Homework (with ponies)

[Glossing swiftly over the hour it took us to make the 15-minute walk home because we got sidetracked into the neighbour children's house and Dash and I had a long umdiscussion about whether or not he could have a cookie there, while Mabel pilfered the pony stash...]

ME: Sit down. Here's your homework. Look. Have you a pencil? Here. Write your name and the date at the top.
Sit down. Sit. On. Your. Bottom.
Mabel, do you want to colour? Here are the markers. Here's your My Little Pony colouring book.
MABEL: Yayyy! Oooh, Pinkie Pie!
DASH: Where? Where's Pinkie Pie? Show me Pinkie Pie!
ME: Dash, sit down. Ignore her. Have you written your name? Now the date. Look, you look at the calendar. It's Thursday, so it's the 30th. Write Aug, A-U-G. Thirty. Okay?
DASH:  Done! Done. I've done it.
ME: And the year. 2012. Sit down.
MABEL: Rainbow Dash! Look, I found Rainbow Dash!
DASH:  Show me! I wanna see Rainbow Dash!
ME: SIT DOWN. WRITE THE YEAR.
DASH:  Wow, there are a lot of 2s. It's like a pattern, look! Two-zero-one-two, see?
ME: Yes. [He's written the 2s backwards. I ignore it.] Okay. Let's read what it says. This says "Directions". Now you read.
DASH:  Wuh-rrr-ih...
ME: The W is silent.
DASH:  Oh. Rrrr-ih-tuh...
ME: Silent E, look.
DASH:  Oh, right. R-ite...out
ME: No...
DASH:  On?
ME: No. It's a number.
DASH: One!
ME: Yes.
DASH:  One c-l-a-ss-r-oo-m...
ME: Very good.
MABEL: Twighlight sparkle! Ooh, Twighlight Sparkle and the Princess!
DASH:  Show me! Where? Show me!
ME: Mabel, you need to move into the other room. Stop distracting him. Okay, look, here we are. "Write one classroom..."
DASH:  Rrr-uh-ul-
ME: It's a silent E again.
DASH:  Oh. Rull...
ME: Rule.
DASH:  Oh, right. D-r-a-w a pic-ture of...
ME: Good, good.
DASH:  ...yourself f-u-l-u-w-ing...?
ME: Following.
DASH:  Following the ru-ll... rule.
ME: Yes. Great. So. Write a rule. Can you think of a rule?
DASH:  Um. Let me think...raise your hand before asking a question... no, not that one...
ME: That sounds like a good one.
DASH: No, let me think of something else...
MABEL: Applejack! Look, Applejack!
DASH:  I want to see Appleja...
ME: I AM GOING TO THROW AWAY YOUR LIGHTSABER!
DASH:  No, no!
ME: Mabel, if you say one more thing I'm going to throw away all your ponies.
DASH:  Always listen to what the teacher is saying. That's a good one.
ME: Okay. Go ahead. Write what you hear.

liser

ME: ListeN, listeN. Look at what you wrote.
DASH:  Lise...r? Why is that there? Why did I do that? [Changes the r to an n. I stop watching.]

[time passes]

DASH:  There, done! Is it right? Is there anything I spelled wrong?

lisen to the techurs is sainge

ME: Perfect. Great.
DASH:  Really? Did I spell everything right? Tell me!
ME: If I tell you, the teacher will know you didn't do it yourself, and it's more important that you did it yourself.
Now a picture.

[Draws two heads. One has a big ear, facing the other one that has a wide open mouth. It's a pretty good depiction of what he's trying to say, actually.]

ME: Hooray! Done! Yay! Is it wine time yet?*

[Mabel is found under the coffee table colouring her knees a nice dark green.]

* In real life this all took much longer, there were many more interruptions by Mabel and many more SIT DOWNs from me. I decided to condense it all a bit for your sake. (You're welcome.) Then I had many more glasses of wine.

You are here

Don't think I'm not writing. I am writing. You're just not seeing it. I have no fewer than four posts at the draft stage that just aren't coming out of it, because they're not working for one reason or another. Too boring, too uninteresting, too irrelevant, too not-quite-saying-what-I'm-trying-to-say.

I know Mabel is tired today because she's spent an indordinate amount of time rolling round on the floor and chewing on non-food objects. Also because it's only 1.20 and it feels like it should be much later. As early as 9.30 this morning she had installed herself on the sofa with all the cusions, numerous blankets, a bath towel and a dragon doorstop (from IKEA; you probably have one too) and asked me to turn on the TV because she was tiiiiiired.

She's tired because I went to a meeting last night and even though she was well ready to fall asleep at 7pm, because I wasn't there with the magic boobies, she was still wide awake at 8.45 when I got home. She'd had the books, she'd had the stories, she'd been lain down with, she'd been left alone ... she has no idea how to go to sleep without the magic boobies. Not yesterday, anyway, even though she's done it before, and she goes back to sleep in the middle of the night very well these days. (I DIDN'T SAY THAT STOP LOOKING AT ME FATE HERE'S A CHICKEN I SACRIFICED EARLIER.)

It's lovely having Dash back at school now that we're used to it and the homework gets started straight away. I've even cleaned a couple of things and baked a couple of things, so it looks like I'm getting out of my doldrums and back to normal.

It will be even more lovely next week when Mabel is back at school too, at least until the existential angst starts to get me. In between, we have the local Labor Day Festival (that's "festible" to my children) to get through/enjoy, with duties to be discharged for both the nursery school and the elementary school as well as many rides to be ridden on and oh look it's going to be 90 degrees on Saturday. Lovely.

So that's where we are. Where are you?

Innately stylish

I was sitting with a friend at the playground one day as our new Italian neighbour approached.
"I wish I was European and therefore naturally stylish," she sighed.
"I'm European," I reminded her, as we sat there in our shlumpy t-shirts and capris. "Doesn't seem to be working on me."
Ten minutes later she looked down at my shoes.
"I see what your problem is. There's a Toy Story band-aid holding your sandal together."

That's probably it.

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When it's right, you just know. Love, schmove; I'm talking about bras here.

Yesterday, I took Mabel to get her pre-school (pre pre-school, I suppose) haircut in the fancy place at the mall where she can watch a cartoon while they snip. She was very good and enjoyed seeing Jerry and Tweetie Pie beat up Tom in many and various ways, and afterwards she got a small fries and chocolate milk at McDonald's downstairs. And then I decided it was a good day to buy a bra.

Because really, my bras are in a desperate state. If you're looking for descriptions of floaty lace and luxurious fabrics and dainty embroidered detailing, you should probably go elsewhere at this point: six years of breastfeeding have left my boobs feeling most at home in something with good support and wide shoulder straps, preferably with full coverage and in a nice beige tone that doesn't show under whatever I'm wearing. Not sexy, is what I'm saying, but looking much better than the old one when the shlumpy t-shirt goes back on. Comfortable and practical are the watchwords these days.

Anyway, while Mabel ran riot in the Nordstrom dressing rooms, sliding under the dividers from one locked room-ette to the next (we were the only customers at the time, I promise), the lovely assistant brought in one bra after another, starting with the fancy, skin-baring sort that looked beautiful but didn't fit, and finally ending with the one that felt like a big supportive hug as soon as it went over my shoulders. It's beige, it's smooth, it's boring, and I'm in love.

Mabel liked it too. Every now and then she'd appear back in my changing room like a miniature, noisy, whirling dervish to pat my boobs admiringly and tell me what she thought. She liked the shiny padded blue one the best, but in general she liked smooth more than bumpy. A few more years, and she can choose her own, I suppose.

-------------------------

Today I had to go to Baltimore so they could take my biometric data and assimilate it, or whatever it is they do. I thought they might catalog my freckles and measure my earlobes. In the end, they just wanted my fingerprints and a deeply unflattering photo - not even so much as a retinal scan, even though they get that every time I come into the country. Though not for much longer, I suppose, if I can pass the civics test. It appears that I will soon be a citizen. If it happens really quickly, maybe I'll be able to vote in the election - that would be a decent reason, at least. Otherwise, I'm still trying not to think about it in any deep and meaningful way. It's only as symbolic as you make it, I suppose.

As with any occassion when I leave the house and go out in public without children, I felt that I should look something approaching respectable. Beyond changing my sandals for ones without a band-aid accessory, that wasn't really possible though, since it was 89 degrees outside and I was too busy looking up directions and finding some leftovers for lunch in the fridge. They're lucky I put on lipstick for the unflattering photo. Anyway, it didn't seem to matter. Apparently they'll let any old riff-raff into the country.

Or maybe I was just looking suitably assimilated.

Patience and time

To be honest, I thought he'd be reading by now. Or at least, reading a bit more fluently than the halting, frustrating, stopping-and-starting pace he's going at these days.

It's all very well being all Waldorfy and lovely and telling everyone how the children don't even look at a letter in Finland till they're seven, and they have the best educational system in the world, but the truth is that, sadly, we're not in Finland. And I'm starting to see how the system here is really geared towards the children who are already reading, even though the "official" list of sight words they're supposed to know at this stage is only 30 long.

I can see, for instance, how tonight's homework would have been the work of a fun ten minutes to a fluent reader and more willing writer. Dash had to read a story and then write down the title, author, setting, characters, and his favourite part. There may have been space for a picture in the middle too, but we ignored that. The instructions didn't even say "Read a story with an adult", but since the only books he can read himself are definitely devoid of character and setting, I helped him read one of his Spider-Man books, and then we went through the required information and figured out what to write where. It took forever, even without the drawing.

"They have to teach me to read first," wailed Dash. "That would make it easier." We sighed, and explained that that's what they're doing, but he has to practise. He was unconvinced. It makes me think of that point in a learning curve where the old way was faster but you have to plough through in the new way because it will get better - like when I learned to type. It was quicker to hunt and peck with two fingers, but I had to keep doing it the other way if I ever wanted to get any better. For him, he's at that point where he can do it, but it's so tedious and time-consuming that it always seems harder than the alternative. Especially where the alternative is just not reading.

I don't remember what I was doing in class or for homework when I was six - the only things I remember learning that year were how to receive Holy Communion and how to knit - but I know I was an early reader, so I suspect homework like tonight's would have been pretty easy for me at that age. I don't remember a time when reading was ever a chore. I do remember looking at the boys in my class struggling over dotted lines in workbooks (at some age, not necessarily first grade) and wondering why on earth they couldn't write their letters more neatly. It's still hard not to let my frustration show.

And we went at it badly today. I didn't realise that homework would start in earnest this week (duh, really), so I let them kill time but not each other in the playground after school pickup. And then there were other unforeseen events, so that by the time homework happened, Dash was eating a sandwich with one hand and using at least half his brain to feel hard done by about the TV show he had missed. Tomorrow I will be more on the ball, I promise.

We all sorely need a routine after the summer. Homework is just going to have to be part of it, and the reading will come.

Burnt out

I haven't slept all night for six years, give or take, but now that I finally am, sometimes, getting a solid five or even six hours at a time - and the right hours at that, not the very unhelpful 7pm to midnight stretch that I remember complaining about Dash doing many many moons ago - I'm exhausted. I think my body has taken its pent-up resentment about not getting to sleep for so long and is throwing it back at me, finally, now that it can.

I would think it was my imagination, but a friend told me it happened to her too - when she weaned her two-year-old and her four-year-old finally started sleeping better, she found she was going to bed early every night to catch up on all those years of missed sleep.

I think it's probably the end-of-summer doldrums too, though. Even though we're out of the 95-degree days, for this week at least, it's still hot and humid and sweaty and sunny, and I'm tired of it. We're all far too jaded to bother greasing up the children with sunscreen these days, and are relying on the natural protection they've built up on their lovely tanned limbs to see them through. The mosquitos are having a field day, or several, and my ankles and poor Dash's legs are currently sprinkled lavishly with their itchy little love-bites. Little feckers.

And the fact that Dash is already back at school almost - not quite, mind - adds insult to injury. I still can't get anything done, because I have Mabel all the time, but I'm also starting to get the feeling that I don't want to do anything, and that when she finally does get out of my hair (4th September not that I'm counting) I'll just slump into a mouldering heap rather than do anything constructive with my surfeit of time and space, because constructive things are hard and require energy.

I think I'll have to ease myself in gently by taking a little trip to Target. Or maybe Kohl's.

Taking my lumps

I got delivered a smackdown from the Internet today, in the form of some mild criticism/advice on parenting on a discussion board where I had specifically asked for (or at least put myself out there for) such. I metaphorically burst into tears, and then I had to spend the rest of the day analyzing my reaction as well as the criticism and whether it was reasonable or not.

You know, I'm bad with criticism, because I lack practice with it. I'm a people-pleaser, a good student, and extremely non-confrontational. I also shy away from things that are difficult or I'm bad at. I do all this, basically, to avoid criticism.

When required to describe me, my teenaged classmates could come up with nothing more interesting than basically "Not a bitch". Which felt like damning with faint praise, and even this mild comment sent me into a spiral of self-examination back then, when my skin was translucently thin, just like every other 15-year-old.

My skin's a bit thicker now, but I have also surrounded myself with people who are too nice, or too polite, to be mean to me (or, you know, tell me the truth if it's anything but flattering). So dealing with criticism doesn't really come up often, except when I am so silly as to put myself on the Internet where total strangers can tell me whatever they like, working with whatever small subset of relevant information I may have provided to come to possibly erroneous conclusions.

If my blog had a bigger readership maybe people would pop up here to tell me that I'm crazy or terrible or a bad person, but I think for the most part, readers of blogs like this one are a pretty self-selecting lot: if they don't like it, they don't read it, and they certainly don't bother to comment. It takes a certain type of hater with a lot of time on their hands to read a blog they hate just to make nasty comments.

So when I read what someone said today, my first instinct was to get on the defensive. But you don't understand ... you don't know ... you haven't even met me so you are unaware of what a nice person I am ... let me give you more information. Also, to convince myself that the critic has vastly different views on parenting from mine (possibly true) and that they're an idiot anyway (probably not true, but I am as much as stranger to them as they are to me, so who knows).

Then I took a few hours to let it rattle around my head. It's still rattling, to be honest. Maybe tomorrow I'll wake up with my faith in myself and my processes restored; it's not that I think I'm the most fantastickest parent on the block, or that my kids are the most perfect humans ever produced, but most of the time I'm pretty happy with the way things are going along, and willing to overlook my small defects in the areas of keeping floors clean and serving vegetables at every meal (for instance). (Those were not things that were criticized by the critic, but maybe they would have been had I provided that information.)

Mostly I have faith in my children's genes, which are good ones from good people, to triumph over the day-to-day foibles of their minder; and in my own intentions, which are for the best.

It's a little too easy, with fingers bouncing on keyboard, to say things you'd never say to a stranger standing in front of you, without taking the time to make them a little more palatable by coating them in manners and prevarication and the benefit of the doubt. Sometimes that makes the Internet a refreshingly frank place to be, but mostly it just hurts people's feelings and makes them less receptive to whatever it was you were trying to tell them.

So there. I've taken my criticism and turned it right back around. Hah. It's much easier to give it out than take it.

Productivity

This is the pile of schoolwork and artwork that Dash brought home from school in the Spring, more or less, with a few things of Mabel's thrown in. It's been sitting there all summer, leering at me. (I leered back.)

This morning, Dash went to school and in ten minutes of concentrated activity, while Mabel watched some nice educational My Little Pony (ahem), I turned the pile into this:

Yes, I could have done it at any point during the past two months - though not with Dash in the room telling me that every single worksheet had sentimental value - but somehow I was never inspired to. It's now sorted into (mostly) recycling as well as a few folders containing some representative pieces of writing or artwork from his kindergarten year, a couple of stray school reports I should have put  elsewhere in the first place, and about fifteen love notes to me, his father, and even his sister. (Awww.)

If you were here last year, you might remember that Dash took a while to settle in to elementary school. Let's just say he fears change. On the first morning he clung to me piteously, and I left the classroom with him crying under his desk, where he remained for two hours until the teacher told him it was against the rules to be under the desks.

Today, I was pretty confident that he'd be fine. He took the new room and the new teacher in his stride, and wasn't fazed by the fact that none of his particular friends from kindergarten or nursery school are in his class this year.

And he looked just as happy at the end of the day. His teacher gave him a candy ("a sugarfree candy") for walking the right way, and she taught them a song about keeping their hands by their sides and their feet straight ahead, and he ate all his lunch, and there was a fire drill at recess but he still found his old best friend from last year in the playground.

So first grade is looking good on all fronts.

Just walk

When we moved into this house, Dash was four, and perfectly well able to talk. But we'd never had a basement before, so I suppose it was a new word to him. It was a long time before he stopped calling it the "abasement" (because I never wanted to correct him).

Mabel has no cute mispronounciations. She's a stickler, that one. At 3.5 she almost always conjugates correctly, she speaks idiomatically, and she likes to note when words rhyme. She can't wipe her own backside, but she can tell you all about it in no uncertain terms.

--------------------------

Yesterday, when we went to the arboretum, I brought the stroller because I thought there might be some walking. There were three children younger than Mabel, but she was the only one riding in state to our destination. A four-year-old went on strike a little way along; his mother was having none of it, and he soon started plodding again without complaint. I looked on in amazement.

The problem, I realised, is that my children both have their father's stubbornness (or tenacity, as I like to call it when filling in school forms About My Child). I, on the other hand, was well-known to be a pushover years before we were even married. There are few issues I care strongly enough to really hold my ground on; if you want to insist that you have it your way, sure, you can probably do that and I'll go along with it. So I know that my kids will both hold out far longer than I care to on almost any point of dischord. And when the issue at stake is whether someone is walking or being carried, I like to split the difference, save all our faces, and take the easy option - a.k.a. the stroller.

Does this make me a worse parent than my friends whose children were walking? I like to think instead that I'm a parent who knows my child, and myself, and understands that the inevitable outcome of forgetting the stroller is a lot of complaining. Mostly from me, as I piggyback the child and carry the remains of the picnic lunch too. Maybe it just makes me a worse person, for being lazy, and allowing my children to keep that lazy gene in good working order by pandering to it. I shall call it "practical," if you don't mind.

I did make Dash walk, mind you. It's not like I ferry them both around in a double stroller. As if.

Tempus

The National Arboretum happens to be just a 15-minute drive from our house, in good traffic. And yet, we don't go very often, because once you've fed the koi, there isn't all that much for the kids to do - adults like the herb garden and the bonsai exhibit, and it's a great place to bring your mother, if your mother is like my mother, but for the children it usually lacks a little je ne sais quoi, where quoi is probably a playground.

But this morning we went with some friends and found that there is a playground, or at least a play area, with big logs to sit on and jump off, and a place to dig, and some sand to sit in, and the kids all enjoyed themselves mightily and we felt smug for exposing them to Nature so well.

Then I came home and wandered through the photos: these are from the first time we went to the arboretum. Mabel was about three months old, and beginning to smile enough for me to capture it on film digital.

And Dash (not yet three, back when he was Monkey around here) was running up the water feature by the columns that are meant to make you think it's the Acropolis of Washington DC or something.

This was today, at the bottom of the same water feature.

Time. Doing that passing thing it does. Crazy.

Metapost

Normally, I try not to blog about blogging. It tends to send me down a rabbit-hole of introspection, which is very fascinating to me, but not so much to you lot. Maybe. Every now and then, though, I suppose I can get away with breaking my rules.

See, earlier today I wrote a post about going back to work. At least, about how maybe once Mabel is back at school, and five mornings a week this year instead of just three, I might look for some freelancing. Except I took a good six paragraphs to say it. And then I thought, "This isn't very interesting. Why am I writing this?"

So, why indeed? If my blog is just for me, it doesn't have to be interesting to anyone else. This post, for instance, will also not be interesting to many other people. And sometimes I just need to write things out to explain them to myself, or to get to the meat of what I actually meant to say.

In which case, I should then delete the first six paragraphs and then publish the meat, but these days I don't really have time to get there.

Which brings me to the quantity versus quality question. Right now, my fingers are clicking away as fast as they can because the children are upstairs with their father, who is overseeing the bath. Soon they'll be back, and then it'll be bedtime, and then I'll have another little while before I'm distracted by someone watching Star Trek Enterprise beside me, or possibly something else I'm more interested in. (Though actually, Enterprise isn't half bad. Sometimes I get sucked in.)

The way I see it, it's easier for me to update my blog almost daily than rarely. Because almost daily is a habit, and rarely far too easily becomes never. And by writing through the dross we sometimes arrive at the good stuff. I don't want you to have to read the dross, but maybe you don't mind either. Not every post can be a great one, and anyway, sometimes my most popular posts are the ones I thought I just threw up against the wall to see if anything stuck. (The one about packing, for instance, has proved surprisingly well-frequented.)

As an editor, all this dross annoys me, but I'm not going to go back and cut swathes through my archives, because as a writer, each individual piece of dross is my baby. Not my perfect baby, but nevertheless, born of my fingers and brought to the light of screen by nobody but me and the nice people from Blogger.

So what do you think (before they get out of the bath)? Are you willing to put up with the dross to get the meat? Have you a higher dross tolerance than I thought? Would you prefer I posted less often with more focused, pared-down, edited content? And at the end of it all, do I care? Because after all, is this blog for me or for you?

You tell me.

Replugged

You may remember that our TV broke when we came back from the beach. (Or you may not, because it was a post I wrote for the DCMoms. Go read it, if you like.) We stayed TV-free for a month, but it was never going to be forever: the new model arrived last week. This one is about an inch bigger than the old one - so still orders of magnitude smaller than the average television in this country - and made by a company whose name we've actually heard of this time, so we're hoping it lasts more than a year before upping and dying on us.

The problem was that TV-free did not equate to screen-free for the children. What happened was that, to buy myself a few minutes' peace, I'd have to let them watch something on my computer, either on YouTube or Netflix. Which meant that

(a) now I couldn't do anything useful on my computer, like blogging or reading blogs or updating Facebook or trying in vain to get one up on the husband in our ongoing Words with Friends tournament, so I was reduced to sweeping the kitchen floor or washing up, which may have been all very nice for our home environment but was not the relaxing time I'd been hoping for;

and (b) instead of watching nice educational PBS channels wherein they enlarge their vocabulary and learn all about manatees and proboscis monkeys and the forces of inertia and the galaxy, the children were becoming hooked on X-Men and My Little Pony.

Yesterday, they both ran up to me to impart some exciting information about how Princess Celestia and Fluttershy had to get their cutie marks or the bad pony would ... and my brain threw up all over the nice clean cerebral coretex so I didn't hear the rest, but I think it's time we weaned them off this blargh. (Yes, the six-year-old boy is totally enthralled by the ponies. I think it's nice, really, because all the Avengers and Spider-Man and X-men cartoons are perhaps a little old for him and people do get blown up or thrown around the place from time to time, but I hope he has the sense to keep this quiet when he gets to First Grade next week. At least around the other macho men of the class.)

So now we have a TV again, but the children are slow to remember their old loves. It's good, really, for now, because letting them use the computer did mean I was paying attention to exactly how much they were watching - the temptation to just leave them where they were happy didn't last for more than two episodes of whatever it was, at most. So the TV isn't being turned on as a matter of course just yet, and since school starts next week for Dash, TV time will (mostly) stay restricted.

Which means that on balance it was a good thing not to have a television for half the summer, even if it did mean I never saw the Olympic opening ceremonies. It's not as if I'd have caught Katie Taylor's winning boxing bouts on NBC anyway.

Don't even read this out loud in your head

I'm really tempting all kinds of fate even just writing this down, so I'll have to say it in code, but Abelmay is eepingslay etterbay. I'm sorry if your pig Latin isn't up to snuff, but that's as far as I'm prepared to go. I said it out loud for real - in a whisper - to a friend the other day, and that very night the child woke up four times.

To recap, briefly, for anyone who's new: Mabel will be four in November, and she has been sleeping like a four-month-old for her entire life. By which I mean that she would wake every two or three hours to be nursed back to sleep. So if she went to bed at 8 she'd wake at 10, 12, 2 or 3, and 5 or so, and finally get up around 7. If she skipped her nap and went to bed at 7, she'd wake at 9, and so on. Every now and then, just so I didn't think I could even do something between 8 and 10, she'd wake up after just one hour. So, rather than lose my sanity completely, I was mostly sleeping in Mabel's bed from 2am onwards every night.

It was okay, but it was getting old. She was getting old, and something had to change. Finally, this February, I got to the point where I was ready to try again, and so for the first waking we sent in Daddy. She didn't like it much the first time, (think heaving, gulping, sobs) and I stepped in, but after a few nights she started to accept him and fall asleep with just a story.

In March I started trying to do that with her pre-3am wakings as well. She was still waking up, but often would go back to sleep with just a story from either me or her father. By 3am I would be too exhausted to hold out any longer, and she'd get what she wanted.

Last month, after babysittergate, I decided it was time to stand firm. She'd shown me she was able to put herself back to sleep, so I could finally deny her without guilt. The first night, she was awake for three hours in the middle of the night, trying to figure out how to do it. But in the next few nights things improved. Nowadays, she often wakes once, some time between 11 and 1, and that's it until daylight. Daylight is when I have decreed she can have boobie, but not before.

So we finally really are nursing just twice in 24 hours: once at bedtime and once in the morning. And in between, Mabel mostly sleeps, in her own bed, and I sleep in mine. It's taken a long time to get here - longer than I'd ever have let you tell me I'd wait, really - but it's a good place to be.

Now I have to go and sacrifice some rubber chickens to the pig-Latin gods so that Fate doesn't read what I just said.

BunBun II: The fluffening

The rest of the story is a bit of an anticlimax, but there are cute pictures, so stick around.

Nobody has claimed the bunny. Nobody has called the local shelter or the police to report a missing fluffy wabbit. Nobody has read the neighbourhood mailing list to thrill at the retrieval of their beloved pet. Nobody has posted "Wanted: Woolly lap-warmer" signs on nearby lampposts. Maybe BunBun escaped from indentured servitude or a mitten factory, or a house with no phones and no internet.

First thing this morning, we rang the local shelter and ascertained that they would take the bunny later in the day. It's a no-kill shelter, lest anyone accuse us of heartlessness, and will keep him until he's claimed, or adopted if nobody claims him within a reasonable time. Once that was done, I felt it was safe to let the children know there was an animal on the premises.

They were excited to hear there was a surprise - that we would not be keeping - in the basement, but once they saw it they were understandably puzzled.
"It's a dog!"
"It's a cat!"
"Here, BunBun!" I said, trying to coax the fluffball out of its cage so we could change his newspaper.
"It's a ... bunny?"

We took BunBun upstairs for a look around.

Mabel was more interested in sorting out the family of wrenches she'd found in the basement.

Dash wanted me to take a photo of his newly decorated new pencil box.

I think B was the one most taken with the rabbit.
"You love him!" I accused.
"He's just so fluffy," replied my very macho husband, cradling him like a baby.

Actually, I think I was trying to keep my distance so I wouldn't start loving him myself. When you see him from this angle, he's pretty darn adorable. And very, very fluffy.

So this afternoon, BunBun (Bunster, says Dash) went to the shelter. We might visit him in a few days' time, but we're not planning to adopt him when and if he comes on the market. I really hope he finds his family. For one thing, I want to know what his name is.

It's probably Arthur. 

BunBun

It's one of those times when I have to blog the start of a story without knowing how it ends.

But for once, it's not the story of how I tried to get Mabel to sleep all night, or do without the booboo (that's what it's called around here these days; mumeet is long gone), or talk Dash into eating more than one nibble of baby carrot every three weeks. Though baby carrots are involved, come to think of it.

This morning, B had gone for his run when the kids and I left to go to an open gym, followed by some playground time. When we got home I was a little surprised to find him still there, only just out of the shower, but sometimes he works from home if it's quiet, so it wasn't that unusual. His demeanour was a bit odd, though, as he acted guilty/excited and told me to look downstairs and see what he'd brought home. Just temporarily, he said.

This is what I found in my basement:

It seemed we had acquired a large wire cage, some newspaper pages, half a cabbage, and a very fluffy thing with a snuffly, twitchy nose.

"What the?" I inquired sotto voce when I got back upstairs. Luckily, the children were too busy telling Daddy about their time on the trampolines to listen in on our conversation. (This is very unusual: most of the time, Dash is the nosiest child on the planet and won't let anyone make the most inconsequential of throwaway remarks without a thorough investigation into exactly what they said and why they said it.)

Not to mention "Whence?" and "When is it going back?"

"It's an Angora rabbit," B said, all knowledgeable about this. I'd left a physicist in my kitchen at 8.45 and come home to a lagomorphologist at 11.15, apparently. (I had to look that up. I was going to say lepidopterist, based on the fact that I knew that was a word, and rabbit is lapin in French so that seemed close enough; but no, a lepidopterist studies butterflies and moths. Aren't you glad you came?)

Could've fooled me. Looks more like a fluffy Yorkshire terrier. I still haven't worked out if he actually has shorter ears than a regular bunny or it just looks that way because of all the fur. But it's a very different shape from your regular common-or-garden Flopsy, Mopsy, or Cottontail.

Anyway. What had happened was that at some point along the road on his morning run, B had seen this animal in the undergrowth, and realised immediately that it was not a groundhog or a racoon, or any of the other middle-sized mammals you might meet in this neck of the woods, nor even a Persian cat out for a stroll, but some poor, terrified creature who did not belong in the wilds at all. Seeing a man nearby getting out of his car, B asked him if he knew of anyone near there who might have lost a rabbit. The man turned out to be vaguely familiar to B  - in fact, he proceded to take his daugher, who is the same age as Mabel and so I run into them at the playground now and then, out of the car - and he was the one who knew it was an Angora.

Between the two of them and another neighbor, who provided the cage, Bunny was brought back to our house, to repose in the basement while his owners are sought. B went out to the pet store in the afternoon and brought back some grassy stuff for him to nibble on, and he has fresh water and we've changed the newspaper twice now. He is not interested in the lettuce and baby carrots from the fridge, and a single strawberry remains untouched. We took him out a few minutes ago and he hopped around checking out the foam light sabers from Dash's birthday party and the bag of wrapping paper and the boxes of baby clothes that I'm gradually whittling down and the other assorted crap we are storing mindfully in the basement area.

The terrible thing is that there has been a rabbit in the house practically all day - a real, live, fluffy snuffly twitchy-nosed rabbit - and we haven't told the children. They went to the dentist (no cavities, yay!), got things at Target (I went in for milk and toothpaste and spent $75, you know how it is), and spent the afternoon fighting over who got which identical plate, just like any other day, and there was a bunny in the basement the whole time. I think when they get to the therapist's couch, this is the thing that will be burning a hole in their psyches.

I would like to tell them, but not until the bunny is leaving. If we don't hear from his owners tomorrow (by which time everyone on the neighbourhood mailing list will have to have seen the posting), he's going to the local animal shelter, because we are not set up for a bunny. We have no desire for a bunny. We are not bunny people. The fact that B calls him Sampras and I call him Snuffles does not mean we have named him and therefore must keep him. And anyway, when it came to it and I had to coax him out of the cage this evening, I ended up addressing him as BunBun. I'm sure he was highly offended. He could be a she, for all I know.

So that's not the end of the story, and I don't know yet what the end is. But when the universe drops a fluffy reason to blog right in your basement, you can't always wait for things to be neatly tied up before you pass it on.

Tune in tomorrow to find out what happens to Mr(s) BunBun Sampras Snuffles.

Gubblebum

This morning at the supermarket I apparently lost the run of myself and was so delighted to have all the shopping done by 10am, in spite of my two little helpers, that I bought a pack of bubblegum for Dash.

"This is the best thing that ever happened," he beamed.

After chewing-gum-gate, otherwise known as his sixth birthday, the allure of chewing gum sort of wore off, but bubblegum was still veiled in a glittering shroud of mystery. He'd accidentally swallowed two pieces of gum - almost three, but then it turned out he'd never put that one in his mouth to begin with, so he hadn't swallowed it after all - and we said maybe he should wait a while before having any more. His green pack of Eclipse is still sitting in the kitchen, mostly untouched, until he feels like coming back to it.

So he'd been campaigning, now and then, for some bubblegum, and I'd been saying no mostly because I thought it was probably much sugarier than the stuff that's ostensibly meant to make your teeth cleaner. But this morning, there was a lovely pink pack of Orbit sugarfree bubble gum, and without even considering what Mabel would get to keep the tally even - the sibling tally of who got what when I didn't get anything, you know the one - I took it off the shelf beside the register and put it on the conveyer belt.

Since then, he's unwrapped the cellophane and carefully thrown it away, opened the pack, and been shown the cunning slot that enables the owner to reclose it neatly. He's counted the sticks and calculated (with fingers, he admitted) that three rows of five sticks makes fifteen sticks. He's unwrapped a stick to see what it looks like, causing the delicious scent of fake pink to permeate the whole car. Then he carefully wrapped it up again, put it back in its row of five, and slid the tab into the slot to close the box.

Every now and then he takes the pack out of his pocket to admire it, and then puts it tenderly back.

I don't think I need to worry about him swallowing any for a while yet.

Who are they?

On our way home this morning we played a quick round of Who Am I? (Also known as Twenty Questions, I think, but we never count.)

"Who am I?" challenged Dash.
"Fact or fiction?"
"Fiction."
"Male or female?"
"Male."
"Grown up or a boy?"
"A boy?"
"Are you in something we watch on TV?"
"Yes, but on a DVD."
"Are you in Star Wars?"
"No." Shock tactical change here.
"Are you in The Incredibles?"
"... Are you Dash?"
"Yes!"

He didn't know how appropriate that was.

Mabel claimed to be a factual female, but then turned out to be Princess Leia. We had a little discussion about how Star Wars is a made-up story.

Dash said, in her defence, "But I think she was going by the characters."
"Yes, I was going by the characters," agreed Miss Any-Way-Out. Then she said, "Do it again. Who am I?"
"No, you just had your turn."
"You can just guess Princess Leia again."
"Ooohkay. Fact or fiction?"
"Fiction."
"Are you Princess Leia?"
"Yes!"

Everyone's happy.

Happy families

It was bedtime, but Mabel had a 15-minute nap in the car at 4pm or so, which will probably push back her sleep time by 30 (60? 90?) minutes, so I wasn't quite giving her the bum's rush to bed just yet. While Dash performed his interminable evening ablutions, she had finished leaping hyperactively from coffee table to sofa and had settled down at my feet to play with a doll. I was concentrating on something important (getting a halfway respectable score against my husband in Words with Friends, if you must know) and mostly let her babbling wash over me.

After a while, the dialogue of her story made its way through to me. She sounded as if she was playing with several small dolls, making them be a family, wheedling and scolding and whining and being polite and being impolite as families do. I glanced down to see which dolls she was using for these lifelike people.

She was playing with Tatiana, the soft doll I bought for Dash when I was pregnant with Mabel:

Just Tatiana. That's funny, I thought. Where are the others?

Then I looked more closely at Mabel's hands as she voiced the Mommy, the Daddy, the sister and the brother. The two big pink ribbons on Tatiana's hat are Mommy and Daddy, the two little ones holding up her tiny topknot are brother and sister. They danced around, wiggled in her fingers as they talked to each other, and fell perilously into the decorative crevices of the coffee table when they didn't heed their parents' warnings.

I really don't know why we have shelves full of toys, when one child plays with nothing but lightsabers and the other can happily put on an elaborate production given just four small pieces of ribbon.

Two boys, six years, three continents

Thanks to the wonders of modern air travel and funding for conference attendees, Dash has met his friend Moose every summer (and a couple of times in between) since they were born, in places both far flung and more domestic. Here's a quick history.

Can I eat him? wondered Dash

With a giant two-month lead, six-month-old Dash was way ahead of the little Moose. At least, he could sit up without listing to the side. This first momentous encounter took place in Delaware, of all places.

Feed us, zoo people

Things had evened up a bit by the next summer, here waiting for lunch at the Sydney Zoo, Australia. Someone asked us how old they were. We replied "That one's 14 months and this one just turned 12 months." "Oh, are they twins?"

A cheeky little vintage, this 2008 stuff

On top of Gaudi's La Pedrera in Barcelona, two-year-old Dash and Moose stopped for a sophisticated water-and-crackers break.

Ireland calls for sweaters

At almost three, a colouring challenge was issued in Cork. (Dunnes Stores gleaming enticingly in the background there.)

Mooom, he's touching me

 By four, Spider-Man just needed to chill out in Maryland.

Three still fit in one chair

Suddenly, just a year later, we had two great big five-year-olds (and a small girl) in Wales.

It's called "mafs." "No, it's math." "No, mafs." Etc.

And now they're six and yesterday they were together again, playing Angry Birds, having lightsaber fights, and pillow fighting on the sofa (not simultaneously). See you next summer, Moose!