wise seven

Coline is not the only one growing faster than our eyes can see. Leila is a newly discovered inconditional fan of shaking it off along with Taylor Swift and keeping her feet off the ground or up in the air. How white should door frames really aim to be? She likes playing dames and drinking grape juice in wine glasses in the evening, making breakfast for the younger ones after jumping on the trampoline on Saturday mornings while I am still in bed. Oh, and she´s and got the whole nail fashion under control, including not biting hers anymore. Life is pretty smooth around here since we accepted week-end schemes that include at least one friend sleepover. Loosing her top front teeth suddenly seem to have made way for words of wisdom and a better understanding of our needs as her parents and we now can enjoy the full potential of her fiery and sensitive personnality.

We see each other every single day, many hours a day, and yet all of a sudden we get slapped in the face with the realization of how big they have gotten. Yesterday one of them or both would come to my bed almost every night, they would ask me to sing lullabies until they were fast asleep. Now Coline starts asking on Monday afternoon to please go for a sleep over at her friend´s.

How her first sleep over happened is quite a story. She left home one saturday afternoon and declared she would stay for the night at her friend´s house. And she did, until 10 pm when she declared that she was actually going to sleep in her mummy´s car, so please give her a call and let her know about the new pick up arrangement. Coline does not get upset or scared in such situations. She announces her decisions softly and firmly and generally gets the message accross that indeed, what she says is how things are going to happen, and it did, I picked her up.

When she asked to repeat the experiment the next day I was not up for it, and instead suggested that she spent the next five days showing me (and herself) that she could fall asleep without me. We cut out a colored paper star every morning following her successfully falling asleep by herself, she proudly stuck it up on the wall by her bed and on the next Friday she went back to her friend´s, spent the night and the next morning, proud and happy to have such a vibrant friendship of her own.

...

I switched my computer on tonight with the intention of sharing light bits of our days but instead I compusilvely read through the internet, searching through words and images of familiar lands and faces for the disappeared, as some have been searching for lives under a thick layer of mud, for the children, the grandmother, the husband, the pets, for a decent explanation why there was no alarm, no bus, no truck to carry them away from the deadly wave of mud swallowing down a whole town, a valley and fearing to discover how many lives our luxurous and absurd lifestyles have cost so far.

Making our house our home

Last month has been all about getting shelves up and stuff out of boxes and slowly making our house our home. This house is a cream-white box. On a friend´s suggestion I accepted it as a frame for all the color me would bring in. I started with swaping fridge-cold light bulbs for their warmer yellow version, got in some circles and curves among the canvas of perpendicular bars, grids and tiles, and we did some doodling too, with friends.

haircut

There came a request for short hair, coming from the girls, and because of the little inhabitants on our heads and those of many schoolmates, I did not think twice, grabed my scissors and water spray and started the fun on our little balcony. I was not alowed to come close to Coline´s fringe - "big girls do not have short fringe" - as she recently found out that you do not get rid of it by cutting it down to the scalp, you actually have to let it grow. This is exactely what she is in the process of, becoming a big,  fringeless little girl. Cutting their hair is for me a slightly stressful experience. I am generally granted a maximum of 3 snaps before they start moving around and running away, but I did manage some sort of symetry and even a drop of creativity on Leila´s hair. When requested again, I will abide.

and we´re back! except, we moved

This is it, our new home, big, white and square. One thing for sure, THERE IS GOING TO BE SO MUCH LIGHT, and so we are loving it for that. 

We had no regret at saying goodbye to the mold, although it did come along with us, in every page of every book, in the heart of our bed mattresses, in the wood of our wardrobes, which a carefully selected bunch of amateur geologists took down so many steps from the morro down to the sunny side of town. Slowly the sun and the air of September dried it out, hopefully for good, or at least for most of each year. 

The tropical forest that I squeezed in a few car trips has not found its way out the pots yet, the soil is still too dry, and to my dismay, covered in a roundup ready thick grass coat (can you believe MY own garden will have to grow over a pesticide contaminated soil?) So for now the kids are sliding it down until the carboard boxes get thin as paper, or the dogs tear it down to pieces. One shelf, one breakfast, one silly dance, one homework on the big table, one moonrise at a time, we are inhabiting this new home.