Concerted effort

My favourite Christmas carol is God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen, because as an alto I can't get up high enough for all the other ones.

I used to sing in choirs. I don't have a particularly good voice, or a particularly strong voice, and I can only stay in tune when surrounded by a group of people also singing the same thing, but I enjoyed it and I can read music decently enough not to go horribly noticeably wrong. I also showed up for practice, which is always a bonus from a director's point of view.

My husband has also sung in choirs for many years. He's much better at it than I am, being what you might call legitimately musical and with a nice voice to boot. He'll even sing alone in front of other people, if you ply him with a drink or three. And it will sound good.

At Christmas, the Messiah is what we should be singing. I sang in the Messiah several times, in school and college and afterwards too. I could probably still get a fairish proportion of the alto line right, if given a score and placed right in the middle of all the other altos. Some day, I'll go to a singalong Messiah and do that, I hope.

For years, the choir concert was part of the beginning of Christmas. Long black skirt, black long-sleeved top, putting on my makeup in the bathrooms in the Science building of UCD, or the ones Dramsoc used in the LGs of the Arts block. Waiting upstairs in the O'Reilly Hall, going through those last few bits where I still went wrong, marking them with a pencil so at least I'd know where to stop singing for two or three notes rather than mess it up. The sound of an orchestra tuning up; it's like the clinking of ropes on masts in the harbour on a breezy summer's day. Sometimes I was in the orchestra instead - third clarinet or something like that. Again, not very good, but a show-er-up.

I love the anticipation, the lights, being on stage, being important but camouflaged as one of many. Not being the one who faints, that's vital; there's always one. Watching the conductor, trying not to giggle, turning pages silently. Looking out for parents, friends, whoever you could strongarm to come along. Smiling keeps you in tune. File out row by row, one by one.

On the whole, I enjoy a concert a lot more when I'm part of it than when I'm just watching. But we should find a concert to go to, because it's not Christmas without one.

The more things change, the more they stay the same

Christmas in America is so different from Christmas in Ireland.

• In America, you go to a performance of The Nutcracker. In Ireland, you go to the pantomime.
• In America, the big shopping day is the day after Thanksgiving. In Ireland, it's traditionally the Feast of the Assumption, December 8th; because all the schools would be off and everyone from the country would come up to Dublin. After going to Mass, of course.
• In America, you have to be careful to say "Happy Holidays", in case someone is Jewish or of some other faith, because you wouldn't want to offend anyone. In Ireland, you say Happy Christmas, because offending people is a national pastime and insulting someone is a true mark of friendship.
• In America people drink egg nog and eat candy canes. In Ireland they drink whatever you're having yourself, and eat selection boxes and Quality Street.
• In America, Turkey Day is Thanksgiving; people eat all sorts of different traditional foods on Christmas Day, depending on their heritage. In Ireland, Turkey Day is Christmas Day and that's that.
• Americans bake gingerbread houses and peppermint bark; Irishers bake mince pies and Christmas cake.

And yet, my Facebook and Twitter feeds - full of people from both sides of the Atlantic - confirm that:

• Everyone is unable to believe that it's December already.
• Definitely nobody is ready for it to be 2014.
• People everywhere have either done all their shopping or are leaving it till the last possible minute.
• Christmas is becoming more commercial every year, but the Christmas spirit is still alive and well if you take a moment to look for it.
• Some people's Christmas trees are already up. Some are not.
• Letters to Santa are being written and some children, on both sides of the Atlantic, are having up close and personal encounters with the man himself. (Don't ask how. It's magic.) 

I think it's just possible we are all cut from the same cloth, after all.

The secret life of books

I started reading Charlotte's Web to Mabel last night. She's heard bits of it before, when B was reading it to Dash about a year (or more) ago, and she was concerned that she wouldn't like it. She asked me to promise before we started that the pig doesn't die. I said he didn't.

I didn't mention the spider.

I love reading books I loved to my children; but more than that, I really love having the exact copies I read to pass on to them. There's so much history there. Even if some of it isn't even mine. Case in point, this edition.

                                                 

I'm pretty sure I bought it at my local second-hand bookshop (the wonderful and sadly now defunct Exchange, in Dalkey). I couldn't tell you when, but I might have been around ten. It probably cost about 25p. It's a 1976 edition, and still has its original pricetag on the back:

I don't know where or what the APCK bookshop was, but I love that it was 49 and a half pence. The halves mattered.

On the inside, the plot thickens, because there's this:

This is a nuns' book! 

And further, this, written with one of those invisible-ink pens that didn't show up until you rubbed the other end over where you'd written. I had one of those pens, but Thomas Galin (sp?) is not me.

For some reason, I never wrote my own name in, but I can guarantee that it has been sitting on my bookshelf for longer than it sat in the library of the junior school at Mount Anville or on the shelves of one Thomas Galin. And now it can sit on one of my children's shelves, at least for a while.

******

I hope she doesn't get upset about the spider.

Wishes

One of the things I wanted to do on this trip was pretty easily attainable. I wanted to go for a walk up the hill. The hill that's close to my parents' house, the one we always went up for a walk, either to the quarry (turn left at the fork in the path) or the obelisk (turn right). One morning the sun was shining (intermittently) and the playground meetup I had planned was postponed and the stars aligned and this is what we did instead.

There's a broad wall to walk along most of the way, making the steps a lot more fun.

You can stop at the shop counter and sell a few twigs or a nice selection of autumnal leaves to the passersby.

And then, just before the obelisk but when you've come out to the breathtaking top of the hill, there are the wishing steps.

Walk around each level in turn, and when you get to the top you can have a wish.

Certain things earn wishes, you know. Birthday candles, of course; falling stars - but other things too, like the first strawberry of the season (also applies to rhubarb) and hopping three times around the base of a round tower. My mother has the definitive list, I believe.

They wished solemnly, to themselves. Mabel couldn't contain a secret, though, and had to tell me when she got down to the bottom again, that she'd wished for a new teddy. Because she's clearly lacking in teddies.

Dash wanted to cash it in as many times as possible. I had to decree that only three wishes could be had on any visit to the steps, because more wishers were arriving. Another family came along and we heard their mother tell them the same thing - walk around and when you get to the top you get a wish.

It's not written on a plaque or an informational leaflet anywhere. It's local folklore, it's how you tell the natives from the tourists.

It's important to know about the wishes. You never know when you might need one.

Recalibrate

Let's look at it this way: I'm lucky to call two beautiful places home. (Sometimes beauty is subtle. Sometimes you have to go away to see it at all.) I'm lucky to have family in one place and a family of friends in the other. My children are lucky to have two passports, to feel (a little bit) at home in two places, to know that America isn't the Only and that the way Americans say things or do things isn't the One True Way.

Someone asked me, or maybe they didn't but this was the question I answered, why we bring the children to Ireland every year. I want them to know their grandparents, of course, before they don't have them any more; and I want them to know their aunts and uncles and cousins too, because those relationships are real and special and not something that you can just pluck out of thin air. But apart from that, I suppose I want them to know Ireland enough that it's not a big, huge, special, once-in-a-lifetime place for them. I want it to be a normal place, somewhere they're used to being and where they feel, to a degree, that they can belong if they want to.

And maybe I look too far into the future when I declare that I don't want to grow old here where my roots are not, and that I don't want to give my children another place they could belong, in case they decamp and have my grandchildren there, far from me. Maybe I should just chill about that sort of thing, because they might move to Australia or have no children or never move out at all, and I might be unhappy about any of those eventualities too.

Maybe everything is just fine, and I'm lucky.

I know I'm lucky.

Shift

After two weeks in the country, my American twang has settled down and I sound pretty much Irish again. (All my American friends are wondering what I'm talking about. As far as they're concerned I don't have any American accent.) It just takes a little time for the shift to occur, as my ear gets reaccustomed to the intonations and the vowels and the nice crisp consonants.

I've been obsessed with black boots while we've been here. I've watched people go by from the ankles down, mostly. I've been to the Clarks shop at least three times. I've ascertained that shoes here are habitually a measurement wider than the regular size in America, which means that everything in the shop should fit me. I have to take advantage of this, because in the States I always have to order shoes off the Internet.

I cruised around the clothes shops a few times, but before I could commit to anything, I had to wait for my eye to shift fashion-wise too. And then I had to be realistic about what I would buy and wear if I lived here versus what I'll actually wear once I return to my jeans-and-tops real life in America. I bought a pair of black trousers that are slim-fitting enough and of soft enough material that they will function as leggings, but with more heft to them. They'll go inside my boots, and under long tops.

Then, eventually, I bought a pair of black ankle boots, after trying on every pair in the shop. I was delighted with them for a few hours, until they started to hurt my feet. So I brought them back and today, with my Irish money apparently burning a hole in my wallet, bought a different pair. These ones are less biker and more arctic, but they're definitely comfortable and will suit my needs better, as well as going with my skinny jeans and the black not-leggings in a very casual, not-dressy way. Which, to be honest, is the way I need them to be, for my casual, not-dressy life of grocery shopping and school pickups and the odd committee meeting.

Tomorrow we shift once more, back to Americans. And so it goes.

Dublin bloggy meetup

Meeting other bloggers is a funny thing. They may look like their profile photos or have unaccountably cut their hair since, but that's really the only aspect of them that you'll probably find to be in any way as you expected. Last time I met up with some other bloggers, I wasn't familiar with their online voices, so what I noticed was more superficial. But on Saturday I met up with some of the Irish Parenting Bloggers in Dublin, and was delighted and surprised by how similar or different people can be in person when you know them best (or only) through an online medium.

In writing, you can't tell an extrovert from an introvert. You can't tell a Dublin accent from Cork from Texas. You might have an idea who would command the floor if a group got together in person, but you might not be right about that at all.

When it comes to socializing, having an online persona doesn't exactly level the playing field, but it definitely changes the game. A bloggers' meetup is a bit like a gathering of rock stars in reverse: far from looking for the limelight, many writers, by nature, tend to shy away from attention and want to deflect instead. We prefer to interact on the page, on the screen, where we have time to consider our words and where we're never too far from the delete key.

So the fact that a bunch of us dared to meet up at all, in daylight, with laptops left at home and phones put away, is a testament to the power of our connection online. And it turned out that we had a lot to say to each other about everything that was not blogging, as well as things that might be.

Here's everyone. From left to right at the back we have Looking for Blue Sky, Laura from My Internal World, Mind the Baby, Lauren of The Dare Project, Sadhbh from Where Wishes Come From, Caitriona from Wholesome Ireland, yours truly, and Office Mum. The front row has BlueSky's daughter Smiley, then Lisa of Mama.ie with adorable baby, Lucy of Learner Mama, Muuka of One More Pair of Boots, and Glitter Mama Wishes.

Welcome

Mild is not a word that's ever applied to the weather in America. In Ireland, it implies an element of grateful surprise that it's not any colder. The weather is mild right now, which is lovely. It's not warm, but it's warmer than we have any right to expect at this point in October. It can be mild and raining at the same time, of course, but if it's mild and breezy and the clouds are scudding past, it's really very pleasant.

The plane came in at 4.30 am and Ireland came up with its fairy lights, as Louis Macniece said, even though it's not Christmas. They were little orange dots, like Lucozade. Exactly like Lucozade.

-----

That was Monday, and now it's Friday. We've been pretty useful, but I still wonder how we got to the end of the weekdays without feeling like we've done more than dip our toe into being here at all. We've established that Mabel will happily exist on unlimited potato waffles while Dash would like to eat nothing but fresh-baked baguettes from the local shops. Along with milk and chocolate biscuits, these will form the basis of their diets for two weeks, and I'm sure they won't die or develop rickets in that time. Probably.

I've also been reminded that while Dash in personality is very attached to schedule and routine and predictability, in physiology he adapts much more quickly to the five-hour time difference than his sister does. However, since Mabel has slept through, or almost through, every night - in contrast to past years when she's been wide awake and wanting to play at 3am for nights on end - I suppose I'll forgive her the screaming and kicking and hysterical "I'm not tired"-ing at 11.30 for the past two nights.

---------

Never mind all this talking. How about a picture or two...

'Scuse me

In Ireland. Busy drinking tea and mainlining chocolate digestives. Back soon.

I felt this embodied the true spirit of the National Natural History Museum,
unchanged from school trips through the ages.

Tiny things

One of the slats of Mabel's headboard isn't sanded smooth like the others. I'd never have noticed it, but one night at bedtime I saw her feeling each one. 

"What are you doing?" 

"I'm looking for the rough one."

I felt with her and found the rough one, one from the end on the right.

It's one of those tiny things that children take the time to find out and adults breeze right by. It will be one of the sense memories she retains of her early childhood, of her first bed, of her bedroom and this house.

I remember what the underside of my bed looked like, how it felt to turn my head slideways and slither swiftly under it for a game of hide and seek, where it's rough and smooth and painted, and how it was surprisingly roomy underneath, before I got too big and it wasn't any more. 

I remember the view from inside the hot press (linen cupboard), behind the mound of spare balls of wool for darning, on top of the good damask tablecloth and the other teacosy that was a present and the pillowcases nobody ever used. I hid there for a long time one afternoon, until my seeker had long given up and my mother was getting worried.

I remember the waist-high wall at the back of my best friend's garden, the one we once climbed over to roam through the next garden over and the one after that, until we heard his mother calling in the distance and scrambled hurriedly back to be roundly scolded. The wall was made of rough dark-grey concrete domed over mortared-together granite rocks. The concrete was flaking away in places, where we could pick at it and find the underneath. 

Even when you can go back - and I still can, I'll be there next week - sometimes you need a child to help you see the past properly.

Way too many things to think about

It's October tomorrow. That means I've a lot of planning to do. For instance:

Planning in further detail our trip to Ireland at the end of the month -

• what I'll wear
• what I have to buy in order to wear these things 
• how I'll masquerade as a stylish person instead of a slobby soccer mom who wears the same pair of jeans and scuffed mary-janes every single day
• if the kids need new shoes for all the walking in rain that will happen (answer: yes)

And boring stuff like

• car seats to borrow
• things for kids to do on the journey

Additionally,

• touristy-type things we might do when we're there, now that the children are a little older
• people I need to contact to see if we can pin down when we might see them
• how wet an Autumn they'll be having for those specific two weeks

Also, not to forget,

• working out our best marathon-viewing opportunities, because of course B is running the marathon. 

Then, as a subheading, we have not merely

• Halloween in Dublin: do we have to bring costumes? what costumes? where will we do the trick-or-treating? does B want to do some sort of elaborate themed family thing? (Answer: over my dead body; only if he organizes the whole thing; therefore, no.) Dash is talking about some variation on last year (Luke Skywalker) that involves a green lightsaber (very specifically) and a brown cloak and I think it's just a ploy to get a new lightsaber when it's neither his birthday nor Christmas.

but also (sigh, sunrise sunset, etc),

• Mabel's fifth birthday, in Dublin: do we have a family party? In which case, where? Can I bake a cake in our Air B'n'B rental apartment? Do we bring presents to Dublin? (No. What sort of idiot do you take me for?) But then I need to buy or order presents before we go so they're here when we get back.

And of course, planning a birthday party with her friends for the weekend after we get back, when we'll be only just over the jet lag but I'll still be expected to infuse us all with sugar some more and again and repeatedly, unless she wants a broccoli cake which sounds to me like a great idea but maybe not to her brother's taste.

Which planning will not be a trivial matter even though I can just bung an evite out there (thank the deity for evites; I love 'em) because we'll have to figure out

(a) just girls?
(b) which girls?
(c) just girls and one boy?
(d) siblings?
(e) just the one sibling of the one boy so Dash has a friend?
(f) and the one who's the twin of one of the girls?
(g) but then, what about the boy whose birthday party she's attending next week?
(h) parents?

And then we have to hammer out the decision in such a way that she doesn't decide the next day and every next day after that to change her mind in some new and unspecified direction. Which probably means just inviting feckin' everyone.

And then, there's always looking way ahead to Christmas and making a cake and planning to go to the Nutcracker for the first time and whatever other things we should do when we have Christmas here instead of in Ireland.


So you can see why planning what we're having for dinner tonight has just fallen completely by the wayside. Maybe there's something in the freezer.

Think calming thoughts.

Back to school in America

This week the lovely Irish Parenting Bloggers, my soul sisters (and brothers) (but mostly sisters), have been discussing the annual financial burden of sending your kids back to school, even in a country where most primary (elementary) schools are state run and therefore "free". I offered to talk a bit about our experience, for the sake of comparison.

This is our third year in the American public school system - something I never expected to encounter at first hand, and a prospect that felt very daunting when Dash entered kindergarten. (Kindergarten is the first year of elementary school for most children here, and they start when they've turned five.) Apart from the mystery that was the PTA - that's the Parent-Teacher Association - I had to navigate the unknown perils of the school supply list.

It was all pretty easy, as it turned out. Of course. You get a list of things to buy before the year starts, and you go to Target or Staples or the supermarket and buy them. In Ireland, cynical me says, the shops would put up the prices of all these things in August, but around here they tend to have at least some of them on sale, and each state even has a tax-free week or weekend at the end of the summer when you can buy children's clothes and school supplies without the usual added sales tax (that's like VAT).

Our list this year, just out of interest, looked like this:

• 1 large book bag
• 1-inch white hard binder
• 12 no. 2 pencils, sharpened
• 2 glue sticks
• 4 composition books
• 1 pair of children's safety scissors
• 4 pocket folders
• 1 box of crayons or coloured pencils (no more than 24)
• 2 small pencil sharpeners with cover
• 1 pack wide-ruled lined paper

There are other things they note would be nice to have donations of, such as copy paper, more crayons, index cards, tissues, and liquid hand soap, but that's the basic list.

The first year I obsessed over whether we were meant to label each item with his name, and if so whether we had to label every single pencil and crayon or just the box, and so on. This year I just put them all in a bag and brought them in. I don't actually know whether my son uses the specific items I bought or whether they are all stored together in the classroom and then doled out as the children need them - it doesn't really matter. I bought the nicer crayons and the brand-name pencils because I like those, but if he ends up using someone else's not-so-spendy supplies, that's the luck of the draw.

As far as back-to-school costs go, that's the lot. Done for about $50. I didn't count.

Our school doesn't have a uniform at the moment, though it is being considered. Several of the local public elementary schools do, and I assume it would be something similar - a simple outfit that I could buy in Target or from Land's End (for instance) depending on the quality I wanted and how much I had to spend. They don't have crests or whatever it is that made my Irish school uniform so terribly expensive and only available from the secret special room at the back of the second floor in Arnott's of Henry Street.

Books and workbooks are all provided at school. They never even come home, so I don't see them and know very little about them. There's no extra photocopying charge, no not-actually-voluntary contribution, and no extra fundraising commitment. If you join the PTA you can volunteer some hours of work at the used bookstall at the upcoming Labor Day Festival, or help organize the 5k race they do every year, or help out at the Scholastic book fair later in the year, for instance, but it's not mandatory and it's easy to help without writing a cheque. (Though cheques are always welcome.)

I'm not counting things my son would need anyway, like new winter shoes and clothes and a coat. He's pretty well set for the coming season as far as that goes, thanks to my affinity for the thrift store and my habit of stocking up on higher-end things (like a good coat) when end-of-season sales happen. I got him a really nice winter anorak last spring that will do him for the next two years, at least. His backpack is still fine, though he may need a bigger one by next year.

We are designated "walkers" because we live within a mile of the school. If we lived further out, he could take the big yellow school bus. During the year, the teachers will probably send out requests for additional supplies - last year they were always running out of glue sticks and pencils and whiteboard markers. The PTA will run a coat drive when the weather gets colder, and I'll probably pick up a decent-quality kid's coat at the thrift store and bring it in, to be donated to a child who might not otherwise be warm and dry all winter. The school provides lunches that can be bought at a reasonable price, and these are free to those who need them. Children can arrive early and eat breakfast at school if that's arranged for them. There is a limited amount of before- and after-care available, but you have to be lucky and get randomly selected from all the applicants to benefit from that.

Schools vary from district to district, from county to county, and from state to state. You can decide to send your children to private school, of course, or you can choose the location of your home because of the school district it feeds into, if you're in a position to do so. But our middle-of-the-road school has such luxuries - as any Irish state-funded school would probably see them - as a librarian (sorry, that's a media specialist), a counsellor, several special education teachers, a psychologist, and dedicated music and art teachers.

There are many things that are far from perfect with the American school system, with my county's school system, and even, maybe, with our school. But from where I'm sitting, I have to admit that it seems like a pretty good bang for my buck.

If you're interested in reading more about the cash crunch many Irish parents find themselves in at this time of year, here's a handy infographic. And take a look at the other contributions to this conversation (I'll update this list as the week progresses, so come back again):

The Clothesline - It All Adds Up
Wholesome Ireland - School Expenses
The Mama’s Hip – Homeschooling haul and chatter
Learner Mama - Back to school - A costly business
Musings And Chatterings – Crests and costs – starting big school 
The Serious Wagon - Back to School Costs 
Dreaming Aloud - Changing Gear
My Country Girl Ramblings - Back to School The Hidden Costs
Jazzygal - Back to school costs (a lot)

Slippery slope (A grammar rant)

You know what annoys me?

Well, okay, plenty of things. The sun is too sunny, mosquitoes bite, I have no cookies in the house and yet can't bring myself to make any because then I'll eat them all; but no, something else.

The plural of euro, that's what.

I know, I just lost most of you. Never mind. Come back tomorow, I'll talk about kids or something.

The euro is the currency of many countries of Europe, and has been for several years now. It was introduced in Ireland only a few months before I left the country, which is why I still have to hunt and peck in my purse to find the right coins whenever we're back there. At the time I was fully and gainfully employed as an editor - in a whole department of editors, no less - so the issue of how to properly refer to the new currency was discussed in a professional capacity, as it were.

We looked into it. It was discovered and agreed upon that the official word was that the plural of euro (in English) was to be "euros." Sensible and obvious, since to make a plural in English we pretty much always do just add an s, especially when the singular ends in a vowel.* 

So why is it that, since that time, the entire country of Ireland decided, en masse and seemingly of its own volition, with no editiorial consultation, that if you had ten of these new units of currency, you would not have ten euros? No, no, of course you wouldn't. You would have ten euro.**

I've tried to be good. Lord knows, I've done my damndest to hold the line, even from this distance. I talk about euros whenever I can, even in Ireland. All it has done is to make me sound like one of those crazies who insists on saying "fort" instead of "fortay" because it's a French word, not an Italian one. (This may be another argument for another day.)

Apparently, much as has recently - heinously - happened with the definition of literally - about which I am figuratively hopping mad - common usage has triumphed and what was wrong has become acknowledged as right just because it's what most people do.

I hate that. Talk about a slippery slope. One minute it's euros, the next minute people will be advertising banana's and apple's and how its over their in the lady's department and nobody will know where they stand and they'll have to abolish the apostrophe all together, as well as common decency and saying thank you and not farting audibly in public.

*Collins still says this:
euro. (n.d.). Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 10th Edition. Retrieved August 20, 2013, from Dictionary.com website: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/euro

** Dictionary.com is a flipping flip-flopper that refuses to have an opinion, so it says that the plural is either euro or euros.

Boob psychology

I'm still thinking about breastfeeding, given the week that's in it. (Actually, August is National Breastfeeding Awareness Month in the US, so I can go on and on with this.)

I've always wondered why the Irish have such terrible breastfeeding rates. Because we really do. According to the ERSI, just over half of mothers (56 per cent) currently initiate breastfeeding in Ireland, compared to 81 per cent in the UK and over 90 per cent in Scandinavian states.* Only 22% of babies are still breastfed at 3 months, with that number dropping below 10% by 6 months. In the USA, by contrast, almost half of babies are still breastfed at 6 months** - no small feat considering how many of those mothers had to go back to work and start pumping milk from as soon as six weeks post-partum.

In the wonderful personal accounts the Irish Parenting Bloggers have been sharing this week, one thing has stood out in my mind: the lack of support they've suffered from many of the health professionals involved in their babies' births. But associated with that is the way several of those mothers found it hard to speak up when faced with terrible treatment, because they didn't want to be a bother to anyone, and because the nurses they encountered - mostly nurses, it seems - made them feel that they were causing trouble. Causing trouble by asking for pain medication. By asking for help with latching the baby on. By asking to have their crying baby picked up and given to them after a c-section.

I understand this mentality, I really do. I don't like bothering people. If I'm a patient, I want to be a model patient. I want to be the one who is no trouble. (Look how proud I was of actually asking questions, way back in my first pregnancy.) I want to get the answers right, so that the doctor/nurse/professional I'm talking to approves of me and decides I'm a nice girl.

What the hell? Who worries about being a nice girl when she's having a baby - which is pretty hard and important work, ya know? Well, apparently I do, and I don't think I'm the only one. Did my mother make me this way? Was it mentally beaten into me, and into her, and her mother before her, that good girls didn't make trouble? I would go so far as to say that, though of course there are people of every level of assertiveness all over the world, in Ireland we perhaps have more non-assertive people/women than in other countries.

Perhaps we even like the martyrdom, just a tiny bit. It feels good for your soul, doesn't it? Hedonism is definitely bad, so putting up with hardship and not whining about it must be good, right? Oh dear, this is getting awfully Catholic.

Whatever - my pop psychology is based on no actual research. But the fact stands that given the vulnerable situation of a mother at the exact time when breastfeeding begins, in the midst of pain and unfamiliarity and at the mercy of the "professionals," the Irish tendency to "offer it up" works against many people.

Maybe, just maybe, this aspect of the Irish national psyche has something to do with the low rates of breastfeeding. Maybe many mothers who really wanted to try to breastfeed were sabotaged not just by the system but by their own innate disinclination to speak up for themselves, because they didn't want to make trouble.

(A doula is really helpful here. One major job of a doula is to advocate for her client when her client is in a vulnerable and unfamiliar state. A doula knows what's going on and how the system works, as well as what the mother wants. If you are pregnant in Ireland, I would strongly advise you to look into getting a doula.)

The thing is, I know that every single mama can and will advocate for her child. Every mama, Irish or otherwise, is a mother bear, a lioness, a spitting, snarling tiger mother if you threaten her child, or fail to help her child, or let her child be in pain.

So I would say to you, expectant mothers of Ireland who are planning to breastfeed (and anywhere else they like to breed nice girls): find that righteous anger, access your deep but vast recesses of self-assurance RIGHT NOW. Use it for yourself right at the start of your child's life, to ensure that you get what you need to begin breastfeeding the way you wanted to, the way you know will work best because you've done the research even if the person talking to you has not. Advocate for your baby. Because breastfeeding isn't just about us, it's about our children.

This isn't the first time I've tried to get to the root of the Irish breastfeeding problem. This is what I wrote four years ago. 

*Source: http://www.esri.ie/news_events/latest_press_releases/breastfeeding_in_ireland_/
** Source: http://www.cdc.gov/breastfeeding/data/reportcard.htm#Indicators

Transatlantic subtleties: Homes from home

Before I go any further I realise that there are some terms that need clarification when discussing one's holidays (that is, vacation) with a transatlantic audience. This is (almost exactly) what we stayed in last week.

The campsite calls it an RV, but it's not. I wanted to call it a caravan, but it's not. It might be a mobile home if you were in Ireland, but here a mobile home would probably be bigger. So here are some parameters for your terms if you should be called upon to explain your temporary dwellings to someone from across the pond.

Tent: Fine, a tent's a tent. I'm not a camper, so that's all I have to say about that.

Caravan: I believe that if you say "caravan" to an American, they will envisage an old-timey Romany (gypsy) caravan. Or maybe a bunch of camels following each other over the dessert. To an Irish person, a caravan is a tin can with bunks in it that you can pull behind your car. This, obviously, is a lovely vintage one. Newer ones aren't quite so petite or bijou.

Adorable; but I wouldn't want to live in it

Trailer: To an American, a trailer is something large and inhabitable that you can pull behind your car - an Irish caravan, in fact. To an Irish person, it's a base with a tow-hitch and wheels that you would put something like a boat on to transport it.

An Irish sort of trailer

Mobile home: To an Irish person, a mobile home is a large caravan, possibly with the wheels taken off. What we stayed in last week was an Irish-style mobile home. To an American, a mobile home is can have actual rooms and a deck built on it and be mobile only in the vaguest of meanings. That it can be easily moved by a tornado, for instance.

This home is "mobile", if you're American

RV: This stands for a Recreational Vehicle. It's one of those huge caravans with a built-in driver's seat so you don't trail it behind your car but might trail your car behind it. Some Americans sell up the family house when they retire, buy an RV, and travel the length and breadth of the continent for some or all of their remaining days. Others just have one to go on vacation with. I cannot imagine trying to drive one on European roads, but I think they're called motorhomes there.

I have no idea where a camper van fits in all this, or what you'd consider one to be. Is it the orange VW Beetle "bus" my cousins had in 1976?

Just add (Little Miss) Sunshine

One other thing occurs to me. If you get rained out of your campsite, you might want to check in to a more permanent establishment. Hotels and motels and guesthouses are fine, but B&Bs might cause a hiccup of misunderstanding.

In the US a Bed & Breakfast is a particularly nice guesthouse. It's usually quite fancy and some of them don't take children. We will probably never stay in one en famille. An Irish B&B, on the other hand, is usually a private house that rents out a bedroom or two to tourists. Generally speaking, Irish B&B's are a good budget option and very family-friendly. The one thing both types of B&B have in common is that with any luck the breakfast will be good.


Transatlantic subtleties is an occassional series of posts, to which I add whenever the mood moves me. You can find the others by clicking on the link in my tag cloud on the right.

Naturalist

American robins are ginormous.

Or, for the other half of my audience, Irish robins are teensy.

The problem with moving away from where you grew up is that you become a total ignoramus - not just when strangers try to ask you directions, but also when your children innocently ask you what sort of bird that is. And you have no idea. Not only that, but you're not sure what sort of tree this is or - what the heck is that creature at the bottom of the garden? (Hint: It's a groundhog. They're big.)

I'm actually not too bad at nature, so long as I don't have to spend extended periods of time in it. I mean, my mother knows the names of trees and flowers and birds, and every now and then I look at something growing and a word pops into my head. Sometimes it's "purple" or "spiky" but other times it's more useful, like when I noticed a flower in our yard recently that made the word "hellebore" trip lightly across my mind. Followed closely by "belladonna," "Socrates," and "poisonous." And "Oh, that's nice, the kids are making pretend dinner in the frying pan I gave Dash because he watched Tangled again recently and wants to have his very own frying pan to fight bad guys with."

I digress.

But wherefore the red-berried Cotoneaster of my youth? The fluffy Leylandii and shiny Griselinia hedges, the pink-belled Fuchsia of the Irish garden? (See, I know all the fancy names. But I had to look up the spellings.) The shy robin red-breast, blue tit (no jokes, please), and ubiquitous blackbird? The birch and beech, sycamore and horse-chestnut? I recognize all those. This country - this part of this country - has other stuff.

So the most common bird around here seems to be a sturdy mid-sized brown bird with an orangey front. I knew it wasn't a cardinal - the bright red, very exotic-looking and smaller bird that makes me wonder just what sort of colour-blind predator ensured its evolution - but it was only this year that my friend-who-knows-about-birds told me what I saw was an American robin.

 

American Robin (image from Wikipedia)

Apart from the reddish breast, it's nothing like an Irish (or British) robin, which is a tiny, delicate bird. I presume the poor pilgrims were so homesick that they decided this was the closest thing this land could manage when they named it. Or that everything in America was bigger.

European Robin (image from Wikipedia)

The other day the children were playing at the front of the house. I saw Mabel climbing in the smallish rhodedendron bush and decided nothing bad would happen if I went indoors. Two minutes later she ran in after me -

"Mummy, look what I found!"

 - and handed me a beautiful, tiny, greeny-blue, warm, egg. Intact. Before I had time to formulate an answer, Dash was behind her showing me a second egg. Apparently none of our parent-child discussions had yet covered what to do if you find a nest in a tree you happen to be climbing.

I took the two eggs very gently and told the children as unfreakingoutly as I could that they had to go back in the nest straight away, so that the mother bird wouldn't miss them. To be honest, I thought that she'd smell us on them and abandon the nest forever, but we had to try. Dash said there were other eggs in the nest too, so I thought at least there might be hope for them.

The poor stupid bird had built her nest at just about seven-year-old head-height, right in front of a big gap in our half-dead, surprises-me-with-blooms-every-year, crappy rhodedendron bush. I'm amazed Mabel managed to climb in there at all without immediately stepping on it. But we put the eggs back and hoped for the best. Mabel got very angry with me for saying that the baby birds might not hatch, so I knew she was feeling bad about it and I tried my best not to sound as if I was blaming her. She honestly didn't know the right thing to do.

So we talked about leaving nests alone and never touching eggs in future, and some helpful friends on Facebook told me that probably the mother bird would not actually fly away and leave her eggs to their unsatupon fate, and lo the next day I looked out the window and saw her happily back there, sitting on her stupidly low and exposed nest. She's still there, intermittently, and I have great hopes that in a few days? weeks? how long do eggs take? we might even see baby birds from the comfort of our own front room, where we have a great view and won't disturb anyone.

I don't know if you can make it out, but that's Mrs Robin in there

And I've given Mabel the task of making sure the neighbourhood cats stay away, any time she sees them outside. She's taking it very seriously.

World Meningitis Day

April 24th is World Meningitis Day, and I promised to help out a little by putting a few words and links here.

One reason I'm glad my children are rarely very sick, and that I always get a little antsy any time one of them does spike a fever, is that the spectre of meningitis is always there. I don't even have any close personal experience with it, thankfully, but for some reason I've never forgotten the advice about rolling a glass over a rash to see if the spots disappear, and whenever anyone looks like they might have a stiff neck, my hackles rise just a tiny bit.

Maybe I watched too many episodes of ER in my young adulthood, or too many episodes of House in my young parenthood, but these things stuck in my mind. On the other hand, maybe it was knowledge picked up from awareness campaigns like this one, aiming to make parents remember that this horrible, sudden-striking, disease has not gone away.

In Ireland and the UK, the most vulnerable group of people are babies and young children. In the US, the main at-risk group is teenagers, and a vaccine is recommended for all 11-18 year olds. (My pediatrician's office gives it at 11, with a booster later on.) But even the vaccine does not protect against all forms of meningitis.

No matter where you are in the world, it does no harm to be aware of the symptoms for all age groups, because catching this early can literally mean the difference between life and death.

Symptoms of bacterial meningitis and septicaemia 

• Fever
• Very sleepy
• Confusion
• Seizures 
• Non-blanching rash (doesn’t disappear under pressure)  
• Vomiting  
• Severe headache  
• Painfully stiff neck 
• Sensitivity to light 

Not all the symptoms may be present, and yes, a lot of this might look like the flu, but if you're worried, please do listen to your spidey-sense and bring your baby or child (or teen) to the emergency room. This really is something that can escalate very quickly.

Ireland has the highest incidence of meningococcal disease (the main cause of bacterial meningitis) in Europe, with over twice the average disease rate. Irish children are currently not protected against all types of meningitis, so it’s important that parents keep watching for the signs and symptoms. 

You can find resources here from the Meningitis Research Foundation (UK) 

Some more information for the United States is here.

 And this is a video for the "Keep Watching Ireland" campaign. 

You can find links to other Irish bloggers participating in this important one-day blog march at the MeetMums site.

I heard the news today, oh boy

When I would come downstairs in the morning, the radio would be on in the kitchen, with my Dad listening to RTE 1. My mum would probably be listening to the same thing on her little "wireless" (yes, they still say that word in my house, and it has nothing to do with the Internet) in the bedroom. On the hour, Dad would approach the radio and stand right beside it, listening intently to the headlines, and anything I happened to say would be summarily shushed.

At nine o'clock every evening the news had to be watched, no matter what else happened to be on telly that might have pushed through that hour. In fact, we didn't tune into programmes that started at odd times like 8.50 on Channel 4 or 8.15 on BBC 2, becuase we'd just miss the end when it came to 9.00 and it was time to turn over to RTE 1 for the nationwide news.

I'm not there any more, but nothing else has changed. I can guarantee you that my Dad was standing by the big radio in the kitchen listening to the news this morning, and will be tuning in again at 1pm (lunchtime news) and watching the TV at nine this evening.

As a child, I didn't really understand this compulsion to find out what was going on. It was only ever boring news (a redundancy of terms, I thought) about another person killed in Northern Ireland - which might as well have been on the other side of the world as far as I was concerned, insulated in South County Dublin - or budget cuts or politicians talking about whatever it was they talked about. Now and then an earthquake or a hijacking to keep it interesting, but nothing that was relevant to me. Certainly nothing that worried me. The only times I remember being affected by headlines are when a family would die in a house fire. I would lie in bed plotting my fire escape route, planning to leap from my bedroom window to the flat roof of next-door's extension.

In this house, where I am the parent, we don't listen to the radio and we don't watch news on TV, unless there's a tornado watch and I have the weather channel on. We get our news from the Internet, at whatever time is convenient, and the children are none the wiser. They barely know what an actual newspaper looks like, so infrequently does one appear in our house.

It wasn't a conscious decision, more a change inspired by lifestyle long before there were children. When I moved here from Ireland I was dazzled by the news channels that either seemed too parochial or bombarded me with constant non-news. I trusted The Irish Times online more than any American news source; though I learned to listen to NPR in the car, and became quite attached to Morning Edition on the way to work each day when we lived in Texas, the unpronouncable names of their announcers, the global reach of their reports, and the warm, comforting voice of Frank Deford, whose amusing takes on sports managed to interest even know-nothing me.

Once Dash was born, though, and went through that inevitable car-hating phase that seems to last for ever, the last thing I wanted was more noise in the car. I started tuning into the classical music station in the hopes that Mozart might calm him down, or at least increase his brain power while he was turning himself red in the face and waving his arms hysterically, breaking the heart of his baby-wearing, co-sleeping mama, trapped a million miles away and trying to keep her blood pressure under control in the driver's seat.

Seven years, two babies, three moves, and one car later, the radio is still mostly stuck on classical NPR, though in the brief moments when I might be driving alone, I'll switch over to the news channel and try to increase my IQ a tiny bit by listening to sensible adults discussing far-reaching things. The last time we heard the news in the car, probably looking for a weather update or something, two minutes of broadcast led to the six-year-old asking, "What's gang rape?" So we won't be doing that again any time soon. (We didn't tell him. I'm all for answering children truthfully, but some things... Just no.)

So my children don't know about the Newtown shootings or the Boston marathon explosions. When B and I want to discuss breaking events, we resort to our pathetic store of Irish vocabulary, or silently motion towards the laptop screen. To be honest, thinking about my own reactions to horrific news - the Enniskillen bombing, for instance, happened when I was 14; Lockerbie, when an aeroplane fell out of the sky onto Scottish people in their beds, a year later - it might all seem distant enough to shrug off. On the other hand, it might terrorize them (mostly Dash, given age and personality), or just gnaw away at them in the dark, like those house fires did to me. The facts that Dash is a first-grader, that we have been to the Boston marathon, might make it seem scarily close, just as they do to me. I don't really know what their reactions would be, but I don't feel the need to find out.

This. So much this.

Will my children be less interested in current events because they don't hear the news every day? I certainly had no interest, and no amount of hearing the news could inspire any, apparently. Should we be discussing the news at the dinner table? At what point will they start hearing the news - when they start reading news websites for themselves? When they have Twitter accounts? I suppose at some point they'll have a Civics class that encourages them to find out more about what's going on, and maybe then we'll finally have to tune in the radio.

How does it work in your house? Do the kids see the news, or do you talk about it? Do you think an interest in current events and/or politics is inborn or cultivated? Did exposure to news events when you were a child go over your head or give you nightmares?

Would we all be better off with less information? Sometimes it certainly feels that way.

Compare and contrast

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oral tradition

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

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

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

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

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

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



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