We missed autumn when we went overseas for our six-and-a-half month indulgence in 2009, and although it was nice to have two springs, I really did miss autumn with its glorious, messy colours, crisp, clear days and thickening cold. Before having the girls we used to make the most of the time off and go away, often to the coast, but this year we found ourselves at home.
On Easter Friday we drove to one of the National Parks that ring the city, through the golden grasses tipped with pink, past roads lined with silver and green poplars and across lush green grassland nibbled close to the ground by kangaroos and wallabies. We had the backpacks in the boot to carry the girls when they were too tired to walk and were planning to do a Koala walk and hopefully see a koala or two.
The girls walked and ran a bit and we sat down on logs to rest along the way. The eucalypts were very tall but we didn’t see any koalas in them (although there was something way up there – could it be?). We came to a bridge and dropped twigs and leaves into the stream, watching the other side for them to float along just like the Winnie-the-Pooh story that we have recently started reading to Lara and Rhea.
– ‘I don’t suppose you’ve seen any koalas?’, asked an English lady we crossed paths with along the way.
– ‘Have you seen any koalas?,’ asked the Indian family just starting the walk.
An English family and an African family along the track had the same question. No-one had seen any and nor did we. But we all enjoyed the walk, and we stopped at the adventure playground on the way home, complete with water pump, flying fox, swings and very long slide which the girls all enjoyed. They went to sleep relatively easily Friday night.
On Saturday we were scheduled to be at Mum and Dad’s for a family lunch with Helen and Rod. We dressed Lara in her pretty 1960s-look dress: white with big green and red flowers, made out of heavy cotton with short sleeves, above-knee-length, trimmed with big green buttons at the back of her neck. Rhea was wearing her short-sleeved red and orange butterfly dress with a white shirt underneath.
We had a relaxed autumn feast, as vibrant as the vegetation will be in a couple of weeks: dark pink beetroot and deep green salted and oiled kale chips; and salads like a deep yellow cous cous and dried tomato salad and a red and yellow tomato one; accompanied by quinoa bread rolls that tasted slightly nutty with lamb and mint slow cooked off the bone. The girls jumped up and down from their seats and played with my old dolls, ran around the garden, sat on our laps, and hid in corners outside the house, but we went after them and they kept coming back of their own accord too so they weren’t too much out of control.
Rhea and Lara, like the Very Hungry Caterpillar (but not the one that they killed with my shoe in the morning – perhaps their first animal murder) also ate through one large slice of strawberry and raspberry pavlova and several chocolate Easter eggs before we took them off, now two hours after their usual siesta time. Rhea fell asleep in the car during the ten-minute journey to our next stop, Bunnings, but Lara, who had had forty winks in the car on the way in, did not, so she got to ride in a trolley with Steve at Bunnings and was still awake when we got to the market to do the shopping.
I haven’t been to this market so close to closing time before, and I was quite pleased with the bargains on offer including a small tray of passionfruit for $1, a small tray of yellow beans for the same price and apples (great for stewing) also $1 per kilo. Rhea and Lara wanted to go to the playground – a great space with four slides, stairs, climbing equipment and rocking fish topped by a giant mushroom, the stem of which forms the central play area. There is also a board painted with different vegetables and fruit with child-sized face holes which the children love playing in. I joined Steve on the metal park bench beside the mushroom when I had finished my shopping: Rhea was off on the rocking fish while Lara was trying to climb up the banana face hole a few metres away.
We were just discussing our next move (it was now after 4pm) when Lara ran towards us and hit the park bench with a heavy thud, the reverberations reaching Steve at the other end. She fell and screamed. If she had hit her head, judging by the sound it would have done some damage. I picked her up and thankfully her head was OK, but her mouth was bleeding, the drops mixing with the chocolate stains on her green and red dress. I rushed her to the toilets to get some toilet paper to clean her up and stop the blood flow but I couldn’t see where the blood was coming from and it was filling up her mouth. I rushed out of the toilets again.
– ‘I don’t know what to do’, I said to Steve. ‘I can’t see where the blood is coming from.’ We opened her mouth and saw a jagged gash on the inside of her lip.
– ‘She’ll probably need stitches. Let’s take her to the GP after-hours clinic or to Emergency next door’, Steve replied.
So we scooped up a bewildered Rhea and our shopping and raced to the hospital, luckily only a few minutes’ drive away.
The triage doctor pointed out that not only did Lara have a deep cut inside her lower lip, she also had one outside it, just above her chin (I couldn’t bear to look too closely). He thought they might be different cuts and warned us that we may have to wait four hours before she was sedated for the procedure because she had recently eaten food. We all trooped in when we were called shortly after and the doctor suggested that Lara could have a local anaesthetic instead so that she could be fixed up right away. She wanted Rhea to be out of the way so that she didn’t cry as well and told me to expect crying and wriggling and to be prepared to find the whole thing very distressing. Then she looked at Lara, introduced herself and said that she would be fixing up Lara’s face and that Lara would be wrapped up like a sausage (this was so that she wouldn’t use her arms or hands). She introduced the intern as well and asked me to go to the other side of the bed so that she could have access to Lara’s face.
– ‘What song should we sing? Do you like Old Macdonald or Twinkle Twinkle?’
We sang Twinkle Twinkle a couple of times, me and the intern, while I showed Lara Steve’s iPhone with their much-loved photos and ‘photos of movies’ (of Lara and Rhea) to distract her. In fact there was a second cut above the first one and the plan was to anaesthetise the area with a needle shot then glue the smaller cut together with special glue, stitching the larger cut with surgical blue thread.
– ‘Success depends on how calm the parent is, on the child and on how relaxed and engaged you are with them. Don’t say it’s a needle – just that there will be a small sting. This will be an indication of how they’ll find it’ said the doctor as she injected Lara with the anaesthetic.
Lara, focused on the photos and movies, didn’t flinch or cry.
– ‘What a super girl you are!’
They continued on, sewing and chatting while Lara, far from crying or wriggling, was still and quiet. She didn’t say a word until we were looking at a photo of Rhea climbing up a slide.
– ‘There you are, climbing the slide,’ I said.
– ‘No that’s ‘Eeah!’
So we got to the end, my brave girl and I, and Rhea kissed her in the waiting room after examining the stitching very curiously.
Lara fell asleep in the car on the way home at last and was more fragile when she woke up, crying now and refusing Panadol, food and water and just wanting a cuddle in bed.
The doctor said she will have a scar but not a significant one. That makes me sad because with her almond-shaped blue eyes, long eyelashes, blond hair and delicate chin and nose our girls are very beautiful (no not biased at all) and it would be a shame to mar that – even if it means that people who don’t know the twins will now be better able to tell them apart.
These things happen. Maybe the scar will be hardly noticeable – we’ll see. If it is, it will be an enduring reminder of Lara’s great bravery as a very little girl.
