It’s been a few days without television. Just happens that good weather has coincided with the season enders and dh’s desire to read more. He hasn’t started reading paper yet – he’s still stuck on the screen even if it is the newspapers online.  We listen to music. A lot of music now – something that was missing from our life when the channels were flipping. Last night we nearly watched a movie, but I ran late and it was too close to bedtime to start anything. Instead more music and screen education, if you can call it that. We know full well the effect it has on dd4.  She begged to watch today: even chose a most-likely video – little grey rabbit, since I’ve a soft spot for this and remember fondly reading and playing the stories in my own play rooms as a child. However tired I may have been I knew her post-tv tantrums would be even more exhausting than playing.  So no, I said, no to tv. No to videos. No to dvds. Yes to playing. Yes I will play with you. Doctor? Alright…

Playtime – we play compassionate doctors adorned in sequin scarves and lamee robes, checking dolphin and puppy for illness, eyesight, dental health, and injury. The line up in the waiting room is long, a pink-hatted bunny complains that her friends kicked her in the stomach while the rottweiler pup nurses a hurt back. Makeup brushes and manicure equipment become needles and medical equipment, lent authenticity by the real tools: johnson’s waterproof self-adhesive tape from my climbing days and a basal digital thermometer. Also she has the idea of a pee jar and sends the animals to the bathroom to pee in a baby food jar. We take readings of the imaginary liquid with sparkling eyelash brushes, run them across a defunct Casio digital Business Organizer System and punch buttons to find out what’s wrong with Hattie.

We have had science time lately with the addition of a now-empty, tiny wasp nest stored in one of our now-ubiquitous baby food jars, a caught snail on a leaf, and two spiders who had the great misfortune to be found inside our house. It was tempting to have a spider deathmatch, but we opted for separate cells.  Even caught a gnat and dropped it in a jar to see if the first spider would be able to catch it. It added a certain excitement to his captivity as he frantically spun a webwork inside the featureless baby jar, spiraling upwards in a futile attempt to catch a tiny bit of food. As it was, the gnat died of exhaustion and the spider slept, as usual, upside-down in his sticky home.

On the subject of the wasp nest – it contained larval globs of wet, cream-coloured pulsing stripes, The possibility of winged babies slipping out in the night was too frightening, and dd4 pronounced the solemn death sentence upon them. I shook Diatomaceous Earth into the nest. The larvae pulsed furiously as fine powder sliced into their bodies, now one sits outside the nest, unmoving. Soon I’ll be able to glue the nest into an unpowdered jar- dh wants to slice it in half to display the interior – I’m thinking silica powder to dry it out first.  They are quite soft, these nests, and collapse easily.  The wasp nest invites the feeling of a Victorian governess somehow, a natural history museum at home.  There is something terrifically macabre about this.    She would have let the spiders die too – after all, how can you teach respect for life the same day you kill the wasps? After all, she reasons, they have dead ants at school all the time. Today our 8-legged friends were both released onto the balcony with a great deal of hip-hip-hoorays and ‘they’re free, they’re free!’ screamed into the air. All this instead of tv – there’s an argument if ever I heard one.