three girls for the price of one

First, can I just say how HAP­PY I am to see the end of the month of Jan­u­ary? Every­thing has to start get­ting bet­ter now, just to have that awful month behind me.

To start things off, it’s a bad news/good news thing. Well, the bad news is, Becky and her hus­band are jet­ted off to New York City to find a place to live and schools for their three girls. The bad news also is, this means Becky and her fam­i­ly are mov­ing, alas, to New York. Not “alas, to New York,” but “mov­ing, alas.” What on earth will I do with­out her? Over the last two years we have shared birth­days, ill­ness­es, gos­sip, exams, fam­i­ly tri­als and tribu­la­tions and the total joy of watch­ing our chil­dren become fast, fast friends. I am not even approach­ing imag­in­ing Lon­don with­out them. How­ev­er, needs must and when Becky flies away, the good news is…

We get her chil­dren! Two of the three, at least. At thir­teen, Ash­ley has moved on to green­er pas­tures. Like Star­bucks and sleep­overs with friends. But at least we got Anna and Ellie, begin­ning this morn­ing. The girls imme­di­ate­ly set up the jumps in the gar­den, as you see, and spent a love­ly time jump­ing, scor­ing, tor­ment­ing Tacy and gen­er­al­ly get­ting more than our usu­al mon­ey’s worth out of the space. A gor­geous lunch at La Car­i­catu­ra, fast becom­ing our Sat­ur­day favorite. Today was a spe­cial of wild boar carpac­cio, which was deli­cious (although I could not in all hon­esty coun­te­nance the raisins along­side), and the girls tucked into piz­za and ravi­o­li and wrote the lyrics for the songs of their upcom­ing evening play. Then it was onto Avery’s act­ing class, so Anna and I went SHOP­PING. Not for clothes or shoes, mind you, but for the raw ingre­di­ents of SLIME.

Yes, you read it cor­rect­ly. Yes­ter­day at school they all made SLIME, of ingre­di­ents sur­pris­ing­ly hard to obtain in our posh neigh­bor­hood of Lon­don. Food col­or­ing, white glue and Borax. Boots, Marks and Spencer, Sel­f­ridges, Ryman’s, we hit them all. We laughed over what a passer­by would think should he see what was in our bags. “It’s the beef mince that would put some­one off the trail,” I said. “No one would know that in addi­tion to slime, we’re hav­ing bolog­nese for dinner.”

So they made slime, I made bolog­nese, they raid­ed all Avery’s cup­boards and put on a very intrigu­ing play about three (appar­ent­ly) orphaned girls, no, actu­al­ly the moth­er had gone inex­plic­a­bly to Mal­ta, ful­fill­ing her prin­ci­pal role in fic­tion: absent. No good girls’ sto­ries have live, func­tion­ing moth­ers. Now they have been cajoled into clean­ing up and are hap­pi­ly eat­ing pop­corn and watch­ing “Bal­let Shoes,” a regret­tably excel­lent BBC pro­duc­tion of the Noel Streat­feild nov­el. I want to dis­ap­prove on some high moral ground about not let­ting chil­dren slob before the tele­vi­sion set, but the cast­ing is excel­lent, the orig­i­nal book adorable, and in gen­er­al, it’s lovely.

Tomor­row brings the Roy­al Acad­e­my of Music con­cert in aid of Chil­dren’s Trust. They par­tic­i­pat­ed in this con­cert last year and it was very, very mov­ing. I’m a lit­tle intim­i­dat­ed by mak­ing an extra lunch for a noto­ri­ous­ly choosey lit­tle girl, and enter­tain­ing Anna in between drop­ping the oth­er girls off and actu­al­ly going to the con­cert. Wish me luck in my role as “Nan­ny.”