The most vegetables Dash has ever tasted

Scene: My kitchen, last night.

Dash, who has had his dinner and his dessert: I want another brownie. Other brownie, other brownie! Or else chocolate milk. Because that one brownie wasn't worth as much as a whole chocolate milk.
Me: No, one is enough.
D: Other brownie!
Me, about to cook my own dinner: No. ... You can have some kale.
Dash, surprising me: Okay. Give me some kale. I want to eat leaves.
Me: You do? Okay, great.

[I dice some garlic, saute it, remove the washed kale from the fridge and start chopping it.]

Dash: ...Because caterpillars eat leaves.
Me, happy to go along with whatever bizarre reasoning might have led to this new and welcome departure: And they're big and strong and fluffy...?
Dash: No, they get wings and then they can fly.
Me: Yes. Yup. That's true. Maybe you'll get wings.

[I cook the kale. I add some salt but no pepper, in case it puts him off. It's perfectly wilted, deep bright green, tender-crisp, and the aroma of garlic is driving me wild. But then, I'm a bit of a whore for garlic, and kale is my new favourite vegetable.]

Me: Here's your kale.
Dash [comes running]: Yay! Kale! I'm going to grow wings! [Approaches a little more slowly. Gets a concerned look when he sees the three slim ribbons I've put in a bowl for him to taste. A note of betrayal enters his voice.] Mum-meeeee!
Me: It's delicious. Look. [I bite a little.]
Dash sniffs from a foot away and runs in the other direction.

Mabel appears, tips her tongue to it, makes a face, runs away.
Dash comes back: I like things she doesn't like, so maybe I should try it. [Makes valiant attempt. Fails.] Maybe there's something else I can try.

Me: Okay, thanks for trying the kale. It's a hard thing to start with. How about a frozen pea? Peas are easier.
Dash, ever the optimist today: Yes, peas! I love peas! I'll have a pea!
[I take the peas out of the freezer, shake a few into a bowl, offer them to him. He picks one up and pops it in his mouth. ... About a milisecond later, returns gagging and spitting dramatically. Scours out mouth with paper towel.] Ptew. Ptew. Blech. I don't like peas, actually. [Thinks.] I'll have a carrot. Carrots are yummy.

[Eats two bites of a baby carrot. Announces, probably truthfully, that it's more carrot than he's ever eaten at once before. Is done with carrot. I eat all the delicious garlicky kale straight from the pan before the rest of my dinner is ready.]

End scene.


--------


NOTE:

If you're new around here you might wonder how my child got to the age of almost seven without letting a frozen pea into his system. He's very VERY food averse, that's how. Never, even as a baby, would he just open his mouth and let new food in. I'm amazed he ever tasted anything, to be honest. The fact that now and then he will take a tiny bite of carrot is a big step from this time last year, pathetic as it sounds. Just don't think I didn't try with the vegetables before now, okay? I have already read Ellyn Satter and Dina Rose's website, so you don't need to tell me about them. Sorry if I sound defensive, but this is one of my parenting Achilles' heels. Let's just go back to being amused by Dash wanting to eat like a caterpillar, 'kay?

Promise

The trees are holding next week's blossoms tightly furled and fuzzy in the palms of their many hands, each one ready to burst forth given just a little more sunshine, a little more warmth, a little more time. They are a beautiful dark red, waiting to explode into pink.

The sky is grey, briefly blue, streaked with white, then grey again. A flurry of snowflakes, a handful of gravelly graupel, some rain that starts and stops and starts again. It's a particularly hard March, and that's just on this side of the Atlantic. At least here I can be pretty sure that eventually spring warmth will come - and after that (with luck, not too soon after) the hot and humid days of summer. In Ireland, though the flowers will bloom and the trees will sway green and lush in the breeze, warmth is what you yearn for and heat will probably only be found somewhere further afield. It will come, the warmth, but not as much or for as long as everyone might like.

 
It's the grey first day of spring break and already the children have dropped their bikes and invaded the neighbour's house, where the toys are better and the snacks more plentiful. I just had a phone call from across the road to ask if they could eat a piece of leftover birthday cake. I was a little surprised that I was being asked such a no-brainer.

Purveyor of Cake: "Dash suggested I call and make sure it was okay to give you some."
Me: "Ah, isn't that sweet of him? What a good child."
P of C: "Mabel suggested she'd have some even if you said no."

That there pretty much sums up the children's personalities at the moment. Up and down; a little give, a lot of take; potential everywhere: just like spring.

Cycles

Yesterday, Mabel gave me a tiny crumb of hope for the human race. Or at least for the portion of human race that we're raising in this house. She was spontaneously thoughtful.

But first, I'll tell you about the walk home from school.

When Dash started at the elementary school, Mabel was almost three. His dad brings him to school most mornings, but Mabel and I walk up to collect him at 3:20 every day, unless the weather's horrible. This meant that Mabel would be in the stroller, post-nap, and I would be pushing. Sometimes she'd hop out and run, and on the way home Dash would perch himself on the front till I yelled at him, and thus not so beatifically, we'd finally get all the way home again. I think I blogged about my frustrations.

When he went back to school this year, with Mabel now the proud owner of two bicycles and a scooter, I started encouraging her to bike to school sometimes. It worked pretty well, though we didn't abandon the stroller entirely. When she biked I'd end up breaking my back to push her halfway home up the slight incline you wouldn't even notice without a bike. Some days she was unhelpfully naked at 3:00 and it was as much as I could do to stuff her into her wheeled throne, put a blanket over her, and throw some clothes in the basket for the point when she was ready to emerge into the public gaze.

Since Christmas, though, she's been biking pretty consistently and the stroller has stayed at home. We took things up a notch last week, when both children suddenly looked too big for their bicycles at the same time - and with Dash's birthday coming up, we decided it was time to buy him a new one and let Mabel inherit his old one. Since the old one is purple, she was happy. Dash got a shiny new big bike and is looking terribly large and moving awfully fast all of a sudden.

And he's started riding his bike to school. Mabel doesn't need a push any more, and is learning to use the brakes - rather than her feet - going downhill too. So now, my view of the daily commute looks increasingly like this (below this paragraph that keeps getting longer), and I'm going to have to unearth - and inflate the tyres on - my own bike if I don't want to have to run home every day. (Which would be good for me, but my stupid foot is still a little sore* and I'm not dressed for running at that time of day.)

And now the nice bit. On the way to school yesterday Mabel was stuck cycling slowly behind a woman pushing a toddler in a stroller. She didn't pass the woman out, and soon stopped to wait for me. I told her I liked that she'd not barged past, and said she could use her bell or say excuse me if she wanted to get by.

"I didn't want to ring my bell in case it scared the baby," she said to me.

The clouds parted and angels sang. My little tyrant, thinking of someone else? Maybe, just maybe, the extreme self-centredness is just a phase. (I've always been fairly sure it was, but I'm an optimist and there's always the chance that you're the one raising Genghis Khan.)

The way we're doing it, the Chinese-water-torture drip, drip, drip, keep-telling-them-about-how-to-behave-nicely, observe-and-praise-the-good-behaviour: it does eventually penetrate, and just when you're starting to think you should maybe have been spanking them soundly on a daily basis and twice on Sundays, they surprise you. Maybe, in time, she'll turn out to be a decent member of civilization. Butterfly, chrysalis, yada yada; springtime metaphors abound. Sigh.

*Sore but improving. Apparently what I should have done to fix it was not bring it to the doctor but simply blog about it. I might escape the nun shoes for a while yet.

Judicious use of all caps

I was somewhat miffed to discover yesterday that we all needed dinner AGAIN, and that I would have to go back to the supermarket AGAIN to buy more milk and more bread and more frozen waffles and that I'd have to continue to make dinner ALL WEEK AGAIN because apparently throwing a big (-ish) party doesn't stop everything from just continuing to happen in exactly the same way as before.

So here I am putting on laundry AGAIN and tripping over toys AS ALWAYS and wondering when I'm going to sort out all those maternity clothes in the box that need to be laundered and ironed before I can consign them (IRONED? Come on!) and realising that I STILL haven't applied for the passport, and now I get to plan Dash's birthday party YAY.

(I should point out that nobody in my family is demanding that I make dinner, and they would all be fine with takeout pizza or spagetti and sauce-from-a-jar all week. But at the very least we still need milk for our cereal and bread for the peanut-butter sandwiches. And apparently I show my love by cooking for people, NO SHIT, SHERLOCK.)

So now I will stop and give myself the rest of the morning off, perhaps. Because Spring Break starts on Thursday and then I'll have even more not-getting-stuff-done to complain about.

The bad wife

I'm a terrible, awful, no-good wife.

It's my husband's birthday. Not just any birthday, but one of those ones with a zero on the end. I have no present to give him, no card, and there's no bread in the house for him to make toast with. (He likes toast.) "Here, I made you two beautiful children!" isn't going to quite cut it.

In my defence, we did have a big party yesterday. There were bellinis and beer and juice boxes and Indonesian ginger chicken wings and tabouli and quesadillas and salsa and pigs-in-blankets and two sorts of cake. There were kids running riot and grownups talking about physics and of course Mabel fell off the back of the sofa straight onto her head, but she was giggling a few minutes later and there's no bump to be seen this morning.

Tomorrow morning, I thought as I fell asleep last night, I'll go to the shops and find something, some sort of token present at least, something that I can give him on the day itself, something to provide a tiny indication of how wonderful he is and how happy I am to be here, to be us, to have done what we did and arrived at this point, which I hope is only the midpoint of everything, if that. Surely I can find some sort of something.

And then we woke up to four inches of snow this morning, and the schools are on a two-hour delay, which means that Dash starts at eleven but Mabel at ten, so you bring one child to school and then you bring the other child to school and by then it's pretty much time to turn around and pick up the first child and your morning is done. And there were wet socks and wet jeans and missing gloves and wet inside-of-snowboots and all the things that happen when they've spent an hour sledding before school to deal with, and now I'm here typing like the wind instead of out buying the perfect meaningful and symbolic token of appreciation.

Here, I got you a blog post. And a snowy vista. Love you.

March 25, 2013

Incidentally, is it bad parenting if I find myself saying, "Okay, if you must eat the snow, just don't eat snow that's grey or brown or yellow. Make sure it's nice and white."? I think that's just accepting the inevitable and working with it.

Motivation

Mabel has had two good nights in a row* and I have done at least half the things on that to-do list, which is pretty good going for me. Okay, so the pile of papers has been sorted through and moved to a new location but not actually put away yet, but things are in train. Shopping has been done for the party on Sunday, and I'm starting to feel as if it might actually all come to fruition in a timely manner.

The trouble with getting things done is that it's all about priorities. And I can't prioritise everything. So either I'm trying to exercise a few days a week, or I'm sorting out piles of paper. I'm writing a blog entry (or even something else) or cleaning the bathrooms. I'm planning a party or trying to figure out how to store our piles upon piles of soft toys or applying for a passport. But I can't do all those things, or even remember that I wanted to do them all, at the same time. No matter how much of a multitasking fool I am - and yesterday I was baking two types of bread, registering to vote, buying Dash a new coat**, filing, drinking a cup of tea, AND bragging about it all on Facebook - I can't hold in my mind the intention and urgency of getting everything done that has to be done.

So this week any notion of exercising went out the window and I skipped blogging a few days and as a result I have accomplished other things. I need a rotating cycle of prioritizing. Maybe I can make myself a star chart for that.

(We are knee-deep in star charts here. Mabel completed one, for good behaviour at school, got her new baby, and immediately demanded a new chart so she can buy all the baby's other sisters. So I concocted a huge new one that covers many aspects of her life, and then Dash wanted one too because if she gets something from Target when there he is in great need of a new light saber and with more than a month to go before his birthday, he should have one too. His is for getting ready in the morning and stopping playing computer games when his time is up. We'll see who gets their next trip to Target first.)

Watching TV with new Baby Belle. Baby Aurora is a little jealous.

So I could have a week for organizing, a week for cleaning, a week for writing, a week for exercising, a week for shopping, a week for baking, and then back to organizing. And if I get all my stars I can buy myself a babysitter, maybe.



*I am not blogging about this for fear of jinxing it. This does not count as blogging about it, okay?

**Long story, but I accidentally broke the zip on Dash's winter coat by closing the car door on it. That makes two coats two years in a row that I've buggered on him. At this rate he'll never wear a coat that fits him, because I keep ruining them before he's even grown into them. The new one is an age 8, and even though he's about to turn 7 he's only just growing out of his 5s. The sleeves will be down to his knees. Ah well. There's not much winter left*** and it'll fit better by next year.

***There'd better not be.

A very parenthetical list

So I thought if I put my to-do list here maybe it would shame me into getting something done. Something other than drinking cups of coffee and convincing myself that pie is a perfectly valid mid-morning snack. (It was apple pie. That's fruit.)

(We have an apple pie because I went to a bloggers' meetup last night and I felt so guilty about leaving B to get Mabel to sleep while simultaneously getting Dash to shut up and stay in his room and go to sleep that I made him a pie. Also because I'd intended to make it on Sunday but then I went shopping instead and bought lots of tops for me on clearance, and didn't even look at children's clothes, which is a thing of which I am very proud.)

(I have to give a shoutout to all the lovely DCMoms bloggers I met last night at the Mellow Mushroom in Adams Morgan where Jennifer and I went to break out of our comfort zones and meet new people and put not so much faces to names as heads on bodies. When you know people as a series of square headshots, it's always surprising to find that they're not all on the same level in real life - they're tall and short and narrow and wide and simultaneously older looking and younger looking and more gorgeous and more approachable and more real in real life than you could possibly imagine from photos. I met Sandie and Allison and Rebecca and Jessica and Jean and Aimee and Elaine and Michelle and Robin and other people too, who I am not managing to remember just now, sorry.  And we ate delicious pizza and the people at the restaurant were really nice to us because they're lovely people and you should check it out if you're downtown.)

So without further ado here is my to-do list:

• Make D's dentist appointment
• Fill in application to vote
• Make appointment at post office for passport application
• Make shopping list for the weekend's baking extravaganza*
• Clean house (but not too soon) (only downstairs)
• Get B a birthday present of some sort
• Bake something and freeze it to get a jump on the aforementioned baking extravaganza? 
• Make pumpkin bread or black-bean brownies for school-lunch desserts
• Bake bread for my insatiable carb-loving family
• Sort out that big pile of papers over there

*I have to explain about the baking extravaganza, and for that matter, why I only need to clean downstairs. It's not that upstairs stays magically sparkly all by itself, but more that nobody will be seeing it so it doesn't matter right now. We somehow have managed to schedule all our social events for the spring into this weekend - on Friday there's a block party potluck thingy, for which I have to make something (it'll be my old faithful kale and quinoa salad, because it's yummy, vegetarian (even vegan), and can be eaten at any temperature). Then on Saturday there's a house-party fundraiser for the nursery school, to which I said I'd bring a dessert - as yet undecided; what goes with delicious white sangria made by a real Spaniard? Something fruity . . . jello shots, maybe? And then on Sunday we're having a party here, hence the house-cleaning part.

Not a kids' party either. An honest-to-goodness real grown-up party, although it will essentially end up being like all the kids' parties with grownups that we've thrown in the past. But my my adored and much-put-upon husband is turning a significant multiple of ten (hint: more than 30, less than 50) on the 25th, and since I have no idea what to give him, I'm baking him a Guinness cake and making other things he likes and inviting over some of his friends and their children and hoping everyone will have a pretty nice time.

So I have to get plenty of sleep and not have any hangovers and be on top of my game for all that. Yup, that'll happen. Tell you what, you bribe Mabel to stay asleep all night, and I'll bake a cake for you as well.

St Patrick's grump

I don't know exactly why, but this year St Patrick's Day in America is bringing out the curmudgeon in me. As a family, we've never really observed it here, by going to a parade or anything, though I suppose we could. It seems too hokey altogether to do that sort of thing. Next thing you know I'd be putting Mabel in a wig of red ringlets and sending her to step-dancing classes.

I'm also quite unjustifiably narky today about other people appropriating Ireland and deciding it's something in the name of which they should get to wear green and drink alcohol and play tricks on their children.*

Mostly, my grump should be directed straight at Hallmark, who fairly reasonably - perhaps, in as much as they're just in it for the profit - decided that nothing was happening in mid-March - Valentine's is over; Easter isn't here yet - and so all of America should push out the boat, dye it green, and decide to be Irish.

It was pointed out to me today, just as I was about to complain that nobody else's national holiday is celebrated all over America, that it's just the same with Cinco de Mayo (that's the fifth of May, Mexico's day of celebration). Any excuse for a party, all the better if it has some sort of food/drink/colour that can work into a theme for an eye-catching display of chips/dips/chocolate/trinkets in the supermarket, especially when half the country is still miserably buried under a thick blanket of snow.

In nursery school this week Mabel's class have been decorating large shamrock-shaped pieces of card with green paint and green feathers and pompoms and furbelows and whathaveyou. Her two teachers, who hail from India and Africa, called them clover and didn't know what the significance was, but that's what they were doing all the same. This irked me, perhaps more than it should have. (I'm irkable, you may have noticed. Irk me at your peril.)

So I don't think we're doing anything special tomorrow. We're not attending a potluck at the local chapter of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, if there is one; we're not planning to drink Shamrock Shakes at McD's; and I don't have a single potato in the house. If we wear green it will be by accident.

Maybe it's because tomorrow is the day when it's not remotely special to say you're Irish in America.


*The tricks thing. Read my previous post about what Americans do for St Patrick's Day.

Pope-ular

Yesterday I had to leave the house at 3.00 to get Dash from school, as usual. The new pope was due to be announced and I had the tv on, but even though I waited - "Come on, it's two minutes past, where is he?" - I had to leave without finding out who it was.

Not that I even knew who the contenders were. Dougal wasn't one of them, neither was Grumpy Cat, and they were the only possibilities my Facebook feed had informed me of in the past weeks; but suspense is suspense and the Vatican knows how to play up a theatrical moment. I asked my friend-and-neighbour, as we bumped into her on the way up the road, if she knew, and we reminisced about past popes, as you do.

"When Ratzinger was elected I was teaching middle school..." she started to tell me.

Hang on. What? But she was a teacher a lifetime ago, and Ratzinger is almost new. I know it's a lifetime ago because her kids are the same age as mine, and she taught before they were born. I was ... wait, I was in southmost Texas, so it was my kids' lifetimes ago too, but I feel like the election of the last pope is still a pretty recent event because I blogged about it.

Which just goes to show that I've been blathering on here for a long time. For more than a whole pope, you could say, using the ancient and irregular unit of measurement.

Everyone's saying - where "everyone" is the people I know who might discuss these things - that they hope this pope is more open to change and more forward-looking and more willing to let in tiny things like, say contraception or women priests to the Catholic church. I said it myself yesterday.

But I've changed my mind.

The thing is, if the Catholic church did all those things that I and many other Catholics and ex-Catholics want it to, things like accepting contraception, and considering married clergy or even women priests, and acknowledging that it's okay to be gay (not even touching on the more controversial topics like abortion and euthanasia), it wouldn't be the Catholic church any more. So I think I actually agree with what Benedict said about wanting a "smaller, purer church."

If all the people who genuinely disagree with the church's teachings but still wish to participate in organized religion voted with their feet and left, heading instead for some more inclusive and accepting place (Anglicanism is not a huge stretch), the church would be much smaller - and perhaps have fewer resources and therefore less influence.

So many people stay in the church for the sake of tradition: because they were raised that way and it's what they know, and they like the warm familiarity of the hymns and the responses and doing what they always did at Christmas and Easter. Maybe because your mother would be devastated if you didn't, because you've never heard of anyone moving church - sure one's as good as another, even because your in-laws wanted to know when the party was when you had the first baby, so you had a christening even though you hadn't been to mass in years, and things just snowballed from there.

But unless you're particularly attached to the other things that only come with Catholicism - transubstantiation and venerating Mary and the saints are all I can think of right now - maybe it's time to move on. My mother was never a big fan of "a la carte" Catholics who take what they like and ignore the rest, and I'm starting to come around to her opinion, albeit from the opposite direction.

I know many people talk about working for change from within, which is laudable indeed. But the Church doesn't want to be changed. The Church would rather you left, actually, if you want things like equality and contraception. God is God, and I'm firmly convinced that he/she/it doesn't care what religion you adhere to and whose rules you follow so long as they're not hurting anyone else.

Then again, I'm an atheist 85% of the time, so you can feel free to disregard my opinions on God altogether.



Disclaimer: As always when I talk about religion, I don't wish to offend anyone and absolutely acknowledge your right to believe whatever you want so long as you respect everyone else's point of view too. The flying spaghetti monster endorses this post.

Bipedal

I went to the doctor this morning and came away with the deeply unsexy diagnosis of "hammer toe". Unlike hammer time, this is not even arguably a good thing.

First, the nurse saw my Kindle and carried on an entertaining 15-minute monologue about how she found a book in the library that had streetnames she recognised and it turned out to be written by a girl she knew from her neighbourhood in Philly, and she called her up and said "Did you do all that stuff? Because if you did, you nasty," and the girl said, "Just don't read my other books." Which was all a bit surreal.

Then she asked about my foot, which was why I had come, and I showed her where it hurts and she considered it critically and then said,

"You have a pedicure recently?"
I wasn't sure where she was going with this.
"Does it look like I had a pedicure recently? If I'd had a pedicure and my foot looked like this I'd be asking for my money back."

She said she's seen a lot of pedicures gone bad lately, from old black ladies (her words) who start getting their feet done every two weeks and all the skin comes off.

I'm not an old black lady, nor do I play one on TV. Also, I haven't had a pedicure since last summer. So obviously I could not have a pedicure gone bad.

Then the doctor came and looked at my foot. I confessed that it wasn't so sore now, but I'd made the appointment because I was pretty sure that would make it get better, and my tactic seemed to be working. But that I'd come along anyway, and look, here's my stupid foot and right here underneath where it looks perfectly normal - or as normal as my foot can get - is where it hurts.

First he asked to see the other foot. Then he asked me if my feet had always been that way.

"You mean weird? Yup."
"Okay." He said. "So this is the normal foot - I mean, the asymptomatic one, since they're not all that normal---" (Not a man to mince words, this one. I like him.) "---and see where this toe bends up?"

So the reason the bottom of my foot hurts is because the toe on top is stupid. I have stupid feet.

"It's usually genetic," he remarked, helpfully allowing me to shift the blame to my father, where it belongs. Why the DNA couldn't have picked my mother's feet instead of her nose to give me, I don't know. I already had his eyes, his mother's hair, and his liking for bad puns; did I have to have his hoofers too?

But I'm sort of pissed off about this. I mean, it's not like I have a large collection of Jimmy Choos that will now start gathering dust, but it was hard enough to find shoes that fit pyramid-shaped feet to begin with (short, wide, high arches, your basic pyramid), and I'm already wearing the cushiest, most comfortable, most German-looking shoes you've ever seen.  

I have a two-day blogging convention to go to this summer, you know, I wanted to shout at the doctor. Where I will be meeting women I want to impress with my personal effortless sense of style. (Stop snorting. It makes your nose look funny.) I have to wear shoes that I can walk around Chicago in that also look okay with whatever I'm going to be wearing, into which a lot of thought will have gone.

I AM NOT READY FOR NUN SHOES. DON'T MAKE ME WEAR NUN SHOES.

Compare and contrast

It's a very Irish-looking day here in America, with the rain, no rain, torrential rain, less rain, no rain until you go out in it, and some rain going on all morning. Looking out the window I'm hard pressed to say what makes it America at all.

I see tall trees, taller than my house in suburban Dublin would have around it, but no taller than some in other parts of Ireland might be. They're still winter-spindly with no sign of spring, but some of the others I noticed this morning have a tiny amount of pink fuzz, just enough to make you gasp in relief, finally heralding a change. The air is softer today too; mild, we'd call it, which is an oft-used word in Ireland for any day when it's not bitter. Those are pretty much our extremes, I think.

The grass is wrong, I know. The grass in my back yard is dead yellow, with tufts of new-growth green in between. That doesn't happen to Irish grass: it stays lush and dark all year. You never understand why the tourists all exclaim over the greenth of the country until you've had a winter somewhere else, or a summer somewhere else for that matter.

There are still dead leaves wet at the bottom of the garden, in the corners and crevices. We're probably supposed to scoop them up, but more likely they'll stay there and turn to mush, to loam eventually, perhaps. We can keep hoping they'll blow away instead. Ivy climbs up the treetrunks, looking just like Irish ivy, dark green on craggy wood against a grey sky. My garden shed does not look like a garden shed. It seems here you can have two types of shed: the sort that looks like a miniature house, or the sort that looks like a barn. Mine looks like a barn, because it's an Amish shed, I'm told. Irish sheds are not Amish. They look like sheds. (If you need further explanation, you're not Irish. I'm not going to try.)

We have a deck, which is unIrish, and a rotary clothesline exactly like the one that still adorns my parents' back garden. I have wooden clothes pegs and plastic ones, but my parents only have wooden ones that are blackened  and thin with exposure and use - becuase in Ireland if you miss the start of the rain, you may as well just leave the clothes out there until the wind starts blowing them again. Here, I am lazy and use the clothes dryer in the winter. I blame it on my Reynaud's, which makes my hands painfully numb doing things like that in cold weather, but the truth is that we have the luxury of large American appliances, and I bask in that luxury and exploit it.

It's lashing again. Torrential. Floods, cats and dogs, Datsun cogs as the old joke goes; pissing, we'd uncouthly say in Dublin. Good for spring, I suppose. A couple more weeks and we'll be surrounded by the beautiful blossoms of the pear trees that line our streets here in the neighbourhood, and the days will be sunny and more than mild and the sky will be blue, and America will look nothing like Ireland once again. Except for my clothesline, the constant.

Placeholder

Mabel and I both woke up with big stonking sneezy snurfly colds this morning (and apologies for quoting my own Facebook status there), which have been sneaking up on us for the past few days, what with my very sore throat on Friday night that had miraculously disappeared the next morning (classic symptom for me of something else to come) and her good sleeping for two nights in a row.

Which is why this blog post is brought to you by Sesame Street in the background and I've been staring at it for ten minutes without writing anything. And that's not counting the half hour I spent trying to write it earlier, and the two posts I have in drafts from last night that are not interesting and will not be making it to the gentle eyes of my readers. At least not till I've got some amount of mojo back and can fix 'em up.

If you've any requests to get me out of my doldrums, let fly. What do you like hearing about most?

Increasingly long-winded thoughts on Twitter, which is why I'm not very good on Twitter

Thoughts on Twitter, from the perspective of one who came from Facebook.

• It's very good for my editing, trying to get what I want to say down to 140 characters.
• But it's a terrible way to have an actual conversation.
• The people, myself included, are more fickle. Because there's no mutuality, you can follow and unfollow guilt-free. I follow someone famous for a while, their too-frequent, or too-boring tweets annoy me, I unfollow them. I suppose in FB we just hide the status updates; unfriending is a lot more drastic.
• The people are more willing to listen to total strangers. On FB, generally speaking, I won't friend someone I haven't met unless I know exactly who they are and feel I have some sort of connection with them on a message board or through blogging. On Twitter a whole bunch of total strangers follow me. I don't even know why, but it's all very ego-stroking. (I mean, I don't know why they follow me. I do know why it strokes the ego.)
• And then, even more surprisingly, total strangers seem willing to engage with me in some sort of exchange. A usually frustrating one if I'm trying to actually impart information (see point 2 above) but not a bad one if we're just tossing quips back and forth. Or insults. Whatever.
• I've had a Facebook page for the blog for a couple of years now and it's just creaking up to 73 likes. I've been on Twitter since January of this year and already I have 80 followers. How does that work? And then some of my followers are corporate-type things that, what, think I'll just blindly follow them back? Does anyone do that? How is that good for business?
• And then, I don't understand how people can follow thousands of others. The Bloggess, to take a "famous" blogger, for example, has 320,000 followers. Lucky her. But she follows 19,000 herself. She can't read 19,000 people's tweets. Even if some of them don't tweet much. I doubt if she even clicked the "Follow" button 19,000 times, for that matter. So how does this happen, and what's the point? Do people just follow people to be nice, and then ignore them? I follow people whose tweets I want to see, but maybe I'm doing it wrong.

In summary, I'm finding Twitter surprisingly nice. It connects me with old and new people in the blogging community in an oddly different way from Facebook, in Ireland and the US (and elsewhere too for all I know). I thought it would just be covering the same ground again, but it's complementary rather than duplicatory. So, um, go click the button over there and follow me.

"You're still WHAT?"

You* are not the only person in the world nursing a three-year-old. I am not the only person in the world nursing a four-year-old. If you think you are, or I am, that's because we're just not talking about it so much.

When Jamie Lynne Grumet and her latched-on standing-up son appeared on the cover of Time magazine last year, the idea that breastfeeding still happens with children who can walk and talk and maybe even write their names in wobbly backwards capital letters was a huge surprise to many, anathema to some, and just another normal day to a subsection of mothers who happen not to have weaned yet.

Time had no interest in breaking down barriers between mothers or normalizing extended breastfeeding: Time just wanted to sell copies of Time, so it made its cover as sensationalist and purposely divisive as it could. It worked - people were suddenly talking about Time magazine, and they weren't even trapped in a dentist's waiting room at the time.

But for most people nursing a preschooler, it's just not something that comes up in conversation. It's probably something that only happens at night, or first thing in the morning; it means you don't have to get up and pour that bowl of cereal quite as early as you might otherwise. It means your son or daughter drops off to sleep in five minutes instead of twenty-five. It's quite easy not to talk about it, and then you realise that you'd feel funny admitting it: if they mention to their teacher that they love you because you have the booboos with the milk in them, you might even be just a tiny bit embarassed. (No, this never happened to me. Not at all. Not three weeks ago, for instance.) If they try to kiss your booboos goodbye at nursery-school dropoff, you might even brush them off with a quick "Not here, stoppit." You might hope people don't know what your booboos are. You might be totally deluded.

This is the thing: Nursing an older toddler or a preschooler is not a conscious decision for most mothers. It's rarely something we set out to do: it's just something that hasn't finished yet. While some babies wean themselves before they turn twelve months old, and perhaps most dwindle and leave off nursing during the second year, others just don't want to stop, and their mothers may be in a position where they don't mind that. It's not a big deal until someone comes along with a magazine article to turn it into one. (If you have an older nursling and are feeling weird about it, read this wonderful piece about nursing in Mongolia, and feel better.)

So while I want to wean Mabel, and I'm looking forward to the day it happens, I'm willing to wait until she's ready too. We have set a tentative date of her fifth birthday to be done, but we'll see what happens. I don't want to be nursing a six-year-old in two years' time; I have no intention of nursing a six-year-old; but then again, I had no intention of nursing a three- or four-year-old either. When I started out on this crazy journey I said, "At least three months. Six would be good."

Life makes you change your plans. That's how it works. Work with it.


*Maybe not you. But maybe you.

Junior midwifery

Dash is anti-marriage these days. He doesn't mind it for other people, and agrees that men and women should be allowed marry whomever they love, but feels it's not for him. So he won't play marrying with Mabel any more, but she's managed to get around that, thanks to the Mr Rogers episode on d-i-v-o-r-c-e that she saw last week. "Let's play babies," she tells her brother. "We don't have to be married. We can be divorced, except you still live here and we have a baby."

Mabel loves to hear the story of when she was born. Or the story of when Dash was born. She particularly relishes the part about my waters breaking (first sign of labor, both times) and also how everyone I called in the early moments of my first labor had their phones turned off. (True story.)

We have a book called the Usborne Book of Knowledge, but neither of the children are remotely interested in learning about birds, or vehicles, or any of the sections other than the one on the human body. Mabel likes the page about how our bodies fight germs, and how bones fit together, but mostly she likes the two that detail how a baby is made and how a baby grows and is born. Lately she's been drawing babies in circles and telling me, "That's the bag of waters."

Then we have the first-aid book, which is a proper grown-up book that has somehow made its way onto the kids' bookshelf. Mabel likes to leaf through that and ask me what's wrong with all the people, or what might have happened to them if I don't know. There's a picture in there of a birth, just in case as a first-aider you come across some poor woman in the last stages of labor and need to do more than just boil water and find towels. It exhorts you not to pull on the head of the baby as it emerges. Good advice.

Yesterday I was complicit in a game of babies that was going on around me. Every few minutes a baby would be placed up my sweater, and then pulled out with a flourish.

"Oh, I can feel it starting to come down," I'd say.
"Push, push," they'd tell me, delighted.
"I can see the head," crowed Mabel.
"Twist it so it comes out," advised Dr. Dash.
"No, don't twist it," I said, concerned for my child's welfare.
"It's a girl! Congratulations!"
"Yayy! I always wanted a baby sister!"

Five minutes later I was safely delivered of two more babies in quick succession. Easiest pregnancies ever, I have to say.

Geo

The children are ... where are the children?... upstairs, maybe getting dressed, maybe something else... it's Sunday morning, Paul Simon is crooning about a train in the distance, and I feel I should be waxing lyrical. Maybe it's the fault of the music, maybe it's the day, I don't know. The husband is out running, checking out part of the route for his marathon in a couple of weeks' time.

I can't write to music, though; at least not music with words, and I don't really see the point of the other sort. I mean, it's nice, but if I'm just going to try to shut it out so I can concentrate, then I may as well not turn it on. I've never been one of those people who studies with music in the background. Maybe it's because my house was always quiet, so I didn't need to drown out other people to get my homework done. Another of those unnoticed advantages of onlychildhood.

If you gaze out the window for about ten minutes, concentrating hard, you might just catch a snowflake surruptitiously sneaking out of the sky. It's too warm for snow, but for some reason that's what the atmosphere wants to give us, so beyond the bare branches is the colour of nothing and now and then something escapes in the form of a six-sided crystal. I don't know why.

It was doing this yesterday too, when we pulled ourselves out of our Saturday-morning decline/recline and stopped putting on the kettle for another cup of tea and remembered that we have a national park five minutes down the road so there's no need to drive for half an hour and pay a king's ransom to get into a zoo or something. We went geocaching instead.

The kids know about geocaching. They know that sometimes we find little plastic boxes in the woods and sometimes they have toys in them. You're supposed to take a little thing and leave a little thing. We hadn't brought any little things to leave. So we took a pterodactyl from the first box, with B promising to run by and put in something else in return the next day. Then we exchanged the pterodactyl for an orange not-T-Rex in the next one, and finally went home with a green lambeosaurus from the last one. Mabel is particularly pleased because she has a tiny blue lambeosaurus already, who must have been missing her mommy.

Finding the first one went like this:

B: Look, I think this is it.
Mabel: Toys, toys!
B: Not toys. A cache.
Mabel: It's not cash, it's toys.

We had to admit that it was. Anyway, we were outdoors and the children were walking on their own feet and nobody complained and we found nature-y things like rotten logs and deer droppings and a hollow tree trunk and a lot of sticks and it was really quite nice and we should do it again.

Oral tradition

There are things I say just because my parents said them. If it's foggy outside, I'll announce that it's a mishty moishty morning, as my father would if he saw it. Any mention of Delaware will have me humming "What did Della wear, boys, what did Della wear?" even though I've no idea how the rest of the song goes, because I know that if you say Delaware to my mother, that's what she'll do. (The state of Delaware doesn't come up much in Irish conversation.)

Sometimes I wonder which of my parents' sayings came from their parents. There must be some. I'd like it if I knew, so I could make a point of passing those ones in particular on to my own children. An oral history family-tree, we'd have.

When my parents came to visit us in Texas we took them to the zoo. When I rounded a corner and saw a bison ahead of us, I whispered to B that if he asked my Dad what that was, he'd say it was a biffalo buffalo bison. Sure enough, those were the first words out of my father's mouth when he saw the hulking shaggy brown creature.

My parents regularly employ the following words without irony: wireless, slacks, plimsolls, the mail boat*, hanky, cardi, serviette. I don't say any of these words, even ironically, because they're not things I need to say, or sometimes because I decided I didn't want to be someone who says "cardi." 

Ireland is another country, and so is the past. My children will be at two removes from these words, and since they don't see their grandparents more than once a year, they're unlikely to remember them unless I do it for them. (My granny would offer me a chocolate from her ubiquitous box - people were always bringing her boxes of chocolates, because old ladies don't need anything - and say "Would a duck swim?" That's the only phrase I have that's uniquely hers in my mind. I wish there were more.)

I always feel that my syntax becomes more mobile when I'm in Ireland, my vocabulary a little more vernacular, my pronouncements more colourful. In America I bland it down, even it out, try not to confuse. I'm sure my friends and neighbours here will tell you that I still sound Irish, that I still say things that leave them scratching their heads on occasion, that I'll never just blend in: nor would I want to. But I feel a certain richness - if I ever had it, and I'm a very mild sort of Irishwoman really, from well inside the Pale - is lost, and maybe my new melting-pot land is the poorer for it. 



*The ferry into Dun Laoghaire from Holyhead; it hasn't brought the mail along with its passengers for many a year, and why it's mail not post I don't know, now I come to think about it. Maybe it was used by the Royal Mail, back in the day.