Secularism

We drive by the local Catholic church at least once most days on our way from our new house to wherever we happen to be going. Sometimes it's a Sunday, and I'm sorry, in many ways, that we're not taking our children into the cool, dark, peaceful embrace of familiarity that I would feel on entering the building. I loved the ritual of Mass, the soothing tones of the muttered responses, the chords of the organ and the warbling of our local choir of old ladies, the space to think or not think for a while, and especially the knowledge that wherever I was, I had a community to automatically belong to. Mass on Sunday, or Saturday evening, put a shape on my week for 29 years.

It seems mean to deny our children all that. (Plus the opportunity of a private education at discounted prices.) There's just the tiny problem that we're both pretty much athiests at this point, and, call me picky but it would seem hypocritical. I think if either B or I had strong feelings about God or raising our children in a religion, the other would quite happily go along with it rather than take a stand for heathenism, but somehow we both fell off the God wagon within a few years of each other and by the time Monkey was born the only decision was how to tell the grandparents that there wasn't going to be a Christening.

I distinctly recall wondering at some point in my childhood whether all this Mass and Jesus stuff was a hoax dreamed up by the adults to keep us quiet. (It may have been shortly after I'd been disillusioned about Santa Claus, which would mean I was 8 or 9, perhaps.) I thought it would be an awful lot of trouble to go to, and didn't seriously consider it, but it's interesting that it crossed my mind. And then, when I turned 30, I somehow went from being a card-carrying Catholic who firmly believed that children should have some sort of framework for belief rather than nothing at all, even if it was Catholicism with all its many potholes, to a sort of atheistic agnostic who felt that God was obviously a construct of man rather than vice versa.

Which leaves us in a bit of a vaccuum when it comes to some parts of childrearing. I want my children to respect the beliefs of others, of course; to have a strong moral compass and don't need to wonder what's right or wrong; to understand the meaning of God and religion and have a basic knowledge of their cultural heritage, including what Christians and Catholics believe. I want them to feel free to make their own choices without fear of ridicule or censure; but we do still have a responsibility to instill our values in them - assuming we value our values. Do I value atheism? Not really - if my kids want to believe in God, I hope I'll be happy for them. But if they want to join a militant right-wing evangelical church or protest against gay marriage or picket abortion clinics, I do think I'll be telling them how I feel in no uncertain terms. I should hope I won't have to tell them because they'll already know.

Last summer Monkey started asking about death, and God, and religion, and we had some good discussions (monologues, more like), but I think he's forgotten quite a lot of it at this point. I have to remind myself that these, just like the talks about where babies come from, are things we need to be talking about frequently, not just once upon a time. Sometimes I'm trying so hard to be politically correct and not offend anyone, that I forget it's my job to teach my children right from wrong and good from bad - if I try too hard not to criticize the man in the truck for smoking, they won't ever know that smoking is something I don't want them to do.

At the moment, Monkey mostly thinks churches are just big buildings for demonstrating how strong a superhero he is when he describes to me how he can lift them up. Maybe a field trip is in order.

How to be both arty and crafty in several easy steps

Day one: Decide to make a lovely jewellery display thingy so that you can keep your necklaces somewhere other than on top of the chest of drawers where the kids can grab them. Allow some indeterminate length of time to pass until there are just a few days to go before your housewarming, and then decide that this, above all else, is the one thing you will accomplish. Clean bathrooms bedamned, you will have your jewellery nicely displayed.

Day two: Drive to the arts & crafts store that's really very close. Decide to take a new, quicker route. Get abysmally lost. Watch helplessly in the mirror as your four-year-old takes a totally unauthorized nap while you drive around for forty minutes. Thank your lucky stars that the other one already had a big nap and is happily conducting phone interviews from her carseat. Decide to call it quits and take them swimming instead.

Day three: Drive to the arts & crafts store again, this time taking the right road. Get there without anyone falling asleep. Already a win. Stuff protesting baby into shopping trolley. Chivvy four-year-old from pillar to post as you wander round unfamiliar aisles trying to find unfamiliar things while he picks up every interesting he sees and badgers you to buy it, or at least let him hold it and wave it around while you shop. Deny him in a cruel and heartless manner. Finally purchase an empty frame, a large sheet of foam-core board, and some silvery paint, and somehow manage to spend almost $60. (Okay, there were some picture frames in there too. Which we totally needed to frame things we've had not on a wall for several years.) Buy two large foam pool noodles in dollar store next door to placate four-year-old.

Later that night, get all arty with the paint and the frame. Decide that it's altogether the wrong colour becuase you were distracted by intransigent children while trying to pick it out.

Day four: Drag the kids, for "just one errand" before swimming, to the local crafts & fabric shop. Discover that it has all the same stuff and you could have avoided the whole getting-lost debacle of day two if you'd just gone there to start with. Run after baby who takes off at a sprint through the rows of fabric as soon as her feet touch the floor. Pick up baby and deeply regret leaving the Ergo in the car. Wonder why you still haven't learned. Trawl the fabrics and finally find some very nice dark red velvet on clearance (because it's 96 degrees outside). Queue up behind several very slow people. Decide to buy more paint. Leave the queue, find paint, drag four-year-old away from tchotchkes and miniature American flags, calm frantic baby who must be teething because you would swear to anyone who's listening that she really did have a good nap, choose paint that turns out once again to be the wrong colour, return to queue, which now has three more people in front of you and hasn't moved at the front. Wait impatiently, sweating, trying to distract baby with sightings of other babies. Buy stuff. Go swimming.

Later that night, get arty again. Paint new paint over old paint. Decide to paint old paint over it again, creating a shimmery two-tone antiqued effect. Perhaps. It's hard to tell in this light.

Day five: Use kitchen scissors to cut foam-core board to fit frame. Put velvet over foam core board. Affix it all neatly at the back with duct tape. Stick pins in board. Hang your necklaces from the pins. Consider how clever and handy you are.



Day six: Host housewarming. Note that nobody remarked on your lovely jewellery, so nicely displayed. On the other hand, no babies ran off with your necklaces either, so call it good. Admire your handiwork again.

(I should mention that I didn't think this up all by myself. I saw it in the June issue of Real Simple.)

House warmed, despite a/c

Here I sit, quite tired, and so pathetic that when faced with the choice between a second beer and a Diet Coke, I went with the Coke. We've just said goodnight to the last guests of our housewarming and put the kids to bed. (At least, child 2 is conked out, totally exhausted from all the excitement coupled with a nap that was both short and early and child 1 is being shepherded towards sleep by his father, who will probably drop off first, by the relative looks of them as they left my orbit.)

Posting has been light lately because B sodded off to a conference in Toronto for six days, leaving me to not only keep the children alive and entertained and fed and all that jazz but also try to keep the house clean and respectable and organised so that he could waltz back here last night and then host a party this afternoon. Doing all that left me with not a lot of extra time for fripperies like blog posts. And to be fair, said waltzing involved attending to a long to-do list this morning that had arisen, spontaneous-like, in his absence, and then he had to take the kids swimming to tire them out. On the other hand, since he has spent all week being able to lie in (relatively) if he so desired and socialising with his work buddies (sorry, listening to important talks and networking) whereas I've been getting up at the crack of dawn, cleaning the house, watching far too much PBS Kids and then (sigh) doing all the unplugging of small appliances before going to bed, I don't have all that much sympathy for him.

Anyway, today was the culmination, wherein I got to do some baking and take out the colourful bowls and fill them with snacky things and introduce some friends to some other friends, and show people round the house so they could compliment me on my choice of paint colours. The weather was too hot and sticky to go outside, so sadly we didn't get to use the croquet set we'd procured specially for the occasion. Not as many people came as I might have liked, but if everyone had come we would have been totally sardined indoors. And when you throw a party in the last week of June, you have to expect that a lot of people won't make it and not get all adolescently nobody-likes-me about it. Even the college kids from next door dropped in to drink some water and tell me how much nicer our house is than theirs. We traded cartoon recommendations and I told them they should watch some Phinneas and Ferb. (They looked so young. B and I were that age when we first met. How is that possible? How on earth did I get it so right at such a preposterously early age? Dumb luck? Predestination? Common sense? Crazy love?)

Kids ran in circles and screamed and accidentally locked themselves in the bedroom (and screamed) and had the occasional meltdown and acquired small injuries (and screamed), and all the child-free couples gathered themselves on the other side of the house and talked about... well, I'm not sure actually because, while I would have loved to engage in the grown-up conversation, I was mostly replenishing pita chips or adjudicating meltdowns or distributing juice boxes or wondering where one or other of my children were. Such is life.

When there were just a few of us left we ordered pizza. It was a nice party, I think. We have a lot of recycling to put out, and plenty of beer left in the fridge, and quite a few new bottles of wine, and even two new houseplants. Win/win, I think. (Except for the plants, which I will surely kill in due course.)

Pudding, proof

The acid test of any decision not to get pregnant again just now/ever is, of course, the pregnancy scare. Even when it's mostly hypothetical and you know that any actual recent union of sperm and egg would have been a miracle of near-Biblical proportions, it functions quite well as an indicator of how you really feel, as opposed to how you think you feel.

A friend of mine went through such a thing recently, with the happy result that now she has decided that her heretofore definitely-going-to-be-an-only child might just end up being a big sister. And lo, my own chance to subject myself to the delights of mental self-examination just happened in the last week or so.

I was pretty sure I was, in fact, finally ovulating again, when I got a big zit beside my nose. This, coupled with the fact that nursing was suddenly quite painful for a few days, made me think that maybe my lovely hiatus from the monthly red deluge was about to come to an end. But then, there were a couple of other factors that made me go Hmmm: there was that one day when I was having sort of dizzy spells in Target (that was fun), and the way my blood sugar kept plummetting between meals, leaving me wobbly and frantically rushing home to raid the fridge for some protein - and most damning of all, perhaps, if I wanted to read into it - the fact that I keep smelling woodsmoke from our wood-burning stove in the family room When Nobody Else Can. Hello bionic sense of smell, I remember you from the days when I could tell that someone had opened the fridge in the kitchen at work. (Ah, work. I remember that too.)

While I knew (89% sure, say) that I wasn't really pregnant, it was an interesting mental exercise to wonder if I might be. I truly, honestly, didn't want to be. Apart from that little bit of me that always likes the extra attention a pregnant woman gets, the thought of doing it all again, right now, and the stress it would put on us as a family, a couple, an already-nursing-to-my-limit pair of boobs - nope, I just didn't want to go there. While the temptation to roll again and see what you get is always present, well, for one thing I haven't been taking my folic acid, and for another, you have to call a halt some time. I had easy pregnancies, and I hate period pain, but there are other solutions, y'know.

The proof of the pudding doesn't come till the dice have actually fallen (allow me to mix a few metaphors here), and I was truly contemplating buying a pregnancy test just to be sure to be sure, but today things were confirmed pretty definitely by an achy feeling in my lower abdomen and a blush of pink on the toilet paper. And so, after 28 and a half months off, my body begins to cycle again. Last time this happened I put up with all of three periods with a bad grace before delightedly getting pregnant again. This time I'm hoping to work out a less drastic response.

Revenge of the rules

This post brought to you in real time, interruptions and all.

I keep writing blog posts, or at least fragments, in my head, in bed, in other beds than mine (nothing exciting, just the children's) but they flit away like forgotten dreams as soon as I open the laptop.

Speaking of beds, though. Miss - oh, here she comes to get in between me and my hands - as I was saying, Miss does not take kindly to the thought that - oh heck, here she is again, scaling my person like a small mountaineer. She has a joke for you: "Knock knock," she asks. "Who's there?" I say. "No?" she answers, shaking her head and grinning like a crazy baby.

Yes. Well. Now she's safely learning about temperature from Sid the Science Kid. Point is, she doesn't like sleeping without me. When I take her up to bed, after our book and our mumeet, I say, "Time for sleeping now, time to go to sleep." And she says, "Oh. Seep." And cocks her head to one side and makes a zzz noise.
- Yes.
- Mummy seep?
- No, I have to go downstairs.
- No, Mummy seep.
- This isn't my bed, you know. My bed is in the other room, with Daddy.
- No. Dis Mummy bed. Mummy seep.

[Wait, now she's climbed up on the arm of the futon to reach her father's wallet and riffle through it. Excuse me a mo'. Yes, those are the credit cards.]

So you can see that when she wakes up in the middle of the night - and a while before the middle, and a while after the middle, and a while after that, and shortly before dawn - she's a bit indignant that I'm not right there. I'm trying to make an effort to leave rather than just give up and stay there once it gets to 3am or so, but that just makes me very tired. And since I'll be solo-parenting all next week while B swans off to a conference in Toronto, I don't see that working out very well. I fear there will be backsliding for the sake of my sanity.

[Interlude for taking her off to the sofa, cutting her nails, being kicked in the back by Monkey as he flies by, causing Monkey to bump his head on the sofa arm as I push him away, and general crankiness (all of us) and feeling guilty (just me, I'd say).]

So so much for getting her to sleep better once she had a room of her own. It just makes me sleep worse, for now. Other new rules that may or may not have worked out are as follows:

1. We have instigated a no-food-in-the-family-room rule. Sort of. Or at least a TV-off-at-dinnertime rule. This is sort of working.

[All right. I cheated there and went to make a couple of phone calls while I had B at home to remove people who tend to yell "Wanna talk to Daddy" any time I pick up a phone from my immediate vicinity. I spent a while on hold to the insurance company and now have another number to call. Maybe tomorrow.]

2. Monkey is really getting into playing all the games he got for his birthday, and then some. He was given Toy Story Yahtzee, Zingo, a monkeys-collecting-bananas counting game, and a Richard Scarry I-spy game. He has also discovered Clue(do) and loves to try to play that, which you can imagine is a tad frustrating for the patient parent on the other side. (That would be his father, whose fault it is in the first place for owning Cluedo, and for introducing him to it.) The trouble is that any time Miss is around, she grabs all the pieces. So B had the bright idea of suggesting that first thing in the morning, instead of running into me and thus disturbing Miss for his morn-side, Monkey should just wake him directly and they'd come downstairs and play games. It worked twice. Maybe it'll work again some other day.

[Big gap there while we went off and did things, had lunch, and Miss is now napping.]

3. The thing about getting them to pick out clothes the night before hasn't happened at all. I just bring down a couple of shorts and t-shirts for them when I come down in the morning, after my very-necessary-for-mental-health going-back-to-bed (from 6.30 to about 8am), kindly facilitated by Lovely Husband. They don't complain, particularly, except about getting dressed at all. When somebody gets back into a must-choose-own-clothes phase, we'll do something different, but this works for now.

4. The housework. I did finally make a list, and though it's not on my fridge (because that would make it really real) it's on the uppermost page of my notebook, beside the computer. I divided the basic tasks/areas into six days and made the simplest of simple lists. It looks like this:

Mon: Sweep/clean wood floors
Tue: Sweep/clean kitchen and hall floor (and powder room)
Wed: Bathrooms (sinks and toilets)
Thu: Shower and bath
Fri: Bathroom floors upstairs and dusting
Weekend: Hoover family room and stairs

Now, you may think that some of these should be done every day (like sweeping the kitchen floor, for instance), but, well, for one thing you should see how wonderful my new floor tiles are at hiding the dirt, and also I feel that if I definitely do it once a week that's good. Any more is gravy.

The reason I like this and think I might be able to make it work is that I don't feel overwhelmed by everything there is that I could clean. I know what I need to do today and I don't have to get distracted by, say, the floor while I'm cleaning the sink, because that's tomorrow. Bear in mind that I have to do this in a tiny period of time while Miss naps and I'm not getting my lunch, giving Monkey some one-on-one time, or vitally relaxing by updating my blog (say). If I miss a day I can catch up the next day or just leave it for a week, depending on how much it preys on my mind. And there's always an extra day on the weekend for catchup. (B will probably help out with the hoovering, but I hope to do the rest myself.)

There are, of course, other tasks that should be done regularly and will need to be slotted in somehow - maybe I can allot one week a month for cleaning the fridge, for instance. And keeping the kitchen tidy and picking up toys is ongoing - B is also nominally in charge of the washing up, since I do the meal planning (ahem), shopping and cooking. Now we have a dishwasher, so that's easier and cuts down on kitchen clutter.

I'm currently a day behind, but nevermind. Point is, it might work. And it hasn't failed yet. I have the best of intentions and am very lucky to be starting with a lovely clean slate. House. You know.

To conclude, here is a picture of the new sofa (detail of fig.) with throw cushions and green wall. So far (har) so good.

Overrun

One day last week I had four children in the house, and just me looking after them. This was a new situation for me. I think it showed why I do not have four children of my own, nor any intention thereof.

I suppose it was a milestone, of sorts, because it was the first time we've had a drop-off playdate, rather than a playdate that was set up because I wanted to get together with the mother for coffee/lunch/gossip and she had a handily aged child to bring along as an excuse. In this case, I don't really know the mum at all, but her son is in Monkey's class, she has a daughter a year older than Miss, and it turns out they're having somewhat of a family emergency and people were asked to pitch in and offer to take the kids off her hands every now and then. As we now have plenty of room and my children are equivalent in age and sex - not to mention the there-but-for-the-grace bit - I felt I should ante up.

They were fine, really. Perfectly well-behaved children. But four at once, galloping all over the house as Monkey was his over-exuberant showing-off-his-new-bedroom self (on a previous playdate he gave the tour to a shy, bemused friend and his mother, mentioning such thrilling features as "This is the glass I use to rinse when I wash my teeth") and then all charging outside equipped with vehicles (bike, scooter, tricycle, dolly stroller respectively) and expecting me to keep up with four different children going in four different directions - at least, I kept them to two and two and employed a lot of long-distance yelling to corral the half I wasn't with - and then being herded back into the back garden where the visitors were clearly bored but Monkey wasn't done showing all the amazing blades of grass and threads of ivy that were just waiting to be pulled up... it was a bit tiring. (There was also the nice moment where he leaned over the deck, where I had pulled up some impressively huge interlopers the day before and asked me to get him some weed. Hope the neighbours were listening to that one.)

Finally I got sense and shunned healthy fresh air for the gated-off family room, where I could at least be sure nobody was about to be run over or fall down the basement steps or barge into some heretofore-unseen poison ivy. The elder visitor tried to coax Monkey into putting on a rock concert with his (plastic) guitar and Sid-The-Science-Kid microphone, while the girls pootled around with their own self-appointed tasks, sorting out game pieces and planning a tea party. Peace (almost) reigned and I sighed a deep sigh, afraid to move lest I break the spell, wishing their mother would pull up outside right now and see how good I am at this.

She came a little later, when things were falling apart just a little bit again. But they waved goodbye enthusiastically and we're doing it all again next week. Maybe I need to plan some activities or something, but I'm not a day camp, you know.

I'm also pretty sure that while the little girl was in a car seat, the four-year-old didn't appear to have a booster seat or even to have his seatbelt on as they drove away. I can't say anything - they're having a family crisis at the moment, and maybe it's a cultural thing, or maybe she was just totally distracted and forgot to buckle him in for the first time ever... Maybe. I don't know whether we're just inveterate rule-followers, but whenever I see a family with kids not in carseats, I just can't understand how they can prioritise so differently. (I know, I've done this before. But those people were strangers. These are kids I know.)


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On a completely unrelated note, we have a new sofa. It's beige. It's still in packaging and various pieces, so I can't tell you yet how it looks in the green room. But I'm pretty happy with it. We went to one of those enormous furniture places and hated all the huge and ugly things there, and then merrily took our modest European sensibilites back to IKEA and bought the one we'd wanted all along. (At least, we were reasonably merry about our decision. The kids, somehow, didn't enjoy a day of sofa shopping as much as one might have liked. There was chocolate milk in IKEA, followed by inevitable sugar rush and craziness and screaming and prompt but unpopular removal from the vicinity.)

Green

I always wanted the chance to decorate with colour. I like colour. I rarely wear black - at least not in the daytime, and since I never go out at night these days, that means I never wear black. Grey does nothing for me. I'm scared of wearing patterns, so I just try to coordinate a couple of nice colours on top with a neutral/denim bottom. Which is really not the point I was trying to make but I'm distracted by a film just now. (How to Kill Your Neighbour's Dog. Kenneth Branagh being an English curmudgeonly type. Sort of engaging, actually.)

Anyway. I loved choosing the paint colours, but I admit I didn't fully think them through. Maybe that's impossible before you live with them. So now my bedroom walls are a lovely taupe/tan/light brown with a tinge of pink and I have no idea what sort of bedspread to get (seafoam, I think). And my living room walls are green and picking a sofa is suddenly annoying because it has to be a boring beige or else another dark brown leather (which would be practical, and I love our existing dark brown sofa, but doing it again seems lacking in imagination. I suppose I can make it pop with bright cushions or something. (I didn't just say "make it pop". You imagined that.) I want it to be restful and calming, but I'm afraid the whole house will just look like it was decorated by a child, with all this yellow and red and green. I suspect my next house, if there is one, will be all tasteful tones of toffee and taupe. And then I can have the green sofa.

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Every time we're home in Ireland I'm amazed by my parents' frugal living. Their global footprint is practically in the negative. They hardly ever seem to spend money, but where I really notice it is in the size of the bin. They have a tiny rubbish bin under the sink in the kitchen, and a space for recyclables and paper/card and a compost bin. The "everything-else bin" takes forever to fill up - until we visit and suddenly it's full of used nappies and whatever other non-recyclable detritus we shed as we go through our consumer-driven life, opening packages and going shopping and ripping off labels and breaking stuff. Part of it is having small kids, part of it is that when we're there we're on holidays and it's more than likely Christmas too, and part of it is the fact that it's not 1977 any more like it was when I was four.

Also, the recycling in Ireland is better than here. Our local people only take plastic containers numbers 1 and 2, when they're bottles with a neck narrower than their body. Which means all those yogurt cartons, margarine tubs, hummus and fresh pesto containers just go into the regular bin. And you're meant to sort out the paper and card and leave it out separately, tied up (we just dump it all into a big Pampers box, since there's always one of those on the go), even though I could swear I've seen them just chuck the lot into the same truck with the plastic/glass/cans stuff.

I'd like to consume less and produce less waste, but then what would happen to the economy? If I can just manage to get through the summer without spending almost $10 at Starbucks every day to keep the kids entertained, that will be a start. (At least if we go to IKEA it's only about $5. Assuming I don't buy anything but comestibles. Miss recognises the underground parking lot there now: she shouts "Kee-A, Kee-A" as we drive down, and I break into "IKEA, IKEA, I just saw a store called IKEA," with apologies to West Side Story, every time.)

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All a bit disjointed, but that's what happens when I update with the tv on.