This is the first time I have blogged on our new computer. Peter is proud to have added a third computer to our home network. The latest addition is a notebook and we are enjoying it - Peter mainly because he can now watch TV and tinker on the computer at the same time. Heaven.

The first day of the holidays went pretty well, after we had spent the first few hours agonising over what to do about Angie. Angie has cleaned our house since we moved here seven years ago and we have been really happy with her. She also looked after Daniel after I went back to work mornings, and before he was old enough for play-school. She's not that young any longer though, and has been quite unwell this year. She returned today after being off for more than a week. She has constant pain in her legs, and has developed a diabetic condition requiring regular medication. Especially in the last few months it has become clear that she can't carry on working as much. She should be retiring, only of course financially it's extremely difficult. She supports a houseful of people. She was assuming that she was going to turn 60 in March and be eligible for her government pension, and the worst part of our talk with her this morning was having to point out that since her ID number indicates she was born in 1947, surely she won't turn 60 until 2007?

After Peter returned from taking Daniel to his swimming lesson, we spent a good two hours going through various permutations of ways we can help her, including part-time solutions, waiving of loans, helping with her pension until she can claim it, employing someone else in her household instead, etc, etc, etc. It's all very awkward, and no matter what one does and how much one tries to help and be reasonable, one always ends up feeling guilty about the whole thing. Just for being the employer of someone in that sort of situation, and for having so much more money than them. To cut a long story short, she will be switching to three days a week from now, and we'll look again at things in February, and she will ask her doctor whether she should be eligible for early retirement due to ill health.

Then it was time for Lauren's swimming lesson (swimming is the only extra-mural which doesn't close down for the whole school holidays, though I wish it did; it closes down from mid-December to mid-January only). I've missed the last couple of Lauren's lessons, and I was amazed to see how well she is swimming. She is a very driven person. Everything she does she puts so much effort into.

In the afternoon we went to buy some really long nails, and started hammering the first wall of the Wendy house together. It was fun. The girls are getting very handy with a hammer. Daniel persisted in wanting to use his plastic toy hammer instead, which made his nails rather time-consuming. Lauren and I both managed to hammer our thumbs. The kids also brought a large number of their dolls outside to have a turn. This is because we have a little routine of me 'animating' their toys for them, and they like to involve their toys in what they are doing. (Until Animated Toy Services close down, as they do quite often. Sometimes the dolls simply and inexplicably go to sleep, mid-conversation.) Dolly, for example, hammers by being clutched in my hammer-wielding hand and making hammering noises while she flies up and down with the hammer. After a while (I think it may have been after one of the thumb-hammering incidents) Dolly et al decided to watch from the sidelines and cheer the kids' efforts instead.

(Lauren, by the way, has two similar dolls. One has purple clothes and the other red. Their names are, quite obviously, Purple and Red.)

In and around our house at the moment are festering various of Robyn's science experiments. I borrowed a book of science experiments for kids from the library last week. On the verandah table is a bowl of drying potato starch, outside my bathroom window is a bush with paper cut-out faces clipped to its leaves, and on top of the fridge are two containers of vinegar, one containing some chicken bones and one an extremely scary egg. (Scary? Don't believe me? Try it.) Before Angie's arrival this morning there were also, tastefully arranged all over the bathroom floor, remnants of the cornflour-paste-which-is-a-solid-and-a-liquid-simultaneously (an isotrope to be precise) experiment. That was creepy stuff too.