Disaster / preparedness

Mabel is sitting on a blue plastic chair in front of the dollhouse, using a large toy car as a footrest. Every so often her bottom emits a noise, and I look at her, and she looks at me. If I try to take her to the bathroom, she runs away. Then she sits back on the chair and gives me those looks and tells me, "This is your last chance."

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Okay, now she's napping. I have moved from zero to somewhat prepared in my Christmas readiness - it's amazing how much you can accomplish in an hour at Target with focus and without children. As I think I rediscover every year, once I let go of the compulsion to buy everyone the Most Perfect Gift Ever, that they will treasure for many years and regale their grandchildren with tales of, it becomes much easier. A present that's good enough is still a present, and will probably be worn or played with or read or otherwise used at some point, and that's fine. Getting it to the recipient before Christmas day is also quite important, at least with kids.

(I have to pack a box and mail it to Ireland by December 9th, lest you think I'm crazy ahead of myself. I could use Amazon.co.uk or some other Internet source to buy myself more time, but I do really like just going shopping and picking things out myself. This, presumably, is why bricks-and-mortar stores still exist even in this click-button age. And I could shop for twelve-year-old girls all day. Which is unfortunate for those of my nephews and nieces who are no longer, or not yet, or have no hope of ever being a twelve-year-old girl, but quite happy news for the one who is.)

I have found some Christmas cards, but have yet to print out a few photos to accompany them - my nod to the American habit of sending cards featuring a lovely shot of you and your family, which to non-Americans seems simultaneously a bit pretentious but also very nice because it's good to see the kids growing up once a year. I have a lead on a present for my Dad, and some thoughts about the remaining people on the list. And when all that has gone to the post office, I might start contemplating gifts for my nearest and dearest and most demanding.

How are your Christmas preparations going? Or are you still hiding under the covers until it's really December?

Shipwrecked

There's an A.A. Milne poem about a sailor who's shipwrecked, and can't decide what's the best thing to do first - make shelter, get water, find a companion - so in the end he just sits on the sand and does nothing until he's finally rescued. I keep thinking about him, because for far too long, in regards to Mabel, I have been that sailor.

I mean,

• I want to potty train her (again) but I'm sort of afraid to go there because I don't want her to best me again.
• I want to cut down on nursing during the day.
• I want to night-wean her so I can get some decent sleep.

I know I can't do all these things at once, because then they'll be doomed to failure, so instead I do nothing but rationalise my inactivity. Like this:

• I can't cut down on nursing during the day and at night at the same time. So I have to pick one. And it's easier to say no in the daytime, when we're busy and I have a modicum of willpower and I don't care if she yells. 

• On the other hand, sleep is more important to me, so I should start with the night-weaning. And anyway, in a while she'll stop napping and I won't have to nurse her down for nap, or give her comfort-boob when she wakes up, so that will take care of itself. 

• But if I can stop her nursing to sleep at night, then she might stop waking so much during the night because she'll learn to put herself back to sleep when she rouses, instead of sitting up and wondering where I and my boobs are. 

• And when she stops taking a nap during the day she'll be much more tired at bedtime and it will be easier to get her to sleep, so maybe I should stop trying until then. 

And then there's the sub-list of all the excuses for why it's so hard to night-wean her:

• The resources on this subject say things like "Use your finger to gently break the suction as the baby [hah] is dropping off to sleep" and "Gradually reduce the length of time you nurse before they go to sleep." So when she seems to be almost asleep, I warily press down on the boob and try to slip a finger into her mouth beside my nipple. She sucks harder. I push a little more. She clamps down on my finger with her teeth. Now I'm playing tug-of-war with a three-year-old, and I'm in a very vulerable position. This is not the way it's supposed to go. She removes my finger with a firm hand. I subside for a few minutes before I try again. Lather, rinse, repeat. 

• If I manage to win the battle and pull out before she's ready, she simply sits up and demands the other side. (She is convinced that there are three sides, at least when I'm lying down.) And she always has to latch on to the "big" side - that is, the one that's uppermost when I'm lying on my side, so it looks bigger. Then I have to heft her, still attached, over my body so that now she's on the breast nearest the mattress and we're both lying down again. As you might imagine, this gets tiring in the middle of the night when she just goes from one to the other. (But when you think about it, if you're switching sides with someone in bed, you either have to go under them or over them, and it's easier for the smaller, more awake, person to be the one going over. These are not considerations that come into your mind when you first discover how great it is that you can nurse your newborn lying down, believe me.) 

• So cutting down on the time of nursing hasn't worked for me yet. My latest tactic is bringing B back into the bedtime routine after stories and nursing - when he's had his "What did you do today?" chat with Dash and got him his ritual drink of water and said goodnight, he's going to come into Mabel and give her the same chat, or a song, or whatever she demands of him. And then he'll leave and say goodnight and she'll cry for me and I'll go in and say "Just five minutes of side, and then I'll stay with you till you fall alseep," and so far I haven't actually managed to keep to the five minutes part due to all the excuses outlined above, but maybe some day she'll get so used to having him as part of it that she'll forget to cry for me and just fall asleep on his shoulder. Riiiight.

I'm still sitting on the sand. I'll probably be here until she grows up and rescues me.

Priorities

I have approximately one hour, and I'm going to spend it with my laptop, briefly, and then a book, and possibly a coffee and a homemade cookie. I am not going to tidy up, clean the kitchen, put on a load of washing, make pumpkin bread, or start making Christmas lists. Doing any of those things might make me feel efficient and that I have accomplished something useful, but I'd still harbour a boatload (harbour, boats, gettit?) of residual resentment at not having got to just sit down and do nothing.

So instead, I'll go back to my original mantra of doing nothing with this time that I could do when the kid(s) are at home. I can always put on the washing after Mabel gets back, and whip up a loaf of pumpkin bread while she's napping.

In the car this morning, Mabel and I had an interesting discussion:

Mabel: Mummy, you know, I think now I can go to the top of the big climbing frame in the playground, because I'm older.
Me: Really? Maybe so. You know, I think now you can wear underpants and use the toilet, because you're older.
Mabel: No, I'm not going to do that.
Me: Well, I think after Christmas you'll start wearing underpants.
Mabel: Will I be older after Christmas?
Me: Oh yes, definitely.
Mabel: Well, that would be okay.
[...]
Mabel: Why are you laughing? I don't want you to laugh at me.
Me: I love you, that's why I'm laughing.
Mabel, grumpy: Well, I love you, and I don't laugh at you.

Touché.

Dedicated follower

Always at the forefront of fashion, today I purchased my first ever pair of skinny jeans.

They look sort of okay, considering. The last time I wore tapered jeans it was 1994 and OJ Simpson was driving around Southern California in a white Ford Bronco. And I think I bought those ones by accident, meaning to get straight-leg. Since then, I've stuck religiously to boot cut and flared jeans, that hug my curves and thoughtfully balance my top half. So it's taken a leap of faith to get to the point where I willingly spent money on another pair. (As little money as possible. Today's pair are from Old Navy, half price for Thanksgiving, with the aid of a $20-worth for $10 groupon. I may have paid little more than the tax, but then I went and got Dash a Superman t-shirt and a pair of camoflauge cargo pants too.)

Now I just have to figure out what to wear them with. My new snowboots, which are admirable more for their bargain-quality than their loveliness, look quite decent with them. I discovered that, if I have no regard for circulation in my calves, I can actually fit them inside my high-heeled tall black boots (the pair that featured in my very first blog post, in fact; I've had them a while, it would seem). Then again, I'm not sure I have anywhere to wear that particular look to, and I also quite like the concept of blood moving unimpeded around my body.

On top, I believe a longish sweater, or preferably a chunky knit, is the way to go. Or probably, given the snowboots, a big puffy winter jacket. Oh, but I don't have one of those. Back to Lands End Overstocks I go...

A new phase

It's all but impossible to narrow your own child's personality down to a few simple traits - they have so many facets, and so many personas - you know, it's almost as if they're whole people who won't fit into little predefined boxes, just like you and me ...

So please indulge me as I now do exactly that, just a little bit. Because I seem to see Dash's personality emerging anew these days, and it's amazing. I don't know if this is how he'll be as he grows up, or if it's just another step along the way, but I love it. He was an active baby, always on the go, kicking hard from the very start. (And I mean the very start. Before he was even out, he'd take my breath away with the thumps.) He was the sort of toddler who's like a wind-up force of destruction: put him down and he was off, straight into the nearest thing he could pull down and take apart. He was a preschooler who couldn't be left alone with a non-board-book: he would just rip them up, because they were there and he could. His paintings at nursery school were huge swathes of black, his drawings were scribbles, his scissor skills lacked accuracy. In short, his fine motor skills had not yet caught up with his gross ones. Which is pretty much the norm for a boy of his age.

Then there was the valley of four-and-a-half, this time last year, when an ocean of self-consciousness swept over him and he was almost swallowed up by the embarassment and terror of just being, especially in public, and life was difficult for a while. This year he's emerging like that most cliched butterfly from a chrysalis, and contrary to everything I expected as I watched him grow, it seems that maybe here I have the bookish child I always not-so-secretly hoped for, after all.

He's still active - his favourite thing at the moment is to ride his bike round and round in ever decreasing circles, and he wants a Razor scooter for Christmas. But it seems his fingers have finally caught up with his imagination. He can happily spend ten minutes at a time (which is an age, for him - he runs on dog years, I think; except when in the bathroom, at which point endless aeons telescope into mere seconds as he stares into space and forgets why he's there) drawing a huge-armed person, or an intricate pattern, and colouring it in carefully, and even labelling it; or painstakingly writing a two-line story, asking at every word how it should be spelled.

[Sample story, intriguingly entitled "How the Hoverbike was Invented". "Once upon a time the scientist invented a new machine. It was a hoverbike." Brief, and to the point, if somewhat lacking in the detail I was so hoping for. Also, "How God Made the World: God made the world by the big bang." Fascinating stuff, from the child of two atheist agnostic ex-Catholics.

Related aside: Mabel came upstairs yesterday while I was getting dressed, turned on the bedside light, and announced, "God created the world!" I was a little startled. I came down to discover Dash had just written the above story, which explains it to some extent, but her let-there-be-light moment was entirely spontaneous. Spooky.]

Anyway. Today we went to the National Harbour, which was very nice, if a little more commercial than I was expecting, what with all the shops, and the frankly Vegas-esque feeling of the convention center, and we thought we might stay for the lighting of the tree. (We didn't, because they spent so long getting around to it that it was time to go home before they'd started. It was still very pretty, though.)

Tree, pre-lighting; harbour; sunset.

Dash pestered me for a small notebook in CVS, so I shelled out a dollar for his art, and while Mabel was jumping off benches and dancing to the warming up choir, her brother was diligently drawing designs for several options for the mechanism of his immortality machine (to be brought out on limited release, friends and family members only, when we're old so we don't die). It will be operated either wirelessly or by a stick. I think. Here, he can explain it to you.

All clear?
I love this kid. I can't wait to see what he does next.


(And while I'm at it, here are Mabel and her dad, for your further entertainment.

)

Tofurkey or not tofurkey

I love the days when I have a legitimate reason to make B take the kids out for a couple of hours, turn on some music, and potter happily around the kitchen all afternoon. Even though I always say that Thanksgiving isn't our holiday, and so we feel no compulsion to celebrate with anything special, the general widespread culinary busy-ness always infects me and it turns into one of those days after all.

A few weeks ago, as I may have mentioned, I saw a recipe for carnitas on Smitten Kitchen, and decided that maybe we should have traditional Thansksgiving tacos, just as the pilgrims did.

On Tuesday I garnered the ingredients I needed, except for the meat, which I couldn't find in Safeway. Never mind, I thought. Fate will provide. Indeed, in spite of a day sandwiched by a dental appointment for one child in the morning and a doctor's appointment for the other in the afternoon, fate, in the shape of the local co-op supermarket did provide: there was a large pre-packaged piece of pork shoulder in the meat fridge, and when I asked at the counter they said that the butcher would happily let me have just the three pounds of it I needed, and even cube it for me as per the recipe.

Then there was the question of dessert. Dash has been pestering me lately to make caramel, ever since he tasted some caramel dip for apple slices at a halloween party. He didn't eat any of the apple, but he very much enjoyed licking off the caramel. I keep telling him that I've never made caramel, and it's very tricky, and I don't have any cream so I just can't; but evidently the notion took root because as I wandered around the co-op waiting for the butcher to do his thing, I vaguely remembered that there was a recipe somewhere for caramel apple cheesecake. That sounded nice, and I had ricotta in the fridge to use up. So I bought some apples.

When I got home I found the recipe, in Nigella's Feast, but it turned out to need apple schnapps and no actual apples at all. As well as cream and other things I still didn't have. So that idea was shelved. This morning I made chocolate ricotta muffins with the ricotta, which was only about a cupful and not nearly enough for cheesecake anyway. But I still had all those apples.

This afternoon I looked at the clock, asked B when he wanted to eat dinner, and then informed him that they'd better scarper quickish so I could put the meat on right now - carnitas take almost as long as a small turkey after all. Once the meat was aromatically braising in its margarita bath (as Deb calls it), I thought some more about dessert and vaguely searched the Smitten Kitchen website for "apples". Bingo. A last-minute tarte tatin.

I've never made tarte tatin before, and didn't realise that the apples were actually cooked in caramel before being pastried, but once that became apparent, it was the obvious solution. I ended up using the pastry from the first recipe I found and the apple/caramel method from the second, because Deb said it was more foolproof. And I used my stainless steel pan with a plastic handle for the caramel part, transferring to a glass pie dish for the baking. As the arrangement of my apples was more rustic, shall we say, than artistically exact, it didn't destroy anything. And the whole thing turned out most satisfactorily in the end.

The carnitas worked miraculously - one moment I was looking at all the brining liquid still in the pan and wondering whether I should cheat and take a scoopful out to help it reduce; then I did a spot of washing up to clear the decks and when I looked again, there was only a tiny puddle left in the bottom and the chunks of meat were starting to brown up amazingly and fall apart just as predicted. (So much so that I took a photo, even though Deb's is much more appetizing, just to show you that even mere mortals can achieve this.)

We* had our carnitas on warmed corn tortillas, with jicama slaw (about two-thirds of a jicama and one carrot, grated, with three finely sliced spring onions and this dressing), queso fresco, avocado, and fresh limes for squeezing. It was just like being back in southmost Texas in the hallowed booths of Mister Taco. (And believe me, for all I malign Texas, that's one of the things we miss.)

And now I'm just waiting, with an extra glass of wine, for B to put Dash to bed before we break out the vanilla icecream and dig in to the tarte. With great forethought, I didn't try too hard to give Mabel a nap this afternoon, so it's 7.15 and she's fast asleep. For now, at least.

*The children, lest I need to comment, did not have any. Dash has had his usual peanut butter sandwiches today, and Mabel, despite being presented with various other foodstuffs, has eaten half an apple for breakfast, three cheesesticks for lunch, and no dinner all all. Oh, and two chocolate ricotta muffins for snacks. Maybe that was an error.

** Mmmm. I have a mouthful of chewy sugary appley goodness as I type. I am a total tarte-tatin convert. A tart for tarte, if you like.  I don't think I'll ever make a plain old apple pie again.

Ambiguity

Dash has decided that we, as a family, will write and record a song. B will compose it, Dash will play the drums, Mabel will play the guitar and I'll be the cameraman. I'm not sure who's going to sing - maybe Dash himself. The lyrics have yet to be pinned down, but the general gist is that it's a song about a family where the kids are asking the mum to make another baby for them.

This adorableness coincides uncomfortably with one of those phases I'm having right now where I can't help feeling nudged by whatever - fate, hormones, my biological clock, hormones, probably some more hormones - to get pregnant again, against my better judgment and all good sense. I just have this nagging feeling that two is not meant to be the final number.

"Not again," you're probably sighing, much as Mabel likes to shout incongrously, every now and then. I know, you'd think I'd have resolved this by now, one way or the other. I would have thought so too, but it refuses to be resolved. I mean, I have yet to persuade either myself or my long-suffering husband to attempt to resolve it in one direction, and I have yet to come to terms with the other direction by deciding for good and for all to nix the possibility.

Last night was one of those nights where you spend far too long on high alert for another cough from another room. As I nursed a very jealous Mabel back to sleep while Dash was comforted through an ugly phlegmy coughing fit by his father, I realised how impossible it would all be if we had a baby as well. Not to mention the extra heart-in-hand-ness of just putting your soul out there all over again in another tiny, fragile body: the more you have, the more you have to lose.

But it's not that I want a baby, per se: it's more that our kids are so great, so wonderful and clever and funny and entertaining that it's tempting to think we should make just one more. Just for the heck of it. And while things I said before still stand, what I hadn't taken into account was how the older one(s) age out a little: I'm not saying that Dash is done, exactly, but he doesn't need so much of the hands-on input that he did when he was younger. Mabel, of course, is a different matter.

There are many practical reasons why a third child would be a bad idea: economics, logistics, my age, population control, to name a few. Just imagining the toy explosion that would bury the family room, and all the baby clothes I've already given away and would have to reclaim gives me a headache. I've sold the Baby Bjorn, for goodness sake. Our bed is too high off the ground for the co-sleeper. We've left all that behind, and I'm happy about it.

I am, really.

I don't even know if I want to post this now. It might stop being true any second.

First, catch your hare

Autumn, when the expat's thoughts turn lightly to Christmas cakes.

For the past month or so, Facebook has provided me with gentle reminders that friends and family at home are busy baking the fruitcakes that will grace dinner tables on Christmas day, and continue to take up sideboard real estate well into the new year, shunned by some and gradually devoured by others, covered first in yellow marzipan and then a thick white layer of royal icing, and decorated - tastefully or otherwise. In our house, a family of reindeer usually trooped across the snowy expanse past a small cottage and a pine tree, with Santa and a snowman looking on, all vaguely to scale and from totally different sources long lost in family mythology.

It was October when it first occurred to me that I might have to make a cake this year. It's not that I like Christmas cake - I'm more of a pudding girl, myself, with copious amounts of brandy butter and whipped cream - but it ushers in the season, and my husband can't really imagine Christmas without it. Since we're not going to Ireland this year, and I don't have a new baby to excuse me as I did last time, I decided it was incumbent upon me to come up with the goods. Besides, any excuse to bake.

So I found a recipe, made my shopping list, and set forth. The orange and lemon I procured that day have long since been used for something else, because that was the easy part. I was happy to find currants and golden raisins (sultanas, we call 'em) in Safeway, but mixed peel eluded me. (Glacé cherries we can do without.) Then I realised that I needed a cake tin too, as none of mine were quite the right size or shape.

It turns out that you can't get a Christmas-cake-shaped tin in America, because Americans don't make cakes that shape. All their cake tins are two inches deep, three at most: the tin I needed had to be at least four, or all the quantities and cooking times would be off. I considered ordering one, but since it would probably be shipped from Europe anyway, and time had marched on while I did all this procuring and considering, I decided I could import one with my mother-in-law, since she was coming over this week anyway.

I didn't have to ask her for the mixed peel, or resort to making my own (despite the very helpful recipe a friend at home sent me, saying that it was much nicer than the stuff they sell in the supermarkets; but as B commented, the whole point of the exercise is to replicate the cake we make at home with the stuff they sell in Quinnsworth) because after failing to find it in the speciality imports store in Rockville, I happened across a pack of just the right thing (helpfully subtitled "fruitcake mix") in our local, magical, stocks everything, co-op supermarket.

So, in triumphant possession of my newly unpacked cake tin, last night I put in motion step one of making a Christmas cake: steeping the fruit in the alcohol. On Nigella's suggestion, I used marsala, because unlike whisky or brandy, there's a bottle of it in my cupboard. 

Today, there was just one more thing to find: brown paper. Because a Christmas cake cooks for so long at a low temperature, it needs extra insulation to stop it burning, and a double layer of brown paper is required to line the tin before the parchment paper. (I suspect my mother skipped this step, because her cakes were always a little burned on top and a little gooey in the middle. Which is good for brownies, but not so much for fruitcake. Or maybe it was the fault of her oven.) I assume that in Ireland you can pick up some nice sheets of brown paper in the baking aisle alongside the dried fruit and the ground almonds and the ready-to-roll royal icing, but I had to use my imagination a little to find something suitable here. Halfway through the supermarket, inspiration hit, I did an about turn, headed back to the bakery department, and snaffled three or four of the paper bags provided to put your bagels in. Bingo.

 Yes, it's supposed to stick up like that. Nigella said so.

And so, with the help of my trusty Kitchen-Aid, I set about making my fruitcake. In fact, though I can't swear I've ever made one before, a fruitcake is perfectly simple and hard to mess up. The most difficult part, once you've caught your hare (so to speak), and lined the tin, is remembering that it's in the oven, because a lot can happen in three hours.

I had some helpers to distract me, of course. They did a great job cleaning up the flour on the countertop, but were disappointed to find that none of it was sugar. Wait till we get to the icing.

 And so, we have a cake. View from above, before cooking.

 View from above, three hours and two (long) bedtimes later.

As soon as it came out, I brushed the top with some more marsala and folded down the paper to keep  in the steam (so the top doesn't harden), as per my instructions. Then I wrapped the whole thing in two layers of tinfoil, and there it sits, cooling slowly and making the house smell gently of holidays.

Over the next few weeks I will feed it regularly with alcohol  - my mother-in-law told me to, so I have to - and a few days before Christmas I'll go through some more entertaining shopping roulette finding the right stuff to do the icing. I will, of course, keep you updated with our progress.

Aspirations

Dash came in to wake Mabel and me up one morning recently, because he thought his father was out running (which he wasn't, and I would have quite liked to catch a few more z's, but that's another complaint). The ensuing conversation, after some formalities like "Go away," and "Why are you here?" and "Please let us sleep," went like this.

Dash: Mabel, when you're a grownup, do you want to be the President?
Mabel: No, I want to be a carpet cleaner.
Me: A carpet cleaner?
Mabel: No, I didn't say carpet cleaner, I said comic reader.

Sibs

The other morning, while Dash was doing his thing in the bathroom, Mabel raced up to the door, burst in, yelled, "Privacy!" at the top of her voice, and ran away again. I think she's got the idea, but her execution is a little off.

Mixed feelings

For the past few months, there's something I've been keeping from you.

No, calm down, I'm not pregnant.

It's just that a job in Ireland had come up - one of those rare jobs that is in my husband's sphere of work - that could mean we would move back home. Not to Dublin, but to another large city not too far away from it. (That could be anywhere. Ireland is a small island by most standards.)

So it's not that I've been ennumerating fowl (counting chickens, that is) ever since, but just that when contemplating the future, my mind would run over the possibilities and include the notion that we might just be elsewhere by next year, say. If the job was offered, accepting it would be a no-brainer - it was a permanent position in the country we both call home, and which we'd like our children to. B's position right now is always dependent on funding, and as we all know, funding, in this economy, in this country, is a very fickle mistress.

Anyway. Yesterday he was told to bog off. I mean, received a politely worded rejection. (Aside: When I first moved to this country I told my boss in Pennsylvania about the Irish acronym PFO for such letters. He thought it was great. It had become such an everyday part of my vocabulary since leaving college that I had to think hard to remember the official word "rejection". PFO stands for Please Fuck Off.)

I'm still mostly in denial, and convinced that once politely reminded of who we are, the employer in question will instantly realise their mistake and say "Oh no, no, you're the one we meant to invite for an interview that would be mostly a formality, before offering you the job post haste. Thank you for bringing that oversight to our attention. Silly us." But I'm also gently recalibrating my view of the future to be one that is probably right where we are - if we're lucky enough to get to stay here.

Random things that make me glad we're staying:
I don't have to pack up our entire house, or decide what's worth shipping and what we have to sell/dump/give away, after two years of just getting it nice.
We don't have to tell our five-year-old son that he's moving to another continent and leaving all his friends behind. (The two-year-old probably wouldn't be too happy to hear that either, but her brother would take it very hard.)
I love our nursery school - it would be hard to find another so great.
Dash is getting on really well at elementary school, and whatever may be said about the state of education in this country, the state of education at home is probably worse. And even if he does say the pledge of allegience every morning, to his father's consternation and my meh, whadayagonnado feeling, at least school is (nominally) secular. Also unlikely to be the case in Ireland.
The warmth of summer, and seeing my kids turn into fish after day after day spent at the pool.
The ease of online shopping.
The relative cheapness of electronic goods.
The beautiful weather of Spring and Fall here.
All the great friends I've made here in the neighbourhood, and how sad I'd be to become just an online friend who might see you again in twenty years when you finally make that long-awaited trip to Ireland.


Random things I was trying not to think too hard about in case they didn't happen:
Living near the sea again, even if it is freezing cold most of the time.
No mosquitoes.
No poison ivy.
Living near enough for friends and family to come and visit us often, not just once in a blue moon when their work sends them on a conference to DC.
Living near enough to go and see friends and family more than once a year when we're all so strung out on travel stress and jetlag and five-hours-time-difference that it's hardly enjoyable at all.
Having the smaller carbon footprint that comes with not living in the USA, even if life is a bit harder because of it.
Not having sweltering, humid summers that last for three months every year.
Not having to fit all our Christmas presents into three square inches of suitcase every year or leave them behind "for next time we come".

I could go on. See, mixed feelings. Above all, I would hate for us to go and then spend the rest of our lives complaining about how life was better in America - I have to hope we wouldn't be Those People.

We always said it was a win/win situation because we'd be glad to go or glad to stay. That's still how I feel, and I know how lucky we are to be in such a place with our lives. And maybe it just means there's something even better around the corner.

Optimism

Three of the children in Mabel's class, one of whom was at our party on Sunday, are now ridden with some horrible plague-like virus, and I find myself already looking at her with that nostalgic indulgent expression reserved for pathetically ill children. When I picked her up from school one of the parents involved (who was there, but without her ailing offspring) apologised profusely and said that she thought Mabel's eyes already had the glazed I'm-getting-sick look. I'm hoping against hope that she was wrong, but I can't tell. I thought she looked preternaturally pale with oddly pink cheeks, but she was probably just warm from running around inside, as it was raining in the playground.

She's acting perfectly normally, and this is one of those times when I'm really glad we're still nursing, because I will continue to tout its amazing immune-boosting properties until the moment she comes down with a horrible rash and a fever of 104.

Still, today is her last day of school for the week, so she won't be marinating in the Petri dish that is a classroom full of two- and three-year-olds, so maybe the clanging chimes of doom won't sound quite so loudly in a few days and we'll be spared. Maybe.

We have absolutely no plans for Thanksgiving, and I like it that way. I have no intention of thinking about it till next Wednesday at the earliest (since my mother-in-law will be here from this Friday till Tuesday), though I did see a recipe I wouldn't mind trying.

Sorry, I was distracted there. Dash sat down at the table beside me to do his homework, except that he wasn't so much sitting as jiggling furiously on the chair in deep denial of his need to pee. Twice he stood up to go, and then sat down again, and my last nerve was busy shredding itself on the cheesegrater of infuriation as I waited for him to finally give in. (I'd love you to think that I sat calmly by, letting him figure this out for himself, but I'm not that saintly. I exhorted him vehemently several times to answer the damn call of nature before nature ran down his legs and onto my kitchen floor.) He's gone now. Hang on a minute while my blood vessels return to their normal size.

 Dum-de-dum... Anyway.

One day last week the kids were playing outside on their bikes, as we have been doing every day after school in the lovely autumn weather that has now given way to persistent rain, and Dash was singing-counting to himself as he circled round and round and round. He got to the highest number he could possibly conceive of (probably having skipped a few on the way):

"What's after a hundred and eight, Mummy? Is it a million?"
"No, it's a hundred and nine."
"Wow. And what's after that? Is it a million?"

That's optimism right there. I don't know where he gets it from.

Viva España

I want to try to remember something.

Spain. I was fifteen, on exchange in Valencia, halfway up the east coast. My host family were from Madrid, but they summered at the beach near their cousins. Their father would come down on weekends, and the mother, three children and I were there, looking out on, sunbathing beside, and swimming in the Mediterranean, the whole time. From where I'm sitting here it sounds unbearably exotic, but at the time it was just the sea beside them, as the Irish Sea was the sea beside us. Only warmer.

One evening we drove up into the mountains for dinner with the extended family. The place was a low, whitewashed building on the top of a hill; dark brown wooden benches inside, little in the way of plush or decor. There were no menus: Isabel's uncle had a conversation with the owner, and after a little while a huge platter came out to our table. On it was a roast of succulent garlicky, rosemary-y lamb surrounded by slivers of potato that had been fried in the meat's fat. I don't remember liking lamb particularly before then, but ever since I've been a committed fan.

I ate other amazing things that summer: tiny fish deep fried in the lightest of batters probably minutes after they'd been caught - a mouthful of salty crunch and essence of Mediterranean summer. Snails, even, sizzled in garlic, chewy and good so long as you didn't dwell too long on the fact of what you were eating. Sweet dripping galia melon; watermelon like a pink iceberg; big, firm, white-fleshed peaches; fuzzy-cheeked apricots - I'd never been a big fruit-lover, because it turned out the versions I'd had in Ireland were black-and-white snow to the technicolour clarity of these ones. We were an apples and bananas household at home; rhubarb and gooseberries when our friends down the road with a big garden had more than they could use, but not much else beyond tinned peaches and the odd honeydew loaded with brown sugar to make it palatable. Ireland is not the place to learn to love fruit the way I did in Spain.

I still look for peaches like those. I don't think I've had snails since. But in New York last weekend I had lamb that rivalled the lamb I remember from that night in the mountains - a personal roast of my very own, the meat falling off the bone and delicious; though the lemon potatoes couldn't hold a candle to the crispy discs of the earlier meal.

Some years later in Spain I learned to like olives - the pits spit on sawdusty floors - and strong beer; and a pincho of tortilla with a glass of red wine, preferably at 11am on a Saturday. On the way to Lisbon, I discovered what real tomatoes tasted like. I threw strands of spaghetti at the kitchen wall to see if it was done (when it sticks, it's ready); I found that a fried egg sits perfectly on top of tomatoey rice; and that I could cook dinner for myself and enjoy it. I even roasted a leg of lamb, studded with plenty of garlic, for Christmas dinner.

Come to think of it, I have Spain to thank for a lot more than just my degree in Spanish.

Post-party

This morning, once the kids were at school, I was planning to do nothing. Maybe take a nap. Maybe just read an actual book. (Probably one I've read many times before, so it wouldn't be too challenging.) Have a cup of coffee in peace. That sort of thing. There's play-doh smushed into the carpet, new toys that have yet to be assigned homes strewn about, serving dishes waiting to be washed, thank-you cards to start on, and I'm sure the laundry is piling up again, but I was going to ignore all that.

Then I took Mabel to school and somebody asked me if I'd mind awfully switching my co-op day with them, because they had meetings all day at work and hadn't realised that today they were supposed to be helping at school. I suppose I could have said that my mother-in-law is coming on Friday and I have a house to clean and a shopping list as long as your arm, but while those things are true it wasn't exactly an accurate representation of my plans for the morning, so I suckered up and stayed.

The party went well, thank you. The children played, the adults drank wine and beer, everyone ate and said nice things about the food. We spirited most of the presents upstairs before Mabel could demand to open them right away, and there were hardly any fights over dolls or lego trains. After the cake we opened the back door and let them loose to frolic in the large pile of leaves our back garden so kindly provides at this time of year. As the light dimmed, I looked vaguely out the window and thought I should take a photo, but I didn't get round to it.

 

Mabel had a new dress. She took off her new shoes before the guests arrived, and put them back on the wrong feet, and wore them that way for the rest of the evening. Whatever. It's her party, she can do what she wants to.

This is my favourite cake for birthdays. Probably because Nigella calls it "Birthday Sponge," and I have no imagination. You have to track down Bird's Custard Powder for it, which might be more or less difficult depending on which side of the Atlantic you live on, but it's totally worth it.

I decided that we needed butterfly buns. They're a staple of Irish birthday parties, but they were new to my neighbours. Take an undecorated cupcake, slice the top off and split it in half. Dollop cream (or buttercream) on the flat top, and stick the two pieces back in at an angle, to make the wings. Decorate with strawberry quarters, or candy, or whatever you like.

This was the finished spread, just before it was dismantled. We have pigs in blankets (mini-sausages wrapped in Pillsbury crescent roll dough), peanut-butter-and-jelly fingers, butterfly buns, pita chips, chocolate cornflake buns (melted Mars Bar [Milky Way in the US] mixed with cornflakes - another classic with a twist from Nigella), lemon ricotta muffins, grapes, and - last-minute gotta-hava-vegetable: baby carrots. Also present: hummus, salsa, ranch dip, M&Ms, mini marshmallows.

A lot of the mini muffins were left over, but that's okay - they freeze well. I think I made too many yellow things, but I was trying hard to steer away from the chocolate end of the spectrum.

Onward and upward. Tomorrow I have to start thinking about guests, Thanksgiving, and even Christmas. Or maybe I'll just read a book.

Anchors

Yesterday evening I sent Dash upstairs to put on his sweatpants for karate. A couple of minutes later a shriek pierced the air, calling Daddy to help - the sort of shriek that normally indicates he can't find his socks, or that Mabel has broken some vital piece of lego. Daddy was in the bathroom. I was annoyed with Dash for being unable to complete even the most simple of tasks without needing parental intervention, and ignored him.

A couple of minutes later, B headed upstairs to see what the fuss was about. He found poor Dash standing, Atlas-like, under his tipping-over chest of drawers, wondering when he would be saved. He had pulled all four drawers out, and, just as I had envisioned a couple of weeks ago when I realised the chest was not anchored to the wall and cautioned him not to do that, the whole thing hadn't needed much more than a gentle tug to tip over. Luckily, Dash is, after all, a superhero, so he was not squashed like a bug as my imagination had had him.

The chest of drawers is now anchored to the wall. And I think we need to talk about safety words with Dash so that we can all tell the difference between "Aaaaaghh! My favourite jeans are not in the drawer!" and "Aaaaghhhh! This time it's serious!"

Realization

I just had an epiphany. It was like when Dr House does something seemingly random, and looks up, and the music lets you know that he's solved the case. I realised that I can go to Target, or Safeway, or any shop not too far away AFTER THE KIDS ARE IN BED. Genius.

Honestly. You'd think I would have remembered that I don't live in Ireland any more, where everything closes at six p.m. except on Thursdays when they stay open till eight; and even at that, more and more supermarkets, or "corner shops" like Spar and Centra that will charge you an arm and a leg and a middle digit but sell everything you could possibly want, including wine and beer, stay open till all hours these days. Safeway is open till midnight. Target probably as long. My husband used to go to Wal-Mart at three in the morning, before I moved in and instigated proper mealtimes and put an end to that sort of nonsense. The fact that our local co-op supermarket closes at 6 on Sundays often catches me unawares and elicits profanity when I really fancied a bottle of wine with dinner.

And yet. There I was trying to figure out when in our busy life I would get to those places to pick up birthday-cake ingredients and goodie-bag stuffers before Sunday's super-duper-birthday-party extravaganza (a giant playdate with cake for everyone and beer for grown-ups, and leaves to jump in; Chucky Cheese, eat your heart out), and bemoaning the fact that probably I'd have to drag both children there tomorrow afternoon, and I had totally forgotten to factor in the possibility of using the evenings.

So yay. If you're looking for me after bedtime tomorrow, I will not be glued to the sofa, quizzing myself on the countries of Africa at Sporcle while re-watching an episode of Angel. I will be out with the grown-up people in the outside in the dark, spending money on stuff we need. (I use the term loosely.)

This may be a dangerous development.

State of mind

I was driving when we hit the road on Friday morning. It's best if I take the first shift, because I get sleepy after lunch and if I don't put myself beside the wheel first thing, B ends up driving all the way to wherever our road trip may take us.

Actually, since the non-driver now has child-calming, snack-handing-out and dropped-toy-picking-up duties as well as being navigator and music-chooser, B was clamouring to switch places after only an hour had passed. But I managed to hold out till we stopped for lunch.

As we pulled out of our development and onto the Beltway, with the children happily engaged in their new colouring books (whoever invented invisible markers deserves a medal), and Billy Joel crooning about how he was in a New York state of mind, I couldn't help smiling. ("I like this song," announced Mabel as the opening piano notes sounded.) The sun hadn't come out yet, but it was dry and crisp, and in spite of the fact that I see less of it every time we go there, I love New York. Something about that concentration of so much life in such a small space, and the buildings that go up and up, and the friendly natives who are always willing to heft a stroller up the stairs or tell you which subway stop to get off at, makes me happy. It's the espresso of cities.

The first time I visited New York (not counting a brief stop-off in 1994) was 2000, when I visited my boyfriend who was studying in Pennsylvania (that was B, if you haven't been following along). He took a Greyhound and I took a cheap between-seasons flight, and we stayed in a tiny hovel of a hotel on the upper west side. We had a bed, we didn't need a/c, and the bathroom was down the hall. That was all we wanted, and it was laughably cheap. We strolled hand-in-hand through Central Park, walked up and down Fifth Avenue, visited Tom's Diner where Seinfeld and his buddies fictionally hang out, tried falafel for the first time, had sophisticated drinks and cheap great pizza slices at 1am, and were all gooey in love. At one point I looked out a window onto a darkening, bustling street and vowed to myself that I'd live in this city some day.

Well, I haven't, and at this point it's unlikely that I ever will. It's more a city for the young, rich, and child-free than the scarily approaching middle-aged, penny-pinching, and doubly encumbered. But I do live a mere five-hour drive from it, and despite the two encumbrances, it makes me happy that we can go back every now and then to see a tiny bit more from a new perspective.

Like I said the last time*, Ted: Aim low

Things we did not manage to do on our weekend in *New York:

• See any sights, basically, at all.
• Go up any tall buildings, not counting the modest 8-storey apartment block we were staying in.
• Keep the children to their regular nap and bedtime schedules, as we do at home.
• Feed the children a wide variety of healthy foods, as we do at ... oh, wait.
• Have birthday cake for Mabel on her birthday - but we had it for breakfast the next morning instead, before rushing out to a playground to run off the sugar.
• Go into any shops on Fifth Avenue, or any shops at all, come to that, other than the giant toystore, FAO Schwartz.
• Get any closer to Central Park than the bottom right-hand corner, where FAO Schwartz just happens to be located.
• Leave FAO Schwartz without spending more than we'd bargained for.
• Avoid acquiring baby no. 15.
• Lose any children, so that's good.
• Spend more than ten minutes in MOMA before Mabel dissolved in a puddle of misery and starvation, with me not far behind her on both counts.
• Spot B running the marathon at either mile 8 in Brooklyn, where we first looked for him, or mile 22 in Harlem, where we looked second.
• See Dooce running the marathon at a somewhat slower pace than B.
• Get irretreivably sucked into what I'm sure is an infinite loop of elevators and platforms from which our train is not leaving in the Atlantic Avenue subway station in Brooklyn. 
• Find an elevator at the 14th St/Union Square subway station, though it was clearly marked as accessible on the maps. 
• Leave the city before 4pm on Sunday, though the marathon runner was back with us by 2.00.
• Not get snarled up in the perma-traffic exiting Manhattan by the Holland Tunnel.
• Not have a pretty good time, in spite of it all.

When we got back, I remarked to a temporarily awake Dash that sometimes one of the nicest parts about going away is coming home again. The older I get, the truer it is.

Bad timing

Friday was Mabel's birthday. We celebrated by stuffing her into a car for a five-hour road trip to stay for three days with people she'd never heard of in a house with no toys. Poor baby. B and I were running round like headless chickens trying to remember everything and also have five minutes dedicated to producing birthday presents and being all yay! you're three!, and get people dressed so we could leave the house according to my military timekeeping (I aimed for 9am, we left at 9.40. I'll call that a win.). I divested her of her pyjamas and her pullup and went to put on the new one.

"But I'm three now so I'm going to wear underpants."

Oh. Oh great. Yes. This is what I've been telling her, right? But today? For the first time? In the car all morning/afternoon? How is that going to go?

"Ohhhh-kay!" I said brightly. "Though we'll be in the car, so if you need to go you'll have to hold it until we stop for lunch, you know." And I ran upstairs to grab an armful of 15 pairs of underpants and as many leggings as she owns (the number of which was, for these purposes, Not Nearly Enough).

By the time I came downstairs she'd decided that actually a pullup would be okay after all. "We'll start with underpants on Monday, okay?" I said, wilting with relief as the weekend ahead started to look that much simpler once again.

Today is Monday, and she's wearing a pullup, sitting in front of the dollhouse with a duvet around her, telling me that she's not doing a poo. I have probably set us back another three months.

Just-in-Time management and other great parenting tips

You might not think it to look at me, but I spent a year in business school.

At least, that's what I call it if talking to Americans. To a fellow Dubliner, I would more disparagingly say that I did the DBS after my degree and it was the most boring year of my life. That's a Post-Graduate Diploma in Business Studies, which you can use to convert a non-business primary degree so that you can then go on to an MBA or MBS, or simply use to get you into some more business-y line of work than your degree in archaeology or history of art might have prepared you for. I didn't want to do a master's in one of my primary degree subjects - though in hindsight I should have, because I turned out to get a scholarship for one in Spanish, which I didn't know about at the time of plumping for the DBS; and because over here it seems that everyone has a master's and it's very infra dig to just have a bachelor's without following it up with a few years of grad school.

The system is very different here/there. In the US, everyone [who goes to third-level education] does a primary degree first and then goes to med school or law school or business school or grad school for something else, quite possibly holding down a part- or full-time job the entire time. Everyone also leaves home to go to college - many (most? all?) schools require students to live on campus for their first year.

In Ireland, the majority of third-level students continue to live at home and go to a college or university near their parents' house. They don't build up an unholy amount of debt because college fees are either free or at least far below American standards, and so they don't all have to have a job during term time. If they want to go into medicine or law or architecture or engineering, they go into that course from the beginning, and if they want to go into business they do Commerce and from there can go straight into an MBA programme. Of course, there are routes by which you can get into professional courses from a BA or otherwise unrelated field, and the med students share a lot of classes with the students studying for a BSc and so on, but that's mostly the way it works.

There isn't really such a thing as grad school per se - if you do a master's you probably just do it where you did your undergrad. PhD programs are a little different, of course, and people might travel further afield to find the right supervisor or the right discipline, but again, many people just have the one alma mater for the whole however many years it may take, and the line between when you were a student and when you became staff and started wearing your sandals with your socks (I may be skewing towards some of the sciences here) seems very blurry.

But I digress. (If I ever have another blog, I should probably call it that. Here I am doing it again.)

So, after my degree, I studied business for a year, because (a) it was funded by the EU and therefore free, (b) I didn't want to do the HDip and become a high-school teacher, which was my other obvious option with a liberal arts degree, and (c) my best friend, who had done a law degree but would have to wait a few years for a place in the professional course to become a solicitor and wasn't sure she wanted to go that route anyway, had decided to do it, and egged me on. Also, it was a handy 10-minute train journey from my house with a quick walk at either end.

My more laudable reasoning - perhaps - was that while a master's would plant me firmly in academia, which I loved but seemed impractical, a business course might boot me out into the real world and give me a bit of a clue about getting a real job. What the business course in fact did was (a) bore my socks off for a year, giving me a great capacity for boredom that would probably stand to me in the following nine months of unemployment, and (b) convince me that the world of business, whether it was in Marketing, Accounting, International Business, or any of the other Incredibly Boring Courses we had, was not for me. I got excellent grades but it all seemed completely pointless. The one useful thing it did was provide me with my first ever e-mail account and expose me to the still-fairly-fledgling Internet (this was 1995, after all). My best friend and I took great delight in sitting next to each other while exchanging insulting missives electronically. I like to think we haven't really changed in the interim, as our birthday cards are still addressed to Fish Face and Gorilla Features.

My point - are you still there? I do have a point, I swear - is that at some stage during this long dark teatime of my intellectual soul, we learned about a Japanese-piloted management technique called Just-In-Time manufacturing. This was based on the principle that instead of having lots of inventory stored in your warehouse, you ordered what you needed just when you needed it, thus saving on storage space and time loading and unloading to different places and so on. A breakthrough, I'm sure.

ANYWAY. I find that my method of running a household falls under the Just-In-Time category too. I might (maybe) think about the things that I will do in the future, I might even plan them and make sure I'm not leaving anything too late, but I basically do what needs to be done just exactly before it needs to happen and not a moment sooner. (Even if I had the time sooner and I won't have it at the last minute.) Which is why I will be packing for our trip to NY tonight, or possibly tomorrow morning immediately before we leave the house. It is also why so far I have done nothing more than issue invitations regarding Mabel's birthday party next weekend - I could have baked things to put in the freezer, and maybe I still will, but mostly it comes under the heading of things to worry about next week. As for my mother-in-law's visit the following weekend, well, every time I clean something I muse that this might be the last time I get to do it before her visit, but I don't think you can really call that actively preparing for it.

I suspect this is how most people function, in fact. I think only those with far too much time on their hands or even more obsessive-compulsive tendencies than mine can possibly manage to think - and then act - beyond the next thing into the thing after that and the thing after that. There are only so many balls we can keep in the air, and the more you have, the bigger the crash when they fall. Minimize the number of balls, and you can keep this trick up indefinitely.

Which brings me back to thinking, as I did in 1995, that everything I learned in business school was so blindingly obvious I was constantly surprised that you could write it down, get it published in a book, and find people gullible enough to be willing to pay you for it.

The best laid plans always involve spending a lot at Target first

For lunch, I have had several pretzel crisps and some trail mix, a rolled up slice of ham inside a rolled-up slice of cheese, some of yesterday's roasted cauliflower straight out of the fridge (and very delicious it was too) and a cup of tea. That hits all the major food groups, even if it isn't very pretty.

What happened was, I spent an hour at Target picking up bits and pieces for our upcoming Very Busy November: new towels because we'll be having a guest, snacks and notebooks for the kids for our road trip to NYC this weekend, last-minute birthday presents for her highness, who just happens to be turning three in Two! Days!, a loaf of bread and a pair of cosy pyjama bottoms for me because they were there and I need cosy pyjama bottoms. I didn't even find the storage bins I was looking for. (They can't be wicker, becuase B hates wicker with the passion of a thousand firey suns. I believe he averts his eyes every time the laundry hamper comes into view. And they need to be smaller than the canvas ones they sell in Target, because those are just a tiny bit too tall for my purposes.)

Then I rushed back to pick up Mabel from school in the nick of time, running into a set of roadworks on the way to slow me down, of course - I imagined myself being pulled over for speeding once the road was clear again (not that I was speeding, Dear, of course) and whether I would get into even more trouble if the first thing I did, rather than reaching submissively for the registration details in the glove compartment, was to grab my phone and dial a friend to go and retrieve Mabel from the playground in time; luckily, no such thing came to pass, but it was a close run thing - but Wednesday is the day we usually take lunch to the playground with a group of friends, and I hadn't brought lunch. So I rummaged in the Target bag and realised that I could purloin some of the road-trip snacks, and we took juice boxes, pretzel chips and trail mix along the wooded path to the picnic tables.

Five minutes later, Mabel said she wanted to go home. So home we came. She's now asleep and has spent enough time coughing without waking up that I'm convinced she's about to come down with some horrible lurgy just in time to (a) make her birthday miserable and (b) stop us from going to New York.

Here's hoping not. I have new crayons, new notebooks, and a couple of those invisible-ink colouring pads for the kids for the journey. What do you bring to keep your children happy on a road trip? Also, any tips for things we should definitely do in New York on Saturday - assuming we get there? The weather should be pretty nice. Fingers crossed.

D

Happy significant blog-post number to me, happy significant blog-post number to me... etc. Blogger tells me that this is my five-hundredth post. If anyone out there who is not married to me has read them all, you probably deserve a lot more accolades for hanging in there than I do for blathering on at you.

But seriously, folks. I know you're not supposed to drink when you're on antibiotics, but is it okay to stuff your face with your children's halloween candy? Hypothetically speaking.

I started the blog out of boredom, when I had recently moved to the US from Ireland. I posted sporadically and had no readers. I've gradually upped the posting and come out a teensy tiny bit, first to people I only know on the Internet and then to (gasp) some friends and family in real life, and I'm sort of proud of the fact that I've been posting close to 5-6 days a week for over a year now.

As my life goes right now, this is the thing I do for me more than any other. It's my hobby, it's my release, it's my connection to the Outside, it's keeping my writing muscle flexed just a little bit, even if some days all I do is post a photo or recount something hilarious my kids said (which - be honest - is what you people like best). And somehow or other I get between 70 and 90 readers most weekdays. They can't all be married to me. (Unless B has rigged my stats. Maybe he has.)

So thank you for reading, whoever you are. If you don't object, I'll just keep on blathering.