June

June started with a mess and a lot of hard work. We had been seeing cracks steadily progressing across the midnight-blue bedroom ceiling for some time. That may have something to do with the fact that Tigger and a collection of gymnastic elephants regularly have clog-dancing contests in the boy’s bedrooms.

Making the great mistake of asking my brother-in-law’s advice (he is a professional house-painter) I ended up gouging out all the cracks with a sharp pointy-thing (there is a name for it but I am NOT a professional DIY guy) and filling and sanding them twice. Over my head. On hot days. The vacuum cleaner gave up the ghost shortly after I finished and I am sure that I have wonderfully smooth, white lungs now.

Needless to say I ended up looking like a post-holocaust harlequin and then I could start on the painting. Credit where credit is due, aforementioned brother-in-law did provide me with professional quality filler and paint. This is nothing like the rubbish that we mortals buy in profane shops and made life much easier, almost compensating for my total lack of skills.
Naturally the enjoyment of a perfectly smooth white ceiling (and it IS perfectly smooth and white) is marred by cruddy half-painted-over wallpaper. Thus, we also had to wall-paper the whole room. This is sufficiently complex task even if your walls are not as lunar-landscape as ours were. Once again the faithful filler and sanding machine came into play and I managed to make a sort of lunar golf-course by converting most of the cliffs and gorges into mild undulations and dells.

Putting the paper on was another learning experience. Slow and incompetent as I am I spent ages tweaking the paper over the undulations to get it smooth-ish, with the result that the next ready-glued sheet turned itself into a kind of corrugated-paper sandwich. Wallpapering requires some speed and great precision: not a good combination for me and we ended up having to buy extra paper. Fortunately Marjolein was excellent at cutting lengths and pasting them up, while I had sufficient patience to twiddle them into position. The great advantage of both being useless at this kind of thing is that we succeeded in becoming deeply unhappy with the process without actually getting very cross with each other. Given the wall-papering stories we have heard from other couples, that seems to be quite an achievement. The final result is very satisfying: we have a really nice, calm, neat bedroom now.

Falco got creative too. He drew what Dutch people call a “koppoter” in playschool: a “head-on-legs”, which is the first stage of drawing for infants. He stated firmly that it was a bear, which is consistent. He aways knows exactly what he is drawing and mostly has a story to go with it. Falco loves making up elaborate plays and dialogues with his toys and also makes up stories to go with his picture books. He is the only one of the three who is consistently careful with books. He has never torn any of them and puts them neatly back in his bookcase.

Falco is however a real child and would spend all day watching television given half a chance or even a momentary weakening of our iron wills. He got yet more horribly mobile this month, cycling away from us on his little bike and side-wheels, there he goes…
Everything is lions and elephants with him right now, whenever you go for a walk there are crocodiles and hippopoBAMs in the pond and anything that is lost is “in Africa”. Two pairs of sandals and the remote of the DVD player are on safari right now and we are hoping they have not emigrated. We shall send Stanley after the remote soon, as the DVD player has not many buttons of its own and nobody seems able to provide a film anymore without at least six layers of menus: Falco’s solution is to just keep pressing play until something happens or God ends the world.

It was also time for the “Avondvierdaagse”, the “Four Evenings Walk”, in the Netherlands. This involves school-age children doing a five-kilometre walk each evening for four days. At the end they get a flowers and a little medal. It was Matthijs’ second time and of course Matthijs could practically do 5km on his head. He regularly runs huge distances just round and round our sitting room, so no worries there.

Daniel was along for the first time and of a much more sedentary disposition. For Daniel a five-kilometre climb and swing would work better or perhaps a 0.00 kilometre lie in a chair and watch cartoons…. Needless to say it was rather hard work for Papa (Marjolein weaselled out) as he needed to have omnipresence and super-stretch arms to cope with the one running ahead and the other lagging behind. Matthijs sprinted ahead with his hyper-active school friend in an attempt to lose himself in the side-streets or get into a really good car-accident and Daniel hunkered down to trade thoughts with ants on the pavement while everyone stepped over him.

Despite various interesting moments and getting massively lost because Matthijs suddenly discovered he needed a toilet, we managed all four evenings and went marching proudly into the centre of Haarlem with brass-bands blaring and crowds of other people’s relatives waving (weasel two) to collect our flowers and medals. The boys were genuinely proud of their achievement and kept the flowers in vases in their rooms for some weeks afterwards; for long after they had stopped being “nice flowers”, of course.

The madness continues. School organised a pirate-themed outing in the dunes and the two boys got dressed up and face-painted as fearsome buccaneers. Naturally Falco could not be left out so Marjolein had a complete criminal brood that day; all with tremendous curly moustaches as you can see. They were very jolly pirates and sang pirate songs at every opportunity.

Falco also had an outing with his playschool to celebrate the joint (how efficient) birthday of the teachers. There was a short train-journey to Santpoort-Noord and lots of running around in a big playground, rounded off with crisps and prezzos: he was tired and satisfied.

Father’s day came round again. It is, of course the primitive, apelike cousin of Mothering Sunday and seems relatively untainted by crass commercialism that would result in me getting some tawdry trifle like a CD or a Porsche. I was roused late-ish by Marjolein and the cheerful toads, who were shining with pride at all the handicrafts they had created. Falco was quite determined that he had made his (painted rock) for him; after he was tricked into giving it to me he was pretty happy having the shiny wrapping paper instead. Matthijs had made a beautiful painted plate at school, which he presented to me loaded with a Dutch school’s idea of breakfast: rusks with butter and jam. It was also the boys’ idea of breakfast so they used me as a table and handy crumb-collector while they feasted. Daniel had made a typically detailed and carefully crafted picture which he presented with great soleminity: doing things by the book as usual. A good time was had by all. There is something to be said for having your three healthy (heavy) sons wake you up on Father’s day.

The third week was tropical and we sent them off into the garden to drown each other with buckets. The water pistols were all busted, the paddling pool sprang a leak but the dog’s basket worked as a replacement. Improvising is 80% of parenthood and the toads were happy as long as they could soak each other.

Jimmy the dog should have had an operation this month to remove a growth on his hind leg. There was no way to know what is was without extensive analysis and unfortunately the vet’s holiday replacement was not confident of her ability to handle such an extensive growth so it will have to happen next month. It does not seem to bother him: though he is getting on a bit (he is eight and a half and dogs of his size generally live to be eleven or so) he still bounces around like a puppy when you throw a ball. He is such a cheerful, playful dog that we always think of him as young, but we have noticed that he is a little bit slower and less bouncy than he used to be: Jimmy is gradually turning into an old dog.

Matthijs has be on about earning and spending money all year, though he is dreadful at keeping track of it. One day Marjolein discovered that there was no paper left in the printer and I found Matthijs outside with a crate of self-made and decorated paper aeroplanes, selling them door-to-door round the square. He was asking 50 cents a time and had already made three euros from various people who could not resist the grin and the curls, particularly when our neighbour’s little girls came along too. It was hard to decide what to do about it: I don’t really approve of my children asking other people for money, but it was very enterprising and as far as Matthijs could make out just as legitimate as the corner shop selling him sweeties for money.

There are also problems with having very enterprising children. As one point we were sitting in our office/study when we heard noises from upstairs AND outside that set the parent-intuition alarm bells ringing. We stormed up to Matthijs’ room to find him and Daniel outside the window on the slanted, tiled roof and Falco stretching his arms out of the window to be pulled up. They had piled up a couple of chairs and opened the plastic kiddo-proof window-locks without any trouble. Two cardiac arrests and some very careful grabbing later they were safe again and spankings followed.

In the debriefing that followed we learned that Matthijs had been out there before (!) and that Daniel was convinced that he would be able to hang on by his fingers like Spider Man. Marjolein had great difficulty convincing him that that would not work and that he would really and truly fall down and hurt himself if he walked around on the roof.
We keep the toads away from some scary/violent stuff, but we had not considered that they might believe they were able to do what Superman or Mr Incredible can do… Maybe the DVDs should have a “Dangerous Fantasy Capability” warning sticker on as well…

 

Piratesong & biking Falco
3.8 Mb, .wmv file