This and that

I'm not going to tell you any more about how Mabel's nights are going until they've settled down a bit and formed a - dare I say it? - pattern of some sort. Besides, I don't want to spoil the suspense.

I happened to look up the school website to see which day Dash starts back, and it turns out there's only three weeks of vacation left. How can that be? I almost (almost) feel sad about it, except for all the reasons it's a good thing. But he and his sister have learned to play together again this summer, in recent days she has come out of her hate phase and been heard to say "I love you" to not just me but everyone in the family, and things are delightful - at least around breakfast time when everyone's at their most happy and polite. (I'm pretty catatonic until I've had a bowl of cereal, but the kids are good.)

And I will miss Dash when he's back at school all day. These summers really are (barf, sorry) precious, because every one that goes by sees him demonstrably more grown up, more grown away, doing more and exploring further, and in no time at all we'll be at the summer where he goes off to Europe inter-railing for two months. Or whatever the kids are doing then.

Our guests get here tomorrow, and though they are the most low-key guests imaginable - my good friend and her six-year-old son, just for two nights - it's a good excuse to clean some things that never get cleaned, and throw out some things that have been waiting all summer to be thrown out, and organize just a tiny bit. Of course, it's a constant uphill battle against the children who know hilarity lies in throwing toys around for fun, but just maybe the floor will be vacuumed tomorrow morning.

This weekend, many people are going to BlogHer in New York. I think I might just make a resolution to go next year, assuming it's either there or in DC again - I don't imagine I'd fly further afield for it at this stage. But for the first time, I know some people (okay, one for sure) in real life who are attending, and it makes it feel like not such a ridiculous thing for me to want to do. I do blog, I am a blogger, I qualify, right?

Are you going to BlogHer? Would you go with me next year?

Midnight Mabel

The time has come. I'm night-weaning the baby.

Yes. The three-and-a-half-year-old baby.

See, I feel sheepish and ridiculous admitting that. Admitting that I have been getting up multiple times a night and breastfeeding a perfectly large and able preschooler for so bloody long now, just because she wanted to more than I wanted to not.

And then I feel bad for feeling bad, because there's a whole phalanx of crunchy moms out there who do this, and who perhaps (but probably not, because crunchy moms worth their salt are all about not judging) would even think that if she still wants it, I should still do it.

But it's time. Tuesday night with the babysitter showed me that it's just habit that leads her to demand me and the boobs around 3am every night. (We are at the point that she can often, if not usually, make do with just a story, sometimes even from Daddy, at the midnight waking, if she wakes then. Which she mostly still does.) She can put herself back to sleep, if she cares to try. But when she knows I'm around, her thought process goes like this:

Oh, I'm awake. 
Mummmmmmyyyyyyyy!!!!!!

Instead of

Oh, I'm awake.
Better roll over and go back to sleep.

It's time to change that, and there's only one way to do it. I've tried waiting it out, but that's obviously not working. So first I send B in (who sleeps deeply and is getting up early every day to go for a run because he's training seriously for this fall's marathon; which is one reason why I was reluctant to do this), and then when she kicks him out I go in and reiterate that there will be no boobie.

And then there are demands for cold water from the fridge, and a hot waffle from the toaster with nothing on it, and more cold water because the first cold water isn't cold enough any more, and a Mabel story*, and the Cinderella story, and another story, and to have the library books read to her, and to get her pillow pet from downstairs where she left it; and some of these demands are acceded to and some are roundly denied because it's the middle of the damn night and that's when people sleep.

And eventually, so far, she has turned on her light and turned over in a big grump, and finally gone back to sleep beside me, or even without me. But it takes a long, long time. Last night she woke at 2.15 and finally fell asleep some time before 5am. That's a big chunk of night to be wide awake for. I think she's part raccoon.

We have guests coming next week, so I really hope she's got used to it a bit by then, because the walls in this house are paper thin, so that I can literally hear a child yawn in their bed while I repose in my own, and I don't think I would feel like a very good hostess if my guests were treated to the upset-Mabel show for three hours in the middle of the night.


* Mabel doesn't know her name is sometimes Mabel, of course, because Mabel is not really her name. But when telling her midnight stories about a little girl who has adventures, I often find that the little girl's name is Mabel.

Submariner

When Dash was a baby - or, at least, a toddler, we did some swimming classes. I had always meant to take my children swimming from an early age, but the first time I discovered how slippery a wet wriggly baby is and how many hard surfaces glared at me in the changing room, I decided to wait until he could at least stand up on his own before going again. So he was perhaps 17 months when we took our first Aqua Tots class at the local pool.

It was quite fun, and he liked the splashy wheels on the bus, but when it came to going under, he just didn't want to. We'd sing Ring Around the Roses (or Ring a Ring o' Rosies, as I would rather call it), and the instructor would instruct us to blow on the babies' faces at the last line, to make them close their mouths when we dipped them under for All Fall Down.

"Why does that make them close their mouths?" I asked her.
She had no idea. "It's just what we're told to do," she said a tad sheepishly.

Well, whatever, but it wasn't working on Dash. So I didn't dip him under, I just swooped him gently down a little way. I didn't see why he should be submerged if he didn't like it, and he didn't.

The next summer we took some more classes, but by then Dash's stubborn streak was showing, and it turned out he didn't really want to put on his swim diaper and his swim shorts, because he knew that if he did that, next thing he'd know he'd be in the pool and we'd be trying to make him put his face in the water again, blowing bubbles or looking for rings, and generally getting water in his eyes just like he hated. So I'd cajole and threaten and ambush and he'd whine and cry and kick and we'd finally get into the pool in time for the last ten minutes of class. By the second-last day I decided to give us both a break and not bother even trying.

When he was four, he was finally old enough for a class I didn't have to get into the water and partake in, so I happily signed him up. He got into the pool willingly enough, but spent most of the time glued to the rail, or sometimes just sitting on the side. I decided enough was enough, and we didn't do any more lessons after that.

When we moved house that year we joined the local pool for the summer, and Dash slowly went from clinging limpet to confident mover-about-in-water-wearing-a-flotation-device. Last summer, aged 5, he started to doggy paddle, all self-supporting. And today, he put on a pair of goggles and put his head underwater.

He'll get there. He'll get to the moon and back, that boy, if we just give him some time and some space.

Authoritah

Last night B and I went out to dinner, because we have now been married for eight years. This time, since the babysitter had had such success putting Mabel to sleep the last time, I let her do it again from the start - Mabel hadn't napped at all, so she was ready for bed as soon as the sitter got here.

Unfortunately, I hadn't bargained on the fact that removing all her time to impress her most-loved fourteen-year-old would make her unwilling to stay asleep. I thought that once she was out, she'd stay that way at least until 10.30 or so, by which time we'd be back. Instead, she went to sleep pretty soon but woke up (or at least revived herself from an almost-sleeping state) several times to tell Emma important things about tiaras and birthday parties, and to eat a waffle in spite of the good dinner I'd fed her before we left.

But then! At 1.30 am or so, I found myself awake, awaiting the inevitable. I heard Mabel moving around in her room. Here we go, I thought, wondering whether to wake my deeply sleeping husband and send him in first (our new strategy, still in its infancy so I can't say how it's going yet) or just cut to the chase and go myself. But the call didn't come, so I waited. Then I heard her bedside light click on. Hmm, I thought. A few minutes later I heard "...T, U, V, W, X, Y and Z, now I know my ABC, next time won't you sing with me." But still, no call - for me, for Daddy, or even for the babysitter.

Eventually, curiosity got the better of me. I got up, snuck along to her room, and peered in. She was lying with her back to me, still under the bright light, hand twitching a little, but certainly trying to be asleep if not quite there yet. I didn't dare go further in and turn off the light, even though I hate the thought of her sleeping under the glare of a spotlight. Clearly, she doesn't care, so why should I?

I went back to bed, and, after a while, to sleep.

That was it until 7am, when she appeared beside me and crawled into my bed to partake of what was rightfully hers. I happily gave it.

Over breakfast, I congratulated her on putting herself back to sleep.

"Well, Emma said I wasn't to wake up again."
"So you didn't call for her?"
"Yes."
"I see. What if I told you not to wake up again?"
"I'd call for you." Impish grin.

So. I have less authority than a fourteen-year-old. This is not even a surprise.

Christmas in July

Last Saturday we went to the National Harbor to see the Gaylord Christmas in July preview event, because now that I'm a DCMom I get to do all sorts of cool stuff. (Really, I just wanted another place to write. I wasn't thinking about events or freebies at all. But apparently sometimes those happen too.)

I hope you don't think I'm selling out if I talk about this stuff here too. I'll keep the proper reviews to the DCMoms site where they belong, but sometimes the experiences might be just too interesting to keep to myself.

Because I have to say it was a weird sensation - being marketed to, being handed a media packet even as my daughter insisted on being carried and my son demanded something or other, and knowing that these people actually wanted me to bring the children, so they couldn't complain if they were a little loud. It was odd to be anywhere in a sort of quasi-professional capacity, especially when that capacity was mostly being my non-professional parent self.

Some thoughts that occurred to my non-professional parent self, then:

• If you're going to hand out sticky green candy canes to keep the kids occupied during the presentation part of the goings-on, please provide some wipes as well. Otherwise, there may be tacky handprints all over your nice upholstered chairs that even the most assiduous parent can't avoid.

• I never turn down free food, but why put the candy and ice-cream first and the hot-dogs two hours later? Where is the logic in that? But thank you for including the fresh fruit. It was a nice idea, even if my kids scorned it.

Green-flavour cotton candy (that's lime, not mint).

• But ooh, pretty, unseasonal, Christmas. 

Soap-bubble snow

• Santa? Seriously? Oh well. Apparently, children aren't at all bothered by the fact that he's not supposed to be around in July. Mabel told him she wants a princess, and he said he'd get right on that.

They got Shrek ears. (I was wearing Mabel's.)

• Also, those pictures of giant ice-sculptured Shrek characters you keep showing us look unpleasantly as if they were made from enormous gobs of glistening snot. I am not attracted to them. Ogres look better when matte, not slimy.

Hugging Puss 'n' Boots. I hope I didn't miss Antonio Banderas in there.

We actually went to the National Harbor for the lighting of the tree last year - hey, I blogged it, even - and happened to walk through the atrium of the Gaylord where all their very impressive Christmas stuff was out in full force - gigantic tree, acres of lights, gingerbread houses to decorate, Dreamworks Characters being posed with. It looked great, though we scuttled past it all pretty quickly, denying the children things left and right. It was a lot of fun on Saturday to experience some of the same things for free, even if it was in a much smaller room and at the wrong time of year.

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After the indoor part, there was an outdoor part to showcase all the fun times one can have at the national harbor this summer. Sadly, the weather decided to make it Christmas - or maybe a dismal November - outside too, just for this one day, so I think it was far from what the planners had envisaged. They had a canopy that I'm sure was supposed to shade us from the blazing sunshine, but instead it could do only a half-assed job of keeping us dry. Every now and then I'd look out and think it was really coming down, and then the rain would kick it up another notch. Luckily, we'd brought the raincoats.

Grey skies, grey water

The kids got balloon animals and a really excellent face painter, as well as a stilt walker and a lady-clown-plate-spinner, so they were happy. The boat rides would have been lovely on any other day, but as it was, we all just kept to wet land.

A happy clown and a mysterious cheetah

Lovely weather for ducks, it was.

Camping

Okay, so I'm willing to admit that I might be all wrong about "smart". It seems Americans use it to mean "cheeky" all the time, and are not in the least confused by its simultaneously meaning just plain clever. What they aren't used to, as Bethany pointed out, is hearing it in connection with how a person is dressed.

But this is why I write these things - so you guys can chime in and tell me where I've got it wrong. So thank you for chiming, and please continue to do so.

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In other news, there was Dash's week of camp. This was the first summer I'd felt he was ready for any sort of camp-like activity, at the ripe old age of six and a bit. Even last year, though five sounds reasonably old, I would have thought that a full nine-to-four day was too long, that I wouldn't trust him to go to the bathroom when he needed to, and that I couldn't remotely see him towelling himself off and getting dressed in reasonable time after swimming. This year, so long as he was willing, I didn't even spend more than ten seconds worrying about any of that. He was ready, and it was great.

He went to gymnastics camp, a long-established summer tradition run by the gym troupe at the university close by. Their daily schedule went like this: gym, gym, gym, lunch, art & craft, swimming, and more gym. (Except on Friday, when swimming was replaced by ice-cream, and then there was a show for the parents to admire all that had been learned.) The counsellors were great - some of them had done the camp themselves every year as kids and moved seamlessly into the instructing role now they were older. I had heard it was well run, and it only took ten minutes to get him there and pick him up. I admit there was also some element of living vicariously in my choice - I was the girl who spent hours perfecting my cartwheels and handstands on our very uneven front lawn, and would have killed for this opportunity to use real gym apparatus when I was his age.

But he loved it. He had a great time, and can't wait to do it again next year. And my week with Mabel was so peaceful, and so productive, that I'm thinking next year maybe he can do two weeks. Unfortunately, they don't take campers under five, so it will be two more years till Mabel can do it too - but I think she'll be ready for some other sort of local camp by next summer. Precocious minx.

Here he is, doing "The birdcage" on the hoops for the show. Sorry about the fuzzy, but Mabel didn't like the way attention was centered on something other than her, so she was jumping around on top of me the whole time.

The downside is that this morning he was in camp withdrawal. It rained, we stayed in, and by 11am he was antsy and belligerant, looking for someone to wrestle or some large object to lift up. Maybe I need to suspend some hoops from the ceiling.

Transatlantic subtleties: Bold and smart

This looks simple enough. Bold is bold and smart is smart, right? Sure, but that's the problem. You think the person you're talking to understands what you mean, but their definition is a little different, if you're each from opposite sides of the Atlantic.

Let's take smart first. In the US, smart means clever; intelligent with a side of good sense. In the UK and Ireland we understand this, but we also use it to mean cheeky, liable to answer back with a snarky retort. A smart comment in the States is always a good thing, but if you make a smart comment to your teacher in Ireland, you're liable to be in trouble. Thus, Irish children may be admonished not to be smart - not something you'd ever hear from an American parent.

The word smart is one that's close to my heart. My employer in Ireland was a software firm which began its life with a nice acronym for a name. Let's call it ABC Stuff. It was an Irish company but it had offices in Silicon Valley, because this was during the dot-com-boom years and most of our clients were in the US anyway. After a while, somebody decided that we needed a catchier name than ABC if the people in Marketing were to do any good for the people in Sales. (Virtually nobody in Marketing or Sales was in Ireland.) They looked around and noted that the big word in California for the new millennium seemed to be Smart - everyone was introducing smart cards with smart chips for your smart money to make smart transactions. Our company was rebranded as SmartCrowd (let's say).

This sounded fine to the American ears, but when the poor Irish employees were told about the new name, there was more than one snicker in the audience - until we realised that now we'd have to tell people we worked at SmartCrowd, and suffer the inevitable smart comments. (That's the bad sort of smart.)

A few years later we were bought out by another company and the Smart name disappeared, much to everyone's secret relief.

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And then there's bold. In Ireland, it's unequivocally a bad thing to have a bold child. In the US, not so much. It took me a while to notice this.

To the UK/Irish reader, bold means naughty. If your children are giving you smart answers, they're being bold and you'd better send them to bed with no supper. (Bold is also a brand of laundry detergent in Ireland. I have no idea why. It is exempt from this discussion.)

Americans use bold in what I would erstwhile have considered the antiquated meaning of brave, adventuresome - it might come with a slight side of foolhardiness, but mostly it's a good thing, in child or adult.

So be bold, and act smart. Or don't. The choice is yours. The location is all-important.

Prevarication

This week I've been letting Mabel nap, since Dash is at camp and it's the first time I've had an hour to myself since the summer break began. It's hard to resist the temptation to bring her upstairs at 12.30 and just see if she falls asleep. She's been waking early, so she does; and then I have a lovely time blogging or baking or sorting things in peace.

But of course, there's a downside. It's called bedtime. Bedtime for the past few nights has gone like this:

Step 1: Get the kids ready for bed. Teeth brushed, stories read.
Step 2: Dash lies down, possibly drawing in his notebook for a while until he falls asleep.
Step 3: Meanwhile, I take Mabel into her room and nurse her down.
Step 4: Down on that side, down on the other side, first side again... and she's hungry. Or thirsty for cold water from the fridge, Mummy. Please, Mummy.
Step 5: I bring her water and/or a frozen waffle. So much for the teeth.
Step 6: All done. I lie down with her again. "This is the last side, Mabel. No more sides after this."
Step 7: Mabel leaps up and makes a break for the door.
Step 8: Mabel gets to come downstairs and play for an extra twenty minutes, so long as she's quiet and leaves me alone to drink my belated cup of coffee.
Step 9: Mabel wants to watch something on my computer. Mabel wants to write her name on my computer. Mabel wants one of those things I'm eating with my coffee. Time for Mabel to go back upstairs.
Step 10: (Optional) Daddy is inveigled into going upstairs and telling Mabel some stories. Daddy is summarily dismissed.
Step 11: I go up one last (I swear, this is it) time.
Step 12: Some time about an hour and a half after her initial bedtime, Mabel finally nurses to sleep.

Hooray! Time to relax. Oh, wait. I had that in the afternoon. Fold some laundry, put away the dishes, and go to bed.

Agnostic bible studies

Raising your children to be respectful agnostics is hard work, you know.

Okay, so we don't have to get out of the house in time for Mass on Sundays. Nobody has to keep their good clothes clean for church. I won't have to budget for the big bucks some people will be shelling out for First Holy Communion dresses in a few year's time. But there's a lot of explaining.

When Dash was born, one of B's aunts sent us a very nice Usborne edition Children's bible, with the explanation that she knew we were pretty religious. This was interesting, and also, clearly, not actually true, though I suppose we both had been at some point in the past, and she had attended our church wedding, so she wasn't being unreasonable. But by then we were busy not baptizing our firstborn into the Catholic - or any - Church, so we looked at it with some degree of distaste.

It's sat on the bookshelf ever since, because it does have lovely colourful illustrations. The only other book about God that we have is a really beautiful nativity story, with raggedy-winged angels in big boots, and text that's all but incomprehensible to the children, as it comes straight from King James. I like to read it to them at Christmas just for the poetry of the words, and explain the pictures in my own way.

So one day last week, Dash pulled the children's bible off the shelf and asked to read some stories from it. He's old enough to understand much more now than when we first talked about the concept of God - God as a type of superhero, God as possible fact and possible fiction, God as putative but not necessary creator of everything. So I told him that most of what was in the first half of the book - the Old Testament - was probably not true, or was what people had made up from old, old stories; while what was in the second half had more weight of fact and provability behind it to the extent that we know Jesus was a man who did exist and who was put to death by the authorities because they didn't like that he was stirring up trouble and trying to make change among the poor people.

He and Mabel enjoyed reading the stories of creation, the Garden of Eden, Noah's ark; and then some from when Jesus was a baby and a young boy, like when he was lost and they found him preaching in the temple to the elders. We didn't go as far as his death, but I said we'd read it nearer to Easter.

I'm presenting the stories, especially the Genesis ones, as just that: stories. I have told the children that some people believe that they're absolutely true, and I've also told them that - unlike with God, where everyone gets to make up their own mind - those people are wrong when they believe it. Science is not an option, it's plain fact, by definition. I don't want them to disrespect anyone's beliefs, but I can't in good conscience tell them that when people choose to believe that dinosaurs walked the earth with man, or that the seas were created in one fell swoop on a Tuesday, or that the first woman was made from the rib of the first man, that it's okay and they can believe that too if they want to. It's not.

Creationism is not an issue in Irish schools. Partly, I think, it's because evolution isn't anywhere on the curriculum - or at least, it wasn't on mine anywhere - but also because the average Irish Catholic has no difficulty with the concept of metaphor. We are happy to take God or leave him, and simultaneously understand that the earth was created over many millennia yada yada fish, monkeys, apes, humans.

So I'm happy to keep reading the bible with my children, and answer their questions as well as I can, and try to help them understand that these stories are good to know, just as much as knowing their fairy tales and their nursery rhymes, because they're part of the fabric of our culture and our history, and because they often come up in pub quizzes. Beyond that, it's up to them.


(I hope I don't have to put a disclaimer here about how everyone's entitled to their own beliefs and I don't wish to offend anyone with this blog post. I would be quite surprised if any reader of mine is a die-hard Creationist, but if you're out there, I'm sorry for saying you're wrong. You are, but if I was having a conversation with you I would be polite and not mention it, and do my best to respect the other tenets of your faith.)

Deep down inside

Shhhh! Don't say a word! I'm hunting wabbits.

No, no, I'm not. But the two children have been playing together - actually, honest-to-dog playing together - quietly, even - for quite a while now. They're saying quite disgusting things, if I bother to listen, about things their imaginary moms do (not me, obviously not me), but I don't care. "My mum messes around her face" was one of the nicer ones that Mabel just came up with.

But I think it's been a while since they've done this. There's been hilarious running-around-the-house-someone's-going-to-put-an-eye-out playing, but not much sitting down with toys together playing lately.

I know now that I've said it - no matter how quietly - it will all fall apart, but it's been nice. Ironic, even, since I came here to tell you about how rotten Mabel has been to her brother lately, and maybe write my way into some sort of explanation of it for myself.

For a while now Mabel's been telling poor Dash that she hates him. Then she rubs it in: "I love Mummy, and I like Daddy, and I hate you, Dash. You're poopy and I hate you forever." Stuff like that. Which is all well and good and developmentally appropriate, I'm sure, but the poor boy believes her, no matter how much I tell him that she's only saying it and that really, deep down inside (just like Anthony, if you've read about Anthony) she loves him. "No, I don't," says Mabel.

So then he has to go and ask her to pour lemon juice on his paper cut, thus:

- Mabel, who do you like?
- Mummy, and Daddy, and everyone, and I hate you.
- Mabel, if Mummy and Daddy weren't here, who would you like?
- I'd still hate you.
- If there was nobody else in the world except me, would you like me then?
- No, I'd hate you. You're poopy.

Of course, in between times they play together, or sit together companionably, and everything's just fine because she's forgotten her fraternal stance, but then she remembers and thinks she'll just stir things up a bit, so she pinches him. Viciously. For no good reason, as he always tells me.

"I did have a good reason. But it's a secret," she retorts.

And for the most part, he doesn't fight back. He's not a saint, so sometimes she gets her just desserts, and other times he just idiotically hangs out waiting - even asking, literally - for more; but so often he's sad about it, and he tries his best to be a really nice big brother. He picks things up when she drops them, and finds her toys if she wants them, and generally does her bidding in the hopes of winning favour. (Sometimes I wish he'd be a little more assertive. She's got assertive all sewn up, and then some.)

Trying to parse her behaviour somewhat, I suppose she's testing her boundaries and playing with her power. She's pushing him to see if she can really push him all the way away. She doesn't dare do that to me (since I'm attached to the very important boobies, remember) and Dash is a far easier target than Daddy. She's learning that she can bestow or withold affection, how it feels to be mean, and how it makes other people feel. Not a fun thing to watch, but I suppose it's necessary.

One day last week when she was horribly overtired, having needed a nap but only got ten minutes in the car, and then managed not to go to bed until too late, her sobs gave me  some insight into her psyche: "It's not fair," she hiccupped at me, "that Dash was the first one out of your tummy."

That's it, basically. There's no competition like a three-year-old's competition, and no matter how many times she bests him by announcing "Whoever's a girl wins! I win!" her brother will always have won the first, the biggest, the most important race of them all. He was born first. Until she comes to terms with that, she's just going to have to work out her resentment with all the immaturity she can muster.

(I've reserved Ames & Ilg's Your Three-Year-Old: Friend or Enemy from the library, and in fact today's outing was meant to be to pick it up, but we haven't made it out yet. I read it back when Dash was rising three, but I think a re-read would be timely. I'm hoping it will tell me this is very normal behaviour for her age, but for the moment I'm just spouting psychobabble off the top of my head. So don't sue me if I'm way off target.)

I hope that she soon decides it's more fun to be nice than mean. This morning she did announce to Dash that she likes him, to his secret delight, so maybe things are moving in the right direction. Or maybe she's just toying with his affections. I already feel sorry for her first boyfriend. Make that her first five or six boyfriends.

Detente

Transatlantic subtleties: The trouble with Cary

In some parts of America, it is well known that the words Mary, marry and merry are homophones. Say them to yourself. Go on. Did they all sound the same? Did you use the same vowel sound for the a's and the e's? Yup. See? There's the problem.

Okay, so maybe that's not really so much of a problem. I mean how often do you really need to employ the sentence "I feel merry because I wish to marry Mary", and wouldn't the context be enough for your listeners anyway? Or maybe just you have no idea what gibberish I'm spouting now, and don't much give a hoot.

But bear with me. Remember Carrie Bradshaw from Sex and the City? Okay. Now, does anyone remember Doctor Kerry Weaver from ER? The gruff lesbian with the limp and the adopted baby? One Sunday evening, out of the blue, my Mum brought up the possibility that Kerry's name was actually Carrie. I was horrified. How could Americans, with their lazy pronounciation, not make this clear for us? What if I'd been thinking she was a Kerry all along, and she turned out to be a Carrie? I'd have to reorganize my whole viewing attitude.

(My mother was given to dropping epiphanies on me during the 9.30 to 10.30 slot on Sunday evenings. One day she remarked that Dr Doug Ross was really very good looking, wasn't he; and my life has never been the same since I realised that she was right - and that she'd noticed first. She rose in my estimation that evening. As did a certain Mr Clooney. (To be fair, this was when he still had the bad haircut.))

Since this was before the days of the IMDB, I had to kneel in front of the TV as the credits went up, trying to catch the character's name in the scrolling text. I'm not sure if I got it that week, but eventually I was lucky, and I was able to relax, safe in the knowledge that she really was a Kerry, not a Carrie. She didn't look like a Carrie.

A little later, it occurred to me to wonder if there was any possibility that Carrie Bradshaw was, in fact, Kerry Bradshaw. I decided not to go down that rabbit hole.

Now, if you're American (and I have to face it, most of you are), you may have found all of that totally intelligible. As far as you're concerned, probably, Kerry and Carrie are just two spellings of the same name. THEY'RE NOT. Sorry, but YOU'RE WRONG.

Kerry has a flat eh vowel sound. Carrie has a long aaa vowel sound. Totally different. But it's hard to tell that to people who say wadder for water.

And then, we come to Cary Grant.

I always had a problem with his name. As far as I was concerned, it was Cary, to rhyme with dairy. But my mother (my mother again... I'm beginning to see a trend) told me that she'd heard the Americans pronounced it Cary to rhyme with Larry. AS IF IT HAD A SECOND 'R'. IT DOES NOT HAVE A SECOND 'R'. SEE THAT? ONE 'R'.

One day, many years later, it turned out one of the parents in my daughter's class had the same name, leaving me with a massive dilemma any time I spoke to, or of, him. How should I say it? Should I rhyme with dairy or Larry? Would I mortally offend him if I picked the wrong one? As I voiced my dilemma to a friend, I saw her eyes glaze over slightly. "Well, how do you say Cary Grant?" I asked her. And then I realised. As far as she was concerned, it's all the same. She could barely discern the difference between the noises I was making when I said the two options. It was like a Chinese person telling me about the differences in intonation in Mandarin that make what would otherwise be homonyms into different words. "To be honest," she said, "he probably won't notice either way."

It's a great load off my mind. Even if it does mean my son has been known to speak of the great hero Hairy Potter, to my undying shame.

Consequences

If you give a six-year-old the sunscreen...

... he'll go to town.

Of course, if he then gives it to his sister, you'll find her slathering it generously all over her tiny plastic dinosaur (correction: someone else's dinosaur, which has been purloined and must be returned).

If you send a three-year-old to play across the road...

... she'll come back in the size-18-month halloween costume of her friend's little brother - and roar at the postman on the way.

If you give a girl a Spidey costume...

 ...she'll wear it to climb a spider web at the playground, of course.

If you borrow a brother's Spider-Man costume...

 ... you'll find he's decided to reclaim it and wear it himself the next day.

If you give a blogger some new teatowels...

 ...her daughter will find her newest princess dress. (Though I think she's more like Sister Immaculata of the Holy Teapot.)
 
If you buy a boy a pirate set in Target ...

... he'll quickly break the earring and discard the eye-patch, but happily wear the moustache for half the day, much to the amusement of everyone else in Target.

Notes from the beach

When I was seven-almost-eight, we went to Corfu for a holiday. (It's a Greek island, sort of shaped like a seahorse, mostly off the coast of Albania. My father pointed across the sea and told me that I was looking behind the iron curtain, but I didn't know what he meant.) It was the first time I'd been on a plane since I was two, the first trip abroad (apart from to England, which doesn't count) that I could recall, and it left me with a host of wonderful memories that were purely my own, not merely things recounted by others or pasted into a photo album that I might think were half memory, half family lore.

Will Dash remember our trip to the beach this summer like that? Is it sufficiently different from daily life? Is he old enough? What will be the parts that stick, that live forever in his mind and come back with startling recall?

Last week I sat on the sand where the waves came in, showing my children how to dig a moat around a sandcastle and wait for the water to fill it. I showed them how to make mud pies with their hands, how to wriggle their feet down into the sand as the ocean recedes, how to turn their backs to the waves so they don't get splashed in the face. By our third day on the beach, I watched my son wander away a little (a very little) on his own, intent on collecting smoothed shell particles, dragging out a channel in the sand with his heel. I showed his sister that I could write her name in the sand, and how the ocean would erase it mercilessly. It was all new to them, and I was the keeper of wonderful discoveries. 

The sea has always been a part of my life, since I grew up with a view of Dublin Bay from my bedroom window (up a hill, half a mile or so from the coast). My school was so close to the sea that  seagulls would wheel outside our windows looking for scraps of sandwich. When bored (or just plain lost) in maths class, I could gaze out at the horizon, watching a cargo ship make its way slowly across the bay, or the ferry head off to Wales from nearby Dun Laoghaire. 

When I was feeling antsy and adolescent, full of pent-up stuff, and the need to be great, or do something, or justify my lonely existence [dramatic flounce], I'd walk briskly to the harbour road and pick my way down to the rocks, where I could sit with nothing further between me and the small island just off our shore. The Irish Sea is not a very pretty or spectacular one - it's not the romantic, exotic Pacific; the sparkling, freezing Atlantic; or the softly lapping Mediterranean - but it has its moods of grey stillness or glorious blue-green or angry energy all the same. I'd sit there until the swell had taken my feverishness and smoothed me over, and then I'd walk up the hills home again.

I've always been drawn, when looking at maps, to the end places. The tips of land, the pointy bits. So when I first saw the Outer Banks, those long sandbars down the coast of North Carolina, punctuated by lighthouses, I decided we should go and visit them some day. Of course, when we got there my somewhat romantic expectations of a verdant and windswept isle were somewhat dashed - after all, one long sandy beach is pretty much the same as another, whether it's Brittas Bay or South Padre Island in Texas or Duck, NC - and with two small children in tow, we didn't get to drive as far as any of the lighthouses, to find out what these particular end points of the world looked like.

But still. I introduced my children to this side of the Atlantic Ocean, the other side of which laps up against such hospitable shores as Roundstone and Achill Island and Dingle, sites of my own family holidays many moons ago (and not in Greece). I showed them how to make mud pies and moats, and they tasted the salt water for themselves and watched the sand crabs scuttle as the waves receded. It's enough.

Iron man

We all know that it's Dash's long-held ambition to be a metal-maker when he grows up, so that he can fashion jetpacks and Iron-Man-like suits to his heart's content. So when we visited a replica Elizabethan ship at Roanoke Island on our vacation, and then found it came complete with model settlement site with real people doing real jobs like, for example, a real live blacksmith, he was pretty thrilled.

He was fascinated to see the forge in action (while the rest of us wilted in the record-breaking midday heat), and overjoyed when the smith presented him with a newly hammered, bent, black, iron nail.

Dash (far right, dodging the camera) in the settlement village. The forge is that structure at the back.

The nail is his new most prized possession. If you asked him to chose between his blue light saber and the nail, he might be hard pressed to answer. But, just like the light saber, he keeps misplacing the nail, and at an inch and a half long, it's that much harder to find.

With a quarter, for scale

The first night, he took the nail to bed with him. So sweet.

Not so sweet at 4.15 when he appeared by our bed with a piercing, "Daddy! Daddy!" I took him on, since I was half-awake anyway (probably just recently back from Mabel's bed; Mabel's not sleeping well just now), and B clearly was not.

"Daddy's asleep. It's the middle of the night. Tell me."
"No, I have to tell him."
"No, tell me. What is it?"
"I can't find my naaaaaiiiil."
"Right."
"..."
"Okay, I'll tell Daddy, and in the morning we'll find the nail. I promise."
"Can I get into your bed?"
Sigh. "Up you come."

Shortly thereafter I was called away again, and left him snoring peacefully beside his insensible father. The nail was located in the morning. He's only lost it several million more times since then, but not, so far, in the middle of the night again. Today he got a small plastic pill box to keep it in, which will make it about 2% easier to find, perhaps.

In its box

The blog post it would have been nice to read before our trip to the Outer Banks, North Carolina

So you're going to the beach. Here are a few tips from those of us who just got back.

• Remember that you are not the only people leaving the greater Washington DC area in a southerly direction on the Saturday morning before the 4th of July. Or on any given Saturday in summer, for that matter.
• Don't panic. Not absolutely everyone else in that particular traffic jam is headed straight for Duck, NC.
• All the people you encounter in the dead-stop traffic five miles from the bridge to the Outer Banks, however, are. Be prepared to add another couple of hours for the last twenty miles of your journey.
• Maybe next time, consider getting a rental that starts on Sunday, and/or leaving earlier than 9.30 in the morning. Yes, that means you'd have to actually make some effort to pack a little more the night before. Deal with it.
• Never forget - don't worry, you won't be allowed - that a vacation with children is not so much a vacation as a relocation of all your daily hassles to a new and less purpose-built area. If you have to eat out, they won't like the food. If you're self-catering, you've just brought all your food-preparation requirements to a new house with an empty fridge and bare cupboards. If you're lucky, there might be a sharp knife, a can opener, and a decent chopping board.
• So let the kids eat fries for dinner every night if that's all there is. A week of it won't kill them, but a week of trying to feed them properly might kill you.
• Leave the Internet behind if you like, but don't unplug so much that your rental has no TV. In fact, cable TV will provide a world of wonder to children who are accustomed to nothing but PBS.  Do try to make sure your accommodation has cellphone reception, though. (Ours didn't.)
• Think of bringing a stepstool so the kids can reach the basin. It's the one thing your rental  almost certainly isn't equipped with.
• Be advised that the a/c will be set for somewhere near freezing, to ensure that nothing moulds in the excessive humidity, and to drive you outside to the beach or the town after a little while inside. You are not allowed mess with the a/c settings, so do bring a cardigan.
• If you lose one of the house keys, don't panic until it hasn't turned up in the load of washing you just put on.
• Come to think of it, if you're bringing seven of everything so you all have enough clothes, why bother doing laundry? Either skimp on packing, or avoid the laundry room entirely. You'll spend most of your time in your swimsuits anyway.
• Your place will have an outside shower so that you don't track sand onto the carpets and into your bedsheets. Don't bother trying to get the kids into it. Just send them to the pool, and don't worry about the signs telling you to wash off any sand before entering. Nobody else did.
• Let the kids know that it's okay to pee in the ocean. Impress upon them that it's not okay to pee in the pool. And this doesn't mean that they should get out of the pool and pee standing beside the pool.
• It's hard to predict how much the sunshine and the water will tire everyone out. Instead of trying to estimate when the kids will be tired, just keep going until they all collapse in a screaming heap of devastation, then bring them home and put them to bed.
• Stop complaining about how it's as hot as hades and as humid as the inside of a tumble dryer, and just go to the beach. That's why you're here.
• Avoid hurricanes, wear hats, and don't forget the sunscreen.

And then my camera got a teensy bit damp and now I can't see anything on the screen, even though it still works, but I have to look through the viewfinder as in the olden days, which is very vexing.