I slipped off my tshirt and put it down, then I pulled down the briefs and let them fall to my feet.

Now, you know that trick you do, where you take one foot out but then you flick them up with the other foot and catch them? Yeah, well I did that.

Only it was first thing in the morning, and I must still have been a little tired, a little off balance.

So when I tried to flick them up with my foot, they flew up, but not far enough. They didn’t go up, so much as across the room.

Into the toilet.

Which my daughter had just used.

And she’s a bit lazy when it comes to flushing.

Fuck.

Once she got the hang of how they worked, she insisted that I give her a quiz on them. So I drew up a page with two columns and wrote some random numbers in the first column. Her job was to write the equivalent Roman numeral in column two.

She got a couple of the easy ones, like 8 and 11 but then she got to something like 37, and rendered that as III VII. You could see her brain working and things clicking into place as I explained how to do it properly. She then blitzed pretty much all the numbers under 100. I inlcuded my birth year, 1972 and had to hold her hand through that one but she did well.

One of the last ones was 309. It was the only number I’d given her with a zero in it. She asked me “How did they write zero?”

I said “there was no zero”.

After a second or two she asked in reply, “Well how did they blast off rocket ships?”

It’s brilliant.

We’re staying with friends who live on the main street. Which is nice.

Anyway, around this time of year, what with all the colour and summerness of the place, I like to whack a colour film in my Holga and set out to take that quintessential summer photo.

I took the kids to the beach this morning: my two and our friends’ son. He saw the Holga and wanted to know if it was a real camera. My eldest explained to him that it was a Toy Camera that took real photos.

The boy was trying to look at the back of it. I could tell why.

“Doesn’t it have a screen?” he asked.

“A screen?” I said. “It doesn’t even have batteries.”

I thought, being the forward thinking type, it would be a good idea to sign my girls up right then. Sure, neither of them could read or write but this was probably their only shot of getting their firstname.lastname@ combination. Generations of kids below us will be consigned to a world of email addresses that will need to have their year of birth or arbitrary characters appended to their first.last base.

Signing them up at birth (theirs, gmail’s) was the least I could do to give them a sense of ownership over their own names.

With little miss L, I was able to secure her first.last combination. With little miss M though, her first.last was taken, so I signed her up twice. So when she’s a bit older she’ll have the choice of first.middle or first.m.last. Thing is, her middle name is way cooler than her first name, so I’m glad I’ve given her the option. I missed out on her first.last combination because, I’m sure, of my wife’s insistence on giving her the most popular first name going at the time. But let’s not go there.

I was mentioning this to a colleague this morning and he suggested that couples having kids now might actually want to consider going so far as finding out which gmail combinations are still available before committing to a name for their kids.

Wish I’d thought of that four years ago.

The one thing we did seem to settle on was Herbie Goes Bananas. Strange choice for a 5yo girl, I thought but I was a bit of a Herbie fan when I was around 10, so I thought if nothing else, I might get a giggle out of it.

Anyway, it was a hit. They both loved it and have watched it again every day this last week (it’s due back today). There’s a good bit of info floating around on it but the standouts are that they used 26 prop Herbies in the making of it, and there’s one scene where a prop Herbie is thrown overboard from a ship. And word has it, is still there. The IMDB says that the prop Herbies were auctioned off after filming for as little as US$25 but in the film a couple of them get beaten up pretty badly (that bullfight was savage) so they were probably lucky to get that much.

So yesterday, C went to Brickbuster again with Little Miss L and came back with not only The Love Bug but also Herbie Fully Loaded, so Herbieville here at the mo.

Little Miss M is in her second viewing of HFL right now. The good parts are the original Love Bug soundtrack and Lindsay Lohan’s winning smile. The not so good is the stupid eyelids they put on the VW and the electric, sparky fx. Still, they probably had to do something with all those CG artists employed by the studio.

The highlight of HFL though, is when Matt Dillon looks under the hood (or the boot, in this case) to have a go at sabotaging the engine, and you know that cute little bug is gonna squirt oil in his face, it’s just a matter of when, and then maybe you think he might not do it because it’s an old gag and this is a new movie, the dramatic irony is intense, but then HE DOES IT!!

Comedy gold.

And in yesterday’s paper I was checking out the prices of old veedubs.

Little Miss M saw the chevapchichis (I have no idea how to spell that) and said “Look at the salami fish fingers!”

They’re so cute when they’re three.

C: What have I seen her in?

Me: Playschool.

C: Yeah, that’s it.

I put this to Little Miss L, explaining the concept of compromise. But she still saw that she was being dictated to, so even meeting half-way was still an infringement on her liberty and was therefore inherently unfair. (Articulate little thing, she is.)

So when diplomacy fails, C did what any parent would do under the circs: she bribed her to wear the originally picked-out outfit. There may have been the promise of chocolate or unfeasibly large lollipops in the offing; I don’t know the details. And the C-picked outfit went on and all was right with the world.

Then C walked in on me as I was doing up my shoes…

“You’re not wearing that, are you?”

For a start, they wouldn’t have been my choice. Having experienced the fallout of buying her presents with as many as 20 or 30 small parts, you learn pretty quickly that small parts don’t stay together for very long. Pretty soon you’re finding small dolls’ shoes, mini plastic bananas, dolls’ house plates, cups and bottles, toy money, flash cards, tic-tac-toe pieces, My Little Pony combs and assorted bits of train track all over the house. Last week she got into the trivial pursuit box, so we’re still finding bits of yellow pie under the couch.

Why then, oh why would we want to go out and buy her a toy that openly boasts on the box that it contains 800 small, fiddly, and yes… round pieces, 600 of which would invariably end up under the fridge. I somehow knew from the outset that it was a bad idea. This was a week ago.

Today, this (from which I will hereunder quote):

The New South Wales and ACT governments have banned a popular toy called Bindeez – because the colourful beads release a compound closely resembling the illegal drug GHB when they are swallowed.
…

NSW Fair Trading Minister Linda Burney has announced an immediate product recall pending further testing.

“We will advise parents as more information comes along but if you have Bindeez in your home, please remove them from anywhere where children can actually get to them, play with them and use them,” she said.

Miss L had a party on the weekend. She scored two smaller boxes of the things.

With any luck we’ll get a refund. Though I’m thinking I could make more by selling them to the crackheads down West Terrace this Saturday night.

Actually, do you think I could get my mother-in-law arrested for being a pusher?