Tales from the farm

Anna is officially on Summer Holidays and the weather is co-operating - it is hot, hot, hot! I managed to meet my work deadline and in theory should be relaxing, but really as any parent of small kids knows, any relaxation can only take place when they are sleeping. And since Aksel is currently hob-nobbing in the south of France, picking up awards at the advertising festival, I have been playing at being a single mother for the last few days. So, even less time than usual to do anything other than mother.

So that post about Samuel's words? Need to update that. A few days ago he said his first sentence: " Daddy havre" - admittedly a mixture of English and Danish, but clearly stating that he needed his Daddy to make him his porridge quick smart. And since then his language has really taken off. Just today he said 4 new words : Bubble, Go, Pitter-patter, and More (which all totally make sense if you saw what Anna, Sam & I were doing this afternoon - but you kind of had to be there).

And I haven't even mentioned his Tractor obsession, which at one point meant that he didn't want lunch because he had just got a new tractor to play with. I guess it is not so surprising that Samuel shares this thrill about farm vehicles with just about every other little boy. But he is able to have a whole conversation only using the word "tractor", just by changing his intonation. We are lucky enough to see tractors quite a bit now that we live in the countryside and he can go from hopeful expectation that we might see one (tractor.. tractor?) to total happiness (TRACTOR!) when one comes our way to slightly concerned (as the tractor passes us and keeps going, trac-tor??) and finally to desperation that the experience is over (Traaa-c-tooorR!)

We have been playing lots of games of farms, and in an attempt to find some way to make it more bearable for me (there are only so many times I can fix the fence and pretend to feed the cows before my mind starts wandering off) I tried to include Anna in them. She enthusiastically obliged but then I somehow found myself, in addition to the Samuel-level game of beep beep, tractor, moo, baa-a, also playing a complicated love-triangle saga involving three polly-pockets taking riding lessons at the farm, Jeremy (the teenage son of the farmer who was rather lazy and forgetful but hopelessly in love with polly pocket no. 1), and a dramatic fall complete with broken legs and ambulances. Talk about going from one extreme to another.

Aksel's back tomorrow. Yippee! I'm looking forward to some adult conversation.