Lost socks and dinosaurs 

When my children were small, I often wondered where the single socks went after they got lost in the washing machine.

As a resident grandmother for more than six years, I found some time ago that the same mystery surrounded lost dummies. My then three-year-old had sufficient dummies purchased for him to have cornered the dummy market but inevitably at any one time there were only two to be found. Sometimes we had a dummy crisis and couldn't find even one. So where are they? They were not under the various beds or behind the various couches, they were not with the bath toy collection or the box of animal figures. A mystery, up there with crop circles.

Of course life being in some sort of balance most of the time, there are other things which accumulated in their place.

Like dinosaurs – lots and lots and lots of dinosaurs, large and small. Dinosaurs with unpronounceable names like pachycephalosaurus although the youngest could manage that with ease when he was not much more than three. And books and books about dinosaurs including an encyclopaedia which was almost too heavy for him to lift. For a long time this was the favoured night time reading and he insisted on paging through the entire book.

The older boy began collecting other books (cue grandma's soppy smile) and was happy to regale us with facts about the biggest, highest, largest, fastest and so on things in the known universe – when he was not playing Minecraft of course. He now plays Minecraft full time and the facts-person is now the seven-year-old; when he needs to sit on the toot he calls out to me to come for “fact time”.

In terms of kitchen paraphernalia, we have a substantial collection of less than useful household gadgets like an orange press which doesn't have the strength to press, a slow cooker which burns the stew, a scent burner of unspeakable ugliness and a very small electric nut chopper which can't.

We also have collections of other things like water bottles, lunch boxes, broken toys, puzzles with bits missing (lots of these) and “crystals” imagined from garden stones.

I used to collect 2L milk bottle screw tops for the kindie's art supplies and still round up dead batteries to deposit in an eco-friendly store's battery collection box.

And then there are screws, washers and nails which accumulate in small numbers here and there leaving us to wonder what will fall off for the want of a nail …

We also have several collections of screwdrivers, Phillip’s head and regular, littered throughout the house including the kitchen where frying pan handles need regular tightening.

And this is to say nothing about the clothing mistakes, collected in bags to go to Vinnies or the Red Cross.

I have many collections in my sewing room. Let’s start with patchwork fabric. I have two large bookcases packed with hundreds of folded swatches of fabric in a kaleidoscope of colours. As I’ve said before, in my next life I’m picking a cheaper hobby. As someone observed when I began to patchwork, you take largish pieces of fabric, cut them up, then sew them back together again. Put that way …

I also have a world class, gold medal winning collection of coloured threads – wools and cottons and exotic threads spun from second-hand saris. I have a lovely collection of beads, another of wools and a small collection of raffia and string from my brief foray into basket making.

There is also an embarrassment of tin boxes which once held Christmas cake or Danish butter biscuits, all of them filled with unfinished embroidery or tapestry projects. Ah well, one day their day might come …

 

Quote of the week from Chambers Dictionary of Modern Quotations:

Of Gerald Ford in 1974. “A year ago he was unknown throughout America, now he’s unknown throughout the world.”