Month: July 2018

The other day, when I called Kit for dinner, he didn’t immediately come running like a cat hearing a can opener. I called again. Silence. Thoughts of various calamities came to mind, involuntarily. Had he wandered onto the carport, and been run over? Had he fallen into the bin and accidentally been put out with the rubbish? Or, had he been snatched from the balcony by a short-sighted pelican, mistaking him for a pilchard?

Eventually, a muffled squeaking could be heard from his bedroom. I arrived at his door as he burst through a pile of clothing.

“Phew! Made it,” he squeaked, clearly not referring to his bed.

“Dinner’s ready. Where were you?” I asked, “And why are you wearing your bicycle helmet?”

“I was all the way over there,” he explained, pointing to the other side of the room, barely three metres away. “I think that pile of toys is going to fall soon, so I had to go the long way, around the edge of the room, for occupational health and safety reasons. I had to climb a few obstetricians.”

“Obstacles,” I corrected.

“Yeah them.”

I took in the scene. The room appeared to have been decorated by a wild racoon suffering from claustrophobia.

“It’s time you cleaned up this mess before you get lost and starve to death in here,” I admonished him.

After dinner, we joyfully agreed that Kit would spend the next day cleaning his room. He was surprisingly amenable to my request, if not actually joyful (the aforementioned joy was all me).

The next morning Kit began his titanic task. I supervised and poked around.

“Do you really need to keep this?” I asked him. He examined my proffered artefact.

“No; that’s not mine. It’s just a dead beetle. I think it got lost in here,” he surmised.

“I can imagine,” I agreed.

Eventually, it became apparent Kit had a purpose for cleaning his room, the ultimate goal of which was not having a clean room.

As he disappeared behind a pile of toys, he could be heard muttering, “It’s got to be somewhere.”

“That seems likely,” I remarked, “What exactly are you looking for, the floor?”

“Very funny,” he said, “I left it under this cushion.”

“Left what?” I enquired.

“A jam sandwich,” he replied, “A couple of weeks ago,” he added for clarification.

“Kit!” I chided, “That is disgusting. We’ll get ants. ”

“I hope so,” he said, “Fresh snacks!”

When I told Kit the sandwich was going straight in the bin as soon as he found it, he couldn’t think of any reason to keep cleaning his room. So, I promised a trip to the park with a bowl of sugar as ant bait, if he finished the cleaning. He then zealously cleaned and tidied every last corner. The sandwich turned up under a different cushion. I will eventually get around to cleaning it (the cushion, not the jam sandwich.)

This week, Kit and I decided to read about fierce mammals, or rather, Kit decided, and delegated the reading to me. Our second mammal was the Tasmanian Devil. These small marsupial carnivores are good at running, swimming, climbing trees, fighting, and crushing bones with their teeth. Even birth is fraught with competition and death.  Females deliver about 30 young, each the size of a grain of rice.  Immediately after birth, they commence an epic struggle to the pouch, where four nipples are located. It doesn’t take a mathematician to deduce that only the strongest survive.

Presumably, if a litter is particularly feeble, none of them make it, as the mother renders no assistance, whatsoever, to any of them. But, perhaps it is not deliberate neglect. If you give birth to something the size of a grain of rice, you could be forgiven for failing to notice. I imagine a Tasmanian Devil, about two weeks after giving birth, suddenly exclaiming “Hey! There’s something wriggling in my pouch! Oh, wait. It appears I’ve had babies. Silly me! I thought it was a tarantula, or something.”

After we had read this, Kit said, “They sound like they might make nice neighbours.”

“Sorry. What?!” I hear you cry. Let me explain.

The first fierce mammal we read about strikes fear into the hearts of men, women, martial arts experts, and every species, native or alien that has ever heard of it (most of which are components of its diet). It can be summarized as a cross between an armoured tank, and The Devil Himself. It has the build of a silverback gorilla, the teeth of a shark, the claws of a sun bear, the stink of a skunk, and the temperament of a ravenous Tasmanian Devil with a dental abscess. We had been learning about…the honey badger!

Kit describes it as follows:

“By weight, a honey badger is 50 percent claws and 75 percent teeth attached to some fur (somebody else’s). It does whatever it feels like, and eats whatever it sees, even you!”

Included in the honey badger’s diet are meerkats! I said to Kit, “To them you’re not Meerkat Kit but a Mere Kitkat!” He glared at me coldly.

Fortunately, the honey badger is the only species in the family, Mellivorinae. Its closest relative is the weasel, which will never admit it. We learned that the males are called boars and the females are sows. The collective noun for a group of honey badgers is a colony. To paraphrase Kit, he hopes that word is seldom employed when referring to honey badgers. I told him that the babies are also called kits. He refuses to believe me. I can’t say I blame him.

Today I played my childhood music box to Kit. He was entranced by the rotating ballerina, and he started pirouetting in time to the music.

“What is she doing?” he asked.  I explained that she was a ballerina, doing ballet dancing.

“This is fun! Can I be a ballerina?” he asked, as he twirled around and toppled over.

“If you want to,” I said, helping him up, “But, I don’t think the boys are called ballerinas.”

“Then, I want to make up a new name for boy and girl ballet dancers.” He sat quietly for a bit, deep in thought. “How about ‘ballarat’?” he suggested.

“I’m afraid that name is already taken,” I told him.

“It is not!” he said insistently. “I only just thought of it all by myself.”

“I’m sure you did,” I said, using up a weeks’ worth of calories to keep a straight face. “But it’s still already a word. Ballarat is a town in Victoria.”

“Victoria who?”

“Victoria is a state of Australia. Like Western Australia.”

“But shouldn’t we have Eastern Australia, and Northern Australia, and Southern Australia?” He asked, perplexed.

“That would make more sense,” I said, “But Australia is not a sensible place. Remember, it’s the land of trees that reproduce when you set them on fire, and marsupial animals that carry their babies around in their tummies after they’re born!”

Never having known anything else, he asked, “What’s so strange about that?” and went back to considering names.

After much deliberation, he settled on ‘ballarooney.’ “Because it sounds a bit like ‘balloon,’ and balloons are fun!”

He glanced at me, and quickly added, “As long as you don’t throw them away like litter, because they can hurt birds and animals, when they try to eat them. Remember that time when you tried to catch that balloon in the park to put it in the bin, and you fell in the lake?”

“Yes,” I said, “Indeed I do!” But Kit had lost interest and moved on again.

“If I’m going to be a ballarooney, I need a frilly thing around my waist,” he informed me.

“It’s called a tutu,” I explained.

“And what about a tiara?” His Dad suggested, but Kit misheard him.

“No way!” he said adamantly, “Terriers look at me like I’m a dog biscuit.”

“Usually, only the girls wear tutus.” I said.

“But why?” he asked. “It’s pretty. Can I please wear one? Please?”

“Why not?” I said, and made him a tutu…but it’s a bit tight, more like a one-one. Kit doesn’t care; it makes him feel pretty!

It was a dark and stormy night about last Wednesday when Kit came to me with concern etched into his tiny face.

“Mum,” he squeaked, “I’m worried about the trees.”

“What trees?” I asked.

“All those green things outside the window!” he exclaimed, “Surely you’ve noticed them out in the storm! Animals can go in a burrow or a den. And birds just go on summer holidays to Bali. But the trees are stuck in the mud. In a storm. In the nude! And there are bits of broken branches everywhere. That’s like tree arms and legs.”

So, I patiently explained about evolution, how trees have evolved to deal with storms, and how they can grow new branches. “That’s like you or me growing new arms and legs!”

When he said, “Wow! But it must still hurt,” I said that trees don’t feel pain.

And he said, “But how do you know?”

And I said, “I don’t know,”

And he said, “Then why did you say that?”

So I said, “It is widely accepted.”

Then he said, “Where does it say that on Google?”

And it was about then that ‘we’ decided to help the trees.

I had to prove I was serious, “And not just waiting, and hoping I’ll forget about it,” said Kit.

So, I sighed inwardly, wrapped us up in most of our clothing and a bit of somebody else’s, and we embarked on a Perilous Expedition. As we set off into the driving rain, Kit immediately directed me to the local play area, where he was certain he had seen a tree in need. By the time he had persuaded me to bandage a branch onto a grass tree (they don’t have branches, by the way), I was certain that his true motive was not to minister to trees but to be allowed to play on the swings after dark. He vindicated my suspicion by asking to play on the swings.

Kit was to later refer to our ‘Perilous Exhibition,’ and after bandaging bits of a tree to another tree in a storm, in front of several dedicated, sideways-glancing dog-walkers, I actually prefer his terminology.

While I was pushing him on a swing, Kit asked, “Do you think the trees might be cold? Should we put some blankets on them?”

Not wishing to look like an idiot twice in one evening, I told him that trees are cold-blooded; a gamble that possibly didn’t pay off. When Kit grows up, I’m going to have a lot of explaining to do, but at least I managed to talk him out of the blankets.