Month: December 2018

Several months ago while I was elbow deep in dishwater, Kit experienced a fit of inspiration. You might prefer not to compare having an idea to suffering a seizure. Just remember, I didn’t say it was a good idea. He asked why we don’t just buy take aways every night, and throw the dishes away. Then I would have more time to play with him.

So we had a talk about throwing away rubbish. “Where do you think ‘away’ is, Kit?” I asked.

“At the rubbish dump, like you told me,” he answered.

“And what about when we run out of room at the rubbish dump?” I probed.

“Wait! I know this one…it’s a story from The Bible,” he mused.

“I’m pretty sure it isn’t,” I muttered.

“When there was no room at the dump, the baby Jesus had to get born in a barn!” he squeaked triumphantly.

“Anyway, he didn’t want to get born in a dump like a piece of rubbish…but now that I think about it, there might have been ‘no room at the hotel.’ That would be right. Hotels are always booked out at Christmas time.” I left the logic of that alone.

“I just meant that we are running out of room for new rubbish dumps,” I explained, “Away from us is always going to be near someone else. The population keeps getting bigger, we make more and more rubbish, and it is getting everywhere. We need to reduce, reuse and recycle more.”

Kit made his excuses and went to play. I though he hadn’t been paying attention. Until a few months later when I took him to an op shop for the first time.

Kit thought it was brilliant how they were selling used things so cheaply. “It’s much better than wasting stuff,” he squeaked. “It is good for the envirolment. Otherwise people put things in their rubbish bins, and then the people in orange shirts come and put it all in a smelly truck. And then they drive, and dump it at the dump. If they keep doing that, the dumps will get bigger and bigger, until they all join up, and the whole world is a dump, like Mandurah!”

“Kit!” I said, “You’ve never even been to Mandurah.”

“I know but I hear things,” he said mysteriously.

“I’ve been thinking about Christmas,” he added, “We made a whole lot of rubbish last year. So I thought maybe we could reuse our rubbish by making Christmas decorations out of it. You know, for the tree.”

Envisaging angels made out of toilet rolls and baubles fashioned from foil and ribbon, I agreed. I left him to it, saying what a great idea it was. I now regret that last bit.

A few weeks ago, I asked Kit if he would like to go to King’s Park.

“No way!” he answered adamantly.

“Kit!” I chided, “Don’t be rude.”

“No way, thank you,” he amended.

“Why don’t you want to go?” I probed.

“Bees,” he said.

A few years ago, Kit, my friend Emily and I went for a walk in King’s Park. As far as Kit is concerned, his abusive mother took him there for the Sole Purpose of getting stung by a bee, and Emily was an accessory to a Bee Stinging. We all wanted to go for a walk and to see the wild flowers. So off we went, Kit travelling in the meerkat pouch in my backpack.

There are some really amazing species in WA. According to MS Word, we saw a lot of boobs, which are actually boabs, or baobabs. They are those trees that look like I do by the end of the Christmas season (somewhat overstuffed). We also saw a lot of kangaroo paws, flowers which I had never seen before. For Kit’s benefit, I pretended they were called meerkat paws. He was chuffed, even if he didn’t quite believe me.

It was a very hot day and we ended up walking much further than we meant to along a special magic path; it went uphill all the way there and uphill all the way back! When Kit asked to stop and play in the flowers, I gladly put him down at the edge of a flower bed and he went nuts climbing plants and digging little holes. Little did I know, he was also playing with bees, who apparently didn’t want to be buried alive.

The bee that stung Kit was having so much fun that it decided disembowelling itself would be preferable. Like a zom-bee, it dug itself out of its grave, and plunged its stinger into the paw of its captor. Kit screeched like a banshee and insisted that he had been bitten by a snake, despite the fact that there were no snakes to be seen. We realised what had happened, scraped out the stinger, and rushed him back to the car.

By the time we got there my shoes contained more sand than feet, and it felt as though Kit had gained about five kilograms. He was very brave, and spent the trip home propped up with his paw in the cold water in my water bottle.

Later, when he was feeling better, we had a chat about bees. He already knew that they are very important for pollinating our food supply. But it seems I had neglected to mention that they can sting you.

“You mean you took me to the park in Bee Season, and you knew that bees can sting you, and you didn’t even tell me?!” he squeaked, and stomped off to sulk.

I guess that explains his snakebite claim.

At the crack of dawn on Tuesday, Kit woke me up squeaking with excitement, singing, “Happy birthday to me! Hehehe! Whadidyaget me?!” It was his fourth birthday. So we had a special breakfast (by ‘special’ I mean two hours earlier than usual), and he unwrapped his presents. Then things got interesting.

Kit asked, “So what are birthdays, anyway? Why does everyone have a different one?”

I explained that it’s the day you were born, and different people and animals were born on different days.

Then he wanted to know, if he was born on a Wednesday, why he can’t have a birthday with presents every Wednesday instead of only one a year. (I pacified him by reminding him that we have dessert once a week, and that is like a special celebration.)

Then he asked if plants have birthdays too, and I said I didn’t think so because they weren’t exactly born like animals.

“What’s ‘born’ mean, anyway?” he asked.

“It’s when you came to be on earth,” I said vaguely.

“But where was I before? Was I like an alien?” He sounded excited.

“Um, no. But you didn’t quite exist.” His face fell.

“But where did I come from?”

“Weeeelllll…you started off planted like a seed in your mummy’s tummy”.

“But that would make me a plant, and I am not a plant! I am an animal”. He was a bit indignant.

“Well, it’s more like an egg than a seed, I suppose,” I clarified.

“But that would make me a chicken! And I am a meerkat! Meerkats don’t lay eggs. We eat eggs!”

“Well, they don’t lay eggs, no. The egg stays inside your mummy until it grows into you.”

“But how did I get in there? Did she eat eggs, and then one turned into me?” he was genuinely baffled, “And if I grew in there, then how did I get out? Did she barf me out?”

“Kit,” I said gently, “You’d better sit down.”

So I explained, as he sat wide-eyed and fascinated.

When I finished, he was quiet for a bit.

Finally he spoke.

“Bloody hell!” he said.