The year is really afoot

I cannot quite believe that today is the last day of January, and that the summer holidays are almost done. On Friday my middle girl, E, will start school and my eldest, A, will go into grade 2. Next week all the various other activities kick back in - playgroup, gymnastics, swimming and more. The rosters have just come out for my various volunteering obligations - playgroup, school breakfast club, community centre, and so forth - and there will be more to add on when I sign up to do school classroom reading one morning per fortnight for E's class.

I didn't quite meet my goal to post every day in January, dropping the ball last week pretty chronically. This was partly just running out of puff with it, but partly also that my husband had the week off work and we did lots of family stuff. Neither hubs nor I spent much time on the computer last week - it just didn't fit the vibe of the week. Instead, we went to the Zoo, we went to the movies, we went shopping, we went to the beach, we had a very productive gardening day, we cleaned out cupboards, and we had friends over for a BBQ on Saturday night. (Sunday, being our first real scorcher of the summer, we were outside until the sun drove us in at 11am then we lolled about inside watching Wiggles DVDs and the cricket).

I am looking forward to this year, although also a bit nervous, as this will be my first year without paid employment since ... well, ever, actually. I've never been completely unemployed since I was 18. Granted, I haven't worked fulltime since 2004 but I've worked various part-time fractions, ranging from 10 to 25 hours per week, across all of those years. I still feel a great certainty that leaving my job was the right thing to do, but I can't quite push aside my faint anxiety that we'll feel the pinch financially. Still, onwards and upwards - I'm just going to cross that bridge when (and if) we come to it. I think I'm still reasonably employable, so if worst comes to worst, I can look for another job. Even if I do need to, it wouldn't invalidate my many reasons for leaving my old job in December.

I'm a little sad to be farewelling these summer hols, actually. A few minor hissy-fits aside (from all of us, truth be told), they have really been an oasis of calm and togetherness for our family. We've done lots of fun stuff (Zoos, picnics, beach, circus, museums, movies) and had lots of time at home doing crafts, reading, playing, cooking, doing puzzles, and watching TV and cricket.

I have felt like I've really been on holiday too, not just because of the absence of the work hours (although that has helped, naturally!) but because of the flexibility and freedom to order our days around our natural rhythms that we can do in the holidays. And as well as having a lot of fun, I am sure that all my girls have learned as much, if not more, in this seven weeks than in any given term at school or kinder. They've both been into maths and are doing harder and harder problems that my husband is sourcing for them; they are both improving their IT skills by writing books (with photos) on my computer using Word, Photoshop, Google and PowerPoint; and E, my 5 year old, is reading fluently now thanks to a self-driven blitz of phonics work.

Every year at this time I feel the same half-spoken tug towards home education for my girls. I am certain they could learn as well and faster, and much more organically, at home, and the rhythm of our lives might be gentler too. Ultimately I come back (for now) to the fact that I do believe the school environment is a positive one for them, and that they get some things from school (peer relationships not mediated by a parent, opportunities to do specialties like art and sport, excursions, school 'spirit', for want of a better word) that I'd struggle to give them at home. Always I'm tempted, though, and suspect it will be ever thus.

So on we roll into 2011 proper (January never feels like part of the regular year to me). I'm hoping it's a good one for us all.

Reading Notes - Lake Wobegon

I read a lot of detective fiction to relax. I also read science fiction & fantasy, literary novels, and non-fiction in copious quantities, but when I'm looking to just unwind and let my mind have a break, I usually reach for a crime novel. I favour cosies (ie low-gore, high-puzzle mysteries) and have an especial penchant for the Golden Age writers, particularly the four Grand Dames of Crime (Sayers, Marsh, Christie, and Allingham).

I also like well-written historical crime fiction, with a particular taste for the sub-genre that is Roman Empire-era crime. (A future Reading Notes will look at a very good childrens' / YA mystery series set in the Roman port of Ostia).

Because I do tend to reach for crime stories for pleasure without effort, it's always a nice surprise to find a book (or better yet, a series) that offers me the same mental escape without being blood-soaked (or at least lightly blood-besplattered, as most cosies are). So when I picked up Garrison Keillor's Pontoon for $5 at a book sale, having vaguely heard somewhere that the Lake Wobegon books were pretty good, I was very happy to find that it delivered in spades.

Lake Wobegon, for those unfamiliar, is a fictional town in Minnesota. Garrison Keillor, who is radio announcer as well as an author, reads the "News from Lake Wobegon" on the radio show A Prairie Home Companion, broadcast live every Saturday afternoon over Minnesota Public Radio and syndicated throughout the US. The popularity of the radio broadcasts gave birth to a number of spin-off books, of which Pontoon (2007) was the first of the most recent crop.

Although the style of the stories - I've also subsequently read Liberty, which was not, to my mind, quite as good as Pontoon, but still enjoyable - is different, the mood I took away from Lake Wobegon was very, very similar to the mood evoked by the TV show Northern Exposure, or James Herriot's veterinary series set in the Yorkshire Dales.

Granted, all of these series derive much of their interest, humour and engagement from the central conceit that could be loosely defined as "small-place-quirky-characters-doing-offbeat-things". Nonetheless, they all succeed in ways that a multitude of lesser works, hung on the same hook, do not.

I think this is down to a potent combination of evocation of place - Lake Wobegon, Cicely, and Darrowby are all real places in my mind's eye - and the fact that the characters that people them are not caricatures or ciphers, but multi-dimensional human beings. (I think Northern Exposure did veer dangerously close to cartooning some of its characters, but avoided it by a hair's breadth). Evelyn and Barbara, in particular, fairly leap out of the page in Pontoon. The plot is a little patchy at times and can feel a touch contrived - the coincidence of the Detmer pontoon wedding with Evelyn's bowling-ball lake internment seems just a bit forced - but the actual characters, and their inner lives, who drive the plot along never feel contrived or artificial, but rather like people who might meet one day (in the case of Evelyn, people you'd really like to meet).

I felt no burning urge to complete reading Pontoon - it didn't keep me from sleep or play or even other books, that I read interspersed with it - but it was a very, very enjoyable book to read, with a quiet underlying philosophy that crept up on me and left me quite uplifted at the end. Keillor's chief message in Pontoon seemed to me to be: Live your life; no matter how old you are or what you think the barriers are, just live and love. There are certainly worse messages, and I found this one gentle, appealing and welcome.

3D Tangled

Well, I know I said the movies are too expensive - and so they are, comparatively speaking - but my big girls were *so* keen to see Tangled that we decided to try it as a family outing, all five of us, in 3D.

This was the 23-month-old's first cinema experience, so we were a bit trepidatious about the $100 outlay (for tix, 3D glasses and snacks), but as it turned out, she was brilliant. She loved the first two-thirds of the movie, sat absolutely transfixed between her 5 year old sister and I, occasionally squealing in excitement or laughing with delight at the funny bits (or which there were quite a few - it was a genuinely amusing and well-put-together kids' film).

Even as she faded a bit near the end, all she did was snuggle into me and nurse, so the rest of us were able to watch the whole film easily. It was fun.

Sleepover

My big girls had a friend sleep over for the first time last night. Their friend, who is the daughter of one of my own longest-standing and dearest friends, is 6 1/2 - 11 months younger than my eldest, 10 months older than my middle. This makes M the "just-right" kid, straddling the age gap between my big girls with ease.

My, but they had fun. They played solidly all afternoon, inside and outside, playing with every subset of toys available, I reckon. A dinner of Nando's chicken & chips came before screening of Barbie & The Fashion Fairytale on our big screen, complete with choc top ice creams and popcorn. This was followed by "bedtime", whereupon all three big girls apparently settled down quickly, but as hubs and I were watching our own movie, I could hear (and see out of the corner of my eye) giggling, flitting girl shapes, and the fridge opening and closing. I chose to turn a blind eye to what I was delightedly informed this morning was "our midnight feast with dancing and stuff!" (It actually took place around 10pm - they were all completely oblivious by the time I headed to bed at 11).

The girls have really enjoyed having M over to sleep; I think it'll turn out to have been a highlight of their entire summer. It's the first time they've ever had a friend stay over all night (we've had other kids go to bed here then get collected later by their parents, but none stay all night). M has been an absolute delight to have and we'll definitely look for an opportunity to have her again soon.

It raised the question for me, though, whether my own girls might be readier than I thought to consider a sleepover at someone's house (other than my parents', where they already sleep over a couple nights each school holidays). I have been assuming that, at 7 1/2 and 5 1/2, they are much too young to do this, but I think I might have been misjudging them a little. Don't get me wrong, my circle of people that I would even consider allowing them to go to overnight is pretty restricted anyway - maybe 3 families that are long-standing friends of ours and whose children are close friends of the big girls. I think I (and they) would initially look for a place where they could go together rather than separating them, too, there being strength in numbers and so forth.

So to my surprise, I find myself willing to consider a sleepover for my big kids in the medium-term future. (Very possibly their first one will be at M's house!) It's another sign of how much they've grown up, I guess. Sweet, yet poignant.

Down memory lane

Me and my second baby girl, who's now just over 5 1/2. How quickly it passes.