Chase the devil out of earth

On Friday we went to a wildlife sanctuary just outside Hobart. The animals are mostly waifs and strays -- they've been brought in after being found injured or sick. They have two tawny frogmouths, both blind after chasing moths into the headlights of cars.

That said, most of the animals were in rude health and we had a great time in particular feeding the kangaroos and wallabies -- you're given a bag of papery pellets at the entrance and as soon as you enter their enclosure they come loping or bouncing over, even grabbing hold of you for balance with their disturbingly long claws as they nuzzle for a snack. Anya thought the whole experience -- kangaroos eating out of her hand! -- was hilarious.

The saddest inhabitant was the sole Tasmanian Devil. I still think of these critters, a la Bugs Bunny, as big bipedal furry brown things with tempers and teeth and a habit of getting around by turning into a sort of furious tornado. The real ones are like black-and-copper raccoons with a pitbull's smile and a funny waddling gait. They're also fighting off extinction due to facial cancers that have been spreading through the wild population for the past decade.

There was just one Devil at Bonorong and he was a pretty sorry specimen, with a balding tail caused I guess by whatever accident got him in there in the first place. Apologies to Max Romeo for the title, but these creatures have been pretty well chased off the earth already. I hope his relatives are still running wild by the time Anya's my age.

Staying with Astrid

We're having a long weekend down in Hobart visiting my cousin Astrid. While it's not dramatically colder here than in Sydney, we are at a spot where the next stop south is Antarctica and the gift shop at the port is named after Douglas Mawson, the polar explorer. Tasmania had glaciers in the last ice age and you can see it in the landscape.

Astrid's house looks right across the valley that Hobart was built around to Mount Wellington, a bare crag that wouldn't look out of place in the highlands of Scotland. It gets dustings of snow all through the winter, and Astrid can generally tell what to wear by seeing how far the snow extends down the slopes.

Haircut

Anya's hair has been getting out of control of late. Tangles and split ends that likely formed more than a year ago (when she was a baby who lay with the back of her head scrunched against a mattress 16 hours a day) have formed an undergrowth of proto-dreadlocks on her nape.

The curls are really beautiful, as crisp as the ringlets on the heroine of a BBC Dickens adaptation and a gorgeous golden-copper colour. But run your hands through them and it can get like velcro. We've used anti-tangle spray, but her yoghurt-stained and crumb-bedecked hands can undo our work as quickly as it's carried out.

On Sunday we put a stop to it and took her to a hair-cutting stall at the markets near our house. I've previously had her fringe done there -- the woman has a lovely manner and, most importantly for Anya, a funny pet pug -- but this is the first full-blown haircut.

We thought this would be a nightmare -- Anya hates people mucking about with her face, and Kate and I become History's Greatest Monsters every time we try to wash her Barnet in the bath -- but in fact once she was sat on the stool she took on that slightly bored, slightly quizzical look that all hairdressees seem to adopt and contentedly watched some episodes of Dora the Explorer on Kate's phone.

Storyteller

Anya made up a story this week. It goes like this:

"Mummy said 'Help, help! And Daddy came back."

She's told this tale half a dozen times over the last few days, and to the best of our knowledge it's not relating an event that actually took place. But to get all Northrop Frye on you, it does pretty well conform to that theory (I can't remember whose) that all plots boil down to one basic story: "The family is divided; the family is united."

She's also written a couple of songs, which similarly dwell on classic themes. Her favourite one goes:

"I lost a flower..."

The tune, in a C major scale, has G on "I", G up one octave on "lost a", and E up one octave on "flower". Loss, beauty, and memory: what more do you need in a classic song? The other one is more of a party tune:

"Splish! Splash! Having a bath!"

The tune here is C for "Splish", the A below it for "Splash", the G below that for "having a" and the E below that for "bath".

Now I realise this is all utterly silly. But I do think it's a beautiful moment when a child goes from reading stories to making up her own. And though this sort of archetypal theory of literature is very out of favour these days (and very susceptible to that fallacy where you can describe anything with the same concepts if you define your terms broadly enough) I think it's pretty fascinating that she has hit on some classic themes.

And, most of all -- it's very, very, sweet!

Attack of the foam monster!

Anya up to this point has been absolutely fearless. I don't mean that figuratively, either: until just a few days ago, I would say that we'd never really seen her scared of anything.

Certainly she's been upset, or angry, or sore on occasions, and a couple of times she's had what look like night terrors: that middle-of-the-night, still-asleep yelling fit that seems to subside as the sleeper wakes.

She also understands the terms 'scary' and 'scared' and likes to use them, though you can tell from the context that she understands them more as synonyms to 'run away' or 'may bite' and thinks of it all as quite a fun concept --missing the essential dread involved in the whole idea of fear.

Well that changed this week. Kate ran her a big bath with lots of bubbles, because bubbles are fun, right? Not so: the bubble mountain was so huge that a piece broke off and perched on the edge of the bath, wobbling. I think you can appreciate that this was utterly terrifying, and Anya became quite hysterical with fear. The next night we tried a bath with only a smaller quantity of bubbles but she was still desperate to escape; only last night, with bubble-free bathwater, were we able to get her to just sit down and enjoy herself.

I suppose this is part and parcel of her showing other signs of imagination, such as telling stories. Fear is all about imagination: it's really just our response to a plausible story we tell ourselves that involves pain and suffering. So I'm glad it's only the foam monster that's scaring her.

Update: Actually, there is one other thing she's scared of. A few times while we were in Fiji she woke up in the night upset, saying "cheeky monkey" in a forlorn voice. We have no idea what this meant -- she loves monkeys, so maybe the monkey in question was a victim rather than an antagonist. Then again, it does sound a bit like what you'd call an evil monkey in a horror film. I don't know if Anya's scared of cheeky monkey, but I think I am...

Weird stuff on immigration forms

Look closely and you can see a requirement to declare swordsticks before entering Fiji. Luckily there's nothing banning the case of grenades I had in my luggage. But I think Raffles the Gentleman Thief will find it hard going in this country.

Don't know why, there's no sun up in the sky...

Last night was stormy. The news is reporting 120km winds and beaches all but swept away by pounding tides along the coast. At work during the afternoon, our view of the harbour gradually darkened until you could barely see the Opera House, five minutes' walk away. The rain came down in drenching gusts, swelling the gutters till you couldn't cross the street.

Anya was a bit unsettled by this, as it rattled her windows and boomed in her chimney for much of the night. Jasper too was running around with his hair on end, quite uncertain what to do about everything. This morning, walking to the station, I saw a eucalyptus branch some 4 metres long lying in a churchyard. In my cursory look, I couldn't see any evidence nearby of the tree it had come from.

Living in Australia you're really aware of how mild most British weather is. I remember as a standout event of my childhood the day it rained so hard that the gutters overflowed the road. I think I still have a photo somewhere of child-me, standing in the water in wellies and a raincoat. That sort of event happens several times a year in Sydney. Likewise with storms: Britain still remembers the great storm of 1987; I think it has its own, quite comprehensive, Wikipedia page. And I'd guess it wasn't much more severe than last night's storm in Sydney, which we'll all have forgotten by the weekend.

The bedtime ritual

"Here's how it goes down.

"We eat our dinner. We have a bath. This is important--when dad tried to skip the bath on Sunday because we'd got home late from the shops, I had to correct him by saying: "Need bathtime!"

"In the bath, we do experiments mostly focusing on the physics of buoyancy and viscosity. Buoyancy: pour water into the hull of our toy boat. After a certain point, the boat is observed to sink. Viscosity: get dad to wind up the paddling turtle toy. When it's swimming, remove the toy from the water. As they are removed, a speeding up of the paddles is observed.

"After this we drink warm milk from our sippy cup and sit on someone's lap wrapped in a towel. We may play "this little piggy" at this point. Mum or dad will try to clean my teeth. This is not to be tolerated, although I will consent to suck the minty paste off the brush. Then, I get into my bedtime clothes and we go to my room.

"Once there, we read two or three stories while we listen to my musical bedtime seahorse. I have to kiss all the zebras on the carpet, my rocking horse, and the horse on the back of the door. And mum or dad lay me in bed and kiss me goodnight. Sometimes I throw a toy out of the cot and call out, "Where's bunny gone?" to check they're paying attention. So far they've always come in."

I remember about a year ago reading about now you have to establish a bedtime ritual to help your toddler get to sleep. This alarmed me a bit. I've never designed a ritual before. Would it need to involve chanting? Chicken sacrifice?

Well I needn't have worried. As you can see, we have a pretty complex bedtime ritual but I can't remember Kate and I ever sitting down with a blank sheet of paper to work out what it should be. And it's not that Anya's come up with it all, either. We've really worked it out together, as a collaborative process. Which is probably why it feels so good.

Whiskits!

It's been a while since I posted a "the things they say" type of post. And of course Anya's verbal abilities have been running ahead by leaps and bounds. We have now essentially moved on from her being preverbal, with occasional phrases or words she can say properly. These days the dialogue between Anya and us is basically a true conversation, although we still don't understand everything she's saying (and vice versa, I'm sure) and there's presumably some things she'd like to talk about but doesn't have the words to express.

Of course most of this actual dialogue consists of us asking if she wants x or y and her pointing stuff out and expressing some fairly rote views of it: "Jasper scared", or "Jasper no biting", or "more mato" (tomato). Then again, a sizeable chunk of conversation between Brits and Aussies probably consists of a half-dozen standard comments about the weather, so I'm not sure how much her limited conversational repertoire matters.

Another one we've been hearing a lot is "want whiskits". She loves Weetbix (Weetabix, as they're known in the UK) and I think their crunchy qualiy makes them think they should be some sort of biscuit. So, whiskits. I try to ignore the fact that this sounds like catfood. I think the knowledge might spoil her breakfast.

One other I want to write down and remember: in the bath on Saturday, she grabbed a water jug and addressed a bobbing duck toy: "Close eyes duckie!" This is of course exactly what we say (minus the duckie) when we wet her hair to wash it, and sure enough she proceeded to pour the water all over duckie's head.

The thing that continues to amaze me about this is that it's all imitation. Language -- this mysterious and complex ability that is more or less the best demarcator of what makes us human rather than animal, this phenomenon that continues to baffle philosophers and neurologists -- is to her a fun game, part of her imitative love of repeating adult behaviours. It's a reminder to me that we're creatures of play as much as reason, and of doing as much as of thinking.

This one she didn't get from her dad...

Though it was a pretty good lead story, for the sports page...

Two cats

It's been a while since I wrote about Anya's language acquisition on this blog. Obviously, it's moved forwards by leaps and bounds. She can now say subject-verb sentences about all sorts of stuff, and I think she's starting to stretch it out to longer strings of words too.

With the usual caveats about 'did she really say what I think she said?' and 'did she just get it right by luck?', today she seemed to make another leap. We were walking up the road to the park when she spotted a couple of cats on the other pavement. This was too good an opportunity to miss so we headed over to say hello. And Anya called out: "Two cats!"

Now she's said "one-two-three-four" a few times so I think she understands the sound of counting. And we have a shape puzzle in the form of a clock, and a couple of counting books. But we certainly haven't tried to teach her this stuff, so I'm pretty amazed if she can spot two similar objects (or cats) and get the concept that they are a group of two. It's certainly not impossible: she understands about colours so she's worked out the adjective trick whereby objects can be modified by properties they have, so a circle can be red or blue etc. But still: if it's for real, she continues to amaze me.

Comfort food

Kate has a horrible dose of tonsillitis, so today I made chicken soup.

Book: The Portrait of a Lady, by Henry James

<p>One of the great things about the Kindle Kate bought me for Christmas is that I can download vast slabs of ex-copyright novels for peanuts money.</p>
<p>The first slab I bought was the complete works of Henry James. I've read a couple of his books before--the Turn of the Screw and What Maisie Knew--and was impressed. Though it's probably fair to say I was struck most of all by the man's stellar critical reputation, and wanted to see more of what the fuss was about.</p>
<p>Well. I'm afraid I just can't see it in this case. If I was forced to choose just one adjective for this book, it would be 'unsuccessful'. It just doesn't achieve what James says he set out to do.</p>
<p>Briefly, without too many spoilers: the 'lady' of the title is a classic Henry James American in Europe, with what we're told is an exquisite and unique character (at the drop of a hat, people fall madly, pining-for-years-and-crossing-oceans in love with her); she comes into one piece of huge good fortune, and then through others' machinations and her own flaws one still greater misfortune; and this tale is then played out.</p>
<p>What's wrong with it? Principally, the gravest one for any attempt at a realist portrait: it's not lifelike. I've already mentioned her implausible desirability. The problem isn't just that I can't believe her suitors would go to such lengths for the sake of making their proposals; it's that I can't imagine them doing it for *her*. She's just not interesting enough.

She's proud, self-absorbed, humourless and rather insipid. She manages the role of society debutante faultlessly, and obsesses about her performance as a woman of society to such a degree that I half-believe the fault is mine for not sharing the prejudices and tastes of James's era. But then I remember that James made his name with stories setting brash honest American customs against exquisite but stultifying European ways, and I realise that this character I'm meant to be rooting for is just rather dull and conventional and with something of a martyr complex.</p>

The main twist in the plot is obvious to the reader about a third of the way through but takes the protagonist the entire novel to work out. Given how central this fact is to her fate, it's astonishing that she's never suspected it; so astonishing, in fact, that you're almost forced to conclude she's just a bit stupid and incurious about human nature. Now, if James was trying to present that sort of character, this could be interesting, but he's not: he keeps telling us that she's an exquisite and brilliant personality. Creative writing classes always advise students to show, don't tell, and it seems to me that James has failed at this basic test: he's unable to show us the character he wants to write, so he's telling us what she'd be like if he had managed to pull it off.

There's some lovely passages here: a beautiful description of the end of a long summer evening in Mayfair, a nice astringent ending and some lively passages around the secondary characters. But really, the least interesting person in the book is the protagonist. To me that suggests James wrote the wrong book.</p>

Now with photo



Flying

Anya LOVES walking around like this: arms outstretched behind her like wings, fingers grasping at the air, leaning forward to be more aerodynamic and humming happily to herself. I guess when you've learned to crawl and walk and climb in the fairly distant past, it's easy to convince yourself that flying will come to you next.

Zombie baby

Anya has a little table in the kitchen where she eats meals and draws and generally is in charge of stuff. On Australia Day on Thursday, her best friend Sofia came over and they did some drawing together. In Anya's case, this tends to involve a reasonable amount of sucking on pens, and so though we tried to stop her, by the end of it her gums and lips were blue. Frankly, her mouth looked like that of a zombie or, at best, a very broken meth addict. But somehow she still managed to be charming.



It's just a phrase she's going through

Anya's personal dictionary these days has exploded since I last wrote about it; I'd say she knows at least 100 words, probably closer to 200. But phrases are clearly difficult: Mum reckons she was saying "daddy car" while I was driving when she was over a few months ago, but there haven't been repeat performances so I tend to think that was a fluke.

That's changed now, though. Each morning we have breakfast at the kid-sized table in our kitchen. Kate and I help feed her, sitting on kiddie chairs with our knees around our ears. She's very particular about this whole process: if we ever sit on her favourite chair she stands behind us, grumpily thumping our backs and keening with frustration, until we surrender it.

Sometimes we'll be buzzing round the kitchen when breakfast is first served, preparing her daycare lunchbox or getting ourselves coffee. But Anya doesn't think this is at all appropriate: mealtimes should be treated with proper respect, so she fixes you with a reproving eye and says, "Mummy sit".

Now I  know I'm not her mummy, and she knows it to. But this particular order is applied equally to both of us. I suspect it won't be the last: most toddler language is in the imperative mood.

Pony club

On Sundays we usually go to the farmers' market in north Marrickville, not far from our house. They have a pony ride guy there and Anya is obviously completely fascinated by the "hossie". I was actually feeling a bit groggy on Sunday and Kate was off looking at bikes, so it took all my limited energy to field and herd this little girl who just wanted to go up and touch the real life hossies like the ones in her book. Mainly this meant not letting her get too close to the back legs, but eventually we asked for a little ride.
J
She didn't like that. I tried to sit her on he saddle a couple of times but she lifted her legs and bucked as if I was feeding her into the jaws of a monster. Standing in the grass, arm reached out towards the pony's head as it cropped, she was much happier.

Tooth brushing



Anya hates people messing with her face. Just after mealtimes, you can hear bloodcurdling screams erupting from our house as we try to wipe that bit of yogurt from her bottom lip or remove that bit of pumpkin from the end of her nose. So I wouldn't blame you for guessing that tooth brushing round here is an endless struggle.

Well, in actual fact it's a bit of a success story. I think part of this is that some friends gave us some tasty toddler toothpaste, and Anya treats her toothbrush a bit like those old Pez sweets dispensers: as an intriguing device to deliver concentrated pellets of flavour to the mouth. She would sit there with a faraway, pre-sleep look in her eyes and contentedly suck the minty water out from between the bristles, filtering it through her teeth; it wasn't exactly brushing, but she was enjoying herself, which was more than half the battle.

The next stage was just trusting her to get it right and giving a good example. I suspect if we'd tried to manhandle her into doing it properly she'd have protested violently; instead, we just brushed our teeth at the same time, so she'd try to imitate how grown-ups do it. That seems to be working now, to the extent that she'll even let us have a go to reach her eight front teeth and the one or two molars that have sprung up at the back. Thank god reverse psychology still works on her--I feel the day is not far off that she sees through this particular parental stratagem.