Day 73: A fourth-generation friendship
Oh man, am I exhausted.
I've known my friend Kim for longer than we remembered. Until Zoe was born, I thought the connection was purely that our grandmothers knew each other. After Zoe was born, and we gave her my birth mother's name as her middle name, Kim's mother sent me a message indicating that she knew my mother. More on that in a moment.
Kim and I must have interacted when we were small, because it predates my memory of her. My earliest memories are of being a pen pal with her when she lived in Kingaroy. She had a stint in South Carolina, and then in my late high school years, she moved relatively close to me, at Albany Creek, and we got to have a small amount of actual physical contact.
Then I moved to Canberra, and she moved to Melbourne, and it was only due to the wonders of Facebook that we reconnected while I was in the US.
Fast forward many years, and we're finally all back in Brisbane again. Kim is married and has a daughter named Sarah who is a couple of years older than Zoe, and could actually pass of as her older sister. She also has as a younger son. Since we've been back in Brisbane, we've had many a play date at each other's homes, and the girls get along famously, to the point where Sarah was talking about her "best friend Zoe" at show and tell at school.
The other thing I learned since reconnecting with Kim in the past year, is that Kim's aunt and my mother were in the same grade at school. Kim actually arranged for me to have a coffee with her aunt when she was visiting from Canberra, and she told me a bunch of stuff about my Mum that I didn't know, so that was really nice.
Kim works from home part time, and I offered to look after Sarah for a day in the school holidays as an alternative to her having to go to PCYC holiday care. Today was that day.
I picked up Zoe from Sarah this morning, as it was roughly in the same direction as Kim's place, and made more sense, and we headed over to Kim's place to pick up Sarah. We arrived only a couple of minutes later than the preferred pick up time, so I was pretty happy with how that worked out.
The plan was to bring Sarah back to our place, and then head over to New Farm Park on the CityCat and have a picnic lunch and a play in the rather fantastic playground in the park over there.
I hadn't made Zoe's lunch prior to leaving the house, so after we got back home again, I let the girls have a play while I made Zoe's lunch. After some play with Marble Run, the girls started doing some craft activity all on their own on the balcony. It was cute watching them try to copy what each other were making. One of them tried gluing two paper cups together by the narrow end. It didn't work terribly well because there wasn't a lot of surface to come into contact with each other.
I helped the girls with their craft activity briefly, and then we left on foot to walk to the CityCat terminal. Along the way, I picked up some lunch for myself at the Hawthorne Garage and added it to the small Esky I was carrying with Zoe's lunchbox in it. It was a beautiful day for a picnic. It was warm and clear. I think Sarah found the walk a bit long, but we made it to the ferry terminal relatively incident free. We got lucky, and a ferry was just arriving, and as it happened, they had to change boats, as they do from time to time at Hawthorne, so we would have had plenty of time regardless, as everyone had to get off one boat and onto a new one.
We had a late morning tea at the New Farm Park ferry terminal after we got off, and then headed over to the playground. I claimed a shady spot with our picnic blanket and the girls did their thing.
I alternated between closely shadowing them around the playground and letting them run off on their own. Fortunately they stuck together, so that made keeping track of them slightly easier.
For whatever reason, Zoe was in a bit of a grumpier mood than normal today, and wasn't taking too kindly to the amount of turn taking that was necessary to have a smoothly oiled operation. Sarah (justifiably) got a bit whiny when she didn't get an equitable amount of time getting the call the shots on what the they did, but aside from that they got along fine.
There was another great climbing tree, which had kids hanging off it all over the place. Both girls wanted to climb it, but needed a little bit of help getting started. Sarah lost her nerve before Zoe did, but even Zoe was a surprisingly trepidatious about it, and after shimmying a short distance along a good (but high) branch, wanted to get down.
The other popular activity was a particularly large rope "spider web" climbing frame, which Sarah was very adept at scaling. It was a tad too big for Zoe to manage though, and she couldn't keep up, which frustrated her quite a bit. I was particularly proud of how many times she returned to it to try again, though.
We had our lunch, a little more play time, and the obligatory ice cream. I'd contemplated catching the CityCat further up-river to Sydney Street to then catching the free CityHopper ferry, but the thought of then trying to get two very tired girls to walk from the Hawthorne ferry terminal back home didn't really appeal to me all that much, so I decided to just head back home.
That ended up being a pretty good call, because as it was, trying to get the two of them back home was like herding cats. Sarah was fine, but Zoe was really dragging the chain and getting particularly grumpy. I had to deploy every positive parenting trick that I currently have in my book to keep Zoe moving, but we got there eventually. Fortunately we didn't have any particularly deadline.
The girls did some more playing at home while I collapsed on the couch for a bit, and then wanted to do some more craft. We made a couple of crowns and hot-glued lots of bling onto them.
We drove back to Kim's place after that, and the girls played some more there. Sarah nearly nodded off on the way home. Zoe was surprisingly chipper. The dynamic changed completely once we were back at Sarah's house. Zoe seemed fine to take Sarah's direction on everything, so I wonder how much of things in the morning were territorial, and Sarah wasn't used to Zoe calling the shots when she was at Zoe's place.
Kim invited us to stay for dinner. I wasn't really feeling like cooking, and the girls were having a good time, so I decided to stay for dinner, and after they had a bath together we headed home. Zoe stayed awake all the way home, and went to bed without any fuss.
It's pretty hot tonight, and I'm trialling Zoe sleeping without white noise, so we'll see how tonight pans out.