Im not sure why I stopped blogging about these three offspring of ours. Days, weeks, months tick by, and there's lunch to be made, on demand telly to catch up on, and god forbid - work to go to in the morning.
Little Miss has grown up a lot. She's now a uniform wearing child of the formal education system. Five years old and after two weeks at school she's able to confidently proclaim - "God made the earth, Mum, and Bob the builder made the houses."
She is taking the independence-or-die-trying approach to finally ditching her mother at the school gates. Some days she won't let me enter the school front door.
"Shall I pick you up after school today?" I asked, like the jolly good chauffeur I am.
"No, I'm catching the bus home!'
"Would you like me to pick you up, today, though, since its your first day?"
"No! I'M CATCHING THE BUS HOME WITH THE BOYS!"
And so she did. The first few days I was rude enough to ask 'How was your day at school?" as she got off the bus.
"Don't ask me that !,' she wailed back, bursting into tears - "I hate it when you ask me that all the time."
She turned up in our room on Sunday morning at the end of week one, dressed in uniform and hair clips at 6am. 'Is it a school day today?" she asked
"Sorry darling, no school on sundays" I had to break it to her, then retreated quickly under the bedcovers.
Then there's the hairdos. First day she requested 3 plaits and seven hair clips for the starting fulltime education look. By day three I had to threaten she couldn't go to school if she didn't let me brush her hair. I'm not counting on that threat working for long. She pores over each school reader, desperate to read it.
Meanwhile the boys have been subjected to a rash of new regimes designed to be implemented at the dawn of the year, with the aim of making our lives smooth and efficient. They're not going that well. Ive brought in Cooking lessons - each child will learn to cook meals and at least help out once a week. We have baking Mondays - designed to have some nice time with my daughter who loves lick the bowl. Hopefully she might share some of her day with me over the cookie dough.
We've got emptying the dishwasher duty and no tolerance regime to crimes of apple-core-discardment. I found two ends of a carrot under a cushion today so that regime may have been overthrown already. It all makes it feel like the holidays were a long time ago.
Little Brother made Carbonara tonight. He really enjoyed it, chatting away -"And you always tell us how hard it is to cook! We're not listening to you anymore! " he berated me.
He informed me over the cheese grater that he really wanted to be a miner and find some gold flakes. Or a pirate (bigger pieces of gold). And of course if he lived in Medieval times he'd like to be a Ranger. I said I'd like to be a medieval princess.
"Do you think it would be better to have a wooden foot, or a peg leg?" he continued.
"Well, I think you'd trip over on a boat if you had a foot, a peg leg would be more practical"
"If I cut off my foot, would you get me a peg leg?"
"Sure, ok, maybe a prosthesis shaped like a blade that you could run on"
Grate. Grate.
"I think if I was a miner I'd cut off my leg and then put a pickaxe on my peg leg. That would be awesome, that way I could kick and use my hand pickaxe at the same time! I'm going to mine heaps of gold. And a diamond."
His announcement as he getting off the bus was that he'd like to start writing a blog. We got right onto that after dinner was devoured by the appreciative diners.
"What are you going to call your blog?" I asked
"My Blog!" - he'd obviously been thinking about this for a while.
"What happens if everyone on the planet - all 7 billion of us - all called our blogs my blog, how would we tell them apart? "
"Ok, I'll call it My Blog NZ, like the TV show The Block NZ"
But that name was taken.
So, instead, he called it The Fire Sheep.