Dangling over the Thames

Tower Bridge has a glass floor. You look down on the traffic and the water, both rushing past. So many things about London in the past are strikingly just as they are today ; before Tower Bridge was built, there was only London Bridge and it got (you guessed it) too crowded. The pictures they had of London Bridge, overcrowded, were so like yesterday afternoon on Westminster Bridge. Crowded and pricy, and enjoyed anyway -- London.

My view: part London, part mini-gymnast. This is Westminster (the London) and Nina (the gymnast). 

A few pictures

Maybe this app will make it easier to post a few pictures now and then...

How could she already be 6?

Nina is 6! 
We had a party, at a local "adventure playground". The ethos of these places is that children can go there and play independently, and learn to take risks. It's the kind of playing (they hope) that we all used to do when we went out and played on our own. There is a large park near my parents' house; I used to make forts, slide down the hill in the snow, even skate on the pooled water at the bottom that used to be a tiny creek. But in London we'd never let our children just roam the streets. Anyway, this place (and the other adventure playgrounds) is free to use, but children have to be 6, and she's been counting the days. She thinks it's really unfair that most of her friends have been 6 for ages. The party was a fun mix of children from school (who I mainly don't know at all, nor the parents), and old and new friends of ours. It was fun and everyone liked the cake (Alton Brown's Devil's Food cake, with purple icing, made by me). 

Nina at her 6th birthday party

  But I'll miss her being 5. She's been such amazing fun at 5. Being in Menerbes (Provence) last year, her so happy there with Max; playing games in Highgate wood, taking her to Canada and sliding down the snowy hill in that same park, taking her to the observatory and seeing Saturn, feeling her excitement as I held her up to the telescope and she saw it for herself. Seeing her get her Student of the Week award (most recently for knowing how to prepare an artichoke; once for climbing the rope all the way to the top of the school hall), her first chess games (guided), her first delighted songs on the piano, the way she loves playing them in all kinds of different ways. She even wrote one herself.
  She noted that you can count by 9s by going up 10 and then subtracting one, so there's a pattern; that when you do that, you never get to 11, and that when you count by 2s or 3s you also never get to 11. This was Nina at 5 1/2: on her way to discovering primes. But she believes in the tooth fairy. She has lost 3 teeth. 
  I loved watching her teach Annika the little dances for the pre-primary ballet exam. There are so many things I'm not thinking of right now. She gives Annika the window seat on the bus, and makes sure Annika can win the little mini-races we do when we're walking together. 
 My point: Nina is fantastic. Happy birthday, Nina. I will miss you being 5, but we'll have tons of fun while you're 6. 

Vegetables, ice cream and innocence

We have started getting a riverford weekly organic vegetable box. I think it's been healthy for the adults in the family -- we eat considerably more bok choi and kohlrabi than we used to. It's a good thing to do, gives farmers a reliable and fair price and all that. The tomatoes and carrots have been delicious. 
  But I don't think it's been that great for the girls. After all, they won't touch a ginger and lemon stir fry with cashews, carrots and kohlrabi no matter how good I say it is (to be fair, Nina will try it and eat a little). So they end up eating a selection of creative soups (including, believe it, a soup made by pureeing a cashew, carrot and kohlrabi stir fry, which Nina in fact loved), or they have more crackers with cream cheese, carrot sticks and apple slices than is reasonable. 
  Amps is too willing (in my opinion) to bribe them with the promise of ice cream. With him away, I roasted some organic squash and some organic red peppers. I briefly cooked some organic carrots and blended Annika a soup with milk, carrot, roasted squash. Nina loved the soup, Annika said she'd have it for breakfast. They both had some nuts and milk. Whatever. Nina was still hungry, and I made a fatal error: I commented that there should be a prize for someone who eats that extra piece of squash. 
  She was really, really disappointed when the prize wasn't ice cream or chocolate. She was whiny and sulky about it.
  I remember about 4 years ago, Nina was 2, and I had a moment when I realised that any latent food issues I had would have to go. I didn't want her growing up thinking that you only eat healthy food to get to unhealthy food, or that thin people "deserved" more chocolate than larger people, or that we "deserved" a sweet treat after we did something active or something good (not that I thought those things, but these are attitudes you can find out there in "the culture"). I didn't want her growing up afraid of being fat, stigmatizing fat people, or even thinking about fat-ness and size, not as long as I could avoid it. I didn't want her thinking that what you do when you want something really fun is eat -- even if that's true. It's not the only thing people do, we do, for fun, so why should she think that way? And I think that we have pretty much managed that. We mostly eat pretty well (except maybe for Annika). Of course we enjoy treats, but we haven't typically held them up as the big reward, the most fun thing to do together. 
    Anyway there I was, Nina whining and sulking away. And I did something I wish I hadn't. I sat down beside her, pointed out her perfect muscular stomach, showed her my rather less perfect version, and started to be perfectly frank about how women feel about food, about fat, about food as a reward, about how hard it can be to consistently make healthy eating choices every day. About how most of us just don't manage it. About how there are so many people out there who worry and think about this every day, when they put on their clothes, when they meet new people, when they go to a party. About how I wanted her to have good feelings about food, and about good food - not to get in the habit of eating to get to "treat" foods. I told her some people get so intense trying to be thin that they stop eating and become very ill. I told her that if I had ice cream and chocolate every time I had healthy food I'd have to get clothes from special shops because I wouldn't fit into my normal clothes (all true, sadly enough). She looked pretty shocked.
    I hope she didn't care too much. I actually hope it didn't sink in. I feel like I got angry and took away a precious bit of innocence, and I can't ever give it back.
    I wish Amps had never started with the treats, but it's not his fault. I picked Nina up from gardening club today - planting radishes - and we went to get some hummus. We passed a few of her friends, all about 4-6 years old, each holding a styrofoam container with at least 2-3 cups of fries. Some of her friends get ice cream at the ice cream van every day -- and all this is none of my business, until I have to keep explaining that we don't do that. 
   One day she'll grow up. I'm glad it's a long way away, but it seems too close today. She'll no doubt be less perfect one day, at least in her physical perfection, though I think I'll always see her perfection. We all decay with time. I just wish the clean slate I tried to start 4 years ago could have lasted a few more years, a decade, two more decades. I wish I hadn't said all those things.  
  
 

Penguins and giraffes

Annika loves the zoo, and with my parents' kind gift last year, we are members. The London Zoo (ZSL, for Zoological Society of London) is small, and according to online reviews, it frequently disappoints visitors from places with more space and fewer high costs. It costs a fortune to go in just once (25£). As a result, it's not dysfunctionally crowded like some other child-centric places in London. It's not far from where we are, and we go there quite a bit. 
  I have many great memories of the Bristol zoo, where I used to meet up with friends fairly often. We were members there too, and it was also small, and even closer to where we lived. It has lovely flowers. Just over year ago, at the London zoo with Annika, I was impressed that she had spent 6 hours looking at animals. And I realized that I remembered Nina playing with the little toddler rides - you know, where you put a coin in and it jiggles gently for 1 minute while your child pretends they are on a bus. I remembered Nina peeing on the playground, being afraid of hand dryers in the bathroom, running on the grass, wanting to go on the inflatable slide, playing with friends, climbing things, climbing other things, splashing in the pretend creek. What I didn't remember was Nina engaging with animals. I'm sure she looked at some. I do remember taking her to see the seals, which were (naturally) swimming around. Their pool area had a gentle artificial wave-maker and I remember watching the seals and her shouting "Mummy look!  A door, a splash splash door!". She was more interested in the door that pushed the water back and forth to make waves than she was in the seals. 
  Well, Annika loves the zoo. Her favourites are the giraffes. She likes to take her toy giraffe to show the real giraffes. She wants to be a giraffe doctor when she grows up. We were there a few months ago and she watched them for half an hour, and then came home and announced that she wanted carrots, cut in sticks just like the giraffes had. The other day we were there, and the giraffes turned out not to be too interested in her toy giraffe. The penguins, however, were fascinated: 

Nina still likes the more physical things. Here she is on a swing. 
  

  

The British seaside

We did see Saturn! And while it wasn't as detailed as the picture I posted, it was amazing. The rings were so bright and so clear, and we saw Titan, too - one of Saturn's moons. Nina was so excited. It was crowded there, and we had to wait, but we got to see Mars just before they turned the telescopes on to Saturn. Everyone there was very nice to us, and they were charmed to see such an enthusiastic 5-year-old. 
   On Sunday we went to Brighton, had lunch, got a car club car, and drove along the coast. I quite like the car club (city car club), but it turns out that of the approximately 60 million UK residents, a surprisingly high portion of them were in Brighton traffic on Sunday afternoon between 2pm and 5pm. And Brighton has an infuriating one-way system, which together with road closures mean that it was very hard to leave the centre, and then it took us 30 minutes to drive the last km to return the damn thing. And of course you can only extend your booking if no one else has booked, no matter how much fun you are having at the beach. This all causes much stress. Ironic that to avoid being stuck in traffic, central London is actually a very good place to live. Anyway, we had a great time, much fun was had at the beach, and there was only one vomiting incident in the car (Annika, who said so early enough that Amps caught it in the beach bucket). 
    

It was 22 degrees and the ocean was what I would call foot-achingly cold: when you stand in it, your foot starts to ache. Nina was not deterred by this in the least. 

Information

I mentioned the other day about the book I borrowed, and the empathy I found myself expressing over the frustration of wrongly-coloured dinnerware. Another part of the same book describes the idea that giving children information and letting them make a decision is a better approach to getting cooperation than the usual suspects: lecturing them, shouting at them, telling them to pick up their coat RIGHT NOW, saying no to their unwise scheme, etc etc. I've tried it, with some success: "Annika, if toys go to nursery they sometimes get lost!" --"Oh," she says, "... um... maybe Olivia can stay in your bag". "If coats are on the stairs, we might fall" ... pause ... 
     Tonight I'm going to take Nina to the Hampstead Observatory. They have a few telescopes and Saturn is visible tonight (if it doesn't get cloudy in the next 90 minutes). Amps took Nina a few months ago and they saw the Galilean moons of Jupiter, and its bands: pretty cool. Nina was absolutely thrilled. She knows all the planets, which ones are gas giants, which is the hottest/coldest/farthest, the fact that Pluto used to be considered a planet and isn't any more. She likes reading her astronomy books and even watching astronomy documentaries on youtube (a little). I was home with Annika; these things tend to happen after bedtime. For tonight, we've booked a car club car, which I'll go and collect while Amps wakes Nina up from a deep, deep sleep. They're going to start focusing on Saturn at 10:30. Apparently it won't be visible here again for a decade; Nina will be nearly 16 by then. She's been reminding us that it will be visible in May for months now, and saying how she can't wait for May. It's May now, and amazingly, the sky is clear.
      All this reminded me of Mother's day in 2012. Nina was nearly 4. They had a little celebration at her nursery (at my work), and her key worker was reading out things the children had said that they loved about their mummies. The previous week, Nina had given me an invitation to this little party, which I had liked, and put up in the kitchen. That morning I had said I was happy to get the invitation and I was looking forward to coming. Anyway, little Sophie loved her mummy's stories, little Shiv loved his mummy taking him to the park, etc etc. Nina had said "I love my mummy because she gives me information!". Her keyworker read this out, much to the amusement of colleagues, acquaintances, and friends. Yep: it's all leaflets at our house.
     It turned out she meant the invitation, not information. We do, of course, provide plenty of information. 
     I won't be able to take pictures through the telescopes. But if all goes well, maybe we'll see (well, ok, it won't be this detailed, I'm sure - but it'll be cool):

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