Thinking Allowed: Life is skittles

Springtime has returned to Canberra, and everything is better for it. Dawn walks with Zadie no longer numb my fingers. Tova can wear her hula dress with unmatched shoes. Aurora and Sophia walk to school unaccompanied like big kids. While Canadians hunker down for a couple hundred days of shivering in the dark, Canberrans are splashing beer on their barbies and getting down to the business of taking her easy and developing melanomas until the ozone layer regrows.

Our weekend was Australian in its mellowness. I had Friday off, and spent much of it with Tamar on a long walk to Guild and back. Guild is a board game cafe where you shell out three bucks for access to their basically infinite selection of games. Zadie took an extremely well-timed nap while we tried Power Grid, in which you try to buy enough coal and plants to supply, say, Dresden with electricity. It was surprisingly fun, and we had a good time. In the evening we made sushi, then Sophia put Zadie to bed, which was a brand new development in our family dynamics and resulted in her being rewarded with a spoonful of honey.

Yesterday was forecast to be very very rainy. We hit up the farmer's market in the morning and bought a truly enormous cabbage, which Tamar spontaneously decided would be the perfect gift for our friends Dan and Tash. The girls' climbing instructor was moonlighting as a vegetable merchant and snuck us some beets. Tova tried her first blood orange; Sophia, who was wearing her Very Nicest Of All Dresses, to celebrate the loss of her tooth, ate her segment of orange so doubled over - so as to avoid any stains - that Aurora thought she was throwing up. Then to the Arboretum, where two gigantic storms rushed towards us from the north and the east, forking the sky with lightning. The kids bravely played in the playground until a blast of wind picked up a cubic metre of dirt and flung it in our eyes. We retreated and had babyccinos and played kids scruples.

Kids scruples, by the way, is a useful game. You come up with a moral dilemma, and the guesser must guess what each kid would do. Then each kids answers, and the guesser scores a point for each correct guess. It's fast-moving and there's lots of room for silliness/creativity, but also lets you raise pretty much any moral issue you want to. Unfortunately I was winging it so we didn't get any deeper than whether you'd admit you broke a vase if you 99% wouldn't get caught. Only Tova said she wouldn't confess, which is confusingly honest.

The rain wasn't letting up so we went to Guild again (twice in two days! We're getting geeky!) with some friends and played Dixit at the suggestion of the wizened woman there; it was a great choice with small kids. Then Apples to Apples which was slightly less popular. Aurora and Frida won with the card "Planetarium" as best matching "Volatile" out of sheer elan and hand gestures. But then Sophia and I won the last round with "Roomba" best matching "Sympathetic" since you can tell it anything and it'll never criticise you or let you down. Tamar felt betrayed by my soliloquy, and Aurora was crushed that Roomba beat her card "School Nurse" (which is about as sympathetic a card as you can get" but the judge was a young boy and I understand young boys far better than her. Anyway in the evening we made Rain Cake, I went to an Israeli housewarming with Aurora and Sophia (rather strained but nice) and Tova put Zadie to bed by singing an abridged version of Old McDonald for 30 minutes nonstop, every time with ducks, no other animals appeared. Amazing! Spoon of honey!

This morning it was an early wakeup to decorate the Rain Cake, which was actually a carrot cake with multiple colours of cream cheese frosting a la Vincent Van Gogh. There was blue rain, green grass, white clouds, yellow sun, and red sunset (because we had red). But Tamar had to prepare our entire outing and day while we made a huge mess in the kitchen AND dining room, not very responsible. Off we went to Tidbinbilla, the nature reserve near Canberra. In defiance of another gloomy forecast, the day was beautiful and sunny. The seven girls <10 y.o. all got find-the-animals cards, ranging from 1 point for an ant through to 100 for an echidna. Our excursion was successful to say the least, as we spotted a duck-billed platypus, long-necked turtle, and red-bellied black snake in quick succession. This last one was about fifty feet long and slithered through the grass in search of prey while we all watched spellbound. Oh and this gorgeous iridescent blue bird kept flying to and fro right in front of us, as though showing off, and turns out to be called the Superb Fairy Wren, which is such a fantastic name that if we ever have a fifth girl (yeah right) she shall be known as Superb Fairy Wren Teitelbaum, or maybe SFW can just be her middle initials and her first name can start with an N? Anyway the girls awarded themselves 100 points for the snake. I told a long story about a mermaid princess who could command all beasts of the sea, and a sly fox who held her best friend the Old Crab, hostage so she would dispatch attack squads of bluies riding on the backs of lobsters to the candy shop until they were repelled by Little My who terrified the lobsters with lemon and dill.

After which we bought groceries, made tagine and salmon for dinner (pro-tip, allspice makes tagine even better and it's pretty great to begin with). Tamar explained Mrs Doubtfire to the girls and we entered into a debate about whether they would recognise me were I to masquerade as an elderly British nanny. There followed six highly memorable impersonations. Tova maybe won - she wrapped herself up in the red blanket with only her face sticking out, stalked wordlessly towards us with an indescribable expression on her face, then lurched towards Tamar and sort of buried her face in her lap as she screeched "What's your naaaaaaaame??" in a horrible voice. We were all helpless with laughter, Sophia looked like she was about to pass out. You had to be there. Then we watched the trailer for the movie. Tamar went to the bouldering gym for a quick session. Aurora tried to put Zadie to bed and failed due to a late nap, she was so disappointed not to get a spoonful of honey, and to have failed where her sister succeeded, that she lay in bed sulking through half of the Good Morning Vietnam soundtrack, all of Ella Fitzgerald Sings The Cole Porter Songbook, and only dropped off halfway through Glenn Gould playing the Art of the Fugue.

It was a pretty great weekend.