Today I had the girls all day while Steve was off gliding again. Maggie and Oli visited us bringing Turkish Pide for lunch, the girls waiting for them excitedly perched up the (now bare) Manchurian pear tree out the front for forty five minutes. They enjoyed listening to Maggie and I play together the same piece we both remembered on the recorder and that inspired them both to pick up the recorder again and play a bit. I haven’t been able to find a local teacher since their teacher last year couldn’t teach them on a suitable day.
After Maggie and Oli had left, Rhea and Lara decided they wanted to ride the three kilometres in to town to have a hot chocolate at the chocolate shop and café. I agreed. Lara has an ‘Elsa and Anna’ bike from Big W whose chain comes off regularly and it came off three times before we had gone more than a few hundred metres. But luckily it stayed on after that.
‘This way, not that way!’ I called out when the girls wobbled down the footpath to the right instead of straight ahead. A passing pedestrian called out ‘you need a sheepdog!’
– ‘Do we need a sheepdog, mum?’ they asked me.
We whizzed down the hill and before long we had arrived at the café.
After much negotiation in which I said firmly that they could share an iced chocolate and could have a small chocolate lollipop each, Lara knocked her water glass over (remember that statistic from my story of March 2014 about pre-schoolers having a mishap on average every three minutes? The statistics for lower primary school aged children must be not that much better) and they dripped chocolate in two of the three glasses, clouding them instantly. They slurped, dipped their chocolate lollipops into their iced chocolate then into my hot chocolate, and coated their outer lips with it. The table was very grubby by the time we had finished with it, but we were refreshed and re-energised for the journey home.
The girls were really getting the hang of it by now: stopping by roads, keeping to the left. We found a small park and stopped to play there, it was a lovely green space taking up a rectangular area between a whole block of two-storey apartments fringed by yellow-leafed trees. Off again, Lara whizzed through the leaf litter on the side of the road, leading the way where I let her. We stopped at another two parks before we got home, the last one being our local school containing monkey bars where they practised ‘the death drop’ that some older children had taught them. Once home, they parked their bikes carefully under the eaves where they wouldn’t get wet and went inside to play.
Lara and Rhea were tired tonight, and pleased with the distance they had covered under their own steam. We all enjoyed stretching our legs in the late autumn sun.
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