Invisible memories

I was taking in the washing on Tuesday when the lady next door called me over to the fence to introduce her visiting friend.

"This is June," she said. "She's the original owner of your house."

Our house was built in 1967, and we're the third owners. The people we bought it from lived here for about ten years, but we'd never met the people before that. Our next-door neighbours are some of the few original residents left on the court, having bought their house from the plans before it was even built - and chosen the only completely level yard on the street, I think (all the others have a dramatic slope either at the front or the back of the house).

So I invited June in to see what we'd done with the place, of course.

She lived here for thirty-four years. She had her four children here and watched them grow. She put in the now-horrible green carpet that we routinely abuse, and the matching wallpaper that we ripped off. She and her husband were the ones who extended the family room, and had the washer and dryer brought up there from the basement - two things I wanted to hug her for because they make my life better on a daily basis. They put in the bay window I'm sitting beside right now, that we won't put shades on because they would hide the lovely gentle curve, even if they would also enable people to sit at the other end of the table unblinded of an evening.

She graciously admired the completely changed kitchen, the bench we put in, the new floor in the hall, but her mind was obviously on the years she and her family spent here, the times they had, the things I couldn't see. As we parted, she wished me well and told me they were the happiest years.

I hope I have them too, those years; a couple behind me already and many more ahead, in her happy house. It's nice to get an inkling of the history we're barging through, as we do all the same things again with a new batch of children to grow up feeding baby dolls and scattering lego all over June's carefully selected green carpet.

Stripes for the kitchen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pictures of us

I was writing something else, but it bored even me, so instead I'll post some pictures. Everyone likes pictures, right? You don't even have to read them.

Almost a year ago, I was thinking of getting some professional photos taken. It nearly happened at Christmas, but then it didn't. We finally did that in July, and I'm delighted to present some photographs of our newly adorned walls for your admiration.

We were given the option to buy the digital copies of all the shots from the session, so I did some investigation to find out how much printing them ourselves (decently, not from CVS) would be and decided that it was the best value. So now we can get as many prints as we want and put our faces (and our children's faces, more to the point) all over our walls if we so choose. And I can make a calendar and everything.

While we own the digital files, we don't, of course, own the copyright to the photos, so I'm not uploading the pictures themselves. Hence, you only get to see photos of photos. If you want to come over for tea and a muffin some day, you can see the originals.

I ordered the framed ones above from MPix.com. I think they came out really nicely, though Monkey is a bit miffed that Mabel is bigger. Hers was square, I couldn't help it. If I make his 8x10, then she'll be feeling miffed.

I had these silver frames in the basement. I think they were wedding presents, so I'm happy to finally have a good use for them. Because you know, it's one of the facts of life that no matter how much you say "it's just a placeholder until I get a better one" about whatever photo you put into a frame, it will never, ever come out again.

Then, for our bedroom, I got all fancy and had a canvas printed. I ordered this from canvasondemand.com. Please do not comment on how it looks like Mabel just tied Monkey up. It was the best one of both of them, and I like the hilarious face she's making, which you can't really see here.

 In the family room, I started a wall-o-photos. The middle one and the top right are from the photo shoot - the others are ones I had sitting around in Ikea frames. I'm going to add to this with various shots of the kids at different ages.

But I had to give you a close-up of this. Butter would not melt in his mouth, right?

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.

Winterage

It's fupping freezing, to coin a Ted-ism.

This morning we had an energy audit. That means that two nice men came over and checked out the house, inside and outside and in the attic spaces, and then they put a giant fan in the front door and sucked out all the warm air and used a thermal camera to see exactly where all the cold air was coming in. All over the place, it turns out. We have so many gaps, and so little insulation, that it's the equivalent of a 3-foot window being wide open all the time. Isn't that horrifying? Imagine how much extra money we've thrown at heating and cooling bills over the past nine months. We feel pretty silly that we didn't figure this out sooner.

On the other hand we didn't realise how much we needed it until the December heating bill came in. (I use the disculpatory "we" here, but in truth I defer to B on matters both automotive and structural. Not that he necessarily knows more than I do about them, but I can't be in charge of everything. Possibly as an architect's daughter (and former denizen of the best-insulated house in Ireland) I should have been more interested in how many inches of heat-retaining material resided in our attic space, but I chose not to ponder such matters.)

Anyway, we'll probably end up with swathes more insulation, and I don't know what else to boot, and it'll cost lots up front but we'll thank ourselves next winter (and even in the summer, when perhaps the A/C will work better too). I'm amazed that people have lived in this house for so long before us and not realised how much they could save themselves by sticking in a few rolls of extra insulation, but maybe they didn't have fancy thermal cameras to show them just what was going on. (Monkey thought the thermal camera was pretty cool.)

**********************

I'm a very bad cold-weather parent. I know I should bundle them up and take them for a walk by the lake, where we could point out, I dunno, bare branches and dead leaves and sticks and stuff, but my fingers and toes go numb at the mere thought of a walk in the woods in below-freezing conditions (and I have Reynaud's, so it really would be very little fun; more irritatingly than seriously, but it hurts in the cold). And I know some people successfully stay home without resorting to all-day TV, but I'm just not able to think up a nice afternoon-long game for my four year old and my two year old to play without my constant company, and left to their own devices there would soon be blood on the new sofa. (I leave you to judge which is the worst part of that eventuality.)

So every afternoon, post-nap, post-nap-recovery-mode, post-shoes,-socks-and-coats-application (don't discount how long that stage lasts) we pile into the car and go somewhere, even if it's just for 40 minutes. Spending 4pm to 5pm out of the house is the only thing that keeps me sane: not getting home till closer to 6.00 is even better, so long as I didn't have anything elaborate planned for dinner.

But I'm running out of things to do in this horrible weather. The groceries are procured, we've visited every Target in a 20-mile radius, and today we'll head over to Babies Is We for a big box of pullups. That's all the errands I can possibly think of. Sometimes I'll take them to one of the bigger malls just to frolic in the play area, but those are all 30 minutes' drive away (is it no coincidence that there's no nice mall in PG County?)

So tell me, what do you do with your kids when it's too cold to be out and you can't stay in another minute?

Retrospective

When I was about eleven years old, a nice family moved in across the road. They had a girl of 5 and a boy of 2 (and later a new baby), and very soon they began grooming me as a potential babysitter. Or perhaps I began grooming them as potential employers. One or the other.

Either way, I had little in the way of social life or friends right there on our road, and enjoyed hanging out with the little kids. I basically functioned as an unpaid "mother's helper" for a while, without even realising it - but I kept them occupied, kept an eye on them, played with them in the back garden, and generally could be relied on to keep things ticking over safely while their mum got on with making dinner or whatever it was she was doing. They used to take me swimming sometimes, and while I thought they were doing me a big favour by paying my entrance fee to the local swimming pool, in fact my presence meant that their dad could take both kids swimming and leave the mum at home with the new baby only because I was there to lend a hand. It was pretty much a win/win situation.

When I was fourteen I started babysitting them officially, with payment and everything. The kids were very good, went to bed easily, and then I'd watch shows I never saw at home (because they clashed with the holy of holies, the Nine O'Clock News) like Twin Peaks or Thirtysomething, make myself a cup of tea and steal an extra biscuit, and possibly sneak The Joy of Sex off the bookshelf for a surreptitious ten-minute gawp, before putting it back as silently as possible. Sometimes I played Tetris on the Gameboy. Sometimes I even brought my homework. The older kids never woke up, and if the baby did I was instructed to just pat her on the back until she went back to sleep.

They were an interesting family - Dutch mother, Irish father, first two kids born in the Bahamas before they moved back to our neck of the woods. I remember seeing her breastfeed the baby once, and being surprised because the baby was walking by then, perhaps - I really don't know if she was one or two or some other age, but it was one of only two times I ever saw a mother nursing a baby in my growing up years, so perhaps it was surprising by virtue of happening at all.

Back then, babies went down to sleep on their tummies, and the nifty new baby carrier was secured by the seatbelt in the front passenger seat (well, there were probably no airbags), and of course I never questioned my directions to just pat her back to sleep. (I honestly don't remember whether I ached to pick her up or not. I suspect not. I do remember droning over and over "Go back to sleep; Mama be back soon," and wishing for her to calm down; she always did eventually, but I think I downplayed the events to the returning parents.) I never gave her a bottle, but I never changed her nappy either.

Last year, when we were re-doing the kitchen in our new house, I had a brief but intense flirtation with the notion of cork flooring. It would be warm and cushiony underfoot and pleasingly retro to the eye, but was pretty pricey compared to other options. Finally, I realised that the reason I really wanted it, the reason it seemed like the ideal family kitchen flooring to me, was that the family across the road had cork floors. The memory brought back the comforting feeling of sitting on the bench in the sunlight from their big back window, helping the kids eat their fish fingers and peas, or tasting lentil soup for the first time, not one of the littles and not a grownup, but somewhere in the middle, finding my own space.

Things of import

Oh dear. I very much fear that we've just spent a large amount of money to import across the ocean a bunch of crap that will end up in the next school yard sale.

Our shipment arrived in Baltimore on Monday night. On Wednesday morning, I hightailed it up the I-95 to the customs building there, small person in tow, to get somebody to stamp a vital piece of paper (and yay, not charge us any extra money for importing our own belongings) and back in time to squeak into the nursery school car park with seconds to spare to pick up Monkey at 11.30. (I did have a backup plan in place in case we'd hit traffic, but luckily we didn't. We also managed to avoid driving in the torrential rain of both earlier and later that day, for which I was very thankful.) Poor Mabel was so pissed off by the long car-ride (45 minutes each way, with only a boring trip on my back to a big building with lots of serious people to break it up) that she refused point blank to get into the car the next day until I swore it was only to go as far as the supermarket, and there'd be a bagel in it for her. (Then again, there always is.)

Today, B rented a truck from those sneaky people who pretend it's really cheap until you discover they're going to charge you for every mile you drive, went up to Baltimore again, and loaded all the boxes into it, and then out again at the other end. I came back from a busy morning out with two babies (zwei! zwei babien!) to find them all neatly piled in the front room.

So far I've unearthed B's entire back catalogue of cassette tapes, his shot-glass collection, a plastic mixing bowl, a battered sieve, a very cheap bedside lamp with an Irish plug, some nicknacks I never liked, a Casio calculator (solar powered - the cutting edge of 1987 technology), and a picture of me at the Grand Canyon.

In fairness, there've also been some lovely pasta bowls I'd totally forgotten about, a huge serving bowl that goes with our Denby dinner service (not yet unpacked), a lot of glasses, and 8 teaspoons that almost match our cutlery. (As God is my witness, I'll never go without teaspoons again. Cue sunset.) And a lot of paintings (my Dad does watercolours in his spare time). Our walls will also never be bare again.

And B is nerdily pleased to once again have his entire Zoid army on the same landmass.

Permanency

I just filled in the customs forms to import all our wedding presents to America.

They've been sitting in a specially commissioned room in my parents' house (my dad's an architect: you need a bookshelf - you've got a bookshelf; you need a small room to house your wedding presents - Bob's your uncle (who gave you a particularly ugly cut-glass picture frame that you promptly exchanged for a really good tin opener and a fancy cheese grater)) since July 2004 or thereabouts. We didn't want to bring them over, really, not yet; but my dad said they were going mouldy down there and seemed to think that now that we have a big house we'll need all that stuff to fill it.

Whereas in fact we already have plenty of plates and bowls and glasses here; and though our wedding crockery is Denby Imperial Blue, neither of us really loved it when we went to make our list in Arnott's, it was just the best thing we could find for our hard-to-imagine future life. (In fact, I believe I blogged about it. Wow. I'm in the future. Welcome. Where's my flying car?) The glassware is nice, I seem to recall, but really what use - or storage space - do we have at the moment for a set of high-balls, and a set of low-balls, and both red and white wine glasses, and whatever the heck the rest of them were. If we'd registered for plastic glasses and sippy-cup straws, that would have been actually useful right now. We've sort of skipped the honeymoon period where we threw all those wild and sophisticated - simultaneously - dinner parties wherein we would have used the glassware.

I'm looking forward to having all my photo albums here, for the scanning of the embarassing photos into Facebook or something; and B's collection of amusing hats will be entertaining for the children (top, jester's, Panama); and I'm sure there are all sorts of knick-knacks and gew-gaws and odds and ends that will be delightful and thrilling to have in our new house with us. (A set of egg cups. A pair of antique fish servers. B's matchbook collection.) The children will be delighted with all the toys that were supposed to stay in their grandparents' house for our Christmas visits, but have apparently been inadvertently packed as well. Because we needed another light-up toy phone and another box of mind-blowing science experiments, and an awful lot of sticklebricks, and whatever else we're paying for the privilege of importing.

Still, it might be quite exciting getting to unpack our wedding presents after all this time. Maybe someone will have snuck a Kitchen Aid in there too. (Unlikely. They're not really the thing at home. And the voltage would be wrong.) Now if I can just spend all the gift tokens we got (and attained from returning the stuff we hated) we can call our wedding finally finished with. Or would that be sad?

Thoughts on a storm

Let's go out on the deck and blow bubbles!
Yay bubbles!
Ooh, those are some dark clouds way over there behind the trees.
And that's a lot of wind all of a sudden.
And maybe we should just go inside now before the storm starts.
Yep, here it comes.
Wow.
Woah.
Eep. I didn't know those trees were that bendy.
Let's just go down to the basement in case there's a tornado* or something.
Oop, there go the lights. Let's not stay in the basement. I don't think the baby finds it fun down here in the dark.
Maybe we'll just sit here on the stairs away from the windows.
I think it's going over.
Yup, that's it.
What a lot of branches there are on the lawn all of a sudden.

...

Let's go out to dinner.

...

Hmm. Still no electricity. What a fun adventure.
Isn't it funny how it's cooler and brighter outside the house than inside?
Even though the temperature has dropped from 100 F since the storm. To, ooh, 95 or so.

...

Well, we can't see any more so we may as well go to bed.
Monkey, why are you still awake? You don't like the dark? You need me to lie down with you for a while?
You're a million degrees and you insist on keeping your duvet on you and you want to cuddle up to me. I cannot do this. Get your leg off me.
What do you mean, "You just have to live with it"?
You need to pee? Great. Let's go to the bathroom. Use your flashlight.
[Cries from offstage]
Okay, now she's awake so I have to go. Sorry.
Go to sleep, baby. I know you're hot. We're all hot.
[Noise of Monkey's flashlight clattering to the tiled floor of the bathroom and sending batteries scattering. I wonder whether he managed to pee first or not.]
Come on, baby, we have to call in the troops.
[I take miserably hot and tired baby to husband's bedside, where husband is pretending to be asleep.]
You need to help Monkey pee.
[I leave with baby.]
Go to sleep, baby.

...


Maybe it's cooler here on the nice wooden floor. Aaah. Nice wooden floor.
Hard wooden floor. Maybe the bed's not so bad.

...

How come you're asleep? It's too hot to sleep. I can't sleep.
[I toss.]
[I turn.]
[I write blog posts in my head, compose packing lists for upcoming trip, think about shoes, and muse on names** for the third baby we're not having.]
[Baby wakes up.]
Go to sleep, baby.

...

Aaand now it's time to get up. Look, still no electricity. How exciting this is.
Let's go out for breakfast and Internet access.


*We live in Maryland. Tornadoes, while not unheard of, are pretty rare. It's not Kansas out there, Toto.

** There are no more names. We've used them all. No more babies, then.

How to be both arty and crafty in several easy steps

Day one: Decide to make a lovely jewellery display thingy so that you can keep your necklaces somewhere other than on top of the chest of drawers where the kids can grab them. Allow some indeterminate length of time to pass until there are just a few days to go before your housewarming, and then decide that this, above all else, is the one thing you will accomplish. Clean bathrooms bedamned, you will have your jewellery nicely displayed.

Day two: Drive to the arts & crafts store that's really very close. Decide to take a new, quicker route. Get abysmally lost. Watch helplessly in the mirror as your four-year-old takes a totally unauthorized nap while you drive around for forty minutes. Thank your lucky stars that the other one already had a big nap and is happily conducting phone interviews from her carseat. Decide to call it quits and take them swimming instead.

Day three: Drive to the arts & crafts store again, this time taking the right road. Get there without anyone falling asleep. Already a win. Stuff protesting baby into shopping trolley. Chivvy four-year-old from pillar to post as you wander round unfamiliar aisles trying to find unfamiliar things while he picks up every interesting he sees and badgers you to buy it, or at least let him hold it and wave it around while you shop. Deny him in a cruel and heartless manner. Finally purchase an empty frame, a large sheet of foam-core board, and some silvery paint, and somehow manage to spend almost $60. (Okay, there were some picture frames in there too. Which we totally needed to frame things we've had not on a wall for several years.) Buy two large foam pool noodles in dollar store next door to placate four-year-old.

Later that night, get all arty with the paint and the frame. Decide that it's altogether the wrong colour becuase you were distracted by intransigent children while trying to pick it out.

Day four: Drag the kids, for "just one errand" before swimming, to the local crafts & fabric shop. Discover that it has all the same stuff and you could have avoided the whole getting-lost debacle of day two if you'd just gone there to start with. Run after baby who takes off at a sprint through the rows of fabric as soon as her feet touch the floor. Pick up baby and deeply regret leaving the Ergo in the car. Wonder why you still haven't learned. Trawl the fabrics and finally find some very nice dark red velvet on clearance (because it's 96 degrees outside). Queue up behind several very slow people. Decide to buy more paint. Leave the queue, find paint, drag four-year-old away from tchotchkes and miniature American flags, calm frantic baby who must be teething because you would swear to anyone who's listening that she really did have a good nap, choose paint that turns out once again to be the wrong colour, return to queue, which now has three more people in front of you and hasn't moved at the front. Wait impatiently, sweating, trying to distract baby with sightings of other babies. Buy stuff. Go swimming.

Later that night, get arty again. Paint new paint over old paint. Decide to paint old paint over it again, creating a shimmery two-tone antiqued effect. Perhaps. It's hard to tell in this light.

Day five: Use kitchen scissors to cut foam-core board to fit frame. Put velvet over foam core board. Affix it all neatly at the back with duct tape. Stick pins in board. Hang your necklaces from the pins. Consider how clever and handy you are.



Day six: Host housewarming. Note that nobody remarked on your lovely jewellery, so nicely displayed. On the other hand, no babies ran off with your necklaces either, so call it good. Admire your handiwork again.

(I should mention that I didn't think this up all by myself. I saw it in the June issue of Real Simple.)

House warmed, despite a/c

Here I sit, quite tired, and so pathetic that when faced with the choice between a second beer and a Diet Coke, I went with the Coke. We've just said goodnight to the last guests of our housewarming and put the kids to bed. (At least, child 2 is conked out, totally exhausted from all the excitement coupled with a nap that was both short and early and child 1 is being shepherded towards sleep by his father, who will probably drop off first, by the relative looks of them as they left my orbit.)

Posting has been light lately because B sodded off to a conference in Toronto for six days, leaving me to not only keep the children alive and entertained and fed and all that jazz but also try to keep the house clean and respectable and organised so that he could waltz back here last night and then host a party this afternoon. Doing all that left me with not a lot of extra time for fripperies like blog posts. And to be fair, said waltzing involved attending to a long to-do list this morning that had arisen, spontaneous-like, in his absence, and then he had to take the kids swimming to tire them out. On the other hand, since he has spent all week being able to lie in (relatively) if he so desired and socialising with his work buddies (sorry, listening to important talks and networking) whereas I've been getting up at the crack of dawn, cleaning the house, watching far too much PBS Kids and then (sigh) doing all the unplugging of small appliances before going to bed, I don't have all that much sympathy for him.

Anyway, today was the culmination, wherein I got to do some baking and take out the colourful bowls and fill them with snacky things and introduce some friends to some other friends, and show people round the house so they could compliment me on my choice of paint colours. The weather was too hot and sticky to go outside, so sadly we didn't get to use the croquet set we'd procured specially for the occasion. Not as many people came as I might have liked, but if everyone had come we would have been totally sardined indoors. And when you throw a party in the last week of June, you have to expect that a lot of people won't make it and not get all adolescently nobody-likes-me about it. Even the college kids from next door dropped in to drink some water and tell me how much nicer our house is than theirs. We traded cartoon recommendations and I told them they should watch some Phinneas and Ferb. (They looked so young. B and I were that age when we first met. How is that possible? How on earth did I get it so right at such a preposterously early age? Dumb luck? Predestination? Common sense? Crazy love?)

Kids ran in circles and screamed and accidentally locked themselves in the bedroom (and screamed) and had the occasional meltdown and acquired small injuries (and screamed), and all the child-free couples gathered themselves on the other side of the house and talked about... well, I'm not sure actually because, while I would have loved to engage in the grown-up conversation, I was mostly replenishing pita chips or adjudicating meltdowns or distributing juice boxes or wondering where one or other of my children were. Such is life.

When there were just a few of us left we ordered pizza. It was a nice party, I think. We have a lot of recycling to put out, and plenty of beer left in the fridge, and quite a few new bottles of wine, and even two new houseplants. Win/win, I think. (Except for the plants, which I will surely kill in due course.)

Revenge of the rules

This post brought to you in real time, interruptions and all.

I keep writing blog posts, or at least fragments, in my head, in bed, in other beds than mine (nothing exciting, just the children's) but they flit away like forgotten dreams as soon as I open the laptop.

Speaking of beds, though. Miss - oh, here she comes to get in between me and my hands - as I was saying, Miss does not take kindly to the thought that - oh heck, here she is again, scaling my person like a small mountaineer. She has a joke for you: "Knock knock," she asks. "Who's there?" I say. "No?" she answers, shaking her head and grinning like a crazy baby.

Yes. Well. Now she's safely learning about temperature from Sid the Science Kid. Point is, she doesn't like sleeping without me. When I take her up to bed, after our book and our mumeet, I say, "Time for sleeping now, time to go to sleep." And she says, "Oh. Seep." And cocks her head to one side and makes a zzz noise.
- Yes.
- Mummy seep?
- No, I have to go downstairs.
- No, Mummy seep.
- This isn't my bed, you know. My bed is in the other room, with Daddy.
- No. Dis Mummy bed. Mummy seep.

[Wait, now she's climbed up on the arm of the futon to reach her father's wallet and riffle through it. Excuse me a mo'. Yes, those are the credit cards.]

So you can see that when she wakes up in the middle of the night - and a while before the middle, and a while after the middle, and a while after that, and shortly before dawn - she's a bit indignant that I'm not right there. I'm trying to make an effort to leave rather than just give up and stay there once it gets to 3am or so, but that just makes me very tired. And since I'll be solo-parenting all next week while B swans off to a conference in Toronto, I don't see that working out very well. I fear there will be backsliding for the sake of my sanity.

[Interlude for taking her off to the sofa, cutting her nails, being kicked in the back by Monkey as he flies by, causing Monkey to bump his head on the sofa arm as I push him away, and general crankiness (all of us) and feeling guilty (just me, I'd say).]

So so much for getting her to sleep better once she had a room of her own. It just makes me sleep worse, for now. Other new rules that may or may not have worked out are as follows:

1. We have instigated a no-food-in-the-family-room rule. Sort of. Or at least a TV-off-at-dinnertime rule. This is sort of working.

[All right. I cheated there and went to make a couple of phone calls while I had B at home to remove people who tend to yell "Wanna talk to Daddy" any time I pick up a phone from my immediate vicinity. I spent a while on hold to the insurance company and now have another number to call. Maybe tomorrow.]

2. Monkey is really getting into playing all the games he got for his birthday, and then some. He was given Toy Story Yahtzee, Zingo, a monkeys-collecting-bananas counting game, and a Richard Scarry I-spy game. He has also discovered Clue(do) and loves to try to play that, which you can imagine is a tad frustrating for the patient parent on the other side. (That would be his father, whose fault it is in the first place for owning Cluedo, and for introducing him to it.) The trouble is that any time Miss is around, she grabs all the pieces. So B had the bright idea of suggesting that first thing in the morning, instead of running into me and thus disturbing Miss for his morn-side, Monkey should just wake him directly and they'd come downstairs and play games. It worked twice. Maybe it'll work again some other day.

[Big gap there while we went off and did things, had lunch, and Miss is now napping.]

3. The thing about getting them to pick out clothes the night before hasn't happened at all. I just bring down a couple of shorts and t-shirts for them when I come down in the morning, after my very-necessary-for-mental-health going-back-to-bed (from 6.30 to about 8am), kindly facilitated by Lovely Husband. They don't complain, particularly, except about getting dressed at all. When somebody gets back into a must-choose-own-clothes phase, we'll do something different, but this works for now.

4. The housework. I did finally make a list, and though it's not on my fridge (because that would make it really real) it's on the uppermost page of my notebook, beside the computer. I divided the basic tasks/areas into six days and made the simplest of simple lists. It looks like this:

Mon: Sweep/clean wood floors
Tue: Sweep/clean kitchen and hall floor (and powder room)
Wed: Bathrooms (sinks and toilets)
Thu: Shower and bath
Fri: Bathroom floors upstairs and dusting
Weekend: Hoover family room and stairs

Now, you may think that some of these should be done every day (like sweeping the kitchen floor, for instance), but, well, for one thing you should see how wonderful my new floor tiles are at hiding the dirt, and also I feel that if I definitely do it once a week that's good. Any more is gravy.

The reason I like this and think I might be able to make it work is that I don't feel overwhelmed by everything there is that I could clean. I know what I need to do today and I don't have to get distracted by, say, the floor while I'm cleaning the sink, because that's tomorrow. Bear in mind that I have to do this in a tiny period of time while Miss naps and I'm not getting my lunch, giving Monkey some one-on-one time, or vitally relaxing by updating my blog (say). If I miss a day I can catch up the next day or just leave it for a week, depending on how much it preys on my mind. And there's always an extra day on the weekend for catchup. (B will probably help out with the hoovering, but I hope to do the rest myself.)

There are, of course, other tasks that should be done regularly and will need to be slotted in somehow - maybe I can allot one week a month for cleaning the fridge, for instance. And keeping the kitchen tidy and picking up toys is ongoing - B is also nominally in charge of the washing up, since I do the meal planning (ahem), shopping and cooking. Now we have a dishwasher, so that's easier and cuts down on kitchen clutter.

I'm currently a day behind, but nevermind. Point is, it might work. And it hasn't failed yet. I have the best of intentions and am very lucky to be starting with a lovely clean slate. House. You know.

To conclude, here is a picture of the new sofa (detail of fig.) with throw cushions and green wall. So far (har) so good.

Overrun

One day last week I had four children in the house, and just me looking after them. This was a new situation for me. I think it showed why I do not have four children of my own, nor any intention thereof.

I suppose it was a milestone, of sorts, because it was the first time we've had a drop-off playdate, rather than a playdate that was set up because I wanted to get together with the mother for coffee/lunch/gossip and she had a handily aged child to bring along as an excuse. In this case, I don't really know the mum at all, but her son is in Monkey's class, she has a daughter a year older than Miss, and it turns out they're having somewhat of a family emergency and people were asked to pitch in and offer to take the kids off her hands every now and then. As we now have plenty of room and my children are equivalent in age and sex - not to mention the there-but-for-the-grace bit - I felt I should ante up.

They were fine, really. Perfectly well-behaved children. But four at once, galloping all over the house as Monkey was his over-exuberant showing-off-his-new-bedroom self (on a previous playdate he gave the tour to a shy, bemused friend and his mother, mentioning such thrilling features as "This is the glass I use to rinse when I wash my teeth") and then all charging outside equipped with vehicles (bike, scooter, tricycle, dolly stroller respectively) and expecting me to keep up with four different children going in four different directions - at least, I kept them to two and two and employed a lot of long-distance yelling to corral the half I wasn't with - and then being herded back into the back garden where the visitors were clearly bored but Monkey wasn't done showing all the amazing blades of grass and threads of ivy that were just waiting to be pulled up... it was a bit tiring. (There was also the nice moment where he leaned over the deck, where I had pulled up some impressively huge interlopers the day before and asked me to get him some weed. Hope the neighbours were listening to that one.)

Finally I got sense and shunned healthy fresh air for the gated-off family room, where I could at least be sure nobody was about to be run over or fall down the basement steps or barge into some heretofore-unseen poison ivy. The elder visitor tried to coax Monkey into putting on a rock concert with his (plastic) guitar and Sid-The-Science-Kid microphone, while the girls pootled around with their own self-appointed tasks, sorting out game pieces and planning a tea party. Peace (almost) reigned and I sighed a deep sigh, afraid to move lest I break the spell, wishing their mother would pull up outside right now and see how good I am at this.

She came a little later, when things were falling apart just a little bit again. But they waved goodbye enthusiastically and we're doing it all again next week. Maybe I need to plan some activities or something, but I'm not a day camp, you know.

I'm also pretty sure that while the little girl was in a car seat, the four-year-old didn't appear to have a booster seat or even to have his seatbelt on as they drove away. I can't say anything - they're having a family crisis at the moment, and maybe it's a cultural thing, or maybe she was just totally distracted and forgot to buckle him in for the first time ever... Maybe. I don't know whether we're just inveterate rule-followers, but whenever I see a family with kids not in carseats, I just can't understand how they can prioritise so differently. (I know, I've done this before. But those people were strangers. These are kids I know.)


********************


On a completely unrelated note, we have a new sofa. It's beige. It's still in packaging and various pieces, so I can't tell you yet how it looks in the green room. But I'm pretty happy with it. We went to one of those enormous furniture places and hated all the huge and ugly things there, and then merrily took our modest European sensibilites back to IKEA and bought the one we'd wanted all along. (At least, we were reasonably merry about our decision. The kids, somehow, didn't enjoy a day of sofa shopping as much as one might have liked. There was chocolate milk in IKEA, followed by inevitable sugar rush and craziness and screaming and prompt but unpopular removal from the vicinity.)

Green

I always wanted the chance to decorate with colour. I like colour. I rarely wear black - at least not in the daytime, and since I never go out at night these days, that means I never wear black. Grey does nothing for me. I'm scared of wearing patterns, so I just try to coordinate a couple of nice colours on top with a neutral/denim bottom. Which is really not the point I was trying to make but I'm distracted by a film just now. (How to Kill Your Neighbour's Dog. Kenneth Branagh being an English curmudgeonly type. Sort of engaging, actually.)

Anyway. I loved choosing the paint colours, but I admit I didn't fully think them through. Maybe that's impossible before you live with them. So now my bedroom walls are a lovely taupe/tan/light brown with a tinge of pink and I have no idea what sort of bedspread to get (seafoam, I think). And my living room walls are green and picking a sofa is suddenly annoying because it has to be a boring beige or else another dark brown leather (which would be practical, and I love our existing dark brown sofa, but doing it again seems lacking in imagination. I suppose I can make it pop with bright cushions or something. (I didn't just say "make it pop". You imagined that.) I want it to be restful and calming, but I'm afraid the whole house will just look like it was decorated by a child, with all this yellow and red and green. I suspect my next house, if there is one, will be all tasteful tones of toffee and taupe. And then I can have the green sofa.

************

Every time we're home in Ireland I'm amazed by my parents' frugal living. Their global footprint is practically in the negative. They hardly ever seem to spend money, but where I really notice it is in the size of the bin. They have a tiny rubbish bin under the sink in the kitchen, and a space for recyclables and paper/card and a compost bin. The "everything-else bin" takes forever to fill up - until we visit and suddenly it's full of used nappies and whatever other non-recyclable detritus we shed as we go through our consumer-driven life, opening packages and going shopping and ripping off labels and breaking stuff. Part of it is having small kids, part of it is that when we're there we're on holidays and it's more than likely Christmas too, and part of it is the fact that it's not 1977 any more like it was when I was four.

Also, the recycling in Ireland is better than here. Our local people only take plastic containers numbers 1 and 2, when they're bottles with a neck narrower than their body. Which means all those yogurt cartons, margarine tubs, hummus and fresh pesto containers just go into the regular bin. And you're meant to sort out the paper and card and leave it out separately, tied up (we just dump it all into a big Pampers box, since there's always one of those on the go), even though I could swear I've seen them just chuck the lot into the same truck with the plastic/glass/cans stuff.

I'd like to consume less and produce less waste, but then what would happen to the economy? If I can just manage to get through the summer without spending almost $10 at Starbucks every day to keep the kids entertained, that will be a start. (At least if we go to IKEA it's only about $5. Assuming I don't buy anything but comestibles. Miss recognises the underground parking lot there now: she shouts "Kee-A, Kee-A" as we drive down, and I break into "IKEA, IKEA, I just saw a store called IKEA," with apologies to West Side Story, every time.)

*************

All a bit disjointed, but that's what happens when I update with the tv on.

Am old

This morning while I was sorting out toys to put in our New! Shelves! Yay!, Monkey happened on a Fisher Price cassette player.

- What's this?
- It's for playing tapes on.
- What are tapes?
- Oh. They're how we played music before we had CDs.
- CDs?
- [Sigh] Before we had iPods, then.

All the Facebook updates I didn't get round to making

Maud...

Loves her new kitchen tap, with snazzy pull-out spray head thingy.

Is very much looking forward to getting her countertops.

Thinks it's great having the fridge at eye level; less great having the ice-cream within reach of kid.

Adores cooking with gas for the first time since Spain ('93-'94, if you can believe it).

Is quite excited to have a new flatscreen telly; fears she won't see her husband again face-on for a week or two.

Finds it awfully tempting to have a bunch of Diet Cokes in the downstairs fridge. Has a downstairs fridge.

Really really would like some countertops. Please.

Notes that your job is not done when you turn on the baby monitor upstairs and call it a day. For full efficacy you should really plug in the reciever end downstairs too.

Will soon be greeted by name by the cashiers at IKEA. Wonders how anyone moves house without an IKEA five minutes away.

Has a groundhog in the back garden. He eats dandelions, which must be a good thing, since she's certainly not doing any weeding.

Just caught the four-year-old trying to start the lawnmower. In the shed. Shed is now totally off limits.

Sort of misses being able to blame the people upstairs for mysterious things that go bump/thud/bang in the middle of the night. Doesn't want to have to get up and investigate. Will wake husband instead and make him do it.

Will probably snog the countertop man the day he delivers.

Pictorial

The house is coming together one tiny bit at a time. Here are a few sample tiny bits.



The cabinetry around the fridge against the yellow walls (with my retro-film-posters calendar). It might all be a bit yallar, but I think when (oh please oh please) the countertops arrive the dark brown will break it up beautifully. Handles and drawer pulls would be useful too.



The paler yellow of the family room, with the nice sharp newly painted door and trim. It even makes the green carpet look not so bad.



And a better shot of the kitchen yellow. It throws the ugly new thingy from the Internet people into sharp relief, dontcha think?



This is all I can show you of the formal living/dining area. The rest has (a) our box spring and (b) boxes, packing paper, detritus. But see how nice the print will look when it's on the wall.



The tan colour on the master bedroom walls, looking into the master bath, or en-suite as we ferriners say. I'm not sure which is more pretentious a title for a small room with a perspex-enclosed shower. But I do love having my very own medicine cabinet.



Miss's room. I'm pleased with this because so far it looks feminine without having any pink at all (almost).



And the blush colour in the guest room. The rest of the room is boxes as far as the eye can see, but I like how the old-fashioned chest of drawers looks against the paint.

A moving tale

We moved. Suddenly putting things in boxes was the easy part, and finding places for them to go when we take them out of boxes is the hard part. We have to get shelves, but first we have to figure out what sort of shelves we get, which we probably won't know until we've got the wrong shelves and discovered that the stuff doesn't fit and we don't like them.

Anyway. We moved on Saturday, with help from some very excellent friends. In a hilarious twist, the box spring of our queen bed didn't fit up the stairs, so our bed was left in the dining room while we slept on the thin spare mattress. (Yes, we had no fewer than three actual rocket scientists - ok then, doctors of physics, but close enough - and one engineer scratching their heads over the item lodged in the crook of the stairs, while I wondered if my husband would be stuck on the wrong side of it for ever and we'd have to send up his food on a pulley. At least they got it down again.)

And of course, the child fell out of his (new) bed on the first night, and of course this woke the baby, and OF COURSE they both ended up sleeping - eventually sleeping - with me on the floor while poor B went off and found a mattress somewhere else for himself. Much the same thing happened last night with the waking and the more waking and the being wide awake at 3.30am and the musical beds, with added wailing and rending of garments because Mummy can't physically put two people to sleep at the same time so someone always has to be the loser in this scenario. I think it's B, who wasn't pleased to be woken up to take a very upset Monkey back to his new bed and be wailed at and eventually have his arm fallen asleep on.

I have high hopes for tonight. For one thing, Monkey is actually being put to bed in the new bed, instead of falling asleep in the car, exhausted after no nap, and being dumped unceremoniously in, fully clothed and thus much too early. If he manages to sleep through we might see how Miss is taking to having her own room, and if she sleeps better when not disturbed by our going to bed. She doesn't seem too freaked out by it, but is fairly indignant when she wakes up and I'm not right there. Again. She'll just have to get used to it.

In other news our very lovely new next-door neighbours brought us over spagetti and meatballs for dinner (which the children spurned, but all the more for us) and I'm going to enjoy some of that now with a nice cleansing beer. Between beer for the movers and wine from my mother-in-law's visit - she always likes to leave us nicely stocked up; have I mentioned how great my in-laws are? - we're well set for the coming evenings.

Interim

Am moving house tomorrow. That sort of crept up on me.

New rules

Let's assume I do, at some point, call the guy about the kitchen floors, and make a decision, and we find some boxes from somewhere and B sorts out the moving truck he says he can somehow borrow from work and eventually it all falls into place and we close on the house as (re)scheduled and at some point we have moved into our new abode and are, like, living there.

There will have to be changes.

We can't go on as we have until now, in our nice, compact (see how I'm already getting sentimental about the very things that until now have been more likely to make me just plain old mental) three/four-room apartment where nobody could ever be more than one doorway away from you.

For one thing, Miss will no longer be sleeping on the mattress on the floor beside our bed, because she'll have her very own room. (With a mattress on the floor where I will no doubt spend a fair proportion of my nights at least at first, as I do now.) Which is good, I know it is: we won't wake her when we go to bed, we'll be able to, y'know, do stuff, without fear of small-voiced retribution, she might even sleep longer... but the thought of it right now feels like sending her to boarding school, or into service - she'll be so far away, it's not natural for a baby to sleep so far from her mother... I'm a sap, that's all there is to it. But sometimes, especially on those rare occassions when B is away for a night, it just feels wrong for me and my two children to be all in different beds, in separate rooms, with walls and doors between us - I dunno, I think it's the cavewoman in me coming out.

Also, I vow to have a cleaning roster stuck to the fridge, with a different task for every day: Monday - swiffer downstairs floors, Tuesday - hoover family room, Wednesday - wash kitchen floor, Thursday - upstairs floors and dusting, Friday - bathrooms; that sort of thing. Fridays will be great. I have to get over this ridiculous attitude of vague outrage and put-upon-ness that things just keep getting dirty and having to be cleaned even though I already did that once. Or else I have to get a job to fund a cleaner.

I'm sure other interesting opportunities to be annoyed by the vastness of our new domain will arise. I might have to pick out the kids' clothes the night before to avoid lots of traipsing up and down stairs all morning before school. (The stairs? When will I hoover the stairs?) I still haven't figured out how I'll keep the small people out of the kitchen when it won't be gateable the way it is now, or what to do when I want to cart Monkey off to his bedroom for three minutes of peace and to stop him beating up his sister. I'm not sure he'll be impressed by the notion of a naughty step, and I'm not really sure I want to channel Supernanny and create one either. Maybe I can just toss him downstairs to the basement instead.