He LOVES your child-sized trolleys.

This ‘what am I reading?’ post ought to have been easy enough. I’ve done many, many before. The difference on this occasion was that our ginger-haired cat wanted to be the star.

So, I give you Whiskers… and some books.

This looks interesting

 
There appears to be more in here…

I was standing in the kitchen when Riley called my attention to this picture he’d made in Windows Paint .

Mum! he said. I made a city all on my own.

When I looked up, from a distance, I thought he’d somehow googled a satellite image from some cityscape from somewhere in the world. It made sense. Look, there were the blotches of light, in lines, like roads; they weaved in and out like roads often did.

Or was it a satellite picture? No, as I walked over, with every step, it became obvious that he had made it, the white was just blotches; the black just…a black background. What was three dimensional was now two dimensional; but to me, it didn’t matter. It was magic because he found it magical. He had created his own world, a city at night, and no one could take that away from him.

***

When I think of night, I think of that horror car ride back to Kempsey the night dad died, fighting through Sydney’s Friday night traffic – how could I have ever forgotten that nightmare? – with me dry-retching because I wasn’t used to my sister’s boyfriend’s driving; I didn’t know how he took his corners, I hadn’t acclimated to the physics of his backseat. So by Taree we’d swapped seats to ease my car-sickness, and I managed to fall asleep in the front seat, my head dipped down onto my chest, and I woke in time to glide through the outskirts of Kempsey in the darkness, with the moonlight glinting off all the puddles. The river was swollen, the banks a mess from the minor flooding, and we kept on driving until we made our house. The powerful outside lights were on, waiting, and there stood my grandparents, on vigil, and my grandmother met me as soon as I stepped out of the car. I turned my head away from the glare and watched her hand as she took mine in it.

“He died very peacefully,” she said, wanting me to know this first, above all else.

They’d held his hands as he passed, a wife and a mother-in-law on each side. Mere hours later, hers were then holding mine, and I drew comfort from that; that after what was possibly the worst ride in my life I could emerge into a greeting of love and care.

When I think of that day, I try to keep it at a distance. I am still grieving, haven’t yet properly cried. Perhaps I am afraid of losing perspective; that from a satellite’s distance I am safe because I have the benefits of abstraction. If I go closer, I will remember the dirtier, sadder, more human moments. Instead of the lights, I will see the white dots of an amateur’s work.

But I remember her hands. Her hands guide me back down, when I want to stay above, in the air of my son’s making, basking in the glory of cities and lights at night.

A friend recently told Adam about this game he’d downloaded for his kids. Then we went and got it too, and I must say it’s pretty cool.

It’s called Toybox and it is, like it sounds, this assortment of toys you manouvure with your mouse. The game can be ‘played’ on your desktop or whatever window you’re got open and working on.

See?

On that open toy panel, down the bottom there’s a yellow rectangle. If you click on that it changes the background to this purple cheque, its ‘own’ area, which is where Keira prefers to play.

Might be a nice distraction on wet – or extra hot – days.

You can download it from here.

This week I’ve well and truly got the head down and the proverbial up in the air getting the last stages of Miscellaneous Voices together for the contributors to sign off on before we go to the printers.

And as you may recall from yesterday, it’s also the the same week Keira started school.

Monstrously bad timing on my part, I must say, but never mind. Perhaps I will sleep again one day soon.

However I did want to remind you all that in one week is my blogging workshop (link to facebook event page). If you’re not sure where it is being held, there is a nice little map on the 2nd page of this pdf.

Also, there is an interview with me over at Express Media, which was fun and thought-provoking.

And don’t forget the panel session afterwards.

Okay I think that’s all for the moment.

I heard Keira up and moving about before 7am this morning. By the time I’d gotten up she’d made her bed, cleaned her room, and she met me in the hallway already dressed in her uniform. When I looked at her, I knew. She was ready. More than ready.

This is why, I think, I was dry-eyed today when we said goodbye. I feel I need to repeat this: I did not cry; didn’t even come close. Sure, my heart did a few extra thumps, and if I sit here long enough, raking through my emotions, I could get teary. But I won’t.

She did me proud, too. After the difficult few years of preschool, I had steeled myself for all sorts of scenarios, and while she did hold on very tightly, and ask for extra kisses, she eventually let go and turned around to listen to her teacher, as class was starting.

{I apologise for the lateness of this post, for I can see one certain family member has repeatedly visited today looking for the re-cap! Our internet was down, and I’ve been out most of the day}

On Saturday I had a catch up with my friend Genevieve for coffee at Montsalvat (I live just down the road) After, we walked through the grounds and I fear I bored her by stopping every few moments to get pictures with my iPhone. Thank you for your patience, G!

Here’s some photos below. As you can see, it was a glorious day.

Today’s linkage is writing/book related.

Well – most of them…

And here we go:

*Here’s a nice breakdown of Kindle vs iPad vs Touch Book, prompted by yesterday’s announcement of the iPad and the general hysteria that ensued.

* Adele taught Surprise! in the classroom over in Japan this month. This has been one of the best things I’ve seen in a while, I’m so thrilled to see it in practice on an international scale.

* Tips for Plotting: How to Create a Fascinating Plot for Your Story. For if you’re stuck and don’t have/can’t find quickly any of those helpful ‘how to’ books.

* The Book Inscriptions Project. I love, love this idea. It’s just such a shame it’s been inactive for several months.

* A HuffPo article – Metrophobia: Are We Afraid of Poetry? It asks the question towards the end: have you been saved by a poem? It’s an interesting one. I’d say – yes. Yes I have, at times.

* Veronica was mentioned in her local paper and so was I and a number of my favourite bloggers!

* The Distraction Beast’s Brainstormer may not technically have anything to do with reading or writing, but it does offer a distracting word-salad that is…quite entrancing.

* How to use a semi-colon.

Okay…

* And last, but not least, let’s have a little fun with Gary Busey. I know this will make my sister laugh. I giggled…and still giggle when I see it. It can come on a little loud and sudden, so be warned.

My daughter has something to show you Maxine.

Keira decorated her school scrapbooks before she was lucky enough to see Maxine’s collages up close, hung on the wall, last week. As you can see, one has a contemporary flavour; the other is more ‘classical/romantic’. She has others covered with Miss Kitty, My Little Pony, and butterflies sticky contact paper, but we’re not counting those today. We like these the best.

I find it fascinating to watch what pictures she chose, and why. Her love of cute animals is obvious, as is her regard for women in white tops, apparently. I particularly like how Ioan Gruffudd makes an appearance, as does Shakespeare.

And I discovered that covering books with contact is like riding a bike – you never really forget how to do it. I enjoyed doing it in high school. It was a pathetic, doomed sort of mastery, squeezing out those air bubbles to create a smooth surface, which would only later get defaced with doodlings and graffiti during bored moments in class!

It happened while we were searching for treats.

Standing at the end of an aisle, I was looking at those helpful signs the supermarkets put up as a guide to locate products and there was the one I was looking for (‘confectionery’), when a girl skipped up to us, accompanied by her older sister. Keira is friendly from ‘around these parts’ (to use the phrase) with the younger sister. They exchanged their hellos, and almost immediately the older sister pounced.

“You don’t pronounce my sister’s name like that,” she said harshly, before saying it correctly, as an example. Keira has always had trouble pronouncing this particular name, and she usually gets it right, however on this occasion, she’d got it wrong. And was it me, but were her cheeks reddening?

I thought to myself, “Why, what a rude little…”

And then I thought, “Well, maybe I’m overreacting.”

Or maybe I wasn’t, for I then turned a few degrees to my left and I saw a woman attendant, stacking easter eggs onto the shelves, had stopped and was watching the girls and me, listening. I didn’t say anything, let the girls chatter for a moment more, and then we parted. I bought chocolate for us all. I needed a little bolstering after that.

***

I have no idea if Keira thinks of what happened. It happened several days ago. I also have no idea why it’s stuck in my head, why in quiet moments, when I’m in the car or lying in bed, it’s snuck up on me and made me want to cry.

***

Yesterday, we went down to the pool for a swim; which is to say they went swimming and I took a book to read. The glass doors had been opened to let the cool breeze inside, and I went outside to escape the chlorine. I sat cross-legged on a towel and with the combination of the clear blue sky and the breeze, it was almost as if it were April 28th 2004 again, and I could’ve been sitting on the strip of meridian grass next to the tram lines on Victoria Street, Fitzroy, with my head bent low, terrified because my labour was about to be induced. I wasn’t in labour then (nay, as it turns out, I was never to spend a single second of my labours outside a hospital), but yesterday, as I sometimes do, I felt a phantom stretching of the cervix; that heat and sting both at the same time, that stretches around until it becomes a band of agony. I am too easily whisked, I’ve decided, back into memory. And this memory bank serves itself, not me. So when I think about an event, an event I may or may not be exaggerating (though not for effect, please note), as you’ve just seen, I can easily get pulled into a segue of trams and labour stories.

I daresay it is a convenience, a cloak I pull around myself, these tales of birthing and babies, the questionable exchange, are all my way of saying, roundaboutly, that school is starting next week. I suppose I’m wondering if this is her last week of being solely bound to, and protected by, me and Adam as parents. As of next week, there will be hours upon hours where she will be fighting her own battles at school, and although all the education experts are telling me to let kids develop resilience (embrace it! They need no coddling!) part of me still can’t believe we’ve made it this far and how on earth I’ll be able to let her go.