Ruth's bach at Hokio.

It was a huge kerfuffle getting there, but once the kids were asleep cuddled up together and I was sitting in the calm bach kitchen, tummy full of Green and Black's Hot Chocolate, listening to Country Life on National Radio it seemed worth it. The cat stayed at the vets' cattery, the stick insect had a nice big lid of water and some Kanuka. The children said their plans for the holiday were to play and play and play and play and play and then play in the sand dunes and play in the sand and play on the beach. I think they acheived that.

My plans were similar. On Saturday Babs and I wrote the slides for our Rainbow In My Head workshop on Attachment Parenting. For fun we had thought we would do them on a laptop in a cafe as if we were smartly dressed professionals during the week, but, of course, kids intervened. Babs' baby decided not to have any breastfeeds that whole morning and so she needed to be on tap for when he noticed his hunger. So we spent a glorious sunny day typing in the back room, but we laughed enough that it counted as play for me.

On Sunday Sean and I left the children there with Anne and popped in to town for my role-playing, a few hours of car conversation and to drop a big lump of driftwood off at Playcentre.

Today we dawdled about getting ready to go.

Here are two stories Hazel told me one morning while we were pretending that I was Flora (the little sister) and she was Hannah (the big sister) and the canopied bed was our spaceship.

The Bad Bear

Deep in the forest there was a bad bear and this bear ate up children but was scared of adults. One day he saw a kid walking with an adult into the forest. He decided that he would chop the child's hands off and then he would eat her, leaving the bones out, but fighting with the adult. But then he ate the adult; forgetting that he ate children not adults and he ate the kid, every single kid and adult that he saw he ate from then on. But one adult and one kid didn't go into the forest at all

They were sensible, they were sensible,
They were sensible, they were sensible,
They stayed away, from the bear,
They stayed away, from the bear,
They stayed alive, they stayed alive,
Anyone who likes dark they should go
Into the dark forest
Into the dark bear's belly.

(The last part is a song.)

The Baby who Needed Looking After

Once upon a time there was a baby who needed looking after who was just a toddler. In the daytime the baby went to creche. She played in the water and washed her hands in a basin of wavy salt water. People looked after her there but people didn't at her home. When people came to pick up the other children she reached her arms up to be picked up but the adults said,
"I'm sorry but my family is full of children."

And then one day as she was walking along the path back to her home on the other side of the wood a wolf swallowed her whole, but luckily she took the teeth into the belly and then she came out with a family who the wolf had swallowed already. They waited for nightfall and as it yawned and wasn't looking they leapt out of its mouth leaving the tongue behind them so it could still lick ice-creams (but it couldn't bite anymore because it didn't have any teeth anymore. So it couldn't be able to bite its favourite foods, but maybe ice-cream was its favourite). The family said
"You can be our toddler" and then they bought a pink dog.