Ramalamadingdong

This week is not going as planned, so far. But not all in a bad way.

Yesterday began not going to plan on Sunday night, when I realised that I was scheduled to co-op at nursery school the next morning. I had vaguely planned on going back to Target and finalizing some of the gift shopping - the gift shopping that I'd done a week earlier and that had been helpfully sitting on my bedroom floor for the next six days, waiting for me to do something else useful with it.

This problem was compounded on Monday afternoon when I discovered that that very day, not some vague date in the misty future, was the last day for posting by regular mail to Europe. Oops. Because of course 90% of the stuff in the bag on my bedroom floor was to be mailed to Europe, but I'd been waiting for this and that, for the perfect final present to present itself to me at the weekend's craft fair or some other opportune place, before wrapping it. I also subconsciously felt that B. should partake in the wrapping so that he had some input in all this shopping I'd done for members of his family, but since I didn't tell him that, and last week was busy with various meetings and whatnot, it hadn't happened.

Finally, last night, we sat down and had our gift-wrapping extravaganza, and happily we did have enough wrapping paper and tape and I had even bought a box at the post office that was the right size, all of which are no trivial matters.

So that was ready to be mailed first thing this morning, which would only be one day late and therefore practically in time, and would probably make it to Ireland before the big day anyway. Which would have been simple if this was a normal Tuesday, but then we got a snow day.
                                           
Monday had already been a delayed-start for the schools thanks to Sunday night's snow and ice storm, but then it snowed all morning here and they cancelled school entirely. It's only about an inch, and melting already, but I suppose the schools didn't want to deal with the potential mess of getting all the buses in during a snowstorm. We're not in Colorado, you know. Maryland is technically the South, and thus Not Great With Winter.

However, it was the good sort of snow day. The sort when B. has one too. Yes, yes, he was "working from home," but that also meant I could send him to the post office once the snow eased off, which it did at midday or so, and the roads had all been nicely treated so they were fine. So, BOOM, the parcel has been mailed and with a bit of luck everyone in Ireland will get their presents in time after all, and even if they don't, it's out of my hands now.

While he was doing that, I got off my arse and went through the recipes I've been meaning to try out and we made pretzels! BAM! Where's my snow-day baking award?

And Dash made a snowman all by himself for the first time. It's a little leafy, perhaps, but he's proud of it.

In the afternoon, B went out with Dash and got a Christmas tree, which we hadn't got around to doing yet, so that's something else we don't have to wait till next weekend for. DING!

It's beginning to look a lot like...

The bad wife

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

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

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

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

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

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

March 25, 2013

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

A lucky escape

They are thick as thieves, these two, these days. The terrible twosome, double trouble, a handful indeed - at times, two handsful and then some.

She has some clothing on, I promise. You just can't see it.

Remember last summer, when I was a little wistful because Mabel was in a hating phase, experimenting with mean words and cruel actions, and pushing her brother away? Since then she has definitely discovered the power of cooperation, the delights of teamwork and also how much fun it is to gang up on one defenseless parent. At bedtime. When the other has gone to a meeting. For instance.

I had a big long whiny rant here about how tired I am and how hard it is and why am I supposed to not just lock them into their rooms at bedtime to avoid all that undignified crying (of mine), but luckily for you, then I uploaded the photos and would much rather show you some more of those instead.

 

Then they noticed the snow.

Hooray for hand-me-down coats, thrift-store snowboots and yard-sale snow pants. Hat from Dunnes Stores.

Not enough for snowmen, but just about enough to make a grassy snow angel.

There's a fence there before the big drop, you just can't see it.

The snow brings all the kids to my back yard. (That's Mabel and Dash on the left.) After half an hour's sledding there was hardly any snow left on the grass, so they were forced to abandon sled and go to school instead.

Prairie living

I'm not just bad with snow psychologically. I'm bad on a physical, up-close basis too. And apparently it's genetic.

There were six inches of lovely snow all round our house for two days before I actually let the kids go out and play in it. And they hadn't exactly been clamouring to go, either. Monkey had some complicated notion about pouring water out of the garden hose onto the snow to make ice, which I wasn't about to indulge him in, no matter what fascinating science discoveries we could have made from such an experiment. (Just one more reason why homeschooling is not for me.)

For all my self-satisfaction at having procured snow boots for the trip to Ireland, Mabel is actually the only one of us properly kitted out for the snow. And all she wants to do is sit down, take off her (extortionately expensive, Irish) waterproof gloves, and eat the stuff.

Exhibit A

Mabel has lovely purple snow pants because I picked them up at a yard sale in the summer. There were no snow pants in Monkey's size at any yard sales, so he doesn't have them. He does have waterproof gloves, but prefers to keep his hands in his pockets instead of putting them on. Which means he's not very good at making snowmen (he prefers to direct operations, but my gloves aren't waterproof), he's scared to sit on a big plastic platter and slide down our tiny back-yard hill, and when he finally engaged with me in a snowball fight, I had to take us all in after three minutes because I couldn't bear to look at his red, achy hands for any longer. (He also has appalling dry skin, because having to moisturise your children is not a notion I grew up with. Hand cream was something my mother used, not something kids needed. That's not the case in this climate, but I'm slow on the uptake.)

Do Canadian and Scandinavian babies instinctively understand that you shouldn't take your gloves off in the snow? Do Minnesotan preschoolers leap onto sleds and whizz unbidden down slopes at the drop of a snowflake? I suspect correct snow behaviour is learned, not innate; but I never learned it either, so we'll all have to learn together if we're to survive in this hard new land that is not of our forefathers.

Faraway hills

Irish things the USA should definitely look into:

When you ask for tea in a cafe in Ireland, you don't get a paper cup of hot water with a teabag on the side, for your (alleged) infusing pleasure. You get a little teapot of tea made with real boiling water, and it's enough to refill your real teacup (with a saucer) about two and a half times. It's so nice to pour yourself some more tea. You also get real milk, probably in a little tiny personal-sized jug. There is no such thing as creamer. And that's good.

The genius of potato waffles. I may have mentioned this before, but every time we're home the humble Bird's Eye Potato Waffle becomes a staple of the kids' meals (well, Mabel's, anyway; Monkey ate one once, I believe, when he was about a year and a half old). I find it hard to believe that the freezer sections of the USA, replete with tater tots and french fries and hash browns, have yet to discover and embrace this simple article, because - here's the brilliance - you can cook it in the toaster. No other shape of potato item functions that way. But apparently North Americans are too attached to their regular waffle waffles to contemplate any other sort of waffle-shaped item. (These are not the same as waffle fries. They're potatoes in a regular waffle shape, not vaguely grid-shaped fries. Yes, there's a difference. Try making waffle fries in the toaster. Well, don't, because that would probably be a bad thing.)

Sausages. In the US, sausages come in many guises - big fat brats, cooked salamis, chorizo from Mexico (not the good stuff from Spain, I hasten to add, which is much harder to find), breakfast links and (urgh) patties. In Ireland, a saussie is a saussie, unless it's a cocktail sausage which is just the same thing only smaller. It's a breakfast sausage, but not remotely like the wizened wrinkly sticks of salt and gristle that we get over here. An Irish sausage is plump and juicy, burnished and conker-brown, glistening and savoury and delicious. Mabel, my little carnivore, thought so too.

American things Ireland could profit from encountering:

The snow shovel. It's not rocket science, lads. Sturdy wooden handle; wide, flat, light, strong plastic shovelling surface, enabling you to move lots of snow quickly, while it's still new and not packed hard. Looks like this, more or less. If they were readily available, perhaps you wouldn't have to mobilise the army to chip the layers of ice off Dublin footpaths quite so often this winter.

Notes from the other side (of the ocean) (or this side, depending on where you are)

This from when there was snow:

I was right: they don't have snow shovels in Ireland. You can't buy them. Everyone who has shovelled snow has done it with a heavy garden spade. If they're lucky, it's one with a square base; otherwise it's a wedge-shaped one that just makes life even more tedious. I saw a man with a rake earlier today, trying to clear behind his car. (A small, flat gardening one, not a big wide leaf-raking one.) There seem to be a lot of brooms employed too.

That said, not many people shovel, unless they have to. (And why would you, if you had to use a big metal yoke that wasn't even a useful shape for shifting stuff any distance?) They look at the footpaths outside their houses and tut-tut about how the county council isn't clearing anything up, but they only dig the bare minimum it takes to get the car out the gate and onto the sandy, mushy, slushy road. Otherwise they just sit at home and wait for it to melt away. Which it will do eventually, but perhaps only to be replaced by more in another few days.

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This from a bit later:

First we were snowed in; then we all got sick. As the plane landed in Dublin, Mabel began to sniffle, and so began the cold that we passed around between us for the entire time away, with a loving personalized touch for each of us: throat for B, sinuses for me, his signature cough for Monkey, and a quick virus for Mabel that gave her two nights of high temperatures and a fun trip to the nice Irish doctor to make sure she didn't have an infection of one sort or another.

In between, there were Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, various encounters with large and small people, family or otherwise, to terrify or mildly intimidate Monkey depending on how he was feeling and how much sleep he'd had, and whether or not he had decided that his shoes were going to be ridiculed by everyone in the greater Dublin area. Mabel, on the other had, lapped up the attention and flounced around the room giving kisses and hugs in a pink dress and a most delightful manner, just about redeeming us as parents who can produce displayable offspring.

Most people were very understanding about her brother and left him alone to warm up, or not, depending on the day. But he did expend an awful lot of energy just hating it and wishing very hard (and very vainly) to be invisible, and I did feel bad for him, to a point. When said point was reached, I'd go away and converse with an adult, and possibly charitably send his father to spell me in the cold room with the plate of congealing cocktail sausages where Monkey skulked in the narrow gap between the sofa and the radiator, hiding his shoes, for the entire duration of the party, as his cousins happily shrieked and played chasing all over somebody else's house. At least his father was able to locate the problem with the DVD player (needed to be plugged in) and start the Disney movie that had been acquired for the purpose.

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This from today:

I hope my children are nicer to me when I'm old than I am to my parents. I know it's a failing, but there's not much I can do about it. B does sterling work running interference, and having conversations where I'd just sit there grumpily like the teenager to which I have regressed (and I'm sick, okay, so don't bug me...), and politely turning down offers of food and explaining again where we're going and that we won't need lunch. I think we might need to work out something different next time, though. It's not getting any better, and while they've loved having Mabel in the house - and vice versa - Monkey has spent the entire two and a half weeks being "shy" and refusing to talk to his grandparents. Which was okay at first, but at this stage it's just plain rude, but there's nothing I can do but field their bemused questions about whether all boys go through this phase or if it's just American children (arrrgh), and remarking once again that I was never like that.

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I will be back with fun anecdotes and nice pictures when my sinuses feel better, I promise. I hope all your holiday times were lovely and just snowy enough. We had our first white Christmas this year, and we're quite over it, thank you. Mr Crosby has a lot to answer for.

Snow chance

It's snowing. Falling gently, persistently; far from a blizzard but more than a flurry. I'll allow that it's very pretty. If it stops us from getting to the airport tomorrow I will be less forgiving, but there's only one to three inches forecast, so I think we'll be okay. We're actually metroing all the way to the airport, and the metro station is five minutes' drive from home, and we have a four-wheel drive with manual transmission, so I think, all in all, we should be fine. I just don't like to have anything thrown in the spokes of my finely tuned preparations at this late stage in the game. (We will not talk about yesterday, when I was convinced we would all go down with some horrible highly contagious bug at the last moment, causing us to miss the flight and all of Christmas and forefeit enormous amounts of money. That was just the paranoia talking.)

In Ireland, even one to three inches would probably be enough to grind the country to a halt, at least temporarily. People from other, snowier, countries can't understand how the Irish are so ill-prepared for the bad weather they've been having lately; how they send their children out to play in the snow in jeans and sneakers with a tea-tray to slide on; how they stand waiting for the train in freezing temperatures wearing snow-absorbing coats and no hats; how they try to walk on icy footpaths in slippy leather shoes or idiotic high heels; how an inch or two of snow causes schools to close and cars to crash.

Thing is, despite the fact that it happened last year too, this sort of weather just isn't Irish. Irish winters are all about the chill, the wind, the rain - but not the snow. Ireland never has a white Christmas, even though the bookies will always give you odds on it and the weatherman on the telly (or -lady, Evelyn Cusack) will tell you every Christmas Eve what the chances are (usally slim to none).

When I was little, snow was mostly a thing of fairy-tale and legend. Every couple of winters a few flakes would fall, and the refrain that rang through every child's heart was "Will it stick? Is it sticking?" It never stuck. The ground was always too wet, the temperature just a little too high. We'd stand outside staring straight up, marvelling at the tiny dots swirling out of the empty white sky, sticking out our tongues, hoping against hope that this might be the year that it would stick, that school would be closed. Once every three years, perhaps, it would stick for a day, or an afternoon. Time enough for everyone to enjoy the magic of time standing still; not long enough for anyone to run out of toilet paper or even turf briquettes. Before your jeans were even dry from your tray-top adventure, wet grey concrete was probably reclaiming the soft whiteness outside, and tomorrow would be another boring snowless day.

Once every ten years or so there was a big snow. The winter I was 6, I remember trudging up through snow so deep that in some places it went over the top of my wellies. (Then again, my legs weren't very long in 1980.) The year I was 17 there was wonderful snow the weekend before we were due to go back to school, and all we future exam candidates rejoiced perhaps a little too hysterically happily. There were throngs of people on the local hill, sliding on tyres and binbags and every now and then an actual sled (I had one, thanks to having a dad who liked to make things out of wood). In between those years, I remember heavy frosts and maybe an inch or two of snow that stuck, but that's really all we got.

This is why Irish people don't know how to dress for snow. We know that layers are good against the cold, we persist in using umbrellas in strong winds, but nobody lays in stocks of snow dungarees and snowboots for their constantly growing kids - why would you do that? Snow gear is not readily and cheaply available the way it is in other places (viz, to wit: my children's $15 snow boots from Target) because it's only found in Pamela Scott on Grafton St, where the people who go on ski holidays shop, or in The Great Outdoors on Wexford St where the mountain climbing enthusiasts buy their expensive goretex jackets and carabiners.

Maybe after last winter's snow, Dunnes Stores has laid in stocks of inexpensive, warm, wetproof, non-slip footwear and jackets and bottoms. Maybe people decided to buy that stuff in case this winter turned out like last winter. (But historically, as you can see, that wasn't likely.) Maybe people are believing the experts who say that heavy snowfall in November/December is a portent of more of the same in January and February. Or maybe every time we Irish see snow, and see it go, we assume that's it for another few years. By which time the kids will be three sizes bigger, so why would we buy stuff now?

Well, I've packed our cheap snowboots and Mabel's snowsuit (from a yard sale), and we all have warm jackets, and I'm giving my dad a set of non-slip thingys to attach to the soles of his shoes so that when he insists on going to the shops in the Arctic conditions, he'll have a fighting chance of staying right-side-up. Somehow I still don't believe it'll be snowy in Dublin, but I'm trying to pack for it anyway.

Now my biggest dilemma is how to keep the children indoors and away from the fluffy white stuff this afternoon, so that I can leave their snow gear clean and dry in the suitcase, where it belongs.

This is not about the snow

We have snow. All the snow you need. Get your snow here. We've plenty. A surfeit, in fact. An overabundance. We also have the concomitant snow days and stuck-in-the-houseness, added to a three-year-old who sees snow only as an inconvenience you have to go through in order to get hot chocolate, and sometimes you can get the chocolate without even bothering with the snow if your mother has been worn down enough, in just the right way, by multiple viewings of The Incredibles - here, we got you Nemo, watch Nemo, will you? No, you want The Incredibles again? Sigh - and random acts of obedience interposed between terribly noisy antics that endanger the life and limbs of your sibling, who has been running circles round the couch wearing various hats and pracising her new word which just happens to be "No!" What I'm saying is, snow, and more to come. We have not lost power and for that I am grateful, and keeping my fingers crossed; and we have the vital supplies and more, so we'll survive. But it will be nice when it's Spring.



I wasn't going to talk about the snow at all. I was going to tell you about this fascinating thing that's going on with my mouth. I have an inbuilt stress indicator, it seems. All I have to do is open my mouth, and - uh. Hey, I can't bite into this burger. I must be stressed.

Last October at some point I had a sore arm; I pulled something or strained something and it hurt to move it around, even though I could still use it to pick up and hold a 20lb baby while cooking dinner with no problem at all, so that was lucky. I did not take it to the doctor, and it went away. Some time during the arm thing, I started having a mouth thing. I realised I couldn't open my mouth very wide at all. Like, I had to turn my toothbrush sideways to get it in. This seemed, well, not normal. I thought perhaps I'd dislocated my jaw in my sleep. Perhaps. I'm sure you can do that. Then it started to ache a bit, and click when I chewed (my well cut-up pieces of food that had to be inserted carefully through the letterbox of my mouth with a deft fork manoeuvre), so I actually did bring it to the doctor. She diagnosed stress and gave me muscle relaxants, and told me to find a dentist.

I have yet to find a dentist, due to tedious insurance things and the tedious tedium of finding a dentist. And really, either my mouth would be fine and he'd wonder what the problem was or it would be stuck at almost-closed and he wouldn't be able to see inside and find that I'm grinding my molars to dust in my sleep, or whatever it is that's going on. I try to consciously relax when I find that I'm clenching my jaw, which is usually while I'm trying to fall asleep as a small nocturnal animal gnaws rhythmically on my nipple. Any time I want to check my stress levels, I just open wide and see how many fingers I can fit inside.

Now for another cup of tea and some more cut-up muffin.