When I was pregnant with her I used to listen to the stereo all the time. My first choice whether I was reading or cleaning or cooking was to listen to the radio. I never put headphones up to my tummy, but the music was always on in the house. (Even when I was a teenager TV wasn't important to me but my records and cassette tapes were.)
When she was young she wanted to be a dancer. She loved turning up the music and singing and dancing around the living room. When she got a bit older we bought her a Walkman.
Something she loved as much as singing and dancing was rocking in a rocking chair. (That one came from her dad.) She would rock for hours, listening to her Walkman, belting out songs.
She would listen to that Walkman so long she'd run the batteries down. Instead of asking for more batteries, she'd go into our battery-storage drawer and take them. Again and again and again. So we eventually cut her off. No more batteries from us.
But then we started noticing things around the house weren't working when we needed them. Clocks stopped working. We'd need a flashlight but it would be dead. TV controls didn't work. I'd like to say we caught on quick to what she was doing, but alas, we did not. We were quite stumped.
No ghost, no electrical interference. Just a battery thief. A battery thief who would replace our working batteries with old, they've-been-used-up-in-the-Walkman batteries.
The day she moved onto an iPod was the day our battery drawer stayed permanently full.
Today our battery thief is returning home for a few days. Her grandma's funeral is tomorrow, and our thief is sticking around to earn some money by helping us catch up in the gardens.
The focus of today's picture requires no batteries, but is certainly helping herself (or is it a himself?) to the garden.
