Teeter totter

When we got engaged, I decided that now, if ever, was the time to bring out the big guns. I would actually buy something from an infomercial. Specifically, I would buy the three-video set for Windsor Pilates, as seen on TV (videos, not DVDs, you notice; this was back in the dark ages, seven years ago) and would make a concerted effort to use them. If something good happened, that would be lovely. If not, well, at least I'd have tried.

As it happened, this tiny foray into exercise (if you can call such a low-key thing exercise; it certainly wasn't in any way aerobic) was quite successful. I've always been attracted to the bendy-stretchy arts, ever since being the second-best girl at gymnastics in my class in school. (I was the best, until a certain curly-blonde-haired tiny firecracker moved to our town and started second year (8th grade, that would be) with us. She could do forward and backward walkovers without batting an eyelid, and I was suddenly a long way behind, albeit in second place.)

So I obediently put in a whole 20 minutes of pilates, and gritted my teeth every time Mari Windsor treated "vertebrae" as a singular, every day after work, with the longer workout at the weekends, and I sort of enjoyed it. And it seemed to do something good, as my jeans were quite loose by the time of the wedding, and I was happy.

I bought some DVDs for variety and continued this exercise regime (for lack of a better term) all the time we lived in Texas, until I got pregnant. Whereupon I bought a couple of pregnancy yoga DVDs instead and gave it the good old college try, with mixed results. Then I had a baby.

Yada yada. As you can imagine. Breastfeeding has the happy result of helping me lose pregnancy weight very easily, so I didn't really worry about fitting my jeans for another couple of years. By then we lived up here and I decided to take a class locally, as I had discovered to my irritation that if you lie down on the floor with a toddler in the vicinity, you're just asking for someone to come and play horsie on your stomach.

[Monkey just came to tell me I really need a Miche bag. It's surprisingly versatile and Uses Magnets! He must be watching Qubo again. What was I saying about infomercials?]

The local class had a great teacher but moved very slowly, because it was the beginners one. It was a prerequisite for the advanced class, and the brochure sternly noted that DVDs Did Not Count, so I just went with the leisurely pace and once again enjoyed being one of the top of the class again. (Overacheiver much?) Then I got pregnant with Mabel so I didn't go back.

And that was the end of pilates for me, until a couple of weeks ago, when I joined the advanced class without having put an iota of thought or work into my powerhouse for two and a half years. Amazingly, I didn't make a total fool of myself (except for the part where my ring went flying over my head as I tried to roll backwards with it gripped lightly between my knees; they have rings now in pilates - it's all newfangled these days) and was pretty pleased with myself.

There's just one thing I can't do. Right at the end of class, when we've done all the hard stuff and our middles and our legs and even our arms are feeling all self-righteously worked in new and exciting directions, we stand at the end of our mats and rise slowly to our tippy toes. Then everyone stays there, balancing effortlessly, while they look to the wall, to the window, back to the wall, centre, and slowly lower themselves again. Meanwhile, Maud rises (too fast) to her toes, goes teeter teeter teeter in one direction, teeter teeter teeter back again, and plonks back down, all smugness comprehensively wiped out of me. Lather rinse repeat.

Maybe it's all just designed to take me down a peg or two about my stretchy bendiness. They could have just got Blathnaid O'Byrne to come along and do a back handspring.

To bee or not to bee

As I lay in bed last night, absent-mindedly scratching a new bite on my back and cursing the still-alive mosquitoes, I suddenly realised what the fuss about the bee had been. Of course, there must have been a mosquito in the room, and Mabel was freaked out by hearing it dive-bombing her. As one would be. As I always was.

But here's the thing. I can't hear them any more. I'm TOO OLD. It dawned on me this summer that I hadn't recently heard that horrible drone in the bedroom that would have me thrashing about and pulling the sheets over my head. And it wasn't because nothing had been biting me. Like the teenager-loitering-discouragement device they've put outside the Chinatown metro station, the hum of mosquito wings are at too high a frequency for my ancient 37-year-old ears. (Oh look, it's actually called "The Mosquito." Exactly like, then.)

So when I was shushing poor Mabel and telling her it was all her imagination, that there was no bee and she'd dreamed the whole thing, the poor child was legitimately scared of a mosquito that was right there and kept up with the fly-bys all night. I feel bad. (Imagine how much worse it could have been if she was less verbal. I wouldn't have had a clue what was going on.)

Last night as soon as she startled and said "bee," on her 10.30pm waking, I took her at her word and brought her into our bedroom. Where we slept peacefully all night. Except for B, who was somewhat limited in space, and the fact that I had to stay on my right side even when nursing from the other "side", which you might or might know is not a very restful postion because you have to angle yourself over a bit but stay upright enough not to fall upon the child, so you can't possibly fall asleep yourself.

And then she woke for the day at 5.30am and was delighted to find Daddy right there beside her. "You going to put your trousers on, Daddy? You going to take me downstairs?"

Night fears

One-thirty a.m. last night found me neither tucked up fast asleep in my own bed, nor slumbering/dozing beside my daughter in her bed, but downstairs watching the Baby Animals DVD and playing lego. This was not my idea.

At 10.45 or so, a little while after I'd gone to bed, Mabel woke up. As usual. I went to her room and settled down beside her, nursing her back to sleep and probably dozing off myself. But around midnight (probably), she started nursing again and became gradually more and more agitated.

"There's a bee," she said. There was a bee in the room, in her eye, on her warsie (rocking horse/unicorn)...
"There's no bee," I reassured her over and over. "The bee's all gone. There's no bee. You're dreaming."
Every time she'd start to nurse and her eyes would begin to close, she'd jerk awake again crying. I asked her was she hurt, did she have a pain, did she need medicine? No, no, no.
"What's wrong, sweetheart?"
"I don't know," she wailed.

When denying all knowledge of bees didn't work, I tried the other tack - what I think of as the Riddiculus gambit. When Monkey was two he went through phases of bad dreams about various characters - Ursula the Sea Witch (aka Yucky Octopus) from The Little Mermaid, the Green Goblin from Spider-Man; when I banned all TV it was just a generic giant, so it seemed he was determined to find something to be afraid of just then - and I remember weaving an involved tale about what the giant was actually doing - asking the way to the swimming pool, I think - rather than telling him there was no giant, as he clearly wasn't taking that for an answer. (Nerd alert: My association for this is that when Harry Potter and his classmates learn to vanquish a boggart, they do so by making it a figure of fun. I think Riddiculus is the spell they use.)

But back to last night. After about half an hour of being ineffectualy comforted, Mabel stood up and decided to take it downstairs. I was happy enough to oblige, because we all sleep with our doors open, and the only thing worse than a wide-awake Mabel in the middle of the night would have been a wide-awake Monkey as well. (See moving house.)

So we came downstairs and watched the baby animals in the zoo and her beloved flamingoes, and her clear voice chimed out like a bell naming everything she saw and chatting away as I tried to hold her close and cosy and make her sleepy. When the DVD ended she made for the toys and started pulling out lego pieces and putting them, clumsily, together, as I watched and wondered how long we were going to stay up and who exactly was in charge here. After about ten minutes I told her it would be time to go upstairs again soon, and gave her a two-minute and one-minute warning and then took her with me. I was afraid she'd protest and we'd end up sleeping on the sofa, far from imaginary bees, but she was acquiescent.

I gave her some Motrin, thinking it might be teeth, and after a few final sallies into bee-worrying, she finally conked out. I stayed with her for the rest of the night anyway, and she woke as usual at 6.30 or so. (And went down for her nap at 9.15. Mummy did not get a nap, but did get a lie in.)

To be honest, if she'd said she needed to go to Hawaii rather than just downstairs, 3am would probably have found me on the road to BWI. When your child is wailing, loud and piteous, in the middle of the night, there isn't much you won't do to make it stop and get everyone back to their happy place. And as I sat there and watched her happily figure out how to fit the big lego blocks together, I had my own faint night fears: the sort even optimists get when faced with a miserable and possibly sick baby in the middle of the night. Maybe she's only so bright, so amazing and lively and wonderful, because we don't get to keep her. Maybe it's meningitis (she had a tiny heat rash at the back of her neck). Maybe I'm too lucky, my life is too good, nobody gets this much good without some terrible to balance it out, and maybe it's my turn...

At which point I know that it's time to go to bed.

This morning I read up on night terrors (at Ask Moxie) and decided that wasn't what we'd encountered. Night terrors occur in dreamless sleep, the child doesn't really wake up, and remembers nothing the next day. In this case Mabel was definitely awake, I assume had been dreaming about bees, and was still talking about it this morning. Even tonight as we went upstairs she asked me to be sure there was no bee. Poor sweet girl. I hope she sleeps tonight.

Obviously, this is an old picture.
She's a light sleeper, so I'm usually too busy staying well out of the way
to try taking photos these days.

Permanency

I just filled in the customs forms to import all our wedding presents to America.

They've been sitting in a specially commissioned room in my parents' house (my dad's an architect: you need a bookshelf - you've got a bookshelf; you need a small room to house your wedding presents - Bob's your uncle (who gave you a particularly ugly cut-glass picture frame that you promptly exchanged for a really good tin opener and a fancy cheese grater)) since July 2004 or thereabouts. We didn't want to bring them over, really, not yet; but my dad said they were going mouldy down there and seemed to think that now that we have a big house we'll need all that stuff to fill it.

Whereas in fact we already have plenty of plates and bowls and glasses here; and though our wedding crockery is Denby Imperial Blue, neither of us really loved it when we went to make our list in Arnott's, it was just the best thing we could find for our hard-to-imagine future life. (In fact, I believe I blogged about it. Wow. I'm in the future. Welcome. Where's my flying car?) The glassware is nice, I seem to recall, but really what use - or storage space - do we have at the moment for a set of high-balls, and a set of low-balls, and both red and white wine glasses, and whatever the heck the rest of them were. If we'd registered for plastic glasses and sippy-cup straws, that would have been actually useful right now. We've sort of skipped the honeymoon period where we threw all those wild and sophisticated - simultaneously - dinner parties wherein we would have used the glassware.

I'm looking forward to having all my photo albums here, for the scanning of the embarassing photos into Facebook or something; and B's collection of amusing hats will be entertaining for the children (top, jester's, Panama); and I'm sure there are all sorts of knick-knacks and gew-gaws and odds and ends that will be delightful and thrilling to have in our new house with us. (A set of egg cups. A pair of antique fish servers. B's matchbook collection.) The children will be delighted with all the toys that were supposed to stay in their grandparents' house for our Christmas visits, but have apparently been inadvertently packed as well. Because we needed another light-up toy phone and another box of mind-blowing science experiments, and an awful lot of sticklebricks, and whatever else we're paying for the privilege of importing.

Still, it might be quite exciting getting to unpack our wedding presents after all this time. Maybe someone will have snuck a Kitchen Aid in there too. (Unlikely. They're not really the thing at home. And the voltage would be wrong.) Now if I can just spend all the gift tokens we got (and attained from returning the stuff we hated) we can call our wedding finally finished with. Or would that be sad?

Saturday

Monkey had his first soccer "game" today, after practices the last two Tuesdays. It went great - in that he ran around and got very pink in the face and even seemed to kick the ball on occassion. On the other hand, they were playing three aside, and the more experienced green team massacred the poor little oranges, who probably didn't even realise. (Which is good, I think.)

I have to admit I wasn't paying a whole lot of attention. I was chatting to a couple of other mums and keeping an eye on Mabel, who had discovered the giant sand pit (aka the baseball diamond (except it's not a diamond, is it? It's just the bit for the pitcher, or something. I have no idea about these furrin games) and was busy filling her shoes with it and making sand angels and swimming and generally turning herself a nasty shade of orange, because they put something special in that grit to make it look like lovely sand when it's not at all lovely and barely sand. Anyway, there she was over there, and there was Monkey running around over there (your other there) and there was me in the middle moving over every couple of minutes to keep in the shade of the tree.

As to why it was 90 F again today, I don't know. I'm really quite sick of this, and have been wearing jeans all day in protest. I hope the weather took note and is suitably chastened.

I was amazed to see all that goes on at 9am on a Saturday down at the playing fields. Presumably they didn't put this on just for my benefit, and it happens every week, even. The yard sale outside the library was a twice-a-year gig, admittedly, and I managed to dissuade Monkey from forcing me to buy back the truck he had just let me donate the day before; instead he came away with a Matchbox car fold-up terrain thing (no idea what that's called), a couple of cars, an aeroplane, a Plastic Man figure - yes, to you he might just be a stupid freebie from a Happy Meal, but to my son (and my husband) he's a bone fide superhero, or at least a B-list superhero - and bittersweetly, a single Spider-Man glove. Oh the rejoicing there would have been had I been able to find the second one. (Even though he just got a Batman costume from the thrift store and will probably be Batman for Halloween now.) But he conceded that one glove is better than none, and we even got it free.

But apart from all that. There were games of soccer for the littles, and games of (American) football for the biggers. Rugby seems to me like a perfectly reasonable game for bigger kids to play, but this thing they call football over here, where they just put on pads and run into each other and there's a ball somewhere that is somehow involved... I just don't get it. I hope Monkey never wants to play it. Surely his cultural heritage will out and we'll have to find him a Gaelic football team. Or, um, Pong, maybe? Geek is culture too.

Stick a fork in me

I'm officially done with today. Toast. Two hours to bedtime.

We went around Safeway with the pair of them giggling hysterically in one of those car-trolleys. Everyone smiled indulgently, but I was sure it would end in tears. It didn't, quite, but it did end with child #2 running amok with a random price-reduction sign and then getting herself stuck underneath the trolley. To the cashier's dismay, and my ennui.

On the way home I asked Monkey if he could read the sticker the nice man had given him. (It said Thank You. Thank you for leaving, probably.) He replied that he was busy right now, so no, he couldn't. When I checked my Monkey mirror, he was picking his nose.

"Too busy picking your nose?"

"Yes."

Mabel announced: "I picking my nose."

I metaphorically threw my hands in the air and resigned.

Now they're in the bathroom where she's putting imaginary sunscreen on him as he does a poo. I don't want to know.

Lever Brothers will give you your money back

I fail at American laundry.

I didn't have a lot in the way of chores, as a child: I always set the table for dinner, I did some dusting now and then when asked, and most of the ironing fell to me. I have no idea who, if anyone, did the hoovering and the bathrooms; let's assume that happened when I was at school.

Anyway. Laundry, in Ireland, is different from in America. In Ireland I could put a pair of jeans in the basket and not see them again for two weeks. First they might sit there for up to a week, since our tidy three-person family didn't generate much washing. Monday was wash-day, and a load would be done: probably not sorted into colours and whites as that would mean you only had enough for half a load each, so I constantly had t-shirts that were white for the first week of their lives and pale blue/green/pink thereafter. European front-loader machines do the job properly, and take about 2 hours or more. It's like watching a movie, only less interesting. Like watching Dances With Wolves, then.

Now for the tedious bit. You hang the laundry out on the line, in the grey not-quite-misty day with a temperature around 10C (that's 50F). It threatens to rain. You dash outside and take them all in. The sun comes out. You hang them out again. You go out. The heavens open and it pours. By the time you get home there's no point doing anything, so unless you actually feel like taking them back in and running the spin cycle again, you leave them there. After three days of this, you bring them into the house and hang them on a clothes horse, or in the bathroom, or on all the radiators, or on the backs of the dining room chairs, or all of the above. After another three days, you try to iron them dry.

You finally put the flattened, folded, and still slightly damp clothes neatly in the airing cupboard, and in another two days they'll be good to wear. Or else you decide to air them and press them at the same time by sleeping on them. (My dad sleeps with his trousers under the mattress every night to keep the crease in. It has never occurred to me until right this second that that's a bit odd. But I always wondered what trouser presses in hotel rooms were for.)

I remember, more than once, wishing fervently for a magic laundry box that would let me deposit dirty clothes, press a button, and remove magically clean, dry, and ironed ones.

Now I live in America, and all my laundry-related dreams have come true. The top-loader takes less than ten minutes to run a cycle, and can fit a king-sized duvet if I need it to. Right beside it sits the lovely, wonderful tumble dryer: a scant hour or so in there, and the clothes come out warm, bone dry, and practically crease free. I use the iron once a year, when I take my summer stuff out of the suitcase it lives in over the winter and anything with linen in it really needs a run over. And our airing cupboard is just the press where towels live. I don't think it's anywhere near the hot-water cylinder, as they are at home.

(My brother in law and I were just discussing ironing, or the fact that nobody does it any more. (I don't remember why. He phoned. We were chatting. Anyway.) He said there was a woman who had been struck by lightning while ironing. He thought the chances of that must be infinitesimally small: for one thing, it's unlikely you'll be struck by lightning; for another, nobody irons any more: how on earth could both happen to anyone at the same time? (This also shows that ironing is dangerous. You should stop doing it.))

So it's all wonderful here in the future. Except that American washing machines fail at one tiny detail. My clothes are wet, and then they're dry, and they smell nice. But they're not noticeably any cleaner. And once they're out of the dryer, that's it: the stain is baked in and it won't be gone till I go home at Christmas and use my mother's machine. (Hmm. A thought. Maybe it's the rain that takes the stains out in Ireland, not the washing machine. Thank you, Sellafield*?)

I suspect that American housewives spend a lot of time - the time that Irish housewives spend gazing at the clouds and calculating the time it will take to get home from the shops, and running in and out to the line - stainbusting. And pre-treating and bleaching and soaking, and doing things with buckets and baking soda and old toothbrushes. I'm scared of bleach, and I forget to pre-treat even when I have the Clorox pen right there beside the washing machine, and if I put anything in a bucket, that's just asking a child to mess with it. Sometimes I throw in a scoop of Oxy-Clean with the detergent, but I don't think it does anything. I wash everything on Warm, because I washed everything at 40C at home, and I think it's the same. Hot is bad for the environment, and my wash is never full of just cotton whites or anything that could take bleach and hot water. I'm obviously Doing It Rong, again.

At least my children rarely eat anything that stains, other than chocolate. Beetroot is right out.


* Sellafield is a nuclear power plant in England on the coast of the Irish Sea. In the past it has been blamed for many woes that befell the Irish population. Not the famine: that was the fault of the English in a different way. Just FYI.

My goodness

My parents were lucky to have me.

I don't mean that the way it sounds. It's just that I was by all accounts an easy baby, an obedient and approval-seeking child, and a bookish and non-rebellious adolescent. I'm mortified by how boring that makes me sound, but there you are. I take no credit for it myself, and the more time I spend parenting, the less I believe much of it has to do with my upbringing either: I think that's just the sort of kid I was.

Not that my parents didn't do right by me: I thank them for teaching me to say please and thank-you and excuse me, and to write thank-you notes (or at least feel guilty when I know they've gone unwritten); to hold doors open for people and cover my mouth when I yawn. My mother dedicated long tedious mealtimes to making sure I didn't put my elbows on the table and that I knew what to do with a napkin and where the soup spoons go. (You'd think I'm a model of decorum. I'm not. But it's not her fault.)

My parents also taught me to be independent (whether intentionally or by judicious neglect I'm not sure, but whichever, it worked) - I couldn't understand my classmates whose parents were busy filling out college applications for them and sorting out their portfolios: I certainly wouldn't trust my parents with such important work. And I think they gave me a certain work ethic - though that might just be a tendency inherited from my somewhat workaholic father tempered by my more fun-loving mother: the result being a fundamentally lazy me who knows she should really be doing something more useful.

I wouldn't want you to think that I never crossed the line into bad behaviour. I distinctly recall lying about whether I had brushed my hair when I was about ten. I certainly fudged the truth about just how big the "gang of people" I'd walked home with at 3am from Stradbrook Rugby Club disco was, when really it was just two or three girls, dropping to me alone for the last ten minutes of dark and lonely road. But I was over 18 by then, so maybe it doesn't count.

Thing is, while we all try our best and put a great deal of thought into how we bring up our children, sometimes what they do just comes down to who they are, themselves, regardless of your influence. My cousin ran away with some bloke at 16 and didn't come home for two months; at the same age, I was dilligently doing my homework and wondering how I would ever meet a boy. I'm sure my father's sister didn't do anything demonstrably different in bringing up her daughter than my parents did bringing up theirs - my parents just got luckier, in that particular respect that let them avoid several months of heartache and soul searching and abject terror that my aunt and uncle went through.

So I think we should all lay off ourselves - and each other - just a bit. If you yelled at your son today because he refused to pull up his jeans without help (say) or let your daughter watch one too many episodes of Little Einsteins (again), they'll be okay. You get to try again tomorrow, and we never (or rarely) have a perfect parenting day, but so long as we keep trying, the balance should end up on the plus side. Beyond that, maybe it all just comes down to luck.

Anyway, I'm sure that revenge for being such a boring child will be amply visited upon me by my own offspring when they go through their hellacious schooldays and rebellious teens. Maybe I should just send them to their grandparents.

Old-Hat Reviews: Let the Right One In

I have very little control over the movies we see. At least, that's not quite true. I just don't choose to exercise my options. B is the keeper of the NetFlix, and though I have the login and am certainly entitled - nay, encouraged - to add films to our list, I hardly ever bother. With the result that the two DVDs that sit on the TV shelf waiting for our viewing pleasure are usually a delightful surprise to me. Or at least a surprise. Sometimes they're Batman, which is a delightful surprise for someone else.

And then there's NetFlix on Demand, where you don't even have to order the movie, you just press play and - thanks to the wonders of wireless internet - it streams straight to your computer. I'm pretty sure that Let the Right One In had actually been in our house ages ago for some number of weeks before we decided we weren't going to feel like watching it, and sent it back unopened. The other night I found B pressing Play on the NetFlix site and ended up watching the same film and being totally drawn in, if not exactly against my will, then at least without any intent on my part.

All I had known was that it was a vampire movie from Sweden that got excellent reviews as not-the-average-vampire-flick. I don't watch horror films; and if your vampires aren't called Angel or Spike, I'm not terribly interested in them, so you can see why I tended away from this. Also, sometimes you just don't feel up to subtitles.

In fact - and I don't want to give anything away, but I don't think this is going to be a big reveal - this is a sweet and tender teenage love story that deals with how horrible kids can be to one another. The whole vampire thing is somehow at the same time pivotal to the plot and also totally incidental; and even though there's a lot of blood, it's not remotely played for chills, or gore, or anything like that.

We were concerned that everyone in Sweden dresses very peculiarly, but then it turned out that it's set in the early 80s (which explained why I didn't recognise any of the furniture as coming from IKEA; it probably came from early-80s IKEA). The young protagonists are excellently understated, and the whole thing is low-key and unhurried, but not boring. It reminded me a little of The Ice Storm, in feeling as well as fashion. (And weather, I suppose.)

Apparently they're remaking it in American this year as Let Me In: no doubt the actors will be prettier, and it will be interesting to see whether they leave the resolution as it is in the original or feel they need to do something different with it.

Demands and counter-demands

While Monkey is, of course, delightful, he does also possess some of the less adorable traits of your average four-year-old: whining, for one, I believe is something they do a lot of at this age. He tends to pick a theme and harp on it, sometimes for weeks - but then, he did that with the Spider-Man costume when he was only three (a prodigy!), and I stood up to it with a heart of stone for many months, convinced he'd finally grow out of it or have a birthday, one or the other. He did the latter. And got the costume and immediately started demanding Spider-Man gloves, and boots, and then a Batman costume and so on.

Recently he decided a ray-gun was the way to go. He used to have a ray-gun. In fact, it was his first gun-like toy: a pleasantly retro-looking thing that made an extremely irritating grating noise and generated sparks inside. (Not real sparks, I'm sure. Just some sort of spark effect.) It was a present from Franklins, which is a local restaurant with toy shop and wine shop attached, so that you can take the kids for a meal and bribe them with a present at the same time. Instant gratification for all.

Anyway, the ray-gun got broken lo these many months, as is the way with these things, and just the other day he seized upon the notion of it for his next thing-to-want. He spent a day or two whining at us that he reeeeally reeeeallly wanted a ray-gun, he'd love a ray-gun, he neeeeded a ray-gun et cetera, until we told him that he might get one for Christmas or his birthday, but only if he'd for the love of all things holy stop talking about it. He mostly did, eventually, stop, but brings it up again every now and then just to make sure we haven't forgotten, in case Christmas is suddenly upon us tomorrow or something.

So there we were in IKEA, he and I and Mabel, as is our wont, and he decided on a little foray into pestering me for the ray-gun. I really want a ray-gun, it went. I need a ray-gun right now. And I said stop talking about the ray-gun, and he did. As we went downstairs from the cafe into the kitchen goods, he shot a final wistful salvo: "I wish I had a ray-gun." I ignored it.

Earlier [I have to back up a bit here], Mabel and I had pottered about while Monkey enjoyed himself in the supervised ball pit, finding some curtain rings, and she had picked up several maps (the flyers they have everywhere for you to write down the name and number and location of your item before you go into the warehouse area) and wanted a pencil. Then she'd got a bit crazy with the running away and hiding, and I'd actually lost her for a perilous 30 seconds or so, so I had put her on my back in the Ergo, at which she was protesting a bit but not too much. She still had a map, though, and wanted to draw on it. However, I couldn't give her a pencil now for fear she'd stab me in the neck as her list-making got too feverish. (She's her mother's daughter, after all.)

As we continued past the pots and pans and big glass jars in which to artistically keep all your baking supplies, Mabel piped up in exactly the same tragic tone Monkey had used three minutes earlier: "I wish I had a pencil."

Metatember

I'm doing pretty well, this month. Compare, if you will, my 16 posts in 18 days of September with my pathetic showing in 2007 of 4 posts for the entire year. (I was busy having a one-year-old, or something. Lay off.)

I'm sort of practising for NaNoBloMo, which is when bloggy people try to write a blog post every day of the month of November. You get a sticker or something, if you manage it. I think they have to be real posts, not just knock-knock jokes or something (unless that was, in fact, the theme of your blog, I suppose), but I think you're probably on your honour to do it right if you're doing it at all.

But I feel a bit like the bloke in the other joke. The one where there's a competition in the pub to see who can down ten pints in one go, and he says, "Hang on a minute," and comes back five minutes later, sits down, and aces the contest. They ask him where he went, and he says he popped to the pub next door and had a quick ten there to make sure he could do it. (Obviously, he was in Ireland, where the idea of another pub next door is perfectly reasonable.)

So I hope I haven't used up all my words by the time November comes around.

Not laughing at. Laughing with.

Monkey can take half an hour to do a wee, if I let him. First there's the increased running around, inability to stand still, generally jiggyness; I ask a few times if he needs to go. Eventually he runs over and - dancing on the spot - in tones of one making an amazing discovery for the very first time, says "Mummy, you were right. I do have to do a wee."

Whereupon I have to usher him to the bathroom and stand in the doorway as he jumps up and down and tries to undo and pull down his shorts at the same time. (If I don't go with him, he'll just run around in circles all over the house until I do.) He lifts the seat and lid together and aims and fires all in one fluid (ha!) motion.

At this point I can leave, so I make my escape. And wait for his reappearance. Which can take a long time. Eventually, after ten minutes or so without so much as the sound of a tap running, I lose my patience and go to see what's taking so long. He's invariably hunkered down, communing in some unspecified way with his parts. "But Mummy," he said to me the other day, "I'm very attracted to my penis." (He may have meant "attached to," since we gave him leeway on something one day because he was overtired and he was very "attached to" the item in question. But in that case it was a sippy cup.)

I make the requisite little speech about this not being the time to get intimate with his intimates, and eventually the pants come up and the handwashing begins. If I go away again he can take another 20 minutes investigating exactly how the plug-on-a-stick mechanism works (and probably breaking it in the process), how hard he can make the water gush if he pulls the tap all the way on, and just how far he can fill the basin before it overflows. (My little engineer.)

Finally the towel is all bunched up but back on its rail, the light is left on, and he emerges, damp of hands in spite of it, ready for the next challenge of the day.

Cake and macaroni

Other people's babies are easy to look after.

News at eleven.

I know, it's not the most amazing of breakthroughs, and considering I started babysitting at 14 I should still know this myself, but it seems that in the last few years I've spent so much time intensively taking care of my own kids that I've hardly ever been alone with other people's, and I'd forgotten this tiny but vital piece of information.

This morning was phase II of the Great Baby Swap, wherein I pottered about for the morning with a sweet and mostly silent 15-month-old, as well as (the highly contrasting) Mabel. (Not that she isn't sweet, but she was fairly possessive every time it looked like I might be dropping her for the newcomer, and she literally and figuratively ran and talked circles round him. But I'm sure they'll be best friends in no time.)

It was a piece of cake. He was perfectly content - or at least didn't indicate to me that he wasn't - and the best part was when he ate my homemade macaroni and cheese with chicken. I love it when other people's children eat food I prepare: it restores my faith in myself and my ability to feed a family. My own silly offspring may turn up their noses at real food, but that doesn't mean I'm Doing It Wrong.

What I need to take from this is the realisation that if I leave my own (tiny! helpless! unable to communicate! not) baby with someone else, she's going to be fine. As she was on Wednesday. She's not going to be hanging on them for boob, pestering them for Little Einsteins (probably at least because they won't understand what she's looking for), demanding a dinosaur vitamin and refusing to the waffle I just toasted because she asked me for it and swore up and down black and white that this time she'd eat it.

Moral of the story: People should swap babies more often. And I should get a babysitter and take my poor beleaguered husband out to dinner.

Writing and reading

I'm at home with no children. It's the first morning of the child swap, and Mabel hardly even noticed as I waved her goodbye and left her in the most capable hands of my friend-who-will-be-a-doula. "I'll be fine," I said, and she laughed. And I walked back up the hill strangely empty handed and unburdened of back.

I have resolved to use this time only to do things I can't do when the kids are here. So no picking up, no cleaning the kitchen, no laundry: blogging is okay, but I shouldn't be checking Facebook (too much). Really I should be writing or editing or working on something I might get paid for, but I have yet to organise anything like that, though I did go to the lengths of joining LinkedIn, which seems to be a sort of cross between Monster.com and Facebook: you make "connections" with people you've worked with or who are in your area, and people can search for you and read your resume and make connections with you, and you can ask for recommendations. Unfortunately, neither of my two old bosses from Dublin seem to be on it, but a lot of other people I've worked with are, so it's fun catching up with what everyone's doing these days, even if nothing actually happens from it.

I might also use this time to do things like sorting out winter clothes or big cleaning/tidying tasks that I can't do without little people clustering round me (yes, two can cluster) demanding to know what this is and what that is for and then taking everything away to play with instead.

But here I am today. I've written two paragraphs of Something Else (to be unveiled Sometime in the Future, or quite possibly Never At All) and I'm blogging so that this evening when B fires up an episode of his latest Netflix-on-Demand discovery, The IT Crowd (very amusing BBC comedy by the writer of Father Ted), I can give it my full attention.

*******

I was going to say that I love having a four-year-old. For some reason, perhaps because I started school at four and have at least some memories of being four, I feel it's a big step up from three. Monkey can be depended on to trail after me in a shop without being chivvied from pillar to post; he can open his car door and climb into his booster seat (but not do up his seatbelt just yet); he can - and more importantly, will - get himself dressed; he can quite often put the right shoes on the right feet. He tells jokes (mind you, so does Mabel, but she gets stuck after the first line: her latest is asking: "Why did the mummy chicken cross the road?", but she can't tell you the answer). He wants to help, even if his efforts are sometimes misguided and I have to try not to shout at him for making it worse when I know he's really just trying to make it better.

Yesterday we ventured into a large shop where I didn't need anything, but we'd come out on a wild goose chase and I felt they should be set free, a little. Mabel ran away. I said, totally without irony: "You can run... but you can't hide." Her new trick in shops is climbing under the clothes on the racks and hiding there, and it's either hilarious or terrifying, depending on whether or not I saw her go. Monkey ran after her, tackled her to the ground, and sat on her; as I brought up the rear, wearily commenting, "You don't have to pull her arm out of her socket...or sit on her..." and catching up with them "...and you, Missy, don't have to laugh about it..."

One of the most exciting things about four is the almost reading. I realise this happens at different ages with different kids, but right now Monkey can recognise all the letters* (at least in uppercase; sometimes the lowercases confuse him) and is beginning to get the idea of sounding them out. In his new class they have a "Question of the day" to read every morning when they go in the door, with their very own cut-out lizard to place on the velcro strip under their answer. There isn't time to spell and sound through the whole sentence with him, as other kids are lining up behind us and there are distractions aplenty, but I'm trying to do the first couple of words every day, with the hopes that they'll start to repeat: when and what and how and where and do you think.

So this afternoon [yes, it's later now. Mabel was fine. I was fine. It all worked out great. Round II tomorrow morning at my house] we went to the library and picked up some of the very first beginning-to-read books - the sort with about three words on each page, but a little more interesting and fun than the cat on the mat. I don't know what, if anything, he'll do with them, but I'd like there to be something suitable in the house in case the mood strikes him and he suddenly wants to read a book.

Have you any great first-reading books to recommend? I'd be delighted to hear about them.



*I thought this was just some miraculous progression that happened on its own, but then I realised that his dad drills him on the letters in the frieze around his bedroom wall every night when putting him to bed. They're doing the days of the week now too, and I was amazed to discover that Monkey knows them all, in order. (Doesn't stop him talking about everything in terms of "the day after this day," but maybe some time it will.)

Fickleties

It may have escaped your notice that it's September now. September, when I was going to be all gung-ho about the winding down on the nursing, the ramping up on the weaning, the getting serious about sleeping and all that jazz. I certainly noticed. But now that we're here, much as I predicted, I can come up with lots of lovely excuses. Teething, still going on, for instance. And the fact that the busyness of the new term has cut down on nursing anyway. And mostly I'm just not in that place any more where the incessant demands are driving me nuts, so I can afford to be all zen and "oh, she's my last baby, who cares how long she needs to nurse" about it.

So there's that.

And then there was also my great and efficient house-cleaning plan. That just totally didn't happen. Maybe some day when I have big oodles of child-free time every day, I can happily devote 20 minutes regularly to swiffering, dusting, mopping, disinfecting, and whatever, but right now housework is still very much on an ad-hoc basis. When the mood strikes, when I have a few free minutes, when people are coming over, when the children demand to hoover (true story), or when I happen to look inside the shower with my glasses on - this is when I clean. It seems to work okay, so far.

If changing one's mind is a woman's prerogative, I'm clearly oozing oestrogen. This blog is evidently a repository for plans that never come to fruition, things that do not come to pass, the best of intentions gone awry.

On the other hand, these two seem to have worked out pretty well, so maybe it's not totally a lost cause.

Mundanities

I seem to have been on a roll lately with posting. I used to post when I felt I had something specific to say, but I'm leaning more towards the "80% of success is showing up" angle these days and trying to make it a habit. Do tell me if I'm boring you, won't you? It's also quite nice just to start typing and see what falls out - sometimes the tangents turn out to be more interesting than what I was originally going to say.

Our autumn is about to get busy. Monkey went back to school last Tuesday (five mornings a week), and I have a couple of classes scheduled for Mabel and me while he's busy there. Add the child-swap for the Correctly Hyphenated Doula Company and that will take up pre-nap every day, pretty much, with maybe one morning for doing the shopping. On top of that we have soccer for Monkey starting tomorrow - Tuesday evenings and Saturday mornings; my pilates class on Wednesday evenings (first time I'll have considered my "core" since I got pregnant with Mabel, so that should be lots of fun); and of course it's coming up to marathon season so I'll continue to be a running widow on a regular basis for the next month or two. Then there's regular co-opping at school and the grannies' visit in October and I'm sure I'm forgetting something.

We went and bought shin guards and a pair of cleats (soccer shoes with plastic studs) for Monkey today, to add to his new shorts and t-shirt ensemble for tomorrow. To say he's quite excited would be an understatement. I just hope I can get him to take a nap tomorrow afternoon, because soccer doesn't happen till 6pm, and a whole field full of unnapped, hyper, overexcited three-and-four year olds armed with soccer balls is really a terrifying thought. Which is why his father is taking him.

Everyone in the family got new shoes yesterday, except me. The fact that I got a new pair of jeans (for $22 - score) does not make up for it. Mabel now has two exceptionally cute pairs of shoes for this winter, and I'm dead jealous. My search for the perfect boots will soon begin again. Again.

Cribbage

We put away the crib yesterday. (By "we" I mean that I did nothing more than agree that it was time to take it down, and take possession of the sheet as the hardware was shuffled down to the basement.) Mabel hasn't used it for months, other than to jump up and down in, preferably with her brother, in the middle of the afternoon. She sleeps (if you don't remember) on a mattress on the floor, and for some/much/most of the night I sleep there too.

If possible, she used the crib even less than her brother did. He at least spent a small chunk of his babyhood sleeping there: I could nurse him to sleep in the rocking chair and then gently deposit him into the crib. I had the trick down pat of pushing in the base of the drop-side with my toe so it didn't click as I raised it into place. If I was lucky, he'd roll over and stay asleep. If I was unlucky, he'd roll over, sit up, and be wide awake again, already scrunching up his face to yell, and I'd have to start the whole process again. Eventually the unlucky nights outweighed the lucky ones and I came up with the mattress plan.

With Mabel, I went straight to the mattress as soon as she grew out of the co-sleeper, and she only used the crib for those rare times when I could put her down in it asleep from the Baby Bjorn or the Ergo.

(I believe some people have babies who can be put into cribs awake and will fall asleep on their own, with little or no or at least decreasing amounts of fussing. At least, I'm told these babies exist, but I shouldn't say I actually believe it, never having seen one with my own eyes. My babies are not those sort of babies. If not put down asleep, they would scream the house down before they'd fall asleep on their own.)

The crib is obsolete already, since it has a drop side and has probably been recalled more than once. We could turn it into a toddler bed, but she'd have to be sleeping on her own for that - I prefer to have her on something large enough for two. But as for all the other baby-related paraphernalia in the basement - do we keep it until it's too out of date to be of any use to anyone, just in case the increasingly unlikely third child makes an appearance after all? Or do I bite the bullet and start Craigslisting it (or freecycling, or donating, or whatever) sooner? I love the idea of decluttering, being efficient, letting other people make use of these things we chose with love and deliberation (and economy). But I think to do it so soon would just be tempting fate and there'd be some sort of slip up and there would be nothing worse than having to acquire all the same stuff again.

I held a two-week-old baby a while ago, and while he was tiny and squishy and little-old-man-esque, nothing in me jumped up and down demanding one of my very own. And Mabel was downright possessive of me, for all her posturings about loving babies and saying we should get one.

I'm looking ahead, to times when the children are older: when we can go for day trips without worrying about naps, when we can all go to a movie together, when Mabel's as old as Monkey is now and we can all stay together without one member of the group taking off at top speed to go hide under the clothes rails in H&M... or maybe that's optimistic. I don't particularly feel the need to slow us all down again by starting from scratch with another baby, despite the sheer curiosity of what another could possibly be like.

But I think the crib and associated stuff will just sit downstairs a while longer. Just in case.

(Not a real cat, BTW)

Old-Hat Reviews: No Country for Old Men

Just in case you're confused, this is the film with Javier Bardem and the terrible haircut, not the one with Daniel Day Lewis and the milkshake. If that helps clear things up at all.

This had been sitting on our to-be-watched shelf for possibly months before we finally got around to it, because it was lodged in my mind as one of those worthy Oscar films that I really should see but didn't hugely want to because it would probably be depressing. I'd forgotten that it's a Coen brothers film; in fact it doesn't have a lot of the Coen hallmarks - at least going by Fargo, which I always think of as quintessential Coen (partly because I haven't seen them all, but let's gloss over that - I've seen The Big Lebowski and Burn After Reading too, but those are definitely in the realm of comedy and this sure as heck ain't). The sense of the quietly ridiculous that normally hangs around a Coen brothers film was very very subtle here - noticeable only in Bardem's quite quite terrifyingly loony hit man, and Josh Brolin's mother-in-law, who had The Cancer and wasn't going to let anyone forget it.

There were a few things about the film that made it particularly interesting to me: it's partly set in border-country Texas, and I just happen to have spent two years living in border-country Texas, albeit further down the river from Del Rio. Not that I could identify with the drug dealing, but the Mariachi singers certainly struck a chord in my memory.

We were surprised to see Kelly Macdonald - best known as the young girl in Trainspotting - as Josh Brolin's wife here. As we'd just spent previous evenings watching her in the very excellent BBC mini-series State of Play, in which she has her real, strong Glasgow accent, it was hard not to miss the tiny glitches in her Texas drawl, but I think she did a pretty good job.

Let me take a moment to tell you about State of Play. If you have a two-DVD gap in your Netflix list, I highly recommend you go and put this on it. It was later made into an allegedly-not-bad Ben Affleck movie, but I'm sure the original is far superior. It has a great cast, with the aforementioned Kelly Macdonald; a floppy-haired and before-he-was-famous James McAvoy; a guy called John Simm, who played The Master in several episodes of last year's Dr Who, if you happen to have a clue what I'm talking about there; and the always wonderful Bill Nighy. (Forgotten who he is? Remember the pervy aging rock star in Love Actually? Him.) It's about a politician whose girlfriend dies in suspicious circumstances, and the investigative reporting team who race the police to figure it all out. Gritty, realistic, BBC, those accents you people all love, damn good TV.

Sorry. Back to the review this is actually meant to be. Tommy Lee Jones does a good job as the laconic and sadly jaded sherrif. (Am I the only person who always thinks of Oz from Buffy when the word "laconic" comes up? /Quick Google search./ No, apparently I'm not.) Josh Brolin almost makes a moustache sexy with his McGyver-ish hunter with a heart of gold and questionable morals. (The film is set in 1980, which explains Bardem's haircut - apparently modelled on a photo of a brothel client from 1979. Lovely.)

I don't want to say anything more about the plot because I'm sure someone out there hasn't seen it and I always think the less you know about a film the better. But it was certainly worth seeing, I enjoyed it despite everything, and it's not at all unremitting gloom - somehow, those Coens make you think there's a laugh just around the next corner even when it turns out to be a crazy-eyed Mexican with a huge shotgun and a silencer. Rent it.

Just say no

Before we went to the UK this summer, I contacted a couple of the elderliest relatives - the ones I had to actually write physical paper letters to, the horror - to let them know we'd be around and try to pin down some dates to drop in and see them, to make it as easy for them as possible to get to see us. A little later, the aunt we were going to stay with obviated this by arranging a big family get-together that the elderlies would come to, so one of the droppings-in was dropped. The other one was still slated to happen the following week, because that relative - I shall call her Cousine, as she is half French and my father's cousin - loves fussing and planning and catering to people.

So then I forgot about it for a while and we hared off to the top of the country to see people not related to me, and my aunt reminded me by e-mail that Cousine was still expecting us but wasn't quite sure which day we'd be coming, so I should call her. By this time we had various things that needed to get done when we went back down to London, and I had looked at a map and realised that she lived diametrically on the opposite side of the city from where we would be staying, and I decided that we'd just have to get out of it. I planned to phone her from the road and say regretfully that we wouldn't be able to make it after all. She's a little hard of hearing, and I hate letting people down, so I was procrastinating on making the call.

I finally dialled her number on my cellphone from the passenger seat as we went over hill and down dale in north England. The conversation went like this:

"Hello?"
"Hi! Cousine! It's Maud."
"Ah, Maud, good. Are you in London now?"
"Well, no, actually...

We go down a hill. Call cuts out. I ring back.

"Hello?"
"Cousine? Sorry, we got cut off."
"I think you got cut off."
"Yes, we're in the car. I'm on a mobile phone. We're just coming into County Durham." [That's right at the top of England near the Scottish border.]
"Oh. Oh. I see. You're driving."
"Yes. Anyway, I don't think we'll be able to make it for lunch, but [here's where my mouth kept going when it was supposed to have finished talking] we could probably call in for afternoon tea on Thursday, if that would be okay..."

Into a valley. Call cuts out. As I press redial, I look at B, who's busy driving with an "I'm not sayin' nuttin'" look on his face. Realisation dawns.

"I wasn't meant to say that, was I? I was going to say no, wasn't I?"
"Mm-hmm," he nodded.
"F...lip." (Mindful of little ears in the back.) "I can't change it now."

Back to the phone.
"Maud?"
"Sorry. We lost the signal again. So, about 3.30, then, on Thursday?"
"Lovely. I'm so pleased you can come. I'll see you then."

Apparently, I can't say no. In the end it all dovetailed nicely. I realised that Cousine's house was on the way to the airport from which we were leaving on the Friday, and as our flight was early and we'd have to check in three (ugh) hours before that, it would make more sense to book into an airport hotel for the previous night. So on Thursday morning B took Monkey on an adventure by train into the city to take the underground to meet a friend and pick up keys we'd left behind and then another train out again on the other side, while I drove the rental car, loaded up with our luggage and Mabel (sleeping, partially), halfway round the M25 - London's ring road - and with minimal getting lost we met up in Bromley as planned before going on to Cousine's house nearby.

She had laid on a wonderful cream tea with scones and strawberries and Victoria sponge - all of which Monkey spurned, of course, to my chagrin; such bad manners - and she had a garden with apple trees, and crayons and drawing paper, and then she produced a glockenspiel, of all things, to give to the kids if we had room in our luggage. They had a great time making a joyful din and we took it with us. (Cousine used to be a music teacher. She just happened to have a spare glockenspiel lying around, as you do.) I hadn't been in her house since I was about 16, but it smelled excactly the same, of bumpy wallpaper and must and plush upholstery and memories of oatcakes and Quark and things I'd first or only ever tasted there.

It was a lovely interlude before we headed off for the impersonal airport hotel and the craziness of our return flight to the US, and I'm so glad my mouth overruled my brain when I tried to say no. Maybe it was just instinct getting the better of me.

Control issues

When we moved house we bought a new TV but decided to drop our cable provider entirely. Instead, at the suggestion of a friend of mine, we spent a massive $12 or so on a digital antenna, which gives us the most basic of basic channels. The only thing we use the TV for now is PBS Kids (and DVDs, because it has a mega-handy built-in DVD player). (No more Top Chef and Project Runway for me. See the sacrifices I make.) (I can put something else in parentheses here if you like, but that might be overkill.)

TV. Yes. I fully admit that my children watch too much TV, but at least I feel better if it's all PBS. For one thing, no ads, so no more Monkey pestering me to buy him "Boominators," which would make him fly. These turned out to be Luminator sneakers, which appeared to give the boy in the ad the power of flight. When I told Monkey that that part was just to make them look cool so people would want to buy them, he was somewhat disillusioned. But still wanted them. (Didn't get them. I am perhaps unfairly averse to buying my children shoes that light up. It's not as if the shoes would be a bad influence, or give them cavities, or make them run across roads without looking, but for some reason I feel I have to make a principled stand against such fripperies. Maybe it's because they usually have a licensed character attached, and I am somewhat more reasonably against turning my kids into free advertising for Disney or Marvel or Pixar or whatever. (Yes, I know he has umpteen Spider-Man things. But only tasteful or retro ones. Which the shoes are not. Leave me to my illogical justifications, please. They're all I've got. Sniff.))

Sorry. My paragraphs keep getting away from me. Anyway.

A couple of weeks ago I read Amalah's post about this new fad among the pre-school set for things called Pillow Pets. (Go and read it, she's very funny. And her kids are cute.) I had never heard of them, but the gist is that her kids saw the infomercial and pestered her for these stuffed-toy-pillow things until eventually she somehow ended up buying them one each, through no fault of her own. Hah, I thought in a superior manner, no such problems for me. I live in an advert-free house. I am so clever.

The very next day, from the living room as I sat down with a cup of tea, out of the blue as far as I was aware, came the yell, in the tones of one who has been having this conversation - though perhaps only inside his head - for quite a while now: "Mummy! I need a Pillow Pet."

What? What? Have you been reading my blogs? Have you been setting up conference calls with Noah? Skyping him, maybe, to be shown his new ladybug Pillow Pet? How do you know about this? Who got to you?

Then I realised that sometimes they watch the Qubo channel, which does have ads. And indeed, there was a cotton-pickin' Pillow Pets ad right now.

As of today, we don't yet have Pillow Pets. I have steered us past the oh-so-helpful stalls right in the middle of malls covered from top to bottom in the furry abominations, pointing enthusiastically at something imaginary in the opposite direction. We will see how long this lasts. But my ad-free superiority complex is well and truly blown.

Serendipity

Here I am with a quiet house, and I can't remember what I was going to say. Isn't it always the way?



Ah yes. So I was working the Nursery School booth on Saturday at the Labor Day Festible (as Monkey calls it) with a friend who lives down the road and has two boys just six months each behind my kids. She recently had the amazing experience of attending a birth, and was still buzzing with the adrenaline of it. (I've never been to any births where I wasn't the one doing the pushing, but I'd love to do so one day. It must be the most incredible thing to see life appear, just like that. (Further, less noble tangent: On the other hand, every time Monkey has a long and difficult session on the toilet, I feel like a midwife ushering these poos into the world, and I think again that it's just as well men aren't the ones who have to give birth because if this is any indication, they'd never manage it at all. Sorry. That is completely beside the point and a shocking generalisation.))

Anyway, she said she'd love to be a doula, but would have to sort out some sort of local and free childcare while doing the training and then to be able to dash off and attend births. Like a childcare swap. My mind whirred like a whirry thing and I diffidently said, "I could do it."

Lately, as you can see from the greater regularity of my blogging, I've been trying to kick things into a new gear, writing and/or career-wise. When Monkey was rising two, I felt like it was time to go back to work or get pregnant again; but I wasn't ready to contemplate work and I happily jumped the other way. I suppose I'm getting that sense again now - the stirrings of the two-year-post-partum brain - but this time I don't feel the need to procrastinate by pregnancy. I actually relish the thought of editing or even (shock horror) writing, and can begin to feel my way towards making it happen. I didn't think I'd be able to do anything concrete about it until next year, when Mabel will be at school three mornings a week, but when the universe drops an opportunity in your lap, it's rude to pass it up.

My friend is a warm and intelligent mother with a quietly wicked sense of humour, and a good person to boot, and someone I'd be more than happy to have watch my children on a regular basis. Moreover, I think the world, and this country in particular, needs more doulas - wonderful women who attend, support, coach, and empower mothers at a time when they need it most - and I'd be proud to help one more come into being. If I get some free time to write or edit or heck, clean my house, out of it, that's just powdered sugar on the funnel cake.

Conversations with my family

Me: Monkey ran a half-mile race yesterday. He ran the whole thing!
My mother: He did not!
Me: I know! He did. I couldn't do that.
My mother: No. And you wouldn't want to.
Me: ...um
My mother: Sure, that wouldn't be good for you.

Well, I am a delicate flower. Then she went on to tell me how she'd won all the races when she was at school. So evidently he gets this athletic bent from her, not from his marathon-running father. Never mind. So long as we all know that I inherited my father's non-athletic genes and I'd better not try running anywhere, that's fine.

****

Mabel, looking at a photo of me doing a cartwheel: That not Mummy, that a lady.
Me: I suppose I haven't taught you yet that a lady always keeps her knees together.

****

Monkey, from the other room: What can I do upside down?
Me: What?
Monkey: What can I do when I'm upside down?

I know, without looking, that he's standing on his head on the sofa, watching tv. I'm pretty sure I used to do this too. Somehow, just sitting down on my backside was never interesting enough.

****

Me, reading an AA Milne poem to Mabel, expecting a comment on this line because she's been playing with her George the chimpanzee this morning: "... George was a goat, and his beard was yellow..."
Mabel, indignant, looking at the picture: That not George. That a moose.

Old-Hat Reviews: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

When I was 12 we were required to write a book review for a homework project. This will be totally unexceptional to my American readers, who I believe as students were constantly required to turn in book reports (as they put it - see, I speak American), but I'm pretty sure this was actually the only time we ever did it. Most of the books I studied in school were laboriously read chapter by chapter, week after week, and then taken apart class by class and theme by achingly boring theme until Charles Dickens was well and truly dead and buried and spinning in his grave. (I'm just not a Dickens person. I find him long-winded and tedious and the fact that Great Expectations finally got exciting at chapter 58 offered no redemption. Actually, I'm really glad we weren't an Emma year, because it would have been horrible to have been put off lovely Austen by the Board of Education.)

Book review, then. My only problem was deciding which book to pick, since we were given free rein in the choice. So many great options - would I go classic with an LM Montgomery or Little Women, or try to impress the teacher with something more sci-fi/fantasy-oriented, something with time travel, perhaps; should I pick a long but straightforward book like Watership Down, or something a little more grown up like Rumer Godden's wonderful Greengage Summer? I don't actually remember what I chose in the end, but I'm pretty sure all of the above and more would have been at my literal and metaphorical fingertips that year.

My friend Alison (let's call her, because that was her name) had a different problem: she'd never actually read a whole book. I found that very very hard to get my head around, but I lent her Tom McCaughren's Run Swift Run Free, because she liked animals and it was about foxes. And not too long. I think I still had to tell her how it ended.

Anyway, that was my first book review, and I think it's time to write some more. Following the lead of my friend and excellent blogger, Morninglight Mama, I thought it might be handy for me to write down my thoughts on books I read or films I see. However, as I never jump on any bandwagon until it's almost completely out of sight, and never get to the cinema for anything more grown-up than Toy Story 3 (which was really very good) these days, these reviews will probably be of books you've already read and films you've already seen. Hence the old hat.

Herewith then, the first in a series. Or at least, what I think may turn out to be one.

I've just finished The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson.

I'm probably the last person in the world to read this, so excuse me if you've thought all these things already. I bought it in the airport as my holiday read, and got about three pages in before being distracted by a cloud or the ice in my Coke or possibly my two children not sleeping on an all-night flight. I found it not immediately engaging, to say the least. It spent the entire holiday somewhere in my hand luggage while I read my aunt's entire collection of Woman & Home and then devoured a Dick Francis in short order on the journey home.

But I picked up the Larsson again once we got back and started to plough through it with a little more concentration. After a while it wasn't so bad. I could put it down and walk away, but I was going back for more. And then, about halfway through, I was walking around the house holding it in case I got 30 seconds to stand still. I was reading it instead of sleeping, and if you knew what sort of sleep regression Mabel's going through at the moment, you'd appreciate how big a sacrifice that is. (Actually, if you know what sort of sleep regression she's going through, I'd be happy to hear when it will be over. Answers on a postcard, please.) I read it while nursing, I held it in one hand and dripped cheerio-milk on my pyjamas from my spoon with the other, I let the kids watch far too many episodes of Little Einsteins as I tried to finish the damn thing: in short, I was absorbed.

And now it's finished, so I can talk about it.

Because of all the hype, I was expecting this to be a really well-written novel as well as a page turner. Frankly, it's not. I mean, it's not Dan Brown, but it's not Nabokov either. Part of the difficulty is with the translation: I often dislike reading translations because it's so hard to get the mood of the writer in a new language. And there were some phrases that jarred, distracting me from the story while I grimaced at the words and tried to figure out what it should have said.

I was hoping to get a sense of Sweden from it, the way Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow - also a translation, but perhaps a much better one, or maybe just of a better book - did of Denmark. With Smilla, I really felt the crunch of the snow, the velvet of her clothes, what it was like - or what I'd like it to be like - in Copenhagen in the dead of winter. With Larsson, apart from all the references to kroner and the placenames, it may as well have been set in Minnesota.

But mostly, I found it a bit unnecessarily gruesome, and it made me wonder how much of the popularity of books like this is because they titillate with gory sexual crimes. It's a good thriller, but so are most of the Dick Francises that fill my shelf o' shame and to which I return time and again because he spins a good exciting yarn and I almost always learn something new from them. And yet nobody rushes out to make Hollywood blockbusters of Banker, or The Edge, or Flying Finish, or any of his other oldies and goodies. (Now I check, several of his books have been made into TV movies. But my point still stands.)

Anyway, I don't think I'll be rushing out to buy the next one and consuming it avidly tomorrow, but if it comes my way in a book sale or to borrow, I probably won't say no. But not right now, because my children can't really take that much neglect on an ongoing basis.

Names

I have opinions about names. You are very much absolutely entitled to your own, possibly different, opinions, but I have mine. They became clear to me when I started looking for names for my children.

For instance, I don't like alliteration. Now I know some people actively seek it out, and others couldn't care less whether it happens or not, but personally I don't want to saddle my child with a Lindsey Loo or Polly Price or whatever it might be. It worked out well for James Joyce, but mostly it just annoys me. (This is part of the reason why I didn't change my name when I got married. I didn't want to be alliterative.)

I also dislike rhymes or half rhymes. Assonance is okay, but only just. So if you want to call your kid Polly Dolly or Polly Barry, that's fine but I wouldn't do it. Polly Dobson would be okay. I think.

(It bugs me, slightly, that people who don't know my husband's name sometimes append my last name to my children's first names. This would mean Child A was alliterative and Child B was almost rhyming and I Would Never Do That. I'd just like you to know.)

Finally, we went to some lengths to avoid names that had obvious nicknames. Not that I have anything against a nickname, per se, but the last name ends in Y so I didn't want the kids to have names that would be automatically shortened by their peers to an "-ie" ending.

In some parts of Dublin, the common diminiutive is formed not with "-ie" but instead by shortening the name and adding "-o" or even "-ser". For some reason this mostly happens with boys. So Monkey, if his cousins feel like it, might be called "Monko" or even "Monkser". (If his name were Monkey. Which I think you probably know it isn't. For one thing, it ends with Y so I wouldn't have done that.) This is strongly - strongly! - discouraged.*



I don't quite understand the current trend for naming children with diminuitives and not giving them a "proper" name at all - for instance, if you want to call your cute and fluffy daughter Fifi, by all means do, but please put Fiona (or whatever you want it to be short for) on her birth certificate so that if she becomes a serious political figure she can do so without feeling inadequately named for the job.

(* I recieved a beautifully worded invitation to a grown-up party recently. It said that children were not encouraged. That can be applied to so many situations, don't you think?)

Flashback

When I was 16 or so I went babysitting one night with a friend at whose house I was staying. She regularly babysat for this family of three kids, who were, say, 6, 4, and a baby of about 18 months.

The baby screamed in her crib for three hours every night before falling asleep. Every night, for years, reportedly. We sat there and listened to her that evening, and I seem to remember being a bit uncomfortable with it, but my friend told me that this was normal and there was nothing anyone could do about it, so we just had to ignore it.

I still feel terrible for that little girl, from time to time, even now. She's perfectly fine: I met her years later at somebody's 21st birthday party, where she was a beautiful 18-year-old.

But you would think, wouldn't you, that they would have tried something else? That if your baby screams at the top of her lungs for three hours night after night, this method of putting her to bed is clearly Not Working? That you might go and lie down with her for a few minutes? Or change something else? Can it really be true that, for a family with three kids and two busy parents in Ireland in 1990 or so, if your kid didn't sleep when you put her to bed, listening to her scream was the only option? Is gentle parenting that new an invention? I don't think so.

End days

These really are the dog-tired, paddy-last, knock-down, drag-out, final days of summer. And dragging out is what they're doing, especially with this hot weather that just goes on and on and on: a high of 96 today and I felt every degree of it just now. The mosquitoes are big and vicious and biting with purpose, and poor Monkey just got eaten up last night when he went outside with his dad for ten minutes before bedtime to move some stones around the garden - his very favourite occupation. I forgot to tell them to put some bug spray on him, and the result is mottled red arms and legs today. (His father doesn't get bitten. I think the 'skeeters can't get through the thickets of limb hair. Or maybe he's just not as delicious as the rest of us.) Poor boy, I feel pretty bad about that.

Weather watch for Saturday is still looking good, though. If we're lucky, it'll be perfect weather for Monkey to be spun around and hung upside down and whatever else happens to little kids at fairgrounds. I even sprang for the bracelet this year, which means unlimited rides for one entire afternoon. I think he's old enough to get the value out of it.

A friend's daughter here started kindergarden yesterday. Her gap-toothed photos on Facebook keep coming back to haunt me in ways I didn't expect: I can't believe this time next year it'll be Monkey all dressed up for real school. We're so sheltered with our lovely co-operative nursery school experience, where parents are not just welcome but required, and everything is transparent to the trepidatious unsure beginners in this whole venture - the parents, I mean. But I can't imagine putting my little guy on a bus and waving him off to the unknown for six long hours every day. That the American school system is a blank page to me at this point doesn't help - we didn't have school buses in suburban Dublin, so I fall at the first hurdle of visualization.

I suppose by then I'll be more familiar with it all; we'll have visited the school and met the teacher, and so on, so I shouldn't borrow trouble and get myself into knots about something a year away. But still. My baby. Et cetera et cetera. If we were in Ireland he'd be starting this year - but then the system is more familiar to me and the day isn't as long for the little ones: for the first two years of school my day went from nine till twenty-to-two (that's 1.40pm, if you're vernacularly challenged). Maybe part of me is still in denial that my kids will be going to school in America, when they were always meant to be going in Ireland. Where will they learn to ask "An bhfuil cead agam dul go dtí an leithreas?" now?