I asked the kids to show me their school work when got home from work today and sitting next to Milo I kept noticing a peculiar smell.  I’m due for a shower, I know, but a quick snuffle under my arm and I was in the clear.  I began to sniff further afield.

I pressed my nose to Milo’s arm pit–there it was, the distinct smell of unwashed underarms.  I checked the other side. Nope, it wasn’t an anomaly.  He smelled on both sides!  My little 9-year-old squirt must be growing up!  “Smell me, smell me!”  Naomi never wants to be left out of the action.  But no, she was still sweet little kid, despite romping around and neglecting her school work all day.  She pouted.  “But I’m growing too, Mom!”

“Yes, dear, of course you are growing, you’re growing a lot….. but Milo just has a head start on being stinky.  You’re not missing out on a good thing…..  But getting smelly underarms isn’t a bad thing either,” I hastened to say, hoping Milo wasn’t going to feel self conscious. “It’s just part of growing up.”  Wow, I might want to practice this conversation when I feel a bit more on my game.

Oh, and speaking of changes, New Zealand is moving to Covid19 alert level 2 on Thursday.  That means almost all sections of the economy can open back up, but there are still significant safety precautions like limitations on numbers in gatherings, and distancing rules for busy social places like restaurants.  Most significantly for us, it means the kids will be back to school starting on Monday.

It’s been a hard season at home, but in many ways it’s been good too.  I’ve actually missed the kids the last two days when I’ve been at work.  Hopefully we can savor these last couple days in the home bubble before the business of life begins again.

I went on a bike ride down the old TaiTapu Rd this afternoon and the weather started to close in on my way back with a light misty sprinkle.

Turning onto Sabys in the gloom I almost ran over a brilliant red maple leaf, startling on the grey shingle road.  There isn’t a maple tree in sight.  I don’t know where it came from.  Its red was intensified by the droplets of mist it had accumulated, and you could even see the slightly orange shadows where the leaf must have been tipped away from the sun when it grew.  I stared at it, soaking up its vibrancy.

I love red.  I always have.  It’s not a calm color; it’s INTENSE and I ADORE it.  It was so fun to run into this one, unexpectedly cheerful for no good reason at all.

“Ugh, what!?  This is impossible!”

Milo was struggling with 5 digit subtraction using the Maths Buddy program.  He started out confident; he had this topic nailed a couple weeks ago.  But he was muddling up the rules of borrowing, so he wasn’t getting the right answers and his frustration was mounting.

“Hang on, don’t go past that problem, let’s work it out so you can see what you’re doing wrong,” I advised.  Too late, he’d already skipped past the wrong answer to try again on the next problem.

“What!” he burst out. “This keyboard isn’t working!”  

“What do you mean, the keyboard isn’t working?”  ….but he’d already moved to the next problem.  “Write this one out on your paper so you can work it out,” I advised. 

“Is this right?”

“Well, let’s check it by adding your answer to the smaller number,” I suggested.  I’ve never been that quick at mental math.  “Nope, it’s not quite right.”

“Yes it IS!”  He typed in his answer and the red X appeared.  “Arg, this is stupid!  Mom, you gave me the wrong answer!”

“Milo, hun, I haven’t given you any answers.”

“The computer is wrong!”

I laughed out loud.  “Milo, if you don’t stop and learn why you’re getting the wrong answers, you’re never going to get them right.”

We repeated this conversation 5 more times.  No joke.  FIVE TIMES.  He clearly didn’t appreciate the humor in the situation.  Each round he might look at his paper and listen to an explanation for a few seconds before deciding that he knew it well enough and carrying on.  Fortunately, Maths Buddy doesn’t let him move on to the next level until he gets more than 85% of the problems right, so the natural consequence of his hard headedness was that he kept having to repeat the problem set, and he kept failing.  Eventually I moved into the kitchen and quietly ducked down behind the counter.  I saw him stand up in the chair and scan for me, then return to the computer, muttering and griping.

About five minutes later he announced success.  “FINALLY!” he groaned.  “Mom!  Mom?  Mom!  Where are you?”  After a round of the house he found me crouched behind the cupboard, reading.  “I’m done, let’s go to the skate park.”

The next day at work I stared at my computer screen.  Somehow the spray management software was saying that after we used Ascend on four different occasions, the inventory was higher than when we started out a month ago.  I scratched my head.  I pulled out the history to validate.  0.436 of a 5L unit was still greater than 0.352 of a 5L unit.  “Impossible!” I exclaimed.  “The computer is wrong!”  Then I thought of Milo and his Maths Buddy…..but this time I really did think the computer was wrong.  Could the calculator in the software have gone haywire?

Tonight I told Milo that something funny had happened at work.  My computer was doing three digit subtraction and it was getting it wrong.

“Well Mom, you should use your head, not a calculator!” he advised.

Touche, little man.

I went to work today without yesterweeks high expectations and decided to clear up the pile of media samples that had been accumulating behind my desk for the last few months.  It’s what I do when there’s nothing better going on.  It’s tedious because we don’t USE the results for decision making; the media is used the same day it’s made, so there’s no opportunity to catch a bad batch before using it.  The samples do serve to build up a story of what the normal pH and EC ranges are; the idea is that we have to know what’s normal to understand when something’s not normal.  But it’s also tedious because by the time I hit the doldrums enough to process soil samples, I have stacked collection of sample boxes built up like a proverbial brick wall.  Uninspiring.

But sometimes boredom breeds a more creative solution, and this time I decided I’d use the zillions of samples to come up with a simpler methodology of testing, one I could hand off to the nursery that makes the soil, so perhaps those samples could stop coming to me.

“Your childhood paid off, eh? Sitting around making mud pies?” My co-worker trundled by moving a trolley from here to there with plenty of time to observe what I was up to.

And he wasn’t the first to comment about the mud pies as I stood stirring water into the stubbornly dry media. Usually the comments are around cups of coffee because the pH measuring usually involves rows of white plastic cups, but this new method did away with the cups and filter papers, hence the mud pie analogies.

“Yup,” I advised my co-worker.  “Tell your kids to go into science so they never have to stop playing in the mud.”

NZ moved to “Level 3” in the brand new alert systems on Monday at Midnight.  That means that socially our lives are basically unchanged, still “enjoying the sanctity” of our family unit bubbles, but more businesses can be open.  In fact, any business that can be innovative enough to carry on without people contacting each other can open up….unfortunately that still means hair dressers are closed, and there’s a run on home hair dye kits at the grocery store.

There have been a lot more cars on the road as many industries start up again, and I added to the traffic as I made my way to work at Zealandia on Tuesday morning.  There was not actually a gorgeous sunrise that morning, but I felt there should have been to mark the momentous “back to work” moment.

I don’t know what fairy tale I was hoping for, but subconsciously must have thought it’d be better than when I left.  Maybe I thought there’d be more purpose and direction, because by now the business would be pared down to only the essential components.  Maybe I thought my great expertise had been missed over the last month and upon return there’d be a list of important tasks to get stuck into.

Instead I got my temperature zapped by a contactless thermometer, signed a piece of paper saying I would follow the Critical Covid19 Policy, then sat at my desk, thumbing through the to-do list from a month ago, long term projects that no one cares about.

Of course, my supervisor is also the general manager, and he’s had a wee bit on his plate of late.  Our sales were down 80% compared to April last year and I could see him through his office window holed up with the CFO pouring over spreadsheets.  I imagine that my little salary sitting in the corner wondering what she should be doing is small peanuts compared to the bigger picture of 270 employees, many of whom were also idle over the last month.

But as ridiculous as it is, I felt deflated.

I had a walk around the nursery.  Insects have calmed down for the year and diseases seem well in hand.  I went out to check on the crop outside.  It was a lovely sun-drenched day.  I went back inside to my dark desk and reviewed the pesticide pricing for our spray database.  I wondered what my kids were up to.  I filed emails in the proper folders.  I had my solitary afternoon tea.  My boss stopped by for a couple minutes between phone calls in the mid afternoon, and asked if I could put together a list of current R&D projects, to review the next Monday.  Next Monday!

I decided that staying home doing school with the kids would be more purposeful than going in to the nursery for the remainder of the week.

“I want to make crepes,” Milo declared Saturday morning.

I really had no good reason to say no; it was Saturday morning, we’re still in lock down, and the fact that I don’t like cleaning up cooked breakfasts or the smell of hot grease lingering on the air seemed pretty thin.  “Ok, you can make crepes,” I consented, “as long as you also do the clean-up.”

He had already looked up the recipe on the tablet, and started to call out the ingredients.  “Mom, can you help me?”

“I can help you cook them; you can make the batter yourself.”

“But I want to do the cooking.”

Somehow I found myself standing at the counter taking ingredient orders from my nine year old son.  Actually, I know how that happened–I’m a conflict avoider.

“1 cup of flour, you got that, Mom?”

“Right, now what?”

“Make a depression in the flour, then mix in two eggs.”

“Really?  I’ve never seen a pancake recipe like this; I’m not sure this is going to work,” I commented, as the mass clumped solidly together, stiffer than playdough.

“That’s what it says.  Now, gradually add 11 slash 2 cups of milk.”

“11 cups?  Do you mean 1 and a half cups?”  I glanced at the screen to confirm and poured in a dollop of milk.  The play dough ball got slimy and lumpy, but not smooth.  I pulled out the whisk and applied some serious elbow grease to the globby mass.  “I’m not so sure this recipe will come out well, Milo,” I worried again.

“It will.  It says ‘Delish’.”

He dismissed my concerns with a blithe calmness, fully confident that his plan would work.  After all, the recipe said “Delish,” and he was directing the operations personally.  What could go wrong?

Confidence.  Whether founded or unfounded, it’ll serve him well in this world in which we live.   For the record, the crepe batter did eventually smooth out.