Bum-cheeks!
Ari, 5
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Question: What do you want to remember about today?
Today was Ari’s first day back after the Christmas break. I asked him “What do you want most to remember about your first day back at school today?”.
I used to have a teacher called Neela but I don’t anymore.
Ari, 5I also asked him if he was sad about it but he said no, that he and the other kids had worked together on drawing pictures for her on a big piece of paper before the break to say goodbye.
I didn’t even know she was finishing up!
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Question: What was the most surprising thing about the fog today?
That the smoke from the chimneys on the houses mixed with the fog and made it even thicker so you couldn’t drive through it.
Ari, 5This was a good one! It was a very foggy day, but manageable. We were trying to drive down to a local playground and had to take an alternate route because the chimney smoke from a house near a roundabout on the way was creating a blanket of fog (smog?) so thick that we couldn’t see more than a metre in front of us, so we slowly looped around the roundabout and found a less terrifying route.
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Baboró 2023
Galway’s got a lot going on for such a small city, and this time of year there’s a children’s festival on called Baboró. Since we arrived right before Covid struck, (and last year Ari wasn’t the right age for any of it) we’d never been, but this year we pounced when the programme was announced and picked up a bunch of tickets.
Saturday 14th October
For our first day, we got Dough Bros in town before Nathalie took Ada to a Universe in the Mick Lally Theatre and Ari and I walked to the university for Club Origami, a beautiful dance event in the O’Donoghue Theatre.
Here’s a little peek of it:
Trailer for Club Origami It’s a beautiful show that starts slow, with two performers creating simple origami shapes outside the theatre before inviting the kids present to create their own simple folded shapes.
They gather everybody’s creations and lead us into the theatre where we sit on the floor in rows delineated by precisely-folded strips of paper. A musician plays a xylosynth to one side, creating a really beautiful “indie-movie” soundtrack to the expressive dance woven with exquisite paper models and props. Ari was rapt!
Then the real fun begins. To one side of the stage is a huge pile of artfully torn up paper. The performers take turns carrying armfuls to the centre of the stage and tossing it in the air. They get more frantic. More chaotic. They change into costumes styled to look like shredded paper. It looks incredibly fun – and then they invite all the children to participate! Ari dove in and had a blast literally tearing it up.
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Spooky adventures with dry ice
I had to use dry ice on a recent photoshoot, and luckily, I got to take the remainder of it home, so we got stuck in to all sorts of dry ice experiments.
Including:
Dry ice cream (verdict: we went with double cream, which was a bit much. A lighter cream might have been better. Also: slightly terrifying to eat something that might contain shards of something that would frostbite your mouth.)
We had better luck with some boozy concoctions: a witchy margarita and dry ice cold brew.
