Cycling, competition and clay - all in one day

Despite the fact that this is a crappy photo taken with my phone I think you can see the happiness bursting out of this child. All because he rode his bike to school yesterday for Ride to Work Day. This is a manufactured experience, we live too far from his school for him to really ride the whole distance. (Although once he is older we might give it a shot. I seem to remember riding my bike a fair way in my school days) So I took the bike for a drive to Cherub's creche, then Climber and I used foot-power to get to school. This photo is taken really close to where we used to live; the park just behind Climber is where his first 2 birthday parties were held because we had almost no backyard in our house. Fixit and I really miss living in this area, even though we now live in a perfectly good area with an enviable backyard. And I feel a bit wistful about Climber not being able to walk or ride to school, if truth be told. But it's having your cake and eating it territory. Climber could very easily ride to school if we sent him to the local one, but we wanted him to come here. So shutup whining already.

The same day we had the Prep to Grade 2 Sports Day in the park across the road from his school. Not a competition as such. I didn't get to barrack for the Climber's 'house', we just sat on a rug watching the kids rotate through a few different sporting activities like frisbee-throwing or net-casting-&-catching.

This lack of competition eventually made a couple of us decide to just get up and cheer the kids over the mini-hurdles. We cheered them if we knew their names. It made them run faster which was quite funny.

And then after all that extra fun, I took Climber to the first session of the pottery course he'll be doing, alongside Next-door-boy, for the next 6 weeks. Fun with clay at a Neighbourhood House, which is like a community centre I suppose. The new families among us stood round the edge of the room in that slightly nervous are we in the right room way. Eventually the teacher came in and fired a few questions at the middle of the room. How many children have I got? Hmm, dunno, seeing as I'm new here... Suddenly her gaze fixed on me, sizing me up as a new parent and presumably a potential trouble-maker because her introductory words to me were I get very testy if people are late so I'm going to give you my phone number. Make sure you call me if you're late or I get quite annoyed.

How on earth could she tell that I'm sometimes late for things?

Also when I get new students to my tap classes I generally say something along the lines of you must be ... hello and welcome, I'm Miss Caroline and I speak to both the parent and the new child and tell them helpful things like where the toilets are and where to change their shoes etc. And I never grump at latecomers, or if I do it's only to tease Astrid.

The boys really enjoyed the class of course. They never care about things like formalities.

Can he swing from a web? Take a look overhead.

Bet you've never seen Spiderman wearing tap shoes before.

And in other Spiderman related news, I knew it wasn't just the commercials that made watching Spiderman of a morning such a bad idea. As we were driving home from school the other day, Cherub suddenly piped up Climber sad. Sure enough, when I turned round, there was my big boy sobbing his little heart out. Not just a few tears trickling down either; the proper cry, with the noise and the snot and the heaving shoulders and the sad, sad face.

And when I asked him what was wrong he choked out "Peter Parker's uncle got sho - o - ot." Luckily I had seen some of that morning's episode or I would have been quite at a loss. And in case you didn't know, Peter Parker is Spidey's alter ego.

He was inconsolable, and needed much cuddling and distracting when we got home. At that stage I hadn't quite broached the you-know-it's-not-real? conversation, because I like that his imagination is not yet cynical.

But that evening as we settled down with a glass of wine in front of Spicks & Specks, I heard a noise from the boys' room. And when I went in, there he was again, crying his eyes out. So then I did give him the it's-only-a-cartoon, it's-not-real talk and we let him watch Spicks with us before putting him back to bed, and he seems over it now.

Don't think I'll read him any more Harry Potter books for a while though.

Spiderman, spiderman, does whatever a spider can.

Fixit has been letting the boys watch Spiderman in the morning. I don't approve, not because of the violence so much (although I'm not mad about them watching violence but hey, you grow two boys, you get less precious about this stuff) but because it's on a commercial station and I Don't Let The Kids Watch Commercial Television. Yes, I am the nanny-state. What are you going to do about it? The kids have the choice of the ABC or their impressive array of acceptable videos. (Thomas the Tank Engine & The Wiggles feature heavily in our collection.)

I'm really just repeating how I was raised. I grew up in Canberra and in my younger years there were only 2 channels to choose from. But even so, we didn't visit that commercial station much. My parents hated advertisements. And guess what? So do I! Qu'el surprise. Nell is not afflicted with this and had to be all sorts of alert when she lived with us, otherwise Fixit and I would give her dirty looks when she forgot to mute the ads. She reckons she barely hears them. And she's always telling me about this or that funny ad, and then remembering that of course I won't have seen it. So now sometimes I have to watch a funny one (Hi I'm a Mac or the pirate & the bandaid) so that I know what's she's talking about. She's my ad-filter. She tells me which ones are okay to watch.

I do remember as we got older and more in tune with peer group pressure that we were let off the ABC leash to watch shows in the 5-6pm slot, such as Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie, Lost in Space and The Brady Bunch. After 6pm, of course, we wanted to return to the ABC for the golden hour of telly : The Goodies followed by Doctor Who. And I also think the rules had relaxed a bit more by the time my brother was 6-ish, because I know he watched Thunderbirds and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Anyway, back to Spidey and the dreaded commercials. Fixit is being good about it. It's all supervised. Obviously, it helps that he's getting a huge kick out of watching Spiderman too. He was muting the sound when the ads came on, but you could see the boys were still veeeeery interested in the commercials, so he has started flicking back to ABC Kids so that their little minds are not contaminated with consumerist longing for expensive, noisy and useless crap.

In the meantime the one Spiderman costume in our dress-up box is in high demand. No fisticuffs yet though.

*********

In other news, I made sourdough bread from the starter and recipe kindly provided by Pea Soup. I've never attempted bread before.

I feel like such an earth mother now.