May We Come To Brownie Land

For some reason Miss Six is rather proud of the fact that she has already dropped out of two hobbies in her lifetime: From age three, she did a couple of years in ballet, culminating in a stage performance that brought tears of pride to my eyes, and then a season of rugby, with the highlight being one of the few times she touched the ball, running half the length of the field and scoring a try.

“Yeah I quit!” she proudly announced to her friend the other day after overhearing her mother and I talking about the range of hobbies available and which ones we’d already ticked off.
While I’m not one to endorse giving up, at this young age, there’s no point pushing these things – if it’s not their thing, then why make life harder. So she’s had a year off hobbies but recently expressed a desire to join Pippins.

Now this is one thing that would be right up her alley but, despite my enquiries and the amount of interest from other parents and children, I’m yet to find one in our area, which is a shame. My years in Brownies and Girl Guides taught me a lifetime of skills that I’m still using today.

Other than skipping round a toadstool singing May We Come To Brownie Land, I learned how to tie donkey hitch knots – which later came in useful in Pony Club, how to pitch a large pole tent, how to work a compass, first aid and CPR, how to cook, knit and sew (although the latter was and still is an epic fail), and how to light a fire, amongst other skills.

The latest one has held me in good stead each winter with my Kent fire. I’ve always carefully built my tepee fire just like they taught me in Girl Guides: newspaper first, followed by kindling and logs. But last week Fair Go put that theory to the test, building an ‘upside down fire’, then lighting it, with it successfully igniting.

I watched fascinated, but like revolving credit, this goes against everything I’ve been taught, plus the jury was still out from viewers as to their subsequent success with this method, so I’ll be sticking to my Girl Guide method.

Another legacy from Girl Guides was the motto: ‘Be Prepared’, although I think I tend to take this one a little too far at times. One particularly ghastly morning last winter, in a bid to ease coming home to a cold, dark house, I prepared a crock pot, before carefully building my tepee in the fire place before work.

Satisfied, I dusted myself off and turned to walk out the door - then ‘whoosh’, I looked back to see the entire fireplace, obviously still hot from the night before, alight.

As I sat at work that day trying to dry off from getting drenched after my umbrella blew inside-out, I thought of my roaring fire and, no doubt, cosy home. And, of course, by the time I walked in much later that day, it had long gone out, the house stone cold.

Never mind, I thought. At least I have a yummy hot dinner to enjoy. I lifted the lid, expecting to see my casserole bubbling away, but was met with the same sight as when I last put the lid on.

You guessed it – I’d forgotten to turn it on.

Childhood Memories

There’s something special about witnessing your offspring experience the same joys and pleasures as you did all those years ago.

It need only be simple, like finishing a packet of raisons then blowing on the box to make a whistle sound, to peeling off the layers of a whole cooked onion from a corned beef roast and eating them one-by-one, pretending you’re playing a game of pass-the-parcel.

Of course my childhood only feels like yesterday, but to them it’s ‘in the olden days’. At least their idea of my ‘olden days’ doesn’t conjure up a black and white world of unsmiling faces as was my interpretation of my predecessor’s day, based on the pictures I had seen.

Those who are lucky enough to still have parents living in their own childhood home can witness their children doing the same things they did back in the day – whether it’s as simple as running races down to the same lemon tree down the bottom of the backyard, or scrambling under the feijoia tree and coming up triumphant with the largest fruit.

My childhood home sold in my early 20s, before I had kids, but one day I decided to take a bit of a trip down memory lane and took us for a jog back to the scene of my childhood, the sports domain which backed onto our former house. This was where we played many an evening cricket match in our summer pjs and, later, where I’d walk across to reach the pony club on the other side where my horse Sparky was kept.
 

As we neared my place, I pointed out dad’s big shed where he kept his car and boat.

“And that’s the shed where my brothers and I would hide from the neighbour’s grandson and pretend we were ghosts.” (It was pretty funny – he used to run terrified back to his nana’s!)

But the kids weren’t interested in the past and they carried on running. Instead I slowed to a walk and stared. I saw it through their eyes. The bird aviary had long gone but I spotted the tool shed in which my brothers and I spent hours seeing who could drill the biggest hole into the wooden post. The wood shed was still there, as was the flat, which we were told used to house the maid back in the day but, for us, was the scene for playing ‘schools’ and exciting sleep-overs in which we rarely lasted the night.

The fruit trees were still there – lemons, lemonades, mandarins, plum, peaches, nectarines, feijoia, apple, loquat, as was the big vege garden.

My backyard had always been a conglomeration of sheds, paths and fruit trees but now the sheds were rickety, the trees overgrown.

I was still rubber-necking – my pace having slowed to a true dawdle - when a guy came out and gave me an odd look, clearly wondering what my problem was.

On a whim, I back-tracked. “Sorry, I wasn’t staring at you, it’s just this used to be my home,” I explained, to which he seemed instantly interested.

It turns out he had recently moved in and was renovating the house and had made a few unexplained discoveries, which I was able to clear up, like the steps leading up to nowhere where once our back door had been, and the circular decking which once wrapped around our oval Para pool where us and the neighbouring kids across the domain spent hours bombing and learning to row the inflatable dinghy.

“And are our heights still recorded on the back of the bedroom door?” I asked enthusiastically, to which he seemed puzzled and said he’d have to go check. He probably didn’t like to tell me they’d long gone.

A part of me was hoping for an invite in but then I’m sure I would’ve been left disappointed. Some of us tend to glorify our childhoods in hindsight and, based on the state of the yard, I was keen to keep my memories of the house intact.

I moved on to catch up with the kids and passed my elderly neighbour who’d lived there long before we moved in in 1981, walking her dog. She said a polite ‘hi’, then looked straight through me.

Yes, time had moved on and this was no longer my patch.

But not to worry, thanks to mum being a bit of a hoarder – something I gave her a lot of grief for growing up, but am thankful for now – I can still witness my kids delighting in former treasures from my overly-pink bedroom at that address.

At least in my mind it’s still pink.

Sick Mummy

We often treat outsiders with respect and tread on our nearest and dearest. This includes the way our kids treat their parents. Short of lining our sprogs up in a row and making them answer to whistle calls Captain Von Trapp-style, often times, in true bang-your-head-against-the-wall-manner, it can feel like this Captain’s orders are just falling on deaf ears.

And then the Captain, AKA Mummy, gets sick and the ship goes down.

Well it could have. Let me rewind. It was the Thursday before the Easter break, which also happened to be the start of two week’s school holidays. Ironically, I had just returned that evening from interviewing a nurse who, last year, almost died from the flu but, after spending three and a half weeks in a coma, managed to survive to tell the tale.*

That night a sore throat came on and, by the morning, I had the full-blown flu. This wasn’t just your average cold, but the knock-you-off-your-feet virus, which comes with sore throat, loss of voice, pounding headache, complete loss of energy, fever, delirium and all the other usual lovely symptoms.

However, I was scheduled to work from home that day so I pushed through it and began writing up the flu story, occasionally getting up to check if I was the blue colour described by the lady in my story.

Meanwhile, the kids came home full of Easter vigour and excited for the holiday plans ahead. They didn’t happen.

Instead each day mummy got sicker and sicker, one day unable to sit up to have a drink of water for several hours – which was when the fever and slight delirium set in. After they’d seen me at my worst, much to my horror, I heard the three of them congregating in the hall outside my door trying to come up with ways to cheer me up.

It was interesting the different ways they coped: Miss Six brought me my childhood Care Bear to cuddle while she scuttled off to draw me a picture while Masters Nine and Six both gave me their money (which I duly gave back of course).

But while Master Six kept his distance, quietly sitting in the corner watching over me, his older brother returned dressed in his best dress-shirt and stood before me.

“I’ve put on my best shirt mummy to try and cheer you up because this is the worst day of my life,” he said, to which I burst into tears again at the sweetness of it all.

His face fell and I felt terrible.

I had to pull myself together so I asked him to go up the road to get some Panadol.

Several hours later, once they had kicked in I was able to sit up and noticed ‘I love you’ post-it notes all over the door. They had since got bored with playing nurse to mum and gone off and made huts, doing a fabulous job of entertaining themselves

For once, the three of them got on brilliantly and that night Master Nine stepped up and cooked dinner for everyone for the first time.

It took three weeks for the virus to leave my system so although we did absolutely nothing for our Easter and entire school holidays, it is a time that holds a special place in my heart for we saw each other through different eyes. I was forced to slow down and become a chilled mum, instead of constantly on the run, barking orders at them. The appreciation was clear in their eyes and, instead of their usual sibling bickering, they bonded together to make life easy for their sick mum.

It may have taken seeing their mum in a vulnerable position to gain their respect, but it was there when it mattered and, as a result, the ship didn’t sink – it stayed afloat thanks to my crew coming to the fore.


*The story mentioned above is in today's Northern Advocate, or you can read it at:

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Humans-of-Whangarei/417107768393351?ref=hl or

https://www.facebook.com/NorthlandDHB/posts/863632740350201:0