Pinterest-worthy?

I needed a storage solution for all the stuffed toys. Mabel has amassed a large number of stuffed toys, because she likes to put families together. This means that one stuffed dog/horse/cheetah is not enough: the more the better, but at least three or four so there can be a mommy, a daddy, a little sister and a big brother. Aw.

So the stuffed toys were growing out of the red box we had them in and proliferating all over the already laden shelves.

On a trip to Ikea I spotted the perfect thing: light, flexible, see-through, inexpensive laundry baskets. We got one for the playroom and one for Mabel's bedroom, but after the one upstairs migrated downstairs several days in a row, I'm putting up with just having both of them down here all the time.

Isn't that great? Don't you think you too should use an Ikea laundry basket as stuffed toy storage?

Because then your children can chuck the stuffed toys all over the room and pretend they're caterpillars turning into butterflies.

(This is curiously reminiscent of the bottom picture here. They're a little bigger now.)

Live and let die

As we rounded the gentle curves of Dublin's M50 this afternoon, death was on the children's minds. In the abstract, probably because we visited an old graveyard in Waterford two days ago and pottered around reading the interesting headstones in the almost-rain.

(Personally, I liked this one, which went off in a big old name-dropping tangent about her brother who had sailed with Captain Cook, even though he wasn't buried there at all:

[This Stone was Erected in memory of M[iss] Mary Dinn of Passage E. a mark of her burial ground and in memory of her Father Nicholas, her Mother [indecipherable], her Brother Martin, her Sisters, particularly of her brother William Dinn (alias Doyle) who sailed round the globe with Capt. COOK  and was present at the death of that Great Circumnavigator at [illegible] and who died respected and regretted at Stoke near Devonport in England in June 1840 (?), having spent a long life as a warrant Officer in the Service of his Country.]

)

(Speaking of tangents. Ahem.)

This weekend I travelled the length and breadth of half the small country for bloggy meetups, wherein I was lucky enough to meet some of the Lovely Irish Bloggers (not their real name) and put names to faces and faces to blogs for Musings of a Hostage-Mother, Mind The Baby, Mama.ie, Proper Fud, and the currently-on-hiatus And My Baby.

As we drove back from today's assignation, during which my most accommodating spouse had taken the children to IKEA, because why not, it's like a little home from home with ice cream, we listened to the Bond theme tunes CD I had put on in the car as a tiny nod to his great service to the blogger good. So at the start of each track - or preferably just before the start, since they were playing in film order - he would announce to us all which song it would be and by what artist.

(You know the way some fathers wait impatiently for the day they can show their sons (or daughters) Star Wars? Well, Dash has seen all six Star Wars movies (in original airing order), but what his father is really waiting for is the day when they can both sit down and appreciate the full oevre of Connery through Craig, including Lazenby for completeness.)

In between these public service announcements, the children posed the following tricky questions:

Mabel: How do the dead people get into the coffins?

Dash: So, do people who go to church believe in ghosts except that they all exist in another universe?

The first was more easily answered than the second, which I think we are still working on.



(Edited after first posting to correct the date of death on the gravestone to a much more likely century. Sorry about that.)

Duvet vous?

The baby has stolen my blanket.

By which I mean that the four-year-old has taken the supersoft espresso-brown blanket that lives at the foot of her parents' bed for the express purpose of keeping me, her longsuffering mother, warm at night - because I run about ten degrees colder than everyone else in this house, apparently - and is currently snuggling her tow-headed little self under it, fast asleep and away with the fairies to boot.

Not to mention the fact that she has a perfectly good duvet of her own, from Ikea, inside a very attractive duvet cover, also from Ikea, and additionally a big bright red fleece blanket purchased in Target not two months ago because she wouldn't wear her coat in Chicago. So she's sleeping on top of the red blanket, under the brown blanket, shunning the duvet, and sentencing me to another night of being just slightly not warm enough in bed. (This is the third night in a row.)

The things we put up with.

Meanwhile, in the parental bed - don't worry, I'm not going into any salacious details: this is about linens - the sheet war is being waged with all the silence and indignance two tired parents can muster over such things. See, there's a sheet under us, and a sheet over us, between us and the comforter. Raised as we were in a part of Europe that came late to duvets, but not as late as America, we're not entirely used to the top sheet - but I really like my down comforter, and I'm not going to wash it every week, so that's why the sheet is there. The sheet is turned down over the comforter when we sleep, but somehow - due no doubt to my inept bed-making skills - it doesn't want to stay there and tends to flip up over our faces. I can deal with this. I calmly flip it down again. But B gets all pissy with the sheet in his sleep and ends up with it mangled and twisted and generally not where it should be.

At some point in the night, inevitably, I come back to bed from my sojourn in Mabel's room, and, as I slip myself into the half-warm bed, I notice that the sheet on his side needs fixing. I pull it up and flip it neatly back where it should be. I suspect he thinks of me as the midnight sheet nazi. In turn, I grumpily wonder, every night, why he can do physics for the government but he can't work a simple bedsheet.

Luckily for all of us, there are more important things in life, and by morning we've forgotten it all again. This morning I dreamed that I tweeted to Mabel the fact that it was 5.15 when I left her bed, and then regretted it because it was bound to wake her up.

Happily, she didn't get my tweet because she stayed asleep for another hour, and all was right with the world.

Eggs over easy

Today, 9.30am:

I am hit by the incredibly obvious revelation for the day. If we're really stopping at two kids, then we're done with having babies. That phase of our lives, which was so all-consuming, so entirely absorbing, so eternally life-changing, that required special furniture, special adaptation of everything, right down to where I keep things in in the kitchen (nothing dangerous, spillable, or breakable low down), is behind us.

You put the high chair in the basement and you think, "Hooray, more space in the kitchen." But you don't think "That's it. Those years are over, and everyone was right, they were so short. And who am I now?" until later. Like, until today.

Today, 11.45am:

Looking around the cafe in IKEA, I start to say to myself that I really want another baby. Then I catch myself in time. "I really ... must be ovulating." Yup.

Where's Freud when you need him?

Mabel's having a bit of a penis obsession. Again.

Yesterday we had friends over for a playdate. Mabel took off her clothes and tried to show them her penis. I hid under the table.

This morning we went to Ikea.

Mabel: Peenie, peenie. I want a peenie. I love your peenie, Dash.
Dash: Mabel, say peenie again.
Me: Stop it. Both of you. Dash, you know better.
Dash: Mabel, don't say peenie.
Mabel: Peenie, peenie.
Me, darkly: Nobody will be getting any ice-cream.
Mabel: Ponnie, ponnie.
Me: That's fine.

[Five minutes pass; we are almost past the checkouts and at the double-edged sword of ice-cream.]

Dash: Mabel, don't say poopy.
Mabel, with glee: Poopy! Poopy!
Me: No ice-cream, then.
Them: [...]

Ice-cream is consumed. Lunch is deferred. Once again, I resolve never more to darken the hallowed Swedish doors.

Seasonal

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.

Boo!

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-unrelated 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.

The mother of invention

As you may remember, Monkey likes machines. He likes dismantling machines to see how they work, and he likes inventing machines that accomplish marvellous things, mostly to do with his long-held ambition of flying. (Not aeroplanes, mind you. Much too pedestrian, if I may mix my adjectives. More along the lines of jet boots and rocket packs.) He's taken to telling us that he's about to make something "magnificent." He just needs a moustache to twirl.

I long for the day when his machines are made of intricate Lego Technix and do not involve a parent until they get to the admiration part: for now, they are either tedious verbal explanations that never end, or things that his father is required to construct out of cardboard.

 Jet pack, by Daddy, last November

So "When I'm a grown-up, I'm going to invent..." is a common refrain around here, and of course Mabel has picked up on it. She too will be inventing all sorts of things any day now.

Me: Mabel, when are you going to start using the potty?
Mabel: When I'm a grown-up, I'm going to invent a machine that goes to the toilet so I don't have to.
Me: [Deep sigh.]

Yesterday she told me she's going to invent a new bottom. Presumably one that doesn't need to pee.

At school last week, one of Monkey's friends was very scared by a thunderstorm overhead. Monkey related this to us in the car on the way to IKEA (it appears, by the way, if I may digress here for a moment, to be so long since I've been to IKEA that I totally forgot my usual route and ended up going a different way, finding the road blocked by flooding, having to go another different way, and vaguely wondering why it seemed to be taking much longer than usual; the clear lesson here is that I need to go more often) and my children proceded to have an argument over who would invent the better machine to comfort the boy in question.

Monkey: When I'm a grown-up I'm going to invent a machine that puts a force field around him to protect him from the thunder.
Mabel: No, I'm going to invent a machine with arms and legs to give him a hug.
M1: No, my machine.
M2: No, my machine.
etc.

I was touched by their concern, and managed to defuse the row by pointing out that they could put Mabel's machine inside the force field and thus use both at once. Co-operation.

No logo

I had another Ikea-related epiphany the other day. This one had nothing to do with yogurt, or sofas, or even utensil holders: it was more of an editorial epiphany, really. As I typed "IKEA" in an e-mail, it suddenly occurred to me to wonder why I wasn't saying "Ikea" instead.

Thinking that a company name should be capitalized (or otherwise accessorized) a certain way just because that's how the company's graphic designers decided its logo should look is a particular bugbear of mine, and yet here I have been doing exactly that for as long as I've been writing the name of a particular Swedish furniture superstore and all-round place of wonder. I don't write Macy*s or GAP when I refer to those fine establishments, so why on earth have I been writing IKEA in all caps?

If you want a better say-so than mine to reference for how to treat logos like real words, look here. This man knows what he's talking about. (And yes, I stole my Macy's example from his piece.) 

In my defence, if there is such a thing, perhaps its foreign provenance lulled my subconscious into thinking that it was an abbreviation: Ideal Kitchens Ever After, or maybe something more Scandinavian, like Inbyn Knappa Ekarp Aspelund*, perhaps. Maybe it thought it was the initials of the nice man who started the shop: Ingmar Knut Edgar Allenpoe**. Or maybe it's just that after looking at the damn website and everything in the place and driving by the enormous sign so often that my two-year-old thinks anything written in yellow on blue says "Ikea," the logo had worked its insidious magic and subjugated my sensible inner editor. For shame!

******

So then, in the interests of completeness, I went to Wikipedia and looked up Ikea. And lo! and behold! It feckin' well is an abbreviation*** after all: the I and K are for the bloke who started it, and the E and A are for his farm and its parish. Thus meaning
(a) I was right all along
(b) I can go back to writing IKEA now
(c) I don't have to worry about whether I should go back and correct all the instances of IKEA heretofore appearing in the blog
(d) but this entire post is somewhat pointless

Ah well. You live, you learn, you buy some nice reconditioned Danish teak mid-century modern instead.


*Yes, those are actual Ikea product names.
**No, that is not the actual name of the Ikea founder.
***There is a completely different editorial issue at stake here which I really don't wish to get into, about whether it's an abbreviation or an acronym. And if it is an acronym, as I think it should be since it's pronounced as a word rather than individual letters, then I might have to return to my original stance, blame the graphic designers who are taking over the world, and start a single-handed campaign to have it spelled Ikea.

I knew I didn't want to get into that. You wouldn't believe how many times I changed my mind in that last paragraph.

Anger management

I know I've said that I'll throw a party when Mabel's last tooth* comes through, but in a way I'm a bit apprehensive about it. Because once that happens, I won't have anything left to blame her shocking behaviour on, and I might just have to accept that she's a terrible, horrible, no-good child.

This morning, for example, in between my taking the old pull-up off her and putting on the new one, she ran off (par for the course) and I found her standing almost on the shaggy rug in the front room, peeing on the floor. I went to pull the chair out of the way so I could yank her all the way off the rug, but it appeared that Monkey had just tied the chair to the coffee table with some IKEA string, so I couldn't even manage that. They conspire against me, you know. (B too. I'm sure he was the one who procured the string.)

To be fair to her, while she can certainly poo in the toilet if she feels like it (key point there), I don't think she can really control the wee yet. But she could have done a better job of looking sorry about it: instead she laughed uproariously and thought the whole thing was hilarious. And it's not as if I was putting on my crossness about this and trying to hide a laugh myself - I was genuinely annoyed, and she hadn't even the common decency to look remorseful.

This evening I had her in a special-event unscheduled bath while Monkey was at soccer practice, thanks to a lot of ice-cream** drips and climbing a tree, and I was just taking the opportunity to clean the bathroom a bit when she dumped a jugful of water over the side. I was so annoyed that I grabbed the jug and retaliated by giving her hair a quick dousing before taking her out of the bath. My (possibly after-the-fact) justification was that she needed a hair-washing, or at least wetting, and I needed to get her out as quickly as possible as punishment for the water over the side. But really, I was just angry and knew she'd hate it. Which she did, loudly.

It is perhaps the case that my daughter and I will have a clash of tempers once or twice or daily in our relationship, as she gets older. I maybe need to get hold of myself and remember that I'm the adult in this situation.

What do you think? Was it a contravention of gentle parenting? Did I act vengefully out of temper? Did she deserve what she got? Or is it, in the scheme of things, a mere blip? All of the above?

Or maybe, once the last tooth comes through, this will all be in the past and we'll metaphorically frolic through the daisies together ever after. You think?

* I should clarify that I'm never sure whether she's teething or not, but sometimes she just darn acts like it. I don't want to dose her up when she says plainly "No, my teeth don't hurt," but I do wonder if she's just not recognising the pain for what it is.

**We got the ice-cream at IKEA, where, as suggested, I asked to see the ingredients. The nice guy behind the counter happily gave me a folder with the information, which told me that it has "corn syrup" but not "high fructose corn syrup". So that's okay. Maybe. Am not really any wiser, to be honest. But it's still better than the Trix with all its additives and colourings as well as the HFCS. And he only charged me for one because I asked him for two really small ones, so that's got to be good.

Cereal offender

When I first moved to the USA, I was baffled and bedazzled by the supermarket aisles, with their millions of unfamiliar foodstuffs in such enormous quantities. The cereal aisle, in particular, took my breath away. I've always been a fan of cereal - Rice Krispies for breakfast every morning of my childhood, two Weetabix after I came home from school, a packet of Kellogg's Variety mini boxes for a treat every now and then, with Coco Pops as the highlight of the week. As I got older, I embraced Special K - because the very act of eating it makes you thinner; and Crunchy Nut Cornflakes are like Frosties for grownups.

But cereal in America didn't taste the same. Between the extra sweetness of even my favourite old reliables, and the funny taste of the milk - no matter what percentage I got - it tasted weird. The milk here is different from my beloved Avonmore SuperMilk of yore, but I think a major part of the difference can be boiled down to four little letters: HFCS.

When I found out about high-fructose corn syrup, I decided I didn't like the sound of it very much. Call me insular, but I felt it would be better for my palate and my health to try to keep the basics of my diet in the US as much like my Irish diet as I could.

Initially, this was because I didn't want to move home and find that nothing was sweet enough for me any more. Now that I have two small people relying on me for their nourishment (directly and in-), I'm continuing to avoid HFCS as much as I can in our everyday foods. At first I felt that my reasoning was a bit feeble: if I didn't grow up with it, and if they wouldn't get it in Ireland, I don't want them to have it here. Then I read about Michael Pollan's book and discovered that one of his rules for eating is that if your grandmother wouldn't recognise it, it's not food. So I felt vindicated, because I'm pretty sure neither of my grandmothers would have an iota what that sickly sweet stuff was, or what it would be doing in bread, crackers, yogurt, or corn flakes.

I'm not obsessive about what my children eat: they're not allergic to anything, and if there's candy from Easter or Halloween or parties, they can have it; but since Monkey's diet in particular is so limited, I do try to rein him in on the blatantly anti-nutritious goodies while I still can. I've managed to eliminate HFCS from the bread, cereal, crackers, yogurt, ketchup, ice cream, and even the cookies that we buy on a regular basis (the kids don't get the cookies: I do). If Monkey has Cinnamon Toast Crunch or Ritz crackers in school for snack, I'm not going to make a fuss, but I don't buy them for home consumption. When he has chocolate milk, I try to make sure it's the sort without HFCS.

I don't spend hours reading labels: I just find the item I want, and then it becomes part of our regular shopping list. Did you know, for instance, that Kellogg's Frosted Mini Wheats have HFCS in them, but the Safeway own-brand ones don't? Isn't that strange?

So. (That was just the back story.) As you may know, we like to go to IKEA every once in a while. (Though I must admit that since the buying-things-for-the-new-house frenzy has calmed down, I find fewer excuses to go.) Now, it's not that I think of IKEA as a bastion of health food, but they do make a big deal of their kids' food options. The chocolate milk there is HFCS-free, so that's something, and usually, assuming I could run the gauntlet of ice-cream demands, I would get the children a yogurt each and be happy with a sticky bun for myself.

But lately, it has seemed that every time we go to IKEA, Mabel ends up like a whirling dervish, acting like someone who's an hour past her naptime even when there's still an hour to go. The last time this happened, it finally dawned on me that maybe I should be putting two and two together. The yogurt in IKEA is Trix yogurt: a small pot aimed directly at the jugular of youth, with pink and yellow dairy product together in one HFCS-enhanced sludge. I looked it up when we got home. If you google "Trix yogurt," the first two hits after an ad for "Nutrition to help your kids grow up strong" and some images, are a series of blog posts detailing how horrible Trix really is, how it's a big old pile of nothing good for you complemented by totally unneccesary additives and colourings.

So maybe, just maybe, that's what sets Mabel off like an increasingly intractable rocket each time we go there. It could be the HFCS itself, since she's not used to it, but it's more likely the infusion of Red #40 and Blue #1 as well as the unnamed artificial flavourings.

I'd have been better off letting them have the ice-cream, except that now I want to know what they put in that, and it doesn't come with an ingredients list printed on the cone.

House matters

Yes, Hugh Laurie, aka Dr House, does matter. We still watch him religiously (if you can download your weekly worship from the IMDB at a time that suits you), though we have a slight suspicion that maybe he jumped the shark a while ago. Yesterday, out of the blue (actually, because Kai Penn turned up on an old episode of Buffy) I got all riled up all over again about how annoying and unnecessary the whole Kutner suicide storyline was, because everyone knew they'd just shoved it in there because he'd left the show to be Obama's advisor on lupus (or something), and it was ridiculous to see Taub and the others feeling all terrible and guilty about not having hadn't noticed his depression when we all knew that was because IT WAS TOTALLY FABRICATED AFTER THE FACT. Bah.

But that's not even remotely what I was going to talk about. I was just going to show you some photos of our new carpet, and stuff. Sorry if I got off on the wrong foot there.

Here's a photo of the disreputable Dr House, to make up for any disappointment. But make sure you come right back.

I finally got around to ordering the runner I wanted for upstairs. The wood floor is lovely, but had some big obvious stains on it that wouldn't come out (probably dog pee, our floor guy said; delightful), also it's a bit chilly underfoot and noisy. This is exactly what I wanted, and after I'd sent back the extra tiles I mistakenly ordered, quite good value. It's from FLOR, as you'll have guessed if you see as many online ads for them as I do. But I invented the pattern all by myself.


Also, in a moment of pure inspiration, I picked up a sideboard at the thrift store a couple of weeks ago for $25. It's exactly the style I wanted - just right in our 1967 house beside our inherited dining table - and if I ever actually manage to refinish it, I'll then put things in it and it will be useful. At the moment I'm still basking in my great bargain.

Here it is under some lovely flowers that just arrived from my brother-in-law because he was here for dinner on Tuesday. If people sent me flowers every time I cooked them dinner ... well, I'd have no vases left, that's what. Luckily, these ones came already in a vase with water, which I particularly liked about them. The painting is an original of B's (high) school, a wedding present from our best man.


Remember our new sofa (photo at the bottom there)? This is the deconstructed version.


And finally, if you're even still here, I ordered some great alphabet cards from Secret Agent Josephine and put them on the wall in the family room (inspired by her photo of her daughter with the cards similarly stuck above her desk); but since Mabel still thinks things should be on the floor more often than a table, and Monkey is prone to pulling up anything that might be trying to remain stuck down, I had to put them at least a bit out of reach. I hope they're low enough to read. Mabel was delighted with them as she saw them go up, and I love the way the colour of the wall makes them look almost as if they're painted right there.


Sorry about the light coming through the window there. If you go to Brenda's post here or her Etsy page, you can see them properly, and maybe even buy some for your own monkeys. I was really happy to order something from her, because she's a great artist with a lovely blog, and I actually met her last year when she visited Bethany near here.

Finally, here's Mabel, bouncing.

Oscars, vegetarian lasagne, and IKEA pencils

I amused myself greatly on Sunday night by live-Facebooking the Oscars. It turned out I was not the only one among my friends to be sitting at home watching TV with a laptop on my knee, and we ended up with a spontaneous virtual Oscars party. I was so entertained by thinking up smart comments (smart in the Irish sense of cheeky, not the American sense of erudite) for my status updates and scanning my friends' comment threads to see what further nonsense I could add to the proceedings, that I ended up watching the whole thing. Though I may have missed a few nuances of the speeches.

On Monday I made vegetarian lasagne. I took some photos along the way and it turned out delicious enough to blog, I thought.

First, I chopped a large onion, a couple of cloves of garlic, one courgette (zucchini), one summer squash (the yellow ones), and sauteed them all with a tub of ready-sliced mushrooms. (You could slice your own, but I'm lazy.) I usually do half an aubergine (eggplant) too, but they were out of eggplants in the supermarket. And I never manage to use up the other half becuase I don't really like aubergine, so maybe it's just as well.

When the vegetables were soft, I added half a big jar of pasta sauce, a tin of fire-roasted tomatoes, and a small jar of roasted red peppers. You could, of course, just use a normal red pepper at the sauteeing stage, but I like the roasted ones. I tossed in half a carton of tomato soup that was sitting in the fridge too. Salt, pepper, dried oregano and a teaspoon of fresh pesto. Simmer for as long as you can bear it, or as long as it takes to make the white sauce.

Here's Mabel helping by balancing pencils on the empty mushroom container. After that she was a little less helpful and decided to empty out the pencil holder all over the floor. Twice.

Take a moment to appreciate how many little IKEA pencils we have. I think it may be time we mounted a pencil-returning mission.


Then I made the white sauce, of which process there are no photos because it's not very picturesque. Visualize, if you will, in your mind's eye, me melting some butter in a saucepan, then stirring in a tablespoon of flour, seasoning it, and stirring some more. Then adding milk, gradually, in between stirring a lot more.

Somewhere around this point Mabel started chomping on a magnet from the fridge.
"We don't eat fridge magnets, Mabel," I said.
"We don't eat fridge magnets?"
"No."
I continued stirring to the sounds of Mabel methodically removing each magnetic letter from the fridge, slurping it noisily, and dropping it to the floor.

When I'd added all my milk and the sauce was too thin, I turned off the heat and put in most of a bag of grated cheese (sorry, JeCaThRe) and some extra parmesan. Sauce thickened up nicely. I built my lasagne. This is layer two of tomato/veg sauce going on.

And the finished product, pre-oven, with the last of the cheese on top.

Out of the oven. 350 F for 30-40 minutes, or until it looks like this. Let it cool down a bit before you serve it up, or you'll burn your tongue.

On the plate. My lasagne always lacks cohesiveness on the first night, but it tastes divine. On the second and third nights it sticks together better, and tastes almost as good.

This was the third night. There is no more.

Other shoe. (Third shoe.) Dropping.

I don't particularly want to talk about the fact that Monkey barfed up all his apple juice and cheerios just before we left for school this morning, meaning that we didn't get to leave for school and Mabel and I also didn't get to meet up with friends at the playground on this, possibly the last day of lovely mild weather before it gets cold again, and how instead I spent most of the day lounging in front of the tv, gingerly enquiring as to the state of his tummy, and finally feeding them both ice cream at IKEA, which may not go down in history as the healthiest turned-out-to-be-dinner ever.

Okay, so the end part wasn't so bad. And when he's lying inert on the sofa Monkey is really very sweet and it stops him jumping on his sister. But still. Not the day I'd envisaged to lead us into the five-day weekend (from his school's point of view). He even missed their Thanksgiving feast, not that he cared as he wouldn't have eaten anything and had missed most of the run-up to it last week. I was working hard on priming him to try some cornbread, but now we'll never know...

You know, it's funny that I never needed a "sick kids" tag before last week. Just as well I'm not drawing any correlation between his finally totally weaning and all this getting sick he's been doing lately. To be fair, I don't think this even was a virus; I think it was just all the snot he'd been swallowing all night, plus a lot of coughing in his sleep, that finally revolted in his stomach and decided to come up again.

[We had discussed how it might be a stomach bug that he had caught or could pass on to other people. Later in the day, when he was still feeling a bit fragile, he said to me: "I think maybe there is a beetle in my tummy."]

You may think that ice cream is not well-advised food for someone with a dodgy tummy. You might be right; we'll see. But I distinctly remember that, when I was small and had a pain, I used to ask for ice cream because that would make it better. My parents, naturally, thought I was trying one on. The thing is, they must have given in, at least some of the time, because I know that it always worked. That was what I was thinking of when I agreed that we could go to IKEA just for ice cream this afternoon. We even went in the exit doors to do it, because sometimes you have to rebel just a little.

Demands and counter-demands

While Monkey is, of course, delightful, he does also possess some of the less adorable traits of your average four-year-old: whining, for one, I believe is something they do a lot of at this age. He tends to pick a theme and harp on it, sometimes for weeks - but then, he did that with the Spider-Man costume when he was only three (a prodigy!), and I stood up to it with a heart of stone for many months, convinced he'd finally grow out of it or have a birthday, one or the other. He did the latter. And got the costume and immediately started demanding Spider-Man gloves, and boots, and then a Batman costume and so on.

Recently he decided a ray-gun was the way to go. He used to have a ray-gun. In fact, it was his first gun-like toy: a pleasantly retro-looking thing that made an extremely irritating grating noise and generated sparks inside. (Not real sparks, I'm sure. Just some sort of spark effect.) It was a present from Franklins, which is a local restaurant with toy shop and wine shop attached, so that you can take the kids for a meal and bribe them with a present at the same time. Instant gratification for all.

Anyway, the ray-gun got broken lo these many months, as is the way with these things, and just the other day he seized upon the notion of it for his next thing-to-want. He spent a day or two whining at us that he reeeeally reeeeallly wanted a ray-gun, he'd love a ray-gun, he neeeeded a ray-gun et cetera, until we told him that he might get one for Christmas or his birthday, but only if he'd for the love of all things holy stop talking about it. He mostly did, eventually, stop, but brings it up again every now and then just to make sure we haven't forgotten, in case Christmas is suddenly upon us tomorrow or something.

So there we were in IKEA, he and I and Mabel, as is our wont, and he decided on a little foray into pestering me for the ray-gun. I really want a ray-gun, it went. I need a ray-gun right now. And I said stop talking about the ray-gun, and he did. As we went downstairs from the cafe into the kitchen goods, he shot a final wistful salvo: "I wish I had a ray-gun." I ignored it.

Earlier [I have to back up a bit here], Mabel and I had pottered about while Monkey enjoyed himself in the supervised ball pit, finding some curtain rings, and she had picked up several maps (the flyers they have everywhere for you to write down the name and number and location of your item before you go into the warehouse area) and wanted a pencil. Then she'd got a bit crazy with the running away and hiding, and I'd actually lost her for a perilous 30 seconds or so, so I had put her on my back in the Ergo, at which she was protesting a bit but not too much. She still had a map, though, and wanted to draw on it. However, I couldn't give her a pencil now for fear she'd stab me in the neck as her list-making got too feverish. (She's her mother's daughter, after all.)

As we continued past the pots and pans and big glass jars in which to artistically keep all your baking supplies, Mabel piped up in exactly the same tragic tone Monkey had used three minutes earlier: "I wish I had a pencil."

Sound and vision

These days, Mabel's opening gambit is "I wuv you too." Which doesn't leave me anywhere to go, really, except a big hug and a kiss.

Lately, sentences such as "Maybe Daddy can do it," responses like "Because I need to," and double-barrelled sentiments the like of "I want to open it so I can drink it" have become so commonplace that I've almost stopped noticing that my not-yet-2-year-old (22 months next Saturday, people) is conversing like an old hand. One day while we were away I offered her a pencil to draw with. She looked up at me calculatingly and said: "How...how...how..." I knew something new was on the way. "How about a pen?"


*******

Oh boy. I've just looked at the forecast and noticed that after a week of 90-somethings, Saturday's forecast high is 77F. I will be all over that - especially as I'll be (wo)manning the school's booth at the Labor Day Festival from 1 to 3 that day. I really hope it's still true by then.

*******

On Sunday morning, as we were being magically transported cafe-wards on the divine escalator of those who worship at IKEA, I noted that my glasses were so scratched (only from repeatedly cleaning them on my t-shirt, not putting them down face-first on tables or throwing them in with fighting cats) that I should probably just get laser surgery. I wasn't entirely serious, but on the other hand it has to happen sometime. I've always thought I'd do it eventually, when the price came down and the procedure was better, and maybe we're there.

At some point it becomes economical to spend the money in one fell swoop instead of replacing expensive glasses every few years, not to mention the incidental expense of contact lenses that I hardly ever wear. (Since moving to the US I've found it more and more difficult to wear my lenses, even when I have the wateriest kind available. Either the climate here is too dry, or maybe I've just worn them for too long. I did well out of contact lenses for all of my 20s, when my ego and I needed them most, but they don't really work for me any more.)

And in a way, now that it's no longer about vanity, I think maybe I could let myself do it. (Vanity is the wrong word there. It's not that I spent hours in front of the mirror thinking about how great I looked. I spent hours in front of the mirror trying on everything I owned and going back to the one I'd started out with in an attempt to look reasonably nice. Just like every other girl does.) But nowadays there's no time to look in the mirror. The door it hangs on swings wide before I've caught a glance, and I have other things to do. If I don't have poppy seeds stuck between my teeth and if any visible stains on my t-shirt might plausibly have been made after I put it on this morning, then I'm probably good to go. I'm only going to the playground anyway. I almost like my glasses these days because they hide my wrinkles - at least from me. Without them my face feels a little naked.

Looking at our insurance, I might be able to do it for as little as $850 per eye. At this point, the longer I wait the less economical it gets, if I just keep buying new glasses instead. But part of me, though not usually icked out by medical things, can't help being a tad ooged by the clockwork-oranginess of the idea of having my eyelids pronged open while they slice bits of my cornea open and fire lasers at me. (Fine: (a) I haven't read the book, and (b) I know that they don't have to slice the cornea, necessarily. Leave me to my literary hyperbole, please, even if it's inaccurate.) And there can be side effects, and sometimes it just doesn't work, and heck, I only have one pair of eyes, and they're crap, but you know I can forget about that most of the time. Maybe it's not worth it just to not have to look through a faint blur of scratches all day.

Anyone out there care to weigh in? Should I do it?

Waving not drowning

The baby turned nine months old and learned to wave today. She was waggling her hand in a puzzling and new way at dinner, and I couldn’t work out what she meant by it. All done? You want to get down? Your hand hurts? But then her father came home and the hand started up again and I realised she was waving for all she was worth.

I told Monkey that Grandad was going to be 80 next week. He said “And then he’ll die?” Since I’ve told him that people get old and then they die, this wasn’t too much of a surprise.
“I hope not for a while yet,” I said, and went on to explain how we’d all die in due course, even me, in many years, and Monkey himself many years after that.
“But I’ll die with you,” he insisted. I laughed it off and we changed the subject.

Several hours later, out of the blue, he said again, “I’ll just die with you, Mummy.” I think he thinks it’s like going to IKEA or something. Maybe it is.