Thinking Allowed: Four on the shore

This weekend made me feel like our departure has suddenly jumped closer. We offloaded our couch and dining room table, and suddenly have a huge empty living room. Aurora plays the clarinet extra loud to take advantage of the acoustics. The girls invented an elaborate game involving throwing a handball at the walls (they wrote down all 15 rules) and it didn’t even end badly.

The girls all invited friends over today for a cookie decorating party. This is a great example of Tamar Vim. I wouldn’t have had the wherewithal, but she stayed up with Roo and Soph til 10:30 pm baking gingerbread, and when kids arrived at 10am sharp the table was ready with five colours of icing, various sprinkles and candies, and masses of gingerbread men, women, hands, stars, kangaroos and hearts. I was shocked at how smoothly it all went. Apart from Tova slathering cookies in inches of icing, losing one sulky boy for about ten minutes, one chin injury (no stitches) and Zadie refusing to leave her mother’s bosom all day, it was pure jam.

There were farewell cards, and I felt maudlin watching Sophia frolic with her friends. They sashay about and huddle and whisper in clusters (even though they are only 4 total). There is a lot of touching. Meanwhile Aurora and her friends were more practical about chatting and making egg dropping contraptions (0/2). Parents said lots of nice things about how much we’d be missed and I just got the creeping feeling that we’re about to leave!

Before bed I took the monkeys down the waterfront. They jumped off tall things and walked along narrow things. Zadie fed a piece of mandarin to a “duck” (vicious black swan). We lost Tova briefly but that always happens. Aurora took a hilarious slow-motion video of Sophia jumping and they collapsed on each other laughing. They all had a competition imitating kookaburras, mosquitoes, bears waking up from hibernation, distant thunder. And I briefly felt nostalgic for Canberra, this boring complacent isolated city which worth nonetheless have many of my most idyllic memories of these girls.