The limits of Lady P's imagination

Lady P's imagination is running wild right now.

The downsides are the occasional bout of night terrors, and her concerns about someone called 'the woo', who apparently lives under the headboard of her bed.

The upside is that she is constantly entertaining herself.

She can play Doctor with a chopstick and some salad servers as her surgical equipment. Two boxes are her 'robot shoes'.

'I'm wearing my robot shoes' 

This workout equipment on the greenbelt near our house is alternately a seesaw, and her house - so you have to knock before entering.

Cushions are stepping stones. The cardboard tube from the roll of Christmas wrapping paper is a horse, and sometimes a broomstick.

Most inanimate objects can be talked to. The turtle candle holder on our outside table gets a blow by blow account of cars passing by. Her toy moose is instructed to watch her jumping. And her favourite, 'Doggie', apparently insists on being cuddled during the scary bits of The Gruffalo's Child.

Yet, despite reading the story, moving the stupid thing every night, and telling him if she's being good in a stage whisper, she has absolutely no interest in communicating with the Elf on the Shelf.

Me: 'Look, that cheeky elf is eating a banana chip!'
Lady P (apathetically): 'Uh huh'.

The popular seasonal bribery is just not working on our Lady P. And while exasperated, I am equally proud of her contrariness and independent thinking.

A Tale of Five Trees

The two beautiful tall palm trees we had to remove, because they were touching the overhead power cables (as I whined about a couple of months ago).

SoCal electricity sent around a crew to do it, slice by slice, as they shimmed down on their crampons with a chainsaw and a machete hanging off their belt. It was surprisingly quick: moments later our house looked bald.

The two large potted palms we replaced them with.

They are not as tall or as beautiful, but they will give us some of the dappled shade and rustling leaves that the old palms used to provide. The earnest dude at the garden centre whose advice we asked said they wouldn't be happy in the pots after about 10 years. When pressed though he conceded they wouldn't look unhappy.  To be honest, at the risk of sounding callous, even if they're crying on the inside so long as they put on a brave face and look good, I'll be satisfied. In the hope that in ten years time we have a proper garden to plant them in, we went ahead and bought them. So far they don't look too unhappy.

And finally, the one proud, perfectly shaped Noble fir we bought last weekend, and decorated to the strains of Silver Bells.

On hoaxes, bomb threats, jitters and career suicide

There were lots of jitters around Hermosa and Manhattan Beach schools last week. On Monday, Wednesday and again on Friday a bomb threat was dialled in, targeting the local high school. The one Lady P's preschool is right next door to. On Monday and Wednesday the school was 'just' on lock down. Urgh, just typing that makes my stomach flip. On Friday they closed the high school, Lady P's Montessori, and the elementary school on the same campus.

I bemoaned these events in a 'this country!' way to my sister, who reminded me that when we were growing up various buildings were sometimes closed because of IRA bomb threats. None of the threats ever materialized in our home town, and I don't think I was particularly scarred by the existence of those threats.

Still, I was away from home during those first two threats last week, on a work trip to Florida. Reading about bomb scares when you're far from home does not help soothe the jitters.

Now I'm in Florida again and my goodness those jitters have spread big time: all the schools within the LA Unified School District were closed down because of another bomb scare. Our local schools are not in LA USD (in fact we moved here because LA USD has such a poor reputation) and remained open. But still, when 700,000 students are sent home it's hard to feel entirely comfortable with Lady P being in the classroom. And it's not like she has finals to sit for. But being the parent away from home, and knowing as I do that TLOML has an overwhelmingly busy work schedule, I didn't really want to call him up and suggest we (he) kept her home.

Fortunately for my peace of mind, he got the jitters too, and picked Lady P up early from school so she could spend most of her day with our former nanny. I know, I know, the whole thing was probably a hoax and she was perfectly safe at Montessori. But still, it's nice to know she's nowhere near a school today.

I'm heading home tomorrow and planning a significant change of lanes on my career path. In a totally unsurprising, mother-of-a-young-child move, I've decided I want to travel much less (okay, not at all), and I don't really care if that means sacrificing my career goals. Being home would not stop the jitters, but it would make it much easier to act on them. And if Lady P is at all disturbed by the changes to her school schedule, the 'lock downs' and the half-empty classrooms, it will be nice to be around to soothe her jitters too.

Happily, of course, Lady P is completely oblivious. Long may it stay that way. In which case I can use the time I no longer spend travelling doing fun stuff like baking cookies.

Things I gave thanks for this Thanksgiving

This Thanksgiving I was thankful for a holiday that is all about eating and drinking with family or friends or both, carries no gift giving obligations, and tees up a three day weekend very nicely.

I was also thankful for a table that was big enough to seat seven adults and three toddlers. An oven big enough to hold a 17lb turkey. And I was thankful that as a result that we could be, at last, the ones who host the Thanksgiving 'orphans'. That just felt really nice, in the new house and all.

I was thankful for all our lovely guests and all the food they brought. And thankful that this is a holiday where everyone brings something (even if it means you end up with enough cranberry sauce to drown an actual living turkey in).

And finally, I was thankful that no-one saw fit to bring this turkey shaped ice cream cake:

The historic sights of ye olde Hermosa

I just overheard a woman telling her daughter, as they walked past our house, 'Hermosa Beach is an old beach town'.

I suppose everything's relative. But only in California, surely, would Hermosa be considered old. It was farmland up until just over 100 years ago and was incorporated as a city in 1907.

The woman's bold claim reminded me of this tourist map I picked up a couple of months ago. We were expecting an influx of visitors, including my parents, closely followed by my sister and her family. I wanted to be sure I had all 'things to do in Hermosa' bases covered.

As you can probably tell from the map, even at this size, there's not a lot of ground to cover. All of those blue and red dots are shops, gyms, bars and restaurants. The squares are historical sites. Not a tonne of them, are there?

They include some murals painted in the 2000s, a 9/11 memorial, and the surfer's walk of fame which I believe was started in 2003. So far, so not very historic. Oh, and a windmill from 1903. So there is that, at least.

The thing is, Hermosa just isn't old enough: there haven't been many people living here for long enough to create any real (as in, old) history.

Fortunately for our guests, if you like wandering along the greenbelt, grabbing a coffee, and relaxing on the beach there is still plenty to do. So my parents were happy enough. And we found enough to amuse my sister, her surfer husband, and their 5 year old twins on the days they weren't driving to Disneyland or the California Science Center. On top of the beach, the strand path and the parks, there is Hermosa Beach fire station: children who ask nicely can look around, and will even be given a fire hat and a sticker. Now that's something they should put on the 'Sights of Hermosa' map.