Category: Kit’s Photos

This afternoon when I arrived home from work, Kit called out, “Hi Mum! I’m a bit tied up in the bathroom.”

“Okay dear,” I called, not wishing to intrude upon his business.

There was an expectant pause, then, “Help!”

A trail of chaos lead me to Kit, actually tied up in the bathroom! Below, I will explain how this came about. Let me begin with some background.

I once lived in a student flat that suffered a moth infestation. I wished they had just eaten my entire ugly jumper instead of nibbling holes in my favourite clothes. I repaid this kindness by turning them into wall paper, with the aid of a fly swatter. Kit has heard this story, and knows I hate moths in the house. Nowadays I don’t kill them, but neither do I offer them a cuddle and tuck them into bed. I simply catch them then let them go. Although no longer a poor student, I would still be annoyed if my clothes got eaten, but that is because I enjoy clothes shopping as much as I enjoy toothache.

So, when Kit discovered a large moth locked in the house after I had left for work, a frantic chase ensued. When he noticed the moth perched on the kitchen window, he climbed my hanging apron to get to the bench. This surprised the moth, which started madly flapping against the window. Startled, Kit stepped backwards onto the spoon from my breakfast cereal, which flicked up like a rake, and hit him in the head. This knocked him into a coffee cup, which slid off the bench and smashed on the floor (which, according to Kit, was my fault because of where I left the spoon). Kit then ran at the moth, and tried to catch it, knocking over the dishes on the bench while he was at it, and also spilling a puddle of dish washing liquid (I hadn’t closed the lid).

When the moth escaped the kitchen, Kit abseiled down my apron strings, which tore right off the apron. Leaping to the floor, he bounded after the moth and cornered it in the bathroom. The moth did the sensible thing and flew up to the ceiling. Kit did a less sensible thing, and climbed up to the shower curtain rail via the bin, the shower curtain, and the shower caddy, dislodging all its contents on the way. Once on top of the rail, Kit tied himself to the shower curtain for safety, and crept towards the moth.

Suddenly he lost his balance, and slipped off the railing, leaving him dangling helplessly tied up in the curtain, where he remained for two hours, waiting for me to get home.

“So, where’s the moth?” I asked as I gently untied him.

“Before I slipped, I ate it!” he said as though it was the most obvious thing in the world.

We’re getting new fly screens. For the sake of the crockery.

Recently in Australia and now New Zealand, there has been an epidemic of fruit for sale being spiked with…actual spikes. Who says plants don’t have feelings? This is tangible evidence that they get pins and needles. It began with strawberries, but progressed to apples and bananas. I now chop up my fruit and put it through Medusa, my juicer.

Everyone is theorizing about who would do this. Except for the people actually doing it. Unless they are experienced somnambulists, presumably they know. The best media explanations are, ‘disgruntled ex-employees’ and ‘copycats’.

Kit has his own theories. They are paraphrased below:

1. Dressmakers; they are underpaid although they do very important work. If you disagree, remember that without them, you would be naked, and so would people with the kinds of physical shortcomings that make you grateful for the existence of clothing. Perhaps the dressmakers want to punish all people who wear clothes for not paying them enough. This explains why they would spike fruit with no consideration for who might purchase it.
2. Disgruntled acupuncturists. When you stick needles in people for a living, they probably shout at you a lot. Clearly people who put needles in other people are sadists. Acupuncturists might want to hurt people in their absence by putting needles in their food. To them, the important thing is that somebody is getting hurt. As they differ from masochists, the second most important thing is that it is not them.
3. Most likely (in Kit’s mind) Spike Milligan, the cactus has been shedding his spikes, and somehow getting them into fruit all over Australasia. He is a wily little scoundrel, who made me like him, despite being a completely useless plant with no leaves or flowers (which is the main reason you have plants), who leads a wholly pointless existence sunning himself on the balcony. In the nude! And, if you try to hug him, he stabs you.

After discussing his theories with His Dad and me, Kit asked, “Didn’t you say that the price of strawberries has dropped?”

“That’s right,” I confirmed, “They’re about five times cheaper than usual.”

“And what about apples and bananas?”

“Probably,” I said vaguely, “Now, please put your coat on. We’re going out.”

I now regret this conversation.

When we got home, Kit disappeared onto the balcony. I found him poking around Spike, who he claims to dislike, a spike wrapped in his paw. I’m afraid I may have a copymeerkat on my hands. I wonder which food he wants to drive down the price of. I may need to confiscate my cactus.

One day last spring, My Partner and I took Kit for a bush walk. Spring is the best time to hike in Western Australia because summer temperatures, and ‘inhospitable’ wildlife make hiking in summer as advisable as licking a toilet brush.

We had decided to hike the King Jarrah Trail. The King Jarrah is a tree, very large old for the area. Since it was logged, the majority of vegetation there consists of enthusiastic weeds and native plants as immature as a grown man on a bouncy castle.

Kit was amused by our maps.

“You won’t see meerkats with maps and GPS units,” he announced proudly, “We all have the Sixth Sense!”

“How does being psychic help you navigate?” I asked.

“Not that,” he replied, “Meerkat sixth sense is a Sense of Direction.”

“I have that,” I objected, “I can tell up from down blindfolded.”

“Please leave the dad jokes to Dad,” he groaned.

We saw the King Jarrah, which was not so much wide as it was tall. After straining to see its top, I realized I needed to see the optometrist (not that I would be able to).

There were other highlights. Kit saw his first tic. When I told him what and how they eat, he looked unimpressed, and promptly ate it, just to be on the safe side.

Kit likes to try to identify birds from their calls, and I suffer from hayfever. Unfortunately, every time a bird called, I would sneeze, and Kit would glare at me. By the end of our hike, he was no longer saying, “Bless you.” Instead, he said:

“I know an old Meerkat Remedy for hayfever. When we get home, I’ll cure you.”

So we finished our walk, and Kit asked His Dad to help him in the kitchen. An hour or so later, he proudly presented me with a concoction of the utmost foulness. Kit’s ‘remedy’ smelled like a freezer that had had the power turned off and been closed for 6 months…after somebody stowed a dead body in it.

His Dad had supervised, so I downed the mixture (it was only a teaspoon full). It tasted like dirty socks and offal.

“What on earth is in this?!” I exclaimed, repulsed.

“Mostly dirty socks soaked in water, and offal,” he replied, all innocence.

“Kit!” I exclaimed, glaring at His Dad, “That’s dirty and unhygienic.”

“They were your dirty socks,” he said accusingly.

“But it probably won’t cure you,” he admitted, giggling, “I can’t believe you drank it. I was just getting you back for scaring all the birds away!”

Kit had no intention to get out of bed,

So he said to himself, “I’ll pretend I am dead.”

But alas! The dead people I’ve met didn’t breath.

So Kit’s cunning deception, I didn’t believe.

“I see that you’re breathing. It’s up time!” I said.

He groaned, “Go lick a dog’s bum. I’m staying in bed.”

“But there’s breakfast, and lessons, and then time to play.”

He said, “You Foot-fungus! Now, please go away.”

He grumped and he grumbled. He said, “What the heck?!

You Fart-sniffing, Crotch-scratching, Old Turkey Neck!”

I said, ‘Stop complaining. That’s more than enough!

I am your mum, and that’s really quite rough.

Don’t be rude to your elders. I’ll teach you to speak…”

He talked over me quickly and started to squeak,

“I don’t want to get up yet, you Snot-gobbling Goon.

Leave me to sleep now! I will get up soon.”

“You’ll regret this!” I snapped as I stormed out the door.

I needed some help. I could take it no more.

So I went to his Dad, and I said, “Did you hear?

The nerve of that Kit!” He said, “Loud and clear.

He thinks it’s okay because he’s not swearing.

He does not understand that the words have no bearing

On whether his rant will be thought impolite.

If he doesn’t say, ‘F$@* you!’ he thinks it’s all right!

Perhaps he is tired, but that’s no excuse

To direct at his Mum a tirade of abuse.”

I asked, “Why’s he tired? He was sleeping by nine.

By my calculations, he should be just fine.”

“At midnight,” he said, “Kit was not in his bed.

I caught him online. He was surfing instead.”

When I saw him I said, “Now, you go back to sleep.

He said, “Not fricking likely, you bleepity bleep.”

The words ‘fricking’ and ‘bleep’ he did not really say.

I imagine you can understand anyway.

Then he called me some names such as, ‘Scrofulous Fool

And ‘Dung-sucking, Pus-munching, Rusty Old Tool.’

I think that it’s time that we all had a word.

His insolence really is getting absurd.”

To help Kit with his moods, we conceived of a way

For him to express all that he wants to say

And all he has to do is to write it all out

The important part is that he isn’t to shout

And when he is sure he’s expressed all his ire

He will bring it to us, and we’ll set it on fire!

So farewell to Burp-turds, Bum-fungus and such

To Rancid Old Turnips, I won’t miss them much.

All unneeded adjectives, rude and unkind

We bid them farewell. Kit has left them behind.

Part 1 (scroll down for Part 2)

Long ago and far away (about last Tuesday in an imaginary world in the middle of the living room), First Aid Kit lived at the edge of the Preposterous Forest with his pet Tyrant-osaurus Rex, Tiddles. While Kit lived in a large burrow, Tiddles preferred to accommodate his substantial bulk in a purpose-built barn. The problem was that the barn was built to accommodate Tiddles at his previous size. Tiddles was a teenaged T-Rex, and he was growing like a mushroom in manure.

One day a little bird told Kit about a disused aircraft hangar on the other side of the forest. It sounded like the perfect abode for Tiddles, so they decided to move house. One morning, they packed up their things, and set off into the forest. Tiddles wore his muzzle, as he always did in public. Although he was well-trained and perfectly harmless, in Kit’s experience the muzzle discouraged passers-by from calling the police, his Mum or their local member of parliament (but not the media or all of their friends).

As they trekked through the trees, they heard a cry for help. At the edge of a deep river, they saw a young woman  struggling in the current. As she tried to swim ashore, a large crocodile was taking considerable interest in her presence. First Aid Kit grabbed the first heavy object he saw, and threw it at the crocodile. It was a saucepan from his luggage.

It is a well-known fact that crocodiles will try to eat anything that moves if they are hungry. So, when the crocodile tried to eat the saucepan, Kit and Tiddles threw the rest of their saucepans and cutlery into the river. The crocodile tried to eat it, but all the metal blunted its teeth, so it became completely harmless. The damsel-in-this-dress managed to swim to shore while the crocodile was busy annihilating its dentition.

Kit and Tiddles didn’t mourn the loss of their utensils, nor did the crocodile miss its teeth. Kit and Tiddles were tired of carrying everything; besides, it is never hard to find cutlery at a garage sale. After all, this is where all office cutlery ever purchased ends up eventually! And the crocodile was going to grow some new teeth pretty soon anyway; crocodiles average 50 full sets of teeth in their lifetimes. As they only need to eat every week or so, this crocodile was only going to miss a couple of meals before he had a full new set of pearly off-whites.

The damsel introduced herself as Bahati  (which means ‘Lucky’ in Swahili). She explained that she had been hiking when she had become separated from her friends after going off track for a tinkle. Kit blushed. Bahati had been trying to find a safe place to cross the river, when she had slipped in the mud and fallen in. She was so grateful to Kit for saving her life that she got him to write down his new address, so she could send him some replacement saucepans.

Part 2

After consulting her map, GPS unit, and compass Bahati established that, if she was going to get back to her car at the end of the road, she needed to go in a different direction to Kit and Tiddles. So, after promising to track each other down on Facebook as soon as they were back in phone range, they went their separate ways.

It was late in the evening when Kit and Tiddles decided to make camp for the night. Kit found a big tree for Tiddles to shelter under, and then dug himself a shallow burrow into the fallen leaves. They had a broken night’s sleep punctuated by falling leaves screaming, “Wheeee!” and “Ow!”

At first light, Kit went and fought some breakfast. Once he had had his fill of fire ants, they went on their way. (Tiddles had already eaten several small trees he found growing nearby. He was a vegetarian T-Rex; this was possible in the Preposterous Forest due to a preponderance of meat trees, which grew in the area.)

A few hours later, they came to a swamp. As they gingerly waded through, they heard another cry for help. First Aid Kit went into immediate action and located the source of the distress call.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake!” he muttered (having become remarkably grown up for the purposes of the story). The victim was none other than Bahati, having wandered into a patch of quicksand and got stuck. Kit tied a vine to Tiddles ankle and threw the other end to Bahati, who was soon dragged out, missing only one boot and most of her pride.

“My GPS won’t work properly because all the clouds are obscuring the satellites. So I got lost,” she explained.

“Well you don’t need obscure stalactites with First Aid Kit around,” Kit said proudly, “Tiddles here is tall enough to see over most of the trees when he stands on his tippy toes (Tiddles obligingly stood on his tippy toes). “In fact he says your car is just over there,” Kit gestured on behalf of Tiddles, who couldn’t for obvious reasons. Kit insisted on accompanying Bahati to her car, just in case she planned on tripping over and drowning in a puddle.

After leaving Bahati safely in her car, it wasn’t long before Kit and Tiddles came across the aircraft hangar. It stood near a beautiful blue lake surrounded by meat trees. It was perfect. The prevailing winds even blew away from Kit’s burrow site, which is a good thing when you are surrounded by meat trees in the summer sun. They happily unpacked and settled in.

Several weeks later a courier pigeon arrived with a delivery slip from the Forest Post. At his third closest Post outlet, waiting for Kit was a brand new set of shiny saucepans.

You will need:

1 cup sugar

½ cup canola oil

2 free range eggs

1 tsp vanilla essence

2 cups self-raising flour

1/3 cup cocoa

1 cup soy milk

1 fire extinguisher

1 warm bath

Method:

1. Run warm bath.
2. Forget to preheat oven to 175 degrees Celsius.
3. Oil a 22 cm round cake tin. Accidentally spill 1 Tbsp oil onto the counter. Set aside spilled oil for Step 5.
4. Confidently attempt to lift a bag of sugar that weighs more than you do. Teeter under its weight. Lose your balance, topple over and spill 1 cup of sugar on the counter. Retain for Step 6.
5. Step in spilled oil. Skate around kitchen counter on oily paws shouting, “Wheeeee!” Crash into wall. Fall down.
6. Scrape 1 cup of sugar off counter. In  a large bowl, beat the oil and sugar. Realise that you misunderstood the recipe, and climb out of the large bowl. Ask your Most Responsible Parent (hereafter MoRP) to help you hold the beater so you don’t fall in.
7. Spend ten minutes trying to determine how to peel a raw egg. Give up and enlist help of your MoRP. Lick remaining egg from shells. Beat eggs into oil and sugar until pale. Ask your MoRP how long it should take for you to become pale. Add the vanilla essence. Proudly measure and pour it in yourself, as it is just the right size for your tiny paws to manage. Remember that you forgot to preheat the oven, and turn it to its highest temperature to save time.
8. Sift the dry ingredients together. Eagerly lean over bowl to smell dry ingredients. Sneeze enthusiastically into dry ingredients. Pretend that you didn’t.
9. Get your MoRP to slowly add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients. Supervise them and make helpful suggestions to improve their technique. They will never improve if you don’t tell them how they are doing it wrong! Distract them by pointing at a duck out the window (they love ducks). When you think they aren’t looking, lick the spoon before putting it back into the batter. Notice ants collecting around spilled sugar.
10. Add the milk, and mix in, then pour the batter into the cake tin. Liberally spill batter onto counter top. Step in batter by mistake. Slip over in batter, and leave paw prints all the way across the kitchen counter as your MoRP marches you to the sink to clean your hind paws.
11. Incinerate cake by placing it in the oven still on its highest temperature setting.
12. Go on Facebook for 30 minutes. Step 13 to be completed by your MoRP.
13. Smell burning. Open oven. Panic. Fetch fire extinguisher. Put out cake. (If you followed the instructions correctly, ideally, it should look like a large lump of damp charcoal.) Turn off oven. Turn off smoke alarm.
14. Allow cake to cool. Throw cake in compost. Eat the ants instead. Yum!
15. Immerse yourself in warm bath to wash the batter off your fur.

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!