blanket; on; legs

g'day amigos,

School holidays. No sleeps-in, but many slow days. Days and days of humans being. Planning with Catherine, playing with Stephanie, knowing Kyla. CJ has seen Kyla through the “fourth trimester”; that first 3 month period of life during which Kyla adjusts to our Earth and we all adjust to her needs. Catherine achieved this while also parenting, supporting, loving, and enjoying 17-month-old Stephanie. Daily, I nicked off to work.

So here we are in July and Steph is 20 months old and she is talking. She speaks more each day and learns new words each day. Today her new words included: milk crate, tricky and elephant. Hearing her construct a sentence is constantly exciting. It seems that she speaks using colons; e.g. “Kyla: awake!” or “Hair: caught: bib” or “Steph: slippers: on.” Stephanie is a loving and supportive big sister of Kyla and a handy helper around the house, too. When Kyla spewed over my shoulder yesterday, Steph cried: “uh-oh,” ran to retrieve a tea-towel and used it to mop the floor.

Kyla is now 3 months old. Her emergence from the fourth-trimester twilight zone has been palpable this week. Her eyes blink in the light and head cranes around slowly, mannerisms similar to a Top End sea-turtle. Curled up on someone’s shoulder like a koala. She has settled right in to a great routine and is fit & well.

Life is quite regimented now. At work I live by the clock. Live in the shadow of an imminently sounding bell. At home I live by the timing of routines and needs of the girls. It’s reached the stage where I could nominate with extreme accuracy where I’ll be, what I’ll be doing, and what time I’ll be doing it on any day for the next 3 months. So very different to the sprawling timescales of uni research life & the unpredictability of the single man.

It’s a complete mental shift.

Fitting additional or non-routine happenings into the well-oiled machine of daily life? My first reaction is to resist. Keep it easy. Keep it simple. But recently I’ve taken up some opportunities and they have been a reminder – a reminder that life goes on outside our house. Riding to the MCG for some footy, out for a dinner date with my beautiful bride, several pints on a Thursday night. Music is playing and the vibe is grand.

Teaching has been relentless and it has been immediate. By relentless I mean that the workload and the pressures and the needs and responsibilities seem never to end. Time in the classroom is a minor part of the job, but that is where the true work is done and where the rewards are found. By immediate I mean that every issue/ concern/ catastrophe/ moment of great need that occurs seems to require an immediate response and needs one in a face-to-face context. Human interaction and the human condition engulf me all day every day – a huge shift from the social isolation of a partitioned office on the first floor of C Block with email as the sole umbilical link.

I am loving the humanity in my daily existence these days. Life right now is exhausting and is brilliantly coloured. It’s like a Papua New Guinean bird of paradise in full flight.

Go well. dave