boil again. While I was waiting Mr B came downstairs and said "Happy birthday," and that was when I remembered this was a "special day."

Off and on throughout the rest of the day, while Scout made me chocolate birthday cupcakes with florescent pink icing and sprinkles, in her favourite Peppa Pig casings, I got to thinking about birthdays. Here are some of my thoughts.

One. People are worth celebrating. It doesn't have to be a birthday, but birthdays are always a good place to start. There's nothing wrong with choosing a day to make much of someone you love. I feel the same way about supposedly-commercial holidays, like Mother's Day and Father's Day and Valentine's Day: so what if they were created by greeting card companies? It's still a good reminder to celebrate the people we love.

Two. I should feel ok about celebrating myself. I shouldn't feel embarrassed to say "It's my birthday" and let people give me hugs or wish me happy birthday or come over for dinner. That's NICE. Why am I so embarrassed / ashamed about being celebrated? I'm totally up for celebrating YOU, I just feel very awkward when it comes to celebrating me.

Three. After I had Scout, I had an a-ha moment about birthdays. I mean I totally got it, at last. Birthdays are MASSIVE deals for the parents of the birthday boy or girl. As far as Scout was concerned, her first birthday was about seeing people she loved, getting presents, eating chocolate cake, playing with balloons, and singing a strange song. All of those are nice things, I'm sure you'll agree, but not exactly deep. That's all birthdays will ever mean to a lot of us. After all, none of us remembers not existing.

But for me, Scout's first birthday was a phenomenal marker of an event (her birth!) that was long-anticipated, extremely hard-won (they don't call it "labour" for nothing), and resulted me creating, growing, nurturing and pushing into the world an actual human being who wasn't there before, and now is, and thinks and laughs and cries and creates and loves. I did that and I'm doing that and that, my friends, is PROFOUND.

So the next time someone glibly says "Oh, the first birthday is more about the parents than the child," so what? Hell yeah it is! Let them celebrate, let them go ridiculously, ostentatiously over the top if they want to. Because for the parents, that first birthday marks the remembrance and the continuance of unfathomable mysteries. Life where there wasn't life. Love that you didn't know you had in you. That birthday and every birthday to follow it marks a turning-point in the life's journey of the parents, after which nothing will ever be the same again.

This weekend, and every year on my birthday and on Scout's birthday and on Ralph's birthday, I think about my mother.

Scout says

"When I grow up I will be Father Christmas. Ralph can be my elf." ("Father Christmas" is pronounced "Farmer Kitmass")

* * * * *

Scene: the cherubs are yelling at each other.

Me: Use your words. Scout, what words do you have? Scout: Umm, PINK!

* * * * *

"When I grow up I want to be Mummy."

* * * * *

Ralph (pointing at TV): Daddy! Me: That's a talking boat. Is Daddy a talking boat? Scout: No, silly. Daddy is a person. Me: Daddy is one of our favourite people, isn't he. Scout: Yes. (Pause) But he is not very good at cleaning.

* * * * *

While baking biscuits...

Scout: Are we using your special recipe book today Mummy? Me: Yes, and when you grow up and move out of home I will give it to you so you can cook all your favourite recipes. Scout (dissolving into tears): Why do you want me to move away from you? I don't want to go!

Scout got two biscuits that day.

* * * * *

Scout: Why did the button fall off my jacket? Me: It's just getting old. Scout: No YOU are getting old.

* * * * *

Said every night at bedtime, like a litany of love:

"Mummy I love you forever. I never want another Mummy. I never want another Daddy. I never want another Ralph."

* * * * *

"We are going to have noodles and croissant! That's what I'm going to type on the Internet."

* * * * *

"Not 'boddle' Mummy, 'bottle.'" And just like that, my child calls me a bogan.

* * * * *

Scout (wearing her pink, plastic high-heels and carrying two hand-bags): Bye-bye Mummy, I'm heading out. Me: Oh ok. Where are you going? Scout: To the Lost City.

* * * * *

Scene: kids are playing with their doctor kit. Without warning, Ralph jabs me in the leg with a toy needle.

Me: Yoww! Scout: We are doctors Mummy. It will only hurt for a second. Me (nursing actual bruise): Oh good. Will you both be doctors when you grow up? (This is a previously-stated ambition) Scout (bursting into tears): WAAAH! No! I want to be a duck when I grow up! Can I be a duck? Me: Um. Okayyy... Scout (after a thoughtful pause): But will you still let me come inside the house when I am a duck?

After the party

These photographs are the calm after the storm has passed. The quiet after the chaos.

When your child has a birthday, you want to take a moment. To pause, to remember: "this time last year, this time three years ago, this time 18 years ago…" I don't think the power of that day goes away for a parent, ever. Does it?

Because in that minute, the minute you are remembering, the world gained this new person. If that minute (and all the hard, gruelling, labour-of-love minutes that preceded it) hadn't happened, the universe would now have a completely different personality.

It would have a hole in it that could never be filled, and a regret that nobody could ever understand, and a loss that nobody would ever know how to grieve. The paths of every single person your child has ever met and will ever meet would have been altered, some of them subtly and some of them in extraordinary and powerful ways, but altered nevertheless.

That's the power of a birthday, when you are a parent.

Scout turned three on Tuesday, and I have been waiting for my own moment of reflection. Searching for it, even, in the frenetic, time-spinning events that have made up our hours and days of late. This is the first chance I've had to stop and think and remember, and now I find my thoughts and memories overpowered by my feelings, and I am without words.

"I love you," I tell her every night when I kiss her and put her into bed (and many times throughout the day). "I love you a million, billion, trillion." And she whispers, "To the moon and back?" "Yes," I tell her. "To the moon and back, and then more."

Every day since she was born, every, single, day, I have told her this: "I love you forever." It is because I believe that my love for her will transcend everything. EVERYTHING. Even if I die, my love is and will be stronger than my body. It is my most profound wish that neither of my children will ever live a second without love.

And that's the best I can do about taking a moment. Happy third birthday Scout!

The poppies

Last week at the Melbourne International Flower & Garden Show I stopped by a stunning garden of trees set around a lake like an oasis, with drifts of brilliant, crimson, crocheted poppies in clusters around it. Looking through the foliage and across the lake, the poppies continued all the way down, into some sort of field. When we stopped to admire them, Scout asked me to help her onto a rock and would I please take her photograph. This is quite rare. She patiently allows me to point a camera at her all day long but rarely requests it, and never before has she deliberately set herself up to pose with a backdrop in mind. As I was helping her onto the rock and pulling out the camera, a man lightly touched my shoulder and said “That is perfect. That garden was made for her. I made it for her.” I smiled and thanked him as he walked away, but was distracted moments later as Ralph started crying and the crowds were growing thick and we’d managed to lose both grandparents and when I turned back to Scout, she had decided to lie down on the rock and was pretending to snore. It was only later that I realised I’d bumped into the creative director of this whole amazing oasis, award-winning landscaper Phillip Johnson, and it made me so happy to think that he’d enjoyed seeing my daughter interact with his garden (which, incidentally, was an ANZAC tribute garden, making beautiful use of the handmade poppies contributed by volunteer-crafters from across Australia for the 5000 Poppies project).

So, belatedly, thank you for your kind words Phillip. We loved what you created and why you did it!