Little Horrors

The ones at school I mean, for insisting to Amy that Santa is your mother. She demanded I tell her the truth yesterday. I evaded the question - "What do you think? What do you want to belive?" and "Maybe they don't know because they are Japanese, and Santa is a European, a NZ, a Christian thing and they don't know anything about it". Hopefully the whole question will just fade away and they will be talking of other things today. She has her second influnza shot today, I would take the opportunity to talk to her about not letting her younger sister hear nasty rumours about Santa's reality, but I think I'll get her Daddy to take her, since I don't want Erica in a germy public hospital pediatric clinic if I can help it.

Erica is having fun kissing everyone! She left a mark on Amy's cheek! On the downside, she is not sleeping well at night. You know when you are tired when you blink and your eyes don't open again. Mums and night workers know the feeling, and we have plenty of both in our family so they are many of you who know what I mean.

She naps in the evening at the right time to enable me to spend some valuable time with her big sisters at bedtime, reading. This is so important right now, as Amy has just caught on, and is reading Roald Dahl's "Magic Finger" and a Little Red Riding Hood Ladybird Book. We discovered we have seven Little Red Riding Hood stories at home, eight if you cound Lena's dance for her ballet concert - as well as the Ladybird book, I have a book of original Grimm's stories, a beautifully illustrated fairytales book I had bought previously, a small travel-size compendium of nursery rhymes, songs, poems and stories with it, a Japanese translation of the Grimm story, the Mell doll book that came with the clothes set that Lena got for Chrismtas, and a tiny mention of the story in another book, which I claim as my favorite because it distilled the story down to two images and two lines: Before the Wolf, (grandma in bed) and After the Wolf (grandma tied up under the bed, Wolf waiting in the bed).

(She just came home from school absolutely full of a grand scheme she has devised - she has promised to make her friend a hood for a play of Little Red Riding Hood she is producing with her buddies. Clearly there has been no more talk of Santa today, phew!)

Meanwhile Lena is continuing to get bullied at kindy. We wrote a note to the teacher, and they said they taught the whole class what kind of things they should and shouldn't say and do to other kids, which seems to have worked, as she reported a 'wonderful' day today, and she played with Maya, who is otherwise the ringleader. Maya seems to be a fair weather friend only. (This is not the Maia who Lena went to English kindy with)

Meanwhile little Erica wakes again just as her sisters go to sleep, all bouncing and smiling and ready to play! She doesn't go to sleep until between 11-12, then wakes again for a snack at 2 or 3, and my alarm goes off at 6am. It's starting to catch up to me! But I always have the option of napping with Erica in the morning after the older girls go to school. I slept from 8am til 11:20am on Tuesday!