A delightful package in the post today. Doctor Who convention Gallifrey One is legendary for its ribbon exchanges between fans, and I was completely squeeful when Erika and Deb of Verity! told me that they had organised a Verity ribbon for this year’s convention.

It says “Brilliantly Opinionated.”

“Make sure you save one for me,” I seem to remember saying, or something along those lines.

WELL.

What they did, those splendid women, along with our fellow podcasters Liz and Katrina, and Katrina’s fellow podcaster Nicholas (AKA THE RIBBON MULE) is they collected as many Gallifrey ribbons as they could, just for me. I was so excited that I kept the parcel un-opened until I had picked Raeli up from home (getting her in the right frame of mind first by playing her the section of the Ood Cast album Dirty Little Geeks in which Laura Sigma sings about going to Gallifrey and COLLECTING RIBBONS BABY, GIVE ME ONE MORE RIBBON UH-HUH).

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Superheroes are hot right now. So hot, in fact, that some of the merch (occasionally) gets targeted at girls.

When sparkly pink and black retro Batgirl, Supergirl and Wonder Woman t-shirts first turned up in the girls section of Target a couple of years ago, I bought them for my daughter Raeli because I thought they were awesome. Luckily, she agreed with me, and they came at the beginning of a long and fun (and occasionally frustrating) journey of discovering comic book heroes together.

For the next year, though, the only superhero t-shirts I found were “for boys” and though I grabbed a couple I thought she would like, she immediately recognised the dark blue and black code as not being “for her” and rejected them. (she has since got over this and I suspect still regrets the loss of the awesome plain black Batsymbol t-shirt that her younger sister wore as a dress for 3 years because it was enormous on her)

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A friend of mine likes to point out to her children when they are having idyllic childhoods. Picnics by the river, cuddling piles of squealing kids on a trampoline, gingerbread daleks at Christmas. IDYLLIC CHILDHOOD. Of course, they never do stop and appreciate the moment for what it is – but maybe, maybe pointing it out to them will freeze a photograph style image in their head that they can pull out as an adult.

It also gives us a chance to let the usual layers of maternal guilt slide away for a few minutes and appreciate that, sure, we do so many things wrong, and so many other things just to get by, and there’s no such thing as perfect parents or perfect children, but right this second, we’re doing a good job and they are good kids, and these are the bits we want to remember when they’re glued to Playstation 2020s and grunting unintelligibly at us.

There are many days of their childhood that are so far from idyllic, with the TV blaring and the kids wanting (or actively trying) to kill each other, the days when the lack of a cup of tea can be the difference between making it to 6 o clock or everybody falling in a heap.

“Look, idyllic childhood moment, over there! You go run after it while Mummy has a sit down and breathes into this brown paper bag.”

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I have been working on my novel edits, honestly, even if they have brought along with them the most titanic attempts of procrastination than I have ever experienced before.

My favourite clanger that I caught in the manuscript yesterday is that if you’re going to use the metaphor that a character “glued himself” to his computer it probably shouldn’t be in the same sentence where he had just made himself a peanut butter sandwich. I just couldn’t stop staring at that sentence! It’s been there for YEARS.

My major achievement for the weekend, though, was something I have been fretting about for, well, years. When we moved into this house seven and a half years ago, with a brand new baby, we came from a compact 2 bedroom unit to a sprawling four bedroom house with lots and lots and LOTS of cupboard space. Naturally we exploded into the house like a cannon, filling every available corner with our (apparently compressed far too tightly) stuff.

The house was so big to us that we spent the first year or so of it living in only half, heating only half (turned out doing that saved no money btw) and sleeping with our baby in the master bedroom at the front of the house. The three bedrooms at the back were, well. Storage. Okay, a couple of studies and… anyway. We were especially cavalier with the built in cupboards because there were so many of them.

When we finally moved little Raeli into her own room at the age of two and a half (we malingered on the decision a bit because we didn’t want her at completely the other end of the house to us – took ages to realise we could move down there too, into one of the little rooms) we focused on the important things: a big girl bed, space for her toys, and so on. Kids have a lot of stuff, it’s true, but she was still tiny and certainly wasn’t going to be using hanging space any time soon.

The room was hers but the cupboards were basically still ours. As indeed were all the cupboards.

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So, Enid Blyton. I don’t even know where to start with talking about Enid Blyton books, and the influence they had on my reading as a child. I know that I was reading chapter books early enough that I don’t recall starting, and that when I was 4-5 my Dad moved away for a year and sent me a book a week – Blyton paperbacks, for the most part. I remember walking to the Post Office to collect my regular parcel!

I know that I read and loved the mystery and adventure books – The Famous Five, the Secret Seven, The Adventure Of and The Mystery Of – and those characters and stories are deeply entangled in my heart. I also loved the random children books, and the various Toy stories, especially Amelia Jane (I think I was always a bit old for Noddy). But thanks to some world travelling in my mid-childhood years, I sold almost all of my collection, and the ones I cared about enough as an adult to re-acquire were not those ones at all.

Instead, the Blyton books I was most desperate to own again, and to reread, were the school stories and the magical classics: Malory Towers, St Clares, Naughtiest Girl, Faraway Tree and the Wishing Chair.

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We have survived Jemima’s birthday! I wanted to do something special for her because she missed out on a party last year, as the whole family was sick, and ever since January when half the people she knew had birthday parties, she has been wondering where hers is. A year is a long time between two and three…

The Alice in Wonderland theme was, admittedly, my plan because I figured it was one of the last birthdays where I would get to decide the theme instead of having to incorporate whatever crazymadawesome ideas my daughter thought up for herself.

I think I made the right call.

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Australia won two gold medals last night, which is lovely, especially for champion cyclist Anna Mears and champion hurdler Sally Pearson, who actually won the medals in question, and are both understandably elated.

But I’ve been far more interested in how Australians have reacted to NOT winning the expected number of gold medals over the last week and a half. This is the first time I’ve watched an Olympics with an animated, interested primary age child (in some cases, thanks to hanging out with friends, several children) who is capable of understanding a good deal of what’s going on, and it has made a huge impact on how angry I have got about the coverage.

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We have a new TV. This is a big deal for us because the previous TV had been with us for 14 years – I bought it with the first cheque I earned as a writer! Also, Raeli hates any change at all and got immediately sad and nostalgic about the old one as soon as the new TV was wheeled in.

But oh my. It’s not a super fancy TV by today’s standards, but it’s big and lovely and clear and we got Apple TV around the same time – so not only can we look at iTunes purchases and DVD rentals (and subscribing to BBC iPlayer OMG), once you combine the whole thing with AirParrot I can mirror my computer on the TV and thus can finally screen my Digital Theatre purchase from December on an actual screen. And oh yes, it’s been a great distraction this week as we sat out our quarantine misery.

Given that Raeli was still lying wanly on the couch from her week of fever and dreadfulness, and that Jem was napping in the midst of her own fever and dreadfulness, it seemed a good time to give in to her occasional request to watch David Tennant and Catherine Tate in Much Ado About Nothing.

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Home for the second day in a row with a flu-sick seven year old. It’s not fun. Poor thing has high temperatures and even higher misery levels. At least yesterday, Jem was at daycare, but today she’s home, she’s cranky and bored because her sister is a whole lot of no fun, and she feels ripped off because she was expecting a fun day of Glammer adventures today (I told my mum to stay away from the quarantine zone).

All this, and Raeli missed school pictures today too! We’re all pretty blah.

So the house is on full sick day mode – the freezer is full of homemade icy poles, the larder is overflowing with croissants and jelly beans (essential supplies, along with lemon squash and butter menthols) and I’ve cracked out the new Young Justice DVD I picked up from Big W the other day. It’s pretty good so far, though… gender issues ahoy! I look forward to when their lineup gets a bit more balance in it. One girl is not enough, especially when she isn’t introduced until after ALL the boys.

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My daughter adored this vid, so I thought I’d better archive it on my blog so she can rewatch multiple (more) times. She loves Van Gogh’s work so much, and studies it about as intently as any seven year old possibly could – recreating his better known paintings in chalk and biro. Not sure if she’d quite go this far though…