The day did not start well with Hannah having to be told about the death of her oldest guinea pig. We bought Molpy (and his brother who died nearly 2 years ago) for her third birthday so she doesn't really remember not having them. We only had the two of them for almost 2 years so we handled them a lot more and our relationship with them was much closer than it has been with our subsequent piggies. Molpy had the most personality of any of them; he and Tolly were the most chatty, not just when they heard the fridge open, but often appeared to be having conversations with each other...especially if they had been out with us for a cuddle. We imagined them discussing their adventures out of the cage when they got back "I had a lovely cuddle with Hannah," "I sat on Sarah's shoulder!" (this would have been Tolly sitting on shoulders; Molpy sat still and purred, Tolly liked exploring!) After some crying and some cuddling, both with me and with poor little Molpy's body, A buried him in the garden. We didn't actually have a proper "funeral". We did when Tolly died, but frankly, I was in too much of a rush to let myself dwell on the real sadness I feel about Molpy. The next stage in yet another frenetically busy day was beckoning!
And the next bit was the Big Bang Science Fair at ExCeL. We had booked in for the 12.30 showing of Brainiac Live and arrived at 11.30 to find the queue for the auditorium already forming. A bit of a dilemma because the website had warned that you needed to queue early as places were not guaranteed, but I really didn't want to make Hannah stand in a queue for an hour, so we went into one of the exhibition rooms and just as I was thinking that it was quite likely we would meet someone we knew, Hannah spotted Isaac and Saska from the Hackney home ed group. They were busy building a tall structure from straws and invited Hannah to stay and help them while I queued up for the show and then they brought H to me in the queue about 10 mins before it opened. She still moaned about having to queue! Brainiac was excellent...lots of explosions! We had lunch, bumped into a few more people I knew from the school, and spent the rest of the afternoon in the Family Science bit making various things like a balancing clown, a balloon buggy and other simple toys to explore the scientific principles involved!
After the Fair closed we did a bit of shopping (no idea where this girl gets her sense of style from, she puts some apparently random clothes together and looks amazing and individual!) then went to Nandos for Afzaul's mum's birthday meal. Ate chicken, talked to relatives. Found something on the menu that Hannah actually liked eating, ratatouille and grilled halloumi! Her six year old cousin asked what she was eating, Hannah explained it was ratatouille and Zara replied,"Don;t be silly, Ratatouille is a film!"
And finally it was off to St Pat's where some of the children from Hannah's dancing class were performing as part of the St Patrick's day party. I don't know what it is about watching Irish dancing, but it makes me feel very weepy. Maybe it's because my beloved grandmother always wanted me to learn and I didn't and I think how happy she would be to see her great-granddaughter doing it. Or maybe it's because my mum wanted to be a dance teacher when she was young and had her dreams destroyed by an accident that left her with a fused left hip and one leg shorter than the other. Maybe there's a hereditary nostalgia that floats around in the DNA of part-Irish people brought up in other countries and cultures and turns them into weeping saps at the first sound of the old diddly-diddly! Whatever it was, it wasn't just the sight of my gorgeous girl in her new dancing dress looking lovely, although she did because I had tears in my eyes no matter who was dancing. Silly old fool!
I did have one of those moments though where the love I feel for her rises up and seems too much for my heart to contain it. I was sitting in the audience and through the open door to the stage I could see her chatting away to the much older girls with her. None of her own class were there and she was really not confident about dancing with the older girls...but she did it anyway, mostly forgetting the steps, but because everyone thought she was much younger than she is, they just said "ahhhhh!" I thought how blessed I am to have her, prickly, feisty, beautiful, generous, pinionated, stubborn, intelligent, quirky individual that she is. My niece and nephews seem to "achieve" lots which Hannah doesn't; she is often not very good at the things she does, but she is such an amazing person and being with her is (mostly...I do still have days I want to lock myself away and tell her to stop being so SEVEN!) such a great pleasure!
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