Dodo Au Go-Go

It's a Saturday morning. Under a wide blue sky, the big-hearted autumn sun warms up a world which had cooled off overnight. Everyone is asleep. Hubby, my not-quite-two-year-old Little One, and my Puppy-Girl. I'm standing at my laptop at the kitchen counter, a hot teacup at grateful hand. I could take my laptop and go and sit on the couch and curl up beneath a warm rug. In fact, I'd like very much to go and do that. But then Puppy-Girl, who's sleeping at my feet, wouldn't be able to follow me through the child-proof gate. And I don't want to lessen our little pocket of quiet time together. Just me and her. Not to mention, she will then move to sit at the gate so she can regard me reproachfully. So I tell myself that standing to type is good for me.  In this little oasis of time, I breathe and my thoughts start to settle. I can stop having to react to everything, and let my thoughts slow and stretch. Think a little bit. Mull. Be introspectiv

I don't remember how the bag came into my possession. Suffice to say it got well played with over the Christmas season, and is now cumpled, tatty and generally, quite the worse for wear. I was trying to decide whether to throw it in the recycling or do something crafty with it before chucking it out. So I decided to try drawing a flower on its crumpled but blank innards. As you do. There was a logic to my madness - which was that I'm not very good at drawing flowers, and doing a doodle inside a hidden and soon-to-be-thrown-out bag is as good a place to practice as any. I grabbed one of my LittleOne's colouring-in pens.  Again, it reduces any expectations and pressure. (I think I've previously mentioned that I have a pretty savage inner critic?) Anyway, I came up with this. Photo taken in the kitchen with as much fluorescent light as I could get into the gift bag with one hand, while holding my phone with the other. Actually, you know what? I thought to mysel

 The whole household has been down with a bad bug (not the pandemic pest) for these past two October weeks. There were sniffles, sore throats, coughs and fevers aplenty.  It's all pretty exhausting, so on the weekend, LittleOne and I did some drawing to cheer ourselves up. I pulled out a roll of brown packing paper (greater novelty factor than your ordinary sheet of A3 white paper) and suggested we could draw a streetscape with some shops for LittleOne's toys and cars to drive and walk past and go shopping. Welcome to PonderBananeMangoSweet Street. (I contributed the Sweet. LittleOne authorised it to join the original.) Let's take a stroll. Here is, IMHO, one of best shops I have ever seen: The Fashion Explosion Rocket Shop.  This is perhaps the greatest name for a shop ever, in the entirety of human existence in the universe. Ever. 100% LittleOne's concept. I love it. It's for - and I quote - "fashions you wear when you go into space." There i

It's a springtime and the weekend post! Featuring bugs. Saturday was muggy after the rains during the week. But it dried up marvellously by the late afternoon. Sunday was bewilderingly cool even in the early morning sun, but it warmed up beautifully in the afternoon. We saw this flower blooming in our hedge. It doesn't belong to the hedge but to a rival vine snaking through. If it's a weed or invasive species, it's got the most insolently beautiful flowers! Springtime also means the return of bugs. Brisbane has lots of them.  It's the tiny, almost invisible ones you need to watch out for. A quarter of the size of fruit flies or smaller. Midges, I think they're called. They've very wily, fast, and their bites itch mercilessly for days. They're the one bug I'm unapologetically nasty to 😳 A baby dragonfly with a blip of bright blue greeted LittleOne by hovering overhead as we went down the stairs! This was our awesome bug experience of the

Saturday the 10th of September was one of those magic spring days.  It started like this: It was the kind of day where the sun is beautifully warm and the breeze is playful and joyous.  The kind of day where, when LittleOne and I went out onto the deck in the morning and the breeze ran up to say hello, we each instinctively, impulsively inhaled and exclaimed about how lovely the day was!  The kind of day that LittleOne said felt just like the beach.  The kind of day where the air is watermelon-scented, and you just want to both bottle it and let it soak in your very cells forever.   That kind of spring day. We saw the first hibiscus flower in our garden in a lovely shade of pink-red that was just slightly more deep pink than red. We saw bees merrily visiting the white-and-pink-edged blossoms all over our prolific lemony-lime tree. We saw a kookaburra bird come and perch on the arbor in the garden. It gave a couple of its deep-throated chuckles, but didn't break out into

LittleOne has reached the age of treats now. Which means we have a lot more treats in the house. The treats have, for various reasons, focused on chocalatey delights. But not any old chocolate. Plain Cadbury chocolates have been given the thumbs up. Terry's Chocolate Orange has been deemed too strong (we're working on this), and Caramello Koalas, with their liquid caramel centres, have not been a hit (I get this, LittleOne - it took me ages to like them too). Smarties have been a ...moderate hit. They're often on the "please, can we?" list at the supermarket, but LittleOne's intake at home can be quite low. Even when I suggest them with rattling, dancing packets. Which means there are often Smarties in the cupboards looking at me, Which is such a pity.  You see, I have a funny old soft spot for Smarties. You see, when I was growing up in Mauritius in the 1980s, we had Smarties, of course. And they were your standard chocolatey treat. But, when we m