Clean Slate Day

By The Red Tent, March 16, 2015

I felt it yesterday morning — the first bites of cool over my arm as I flung open the front door. April is fast approaching, one of my favourite months, when the relentlessness of the heat and humidity give way to tights and boots, to crisp evenings, to blankets and movies and cozy jammies. Autumn’s a-comin!

Some Small Happies today. Grab some socks and a cuppa and let’s pretend we’re in the throes of snuggly, romanticized winter – the winter where we curl up in front of fires and look all cute in our beanies, instead of curse how cold Queenslanders are with their holey weatherboards and proceed to run to Bunnings to buy all the oil heaters before they sell out.

Small Happies….the joy that is post-bath, jammied-bodied neighbourhood walks. The kids let off their final steam and I get to wander past all my future dream houses and pretend we live there.

Small Happies…..the beginnings of a big girl room. Out with the cot, into a bed, and dreaming of this next phase of her life – particularly sleep-overs with friends.

Our options were a single bed with trundle, bunk beds, or a double bed in order to accommodate her friends, and maybe even her baby brother on those special nights they might want to sleep in the same room. There were no single beds I liked, so the toss-up was between a set of bunks I fell in love with or a double. My thrify-blooded cells won out in the end, with the double being half the cost of the bunks, but more than that, the fantasizing of lying in bed with her each night reading stories and talking made the double bed swing far more heavily in favour.

Small Happies…these two. He could say the word Ella before he could say the word Mama, analogous of the exact kind of love they share. To stand back and watch it stops me in my tracks sometimes, because if I’ve done nothing else right in my life, I’ve given them each other. Look at them.

Small Happies……curls. Holy Mother Mary the curls….

Small Happies…..hairdresser mornings. This girl of mine, she likes to rub mud all over herself. She likes to steal her brother’s toy cars and she loves to watch the garbage truck go past every Friday morning, but whip out anything that spells Girly Girl and she’s there in a flash. We embrace both sides. We are a great many things.

Small Happies…library visits where we find every book we can to throw to the floor – hence the cheeky face.

We return home with stories like Aliens Love Underpants and The Monsters Who Fart, because three-year olds and toilet humour are likes moths and flames.

Small Happies…bedrooms. Being within clean ones (vacuum cleaners score 10 points on the Coolest Toy Ever scale),

…and stumbling upon grandparents in other ones, loving on their grandchildren like it’s serious business. Which it is, of course.

Trips to the waterfront with friends, where clothes stay on bodies for all of three minutes before said bodies are stripped off and run like crazy to the ocean.

To which we realize, like always, we’ve forgotten to bring towels, or swimmers, or anything which might represent Organized Mother status. The ocean water mats their hair and the dark sand covers their bodies like mud, and we whip them home for warm baths and cozy pyjamas.

Small Happies….walking past the lounge room only to find Ella bathed in light reading to herself, in her hodge-podge story-telling way. And then Elsa of Aryland saw Sven, and then Sven said ‘Don’t you push Billy or I’ll be cross’, and then last day, they had a sleep and Elsa ate the chocolate cake, and remember, it’s my party on the weekend! Accompany the story with the sweetest high-pitched voice you ever did hear and it’s enough to make you linger there and swoon for ages.

Small Happies….finding cheeky little boys on tabletops, having secretly scaled up them like the most pro of mountain climbers.

And the last of the Small Happies…our Sunday morning market ritual. Blueberry bagels, good coffee, fresh produce and pink juice. And a few little plants snuck in.