Awfully Chipper

The natural

2012-01-31T20:09:00.001-05:00

I am generally unwilling to read new books, but will happily take an old beloved off the shelf and re-read it again. I'll have forgotten either the whole thing or the details, or else I love it so much that I know every word that's coming before my eyes get there. Why spend time on the unknown and possibly disappointing, when I can pick a winner every time by going back to the ones I love?

In hindsight, I'm glad I pretentiously spent much of my 20s reading books one "should" read just so I could say I'd read them, because I don't have the patience, or the time, or the peristence for such things nowadays. The Sound and the Fury is sitting on my bookshelf with a bookmark holding fast at page 20 or so, because I know I should read it, and I'd like to read it, but every time I open it, it just looks a little too much like hard work.

So I'm in a bit of a Dick Francis phase, again, just now. Mock me if you will, but his stuff is exciting, well-written, engaging, and even if I remember whodunnit once I'm a third of the way through, I usually still need to find out exactly how once more. I seem to have an affinity for twentieth-century males - Neville Shute is another old favourite (if you've never heard of him, you may have heard of A Town Like Alice; he was British but wrote a lot about Australia, and, like Francis, always had an interesting subject to describe in detail as background for his adventures). (My husband is also a twentieth-century male, come to think of it. I quite like him too.)

I have a high tolerance, is what I'm saying, for the type of writers often described as misogynistic. It's an unfair description: it's not that they hate women; they're just products of their time. Hemingway, now, was a total bastard, but I love his writing - partly because he gets me swearing at just what a bastard he is as well as how he manages to evoke a scene or a mood with three well-chosen single-syllable words and no adjectives at all. JK Rowling he was not.

So now and then Dick Francis comes out with a humdinger like this:

She glowed with happiness, the peach bloom cheeks as fresh as a child's. It was extraordinary, I thought, how quickly and clearly the mental state of a woman showed in her skin.

Idiot. (And not just because he missed a hyphen there.) Still, maybe it makes me a bad feminist, but I'm willing to register such nonsense and keep reading because I want to know how it turns out. His heroes are highly intelligent men of honour who often find themselves in enormous amounts of physical pain - here, have a pitchfork to the back and a dislocated shoulder while you get kicked in the head by a crazed stallion - before emerging victorious against the forces of evil, and if the love interests are often treated in an uncomfortably patronising manner, well that's just Mr Francis being what he thinks of as a gentleman. It's all good clean steeplechasing fun, and a breath of fresh Cheltenham air compared to things like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

What inspired all this musing, however, was a line I came across yesterday. The narrator was talking about how if he refused a drink, people sometimes thought he was a recovering alcoholic. "One had to drink to prove one wasn't, like natural bachelors making an effort with girls." This is a 1974 publication, and natural bachelors must be a reference to gay men.

Which, I think, answers my mother's question. The lesbians, who were there all the time, were natural spinsters.

Spice of

2012-01-29T21:19:00.000-05:00

The existence of lesbians is giving my mother a crisis of faith. Apparently.

She said that the news at lunchtime today was all about lesbian weddings in Ireland.
"Where were all the lesbians when I was growing up?" she asked me. "None of the girls at school were, or in the bank [where she worked before she got married], or on the road where I lived. Where did they all come from?"
"Well, they weren't invented in the last five years, Mother. They've always been around. People just didn't talk about it in those days."
"But I don't understand what God was thinking about. Why did he make them?"
I decided not to tell her that I can't answer that because I tripped and fell into a vat of atheism.
"Maybe he just likes variety."

Grrrls

2012-01-27T14:02:00.003-05:00

Mabel was hell on wheels this morning at playgroup, for no apparent reason. When I asked her why, in the car on the way home (I mean, I asked her in the car, she didn't do it in the car; and yes, for your information, it is much easier for me to just keep typing than to back up with the delete button to clarify things), she had felt the need to fight with her friend and push over her friend's little brother, repeatedly, she told me it was because she hasn't had a nap. Which is fine, except that this was at 9.30am. I need to stop excusing bad behaviour with lack of naps, it would seem.

Now she's napping, and I feel like I need one too. I didn't think last night was particularly bad, but perhaps we were both sleepwalking up and down the corridor for hours and neither one of us remembers.

I think she was just very excited to be there this morning, and wanted to show off to everyone that these are her particular friends whom she sees outside school/ organized playtime events, and she felt the best way to do that was with overenthusiastic belligerent physical contact. Interspersed with taking toys away from smaller children just for the heck of it and/or because they weren't doing it right.

I don't know if this is a girl thing, but it's exactly what Dash's friend (known here as Helen) used to do every time we had a playdate, and here's Mabel being her second incarnation all over again; and it's not as if her first incarnation isn't still out there wreaking havoc - I mean, being sweetness and light and growing up at twice the speed of Dash, it seems whenever we see her - so I'm not sure population of greater Washington DC can deal with the sheer force of another one. Or that I have the fortitude to cope with it.

So is it girls in general, or those two in particular?

Wordation

2012-01-26T19:41:00.001-05:00

I would love to record Mabel playing by herself and play back it for you (or, you know, for someone who would hear it and declare her a genius), because it's very entertaining. She not only does the voices, she also narrates the whole story. So she might be holding a Strawberry Shortcake doll and a dinosaur, or a small pony and a squishy frog, who will be each other's sisters, or mother and daughter, or some such relationship, and I'll hear:

...[Squeaky voice] No, you can't do that. You're not allowed to. Becuase it's naw-dy [American accent coming out there] and dangewous.
- [Other squeaky voice] But mother, I want to do it. I'll be vewy careful.
- [Normal voice, a bit sing-song] And then she went upstairs and climbed on the shelves and she fell off and hit her head. And she said [Squeaky II] Ow, my head.
- [Narrator] And her mother came upstairs to see what was going on and said [Squeaky I] Oh, sweetheart, are you all right?...

And on and on and on, only much funnier than that. If I listen carefully I hear her go over things we've been talking about, or things she wants to do, or things that are on her mind - going to sleep on your own, the ever-present little sister role, working out the concept of death, even. It's also a little unnerving to hear your own words coming out of someone else's mouth, and makes me very happy that I've managed to excise swearwords from my vocabulary, because I know she'd be using them right now if she'd heard them.

Speaking of which. Dash has taken to saying "Aw, nuts," when something frustrates him. After listening to this for a while I decided it was probably not the most gentlemanly of expressions, and I asked him to say something else instead. More importantly, I thought he should know what it was he was saying, so I told him what it was a slang expression for, so that he didn't think he was just talking innocently about squirrel dinner. He said he'd say "Oh, brother" instead, which I can't find any objection to. So now Mabel is saying "Aw, nuts," and I'm a little afraid to stop her for fear she'll decide to say it all the more.

As I may have mentioned before, I grew up convinced that rude words had been invented in the 1980s and my parents had never heard any of them. My father's worst expletives were Damn and Blast, and I got into a fair amount of trouble with my mother the day I tried to say either of those. When I was about 13, the word of choice at school seemed to be "crappy," and one day I used it at the dinner table. To immediate and shocking effect. I had no idea it meant anything other than, well, you know, crappy. Bad. Not nice.

Which is why I would rather Dash knew what he was saying. Then it can be his own decision, though of course I can let him know that some words are not for use around his elders and betters, or his youngers and more impressionables either.

Mabel has also taken to exclaiming "Good Lawd!" if she needs to express dismay. I suppose I need to start saying Good Gravy instead. Maybe with a side of Heavens to Betsy or Holy Mackeral. It would, after all, be amusing to hear her come out with those while sorting out the members of the dollhouse at school some day.

And then it occurred to me that perhaps fudge and fiddlesticks and sugar are things people say not because they're granny-types who never said anything stronger in their lives, but from many years of not-in-front-of-the-children last-second adjustments.

Running into trouble

2012-01-25T11:10:00.000-05:00

I'm sorry if you're only here for the pictures of children in boxes, but I have to gab on about running again for a minute. I'll bring it back to the children, I promise.

This morning I went out and I ran a whole mile without stopping. When I came back I told B that it had taken me 15 minutes to run it, and by the way he looked at me I could see that he was wondering how that was physically possible. "I lay down between each step," I added, to reassure him. But after my shower he told me that I'd read the watch wrong (he lets me use his fancy GPS running watch) and my pace had in fact been a much more respectable 12 minutes.

Just to put that in perspsective, his "slow" pace is about a 9-minute mile, and in marathons he's aiming for 7.5 or so. For all 26.2 miles. I will never be running marathons, is what I'm saying, but on the other hand, apparently I didn't lie down between each stride either.

It turns out that my limiting factor is mostly getting a stitch: if that doesn't happen, I can keep going till my legs get tired, which is about a mile as of this morning. I have yet to figure out how to not get a stitch: is it random, has it something to do with fitness, or is it about how much coffee I drank how soon before I left the house?

And I have to get all soap-boxy about it for a second and say that if you can walk, you can run, so you may as well give it a go. It's over sooner, it gets your heart rate going faster, and it makes you think you're the bee's knees. (Bees' knees? How many bees are we talking about here?) But, three words: Buy A Bra. (Unless you're one of my two male readers. Probably, you don't need to. But hey, whatever floats your boat.) Don't think that the one you wear for yoga will do; don't pick up a cheapie in Target or Dunnes Stores; choose a heavy-duty one in the right size, take it into the changing room, and jump up and down a few times. If you bounce, move on until you find the right one, and don't begrudge the money. The difference between running while bouncing and running while being properly reined in is astounding.

So there I was, pootling around the lake this morning - I've decided I need a better word for what I do, because it doesn't yet aspire to running, and a good quantity of it is still walking, but it's walking in a good bra, you know - and thinking why it is that I eschew those app-y things like Couch to 5K that tell you when to run and when to walk and are roundly praised by people like me who start from negative levels of fitness and want to go a bit faster and a bit further without falling down. Basically, it's because I don't like to do what people tell me to. In fact, I am positively motivated to not do what they tell me to.

Ooh, look, once again running (pootling) helps me understand how my children's minds work.

But, historical revisionism, ahoy. My mother says I was never any trouble. How can this be, if I am so programmed for rebellion? Did I develop this characteristic late in life? Or else,

(a) I was Trouble, but my mother has forgotten
(b) I was Trouble, but my mother didn't find out
or (c) I wasn't any trouble, because my desires meshed with my parents' desires

This last may have been true once I was older and decided it was fun to get good grades - because if there's one thing I hate more than doing what people tell me, it's getting answers wrong. And since I didn't know where the boys lived or how to find them, I had nothing else to do but my homework.

I suspect I was Trouble, but both (a) and (b). Also, it's possible that my mother was more canny than she gives herself credit for, and manouvered me into doing what she wanted me to do while making me think it was my idea.

Or perhaps my parents just left me alone and I turned out okay. Free-range parenting in the eighties? What a concept.

Goings-on ongoing

2012-01-24T17:43:00.000-05:00

Once again, this morning, I didn't go for a run.

One way or another, the fates have conspired against me for the past week, and between weather, and days off school, and weather, and my period, I haven't had a chance to go out for ages. I hate this - not because I'm a runner, all champing at the bit for activity and pacing up and down like a caged tiger; but because it makes me afraid that I'll never get back out there and my tiny bit of motivation will desert me and I'll be back to being a blob who wasted money on good shoes for nothing.

On the other hand, it's novel, if irritating, for me to actually want to exercise and be prevented by outside influences. I'm almost completely certain I'm not just using them as excuses. And B has been very good about not bugging me, because he knows that the one thing certain to make me not go is someone telling me that I should. (Mabel? My daughter? What? I see no correlation here.)

I have gone to the not-aerobics class for the past two Saturdays, even last week when there was fresh snow on the ground (all of half an inch) and only the die-hards were there (and me), so all isn't entirely lost. I can do a sexy march with the best of them. (No. No, I can't. But I'm learning.)

****

The wearing of the underwear was going really well until I bragged about it to a friend, whereupon Mabel immediately went through two pairs of trousers, peed on the aforementioned ice, and is now wearing a pullup. I suppose we'll get back on the horse soon, but I'm not talking about it. If you see me start to talk about it, put your fingers in your ears and sing la la laaa at the top of your voice.

****

Yesterday, in a fit of something or other, I bought a bag of mini croissants. (This is what happens when I go to a different supermarket. All sorts of odd things seem perfectly reasonable purchases.) Dash was excited but wished they were chocolate croissants, and I said we could probably do something about that. So when we got home I cunningly sliced along the top of one, put in a few chocolate chips, and heated it for five seconds in the microwave. He was quite pleased.

Today, somehow, there are two...one...oh, look at that, the mini croissants are all gone. Mabel just asked for the last one, let me put three chocolate chips carefully in it, and said she didn't need it heated up. Then she fished the chips out again, sucked each one into happy oblivion, and told me I could eat the croissant.

****

Dash came home today with a big picture of a penguin captioned in his writing with "My penguin and I like to fly." His teacher had stuck on a post-it in response to my e-mail of this morning, saying that the children had used their IMAGINATIONS to think of something they would like to do with their penguins. (Hmm. That sounds dodgy. She didn't put it quite like that.) Dash has recanted his earlier statement about there definitely being a flying species of penguin and now says the movie they watched was a cartoon. I'm still a bit confused, but I think we can be confident that his teacher was not using BBC April fools jokes as source material, and that you can't always take what a five-year-old says at face value.

No news there, then.

Up and Down

2012-01-23T20:06:00.003-05:00

Dash has been telling us that there's one species of penguin that can fly. He watched a movie about it at school. (Sigh. Nobody watches videos at school any more. I suspect nobody listens to tapes in French class either. Remember when your teacher had to bring in a giant boombox and balance it on a stool beside the wall where the outlet was so that they could press play to let you listen to the fuzzy-voiced announcer telling you something impenetrable about le train que départ à quai numéro trois? Now I suppose they just send an mp3 to the kids' iPhones or something.)

But all the knowledge that Dr. Google (that's Dr. Google, PhD in acquatic avians, not Dr. Google, MD) has put at our fingertips tells us that there is definitely no such species. I really hope Dash's teacher didn't inadvertently show them this BBC clip from 2008, which turned out to be an April Fool's Day hoax.

If he comes home talking about the spaghetti harvest next week, I suppose we'll know something's up.

(The title is this adorable book by Oliver Jeffers, which confirmed our suspicions that penguins don't fly unless shot out of a cannon. Then again, it would lead one to believe that they're quite partial to playing backgammon, so I'm not sure this is the ideal resource for those of you looking to find out more.)

Note to self

2012-01-22T18:53:00.000-05:00

For future reference, when your recently-bribed-into-toilet-training three-year-old clutches her crotch while you put on her ice-skates, don't just let her refuse to let you take her to the bathroom. Because the quickly spreading yellow puddle on the ice is a bit of a giveaway when things go wrong.

In fact, backing up a bit, when you know that she really should have taken a nap, even though you're trying to phase out the naps because they lead to neverending bedtimes, don't take her ice-skating in the first place. Because while it may seem cruel to deny her the outing if her brother and her daddy are going, having her fall so solidly asleep on the way home that she takes an unwakeable hour-long nap at 4.30 is probably going to have a worse effect. On your mood when she's still wide awake at 9pm. (Not that we're there yet. Maybe the gods will be kind.)

Fingerwalking

2012-01-20T14:00:00.001-05:00

Sometimes you just have to click the button with the big pencil graphic on it and see what your fingers do.

Sometimes I don't think I have anything to say, but something comes out anyway. Sometimes I start out saying one thing and end up telling a totally different story. Sometimes I just put it away and don't publish anything that day, and sometimes I fall back on something funny somebody said, or what we had for dinner.

Sometimes I self-censor a blog post out of existence because it's too personal, or too uninteresting, or about money, or religion, or things maybe I don't want all those people I know in real life to read and be thinking the next time they see me at nursery school or a family gathering. Whereas in reality, they probably didn't read it anyway, and certainly won't remember it if they did. They have too many other things in their lives. But sometimes the post I'm not writing drowns out the post I might write, so that I'm left with nothing to show for it.

Sometimes one word borrows another and suddenly I'm knee-deep in reminiscences about schooldays or misspent youth, whether you wanted to know it or not. Sometimes I read another blog, one so piercingly written or side-splittingly funny, that I wonder what the point is at all. Sometimes I think my stats are all just a big lie told by Russian searchbots and nobody's reading at all except my two friends down the road and my ever-constant husband.

Sometimes it turns out that you really just didn't have anything to say today. Try again tomorrow.

Daughters

2012-01-18T13:15:00.000-05:00

I sat opposite Mabel in the food court of the mall last week, watching her chow down happily on a slice of pizza and hoping for many more pleasant outings like this as she gets older.

She's three. It's easy for her to delight me. All she has to do is eat the food I just bought her, not throw a tantrum, sit on her chair without knocking over her drink, grin her big grin, and I'm suckered, hook, line, and sinker. As she gets older, I suppose I'll expect a little more from her, and there'll be disagreements over jeans, or shoes, or Bieber, or whatever it is the young people will be wanting when she's a tweeny bopper; but I can't help thinking that I'll always be delighted if my daughter - my beautiful, hilarious, vivacious daughter - is happy to be out in public with her mum.

And then I thought of the gulf between mothers and daughters and saw it from a new angle; this gulf that can be miles wide and unbroachable, or small enough to step across with a shared joke and a smile.

Perhaps I see what I expect to see, but I feel as if her relationship with me, mine with her, is already more complex than the other one, the mother-son bond of simple mutual affection. (And frustration, infuriation, impatience, all those other things.) But because I've been there, because I know Girl from the inside, the weight of all the things I want to teach her - tell her, advise her, show her, avoid for her - is mighty.

Did my mother think these things when she looked at me? Did I barge ahead, embarassed, tolerant, amused, or superior, according to my age or mood at the time? As she sat there, smiling calmly and knowing that some day I'd get my comeuppance? Or was she thinking that my hair was too long and my shoes were too clumpy and my table manners were lacking? It's not a gulf, then; it's a finely balanced scale that is tipped in one direction and then the other by the merest glance or a throwaway comment.

Do Mabel and I still have plenty of time for just enjoying each other's company before all that hits?

Rules for co-sleeping*

2012-01-17T13:30:00.003-05:00

*if you are under six and want me to continue sleeping with you, at least some of the time; rules for Daddy are somewhat different.**

Do not kick off the covers. I am cold. I need that duvet. Especially, do not lie on half the duvet and kick off the rest, so there's nothing at all left for me.
Do not stick your foot down my pyjama bottoms.
Do not have sharp, pointy toenails.
Do not demand a waffle at 3am.
Do not barf. Ever.
Do not touch the other nipple. At all.
Do not hog the bed so that the smaller person takes up 80% of the space, leaving me to wake up perched on one shoulder, wedged against the wall, with my head on your unicorn pillow pet.

Thank you,
the Management

**Actually, come to think of it, rules for Daddy are mostly the same, except perhaps for number six. Ahem.

Food for thought

2012-01-15T20:15:00.003-05:00

Dash seems to be having a growth spurt. Which is very annoying. Because even though he's always hungry for more, the only more he's hungry for is the same more as always. Somehow, I've made peace with him having a sandwich for lunch and another for dinner, but when he then demands a third sandwich mid-afternoon or for his after-dinner snack, I see a missed opportunity as it skids by me and lands in the peanut-butter, and get all enraged about it.

He's been dutifully tasting things, and getting stars on his chart, though when he got to a dollar he said in a relieved manner "Phew! I've finished!" and was not so happy to hear that I expected this to go on ad infinitum. Money isn't really very meaningful to him yet, so perhaps it's not a great incentive. We need to go to Target and pick something he wants to work towards, I suppose.

But I'm getting frustrated. I know it takes up to 15 tastes before a kid might like something, and that licks and spitting things out still count towards getting familiar with a food, but when he licks a carrot, again, and wants it to count as his "taste" for the day, or gingerly touches his tongue to a cut piece of sausage and annouces "yuck", or spits out a mouthful of applesauce, for heaven's sake, and says it feels dry in his mouth, well, it's a little wearing on the spirits, you know. He's starting to act as if it's our duty to come up with new and desirable things for him to taste every day, as if we should say "Hey, I know, why don't you try this caramel-flavoured ice-cream for today's thing" and then give him a big round of applause for his great effort.

And then I read something like this and get all discouraged because we are so far from having either child eat what the adults eat that it's not funny. Unless the adults are eating sausages and plain pasta, or pizza, in which case Mabel will happily play along.

But then. If I list the things Dash has tasted (/licked, spat out, whatever, sigh) in the past two weeks, compared to all the nothing new ever he would even consider looking at before then, I should be impressed, and keep on plugging away. So I will. Carrot (raw, steamed, roasted), cheese, applesauce, baby spinach leaf, sausage, banana, tinned peach, a new type of cracker, cauliflower, pasta.

See? That's pretty impressive. Except that he has yet to meet anything he likes. Even tinned peach. Come on, who doesn't like tinned peaches? And he thinks that having tasted something once should give him the benefits of its nutrients for life. I try to explain that he has to keep eating them, and more than just a micro-bite, and that the food you eat doesn't have to be your favourite thing all the time, it just has to be okay, and you eat it because you're hungry. Damn, that sounds depressing. No wonder he sticks to what he likes best.

And he's started making his own sandwiches, so really, what am I complaining about? Gah.

All Mabel, all the time

2012-01-13T19:47:00.001-05:00

Last night Mabel woke up crying and writhing with a pain in her tummy. This morning she said she had just been hungry. Not peritonitis, then. Could have told me that in the middle of the night when I was doing my Pieta impression. (Wherupon she fell back asleep and I heaved a huge sigh of relief.)

The white noise made no difference last night, except to leave me convinced that it was about to rain in her room at any moment because the humidifier had been running so long. She still woke up after less than two hours of sleeping. The new and exciting development, however, was that I had taken Dash to his karate class and B put Mabel to sleep. Admittedly, she was exhausted, but she has never (since newborn days, when a baby will fall asleep on anything with a pulse) gone to sleep for him before. And without a peep, too.

So that was good.

Today, we had nothing on the agenda and were on the move relatively early, so after bringing Dash to school she and I headed for the mall and had a nice-until-inevitable-meltdown mother-and-daughter morning of snacking, playing, and browsing. We took a look in the Lego store and she immediately started taking the minifig keyrings off their display and deciding which was whose mummy/sister/grandad.
"Look, Mummy! It's R2!"
"R2D2? So it is!"
We finally got Dash to watch Star Wars over the Christmas break, and of course Mabel saw it too. I desperately hoped the lovely nerds who work in the Lego store would hear and appreciate my pint-sized prodigy, but I think they missed the moment.

She's been well stuffed with sausage and oven fries this evening (there was carrot, she declined - but she did have ketchup and that's a vegetable); I'm having another glass of wine and hoping for no more hunger pangs/appendicitis tonight. Never a dull moment, yaknow.

News at eleven

2012-01-12T15:54:00.000-05:00

Stop the presses. Mabel slept from 9pm to 12.30am without waking up last night. And then I even spent another two hours in my own bed from 2.30 to 4.30 or so.

Recent nights have been so bad that this seems like a fabulous advance. As her ever-logical father pointed out, it must be due to one of the following factors:
(a) the humidifier I put in her room to stop her waking early from congestion
(b) the white noise from the humidifier
or (c) chance.

As it was raining last night, I don't think the humidifier did much to change the quality of air, so maybe it was the noise; which I admit I've never tried before because I hate even the tiniest hum or buzz when I'm trying to sleep. Tonight I might try tuning the clock radio in her room to nothing, and seeing how that works for her.

But because I am Never Satisfied, as I luxuriated in my own bed at 11pm, unencumbered and unsummoned by small person, a tiny part of me felt rejected. It's just a glimpse into the future when the children will scorn any notion of sleeping with a parent, and my own bed will be my only bed. And for all the complaining I do about sleepless nights, it's so much simpler, if not always easy, to give love and cuddles to a small warm body that readily accepts them, than to fulfill all the other requirements of parenting.

The anchovy thing

2012-01-11T11:06:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I made fabulous oatmeal cookies. I even pandered to my husband's desires a bit with them, by putting in raisins instead of chocolate chips. But then I added pecans as well, because I had some to use up, and I like nuts in cookies. This was perhaps cruel of me, because B does not, mostly, like nuts in cookies, but I thought it might be given a pass. (Apparently I feel I can't be too nice to the man, because that's giving in to The Man.)

My friend, who had brought over some fresh soda bread and dill butter to snack on with our tea, as well as the cookies, during the playdate that was really a thiny veiled baking-exchange eating-excuse, asked, "Why don't you just not tell him about the nuts and see if he notices?"

"Ah," I replied. "I can't do that. Because of the anchovy thing."

And then I had to explain the anchovy thing.

When we first met, B was not a fan of fish. He had once eaten a piece of salmon that was quite nice, but saw little reason to repeat the experiment. Since those far-off days, I have gently introduced some seafood into his diet, with simple mild tilapia, salmon in peach-habanero marinade, mussels with lots of garlic, things like that. But when we first moved in together, I still had much to learn about the ways of man, The Man, and this man.

I had just moved across the Atlantic and was looking for a job, watching lots of Food Network, and doing the shopping and the cooking, since he was an overworked grad student who had to adjust to being home for dinner and not getting to go to Wal Mart at 3am any more, and who had very patiently let me reorganise all his bookshelves when I arrived, because evidently my psyche needed to lay claim to the place. Rachael Ray, my new girl-crush, told me that if you sizzled some anchovies out of a jar with some garlic at the start of making a tomato sauce, it would taste fabulously savoury but not at all fishy. I couldn't wait to try it.

So I made the sauce, and didn't tell him what the mystery ingredient was. He liked dinner well enough. Then came the big reveal. He was appalled. Horrified. Betrayed. Not happy. As far as he was concerned, I had deceived him. What was next? If a girl starts by sneaking anchovies into a man's dinner, no doubt arsenic and belladonna will soon follow.

I was contrite, learned that I couldn't always anticipate his reactions, and haven't snuck in ingredients again. (Though, you know, he might be happy to find I'd been gradually building up his immunity to arsenic, or iocane powder, when a random Sicilian tries to poison him. Oh well. His loss.)

Last night we were reminiscing about the incident, now that we're so much older and wiser.

"I realise now," I said, "that it was as if I'd fed meat to a vegetarian and told them afterwards."
"Yes, it was. Well, vegetarians might have an ethical reason for not eating meat."
"Exactly. So that would be a reasonable reaction."
"Wait a minute. You mean, my reaction was like that? Not that what you did was like that?"
"Yes. No. Your reaction."
"Oh. Oh. I thought you were being a bit generous there for a minute."
"No, no. As if."

******

And of course, I did check with him this morning that he didn't mind my writing about it. I know now not to spring things, even delicious things, on him without full disclosure in advance. (And don't worry about the cookies. He liked them.)

Things to do

2012-01-10T10:25:00.000-05:00

Things I am not doing right now though I'd really like to:

Buying these boots (black) online or in person, even though they're reduced and I waaant them like zombies waaaant braaains, but I tried them on and they're too narrow for me and I'm not sure I want to gamble that much on the possibility that they might stretch to fit my freaky feet.

Buying these other boots (brown) which are clearly too expensive as they're the same price the first ones were before they were reduced, but these are also beautiful and I don't know yet that they don't fit me.

Rushing off to the mall where I saw it two weeks ago and buying a down jacket that was more reduced in real life than it is online, because it's too far to go and it wouldn't still be there and I'm not sure about the colour and I don't really need a down jacket except it would be nice to have something warm that was light and had a hood.

Booking tickets to go to a family wedding in Italy this summer, because the prices are just insanely crazy, and we're already going to Ireland in March because we didn't go at Christmas. But this is good, because we might finally get to have a beach holiday at the Outer Banks, which is something I've wanted to do ever since I saw the Outer Banks on a map. I imagine us looking like one of those beautiful families in one of those beachside houses in a Land's End catalogue. The truth may be sandier and more sunburned, but I'm willing to risk it.

Making oatmeal raisin cookies.

Things I am not doing right now even though I should, because I have no desire to:

Cleaning any part of my filthy house.

Sorting and filing all the papers that are ranged on the shelf where I keep my computer.

Finding the hole punch so I can file the notes from last night's committee meeting.

Most of these things are beyond my control, or my budget, but I suppose I could get cracking on the cookies.

Snow

2012-01-09T16:07:00.001-05:00

It's snowing and I suddenly have a burning desire to look up cookie recipes. To be fair, I'm always happy to look up cookie recipes, but it's nice to have an excuse.

But I can't decide. What do you think is the right cookie for a snowy day?

Rhythm: gonna getcha

2012-01-07T19:54:00.001-05:00

I went to an aerobics class once.

It was 1991 and I was in my first year of university. All the girls were doing it - at least, some of all the girls - so a friend and I said we'd have a go. I lasted about ten minutes, I think, between the vast gym full of people who knew the steps gyrating away in time with the crazy-fit lycra-ed instructor, and the balcony full of male students whose lunchtime entertainment was to go and watch the scantily-clad girls bounce up and down. "I'm not going to be a piece of meat in your between-lectures porn fantasy," I said, as a good feminist; "and also, I don't like getting sweaty and I don't want to have to bring extra clothes to college every day, and I certainly don't want to shower in the sports centre, and it's too long a walk from the Arts block, and it looks haaaard."

So that was that. Until this morning, when I participated in an Ultimate Groove Workout - which turned out to be, as far as I'm concerned, thinly disguised aerobics to music. (Didn't aerobics always have music? But somehow this is different. Maybe the music is more intrinsic to the movement here.)

I had thought that my two or three years of ballroom and Latin dance would help me out, but it seemed not. Apparently, I'm incapable of moving my arms and my legs at the same time. You'd think I'd have noticed that before now, but it seems that over the years my body has become skilled at hiding this tiny handicap. Dancing with a partner, my arms were almost always engaged in leaning against the other person; it turns out that when you take this person away and ask me to make prescribed motions with my arms while stepping steps apace with my legs, my brain goes into its math zone: that fuzzy place where all of me decides to go on hiatus until someone asks an easier question. Or in this case, until the music slows and something relatively simple happens, like standing still or maybe lying down and closing my eyes.

Even when everyone was clapping their hands nonchalantly above their heads while skipping lightly from one step to the next, I was the one clapping out of time. Decades of my life dedicated to weekly choir practices, years of recorder and piano and clarinet lessons, many many nights spent shaking my booty on the dancefloor, and I couldn't even clap in the right place. Sigh.

The good news is that I can only get better. Surely.

Or petrel blue, as my mother always called it

2012-01-06T20:35:00.001-05:00

My school uniform was a dark teal skirt with a grey knitted sweater, light grey shirt and bottle-green-and-silver striped tie. Our secret shame was that the skirt wasn't a skirt, it was a pinafore. (Before I go any further let me clarify for Americans. A pinafore is what you would call a jumper. The sweater was what we would call a jumper. All clear? Good.) We only ever exposed its top half when mandated for school concerts or when sunbathing under the Home Economics room windows.

The pinafore was such a bone of contention that I remember it being a topic for our Irish Debates class in second year. I have no idea why we felt so put-upon by that extra swathe of mostly-invisible material, but it was seen as a vast injustice to us, when other schools, such as Loreto Foxrock and Mt Anville had real honest-to-goodness skirts. In fact, I think the teacher was hard-pressed to find anyone to argue the opposing side in the "That we should have a skirt instead of a tunic" dialogue. I remember her putting up some sort of feeble nonsense that girls of our age were developing (cue hand movement in the vague bustular region) at different paces and it was for our own modesty that this area was more hidden by the pinafore. Perhaps the girls at Mt Anville all lived in daily embarassment as their breasts grew overnight and the buttons on their shirts gaped and then popped undefended, but we were unmoved by their potential plight.

I know at least one girl who had taken to wearing her gym skirt instead of her tunic in protest - which rebellious behaviour went unnoticed until the end-of-term concert when she was found to be (gasp!) tunic-topless and relegated to the very back row. As she was not anywhere near the five-foot-eight or more of everyone else in the back row, this rendered her basically invisible for the whole performance. That showed her, I'm sure.

This morning I wore a teal top that I bought on sale somewhere or other last week, thinking that finally I should be able to wear teal without feeling like I was back in my uniform.

So yes, I can. But then it goes and dredges up stuff like this...

Crazy fool mother

2012-01-05T13:51:00.005-05:00

Sometimes I pretend I'm a stranger and have a conversation with myself that goes something like this:

"You what?"
"My daughter wakes up multiple times a night and I have to nurse her back to sleep and nobody else can do it and she has never slept through the night in her life."
"And she's ...?"
"Three."
"And you think this is perfectly reasonable."
"Well, it's not ideal, no. I'm sort of hoping she'll grow out of it."
"What sort of crazy fool woman are you?"
"Um. Yes."

And then I feel pretty stupid.

The night before last, after a prolonged putting back to sleep that saw me finally get to brush my teeth at midnight, Mabel slept on her own from 12.30 to 4.30. Four hours. I was so excited I spent the rest of the night planning to make a Facebook page called "Mabel slept for four hours on her own" just so I could Like it.

She's not even at the point technically known as sleeping through the night - the five-hours-at-a-time thing that you might reach with a baby who's a few months old, when after giving thanks to the deities and scattering burnt offerings over the ceremonial altar, you get greedy and think, well that's nice, but I'd like it to be five hours when I'm asleep, not just from 7pm to midnight, thank you very much, "technically". I'd LOVE her to sleep from 7 to 12, because then I could go out without rushing back to either a screaming child or a wide awake one, either of which will take a further hour to get to sleep now that I'm here because she's so disgruntled that I had the temerity to leave her.

Her sleeping is more in flux now than ever because we've scrapped the nap, mostly. Tomorrow night we're going to the cinema and a friend is babysitting, and so I'm going to give Mabel a nap so that she can stay up till we get home at ten. (If I put her to bed before we leave, she'll scream when she inevitably wakes up to find me missing. If I let her stay up, she'll be perfectly happy hanging out with one of her favourite grown-ups until we get back.) She definitely needs a nap now, after four napless days, but we're toughing it out, and she'll be fine so long as we don't try to go anywhere she needs to be civilized.

And as soon as I had written that she came to me and said "I know what we can do! We can go and have a nap!" so I took her upstairs and she was out like a light. I'll wake her after 40 minutes and I don't think it'll do too much damage to the master plan. It's one thing not napping a child who could do with one but won't admit it, but I'm not going to deny a nap to a child who actively seeks one out. I may be a crazy fool woman, but I'm not a monster.

Cryogenic

2012-01-04T12:40:00.003-05:00

Yesterday, one of the teachers at Mabel's school asked, "Did I see you run past my house the other morning?"
"Mumble," I replied, busying myself with the important task of posting some information about housekeeping duties to the noticeboard in her classroom.
"Sorry?"
"Yesnomubby. I mean, yes, I suppose it was. But I can't do it yet, so don't ask me about it."

I did learn some useful related facts this morning, though, which I will ennumerate for you here in handy list format.

Bad things about going for a short run in 21 F (that's -6 C) weather: My fingers don't thaw out until I get home again.

Good things about going for a short run in 21 F (that's -6 C) weather: At least my glasses don't slip down my nose from the sweat.

Most important thing about going for a short run in 21 F (that's -6 C) weather: Whatever you do, don't check to see what temperature it is before you leave, or you'll abandon the whole endeavour.

Chilly

2012-01-03T17:26:00.000-05:00

Mabel is eating a piece of frozen bread and complaining that it's cold. She won't let me defrost it or toast it though, so I can't really help her.

(We keep our bread in the freezer, mostly for space reasons. As we generally make toast, it doesn't matter to us, and we never have to worry about it going off. But it means that our children are slow to associate the word bread with the sliced stuff, and when Mabel asks for a piece of toast, I have to make sure to find out whether she wants it toasted or frozen. Pointing out that it's not toast if it's frozen does nothing to convince her.)

Geese are flying overhead, big flocks of them up from the lake spreading themselves across the sky. They've finally packed their little feathered suitcases and are heading for Florida. The temperature today is hitting a high of 32 F (or 0 C, which is freezing in both languages) for pretty much the first time this winter, and my fingers don't like it. If my fingernails weren't silver, you'd be able to see that my fingertips are a delicate shade of palest purple. A tiny flurry of snowflakes is whirling outside, and we will be driving the half-mile to pick Dash up from school.

It's all well and good to be cosy and warm inside while the winter wind howls, but when the winter wind makes the drainpipe outside your bedroom window vibrate in some unidentifiable way that sounds unpleasantly like a pneumatic drill at random intervals all night, things are less like snug as a bug and more like Night of the Living Dead. This is what was happening two nights ago outside Mabel's room, which just happens to be on the windward corner of the house and as inaccessible as possible by ladder or leaning out a window. I decamped to my bedroom leaving a soundly sleeping Mabel behind. She woke up three minutes later. I went back and got her, but she spent the next hour and a half flipping from one side to the other as she didn't nurse back to sleep, before she finally did.

Must be time for a cuppa. Should be warmer tomorrow. Maybe the geese will turn around.

Repeat to fade

2012-01-02T19:25:00.000-05:00

Conversations with a five-year-old go like this:

- Do you like this picture?
- Yes, it's great.
- Is it the best picture you've ever seen?
- Well, there was once this man called Dali who did some pretty good stuff...
- Is it the best picture of me and [the boy across the road] you've ever seen?
- Yes, yes, it probably is.
- Which picture do you like best? My picture or Mabel's picture?
- I love you both the same so I love your pictures both the same too.
- But which one is better? Is mine better?
- Yours is excellent for a five-year-old and hers is perfect for a three-year-old.
- Do you like this picture better than the picture I gave you for Christmas?
- I like them both. Can you stop asking now?
- Why?
- Because.

Conversations with a three-year-old go like this:

- I spy with my little eye, something that is black.
- Is it inside the car or outside the car?
- It's outside the car. And we saw it when we were leaving the house.
- Can we still see it now?
- No, it's in the red car next door to our house.
- This is not really the way you're supposed to play this game. Is it the dog that was in the car?
- Yes! It's the dog!

- I spy with my little eye, something that is brown.
- Is it inside the car or outside the car?
- It's outside the car and we ate it on Christmas morning and it's made of chocolate.
- Is it M&Ms?
- Yes! It's M&Ms!

- I spy with my little eye, something beginning with M.
- [Suspicious, because she usually does colours.] Is it Mabel?
- Yes! It's Mabel! Good guess, Mummy!

Wish

2012-01-01T19:47:00.000-05:00

I have no deep thoughts today. My children failed to provide me with material, parenting epiphanies were sorely lacking, and I didn't bake anything pretty. (Well, I made some muffins, but they were hardly original.) The fact that the clock ticked past midnight once again and a number turned over is not inspiring me to fill this page with insightful banalities.

So I'll just wish you a happy year, again, replete with simple - or exotic - pleasures, and thank you for reading.

If you're looking for a French lesbian tube, I gots nothin'.

The mouths of babes

2011-12-30T20:02:00.002-05:00

(With apologies for repetition to anyone who's read my or my husband's Facebook status updates recently.)

Mabel was looking for a library book.
- Tits, tits! she exclaimed.
- Um, I prevaricated.
- Tits. I want tits. You go into dem tits!
Then I realised she was looking for the book called You'll grow into them, Titch.

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

The kids got one of those swirly hooded chairs from Ikea for Christmas from a generous aunt. They have amused themselves ever since by pushing each other around, demanding to be pushed round by us, pushing themselves around with hands or feet, or closing themselves both in and doing I don't know what.

This last was going on the day after Christmas, with - apparently - something they were using as a pretend screwdriver, when I heard the conversation go something like this:

- Stop screwing [it?] around!
- I'm not screwing.
- You have to stop screwing now.
- Now I'm screwing! Screw, screw, screw...

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

Lately, Dash's fourth-birthday presents of Zingo and Junior Yahtzee have been experiencing a resurgence. Mabel is perfectly well able to play Zingo, though she gets bored with Yahtzee and wanders away after a few throws of the dice. A few days ago Dash and his dad were playing Yahtzee. They got to the end, when you have to add up the scores to find out who won.

Dash: Now for some math!
Mabel: No it's no-ot!
Dash: You don't even know what math is.
Mabel: Yes I do. Granny goes to math.

Revolutions

2011-12-29T18:02:00.001-05:00

I introduced Dash to the idea of new year's resolutions today. He liked the concept and immediately announced we should resolve to give more cookies to everyone. Laudable, though maybe not exactly somethijng that will jibe nicely with other people's weight-loss or healthy-eating aspirations.

Ironically, I think deciding to run - jog, whatever - on a regular basis and actually doing it might be the easiest of my resolutions. The other changes I want to make depend more on my children and less on just me; except for those that are good for the kids and make my life harder, like the one about letting them watch less TV.

But then there are the things I want to get the children to do, like getting Dash to eat more foods, and getting Mabel to sleep better. This is trickier, and requires wiles. (You'll note I say nothing about toilet training. She's on her own for that one at the moment.)

Dash and I decided that he's going to try a new food every day, even if it's just a tiny taste that he spits out, or another taste of something he didn't like before. If he doesn't, his regular bedtime game of superheroes won't happen. If he does, he'll get the superhero game and also a star on his chart. After ten stars, he'll get a dollar. So far today he's tried a cracker he didn't like before, and carrots; steamed and plain, and steamed and tossed in butter and salt. He didn't like any of them, but it's a start.

So there's that. The ultimate threat to keep him on track is that if he doesn't make an effort, we'll have to take him to a doctor or a therapist or someone, because I do think he's a lot worse than the average picky eater. I don't see that a therapist would be able to do any more than what we're trying now, but Dash would hate it, so the concept serves its purpose. (I found an SPD (Sensory Processing Disorder) checklist yesterday and really, though a few of the many behaviours listed could have applied to him at times in the past, he doesn't send up big red flags for anything, even in the "Oral Defensiveness" section, except this one:

picky eater, often with extreme food preferences; i.e., limited repertoire of foods, picky about brands, resistive to trying new foods or restaurants, and may not eat at other people's houses

Yes, that's my kid. And lots of other kids too, I think.)

Then there's the sleeping and the Mabel. For the past two nights she's been up till almost 10pm, after protracted nursing-not-to-sleep, leaving alone to yell a bit, sending up Daddy, more nursing, more yelling, finally bringing downstairs because I wanted my coffee, and eventual dropping off. I think this means it's time to nix the nap. Much as I love my hour of peace in the middle of the day, and much as I think she can still use it, I need my sanity and my two hours on the sofa at the end of the day even more. We'll work through the afternoons of crazy until she gets used to it, and when Dash is back at school it should be easy enough to instigate an hour of quiet play (though not in her room, I fear) after lunch.

I reviewed my options, discussed it with friends and spouse, and decided to start with the tactic that's probably least likely to work, but involves the least crying. Because I can't take the crying, and in the middle of the night I know exactly which of us is more likely to back down. We're going to try putting them together tonight, on mattresses, both in Dash's room. For a sleepover. Yay! Sleepover! Mabel said that she won't need me to go to sleep with when she has Dash there. So it must be true.

You may see I've created an entirely new category for this type of post, called Best Intentions. So you needn't point out that I'm always promising to do things that don't pan out. I'm painfully aware of that. But here I am again, writing from the point of view of unalloyed optimism, as we've yet to try which means we've also yet to fail. There's probably only a tiny chance it will help, but heck, here goes nothing. Again.

Saving myself

2011-12-28T14:43:00.001-05:00

And so it came to pass on Christmas morning that I opened my present and lo, there was a pair of running shoes and a marvel of sartorial engineering sometimes known as a sports bra, and thus I could avoid my self-appointed destiny no longer and on St Stephen's Day (also known as Boxing Day or December 26th) I donned my new apparel and went out for a run.

Why does nobody jog any more? In the 80s, when yuppies were invented, everyone who did that sort of thing went jogging, with their Sony walkmans and their Adidas, didn't they? People only ran from escaped lions, or the Feds. My mother's vocabulary is still stuck there: when I tell her that B goes running she expects him to be sprinting from start to finish. (And winning. My mother expects him to be sent to Mars and/or win a marathon at any moment.) "You mean jogging," she says, to clarify. "Yes, Mother. Jogging. Except it's called running these days."

Anyway. When I came downstairs all togged out in my running bottoms and my running top and my running fleecy hoodie and my new bouncy shoes, B grinned admiringly and said I looked great. Taller, even. I very nearly went back upstairs that point, because clearly the gear had done its job already. Magical. I probably looked smaller in volume because the bra was squishing me as I had never been squished before, that was all.

Anyway. Out I went. And I have to say that the constricting upholstery did its job and the only parts of me bouncing as I set off down the hill (always good to go downhill first, so long as you can work your run so you never have to come back up) were my cheeks. The cheeks on my face, I mean. And my bum.

Too many years of cycling to school and to work have left their mark on my psyche, and I always think running downhill should take no effort at all, but the truth is that you still have to put one foot in front of the other, even with gravity helping. I apply this principle to everything actually, assuming that once I'm past the halfway mark, the rest will do itself. Sadly, not always true. Not even mostly true. But still, the downhill gave me a nice boost and I got around the rest of my 1.6-mile route running a bit and walking a bit. I was still able to run to the front door when I rounded the corner to our road, so I felt pleased that I hadn't overdone it.

As if there's any chance of that. I vividly remember Mrs McGoldrick's enraged tones yelling at me from the other side of the (field) hockey pitch: "Stop saving yourself, Maud," as I pootled around in the idle backwaters of "defence" and tried to look as if I gave a hoot. When it comes to exercise, I have a history of saving myself. Women and children first, you know.

But that's not the point. The point is that the shower afterwards felt like I'd earned it, and yesterday my legs were that good sort of sore, and even though it hadn't completely worn off this morning, I went out again and did the same thing, and I could swear I was able to save myself just a tiny bit less.

Mabel declared that she doesn't want me to go out for a run again until she's four. But then, she says she's not going to wear underpants till she's four either. I hope she'll be proved wrong on both counts.

Meringues and gingersnaps

2011-12-27T13:55:00.003-05:00

Finally, some baking updates I owe you.

Gingersnaps going in

One afternoon when the kids were otherwise occupied, I rolled out the second half of the gingerbread dough as thin as my OCD little heart desired, to see if I could make crispy, crunchy gingersnaps. They turned out perfectly.

Gingersnaps all out

And these are the meringues I made to use up the egg whites left over from the other cookies. I whipped the three egg whites (should have been four, but one absent-mindedly went into the cookie dough) with my hand-held electric mixer until they were stiff. Then I mixed in three tablespoons of white sugar and folded in another three of light brown sugar. (Nigella's suggestion to make them chewier.)

Brown sugar meringues

I dolloped them artistically onto parchment paper on a cookie sheet and baked them in a very low oven (140 C or 275 F) for about an hour, then turned the heat off and left them there until they were cold. (Again, Nigella's instruction.) Easy as pie. In fact, much easier, I'll wager. The only thing is that they do occupy the oven for a long time so it's probably best to cook them last thing in the evening and just leave them overnight.

They stay fresh for up to a week in an airtight container, so they're the perfect lazy dessert for a special occassion - just add cream and fruit.

Mmmm

The hare, part II

2011-12-26T14:25:00.003-05:00

The hare is the Christmas cake, and part I is here.

So. In November I made the cake, and put it away in an airtight container and conveniently forgot about it for a month. That was easy.

About a week ago, I bought some marzipan in Ikea. I painted the unwrapped cake with warmed apricot jam (to help it stick), rolled out the marzipan, and stuck it on. Because this is just the inner icing - the undercoat, if you like - you don't have to be very particular about how it looks, but it's good to aim for a fairly uniform thickness.

The cake looks shiny because this was after I'd done the thing with the jam

You can see here how the marzipan was pieced together, Frankenstein-like, to cover the whole thing. Don't worry, I did that last bit before I put it away again.

Then it went back into its tupperware for a few more days, until I was ready to make the royal icing. It turns out that royal icing is much like making meringues, and just as simple. I whipped two egg whites, gradually adding about a pound of icing sugar (confectioners' sugar) as I went along, and finally mixed in a teaspoon of lemon juice. (I don't know why. Because the recipe told me to.)

It starts out runny, but as you add the sugar the expanding egg can't quite keep up and eventually it becomes the right consistency to stick onto your cake.

I went for the rustic look, because making this smooth was way beyond me and my new red spatula (not pictured). In my parents' house, this is the point when I'd put my little Christmas scene on top, or at least sprinkle some sugar silver balls in festive fashion, but I have no cake decorations and had neglected to buy any silver balls for the task. I'm also missing the vital cake wrapper thingy, usually red and white and gold with fringey bits, to wrap around the outside. Maybe I'll pick one up next time we're home. (You have no idea what I'm talking about, but the cake in the photo on this page is wearing one. I think it keeps the cake fresh once it's cut into.)

And finally. After Christmas dinner, and our Christmas meringues, we cut the cake. This is how it looked. Personally, I think it's a tiny bit dry, but B sighed a sigh of nostalgia at his first bite, so I must have done something right.

Here's the kicker, though. He doesn't eat the icing.

Next year, I'll make it bald.

Merry whatsit

2011-12-25T19:29:00.000-05:00

Eighteen people have visited my blog today, so clearly my audience demands that I post something.

They weren't even here as the result of some random Google search, unlike the poor misguided person who, according to my stats, recently looked for "French lesbian tube" and somehow - really, I have no idea how - ended up here. Maybe they saw the error of their ways and decided to stay and read about my thrilling life instead. Let's hope.

As predicted, it's been a much quieter, more relaxed Christmas Day than our usual whirlwind of courtesy calls and extended-family dinner and mince pies, but the basics of crazy-excited children and something containing fruit juice and alcohol with breakfast remained unmovable. (In Ireland, at my in-laws', it's always buck's fizz, or what Americans call mimosas - champagne and orange juice. We rang the changes just a little with bellinis - peach juice and prosecco. Because we're rebels.) I made buttermilk pancakes and bacon; Dash ate one bite of pancake with a lot of maple syrup, and Mabel ate an orange segment.

However, this evening we all ate dinner together at the dining table, which was a feat in itself. We had to partake in a game of I-Spy to keep the kids in situ, but, probably, conversing about the situation in Korea and Mitt Romney's election prospects are beyond a three-year-old and a five-year-old. And I-Spy was more fun. (My words were "brussels sprouts" and "wine", because I didn't extend myself too far in finding things to spy. Mabel made us guess the blue shoes on her baby in the other room, which was a little tricky. B had us trying to pinpoint the red stripe on his sweater, which merited a slap, but my end of the table was too far away.)

I roasted a chicken, and potatoes, and did sprouts with bacon. It could probably have profited from gravy, but hey, whatareyougonnado? Dash has recently taken a vegetarian stance on behalf of the poor dead animals, which I laud from an ethical point of view, but really when you're a peanutbuttersandwichatarian, anything else is purely hypothethcal. I keep telling him I'll be delighted when he's a vegetarian, but he'll have to actually eat some vegetables. Mabel ate a lot of chicken and nothing else. Then we had the last of the meringues with cream, and cut into the long-awaited Christmas cake.

Photos tomorrow, when I've had less wine. I'm told I still have to help finish the bottle.

Happy whatever-you-want-to-celebrate to you and yours.

Elephants

2011-12-23T20:46:00.000-05:00

When you invite people over for food, it's usually important to have something to eat in the house. Similarly, when you invite friends over for drinks, it's customary to have more than just our usual milk, water, or fruit-and-vegetable juice available. And so it was that I went to the shops again this morning.

B and I, as many people do, spent our twenties expanding our tastes for drinks both fruity and hoppy (though not at the same time), well-chilled or mulled, spicy, bold, well-rounded, Russian, slammed, shot, bubbly, flaming, muddled, colour-changing, or with a slice of clove-studded orange floating in them. Whether it had a nice creamy head or came in a fancy glass, we were probably happy to try it.

Then we had a baby. First there was the ritual giving-up-of-alcohol-during-pregnancy for me. And then the cautious re-introduction of just a little alcohol while nursing. And then we moved from Texas to Maryland and somehow I felt as if we were moving trans-Atlantically and couldn't take anything comestible with us, so I gave away our few bottles of spirits and we arrived here without so much as the makings of a gin-and-tonic to our name.

And thus, almost, we have stayed. We like a beer with dinner, we drink wine now and then, but hard liquor has not been a part of our lives recently. My aunt and uncle stayed with us before Dash turned two, and gifted us with a bottle of gin - for some reason - when they left. It has - I kid you not - sat unopened in the freezer ever since.

(B would like to point out that that's not strictly true. We've only lived in this house for 18 months. Before that, it sat unopened in the freezer in our old house. And there was probably some period when it was in transit from one freezer to the other and therefore was in no freezer at all.)

My point still stands. We're pathetic, that's what. I had great intentions of having gins-and-tonic this summer, because what could be more refreshing, right? But then I was stuck looking for tonic water that didn't have high-fructose corn syrup in it, because I couldn't believe that was necessary. And when I finally found it, in the organic supermarket, I couldn't believe it was that expensive, so I didn't buy it. B eventually circumvented all this by going out one day a few months ago and just picking up a bottle of Schweppes, HFCS and all, and that has sat unopened in the fridge ever since.

So today we said, "Right. Let us have on hand this Christmas the makings of cosmopolitans. And maybe bellinis."

I went to the supermarket that has alcohol. I needed more sugar for icing the Christmas cake anyway (more on that in a few days, I promise) and more bread for Dash's interminable peanut-butter sandwiches (guess what he's having for Christmas dinner?), and a bottle of wine for the day that will be in it, since we've already started into the one I got before. (Note to self: should stock up with more than one wine bottle at a time. Maybe need to throw a party so people will bring us wine.) I got a lime, for the cosmo's. I got peach juice for the bellinis. We already have a bottle of prosecco in the fridge that needs to be used.

Then I realised the supermarket-with-alcohol doesn't stock spirits. So I got back into the car and drove to the liquor shop. At least this isn't Pennsylvania, where no supermarkets have any alcohol at all, and you can't even buy beer and wine in the same establishment. And nothing on Sundays.

I picked up a bottle of Guinness to make beef-and-Guinness stew with for Christmas-Eve dinner. And a bottle of vodka for the cosmopolitans. I contemplated the Cointreau, but it was too expensive. (I have only just now looked at that link up there and discovered that's meant to go in the cosmo too. I think we used to make them without.) Where's duty-free when you need it? When will we ever be travelling light enough to think it's a good idea to add a heavy glass bottle to our luggage on the way home from the airport?

I came home. We still need at least cranberry juice for the cosmo's, and there are only two beers left in the fridge. Entertaining will have to wait for another trip to the supermarket. In the meantime, would anyone like a bellini? I think we'll be having some with our bacon and pancakes on Christmas morning.

Mabel raiding someone else's Christmas drinks stash two years ago

Seezun's greetings

2011-12-22T09:52:00.000-05:00

At our little parent-teacher conference a month or so ago, while waxing lyrical about how wonderful Dash is (of course), his teacher did say that she wished he was a little less of a perfectionist sometimes (oh, so do I... huh?). He was very reluctant, she said, to try to write anything by sounding it out - he insisted on asking for every letter. Which is fine at home, but I can imagine that a class of twenty-three five- and six-year-olds all asking you for the next letter could get tiring.

On Tuesday, Dash sat down to make a card for his beloved teacher. I oversaw the drawing of the picture:

[Draws a big curve]
- What's that going to be?
- An earring. Because we're giving her earrings.
- Um. No, we're not. Remember I said that wasn't the best idea? We're giving her a gift card.
[Erases curve. Draws a big rectangle.]
- No, you really don't have to draw the gift card. Why don't you draw something Christmassy?
- Okay, I'll draw a present. On a reindeer.

Then I was distracted in the other room while he started with the writing. I could hear him sounding out "Happy Christmas," but he didn't ask me anything, so I didn't offer.

I think his teacher should be happy with the result. I loved it.

Slow down

2011-12-21T12:00:00.000-05:00

And now we're for it, rushing helter-skelter head-over-heels into Christmas as if there were no tomorrow, or Friday or Saturday for that matter. Things were progressing in a fairly orderly fashion until suddenly the last weekend before was gone and there's no stopping it now. We haven't been to a carol concert or seen The Nutcracker or put up lights outside the house (not for want of trying, but for want of sockets in the right places) but now it's follow-through-or-bust time for everyone with all those little plans of things you thought would be nice to do or make or give, and we're rapidly coming to the day when we'll all throw up our hands and wish Christmas had never been invented because it does nothing but stress everyone out and cause massive rifts in families that were otherwise happily chugging along in mutual indifference but have now been thrown together and ordered to be not just civil but extra nice to each other because of the season that's in it, and sometimes that's just too much for anyone to handle.

Things would go so much more smoothly if we could just hunker down and get through the darkest time of the year without this annual requirement to decorate, to shop, to spend, to wrap, to give, to recieve, to entertain, to cook to bake to mull to spike to sprinkle to keep up.

You don't have to keep up. Nobody is making you do this. Nobody except your mother, your husband, your in-laws, your children, their friends, the economy, and the media. Stop. Breathe. Revise your plans. Do the least you can get away with. Do less than that, because your harshest judge is yourself and everyone else is too busy wondering how much they have to do and what they can get away without doing. Give yourself permission to take something off your to-do list. Simplify. Delegate. Outsource.

See the people you like. Give presents to your friends, if you want to. Dress up if it's fun to dress up. Bake if you like to bake. Make your children happy by sitting on the floor to play a game. Make one fewer side dish.

Give yourself a break. It's Christmas, after all.

Commute

2011-12-20T14:00:00.000-05:00

Three to four o'clock every weekday is not exactly my finest hour. It's then that I have to disturb Mabel in her avid viewing of Angelina Ballerina or her complicated play scenario involving all the horses living in the dollhouse (you'd be surprised), stuff her into the stroller, with a snack if I'm feeling magnanimous, and get Dash from school. And then shepherd them both home again.

Most often, Mabel does not feel like putting on a coat when we set out. Quite often, she doesn't want shoes and socks either. This is okay in September, or even October, and we've had a very mild November, but nowadays it's pretty chilly and shoes would really help, I think. The biggest concession I can get from her is usually to hide her bare tootsies under a blanket so passing motorists won't call Child Protective Services. It's very considerate, really.

On a good day, she'll eat a snack or play with some toys all the way there. I can't really let her out to meander or we'll be late. So apart from the nagging feeling that I'm giving my child pneumonia, this is really the easy part. Half a mile later we get to the school.

Mabel attempts to hop out, and I take my moment to swoop in and deliver a shoe ultimatum. She acquiesces, and then, finally shod, she's off to climb a tree or run up and down on a bench in some dangerous fashion, leading younger, more impressionable friends into temptation as they too wait for their big siblings to exit the hallowed doors of learning. I chat to some other mothers for a brief moment of relative peace.

The doors open and Dash is released as if on a spring - he runs down the ramp to hug me, and his sister, if she's in our orbit. How sweet, I think they all think. And then we set off, homeward bound.

I am hampered immediately - it's a conspiracy, like when someone in an Italian railway station distracts you by rustling a newspaper in front of your face while their accomplice runs off with your luggage - by Dash pulling his folder out of his backpack to show me some wonderful worksheet he completed or drawing he coloured in, while Mabel sprints towards the road as fast as her little marathon-runner's-daughter legs can carry her. Luckily, so far she has always stopped at the kerb, and the nice crossing guard would probably catch her even if she didn't. I wave Dash and his pages away and run after her, catching up just in time to stop her crossing the road, and turn right instead. We wend our way along the path, Mabel running ahead and Dash insisting on plonking himself in the stroller.

"Get. Out. You're five and a half. Why are you in the stroller?"
"Did you bring snacks? Where's my water? Did you not bring my water? Why does Mabel have water?"
"It's the middle of winter. You don't need water. You're not going to die of thirst before we get home. Didn't you just have a snack after recess?"
"I didn't like my snack at recess. I'm thirsty."
"How was school?" Trying to reclaim the cheerful, interested-Mommy ground.
"Fine."
"What did you do today?"
"Work."
Listen to that, he's fourteen already.

We may or may not stop at the playground at this point, depending on the weather and how clothed and shod Mabel is, but it usually becomes clear that Dash wants to sit in the stroller because he can't hold his need to go to the bathroom once he starts walking, so I soon pry her out of the baby swing and we set off again. I try to put her in the stroller, but she rebels. He tries to sit on the front part, where there is no proper seat and his five-year-old legs now trail along the ground. (I believe I described this a year or so ago. He hasn't got any shorter since.) I rebel. They both run like crazy towards the second road-crossing of our daily oddysey.

Yesterday, around this point, as I slogged along pushing my giant child like a young rajah travelling in state, in the wake of my smaller, overtired, hopped up on, I dunno, air or something, speck-in-the-distance one, Dash hummed a little ditty of his own composing. The lyrics went, "Dash is the best one in his family-y-y..." I restrained myself, with great difficulty.

Then we turn the corner and have to navigate a fine line between the house whose owners are going to sue me one day for letting my children walk on their wall, off which they will no doubt one day fall, before I sue them for having a wall that children like to walk on; and the house a little further on on the other side of the street where the children like to steal the ornamental stones and bring them home. At some point I lose patience and stuff Mabel into the stroller, clicking the straps to keep her there. The day she figures out how to unclick herself, I'm toast.

Finally we turn onto our court, and I unleash the beast. I mean, Mabel. They both run haphazardly towards the house and, just when I think we can finally go in and be in a somewhat controlled environment again, they swerve off course and head for the scooters and bikes instead of the door. "Noooooo," I lament. "No, we are not staying out. We have to go in... oh, all right, just for five minutes..." And they're specks in the distance again.

Christmas cookies

2011-12-19T13:50:00.000-05:00

Right now I am a miracle of over-achievement. I have meringues in the oven, french toast in the pan, gingerbread dough ready to roll, and now I'm trying to blog. I'm also letting Elmo and a bowl of apple slices do the child-minding, because though Mabel annouced she was ready for her nap as soon as we got in the door from school - and so was I; this morning was a co-op morning, so I spent two and a half hours rolling playdough, shaking glitter, breaking up three-year-old fights, reading stories while six children tried to sit on my lap, washing small hands and then trying to stuff them into mittens: I'm pooped - she then did not fall asleep but popped up again and asked what was for lunch.

The meringues are because I made two batches of cookie dough yesterday, to give to friends as ready-frozen, bake-me-when-you-need-me presents, and my recipe calls for two egg yolks. Last time this happened I conscienciously put the unused egg whites in the fridge, whence I just extracted them five minutes ago, threw them out and reclaimed the tupperware container I've been without for a few months now. So I made today's meringues with the more recent whites in an attempt to atone - and honestly, it took three minutes and I should have learned how to do this years ago. (On the other hand, I haven't tasted them yet. But they looked good going in.)

I made the gingerbread dough on Friday, and on Saturday morning, while B was out running a race, I presided over the most successful baking/decorating session we've ever had. I take no credit for this: the trick, as I told a friend who was lamenting her riotously chaotic attempt to decorate a gingerbread house in the company of three three-year-olds, is to have a five-year-old in the mix. While his sister piled up her dough and told me it was a castle, Dash industriously rolled and cut and pressed and shaped as carefully as my type-A little heart ever could have wished.

Perhaps we think that as soon as our kids are old enough to convey the results to their mouths independently, they'd really enjoy to bake and decorate some cookies, beginning a lovely family holiday tradition. But honestly, they won't remember that you didn't do it when they were two, and you'll be a lot saner if you wait till they're four or five before you start.

But then, maybe I'm just a curmudgeon. When we got to the decorating I gave them one cookie each, a tiny tube of icing which was all I had in the house, and a few chocolate chips for buttons. Minimalism, always minimalism.

Maybe when they're sixteen I'll be ready to tackle a gingerbread house.

(And I didn't even burn the french toast.)

Wax on, wax off

2011-12-16T12:37:00.000-05:00

Last night I took Dash to his karate class, instead of hustling him out the door with his dad as I usually do. I thought it was the last of the session (in fact, there are two more) and I had never seen him in action.

We arrived a few minutes late, so as soon as we reached the gym Dash was kicking off shoes, peeling off socks, and joining the other children in front of the instructor. Half of them had proper white karate gear with orange belts; the other half, like him, were in regular clothes. I sat myself on a bench and watched my child in this new environment where he belonged and I was the outsider.

At first I felt a little bad for him: he seemed to have trouble catching up with what they were doing, and the instructor was moving quickly and could hardly see Dash behind the white-clad taller kids, who were clearly more advanced. But after a few minutes the class was split in two, with one teacher taking the orange-belters to the other end of the hall while Dash's class stayed with the other and broke down a long series of movements - punches, kicks, and blocks - to practice them over and over. It reminded me of my ballroom dancing classes, watching the movements and trying to replicate them with my unwieldy limbs - but then at least I had a partner to rely on, whose very presence helped my body remember what to do.

(I took ballroom and latin dancing classes for a few years before I left Dublin. I absolutely loved it. The only catch was that I functioned so much by muscle memory that though I could perform the steps perfectly with my own regular partner, I was pretty much lost without him. It wasn't that he was pushing me around the floor or that the others couldn't lead; it really was that when dancing with that one person my body knew where to go, but with anyone else, when I needed to engage my brain to tell my feet what to do, the process was much more prone to disaster.)

So there was Dash, clearly the smallest and probably also the youngest in his class - they can start at five, but it looked like the others were six or even older - giving it his all. While some kids were goofing off or just going through the motions, flopping their arms around like wet fish and shuffling through the steps, I could see the intensity in every move he made. His arms were strong, his fists clenched, his steps deliberate. He wasn't just gamely giving it a go; he was focused and determined and undeterred by the others a head taller. As the sequence got longer and the moves more complicated I was really impressed by his ability to put it all together and keep going in the right direction, even without the teacher to mirror.

The class ended after some fun mat instruction on how to fall correctly, and as I headed for the other side of the room with Dash, the black-belt instructor acknowledged me with a gruff - manly, karate-like - smile and said, "He's doing great."

Dash sat on the floor and I resisted the impulse to help him while he got his socks disentangled. It's only a year or so since he finally started to put them on himself, and now here he is taking classes, learning moves, knowing words I don't even know, putting his mark on the world.

He doesn't even want to do karate again next term. He's thinking maybe basketball.

Seasonal

2011-12-15T13:49:00.000-05:00

The good thing about being thousands of miles from your loved ones at Christmas (sniff, sniff) is that at this point, when all around are wringing their hands and declaring to Facebook that they're not remotely organized, will never be organized, and vow to be super-duper organized next year, you can sit smugly with your tea and muffin and bask in the glow of having it all in hand.

No doubt a large whale will now fall from the sky to crush me in my insufferable cockiness.

But, fingers crossed and stuff, I'm not too disorganized. Cards were posted, with photos, to the lucky few recipients. The parcels to Ireland went off last Wednesday - two days before the Post Office's deadline for international mail, but up to the wire on my own personal last-chance-to-queue-up-child-free timeline. (And boy, I'm glad I did it child-free, especially when I discovered that the large box I'd so cleverly packed everything in was now too big for the regular customs form and needed a special iron-clad extra-information form to be filled in. I was also glad I'd covered up the graphics and lettering on the box I'd snaffled from outside the supermarket with plain paper, as I heard the woman behind me being told that she couldn't mail that ex-wine-bottle-box as it was with all that other stuff visible on it. Well, you would feel a little silly if your presents all ended up at a vineyard in California.)

I have procured marzipan - from IKEA, of all places - to commence icing the Christmas cake, the children's presents have arrived from far-flung Amazon (not the river), and I even have something for my husband that's a tiny bit more imaginative than a CD and a book. (It's not even a book and a sweater, so there.) I am counting the slippers I bought him yesterday in Target as part of his present too, even if he did ask me to buy them, they were not wrapped up, he's been wearing them since last night, and - oh yes - I don't bring home a paycheck so I suppose, technically, he pays for everything. But I totally was going to get him slippers for Christmas because I knew he needed them, so it counts, right? I'm just so thoughtful and concerned for his cold feet that I didn't want him to have to wait another day for them. Or even have to go to the bother of unwrapping them.

So that's how organized I am. We also have a tree, though there will be no presents under it until Christmas Eve, because three-year-olds are not known for their self-restraint. What we don't have is any actual plans for the day, or any of the days surrounding the day. I don't know what we're going to eat or who we're going to see or even what I'm going to wear (which is really a moot point if we don't see anyone). Maybe we'll spend Christmas Day in our pyjamas, eating muffins and drinking Prosecco (just the adults, I promise), and watching cartoons.

That doesn't sound so bad, really.

Today's Public Service Announcement

2011-12-13T10:44:00.000-05:00

Here's a new topic.

What do you think of if I say "transgender"? Drag queens in dodgy dives and Pride parades? The big reveal in The Crying Game? (Oops. Sorry.) Middlesex, if you've read it? Now what if I say "transgender child"? Ross from Friends wearing a dress and throwing a tea party? Maybe the stupid captions that the trashy magazines throw at Shiloh Jolie-Pitt from time to time when they've run out of pregnancy rumours for Jennifer Aniston? (Angelina was pregnant with Shiloh when I was expecting Dash. And Gwen Stefani with Kingston, and Jennifer Garner was just ahead by a month or two with Violet. That's a link that can never be broken, the celebrity-pregnancy-sister link.) (Wait, is Jennifer Aniston actually pregnant now? I can't keep up.)

Transgenderedness (I don't know if that's a real word, but I bet it is) is not something that affects my children or anyone I know right now, but it came up recently and was so interesting that I feel like I need to spread the educational word. What follows is my own very lightly educated opinion. If I've got something wrong, please let me know. I aim to enlighten.

Our society, for whatever reason, has decided to lump transgender in a box with gay, lesbian, and bisexual. But transgender - in children, at least - is not about sex, it's about gender.

Sex is a biological fact; gender is the boy/girl identity, and everything that goes with it, that people assume, usually at a very young age. For most of us the two things mesh and we go about our lives thinking gender just is another word for sex and blithely misusing it all over the place in an effort to save granny's blushes. (You are finding out the sex of the baby, not its gender, no matter how much more polite you might think that sounds.) To put transgender in simple terms, I think it's possible to say that a person's body grew one way, but their brain is wired for the other.

Transgender is also not about sexual preference. This is the Very Important Thing to remember. This is why it is perfectly possible for a child to be officially diagnosed as transgender when they are as young as four years old. They are not deciding that they find boys, or girls, or both, sexually attractive. They are telling the world that they are a boy or a girl, no matter what the world tells them they should be, based on their physical appearance.

These children face a huge struggle in their lives ahead. If they are lucky, their parents will listen and take their feelings to heart, and read good books and consult trustworthy experts, and let the child identify as they wish to. They might make it through elementary school unnoticed and unquestioned in their "new" identity. But when adolescence hits, they'll have to make some huge decisions about hormone treatments and eventual possible surgery, and their lives will always be marked by their difference.

And those are the lucky ones, in today's society where we understand that such a thing is possible. The unlucky ones walk a much sadder, lonelier road.

That's my PSA for today, so that in the unlikely event that this issue comes your way, you might face it with a tiny bit more education, insight, and compassion than otherwise.

Move-y time

2011-12-12T10:30:00.000-05:00

In a gigantic triumph of optimism over experience, we all went to the movies yesterday. It was our first movie together as a family, and Mabel's first ever trip to the cinema, not to mention Dash's first since last Thanksgiving's disastrous half-viewing of Tangled, and it went admirably.

On Saturday, were were supposed to have a date night, but our babysitter forgot us. I gave her an Irish half-hour leeway, and by the time I realised she'd crossed the line from a little late to probably not coming, our delicately timed window of opportunity was closing and there was no point trying to get her. Also, it turned out I didn't have her mum's phone number.

(As she's only 13, her mum looks after all her scheduling. Which is a less-than-ideal situation, really, because her mother is a busy, working mother-of-two who has other things on her mind, and the babysitter is a 13-year-old girl whose first priority probably is not her babysitting job. Basically, I blame myself for not sending a confirmation e-mail on Saturday morning. And she was very apologetic, said they'd had the day from hell and all forgot, asked can we reschedule... I'm not sure whether to give her another chance or find an older babysitter we should have probably got in the first place. Probably both.)

So I was hungry and cold and grumpy and then Mabel refused to go to sleep. She had been going to stay up with the babysitter and fall asleep, um, organically, let's say - that is, if I put her to bed before we left (a) she'd never go to sleep that early and (b) when - not if - she woke up, she'd be unhappy* to find not-me there. And she won't go to bed for anyone else, but if allowed to stay up she'll either happily play the entire time or fall asleep on the sofa while pretending she's not tired. So I was hoping for the latter, but there's only so long you can push that, so if we weren't out the door at 7.30 - not to mention the issue of the place we wanted to go for dinner being popular on a Saturday night - it was too late to go by 8.00.

Finally, having been brought downstairs again while I had some hastily conceived pasta-from-the-freezer to haul me back up the cliff from Evil Mummy to Nice Mummy, she went to sleep at about 9.45. So the next morning we slept in till almost 8am. She's been in a phase of 6am wakings, so this was a departure, and while welcome, I was afraid it had put the kybosh on Sunday's nap.

As predicted, 12.30 came and went and Mabel decided she didn't want a nap after all; what she really wanted was some cinnamon toast. So after lunch, I looked at my precious, overtired daughter and decided that her father and I should indulge ourselves at the expense of our children, and that today was the day to go to The Muppets. "If she's tired," I thought, "she can just snuggle up on my lap."

What sort of self-delusional teabag was I steeping in my mug of piping-hot self-indulgence? This is the sort of denial that you are reduced to after five and a half years of parenthood and about that many trips to the cinema in the whole time. I conveniently chose to forget that when tired, my children turn into Duracell/Energizer bunnies, unable to sit still, and - for Mabel at least - also unable to shut up.

We at least had the sense to miss most of the obscenely loud trailers and ads before going in. We even got Dash to use the bathroom so he wouldn't spend the whole time jigging in his seat. Mabel, in underpants, refused to go. She sat on my knee - because her own seat kept tipping up and swallowing her - and, to her credit, stayed dry the entire time, until we arrived home and she peed all over herself because she just won't go to the toilet for me.

And she sat there and ate popcorn for probably the first half of the film. For most of the second half, she climbed onto my lap, from there to the empty seat beside me, back down off it, and up on to my lap again. About one gazillion times. Stopping (or not) only to ask in piercing tones why they were doing that, whether that was the baddie, why he was the baddie, why he wanted to knock down the theatre, and a host of other pertinent questions. Or to declaim random non-sequiturs such as, "I like my friends, Mommy**." Which was fine most of the time except when it coincided with a brief quieter interlude in the film.

Eventually the climbing was too much, and, with what I estimated to be five minutes to go judging by the advancement of the plot, I took her out of her seat and brought her down to the passage to the door, put her down and said "Run up and down there." Just like the bunny, she took off as soon as her toes touched the ground, and happily ran a few laps. Then she found a handrail to climb, so I brought her down to the very front seating area, where we were out of sight of most of the audience, and let her clamber around for a while, shushing her regularly. At this point I noticed that she'd taken off not just her shoes - politely handed to me much earlier - but also her socks. The floor of a cinema is just where you want to romp barefoot, isn't it? (Ugh. Now I'm having flashbacks to the sticky carpet of the big screen at the Savoy in Dublin, never seen but always felt, slightly spongy and holding onto your shoes just a moment too long at every step. This floor wasn't that bad. At least, it wasn't carpet.)

And then it was the credits and we could gather our belongings, locate the socks, and take her and her brother - who sat still and enjoyed the film like a pro - home for pizza, a bath, and an early bedtime. The weekend was pretty decently salvaged after all.

*screaming blue bloody murder, that's what.

** It pains me to admit it, but what she calls me sounds more like "Mommy" than her brother's "Mummy". Except when she's saying Mom, or Mama, or Mummy Jaguar, or whatever my moniker of the day happens to be.

Raindrops keep falling on my daydreams

2011-12-10T13:08:00.001-05:00

Mabel is very much enjoying this song these days. It may have taken over from One Dozen Monkeys, at least for a while. I think it's hilarious that my budding grammar maven insists on expanding "you'll" to "you will", with no care for scansion.

I think she's really going to get into the Christmas spirit in a week or two. Yesterday she ran up to me:
"Mummy, sing 'Redolf, the rud...', 'Redulf the rod...' ... sing the song about the reindeer."

The thing she's messing with in the video is one of those devices for hooking bikes on the back of a car. Sadly, no longer much use to us as B left his bike out front one too many times and it disappeared. So the frame thing came into the house, and Mabel found it this morning and decided it was her pilates machine. She's doing exercises on it while she sings, you'll notice.

The kids are mostly mystified by what pilates is, I realise. It's just this mystical place I disappear to on Wednesday evenings (sometimes), and I'd love to know what their little minds envision when they think of it. Earlier in the week I had brought my pilates mat into the house, and they unrolled it and gave themselves a pilates class. "This is a very difficult pilate," Dash advised Mabel, as he contorted himself in to some sort of pushup on the mat.

Which brings me to my other traffic-stopping revelation for the day: it's much nicer to think about exercising than to actually do it. I was happy with my new decision to start running (walking briskly in expensive clothes, whatever), and it was lovely to think about how nice it will (firmly using the future tense, none of these hypotheticals for me) be when I am fit. But B was almost unseemly in his enthusiasm, and made sure to bring me to the running shop this morning to buy some good shoes. "There's no rush," I assured him, but off we went anyway.

The man in the shop asked me how much running I was doing, when I said we'd come to get me some shoes. "Well, none, yet." Really, who buys shoes after they've started running? Isn't the right thing to do to get the shoes first? He found me some shoes in my size with a "neutral" gait, to see how I looked on the treadmill.

"You're familiar with running on a treadmill, right?"
"Um, no. No, I don't think I've ever been on one, really." I did use the elliptical machine a few times when we lived in Texas and had a tiny gym attached to our apartment complex, but I steered clear of the treadmill. It just didn't look very interesting.
"Okay. I'll set it to a walking pace. Probably somewhere between three and four miles an hour for you."
We settled on 2.9, because I was in danger of falling off the back.

He pointed out the various wierdnesses of my gait, and I mentioned my vertiginous arches, and he came back with a new pair of shoes that felt bouncy and snug. I was sent for a little run outside and assured that the people around here were used to seeing people who didn't look as if they should be exerting themselves running around the square. Once around the plaza was just about as far as I'm able to run, it turned out, so I looked perfectly reasonable until I reached the doors and flopped myself back in, a tad out of breath. We had a little conversation about how people who are aerobically fit when they start running are prone to injury because they push themselves harder than their bones and muscles can cope with at first. I agreed that I would probably not have that problem.

Then, the piece de restistance: I needed a decent sports bra. The ones I wear for pilates are from before I had babies, which makes them at least six years old, and not exactly the right size in several directions, besides being not nearly sturdy enough for running purposes. I tried on a few, and, as I had feared, had to accept that the best one for me was the most ugly, most industrial strength model there. I may look a little too well-upholstered for comfort, but damnit if I won't bounce. At least, some parts of me might be bouncing - let's charitably say my feet, in their new shoes - but my boobs will be bound tightly to my chest in perfect, immobile squishedness.

As we left the shop, I told B that he can wrap it all up and put it under the tree, because of course I'm not going to use any of this stuff yet. That would take all the enjoyment out of my daydreaming.

Fiction, two ways

2011-12-09T13:25:00.001-05:00

A friend of mine is writing a novel online, in serial form, just like Mr Dickens in the olden days, except about a million times more interesting and readable. (Sorry, but I've never been a Dickens fan. Hard Times was just that, Bleak House even moreso.) I am in awe of how smoothly the story flows, how I read it and want more without even noticing, and the fact that - she claims! - she has the whole thing planned out in her head, even if now and then her characters turn around to her and announce that they're just not ready to do that yet. I suspect it's just that sort of easy readability that is in fact very difficult to pull off.

The tragedy is that she has very few readers, so I said I'd give her a plug over here. Go and have a look. Read the Introduction and then start at the Home page, where you'll find the table of contents. Then tell her you're reading and that you'd like some more, please. Because I want to know what happens.

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

Mabel has moved on from announcing "Not again!" with as much italicization and eye-rolling as she can possibly inject into a two-word exclamation, to saying, "Forget it!" I think the girl has bershon all sewn up, at the tender age of three.

She got a new baby from the thrift store yesterday after her dental ordeal, because that's where we go when a new baby is in order but I only want to spend two bucks on it. For 1.95, she has a new "baby sister" whom she loves nearly as much as the last one, the one that cost an appalling $40 in FAO Schwartz for her birthday. This morning she staged a baby festival, but I'm not sure if that was a place you could get babies, or a place to bring your babies.

Dash has Santa Claus all figured out this year, which is something of a relief. Worrying about what we would do about Santa took up a good deal of my time even before he was born. In the end, we took a sort of middle path where we didn't push the myth, but didn't exactly explode it either. We had stockings, but didn't make a big to-do about who put the presents in them. In September or October this year, he whispered to me that he thought the parents really brought the presents, and I agreed, but told him we were still playing the game for Mabel and not to let the cat out of the bag.

He doesn't seem scarred for life by the lies we told him, or allowed him to believe, or failed to debunk, so I'm a bit more relaxed with Mabel. She has a vague idea that Santa, who is that guy with the red-and-white suit, is going to bring her presents at Christmas.

- What would you like for Christmas, Mabel?
- I think probably a baby. Because I like babies and puppies.
- So maybe Santa will bring you a puppy*. You have a lot of babies already.
- Yes, but I want a baby, because I like puppies but I need a new baby.

This conversation took place before the advent of yesterday's baby, but I'll wager her position hasn't changed. Because you can never have enough babies.

*Not a real puppy. No way, Jose.

Nothing to report

2011-12-08T13:13:00.001-05:00

Must blog, despite the fact that both Blogger and my poor little computer appear to be having nervous breakdowns right now. The cursor is having difficulty keeping up with my fingers. (Type like the wind, little fingers.) Also, lack inspiration.

I could tell you about Mabel's trip to the dentist this morning for her very first filling. It was meant to be a crown, but she wriggled too much. I hope the filling holds, because I don't feel like doing that again soon.

Or about how I wore the skinny jeans yesterday, told Facebook about it, and was then led down a rabbit-hole of paranoia about why so many of my female friends were liking my status. Had I worded it amusingly? (Good.) Did they think skinny jeans on me sounded like a good idea? (Good.) Were they secretly laughing at how ridiculous I must look in my skinny jeans and congratulating themselves on the fact that either they look better in theirs or have the sense not to wear any? (Not so good.)

Why must we women tear each other down? Oh wait, I did all that tearing down by myself. The comments were nothing but supportive. I stopped thinking about it, was happy not to have half a square yard of denim flapping wetly around my ankles in the copious rain, and had a cup of tea.

Or I could mention that we have a babysitter booked for Saturday evening. Whether Mabel's asleep or not.

This time I mean it

2011-12-06T14:24:00.001-05:00

But first, some administrative stuff. Have you noticed my new thingy? Yes, it's lovely, isn't it? Oh, and also, I have a clever whatsit now that picks out four related posts, with or without pictures, and links to them at the bottom of every post. I'm not sure if it uses the tags, or possibly magic, but I love that it's giving some love to lesser-spotted posts, and personally I have found when I saw such a thing on other friends' blogs, that it drew me in and brought me to lots more interestingness, so I hope it does the same for you.

And then, when I was thinking about how to lure you people in and enmesh you in my fascinating word-tangles - I mean, how best to serve your needs as readers - I decided to do away with the silly and self-perpetuating "Popular recent posts" section in the margin and instead make a new page called Cliff Notes, which lists a few of my favourite blog posts and serves as a sort of potted history of what's been going on here and what I like to write about.

If you'd like to nominate a post to go there, I'm always open to suggestions, by the way.

(Cliff Notes, for my non-American readers, are those yellow-and-black-covered summary texts you can buy so that you don't have to read the whole book. Not that I've ever owned any such thing.)

See the link over there under the About Me section? There it is.

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

That's enough of that.

I vowed not to mention this until we were at least a week in, but then I changed my mind. So what if I end up eating my words (again) in two days' time? Will you scorn me? And will I know? Will you stop reading entirely because I jumped the gun and blogged about something without giving it due thought and process? Well, fine, I never liked you anyway.

No, not you. Come back. You don't even know what I'm going to say yet.

On Sunday, which was exactly one month after her third birthday, I said to Mabel, "Let's put on your new dress for your friend's party," and she said to me, "I want to wear underpants." And I did not stand upon the order of my going, but went at once and fetched said underpants from the ranks of their brethern where they have been waiting patiently ever since June, being the last time she was potty "trained". I also took with us a spare pair, and a pullup, and an extra outfit just in case, because I'm not thick, me.

Luckily, the host is a wonderful, laid-back mother who greeted my news of an undefended bottom on arrival with "It's not a party until someone's peed their pants." Indeed. And Mabel successfully came to me twice and had me take her to the bathroom, before the third time telling me that she had indeed peed her pants just a little. That was pretty good going for a birthday party, and I certainly wasn't swooping down on her to check every ten minutes, because there was wine and spinach puffs and entertaining people to talk to and my son wasn't hiding under my legs like last year - he was happily playing with the birthday boy's brand-new robot and eating his weight in potato chips.

Yesterday I casually produced more underpants with the day's clothes, not sure how it would go down, but she was happy to put them on and tell everyone at school, at the top of her voice, that she was wearing underwear. She came home dry, wearing the same thing she'd set out in, and then proceded to motor through four pairs of bottoms in about two hours.

This may be the pattern for a while yet. Today I was all set to announce, in foolhardy manner, that this was it, no turning back, pullups for bedtime only... and then she took an extra-long nap, woke up soaked, and tearfully demanded a diaper for the rest of the afternoon.

Like I said the last time Ted, it won't happen again.

Kermuffins

2011-12-05T20:25:00.001-05:00

I think my free ride may be coming to an end.

I'm one of those happy people for whom breastfeeding performs as advertised: I mean, as well as nourishing my babies, it had the lovely side effect of helping me lose the pregnancy weight. And then some. (I always remembered a friend of Anne Shirley (of Green Gables fame) telling her that she - the friend - had got fearfully thin since the babies arrived, and I hoped against hope that I'd be that sort of person.) I'm not saying you'd mistake me for someone with a tapeworm or anything, but I've been cheerfully wearing a size I like without having to think about it for several years now.

Anyway, I'm starting to get my kermuffins, as a friend of mine would say. Yesterday I tried on and discarded two dresses and several pairs of trousers in my search for the perfect thing to wear to a three-year-old's birthday party; the sort of thing that says, "I'm not going to any great effort, but I can look a little nicer than my usual playground self on occassion." But my difficulty was not just in finding the right level of casual/festive/able-to-withstand-barf, but also due to the mystifying way my middle section kept rolling itself over the top of my tights. Sigh.

It's about time, really. I've coasted by on a lone weekly pilates class, when the mood strikes me and the bedtime gods are favourable, for far too long. But I'm hampered by a distaste for exercise - and sweating, and getting out of breath, and having to wash my hair more often, and so on - and a fondness for muffins. (Ker- or otherwise.) Lately I've been having stern talks with myself about the need to prioritise exercise in my life instead of finding more important all the other things that have to get in the way. Perfectly reasonable things, like procuring food for my family, and laundry, and Christmas shopping, and sitting down with a good book, and blogging.

So I leveraged my synergies, and swallowed my pride, and mentioned to my husband the marathon runner that he might like to buy me a pair of running shoes for Christmas. Because even though I have always said that I'm not a runner, when you come down to it, it's the simplest thing to do. And I thought that if I had a decent pair of shoes and maybe some nice new gear to run in, the guilt of needing to get my (his) money's worth might prod me into actually doing it.

It's funny, the first blogs I read were weight-loss and fitness blogs. Not because I was mad to lose weight and exercise - more because they were there, and there was a satisfying progression built in as I read about people getting thinner and fitter. It was almost like getting thin and fit myself. Quite the armchair gratification. Then I gave into temptation and moved on to the the pregnancy/baby blogs, which was what I really wanted to read but hadn't wanted to admit to just yet. And now here I am, going in the other direction.

Which is not at all to say that this is about to turn into a fitness blog. I will not be counting down my pounds, if any are misplaced, but I suppose I might brag about running some distance, if I ever do such a thing. Based on past experience, I'm more likely to come back here with my tail between my legs and admit that I've moved on to something else and decided to embrace the zaftig. But I'll try to give it a decent shot first. If only for the sake of the fancy sneakers and the aerodynamic new top I happened to buy myself in Kohl's this morning.

Mumeet and proper

2011-12-02T19:25:00.001-05:00

Mabel takes a doll with her in the stroller when we walk to collect her brother from school.
"My baby sister's thirsty. She wants her bottle." (Alarmingly, she has taken to pronouncing it "boddel," like a good American. This is just the sort of thing I wanted to avoid by having Irish children.)

"What about giving her some mumeet, Mabel?" I ask. I find it fascinating that she is so enamoured of giving bottles to her babies. Shouldn't she be lifting her shirt and latching baby on, as so many photos of breastfed toddlers depict. Where did I go wrong?
"She's my baby sister."
Oh, yes. Good point. "Well, shouldn't you bring her to her mummy and get her to give her some mumeet?" Pronouns getting the better of me, but she knows what I mean.
"No, she's thirsty. She wants baby milk."

I try to explain how milk from the mother is much better for a baby than formula. Then, overthinking a little, I decide that I shouldn't prejudice her against bottles. Sometimes bottles have breastmilk in them, after all.

"But," I continue, "sometimes the mummy can take out the mumeet and put it in a bottle so that another person can give the baby mumeet when the mummy is somewhere else." Even as I said it, I knew how this would sound.
"Mummy, that doesn't make any sense."

How right she is. Because mumeet, to her, is so much more than a drink. It's her word for the comfort of being close to me, for snuggling up and getting what she needs, for how to feel better when you're frustrated with the world and how to fall asleep at the end of a long day. How could anyone put that in a bottle?

I think she loves giving her babies bottles because they're part of the mysterious baby trappings that she's so fond of. Mumeet is not something she associates with babies, because she's not a baby, and mumeet is still her right and her privilege every day.

I don't think I've gone too wrong there.

Hoppity

2011-12-02T14:13:00.001-05:00

Isn't it great when your three-year-old, who was demonstrably tired all morning, if the unwarranted hitting littler kids and yelling "I don't like [poor innocent 20-month-old who just happened to get in her way]!" and repeatedly climbing in and out of the shopping trolley at the supermarket checkout* are anything to go by, then turns out not to take a nap? Well, yes, it's great at 7pm when she finally goes down for the night and you get to enjoy a rare early night of peace and perhaps some red wine (or perhaps a lot of red wine), but right now, it's not so great, no.

*My children wind up, not down, when tired. So if they can't stand still and are bouncing off the walls, that means they're exhausted. (Unless it's Dash, in which case it may also mean he is trying very hard to ignore the call of nature yelling at him from his bladder region.)

Details

2011-12-01T13:04:00.001-05:00

I think, speaking for myself and generalizing wildly (as I do), we have an endless fascination with other people's lives. I think this is why people read blogs. Because even when other people seem just like you, their lives are always different in tiny (or enormous) ways, ways they often wouldn't even think of as remarkable - and it's those chinks that make it so compelling to read about other people's doings. It's like visiting a friend's house, a friend you've known a while, and seeing their family photo collages on the wall, and poking around the books on their shelves, and considering the colours they painted their walls that you would never have thought of. (And then, I suppose, you either think "I'm so glad this cool person is my friend," or "Wow. Maybe I should ease gracefully out of this whole thing.")

And so I think I blog because, if you care enough to read this, and are interested enough to stop by every now and then, I'd probably like to invite you over to my house and have you ask me about my photo collage with its grainy, orange-hued 1970s picture of me with my grandparents (they had Instagram even then?) and the photo of me with my class in our white First Communion dresses ranged around the stautue of Mary in the chilly Dublin wind of May 1980, and the blurry one that looks all arty because my mum's disk camera was dodgy and you never knew what sort of double exposure you were going to get. And then, while I was making the tea, you could scan the bookshelves and ask yourself what sort of people have an ancient set of classics (in the original languages) on the top and far too many battered Dick Francis paperbacks in the middle and an entire collection of PG Wodehouse on the bottom, and discover many new and fascinating things about us.

The devil, as they say, is in the details. So please keep writing your own details, and I'll keep writing mine as best I can.

Disaster / preparedness

2011-11-30T12:35:00.001-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shipwrecked

2011-11-28T10:55:00.001-05:00

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

I mean,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Priorities

2011-11-28T10:11:00.001-05:00

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

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

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

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

Touché.

Dedicated follower

2011-11-26T19:19:00.001-05:00

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

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

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

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

A new phase

2011-11-25T19:55:00.001-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tree, pre-lighting; harbour; sunset.

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

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

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

)

Tofurkey or not tofurkey

2011-11-24T18:58:00.001-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ambiguity

2011-11-23T18:56:00.001-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am, really.

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

First, catch your hare

2011-11-22T19:41:00.001-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aspirations

2011-11-21T14:19:00.001-05:00

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

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

Sibs

2011-11-20T14:05:00.001-05:00

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

Mixed feelings

2011-11-18T13:19:00.001-05:00

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

No, calm down, I'm not pregnant.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Optimism

2011-11-16T13:40:00.001-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

Dum-de-dum... Anyway.

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

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

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

Viva España

2011-11-14T20:44:00.001-05:00

I want to try to remember something.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Post-party

2011-11-14T13:37:00.001-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anchors

2011-11-11T13:48:00.001-05:00

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

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

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

Realization

2011-11-10T14:08:00.001-05:00

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

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

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

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

This may be a dangerous development.

State of mind

2011-11-09T13:29:00.001-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

2011-11-08T13:20:00.002-05:00

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

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

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

Bad timing

2011-11-07T12:59:00.004-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just-in-Time management and other great parenting tips

2011-11-03T14:27:00.000-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2011-11-02T13:56:00.000-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

D

2011-11-01T13:27:00.000-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

Boo!

2011-10-31T13:41:00.000-04:00

Hot buttered cinnamon toast (from the good bread place, not just the normal stuff) and tea is a perfectly reasonable Halloween lunch, right?

On a not-entirely-unlrelated note, I'm thinking of bribing Mabel with Halloween candy to wean her down to just a couple of times a day instead of all the "I want mumeet while I'm watching TV before dinner" times. That's good parenting right there, I know it.

Dash is off school today, because for some reason even though Halloween is not an offically sanctioned holiday, it warrants a day off. We dropped Mabel at school and went to IKEA, because that's where the fun is. He got a chocolate milk, I got bacon and coffee. We failed to buy a rug for the guest room.

No wonder my mother always says I was no trouble at all. A single child surrounded by grownups is light-years away from two siblings ratcheting each other up to high doh every single second. If it hadn't been for the sinus headache boring a hole in my left eye-socket, I would have had a really nice morning hanging out with my big grown-up (kindergartener) son.

As it was, we had to go home quickly so I could take a Sinutab and make a doctor's appointment for tomorrow. Blech.

Effing and blinding

2011-10-30T19:45:00.002-04:00

I was wondering about swearing this morning. I mean, in the abstract; not that I was jumping up and down having just driven an errant nail through my little toe and thinking that there used to be a good word in my vocabulary for just this occasion that had been eroded by all these years of sanitizing my language for use around children. Swearing. The Irish are known for their love of bad language, and I don't think it's all down to that one time Bono said that thing on American national TV. If you've seen In Bruges, you'll know what I'm talking about.

But it's not fair. Other nations swear a lot too, they just do it in their own languages. I'm not saying that all Americans and every Englishman - not to mention the wily Welsh and surly Scots - have speech that's unmitigatedly fair and delightful, but on the whole we Irish are the ones tarnished by the effing brush when it comes to English-speaking countries. (Oh, and the Aussies. They're pretty bad.)

But have you ever heard a Spaniard swear? They've turned it into an art form. It's a point of personal pride to come up with the most elaborate and creative profanities imaginable. (Which made me wonder if it's something common to Catholic countries...) I'm sure other nations in other languages are also quick to blaspheme and find release in using rude words, we just don't hear about them. Do the Irish legitimately have a bad rep?

(You know the way every generation thinks it invented sex? Or at least the orgasm? I was pretty certain as a teenager that swearing was a modern innovation and that my parents had probably never heard any of the words my schoolmates bandied about with such vigour. Convent girls, you know, are the worst. This was not helped by the fact that our Shakespeare was sanitized and somehow they managed to choose only those very few poems in the world that are not literally or metaphorically - at least on the first, second or third readings - directly about sex for our exam texts. I was very surprised when I went to University and discovered that everything anyone has ever written that qualifies as English literature is actually about sex. But I digress.)

So what do you think? Does every language have its potty-mouths? Are Latvians the Bonos of the Baltics, perhaps? Do the Flemish put the phlegm in vitriol? Are the Japanese really calling each other by arcane words for genitalia when they do all that saving face and refusing to say no? Or does every nation think really they could do with cleaning up their vocabulary, at least in front of the children?

Cliff Hanger

2011-10-28T14:10:00.001-04:00

I know you're all dying for a potty-training update. It's the most suspenseful narrative since, um, that time Angel was trapped in a box under the sea for a whole summer. For instance.

Our efforts go something like this:

Me: "When you're three, there will be no more pullups. Then you'll wear underpants all the time."
Mabel: "No, when I'm six, I'll wear underpants."

Mabel, this morning, from the other side of the room where she has barricaded herself behind a fence made of two small chairs, a baby stroller, a large toy car and some items of dollhouse furniture: "I'm just sitting here not doing a poo."

Mabel, just now, as she tripped lightly past me to wash her plastic horsie in the bathroom (she enjoys washing all her toys, frequently, wetly, using up all the soap): "Don't smell me, I'm not pooey."

So you can see how well that's going. She'll be three in a week. We're going away that weekend, but once we come back, will I stick to my guns, or will my carpet forever regret it?

Assimilation

2011-10-27T14:38:00.002-04:00

One of the other mothers at school (didn't I start yesterday's update with that line too?) said to me yesterday that they had been slacking off this year on their family pumpkin-patch visits. I tried to explain how this tradition strikes non-natives.

Well, I've only been here, what, almost nine years, and we've only had kids for the last five and a half, and pumpkin patches really don't impinge on your consciousness as a child-free adult. And then there's the requisite number of years spent thinking that it's a particularly ridiculous American thing to take your small child, dress it up (preferably as a pumpkin), stick it in a pile of hay with some real pumpkins and take photos. Because that's what happens at pumpkin patches, right? So at this point we're only really starting to work past our natural Irish cynicism and embrace the autumn tradition.

Dash's first year at nursery school, he was in the youngest class, and their "field trip" to the pumpkin patch took place in the school playground, where some straw was strewn and pumpkins placed. I didn't really even notice it, except that a pumpkin appeared in his tub at the end of the day. We took it home and put it outside the front door, where it probably sat and rotted sadly until about January. His second year, the day of the field trip was our second day back after a trip to California for a marathon, so he wasn't really feeling up to school. I ended up walking him down to the lake where the patch for the "big kids" was created, and accidentally discovering that it was quite a nice thing.

2010 pumpkin patch

They bring a lot of hay and a small pumpkin for every child (and a few over) down to an area beside our local lake that's a short walk from the school. The kids walk down, find a pumpkin and have their name written on it by a teacher or parent (to avoid disputes later). Then there's playing in the hay and snacktime, and then we all walk back up, pulling the pumpkins in little wagons. Somehow, it takes most of the morning, and it's delightful. Last year I was happy to find I was scheduled to co-op on the day of the walk, and this year, with Mabel, I embraced my role as self-appointed event photographer (along with most of the other parents there) and went along just for the heck of it. They're always happy to have a few extra helpers to stop the kids from pitching into the lake or burying a classmate irretrievably in the hay.

2011, Mabel helps

So we've still never been to a real pumpkin patch, the sort where the pumpkins actually grow. I'm ashamed to admit that I bought our big pumpkin in the supermarket this year - on the other hand, it's the first year I've actually gone and purchased one to carve at all. At real pumpkin patches, there are scarecrows and hay rides, and probably farm animals to pet, and all sorts of things I can't even imagine. Maybe next year we'll assimilate a little further and do that. One step at a time.

MTV generation

2011-10-26T13:37:00.002-04:00

Never mind school; my children learn everything they know from television.

Dash impressed the zoo employee at the cheetahs' area last week no end by knowing not only why the cheetah needed such a big nose (to breathe in lots of oxygen to run fast) and such big teeth (to eat meat) but also what sort of meat it ate (antelope). This is directly related to the fact that the episode of his favourite show - Wild Kratts - that he'd watched the previous day was the one about the cheetahs.

One of the other parents from Mabel's school told me that she had brought her violin in to play something for the children when she was co-opping last week. When she took out the bow, she asked the children if anyone knew what it was. Mabel piped up:
"I know! It's a violin thingy!"
The mother was impressed.
"That'll be because we took the music and art class last year, and the teacher had a little violin that the children could try out," I told her, proud of my little Rimsky-Corsikoff.
On the way home, I asked Mabel how she had remembered the violin. Was it from music and art?
"No, it was from Little Einsteins."

Of course it was.

Mugshots

2011-10-25T18:53:00.001-04:00

Mabel's Irish passport is due for renewal in a few months' time. (To recap: our kids were born in the US to two Irish parents. So they have two passports each.) The first US passport lasts five years, but the first Irish one only lasts three, which is good, because her current passport photos show a squishy two-month-old with dark brown hair and dark blue eyes. Like this:

Excuse crappy quality. You wouldn't believe the lengths I will go to to avoid scanning things.

When Dash was three and needed his new passport, he was in the midst of one of his stranger-averse bouts, and was especially shy of men he didn't know. I took him along to our local CVS hoping to get the nice lady who was usually behind the photo desk, but there was a male employee instead, and the endeavour was doomed from the get-go. (Or from the gekko, if you prefer. Those lizards.) Dash just refused to stand in front of the white background, and that was that.

In the end, I took a shot at home against the white wall, sized it on the CVS machine that actually has a very useful passport photo setting, and sent it off to the Irish embassy with his application with some trepidation.

This is the one we ended up using. (Awww.) They sent it back ensconced in its very own new Irish passport, so they must have decided it was okay. (Either that, or they give you a little leeway on three-year-olds' photos. I began to understand why the US didn't require it till five.)

This year, I thought it would be a doddle to get my gregarious daughter to stand on a stool and smile at a camera for a few seconds. I mean, the girl bids a cheerful "Hi!" to every stranger we pass. Anxiety is not an issue here. Plain old grumps, on the other hand... We got to CVS and the nice lady was there. Mabel was put standing on a box on a chair and asked to look at the camera, while two other employees watched closely to learn the correct technique for taking a good passport photo. Because I have grown and as a person in the two years since we did this with Dash, I had the good sense to bribe her with something small from Target, where we were going next, to get some cooperation. With the promise of a new baby fresh in her head (I didn't say new baby, but she decided I had - we ended up with playdough, which made everyone except the carpet happy for an hour or two) she acquiesced. Eventually, I came home with this.

I decided it was too blurry and her hair was obscuring her eyes, and then it turned out it didn't quite fit the size requirements for the Irish photo (which of course, are a tiny bit different from the requirements for the American one; for one thing, they're in metric). So it was time to make my own again. I thought I couldn't possibly do any worse.

First, it took two days to let me trim her fringe (bangs). You might think it would be easier to just use a hairclip, but maybe you haven't met Mabel. Second, we have no more white walls. Luckily enough the basement door is opposite a window and lacks visible smudges. Then she had just woken up and was suffering from nap-head, but wouldn't let a brush within a million miles of her.

So we have: unruly hair, sticking-up fringe, mouth open (not allowed), head not straight, and a shine on the door behind her. Not to mention whatever weird thing is going on with her nose there. I swear it doesn't normally look like this.

Next comes the mugshot. This could be right up there beside Lindsay Lohan. She looks like she just knocked over a 7-11 for some fried chicken, and they'd run out of ketchup and then she got caught to boot. Not helped by the scab on her chin. I don't know what she did to her chin.

I think this is the one we're going with. Head straight, mouth closed, looking at the camera. How do you rate my chances? At least her hair is brushed, right?

Just say no to housework

2011-10-24T12:25:00.004-04:00

This morning has been one of those accidental housework days. I thought to myself "Ugh, should clean the downstairs toilet," and "Maybe I'll hoover the stairs too," and now I've spent an hour and a half noticing things like grimy baseboards and sticky fingers on doors and - here's the kicker - doing something about them instead of shrugging and deciding to leave it to the housework fairies, as I usually do. And now the stairs still haven't been hoovered and I've doomed myself to do the shopping with two children in tow because I have no more free mornings this week, but a girl's gotta blog. And those darned housework, fairies, they keep cancelling on me. It's so hard to find good help nowadays.

I walked to school with Dash this morning; possibly the first time I've brought him to school without Mabel, and therefore on foot. It was nice to chat uninterrupted - we get far too little one-to-one time these days. And I took the opportunity to talk to him about drugs.

Yes, he's five, and I don't think he's getting into bad company just yet. (Five-and-a-half today, actually.) But according to a notice that came home from school on Friday and I found this morning as I rooted for his lunchbox, this is Red Ribbon Week, and we will celebrate not taking drugs this week (I paraphrase) by wearing a team jersey on Monday (don't have one, Batman will have to do - Go Team Gotham!), crazy socks on Tuesday, something red on Wednesday, sweats on Thursday, and the costume you were going to wear anyway for the storybook parade, which is the school's "not Halloween" (I see through their cunning scheme) on Friday. How this helps beat drugs I'm not sure, and I really have no idea if the kindergarteners will be participating in anything about it, but I thought I should give him some warning in case someone comes along to tell the five-year-olds not to do drugs.

Seriously though, it's probably another of those things, like sex, and bullies, and religion, that you should mention to your children early and often, so that it's something we talk about at home, not something that's never mentioned and therefore (a) your parents have never heard of or (b) totally tabboo. And actually, the subject has come up before, earlier this year when a friend's husband was mugged and I was trying, with difficulty, to explain something about people's motivations for crime, to Dash.

The kids know about cigarettes and how they're bad for you but adults are allowed smoke them if they want to. I tried to extrapolate from there to illegal drugs, first mentioning other sorts of drugs that are fine, like medicine the doctor gives you to make you better. It went something like this:

Me: ... but there are other sorts of drugs that some people like to take because they make them feel good...
Dash: Oh yes, like an inahler.
Me: No, not like an inhaler. An inhaler for asthma?
Dash: Yes.
Me: No, not that. These drugs make people feel good but they're bad for their bodies. And it's against the law to take them.
Dash: Oh.
Me: So I don't think your teacher will talk to you about this at school, but just in case she does, I thought we should first.
Dash: Right. ... I saw a punkin!

... and that was that. Another parenting triumph.

Mrs Tweezers

2011-10-21T20:03:00.000-04:00

I can't help thinking that I've done something wrong somewhere. Again. Just for a change. The thing is, I'm so fond of having a quiet life and working things out so that everyone remains (as) happy (as possible) as often as possible, and not getting myself into face-offs with toddlers, because we all know they never end well, that it appears young mistress Mabel has never heard the word "No" in her life. At least, that's what it feels like lately whenever I do say no to her.

It brings to mind the story of Owen and how Mrs Tweezers next door asked his parents if they'd ever heard of saying no, and they hadn't. Mrs Tweezers (ominously enough) filled them in.

Owen's parents eventually found a compromise to keep everyone happy, and Mrs Tweezers and her antiquated notions of childrearing were sent firmly back to the other side of the garden fence - but sometimes, whether it's not staying another five minutes or not getting another cookie, saying no just has to happen. And Mabel is displeased. Depending on her level of nappedness, Mabel is wheedling, whiny, whingy, screamy, shrieky, or appalling. And sometimes I reach a compromise, and sometimes I just can't.

I don't think she's spoilt, but then, what parent ever does? Yes, she's the baby; but I try my hardest to treat them both the same when it comes to things like cookies and priveliges - not least because I know I'll have trouble on my hands from the elder lemon if I don't. I am trusting that we're doing pretty much the same with this one as we did with the other, and while he's certainly not a done deal yet, he's just that much less of a work-in-progress that I can see a light at the end of the tunnel, and it seems to be a good sort of light. (More daylight, not so much oncoming train.)

Stripes for the kitchen

2011-10-20T14:49:00.002-04:00

Every time I upload photos from my camera (download, upload, it's all the same to me...up to my computer, down from the camera, blah...) I get a message telling me that there are duplicates and asking whether I want to re-upload them or not. (Because I don't delete the camera contents until I've printed out hard copies of the ones I want for my old-timey paper album, just in case something happens to the laptop.) Usually, I get the right answer to this question, and leave the duplicates alone. But every time I see the prompt I remember the time I uploaded a batch shortly after Mabel was born, when I gazed at the question in genuine puzzlement, unable to work out which way I should answer, and eventually chose poorly. Baby brain in action.

(There was also the time I couldn't for the life of me remember whether it was half as much water as rice, or the same amount, or twice as much. That was baby brain #1.)

Then I upload the photos and iPhoto promptly crashes, becasue it is the red-headed stepchild of iThings and I don't like it at all and it appears the feeling is mutual. (Sorry, Mr Jobs. Nothing personal.)

All that is to say that I just uploaded/downloaded yet more photos for your viewing enjoyment.

Remember back when we bought the house? And moved in? And had the bench made in the kitchen? (Hmm. Apparently I didn't blog that development, but it happened while we were away that summer.) And the next step was to get cushions for the bench? Well, here we are a mere year and some number of months later, and whaddaya know, we have cushions! I had known pretty much all along where I wanted to get them (www.customcushions.net) and the fabric I wanted, but I just kept procrastinating on finding the tape measure and clicking the Purchase button.

See the red/orange napkin over the back of the chair? That was my inspiration. I nearly second-guessed myself on the colours and went for something safer, but in the end I'm glad I stayed with my first choice.

Of course as soon as I took them out of the box, the children started to jump on them. But I'm hoping that once the novelty wears off, it might cut down the amount of walking all over the window seat that happens now. Don't disillusion me, 'kay?

Introducing Dash, and some new superheroes

2011-10-19T14:06:00.000-04:00

Monkey - no, I think it's time for an upgrade: Dash. His new name is Dash. Monkey isn't really "him" any more, and in my travels on the Internet I have noticed that far too many other bloggers, in a fit of originality, have dubbed their offspring Monkey. I will try not to make this too confusing for you.

Dash, then, has never shown any great artistic talent. This is not terribly surprising: I take more after my can't-draw-a-straight-line-with-a-ruler mother than my architect and sometime watercolourist father, and B will tell you that he reached the zenith of his artistic heights with a pencil drawing of a blue-tit at the age of ten. (That's a bird. Really. Stop looking at me like that.) So while it would be nice for my kids to take after their maternal grandfather, the odds are mostly against it. But sometimes, Dash surprises me. It's not that he can't draw, it's just that most of the time he's uninspired to put pencil to paper.

The other day the bigger boys on our road told Dash he could maybe, perhaps, be in their superhero club. These boys are second-graders, seven-year-olds, and Dash dearly wants to impress them. I think his superhero knowledge is standing to him in this respect, as he can discuss Wolverine and Iron-Man and the finer points of Thor's hammer-flinging abilities with the best of them. Immediately after the ensuing battle involving a light saber, a Captain America shield, and possibly some sticks - I didn't step in because at least everyone was still wearing their bike helmets, which I think is an excellent spin-off of all this safety-consciousness we have these days - Dash rushed indoors (dashed, even - see how good this name is?) and sat at the desk, demanding a clean piece of paper and rooting for a pencil.

In the next couple of minutes, and again later on, he came up with the following four new superheroes to show "The Boys". (I'll translate for you, because it's possible you can't read his writing.)

Slick shot. He, um, shoots things. Slickly?

Slurp Buzz. He has snakes' tongues coming out of his hands.

LightningBoltGrip. His hands are lightning bolts. Obviously.

And Blast-Four. You can probably read that yourself.

It's been a while since I subjected you to a sample of his artwork. You can really see how he's come along. Okay, so the humanoids aren't exactly DaVinci-esque, and I'm not sure why so many of them are cloven-hoofed, but what I really love about these are the names, and the fact that he sat down and so industriously and dedicatedly came up with them, and asked me how to spell the words and wrote them so well with very little input from me.

This is just one more of those times. The ones when your child acts like every other child, but because you've been there all along, seen him from the days when all he could do was suck and burp, watched him crawl and walk and stumble along the way and keep going - because you've been watching the whole time, it just seems amazing.

Be nice to tourists

2011-10-18T10:26:00.001-04:00

It's sad, but to a lot of other people in the world, America is The Enemy.

Not in military or political terms - though that happens too - but for simpler things. America is the enemy of the fight against obesity, against consumerism, the fight to save the planet. Even, sometimes, of common decency, a modicum of modesty, and good old-fashioned politeness.

Hollywood is to blame for a lot of it. Even though Hollywood itself is probably one of the most densely populated centers of people who are obsessively thin, fit, green, and left-leaning, the America it manages to portray to the rest of the world is skewed. We see the extremes, rarely the norms. Because the extremes are more interesting and more fun: they tell better, funnier, sadder, more money-spinning stories. (Because Hollywood is about consumerism. They can't get out of that one.)

But I'm here to tell you that it's a shame. Americans are the politest people I've met. They work harder than anyone else, and whatever they rush to the shops in their enormous cars to buy in bulk, they've damn well earned. (For the most part.) Far from being the sex-crazed heathens so often seen on screens, a lot of middle-Americans are as just repressed and guilt-ridden as their Irish counterparts, if not moreso. Jewish guilt and Catholic guilt cover much of the same ground.

Americans are nice people. They come from a country so vast and variegated that sometimes it's hard for them to see - by which I mean, travel - beyond its borders. Those of us from smaller countries, who can easily travel abroad to places where people speak other languages and live in different ways, eating different things for breakfast and dressing more stylishly, find it easy to scorn someone who has never left their native country; but if you lived somewhere with so many amazing things on your doorstep, you might not either. Many Irish people are more familiar with Benidorm or the Algarve than with the Ring of Kerry or the Giant's Causeway, and that shouldn't really be a point of pride.

Americans are proud of their country, and they show it in ways that some others may find a bit in-your-face, with all the rampant flag-waving and God-Bless-America-ing - but the sentiment is just the same as that of all the Irish people who get obnoxiously drunk and paint their faces green white and orange when our team gets past the first matches of the World Cup. (Any sport.)

So if you're in Dublin and you see some Americans on the Dart, announcing their origins with every step of their bright white runners with their stone-washed, high-waisted, tapered-leg jeans, looking for their roots and being delighted anew at all the quaint, be nice to them. They'd be nice to you.

Wiggles

2011-10-17T13:42:00.000-04:00

I was just composing a lament to lost naptime, an ode to naptimes past, when it struck twelve-thirty and there was Mabel looking for mumeet. So we went upstairs, and lo, she is asleep. Hooray for naptime.

I will pay later on, of course, when it will take an hour and a half to get her to sleep tonight, but for the moment the respite is welcome.

I think we're just at that stage, where she needs a nap half the time, maybe less, and when it happens it's vital, but it messes up bedtime no end. So we need a new bedtime routine for the days when she doesn't nap, in order to get her to sleep earlier than 8pm, which was fine in the olden times but not no more. The trouble is that it's difficult to get her to sleep before her brother, unless she's really so fried that she has a total breakdown and I cart her off to bed on the spot.

The old routine started at 7.00 for both of them: pyjamas, game of superheroes, upstairs for teeth and stories in Monkey's bed with Daddy, after which I would be summoned to spirit Mabel away to her downy rest. The new routine goes straight from pyjamas to stories on the sofa with Daddy, and then I take Mabel upstairs for teeth and bed while Monkey gets a reprieve and a more leisurely game of superheroes and whatever else he needs downstairs.

This worked pretty well on Saturday, when it was implemented. Monkey decided that if we were having stories downstairs, we should just go ahead and sleep downstairs too, so he carted his duvet and pillow down to the sofa and every one got cosy. Nobody did sleep downstairs, mind you.

Hm. Looks like pyjamas hadn't quite happened for Monkey at this point.

Earlier today, looking at a two-inch-high plastic horsie, of whom Mabel is particularly fond:

- Mabel, why does this horsie have no ears? Did you bite them off?
- No.
- Oh. So where have they gone?
- Well, they were wiggling all over the house, and then we went to the zoo, and they just wiggled off.
- I see.

Meet the babies

2011-10-14T14:15:00.000-04:00

- Mabel, how many more babies do you think you need?
- Lots.

You have no idea how hard it was to get them all to sit up straight with their eyes open, facing the camera, without any kicking and biting going on.

Mabel would like to introduce you to everyone:

A few more group shots:

Baby can-can

Square o' babies

With our proud Mama/overlord

Hanging out, watching TV. We seem to have been infiltrated by Baby Elmo.
He's a bit furry, but hey, he's a baby too, so it's okay.

Meanwhile, T-Rex realises he's fallen out of favour. I have a bad feeling about this.

Dun-dun-duuuuunnnnn....

Things, quickly

2011-10-13T14:14:00.003-04:00

1. I should not leave it to the last five minutes of naptime to blog.
2. Oh well, what are you going to do?
3. No, don't go away. That was rhetorical.
4. I had to try to explain sarcasm to Monkey the other day. Then I overheard him explaining it back to his father. He did a pretty good job until he got to the example: "It's like, when you say 'Go right ahead, then.'" I think his father was confused. I may have been addressing my comments to a driver who took my turn at a four-way stop when the need for the explanation occurred.
5. Mabel did the thing with the soap and her hair a second time yesterday. I think maybe she enjoyed being rinsed off at the kitchen sink a little too much. Next time I'll just put her out in the rain.

Girl with a (metaphorical) curl

2011-10-12T16:54:00.001-04:00

I had a badly needed haircut this morning, at a new place that had been recommended by a few friends. I wasn't sure about it at first, but now that I've had a while to pose in front of the mirror at home and flatten it down some from its slightly Jersey-Shore proportions, I think it's not bad. The acid test, as always, will come when I wash and dry it myself, but I can put that off for a good few days yet.

Mabel had a perfectly good morning at school, but it deteriorated horribly when I removed her hastily from playgroup at lunchtime and she had a screaming fit all the way home in the car. She was stockpiling the riding toys and refusing to let anyone else play with them even though she wasn't either, so I decided it was time to go. Cue the screaming. And some more screaming, all the way home in the car, because of the indignity of being removed early.

So you would have assumed that no sharing + screaming tantrum = a child ready to nap. You would have assumed wrong, apparently. She sat and nursed on the sofa for a long time, watched TV, and finally was playing alone quite happily, but when we tried to go upstairs and lie down she wouldn't even stay there.

Then she went into the bathroom and plastered liquid hand-soap all over her hair.

You know, she's a perfectly sweet child. Just don't cross her, if you value your eardrums.

Current conversation snippet:

Monkey: Mabel, are you making up these stories as you go along?
Mabel: Yes.
A daughter after her mother's heart.

Steve Miller

2011-10-11T13:28:00.000-04:00

Balls in the air. (Hey, get your mind out of the sewer, you.) I mean, I'm juggling. No, not even juggling so much as just doing a few things I should do as a matter of course, but never get around to. Last week I had a routine physical at my GP (such as I have basically never done) and my six-months-overdue girly-bits exam. Today I got my flu shot at Safeway and booked a haircut for tomorrow. I would have requested Mabel's passport forms (her Irish passport will expire soon), but the embassy phone is out of order. Not my fault. The only other major thing is a dental checkup, which I promise to book for myself (and Mabel, come to think of it) when we take Monkey to his appointment next Tuesday. I even hemmed my cords so I can wear them with my boots. I'm so smug I'm practically incandescent.

But this comes at a price. The bathroom needs cleaning (when does it not?) and I'm neglecting my blog. I decide what to make for dinner twenty minutes before dinnertime. I haven't made muffins in ages. (Okay. About a week. And I did make zucchini bread, but I prefer muffins.)

I'll probably fall off this efficiency wagon any day now, but once the phonecalls are made and the appointments written on the calendar, most of it just proceeds as scheduled. I'll throw some new balls up - birthday-party planning, trip-to-New-York planning, housework, even - and juggle them for a while instead, and bit by bit things will happen, or not happen, and we'll all totter onwards regardless.

My son might think that time is an infititely large elastic band that stretches to encompass whatever it is he's doing, and then springs back to get us where we need to be at the appointed moment - but I know better. It just keeps on slipping into the future.

Now I'm going to read a book

2011-10-10T13:54:00.001-04:00

Blogging against the clock, here. Blogging like the wind.

Mabel is taking her first nap in four days, and will probably wake up any moment. This morning she had her Best Day Ever at school, and for the first time, didn't want to leave the playground the moment I arrived. I hope a corner has been turned.

It seems as if she's turning corners on several fronts right now. The crazy mama-centricity is wearing off just a little; she may be giving up her naps; and she's showing some signs of interest in using the toilet for its intended purpose. I don't want to say anything about that, for fear of jinxing.

She's still screeching, but that's little girls for you. She's still waking up every two hours (at the outside) until I stay in bed with her, but that's life around here. If her falling-asleep time moves permanently to 7.00 or thereabouts rather than 8.30 or later, as happens any day she hasn't napped, some changes will have to be implemented or I'll miss my pilates class every Wednesday. I'm payed up as far as Christmas, so that's not very reasonable.

I walked to school and back again today, at a slightly more leisurely pace this time. If I can do it twice a week, that will be - well, more exercise than I've taken in a while, that's for sure. I can feel the hill in my glutes the next day in a way that I never do after pilates.

Monkey brought home his first school report last weekend. They get them quarterly, I guess. He was marked PR for proficient in every subject except PE, where he only got an Improving (or something; whatever the next one down was). I find this amusing, since running and jumping and so on are what he likes best, and I wonder what he's done to piss off the gym teacher. Or maybe the gym teacher just doesn't give PRs on principle, unless you're the fastest kid in the class. Either way, I'm quite entirely unconcerned. I also had a word with his class teacher on Friday - she's normally seeing the bus kids onto the bus, so we walkers don't see her at the front door at home time - and she told me he's getting on great, takes his time with his work, is quite the perfectionist. That's one way of putting it, I suppose.

He's happy; she's happy; we're all happy. School is good.

Answers

2011-10-07T13:20:00.000-04:00

The answers to all those questions that have been bugging you. Me.

Why does it take Monkey so long to get ready in the morning?

Well, I still don't know what takes so long in the bathroom, though I strongly suspect there's a bit of staring into space, a bit of messing around, and probably some putting as much water as possible into the basin to see how the overflow hole works. But I know part of what he's doing in the bedroom, since I was putting away laundry this morning while he was dressing.
First, he carefully picks out his clothes.
Then, he meticulously folds them.
Then he puts them on.

Why yes, I have Googled "OCD+children", thank you for suggesting that. (I'm not too worried for now, but will be keeping things in mind. I think when two type-A people have children, the likelyhood of extra-super-duper-type-A-ness emerging is pretty high.)

What is Mabel doing with her yogurt raisins?

Not eating them, that's for sure. She's rubbing them all over her ankles and calling it sunscreen.

These cows are small...

2011-10-06T22:36:00.000-04:00

I've just spent two hours getting Mabel to stay asleep enough for me to leave the room. It wasn't pretty. I've heard of some parents who can successfully explain to their little darlings that Mommy needs some time with no children in the evenings, so little Tommy has to stay in bed and go to sleep - but I am deeply sceptical about this. Small children were not put on this earth to do things that make other people happy; they'll be nice if it suits them, but basically they're looking out for number one, becuase that's how they're programmed. And where another kid who is practically asleep anyway might be content to roll over and say to themselves "Ah, feckit" when they realise that Mommy is leaving the room (I'm paraphrasing here), Mabel prefers to wake herself right up and (a) grab my arm, (b) sit up and demand more mumeet, and (c) shriek like a banshee if I go away and/or send Daddy instead. And then I have to go back and she takes twice as long to stop hiccupping and her grip is twice as vice-like and her eyes are twice as ready to fly back open and I've just shot myself in the foot again and can say goodbye to another hour of my evening.

Hence, me griping about bedtime instead of presenting you with a well-thought-out and lyrical piece of prose. Them's the breaks.

I was going to say a few words about perspective. I even found you the perfect Father Ted clip to go with it. (And are these subtitles in Icelandic? How bizarre.)

When we started this year at the nursery school, I was struck by how the biggest kids in the playground no longer looked nearly so big. When Monkey started there, at the tender age of two-and-almost-a-half, the big kids looked so huge, rattling round the little racetrack on the big trikes and playing their carefully orchestrated team-like games of this and that. They were enormous, clearly six or seven or something. (They're four and five.) This year, even though Mabel's just a little older than Monkey was - and probably no bigger in stature, though definitely chattier - the big kids still look like reasonably little kids.

I mean, I'm not saying this is a great mystery. It's just interesting to me. When Monkey started, two of his classmates had big brothers who had just entered kindergarten, and they too seemed like tall, grown-up boys, in a way I can't quite get him to replicate in my mind now, even when surrounded by Mabel's friends.

And then, Mabel is blithely passing out ages when Monkey did such and such - slept through the night, for starters - without getting anywhere near the same milestones. He seemed like such a big kid to me by the time he was three, that I had to keep reminding myself how young he really was. With her, it's the other way around: I have to stop calling her the baby. The one way to remedy this is obviously the nuclear option of having another, which I'm not prepared to do just now: eventually you have to stop, and, one way or another, you're left with one last baby who insists on getting bigger no matter how much you try to ignore it.

[Aside: I used to think that ascribing something to birth order was pretty much the same as blaming it on your star sign. As soon as I had two children, I realised how gigantic an influence it really is, and how impossible to divorce from other aspects like gender or personality. If a child is raised in a family environment, their birth order will always make a difference - though I suspect that once you get to a situation where there is more than one middle child, other elements come into play. (As an only child, I get to make these observations in a vaguely superior way. I have characteristics of both firsts and lasts, but apparently lack the peacekeeper inclinations of a middle. Which doesn't explain my tendency to sit on the fence whenever possible.)]

Anyway, it's not that I don't want Mabel to grow up. It's just that I don't have any pressing need to make her act more maturely than she's ready to. Apart from my pressing need to call my evenings my own again and sleep all night in my own bed, I suppose.

Miles

2011-10-05T19:56:00.001-04:00

I walked over four miles today, and have excused myself from pilates. It's not that that's a very good excuse, but more that whenever Mabel doesn't nap, the time she needs to go to bed is just exactly when I would be at pilates. So I can't go. Tonight, she dissolved into a screaming, flailing pile of noooooo at 7pm exactly, whereupon I whisked her upstairs, read a quick book, coaxed her to lie down just to see what happened, and she was out in no time flat. She must have been really exhausted, because usually she will not absolutely never ever no way go to sleep before Monkey's stories have been read. So I'm glad I skipped the class (which starts at 6.45) because she'd never have made it to 8.00, when I would get back, without a lot of grief for all concerned. As it is, I think I lost an eardrum.

I say over four miles, because my husband the runner knows how far anything around here is from anything else, and he did the math(s) for me. The day was beautiful - like the nicest possible summer's day in Ireland, which means it was about 70 degrees and sunny. Perfect for a walk. I took the empty stroller and our packed lunches down to the nursery school at eleven, power walking at top speed because I thought I was going to be late, to find myself arriving ten minutes early. Even better, Mabel was not immediately spottable in her teacher's arms, so I knew things were going well. She ran happily to meet me, and reports of her morning were good. Just a little tearing up around snack time when she didn't want any nachos and told everyone who would listen about how Mummy hadn't fed her dinner last night. Again. Sheesh, that Mummy.

Anyway, that was a very quick mile and a bit, and coming home again after lunch at the playground was slower going, what with the occupied stroller and the person jumping out of it every now and then to "run ahead" i.e. dawdle behind, and then the big hill just before home.

My parents live in a cul-de-sac at the top of two steep hills. Wherever you go, you have to go down at least one of them, and usually both. I used to daydream, as I slogged back up after school every day, of miraculous outdoor escalators of the future that would take me home without effort. (They actually have outdoor escalators now, you know. I've been on them in Italy and Spain. But I don't think Ireland got any.) I still have actual night-time dreams where a bus stop has miraculously appeared on our road, at the top of the hill. But then I'm usually late for my exams and have to walk along some fictional road by the crashing sea to find my school and I can't keep my eyes open so I won't be able to read the questions. I'm usually not naked, but sometimes I'm topless. At least my teeth aren't falling out.

Anyway, I'm apparently fated to live at the top of hills, because here we are on one again.

So that was two and a half miles. I needed a drink of water and a bit of a sit down after that. Mabel decided not to take a nap, but I nearly dropped off on the sofa beside her, and it was only thanks to my foresight in setting the kitchen timer to wake me that we got to school in time to collect her brother. Up to school is another half mile, according to my source, and back home; and then half an hour later we went back up to to the playground only a block or so away from the school to fly kites, or try to fly kites, with some friends. Which makes almost another two miles.

And now I am thinking that I would like to get a trailer for my bike, if Mabel would sit in it, because I much prefer biking to walking.

Verbose

2011-10-04T14:02:00.000-04:00

If anyone knows how somebody visited this blog from the page of an engineering firm in Russia (this one, actually), I'd be fascinated to hear it. Blog stats are wierd and wonderful things, and I could spend far too much time obsessively refreshing them and wondering who my fan in the Philippines might be. (If it's you, hi! Stop by the comments and tell me all about yourself.)

In other news, we are in for a whole lot of trouble when Mabel gets older. (Okay, this isn't exactly news.) Her brother is as transparent as a sheet of glass - he is completely devoid of guile, and no matter what he's done, he'll always tell us about it. Mabel, in contrast, is full of shite, and I say that in the most loving way. She just told me that her granny just spoke to her on the phone and said that it's morning time so we can definitely turn on the TV. (She's not napping, and I couldn't get her to stay in her room, but at least, so help me, I can keep the TV off for an hour. Is that too much to hope for?)

B brought Mabel to school this morning, and drop-off was painless. When I picked her up at 11.30, though, she was a little teary. First she informed me, hiccupping, that "I'm not crying. My eyes are just a bit wet because I ... didn't get that little bike I wanted yesterday in the playground." Pure fabrication. Her teacher told me she'd spent most of the morning, once she got upset and decided it was time to miss me, talking about how Mummy hadn't done this, that, or the other. Miss L said, apologetically, "I do usually try to give weight to their concerns... but I think she's just... you know..."
"I know," I said."She just likes to talk."

She's playing with the dollhouse. Doll 1 just said to doll 2, wearily, "I don't have any patience for this." At moments like this, I'm really happy I don't give into my first instinct and swear like a particularly blasphemous sailor every time my kids drive me bananas.

Galileo

2011-10-03T13:05:00.000-04:00

The temperature has dropped, like a body from a leaning tower*. On Friday morning it was warm and muggy and I was complaining about how going outside was like walking into a sock. A sock that had just been peeled off a very sweaty giant. By Friday before dinner, the kids were out on their bikes again and the humidity had blown away - it was still t-shirt weather, but delightfully fresher. On Saturday morning we were at the nursery school yard sale in our fleeces, and I couldn't pick over the clothes because my fingers had all gone bloodless. (I have Reynaud's. My fingers go numb and look like they belong to a corpse in record time. It's my party piece.)

Tomorrow, allegedly, it will get nicer again and maybe we'll have some actual autumn weather, because going straight from summer to winter is no fun and gives you very little playground time.

Another thing that I hope is short-lived is this new phase of Mabel's. The one where she shrieks a lot, and makes irrational demands, and won't take no for an answer. Mostly it's the shrieking that I object to, since the others are pretty much expected behaviour for a 2-3-year-old. Not exactly helped by her brother, who does things like this:

Scene: The car.
Monkey leaps into his seat and fumbles for the seatbelt. He's in a high-back booster and can click himself in very well. I'm usually a little slower putting Mabel in her seat and settling her five-point harness around whatever baby/t-rex/horsie she insisted on bringing.

Monkey: I won!
Mabel: No! I won!
Me, wearily: It's not a race.
Monkey: It's a race! I won! I'm happy! Mabel, you're sad because you didn't win.
Mabel: I'm not sad! I'm happy!
Me: Monkey, please don't tell her how she feels. That's not helping.
Monkey: You came second, and Mummy's going to come third and she's very angry.
Me: No, I don't care. I'm not angry about the race. Because there is no race.
Mabel (increasingly upset and agitated): I won! I'm happy! You're sad!
Monkey: No, I won! You're sad!
Me: Argghghhh.
Mabel: aaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhh
My eardrums: Kabloom.

Every damn time.

*Wherever I first read about Galileo and the Leaning Tower of Pisa, it referred to the speed of falling bodies. I assumed he had taken dead people and thrown them off the tower. It wasn't till much later that I discovered it just meant objects, so in my head there will always be visions of the great scientist hefting corpses over the parapet to measure how quickly they fell.

Old-hat reviews: The Hunger Games Trilogy

2011-09-30T14:31:00.001-04:00

In June, it was my turn to pick the book for August's book club meeting. My first two suggestions were shot down as, inexplicably, they'd already read them (bad Maud, forgot to check the list). And despite their five-star reviews on the book site I'd taken their titles from, nobody present had liked them much. This left me feeling insecure: people don't have to love the book you choose, but it helps. And I wanted an easy read, because I knew I'd probably be reading most of it on a plane, my eyes propped open with matchsticks but unable to sleep. I cast about for a third option and came up with something other people kept telling me to read: The Hunger Games. I was afraid it might be gory or gruesome, because I'd heard something - erroneously, as it turned out - about cannibalism, but it was the best I could come up with on short notice. I was pleased when the others seemed happy to take it on.

I bought it in the airport, read the first 20 pages or so, and promptly left it in the pocket on the back of the seat in front of me. I didn't manage to find another copy until about a week later, but it's not as if I'd had much time for reading anyway, what with navigating myself and two children past the transatlantic jetlag and around the local parks of Cardiff while my husband attended a conference. I bought it again in Dubray Books in the Blackrock Shopping Center in south county Dublin, along with a Oliver Jeffers for Monkey and a tiny box-set of Charlie and Lola books for Mabel. And then I read it rather quickly. Indeed, it was a page turner. My husband, having finished his own reading matter, picked it up and was immediately engrossed. It's that sort of book. It pulls you in from the instant you start, and tosses and turns you over and over until you're dizzy, but you keep going.

Yesterday I finished the third and final book of the series, Mockingjay. (The middle one is Catching Fire.) My husband finished it the night before that. So now I think I can discuss them here - and they've been out long enough to qualify as "old-hat" in my review series, right?

If you haven't yet read them, there will be some spoilers ahead, but nothing too vital.

The biggest question I had was why I wasn't more traumatised by the horrible images of violence and suffering in the books. Terrible, horrific things happen, the sort of things you don't want to dwell on lest you wake in the middle of the night, and yet, I was able to gloss over them and keep reading without them entering my brain and scarring me.

It might be because I know they're YA books, and I scorn anything that's "popular fiction" rather than "literary fiction". Except that I love YA, especially YA fantasy - ever since I was pulled into the wardrobe with Lucy and Edward, since I entered the hole in the ground where a hobbit lived, ever since I read Alan Garner's Elidor, I've loved this sort of thing and happily suspended my disbelief along with my sense of time passing and my need for a snack or a bathroom break or to go to sleep until I found out how it ended.

It might be because I'm grown up now, and the books that I read and re-read as a teen just don't stay with me and become part of me the way books did then. Except that I read Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials series, and the Susan Cooper books, and Earthsea, not to mention all of Harry Potter, as an adult, and consumed them eagerly and without criticism. (Because at heart I'm a terrible literary critic - I could never get the hang of it and its pretentious vocabulary, despite my BA in English.)

I came to the conclusion that it's because the Hunger Games books are plot-driven, not character-driven. Maybe this was a conscious decision on the part of Suzanne Collins, because honestly, it would be impossible to write it more deeply and (a) cover all the material she covered and (b) leave your audience actually wanting to keep reading. I think you keep going, and you see these horrific images on the surface of your brain, but they don't penetrate because there are more words and you're just moving right along here and not thinking about any of it too hard. I didn't really identify deeply with the heroine, didn't feel a part of her despite the first-person narration. Maybe the present tense narrative made it easier to rush on ahead and not dwell on what had just happened.

I can't help wondering how they'll portray these horrible events - people being mauled to death by wild animals, consumed by acid, or having their flesh melted off by a beam of light, to pick a few at random - in the movies, without creating a horror to rival the Saw movies (which I have no intention of ever seeing) and getting an R rating. They'll have to dumb down a lot of the horror, and will presumably up the love-triangle aspect instead, but I wonder will it lose its punch as a result and become just another alternate-universe love story.

I can't even figure out what you would do to fix this sense of being slightly removed from the action, if you wanted to, which in this case I don't think anyone really should. But as an aspiring writer, it interests me. When a Dick Francis character is kicked in the ribs, breaks a bone, falls from a galloping horse (as they frequently do; Francis's heroes have amazing pain tolerance and live dangerously), I gasp and wince in sympathetic pain. But when Katniss is hurt, I just gloss over it. Is it overload, because she gets hurt so much? Is Francis so much a better writer than Collins? Or is there something obvious I'm missing about how this works?

If you have an opinion, I'd love to hear it.

A day late and a dollar short

2011-09-29T13:49:00.000-04:00

I'm going to post a What's for Lunch Wednesday post, except that I didn't get the photos out of the camera till today, so it's not Wednesday any more.

(Mabel loves Thursday, because it's named after Thor, her favourite of the Avengers. Except when her favourite is Wasp, or Ant-Man, or Captain America. Last night she was very excited to hear that today would be Thor's Day.)

Other people who shall remain nameless always get their post up in time, so if you go there you can read more about yesterday's food and follow the links to everyone else's lunches.

I packed the big lunchbox for me and Mabel yesterday, full of good stuff that of course came back mostly uneaten. This is why I don't feed my children: they don't eat food. In our lovely green Goodbyn (that always gets admiring glances) I have apple slices, grapes - quartered because they were big fat ones with choking hazard written all over them - some watered-down red juice (V8 V-fusion), a mini yogurt, and quesadillas. Mine had black beans from a tin (well rinsed) mixed with a spoonful of chipotle salsa and some grated red cheddar. Mabel's had ham and cheese, because she doesn't like purple beans. All she ate was the yogurt.

Those mini yogurts, by the way, are called Danonino and are unappealingly labelled "Dairy Snack". But if you look at the ingredients, they have no HFCS and are mostly just milk, and have 19% of someone's required protein (I don't know if that's a toddler's or an adult's) as well as calcium and some other good things. In Europe we have tasty little pots of stuff called Petits Filous, or Petits Suisse, or simply fromage frais, but all those words are French and therefore would be frowned upon by Les Etats Unis. From the taste, these little guys are almost the same, a little milder perhaps, but clearly the Danone company is stumped to find a decent name for them.

So that was lunch. Mabel hasn't been eating much lately, but between the fact that she's been on antibiotics for almost three weeks now to make sure she doesn't develop Lyme disease - and it seems to be working, because the mystery rashies have gone away and the target-shaped one is fading nicely - and that she came down with the snurfles at bedtime last night and is currently streaming snot, I'm not too surprised. It's not like she's slowed down any with the nursing, I can promise you that.

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In other news, I'm painfully - painfully, I tells ya - aware that the banner graphic is horribly out of date, and I have a nice autumnal photo all ready to go for up there to replace the swimming pool we haven't been to since August. But Blogger tells me it's too big, so I'll have to wait for my IT advisor to come home and do clever things with Gimp to make it fit. I hate iPhoto. For an iThing, it's really annoying. [... Update: Done!]

While I'm talking shop, I have to say I'm very tempted to change Monkey's name to Dash. What do you think? He's just not a Monkey any more, and it also turns out that Monkey is a very obvious and boring thing to name your blog son. Mabel has been playing The Incredibles a lot - she likes to be Violet and look after her baby brother Jack Jack - and has taken to addressing Monkey as Dash. It's a good name for him, since he likes to show us how fast he is at every available opportunity. (It also fits the Halloween costume I picked up for him at the thrift store last week to a T.) Do you think I should? Would it be too confusing? Do you care? Etc.

Acclimatization

2011-09-27T13:22:00.003-04:00

So it appears that Mabel will be okay at school after all.

Yesterday when I confessed that it was, in fact, a school day, she registered the requisite protests. "I don't want to go to schooooool," came the pitiful wails. "Don't bring me to schooooool." Unmoved, I plopped her in the car beside her brother, as for the first time I was required to get them both to their separate places of learning at 9am. (Okay, she can be a little late. They don't count tardies for the two-year-olds.)

"You'll be fine," said her brother, with the assurance of one who knows. "Your school is even nicer than mine. You get to play all the time. I have to do work." His work mostly consists of colouring, but I suppose it's a little more arduous than all the playing with large wooden blocks he spent the three years of nursery school mostly doing.
"Waaaahhh," she answered.
We stood in line with Monkey as the rest of his classmates arrived, and wished him a happy day at school as he headed on inside when the doors opened. And off he went.

Perhaps Mabel remembers the first few mornings of kindergarten, when Monkey yelled and wailed and clung and cried and demanded that we not take him to school. I think she was at least a little impressed to see how he seemed to be taking it now.

When we got to her school, I brought her over to the table where several of her friends were helping to make playdough. As she gripped her wooden spoon and began to stir, I brightly told her I had to go now, and kissed her goodbye. She didn't flinch. Nor did she cry, or cling, or ask me not to. She looked a little damp of eye, and I could see that she was making a huge effort to hold it together, so I stayed not upon the order of my going but went at once.

She didn't cry all morning. She was totally fine when I picked her up from the playground two and a half hours later, sitting by a tree trunk with a big red plastic shovel, doing something with mulch.

This morning was much the same: she complained about the concept of school, I ignored her. I took her to school and said goodbye. She wasn't quite so stressed. When I arrived at the playground, she wouldn't look at me and said she didn't want to talk to me, but after a couple of minutes she deigned to come down off the slide and demand that I take her home.

I think she's confused by her emotions: she's probably worried that she's not missing me so much any more, and maybe even feels a little guilty for forgetting about me and having something akin to a good time. So when I come back, she can't even tell what she's feeling any more.

Her teacher told me that every sentence that comes out of her mouth (and there are plenty) is no longer a reference to Mummy and things Mummy failed to do - yesterday she told them that I hadn't made dinner on Sunday night and she was very hungry; blatant slander - I fed her several slices of pizza from those nice Domino's people, and fed myself several more.

All in all, I think she's settling in nicely.

Bloggity

2011-09-26T20:52:00.000-04:00

See, as soon as I take my eye off the (blog) ball for a few minutes and try to write something else instead, in the shape of this crazy short story I'm playing around with that I think jumped the shark the moment I mentioned zombies, but I just ran with it and now I'm really quite enjoying the whole nutbally thing - as soon as that happens, then I have nothing to blog about and it just sits here all day and I realise that while it was extra super-duper nice of me to post on Sunday afternoon so that all those people who are bored at work on Monday morning will have something to read - wasn't it? because I used to be one of those people, so I do feel for you - that it doesn't really count as a Monday post, and what about all those other people who came along looking for something new on Monday and still haven't found it? Well, there's an extra long sentence just for you, that's what.

My most regular source of visitors, according to my stats, is a discussion board I happen to frequent that also has a portal where members can advertise their latest blog posts. Before the advent of things like Facebook, this was totally fabulous, because even people who hadn't bothered to bookmark your blog could go there and find the most recent post. Even now, with things like FB, it still sends me by far the biggest chunk of readers. But right now the portal is broken, so I'd like to extend a big thank-you to anyone who's still coming along to read even though they have to do it by a more convoluted route than usual. I'm really surprised my numbers didn't drop further, so I think some people are actually making an effort. And I do appreciate that.

Ugh. I just accidentally Febreezed my hand. You don't really want to know why.

You know, I'm very happy that the Internet came along in my lifetime, and that someone invented blogging and that it became a thing that people do. Because it's exactly the perfect thing for a person like me: a closet exhibitionist (I do cartwheels in the streets, but only when they're deserted) who used to subject her friends to ten-page letters and, later, e-mails that took way too much scrolling. This way (a) only people who actually feel like seeing me exhibit need to do so, (b) I don't have to write the same news over and over to different friends, and (c) I have an outlet for the constant stream of drivel that apparently comes direct to my fingers, bypassing my brain.

It's also good that I learned to type, disregarding the advice of my uncle who told me that if I did, men would only see me as a secretary. (I've been a secretary, and I was glad of the job and the fingerspeed that got it for me.) Times have changed.

In fact, now my uncle has a blog. I bet he has to hunt and peck to find the right keys.

a.m.

2011-09-25T13:13:00.001-04:00

Thud. Monkey gets out of his mini-loft bed.
Click. Bang. Click. Monkey carefully opens his door and closes it again behind him. He has not yet figured out how to do it quietly.
Muffled tromp tromp tromp. He goes into the bathroom.
Whsssshhhhhhhhh. Water hitting water.
Clunk. He bounces the lid of the toilet off the cistern, or the seat off the lid.
Clunk. Clunk-clunk.
Long period of silence while he stares into space, probably having a super-hero battle in his head. Possibly using his fingers to illustrate it.
Chhhhhhh. Water into basin.
Long period of silence while he washes his hands ritualistically and with many stops to stare into space. Click. Bang. Click. He opens the bathroom door, closes it behind him.
Excited tromp tromp. Moving towards me, not away from me. Bad sign.

"Mummy!"
"Yes."
"Mummy, I just have to tell you something really amazing!"
"Really."
"I just heard a train whistle!"
"Amazing."

What's amazing is that this doesn't rouse Mabel enough to make her decide it's time to get up. Also that he goes away again.

Tromp tromp decrescendo.
Click bang click. Opens his bedroom door and closes it carefully, but not quietly, behind him.
Rrrrrr. Rumble of top drawer opening smoothly but not silently. Selection of underwear and socks.
Rrrrr. Bump. Rumble of top drawer rolling to a close.
Repeat for t-shirt drawer and trouser drawer.
Long period of silence while he gets dressed, stares into space.
Click, bang, click.

"Boo, Daddy! Can I watch Avengers now?"

Mabel decides it's time to get up too. She scrambles across me, all elbows and knees in my soft parts, eager to see her brother and start the day.
"Wait for me!"

I roll over and go back to sleep until the decibels rise again.

Note to self: Do not mess with a good thing

2011-09-23T13:47:00.000-04:00

For a minute there I was about to be the next great culinary genius. Alas*, fate threw a spanner in my works and I'm just another failed chef. For now. Let me take a moment out of what I'm supposed to be doing, which is trying to work out how my spreadsheet of all the housekeeping jobs at the nursery school just fails to tally with the list of all the families at the nursery school, to tell you about it.

*This reminds me that I have to mention that Monkey has started saying "Behold!" in his games of superhero-before-bedtime. I heard it for the first time last night, but B says it's a regular utterance now. Maybe Thor says it in The Avengers; he talks a bit funny sometimes. (Also also, and clearly I'm procrastinating on the spreadsheet even more than I thought, given all these tangents, I do love that Mabel can tell me that Odin is Thor's daddy and Loki is his brother who is not nice. I don't care that she's getting it all from a cartoon series that also includes Iron Man and The Hulk. It will win her a pub quiz in later life, I'm sure of it.)

Where was I? Oh yes, culinary. Genius. Me. Yup.

Last week I made sweet potato pancakes for lunch one day, and nobody ate them but me, because my children are heathen ingrates with cardboard where they should have palates (and don't tell me that heathen is irrelevant there, because I'm sure it's not; and they are, because we're raising them to be). B didn't eat them either, because I ate my share and quickly froze the rest for safekeeping. Then I had two a day for the next week, with syrup, instead of toast for my breakfast. They were yummy. I suspected they could be made even better for one by using half wholemeal flour the next time instead of all white flour. I promise to try that next time.

Today, I looked at the half-can of pumpkin puree and the buttermilk that needs using up in the fridge, and decided that I was perfectly well able to make up my own delicious Wholewheat-Buttermilk-Pumpkin Pancake mixture, riffing off the sweet-potato one and the Alton Brown recipe that's my basic standard. As I threw together a cup of this and a pinch of that, I mused on my future as the latest big food blogger, who could whip up delicious baked goods using no more than her intellect and her innate baker's soul.

However. There's a reason I am happy to throw food in a pot and call it dinner without consulting a book, but tend to stick to the letter of the recipe when baking. It works better that way. My batter was was a bit stiff. No matter - just stir in another quarter cup of pumpkin. Plop it in the pan and wait for the bubbles to let me know it's time to flip. No bubbles. Flip it anyway. Golden brown with a hint of orange: the perfect autumnal pancake. They'd be soft and yielding, slightly spicy, crisp on the outside, just waiting for communion with maple syrup to acheive pancake nirvana...

No. Not really. Mabel was not interested. The finished articles, while edible, were a bit too heavy, a bit too doughy, a bit too bland, a bit too not much good. They reminded me of the sort of thing sailors used to pack on long trips to the end of the world. Dense. Stodgy. Full of nutrients.

I will channel my father and eat them up rather than waste them, but I'll do it with the help of a lot of syrup, and if they're really not hitting any spots at all, I give myself permission to chuck them out. Next time, I'll just make pumpkin bread again. Maybe I can turn it into muffins. I think I could safely manage that. Probably.

On the loss of the career so cruelly denied to me

2011-09-22T14:07:00.001-04:00

Last night my pilates teacher told me - and the room at large, for that matter - that I have amazing, prehensile feet. Luckily, I've been watching Animal Exploration on Qubo lately, because until about two weeks ago I would have thought she meant they were better suited to cavemen and should have gone out with the ark.

When my children were born, the first thing my mother asked on being informed that she had a new grandchild was whether they had my feet. (Okay, practically the first. After whether they had curly hair.) The funny thing is that even on a newborn, it was easy to see that they didn't. This is because my husband's toes look like fingers, and my toes look like toes. Or tiny nubby things, depending on your perspective.

My feet are basically pyramid-shaped. They're short and wide with a very high arch. I try not to bore people with the litany of all the shoes I have bought that didn't fit me, and all the shoes I can't even try to wear because they would fall off immediately or not even go on. They are my father's feet, except his are even worse, mostly due to the accident he had 40 years ago, resulting in a smashed patella, a broken femur, a broken tibia/fibula, and something wonky happening on down at foot level. He was lucky to keep the leg and is on his second artificial knee. Which, I suppose, should put my finding it hard to find nice shoes into perspective. But hey, I'm shallow.

I never thought much about my feet as a child, until one day my so-called friends from high school saw me barefoot and did the point-and-laugh thing about how intensely weird they were. After that, I knew for certain that my feet were not just difficult to sandal, shoe or boot, but also freakish and probably malformed. Even reading that a high arch was considered a sign of good breeding in years gone by wasn't really enough to take out the sting.

Then, a few years ago, I started taking pilates classes. My teacher is an amazing woman - a librarian who used to be a ballet dancer. She's 70 years old, and an inspiration to everyone to keep at it. In class, she doesn't take things too seriously, and knows that we probably don't managed to put spine to mat in between classes. One evening she was exhorting us all to practice more regularly: "Just imagine how you'd feel if you did even ten minutes a day!" she told us enthusiastically. "It would be amazing."
"Well, yes, it would be amazing," we all replied dryly.

When she saw my feet, she asked if I was a dancer.
"No," I replied.
"Ah, those that have it never use it," she said enigmatically.

One thing partaking in an exercise class like this does that no DVD can do is to show you how many variations the human body comes in. I always assumed that everyone could bend their limbs about the same amount, that everyone's head could touch their knees if they tried hard enough, that everyone's toes pointed all the way down. But looking around my class, it's amazing to see how far, or how little, we can all twist or bend or gyrate when doing the same silly exercises. For instance, when I sit on the ground with my legs out in front of me and my toes pointing up to the ceiling, it's very hard for me to stop them from doubling over and pointing towards my head instead. They don't want to go straight up from my feet. If I sit the same way and point my toes as hard as I can towards the wall, they almost touch the ground. I suspect this is peculiar.

Clearly, I have the feet of a great ballerina. (I stashed the rest of her in the freezer.)

But this amazing genetic trait went unrecognised by my parents. I even read the books - Ballet Shoes, and A Dream of Sadler's Wells and its companions are still on my bookshelf in Dublin. The kicker is that I did take ballet from the age of four until the time for the class for my age group moved too close to dinnertime for comfort, and then my Mum took me out and put me in drama instead. A great career stymied by something as prosaic as dinner. And, probably, lack of innate talent and too much of a taste for the easy life, but that's just splitting hairs.

Sadly for their dance careers - though happily for their shoe-buying futures - neither of my children have inherited my feet which are both amazing and prehensile. But I will be paying attention when presented with my first grandchild, and if they have short, fat toes, I will not depress everyone by discussing how much they'll have to spend at the orthopedist's, but rather celebrate the newest proto-ballerina in the family.

Winner/victim

2011-09-20T19:24:00.000-04:00

Brought to you by the random number generator at www.random.org, the winner of the mani/pedi/fish-y cure from Yvonne's spa is JeCaThRe (whose lovely mostly-food blog is going sadly neglected these days, just because she's busy helping people have better birth experiences, of all crazy things).

You and a friend can go and pay a reduced amount of only $50 for the privilege of having your feet nibbled by pirahnas. Or some other fish, maybe; can you tell the difference? Just don't put any more in than your feet, okay? (You can thank my husband for that lovely story.)

And if you don't use it, I won't even know.

Sink or swim

2011-09-20T13:43:00.000-04:00

First of all, if you're wondering (yes, you and you) about the fishy spa giveaway, the mere thought of which seems to have driven my readers away in hordes, I'm still waiting to be sent the vouchers for the "save". Once I have them, I will put your anxious minds at rest by having the computer (or my two-year-old) choose a number at random. A number between one and three, where number two did not wish to be considered. And if I go and do it myself, I will certainly be telling you all about how it was to be paddling with the fishies at a later date. I just wish I hadn't been so freaked out by Pirahna when I caught a few minutes of it on a friend's TV at the age of seven.

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My much-anticipated free time has mostly yet to actualize. To help Mabel with the transition to school, I went back at 10.15 yesterday and stayed the rest of the morning with her. She wasn't hicupping and on the verge of tears, as she had been last Wednesday (she only has school Mondays to Wednesdays, which makes for a very long weekend in which to get de-accustommed again), so today I left her till 11.00, which is the start of outdoor playtime before the regular pickup time of 11.30. Tomorrow I would quite confidently leave her for the whole morning, except that I'm co-opping - that is, helping in the classroom as part of our co-operative membership duties - so she'll be happy, but we may be back to almost square one next Monday. Baby steps, always baby steps.

I don't mind taking the time to ease her in gently. (If you can call it "gently" when I put a protesting child in the car, drive her to school, and leave her sobbing in my wake. But she calms down and cheers up quickly now.) I don't really have anything else pressing to do, anywhere else to be other than the very exciting supermarket or here in front of my computer blathering to you, or anyone else to be rushing home to attend to.

Yesterday morning, when I left her crying and didn't know if she'd cheer up in five minutes or be sobbing and heaving for the next hour, I felt all the requisite pangs of uncertainty. "We're not supposed to do this," I thought to myself. "She's too little. We should all homeschool forever. Why on earth do we feel compelled to send our offspring away from us and think, 'Well, if not now, she'll have to get used to it later and it'll be that much worse if she's been with me all day every day until she's three-and-a-half instead of two-and-a-half...' How is this any more civilized than sending a five-year-old into service, or up the chimneys, or to boarding school for months on end...? You can't make an omlette without breaking eggs? I don't even like omlettes! I don't want to break her!" All adding up to a pitiful internal wail of "Mah Baybeee!!", as Amalah would say.

Don't get me wrong: I have the greatest of admiration for those who choose to homeschool. I am in awe of their dedication and patience, and I have no doubt that they - assuming they are doing it with the right motives - will turn out exceptional and highly educated young people who can function excellently in society. I'm just not one of those parents. I'm not a teacher. (I don't delude myself that a love of pontificating on the Internet means I can teach children anything.) And when I'm not all caught up in the emotion of the first few days, I can work out why it is that I do this to myself and my beloveds.

At school my children get the opportunity to do things they don't do at home. They play with water to their hearts' content instead of until my patience gives out and I demand that they stop washing up and give me back my kitchen sink before the floor is completely submerged. They paint with paint, using big fat brushes, or their fingers, or sponges or wonderful implements like toy car wheels and spatulas and potato mashers. They get to make their own play-dough and turn it into sausages and spaghetti and spirals without being yelled at to stop walking it all into the carpet. They learn to sit at the table and help themselves to a snack served family-style, and see and maybe taste new foods because their friends are eating them too. They learn to be quiet and considerate so that others can hear the story, instead of being the only one ruling the roost.

These are all things I could do at home, but the one thing I couldn't do is be an adult who is not Mummy. Mabel is learning that she's not the planet around whom we all orbit - not all the time. She's learning that sometimes there are fourteen of you, all thinking that maybe you're the planet, and all finding out slowly that to make things work smoothly, you often have to wait your turn and stand in line and sit when sitting is called for - and also that when you need something, you have to speak up and ask nicely, and then you'll be helped.

And yes, you could say that my darlings are learning to be good little cogs in the machine, to do what The Man tells them, to never think for themselves but just follow along with the crowd, to submit to peer pressure. But I don't think that's how it is. I think they're learning to rely on themselves a little more and me a little less, to discover what they can do as individuals; and if a tiny bit of that involves throwing them into a very shallow deep end to help them see that they can paddle after all, then I'm just going to nut up and do it.