Thinking Allowed: The Troopers

The girls have formed a club, The Troopers. Aurora is clearly the ringleader, with Sophia playing the role of lead mimic and Tova gamely trying to keep up. Aurora sometimes yells "Trooper Meeting!", small feet run, and then a bedroom door slams. They come out ten minutes later with either a show or a demand. At the first Trooper Meeting they came up with a Trooper Song which went like this:

We're the Troopers!

We tell other people!

What to do!

We're the Troopers!

However, this soon gave way to the second and (apparently) final Trooper Song, which Aurora extemporized during a long car ride. It has stuck, much to our chagrin. It goes like this, and should be bellowed as loudly as possible:

Let me FLY in the SKY

Oh my FLEA is a LEA

And my HOUSE is a MOUSE

Oh how FAST I can SAY it

[very fast:] My flea is a lea! My house is a mouse!

Oh my *PIIIIIE*!

Even Tova knows all the words, and she just turned two. A whole mythos has evolved around it, explaining that there is in fact a mouse named House, who lives in a Pie, and so on. Now this song is top of the charts, and the girls are frequently hoarse.

They really are troopers: we're very happy that they've put up with hike after hike in the Grampians, along the southern coast, and around Tasmania over the past three weeks. The bigger girls are content to walk 10k for some Moomintroll stories and three candies apiece, while Tova rides high in the backpack and scans for lizards and butterflies. Now Aurora is nut-brown, Sophia's hair is every shade of gold, and Tova is dusted with freckles.

Our three weeks of happy and eventful holidays are sadly coming to an end, and so we are going to Cairns for a fortnight. This is what life is like when you have no house - if you don't have to be at the office, you may as well work somewhere tropical!