Telling the twoosh

Tonight while getting getting ready for bed:

- Mummy, on the television at grand-papa's I saw a mean bird eating a baby penguin.

- Well, that's nature sweetheart. Some animals eat other animals to live.

- Why?

- Well it's like us, we eat animals too.

- (incredulous) We don't eat cows!

- Yes we do, we eat cows.

- Papa, do you know what mummy said? She's teasing me! She said we eat cows!

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A (slightly hammy) recreation:


And the look on his face when C told him there's horse's hooves in ice cream - was it very different from the expression of you anglophone readers when you heard me say we eat horses??

A spot of bother

Our new au pair is leaving us - for unfortunate reasons and against what she'd like to do, she has to go back to her home country. It's a sad story and I feel deeply for her.

For us it's back to the au pair search. Not nearly the same magnitude of a problem as what our au pair is facing, but still, oh joy.

We interviewed six people to replace J, our lovely summer au pair.

One didn't ask any questions at all, making it an interview with long silences once we had run out of things to say and before she needed to leave to take the train home. This didn't bode well for dinners together.

One was sugary sweet and overly polite, and also a very definite and dominating presence. This both annoyed and intimidated me, respectively.

One seemed OK except that just the week before she'd suddenly left her previous au pair job in a perfect family after an (understandable) emotional breakdown and now (inexplicably) didn't want us to speak to them ... and then let slip that her boyfriend had recently thrown her mobile phone out the window in a fit of rage at her speaking to other males. This didn't help me believe that there wouldn't soon be another crisis.

One got a face full of Téo fiddling with himself. Apart from that, she wasn't actually an au pair.*

One we didn't even get to interview because, despite C spending a lot of time charming her mother, she did a no-show twice. Twice. And then she had the nerve to be rude when C told her we'd chosen someone else!!**

The sixth, who was the first we interviewed, seemed capable and pleasant. She got the job.

Here's hoping we find someone good to replace her quickly - for both the kids and my deadlines!

* She would have minded the kids in her own home... but J spoiled us with the benefits of having an extra pair of hands around even when I wasn't working. Like at dinner time.

** Here's the whole story if you are interested:

It started when the mother (who was handling all the emails) dismissed us as being an option because other families had sent lovely welcoming emails and pictures of their kids and houses in contrast to C's short email followed by a telephone call. So C spent an evening writing a very polite email to the daughter (sent through her mother) and taking pictures of the kids and the entire floor we have to offer to an au pair. He was rewarded with a very effusive email from the mother gushing over our beautiful children and saying that we were now the favourites. So he got what he wanted... but she was never a real candidate after this as we still had no direct contact with the daughter and the mother seemed a little over the top (e.g., she told us hadn't sent any pictures of her daughter (not that we asked for any) because the ones she had were not to her daughter's advantage) . I was concerned that if we took on this girl, the mother would be on our doorstep any time her precious darling didn't like something. And then the daughter failed to show up twice for an interview, and didn't even call to tell us she wasn't coming. Pity, as I was curious to meet them both in person. (You didn't think she'd be coming to the interview alone, did you??)

A cheesy story

C loves himself some cheese fondue. Every year come September, he starts dreaming of a weekly fondue dinner.

A weekly fondue dinner is never going to happen. And I hold out as long as possible for the first one of the season.

It's not that I don't like fondue, because I do. It's yummy. So yummy that when it's there bubbling away in front of me, I can't stop dipping into it... and no matter how sternly I have told myelf beforehand to just eat a little, before I know it I've ingested a quarter of a kilo of cheese. That's a lot of cheese. And however much C insists that it's really not so many calories, it's still a lot of fat. Fat which will not in any way help my (not very strenuous) efforts to lose the last 5 kilos of pregnancy fat.

So anyway, this year I held out until last weeked.

C was very happy to hear I'd relented. He got the ingredients ready, took out the fondue pot... and ran into a problem.

The fondue pot is ceramic. Our new stove is induction.

Lucky we have a gas burner!

So the 2008/9 fondue season could start after all.

(But we're never having one a week.) (No matter how much you nag me sweetheart.)

Little engines that can

Téo got a bike for his birthday. I wasn't sure how he'd go on it.

He's never been the most agile child. It's not that he can't do things, he just doesn't always do them very gracefully. So while other kids his age would climb easily onto those rocking things at the park, Téo would awkwardly clamber and get a foot stuck somewhere. Other kids would give one powerful push on their scooter and then breezily glide along, while Téo would hesitantly push-push-push, only daring to glide for a half second at a time.

(I worry that he takes after me.) (I'm sorry sweetheart if you do.)

Even recently I had seen kids a full year younger pedal better than him. So while I wanted him to have a bike, I thought it might take a while before he got the hang of it.

Wrong. It's like he was born to ride it. And the look of capable determination on his face while he pedals - I love it. His expression, it's like a glimpse of an older Téo, the man he will be.

I love that he's so proud of himself, and that he enjoys riding so much.

It was the perfect present.

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In other news, Lukan took two steps today!

My next wish...

... is that Barack Obama is not assassinated by some nut job.

Who will it be??

For the first time ever, I want to stay up to see who's won the American presidential election. I've always wanted the Democrat to win before, but this is just me following party lines - I've never really cared about who exactly the winning and losing candidates are (well, except for George W. four years ago). But this year I do. This year I even wish I could vote myself.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not really that engaged. I haven't followed everything each presidential and vice-presidential candidate has said, I didn't watch the debates. But even so, I know that I really really do not want Sarah Palin anywhere near the Oval Office or getting any further public endorsement, and that I'd really really like Barack Obama to win.

I'd like to be more eloquent about my admiration for Obama and despair over Palin, but many others are saying it so much better. So I'll just say that it's pretty much summed up in this speech by Obama and this snippet from Palin (her anti-research remark is at 01:18) (and how is it even possible that someone so ignorant can even be part of a contest against Obama's thoughtfulness???)

Here's hoping there's good news in the morning...

Cataclysm

There you are, wandering the world, when all of a sudden you stumble across a nice place to live. A warm place, with lots of food and enough water. A calm, cosy place. Uncrowded. You settle down, meet others of your kind, reproduce.

Generations pass, and your by now large family prospers. Food remains plentiful, as does water. The climate stays stable.

One of your descendants carries a new mutation - which who knows, may lead to an entire new species with wondrous new capabilities.

And then, out of the blue, a random event wipes it all out, leaving nothing behind but a barren wasteland. Whatever possibility that descendant with the new mutation held - gone. It's all gone.

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This is what I was thinking the other day when, for the first time ever, I cleared out the gunk from Lukan's earfolds.