the "umungous" jellyfish

i awoke this morning in the bean's bed (having been summoned by her in the middle of the night), and when i turned around to see what she was up to, i found her sitting up already, looking over the side of her safety rail.

without turning round to look at me, she said, "my toys are in the sea mummy. i have to rescue them and put them in the boat."

with that she got out and returned with the few soft toys that were on the floor, placing them on the bed in front of me. fearing that i would be overwhelmed with a bombardment of toys, i told her that her settee was a rock where the other toys could be safe too. she took up that idea and set the rest to safety. then she clambered back onto the bed.

"do you know the name of this boat?," she asked me, and then said, "it's a dinghy." when i posed the question back to her.

she picked up her mini bolster and said, "this is my oar. i can row with it. to get away from the umungous jellyfish. row row row," she puffed before adding, "oh no, it's stuck in the slimy kelp."

i asked her why the humungous jellyfish was chasing us. maybe it's trying to be friendly because it was lonely. but the bean said, "noooo. it wants to sting us." like i was some kind of benign moron.

when her daddy came into the room, she told her daddy to get into the dinghy as we were being chased by the jellyfish. delighted, i told dh that it's a "umungous jellyfish" but he wasn't surprised, telling me that yesterday, she told him, "it's invisible", which is why daddy couldn't see it (of course).

she's been obsessed with the dinghy and the octopus/jellyfish ever since i read her the story, the hidden forest, a well-illustrated australian book by jeanne baker. her previous book was where the forest meets the sea, which i had read to her when she was in the under 3s montessori programme. it's a book that i have been meaning to buy, but always forget.

anyway, in the hidden forest, the young protagonist, ben, is initially wary of the sea and what lurks beneath the waves and when he gets accidentally thrown overboard he imagines that something sinister is trying to grab hold of him. here, the page shows a translucent giant octopus reaching for the dinghy and ben.

the bean can't discern that this octopus is supposed to be what ben imagines and not a 'real' one, so she gets excited when we get to this page.

i recall that her first enactment from the story involved an octopus, but lately it's evolved into a jellyfish.

pink camel

I think the Bean did this drawing a few days ago, but my memory is hazy, and it could've been done a week ago. Anyhoo, I can't remember the context, but she told me that she'd drawn and coloured a camel (in one of her favourite colours). The face of the creature can be clearly discerned I think, and I have marked out where she had put the humps of the camel. The 4 legs are there too, with the space between the limbs coloured in.

It seems to be a kind of progression to a more realistic representation of animals. Certainly a development away from the blobs with stick arms and legs that stood for ALL humans and animals when she first started.

mandarin in oz

a video of justine clarke singing 'gumtree family' was on the telly just now, which prompted the bean to exclaim, "she's in australia!"
i nodded in agreement, and said, "she's australian."
to which the bean added, "she doesn't speak mandarin."

she's learnt that a lot of aussies don't speak her second language. which reminds me that i've not been using it much on her lately as well. yikes.

going on a slight tangent: it's interesting that there aren't any chinese schools in oz. i mean, there are jewish schools a plenty, and french and german schools, even a japanese school. i had been thinking about this for a while before another mama from the bean's mandarin playgroup class voiced it too. she said that she would be eager to enroll her children in one if a group of parents could set one up.

hmmm...i wonder how difficult it is to organise something like this to set up such a school? chinese parents are notoriously pushy and achievement oriented, so the teaching standards will have to be pretty high. anyhoo, an interesting thought.

kuringai wildflower garden + "a nice lady"

a nature activity
yesterday, i took the bean to a 'bush kids' program at the ku-ring-gai wildflower garden (kwg), which is a lovely bush setting. one of the kwg officers read the 16 children a graeme base book - uno's garden - before leading them to kwg's vegetable garden where they had to search for some of the creatures from the story and then do a craft project*. the kids were also shown a real blue-tongued lizard that was about a year old.

apparently the garden breeds these critters and releases them in suitable home gardens. (they survey the gardens of potential lizard adopters before giving the green light.) it's an initiative** to reintroduce more native animals into the suburban environment, whilst also introducing a 'novel' non-pesticide way to reduce snail populations in gardens: the blue-tongued lizard's favourite meal is snail.

at the end of the session the bean was very reluctant to leave ("i don't want to go home!" she wailed), so on the suggestion from the kwg officer we went down one of the trails that led to the garden's picnic area. some playground equipment there kept the bean happily occupied for a bit, but only after she had some snacks was she happy to leave with me.

kwg is a lovely bushland that is relatively civilised: there are loos, picnic areas, and stroller-friendly tracks besides a couple of more challenging ones for better walkers. we heard the tweeting of fairy-wrens as well as the croaking of frogs in the pond - all surrounded by banksias and gum trees.

however, evidence of civilisation is not far away: we can hear the roar of the traffic nearly all the time as the garden is just beside a major road. but still, it was a delightful way to spend a morning. i just wished that i had done this with the bean sooner.


the nice lady
after lunch that same day, we headed to a fabrics shop to get some haberdashery items. whilst walking down a step to the boardwalk outside the shopping centre, the bean stumbled and fell forward. i caught her in time but an elderly lady coming round the corner was quite concerned. she made a bit of fuss over the bean and then said, "isn't she beautiful!" to me.

naturally, the bean lapped it all up and when she heard the compliment, she said to me, "this is a nice lady."

the 2 of them had a short chat. the bean volunteering most of the information: we were going to buy ribbons, mummy doesn't like the colour pink, mummy likes red. then the bean did a dance - spinning round and round - in the middle of the walkway, becoming a minor obstruction for pedestrian traffic. when she finished dancing, she bowed deeply twice (because the "nice lady" didn't see her bow the first time).

when we finally said our goodbyes to the "nice lady" and walked away, the bean said, "she's old. she's a nice old lady. i did a dance for her."


* i almost forgot: the kids had slices of watermelon that was grown from one of the patches in the veg garden itself. very refreshing...i had a slice too!

** the kwg only releases lizards that are a year old or older because young ones are easy prey for magpies.