Come a little closer

Dash is sick (which is entirely my fault for stupidly - stupidly! - bragging that my children were disgustingly healthy) and I have two posts half-written that have been running round my head for a while now but it turns out they're not very good, or very interesting, or need photos I don't have, or something else unsatisfying, and maybe it's just that I'm unnerved by having my rudely healthy six-year-old completely flaked out on the couch all morning which is just so very uncharacteristic of him that it makes me twitchy.

I think I've mentioned before how becuase my children are rarely sick, I tend to get all melodramatic in my head when they are, and feel like they'll never be well again. On the outside I'm a competent and non-panicky mother, all adequate fluids and keep you warm and no need to call the doctor but I am aware of peritonitis as a thing that exists (and nearly killed my father at the tender age of 5 all those years ago) and check for a rash and so on. But on the inside I'm looking tenderly at his sweet face, so innocent and non-combative in quiet repose, and feeling like Jo in Little Women watching Beth breathe her last. (Okay, not her last. Not just then.) Phrases like "The fever has finally broken" and "galloping consumption" and "youth stolen away" wander across my mind, even though he doesn't have a fever or even a cough.

Mabel seems to have an ear infection too, though it's not in the least bit debilitating except in the middle of the night. Last night after my bringing her a tissue and a waffle and a drink of water (and the boobs, of course, always the boobs) she was still throwing shapes all over the bed instead of falling back asleep, and having wide-eyed conversations with me about totally unrelated things. (Which would be adorable, if it hadn't been 3am.) Eventually she said "Mummy, come closer to me." I was already right there on her pillow, but I put my arms around her and she burrowed her head into my hair and pressed her lips right up against my ear - which tickles, you might know - and whispered "My ear hurts."

Which was great, because then a quick dose of ibuprofen meant she was out for the count and I finally went back to my own bed for a blessed two hours or something of sleep before everyone woke up again for the day. I sent her to school, though, because she's no more contagious with a slight runny nose than she was yesterday, and I dosed her again so her ear definitely won't hurt.

So, sick kids for the win. Remind me to keep my big mouth shut next time, okay?

Room in my head

I love trying to bring up a memory that's hidden deep in my mind. I sometimes set out to find one, or to expand one further than I think I know. There's a knack to it, and it doesn't always work, but you have to hook onto a thread of something - from your childhood, probably, when your memory was an open plain to be filled - and tease it out, pulling, pulling, gently, looking around and delving inwards, until you produce a gem that you didn't know was there.

Today I noticed that a particular room I remember has become a location in more than one book I've read. My brain is a theatre filled with dusty sets and props - every now and then a new production pulls out the old stuff again and it's been so long that everyone's forgotten they were used before.

This room was in the home of a friend of my parents. Only children tend to be taken where plural children are not; they are unlikely to create mischief alone in a room full of adults, and given a book or some paper and crayons, can probably entertain themselves for a while; failing that, they can be precocious and entertain the adults while their parents attend a grownup gathering, drink wine in the afternoon, gently flirt with people who are not their spouse while observing their spouse doing the same thing across the room, and pretend that their life hasn't changed all that much.

So while I also visited this room on quiet afternoons with just my mother, what I remember most is tucking myself away in a corner while the adults mingled and jested and nodded and guffawed and tried out this newfangled wine-in-a-box. I remember the Russian dolls that lived in this house, dolls that I was always allowed to play with most carefully, and how the biggest one squeaked painfully every time her belly was wrenched open along its slice to disgorge her daughters and granddaughters and greatgreatgreats. I remember getting to the point where I would seek out my mother and pull her sleeve and ask, "Pleeeease can we go now?"

I think I remember, too, curling up on the spare bed in the front bedroom, with its soft black woollen coverlet of some sort of holey 70s knitting, and going to sleep there during an occasional evening party; at the end of which my parents would just hoist me up, toss me in the back seat of the car, and drive home. I do remember how the streetlights looked from my horizontal position, cosy in my sleeping bag, watching them flick past against the black; restful orange or bright white, hurting my eyes and sending out spears of light when I squinted.

And then we'd turn into the second-last road and then there'd be a sharp corner and I could always tell our hill by the gradient, as gravity pushed me against the join where the bottom of the seat met the back. Then a quick swing around (my father was quite the rally driver) and the same again as he backed down the steep driveway to the hidden carport at the back of the house.

And then I'd be picked up and I'd pretend to be asleep, and I'd be fireman-carried into the house and up the bumpy stairs and plopped into my own bed under the eaves, under the wooden ceiling, where I belonged.

Pretty cool

Dash is still pushing the envelope with his sister, and she's still yanking his chain:

- I love you a million. But I love mummy and daddy and friend-across-the-road giant.
- So do you love me giant?
- No.
- Tell me the truth.
- I love you seven. That's the truth.
- But do you love me infinity? I love you infinity.

**********

Somehow, a dichotomy has been established in our house between cool and pretty. Cool things are boy things and pretty things are girl things. Every time I hear some variation on this being trotted out, I tell them "cool can be pretty" and "pretty can be cool" and "nothing is just for boys or just for girls" and I hope some day it makes it through and out the other side by osmosis because at the moment they are rigid in their definitions.

**********

And I want to tell my daughter something:

Pretty is fine, but you don't need to be pretty*.

I want you to be strong, I want you to be heard. I want you to stand up for yourself and for others. Polite is good, consideration is vital; but I want you to above all keep yourself safe and sane, which means demanding the respect that is due to you and no less, as a member of the human race and as a woman.

• First, use common sense. You're smart. Act smart.
• Second, listen to your gut. Follow your spidey sense, never discredit a "feeling".
• Third, it's never too late to make a change for the better.

Pretty is fine, and good is nice, but strong is beautiful. Be strong, my beautiful daughter, and you will rule the world.


*Inspired by this blog post I happened upon recently, which quotes (but doesn't really attribute) a famous thing Diana Vreeland once said. And I have no idea who she was, but she seems cool.

Weekend edition

I have a confession. I hate weekends.

At least, I'm really bad at them. I suppose it's a leftover inclination from all those years when weekend meant something different, and less taxing, than Monday to Friday. But now all it means is that we have no particular schedule and are required to either have some of that holy grail - quality family time - or else feel guilty for failing.

I am also hampered by my extreme lack of ambition, outing-wise. The museums downtown are great, but we've seen the child-friendly ones quite a lot now, and they don't change the dinosaurs all that often. I'd like to go to the art galleries, but the children don't enjoy those much. A nice walk in the great outdoors would be excellent for our mental and physical health, but dragging our offspring to walk somewhere and look at scenic nature is doomed from the get-go. You can try to bribe them with hot chocolate afterwards, but they'd much rather have the drink right now and skip the nature, thank you.

Today we even considered pushing the boat out and going to see a film.

Us: Hey, guys, how about we ... [thrill of anticipation]... go to see a movie this afternoon?
Them: Nooooooo.
Us, grasping at straws: There'd be popcorn.
Them: Nah.

They'd much rather sit at home watching tried and trusted episodes of Curious George on PBS than see something new and exciting and potentially scary on the big, noisy screen that you can't get away from.

It almost makes me yearn for the old days, when they were little. Okay, so you had to pack the entire contents of your house and fridge before you could get out the door, and someone always had a huge up-the-back-of-the-onesie blowout just as you strapped them into the car, but the decision-making was up to you. If you said "Right, we're going to have a lovely walk and see a waterfall!", they'd be pretty much powerless against your bundling them into their coats and carseats and stroller and Ergo and just going there. Apart from the poop and the requisite tantrum, I suppose.

But nowadays, everyone's buy-in is essential just to get people out of pyjamas, never mind wearing shoes and socks and coats and sitting voluntarily in the car.

Honestly, sometimes I almost want to have another, just so that I can get someone doing what I want instead of what they want. (Don't worry. I know that's just an illusion.)

So today, despite everyone being already dressed by 9am (thanks to the remaining snow, that needed to be played in before it dissipated entirely), despite our having a conversation about what we should do today quite early on, despite discussing museums and cinemas and walks in the park, we ended up getting into the car at 3pm and going to that most exotic of destinations, Target.

Not just our regular Target; a slightly more distant, newer one. We bought one thing we needed and a few things we decided we probably needed, weathered tantrums about Christmas presents never received as we perused the toy department for someone else's birthday present (never a good move), spent $3 per child on a "small, inexpensive" treat, and finally sat down in Starbucks for our reward for getting out of the house: latte, latte, vanilla milk, smoothie, and one slice of lemon cake split four ways.

And now we have to figure out something to do tomorrow. I'd like to curl up with a good book, but that sort of weekend is both behind and, I hope, ahead of me yet.

A lucky escape

They are thick as thieves, these two, these days. The terrible twosome, double trouble, a handful indeed - at times, two handsful and then some.

She has some clothing on, I promise. You just can't see it.

Remember last summer, when I was a little wistful because Mabel was in a hating phase, experimenting with mean words and cruel actions, and pushing her brother away? Since then she has definitely discovered the power of cooperation, the delights of teamwork and also how much fun it is to gang up on one defenseless parent. At bedtime. When the other has gone to a meeting. For instance.

I had a big long whiny rant here about how tired I am and how hard it is and why am I supposed to not just lock them into their rooms at bedtime to avoid all that undignified crying (of mine), but luckily for you, then I uploaded the photos and would much rather show you some more of those instead.

 

Then they noticed the snow.

Hooray for hand-me-down coats, thrift-store snowboots and yard-sale snow pants. Hat from Dunnes Stores.

Not enough for snowmen, but just about enough to make a grassy snow angel.

There's a fence there before the big drop, you just can't see it.

The snow brings all the kids to my back yard. (That's Mabel and Dash on the left.) After half an hour's sledding there was hardly any snow left on the grass, so they were forced to abandon sled and go to school instead.

Magical optical

Dash had a four-day weekend because of the teacher training day on Friday and then Martin Luther King Day and the presidential inauguration on Monday. On Saturday, I asked him where his glasses were. Like this:

- Dash, it's time to do some reading. Where are your glasses? I remember you didn't wear them reading last night.
- Where did you leave them, Mummy?
- Where did I leave them? I didn't have them. Aren't they in your backpack?
- No, you put them somewhere.
- No. No, I didn't. Are they at school?
- No, I brought them home.
... etc.

Dash was sure they were in the house, and I was sure they weren't. We'd brought them safely across an ocean and back, not to mention running the daily gauntlet of leaving them in the kitchen of a house containing three teenagers, but apparently now they'd disappeared. (They come with a great warranty. It says that if you break the frame or the lenses, you get the first new ones free and subsequent ones for just $25. But if you lose them entirely, you just have to go and buy new glasses.) I also realised we hadn't put his name on them or even on the case.

I decided to assume that the glasses were in school, hopefully sitting on his desk or somewhere else in his classroom, even though he assured me that they'd come home with him on Thursday evening and I had put them somewhere mysterious.

Yesterday when he came out of school the first thing I asked him was if he'd found his glasses.

- Yes! Somehow - poof! - they were in my desk, even though they'd been at home and I didn't bring them back into school with me.

As if by magic! Wonderful. I particularly liked the poof! part.

We have the follow-up at the optician's tomorrow. His father and I are not convinced that the glasses make a whit of difference, other than perhaps as a rather expensive placebo that enticed Dash to do his homework more eagerly for the first week of having them. Maybe the eye doctor will be able to magically tell something when he peers into Dash's eyes and whirr-clicks the lenses into the machine and asks him to read the lines of letters.

Or maybe his reading is just improving slowly the old-fashioned way, with practice.

Chill

It's a gloriously sunny 20-degree day outside.

All my Irish readers just went "Aaahhhh" in jealous approval. All my American readers went "Brr" in sympathy - or empathy depending on where they are. Twenty degrees farenheit, you see. That's minus six Celcius. Yes. A bit chilly.

I think, as a child, I had the idea that the temperature could only ever be below freezing in the middle of the night when everyone was tucked up warm in their beds. Freezing point, or "zero" as we funny Europeans call it, was the mark of civilization. Only Eskimos, probably, in their cosy igloos, lived where it was that cold on a regular basis.

Apparently I'd never heard of Canada. Or the northern half of the US. Or Russia or even Central Europe, I suppose. (Actually, I was very vague about what and where Canada was. It just never came up. I had no idea that Anne Shirley lived there and that it was not the USA, for instance, and when I read a book set in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, I assumed those were makey-uppey names. Because really. (And I'd just like to illustrate how far I've come by telling you that I just spelled that right first time without checking.))

Anyway, it's very cold outside but pretty nice inside, and I've made the concession of wearing a thermal vest (that's not a vest, if you're American - undershirt?) and I've got my knee socks on and I'm quite toasty, thank you. I'm sure I'm not doing this right, but in this part of the country weather like this doesn't happen often and doesn't last very long, and for all that I complain about the summer weather (and yes, I do complain), I'm happy that we don't live in Minnesota or Montana or even Maine at this time of the year.

Curiosity

Dash was off school today, for teacher training, or teacher teambuilding, or teacher coffeedrinking, or whatever it is those lucky teachers get to do on the days when they have to go to school but their little darlings don't. He was very good about not mentioning it to Mabel this morning, because I knew that once she twigged that he was staying home but she wasn't, there'd be mutiny. Somehow, she didn't really notice that he wasn't yet dressed as I took her off to nursery school, and disaster was averted.

Dash and I went to the thrift store and the supermarket and treated ourselves to a Starbucks as a reward. Over chocolate milk and lemon cake (latte and cinnamon bun for me), we discussed topics as far-flung as where people get married if they don't go to church, the duty of men to take equal responsibility for contraception, and how many people he knows who speak Welsh.

In Mabel's quest for knowlege later this afternoon (while her brother was out wielding the lightsaber against Mace Windu from across the street*), she had me reading her the Body Book, the How Babies Are Made page of the Book of Knowledge, and finally leafing through the (adult) first-aid book to tell her what was wrong with all the people in the pictures.

I think that's plenty of larnin' for a no-school day.


* When Dash calls on his friend to come out and play lightsabers, the friend suits up in his Halloween costume for the full effect. He's method, man.

Point of origin

I forgot to mention it here because I said it elsewhere, but I've been in the US for ten years this month. I think my anniversary was last Sunday, actually. I emigrated without even feeling like that was what I was doing - I was just moving in with my boyfriend. The fact that I had to painstakingly win the visa lottery, go through the green-card process, and move across an ocean to do it was just details, once it was all under the bridge.

For my writing course this morning I had to describe fifteen important minutes of my life. Tricky. I mean, I suppose they had to be minutes in my life, not just minutes that affected my life, because otherwise I'd have been duty-bound to envision my own conception, which is really not something anyone wants to have to put any amount of imaginative thought into. And they had to be minutes that were important to my life, not someone else's - because who knows if something I said offhandedly in a supermarket queue or at a playdate or online had a deep and lasting effect on someone else's life? I mean, it's unlikely, but not impossible.

So I had to come up with a fifteen-minute episode that made a difference to my life. There are the birth stories, of course, but I've already written those. And the thing is, once the baby's in there it has to come out one way or another, so while the births were great and life-affirming, they didn't really change things. Finally, although it's the epitome of cheese and terribly obvious, I found I had to go back to that house party in 1993 when I calculatedly but nonchalantly wandered into the kitchen after the boy who'd gone looking for a corkscrew, because I thought he was cute.

I won't give you the blow-by-blow account here, but it was probably a pivotal moment. It's possible that the same moment could have come later, or earlier, since we had a mutual good friend and would probably have encountered each other again if we hadn't that day - if I hadn't gone to the party, or he'd chatted up the Australian girl for a few more minutes, or he'd been wearing the sweater with the duck, for instance - but that's how it happened.

There were probably lots of other important moments or sets of moments: when we broke up (numerous times), when we got back together (numerous times +1), when I filled in the visa application form, when some random-number-generator or bikini-clad lady pulled my application number out of the hundreds of others, when we dated other people and found them not measuring up to previously set high standards. But the fact stands that if things had gone differently that evening in Rathmines, I very easily might not be sitting here, emigrant, immigrant, runner's wife, mother of these two particular amazing/appalling children. I might be writing somewhere, wherever, but that's about the only thing that would be the same.

I don't think I have to mention, do I, that I'm pretty happy with the way it has turned out so far?

Present disculpatory

Apparently I was a little distracted when putting Mabel to bed last night. She wrapped herself up in my big brown blanket and I totally forgot that we hadn't put a nighttime pullup on her. So at eleven thirty she woke up all wet and it took a long time to get her back to sleep.

My big brown blanket is now in the wash.

I'm busy. Which is good. I like to be busy when it's just the right amount - not overwhelming, not stressful, just busy enough to give me a sense of purpose and a good excuse when the children come wanting me to be a mommy cheetah. (I said "Miaow," but apparently cheetahs don't miaow. They don't roar either. They make a high-pitched chirping noise. I find this hard to believe. I am suspicious of my children's television-acquired knowledge.)

I'm busy getting us back to normal, whatever that is, but also trying to start exercising again - running and yoga, I've decided, this year/semester/term/week - and doing a small freelance job, as well as the writing course I'm taking from Alice Bradley (the wonderful, hilarious Finslippy, and I only partly said that because she might be reading). [Alice Bradley is reading my blog. Hyperventilate, hyperventilate, spend an hour browsing past posts to try to read them with a stranger's eye; fail.]

And then I had to restock our supplies of peanut-butter and tinned tomatoes and boxes upon boxes of Cheerios (they were on special offer), as well as trying to keep the house from falling into a state of absolute squalor (some squalor is fine, just not absolute), and have a cup of tea every now and then and eat a muffin (somebody's gotta do it) and also see above re laundry, and so that, what I'm trying to say, is why I didn't update the blog yesterday.

No shirt, no shoes; no shame

Mabel is a tactile person. She likes textures. Specifically, the thing she likes most is to remove (almost) all her clothing and wrap herself up in my big espresso-brown soft fuzzy blanket. She tends to do this at the most inopportune of moments, though, like right before we have to leave the house to get her brother from school.

For the past week we've had the same problem every day: three o'clock comes and Mabel has no intention of putting her clothes back on. I've dealt with it variously by tossing her (almost) naked self plus blanket into the car and dressing her when we get there, sitting on her to get her dressed (not so successful), or just going with it.

Today I just went with it: she sat cross-legged in the stroller with a crib-size knitted blanket covering her completely, like a cheerful orange shroud. Underneath she was clad in nothing but underpants and a fine layer of black (washable - I'm not stupid) marker, to which she was adding for most of the ten-minute promenade. She poked her head out once or twice, but mostly was content to stay thus concealed while I chatted to my friends, retrieved Dash and our neighbour who we were also getting today, and walked back home.

I had her clothes in the basket underneath, should she have wanted to get dressed. (If she'd decided to set foot out of the stroller, dressing would have been mandatory.) And it is quite mild today, though threatening rain, so I wasn't too worried.

One day last week, though, the school counsellor, who oversees the dispersal of the pupils outside school, was definitely giving me the hairy eyeball as she watched Mabel cavort shoeless and coatless, but perfectly happy, as we waited for her brother. That child should have more clothes; where is her mother?, she was clearly thinking. Then my neighbour arrived and shrugged in my defence: "It's not so cold. I've seen her barefoot in much colder weather." I didn't know whether to be proud or mortified.

But I'm glad Mabel didn't venture out of her blanket today to further scandalize the counsellor. I might have been called in for some counselling of my own.

Transatlantic subtleties: dessert v. pudding

This came up in my comments one day, but it deserves a disambiguation post of its own, so here you go.

Dessert is dessert wherever you are: something sweet that you eat after your main course. Breakfast does not get dessert, but my children still ask for it. Lunch should not get dessert but sometimes it does. Dinner, conversely, doesn't always get dessert around here. Sometimes your chewy vitamin is dessert. You takes what you gets. If I was a good French mother, dessert would always be fruit. I'm neither good nor French.

I digress; dessert is easy, is my point - so long as you're talking semantics rather than parenting.

Pudding is another matter entirely.

In Ireland (and the UK, I daresay), pudding mostly is a synonym for dessert. Thus: "What's for pudding?", "Where's my pudding?", and "I want pudding!"

However, it does have a couple of other specific uses:

steamed pudding - a dessert traditionally made with suet (animal shortening, like Crisco) that comes out cake-like but is eaten hot. It's a more old-fashioned thing, and most people these days only encounter one at Christmas - Christmas pudding is a dense, dark, alcohol-soused mixture of raisins, sultanas, currants, mixed peel (and glace cherries if you're into that sort of thing), just about held together by some fluffy stuff. It's basically just another form of Christmas cake, but to be eaten warm with whipped cream and brandy butter. Variants might have amusing names like "spotted dick" or "pig's bum", as well as the more palatable-sounding treacle pudding.

blood pudding - in Ireland this is black or white pudding - definitely a savoury, not a dessert. It's a sausage made with pigs' blood that you might fry up a few coins of for breakfast with your rashers and egg. You either love it or hate it.

In the US, pudding is a specific type of dessert - a thick, viscous, sweet slurpy stuff that's often vanilla or chocolate flavoured. The closest thing to it I might have encountered in Ireland is Angel Delight. Something between the texture of thick custard and slightly runny blancmange, maybe. You can mix it up from powder or buy it ready made in little individual pots, or probably even make it from scratch.

So we have learned that pudding is always dessert (except when it's not) and dessert is not always pudding. Did I clear everything right up? Oh good.

Comparative dissonance

Every morning, Dash runs into school with a big smile on his face. Every afternoon he runs out to sneak up and Boo! me with another big grin. When I ask how his day was, he says, "Great!"

(Well, there was one day when he said "Fine." But then he followed it up with, "No, I'm only joking, it was great.")

This really is the best thing in the world. It makes up for all the dawdling and nonsense getting out the door in the first place; it (almost) negates the stress and hassle and nagging of homework. He loves school, he loves his teacher, he's happy to be there every day. I am totally delighted and hope it lasts forever - even though that's not likely.

Mabel, on the other hand, has cried and wailed her way into the classroom every day so far this week. On Monday I took pity on her and gave her a pass, as we were only back from Ireland and she'd been awake since 3.30 (and up since an hour later). So I took her home with me, on condition that she would go to school on Tuesday. 

Predictably, on Tuesday she was just the same, but my heart was hardened towards her and besides, I had to go to the dentist. I left her in the capable hands of Miss B and she was perfectly happy at going-home time. Since then I've learned to ignore the collywobbles that only come on once she's sitting in the car and remembers where we're going. She's fine, and the return to a little routine is good for all of us.

Still, when it comes to elementary school, I hope she's as happy every morning as her brother. I hate hardening my heart.

Lower your expectations

My ambitions for this week are not so lofty as most people's, I think.

You may be training for a 5k or a triathlon, eating paleo or wheat-free, or implementing all sorts of wonderful screen-free, eating-at-the-table rules in your house, and maybe I thought I would be too, but actually I'm just trying to keep us all on an even keel as body clocks return to normal. Since B decided to add an extra three hours to his jetlag by heading to California for a three-day conference on Sunday afternoon, I get both the bedtime and waking-up ends of the messed-up-sleep stick, which strikes me as a little unfair. The fact that his hotel room was upgraded so that now he has an ocean view and can see the Queen Mary liner from his pillow-top mattress with plush down comforter is just rubbing salt into it.

Tomorrow, I lie in, is what I'm saying. No matter who's stealing whose markers or hiding whose Barbies or pulling down whose pants.

[At some point while we were away my children discovered the delight of the moon. Not the celestial orb, you understand, but the fact that you could pull down your pants and wiggle your backside at someone and it would be the most hilarious thing ever invented. I hope this is over soon. Maybe in ten years, if I'm lucky.]

So we are unpacked, the laundry is under control, the kitchen is clean(ish), and I have baked and given away most of half a batch of peanutbutter cookies, but other than that chaos reigns. It doesn't matter: sleep is a priority, and getting everyone back to square one is the vital thing.

I'm sure I'll get round to training for the 5k and overhauling my diet next week.

Biting and writing

Things and stuff, things and stuff. It's nice to be back here with my things and my stuff and all the Christmas decorations put away since I never put any out to begin with. Dash is at school and Mabel is napping, since she woke up at 3.30am thank you jet lag. I think I might bake something soon.

Speaking of which, it is an excellent idea to bake something just before you go away and leave it in the freezer so that when you come back and you're mainlining tea to keep awake, you have something nice and homemade to go with it just 15 seconds in the microwave away. The only thing I did wrong was to leave only six chocolate-chip pumpkin muffins waiting for us, because they didn't last long.

Other things you might have missed because I didn't mention them here include the fact that Dash lost his first tooth (not counting that one he knocked out as a baby, a mere month after it came in, great maternal trauma):

It (the bottom one - the top opposite is the gap he's basically always had) was wobbly, and wobblier, and I thought Santa might be bumping into the Tooth Fairy but it held on a few days longer and then he and Mabel and their dad and their cousins, but not me because I escaped to meet a friend and also had bashed my toe a la Amalah that morning*, all went ice-skating and when they stopped for an ice-cream break his father pointed out that his tooth was gone. And Dash said "Is it?" and so we think he swallowed it but maybe it's out there on the ice somewhere waiting to trip someone up.

Then there were some negotiations and a note was written to the Tooth Fairy (by me, which is a little ironic) explaining that Dash would like dollars, not euros, and also that he had swallowed the tooth, and I had to tell him that the Tooth Fairy had left her dollars in Dublin where we were not at that moment, so also that he would like to get his money tomorrow night instead. I think he was a bit jaded by the whole charade, but he wanted his dollars, dammit, and luckily for him the Metro ticket machine had given me dollar coins just before we left the country, so it all worked out. Though the writing notes to myself was a bit surreal.

........

I did some writing (elsewhere, to which I'd rather not link because it has my real name, but if you came here from there that's lovely and I'm thrilled to see you, please stick around) and got lots of nice comments and some off-the-wall ones that made me think about, well, how you can never tell the full story, I suppose. Maybe what I'm trying to do here is to make you understand me, but that's nonsense because there's always more, there are always qualifications, provisos, quid pro quos (thank you, Genie from Aladdin), ways in which I have to explain that I didn't mean what you thought I meant, I meant something else.

Clarity; I like clarity. That's why I'm an editor. I disambiguate. But eventually you have to just leave it alone and accept that you can't get everything across to everyone, and you wouldn't actually want to.

So I will continue to offer snippets of what the ex-pat experience is for me, and how Ireland feels and how America feels, and try to find words that explain how the cold hard sunlight outside my window parches the grass of the backyard in winter in an entirely different way from the soft air of my homeland, where you don't understand why they talk about how green it is until you go somewhere else and then come back.

........

Other items of note: I now have a Search tool (over there -> under the tag cloud), and you can sign up for e-mail updates whenever I post, if you like that sort of thing. And I made some tabs and put all the links to other people's blogs on one, so you should take a look at that.

And if I can gently remind you here that liking me on Facebook and/or following me on Twitter makes me very happy and gets you extra bits of wit and wisdom and cute photos sometimes, as well as links to new posts, I'll do that too.

........

Time to read a book and bake something and wonder when I have to wake Mabel in order to pre-emptively rescue bedtime.


* My toe was not actually broken. I wasn't limping at all by the next day. But still, ow.

Required reading

You might wonder why our suitcases coming back were so heavy, especially considering the biggest new/reclaimed items we returned with were unwieldy but comparatively lightweight: one foot-high stuffed reindeer, one ukelele, and an extra doll.

But then, there was this little haul:

Yes, we picked up a couple of books along the way.

You'll note that many of these do not look new. In fact, some are positively antique. That's because I have this little habit of raiding the bookshelves in "my" bedroom at my parents' house when I'm back and removing some of the most meaningful items in case some day everything gets somehow disbursed to a charity shop before I can reclaim it. Additionally, in a fit of nostalgia, B rescued a stack of his old beloved Asterix and Tin-Tin comics from his nephew, on whom he'd bestowed them in 1999 when he emigrated. He was always concerned that said nephew did not fully appreciate them, but in fact his mistrust was misplaced - nephew had enjoyed the stories and kept them through a house move - but now was happy to give them back to someone with safer hoarding tendencies.

Shall I catalogue the whole bunch for you? Oh, okay then...

Left-hand column, from the bottom:

• sundry Asterixes
• sundry Tin-Tins
• Ian McEwan, Sweet Tooth
• AM Homes, May We Be Forgiven
• Exploring English 1
• Roald Dahl, The BFG
• Two Mr Men books
• Roald Dahl, James and the Giant Peach

The two novels are a present from my sister-in-law, who is knowledgeable about books. She was delighted to hear I hadn't read them, but it's not really that much of a surprise since the only books I read last year were probably a few tried and trusted Dick Francises.

Exploring English was the Inter-Cert short-story collection - that is, B and I and every other 15-year-old in Ireland studied many of its stories. It's a really great selection of Irish and other fiction, and now holds pride of place beside our copy of Soundings (the original, scribbled full of notes; not the recent reprint).

I bought the Dahls because Dash is really getting into this chapter book thing, and several items from his cousin's bookshelf were eagerly consumed (via reading out loud by someone else, I mean) over the break. I produced James and the Giant Peach at the airport yesterday morning, and this happened:

 And this,

And also this

All that got him triumphantly to the end of the first paragraph, and he hadn't actually retained any of the information, but it's a good bit above his reading level, and anyway, it's the intention that delights me. We did read some of it to him as well.

Anyway. The right-hand stack, bottom to top, goes as follows:

• Deb Perelman, The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook
• Marian Keyes, The Mystery of Mercy Close
• JRR Tolkein, The Hobbit
• Arthur Ransome, Swallows and Amazons
• Noel Streatfield, Ballet Shoes
• Antonia Forrest: Autumn Term, End of Term, Cricket Term, Attic Term
• Rumer Godden: The Peacock Spring and The Greengage Summer

I am totally delighted with the cookbook, which has been on my Christmas list ever since Deb announced it would be happening, back in the Spring. I only opened it this morning for the first time, I'm halfway through the first chapter, and I can categorically state that the woman is a genius. As if we didn't know that already.

The Keyes is the last in the series of sister-books that began way back with Watermelon in 1998. She's a delight and a wonder and I and started it yesterday and despite children on airplanes I'm halfway through. It's immensely comforting to have such an entertaining piece of south county Dublin sitting on my bookshelf for whenever I need it.

And the others, well, they're special, obviously. My copy of The Hobbit was given to me by my aunt on my 11th birthday (this fact is recorded in my wobbly cursive on the title page), the Swallows and Amazons series was one my Dad (the hobbyist yacht-builder and lover of messing-about-in-boats) and I read together, and I look forward to seeing just how well or badly it has aged when I share it with Dash in a year or three. Noel Streatfield was my tween author of choice - more sophisticated than Enid Blyton but before I'd got to LM Montgomery, perhaps. So very British, so very pre-wartime, so very full of optimism that every little girl had inside her an actress, a ballerina, or perhaps an engineer.

The Antonia Forrest books were just a little more up-to-date - though it's hard to pinpoint since the first was published initially in 1948, the second 10 years later, and the last two in the 70s - but they all take place within about two years of each other. They're your standard sisters-at-English-boarding-school stories, but with a side of maturity, boyfriends, and comparative religion never seen in Blyton. (Mabel's real name comes from one of the characters, who always struck me as the coolest, nicest, strongest girl-you'd-want-to-be ever.)

Then, the Goddens. I picked up the first half of her fascinating memoir, A Time to Dance, No Time to Cry at the Labor Day book sale (local institution) and loved reading about the life behind the woman whose books had held me so as a teenager. I always consider The Greengage Summer to be the first "grown-up" book I read - not that the protagonists are older than teenagers, but because the narrative is non-linear and flits from afterwards to before to during without warning. It at first confused, and then elated me to pick out the strings of this story, steeped in heady, sensual, through-adolescent-eyes France, and fit them together myself. The Indian Summer is not quite so good, but smells and colours of India come through so vividly that it was no surprise to find out from Godden's memoir that she lived there for much of her life.

So I should manage to keep my new year's resolution of reading more quite easily. I didn't say I'd be reading new books, did I?

In dreams

There's a road I walk along often in my dreams. The sea is on one side, a high wall on the other. The waves tend to be choppy and white-crested, the weather harsh. I am trying to get to an exam, or walking an impossible route to catch a train, or late for a performance of something unlikely. I may or may not be missing some clothes, or have lost my glasses. Maybe I've only visited this place once or twice in some very vivid dreams, but it feels as familiar to me as a path I tread every week.

I've always known exactly where it is, because this place exists in real life - though the wall might be a little craggier and the sea a little wilder in my dreams. It's near my old school, by a tiny local harbour with a marine-supply store my dad often went to. I don't know that I've ever walked that particular part of the path in reality, as it's beyond where we'd turn off to go down to see the boats, and I'd never need to go further by that route - but in unreality, it plays a frequent role.

I have no idea why my subconscious chose this place as the site of so many incongruous and frustrating adventures, and it had been a long time since I went there in person. I was driving to my parents' house a few days before Christmas, and I took the sea road, as we often do when we're home - I like to see the sea. The road turns up inland after a little and we usually follow it straight up the hill, but this time I turned back down a smaller road to go past the harbour.

There it all was: the stone of the tiny pier; the narrow concrete path, single-file wide; the sheer, slightly mossy granite wall - I probably hadn't been there for more than a decade, but I'd seen them all so recently and so regularly that if I stopped to concentrate, my feet and my fingers could trace every inch of it.

We didn't stop, though, because while in my dreams I'm usually alone, singular, in the daytime world I had two cantankerous and jetlagged children in the back seat, who were getting tired of being told to admire the sea.

"Why do we have to look at the sea again?" they whine.
"Because it's a rule," I say.
"It's not a rule." They are too canny.

But it is a rule. The sea is always there, and even when I'm an ocean and a landmass away, I have to stop and look at it in my dreams.

Resolute

Carr's Cheese Melts are either mankind's greatest invention or the item that will lead to the fall of civilization. I haven't decided which yet, but in the meantime I seem to be mainlining them like they're going out of fashion. I shall blame my sister-in-law, since it's her kitchen I'm sitting in, and therefore her crackers I'm bogarting.

I was feeling very noncommital about the whole new year's thing yesterday. I've really only got used to it being 2012, and now I'm expected to remember a whole new number? That's a bit demanding, for a woman who can probably tell you either what day it is or what date, but never both at the same time. I wasn't really getting into the spirit of the year-in-review thing or the looking-forward thing. I decided it was just another day.

However, with no particular sense of resolution, I have just submitted a tiny piece to the newspaper (and had it accepted) and signed up for a writing workshop. That seems quite motivated, somehow. Maybe it's subliminal.

Meanwhile, as we sat in McDonald's* this afternoon savouring the guilt-free taste of pure bribery, I asked the children if they'd made any resolutions. Then I had to explain what resolutions were, which ended up something like this:

Me: ... and so, sometimes people decide to try to change something in the new year, to make themselves a better person.

Dash, a little confused: But Mummy, I'm already a great person.

Once we got past that, they were all gung-ho about things they could do. Dash plans to try pasta again (again? he swears he used to eat it, but I know very well it has never passed his lips) and to read more books. Mabel is going to do more sit-ups (um?), eat carrots, and not scratch or bite her brother.

That final item didn't last the day, but maybe something will stick, some time. I find that going back after a trip away is often a good time to instigate a new rule, so maybe next week will find us all eating dinner in the kitchen instead of in front of the TV. That would certainly be a start.

Now, if I can just get the last of these cheese melts out of the way, I will also resolve to start running again.

*McDonald's in Ireland has bendy straws. And I'm sure the food is much less unhealthy than it is in America.