New-obsessions week, day 4: My Little Pony

It's not new, and it's not mine, but it's certainly an obsession. I've put a limit on the daily television watching for the summer, and the kids are currently using all their allotted minutes on episodes of My Little Pony.

The great thing is that it's on YouTube, so they can watch it whenever suits us, like when I'm having a shower or trying to make dinner. The terrible thing is that they have to use my computer for that, so I can't do anything useful or important like blogging or checking out Facebook while they are quietly and harmoniously occupied.

(Which is why the TV is on right now and Mabel is watching unsanctioned Daniel Tiger. After a good start last week, I am currently failing at TV restriction.)

But as TV for kids goes, I'm pro the Ponies. It's not quite as educational as their other firm favourite, WildKratts, but it has a positive message - friendship really is magic, after all - and at least with ponies you don't have to worry about negative body image issues. None of the ponies are fat or thin, and though some are pegasi* and some are unicorns and some are just regular ponies, there is no ponyism. They do have slightly differing American accents (now I'm wondering if they dub them with UK accents for transatlantic viewing) and the poshest one, of course, has an English(ish) accent. For a while I thought she was a villain, but she's not. So that's a strike against typecasting right there.

When I started watching (that is, listening, while I did something else) I was horrified by the saccharine twee-ness of it all: they have to search for the elements of harmony to bring peace to the kingdom; they each have a "cutie mark" that tells them their destiny and appears when they're adolescent ponies, like a particularly informative first period, maybe. They warble sweet tunes about being there for your friends and showing up when needed and helping each other out. They learn valuable lessons about life and love and friendship.

Then I watched this episode and discovered it was essentially a takeoff of The Music Man, which just happens to be a much-favoured musical in this house. And gradually I came to see that the Ponies are pint-sized works of genius.

Which is just as well because now we are all stuck humming the words to "A True True Friend is a Friend in Deed" in the wee hours of the insomniac morning. At least, I think it's not just me.

*Pegasuses. Pegasusi. Pegasusi. Pegasus ponies. They have wings, right?

Oscars and others

So many disjointed thoughts to impose some sort of order on, as I sit here having third breakfast which just happens to be the same as last night's dessert minus the custard and plus some coffee. It's got apples and oatmeal in it, so the cake part can be disregarded (but enjoyed, of course). Also, I went for a walk/run, so I'm allowed.

Mabel gatecrashed my weekend, basically. Friday night and Sunday night were supposed to be kid-free zones, and somehow they ended up including a certain four-year-old. This morning I dragged her kicking and screaming to school and left her there, where she stopped screaming as soon as I left the room. When I came back at pickup time I was told she'd thwacked her best friend in the face with a shovel. So that went well.

Last night I packed the children off to bed early and tuned the TV in to one of its rarely watched non-kid channels and spent a happy hour or two making snarky comments about the Oscars on Twitter and Facebook, and even paying attention to the show now and then between frantic typing. Just when they were FINALLY getting to the interesting awards, Mabel woke up and wanted to come down and see what we were watching. Getting her back to sleep made me miss the rest of the show, which was probably just as well since it was after 11pm and I had a raging headache, but it was still a bit of an anticlimax.

Oscar thoughts, randomly:

• None of the dresses really stood out to me, but then I missed most of the red carpet. I liked Amy Adams's feathers, Jennifer Aniston's red, and Jennifer Garner's violet, even if the ruffle did make my husband think of seaweed.
• I prefer my men beardless, but George was still lovely. You can all keep Ben and Hugh and I'll have George, thank you.
• Adele's hair looked good. I like the song but I wish she'd stop singing about "Skyfoal" and how it "crumbowls." The husband was delighted with the Bond tribute but would have liked it to be a bit more in-depth. We may have to just view the whole ouvre again
• I laughed at the boobs song. Sorry, world. On the other hand, if you're so unsure of your content that you have to envelop it in a cloaking device of Shatner coming back from the future to tell you it's not much good, maybe you should just get some better content. Or a host people are well-disposed to from the outset. (Hint: Neil Patrick Harris, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler.)

Other thoughts:

• This is the third time I've tried to write a post, so this is what you're getting.
• I have Girl Scout cookies. The end.

Watching Tangled with the Rapunzels

Metapost

Normally, I try not to blog about blogging. It tends to send me down a rabbit-hole of introspection, which is very fascinating to me, but not so much to you lot. Maybe. Every now and then, though, I suppose I can get away with breaking my rules.

See, earlier today I wrote a post about going back to work. At least, about how maybe once Mabel is back at school, and five mornings a week this year instead of just three, I might look for some freelancing. Except I took a good six paragraphs to say it. And then I thought, "This isn't very interesting. Why am I writing this?"

So, why indeed? If my blog is just for me, it doesn't have to be interesting to anyone else. This post, for instance, will also not be interesting to many other people. And sometimes I just need to write things out to explain them to myself, or to get to the meat of what I actually meant to say.

In which case, I should then delete the first six paragraphs and then publish the meat, but these days I don't really have time to get there.

Which brings me to the quantity versus quality question. Right now, my fingers are clicking away as fast as they can because the children are upstairs with their father, who is overseeing the bath. Soon they'll be back, and then it'll be bedtime, and then I'll have another little while before I'm distracted by someone watching Star Trek Enterprise beside me, or possibly something else I'm more interested in. (Though actually, Enterprise isn't half bad. Sometimes I get sucked in.)

The way I see it, it's easier for me to update my blog almost daily than rarely. Because almost daily is a habit, and rarely far too easily becomes never. And by writing through the dross we sometimes arrive at the good stuff. I don't want you to have to read the dross, but maybe you don't mind either. Not every post can be a great one, and anyway, sometimes my most popular posts are the ones I thought I just threw up against the wall to see if anything stuck. (The one about packing, for instance, has proved surprisingly well-frequented.)

As an editor, all this dross annoys me, but I'm not going to go back and cut swathes through my archives, because as a writer, each individual piece of dross is my baby. Not my perfect baby, but nevertheless, born of my fingers and brought to the light of screen by nobody but me and the nice people from Blogger.

So what do you think (before they get out of the bath)? Are you willing to put up with the dross to get the meat? Have you a higher dross tolerance than I thought? Would you prefer I posted less often with more focused, pared-down, edited content? And at the end of it all, do I care? Because after all, is this blog for me or for you?

You tell me.

Replugged

You may remember that our TV broke when we came back from the beach. (Or you may not, because it was a post I wrote for the DCMoms. Go read it, if you like.) We stayed TV-free for a month, but it was never going to be forever: the new model arrived last week. This one is about an inch bigger than the old one - so still orders of magnitude smaller than the average television in this country - and made by a company whose name we've actually heard of this time, so we're hoping it lasts more than a year before upping and dying on us.

The problem was that TV-free did not equate to screen-free for the children. What happened was that, to buy myself a few minutes' peace, I'd have to let them watch something on my computer, either on YouTube or Netflix. Which meant that

(a) now I couldn't do anything useful on my computer, like blogging or reading blogs or updating Facebook or trying in vain to get one up on the husband in our ongoing Words with Friends tournament, so I was reduced to sweeping the kitchen floor or washing up, which may have been all very nice for our home environment but was not the relaxing time I'd been hoping for;

and (b) instead of watching nice educational PBS channels wherein they enlarge their vocabulary and learn all about manatees and proboscis monkeys and the forces of inertia and the galaxy, the children were becoming hooked on X-Men and My Little Pony.

Yesterday, they both ran up to me to impart some exciting information about how Princess Celestia and Fluttershy had to get their cutie marks or the bad pony would ... and my brain threw up all over the nice clean cerebral coretex so I didn't hear the rest, but I think it's time we weaned them off this blargh. (Yes, the six-year-old boy is totally enthralled by the ponies. I think it's nice, really, because all the Avengers and Spider-Man and X-men cartoons are perhaps a little old for him and people do get blown up or thrown around the place from time to time, but I hope he has the sense to keep this quiet when he gets to First Grade next week. At least around the other macho men of the class.)

So now we have a TV again, but the children are slow to remember their old loves. It's good, really, for now, because letting them use the computer did mean I was paying attention to exactly how much they were watching - the temptation to just leave them where they were happy didn't last for more than two episodes of whatever it was, at most. So the TV isn't being turned on as a matter of course just yet, and since school starts next week for Dash, TV time will (mostly) stay restricted.

Which means that on balance it was a good thing not to have a television for half the summer, even if it did mean I never saw the Olympic opening ceremonies. It's not as if I'd have caught Katie Taylor's winning boxing bouts on NBC anyway.

Peppa Pig

As is always the way, the kids watched a mite too much television while we were away. Staying in other people's houses with few toys, getting over jetlag, being ignored while adults talk, refusing to get dressed - such things lend themselves to every trip having its own signature movie or TV program by the time we're done.

Last summer, it was Megamind and Monsters V. Aliens, two movies we had access to that got played over and over. This time, I think it's the entire Nickelodeon Jr UK cartoon ouvre, complete with fascinating ads for wonderful toys and highly efficient cleaning products. Every five seconds - it seemed - a wail would emanate from the sitting room: "Mummy! Can I have the HotWheels Double Dare Snare?" "Mummy! Can I have the baby that pees?" or, in unison, "Mummy, can we have Oogly booglies?" (Whatever.) The fact that the answer was always a resounding and instant "No" didn't deter either of them in the least.

Mabel had a running list going of all the things she wants for her birthday and Christmas: the baby that goes to sleep, and the baby that pees, and the mermaid dolls that change colour, and the Lalaloopsy doll, and several more that I've happily forgotten now. Dash was so mesmerized by marketing that he demanded we buy Fairy Platinum for the dishwasher (and was delighted to find we were already using it).

On our journey home, Mabel had a huge crazy fit of the screaming no's just as we went through immigration. They do US immigration in Dublin for transatlantic flights, so I couldn't even blame the journey - it was only noon and our oddysey had barely started. It's going to be a long day, I thought to myself, as I gritted my teeth and presented my fingerprints to the scanning machine. Luckily for everyone on the plane, she regrouped and was fine for the long flight, and even made it intact to the short hop at the end, though it was way past Irish bedtime by then. I fished some stickers out of her backpack and she busied herself for quite a while with a strip of sticky paper while we waited for takeoff. She would stick it on the wall beside her and pull it off again, saying "Sparkling! Look, Mummy, now it sparkles!"

For a few minutes I was afraid she was going all Edward-and-Bella on me, but then I listened to some more of her monologue. "You stick it on, and you pull it off, and now it's all clean and sparkling! See how it shines?"
"Mabel," I asked, "Have you been watching the Pledge ads again?"
"Yes."
Then she continued: "Command stickers. They stick and then they come off cleanly." R-r-r-r-rip.

Friday dinner: Cook like it's BBC 2

The children are being cowboys, complete with authentic cowboy accents. I don't know where they learned how cowboys talk, except perhaps from Woody and Jessie on Toy Story. "Ah'm a cowboah," says Dash. "Yowdee!"

On the plus side, they're mostly dressed, Mabel is wearing underpants, and both are safely entertaining themselves (ish), so I have no complaints.

Never mind that. Am returning, as promised, with Friday's dinner. I should probably reiterate what I said the last time I did this: I'm not pretending to be a great cook, or trying to steal any thunder from the illustrious foodie bloggers, or telling you what you should feed your family. I just think it's interesting to see what other people eat for dinner, especially when they're not trying to impress. So I propose to document what we have for dinner for seven nights, whatever it turns out to be. I admit that doing this does tend to influence me to plan a little more than usual - which is no bad thing - but I won't do anything special or out-of-the-ordinary just for the sake of blogging it.

The meals serve two adults unless otherwise stated. My children are barbarians who don't eat food.

On Friday the cupboard was mostly bare, and I was thinking we'd probably default to carbonara, but I feel bad about that because it's esentially a plate of pasta (delicious, delicious pasta, probably with lots of broccoli and a bit of ham in it the way I do it). Then I discovered a head of cauliflower in the fridge, two sad little potatoes, and a couple of pork chops in the freezer. Exhibit A:

It started to look like an episode of Ready Steady Cook, wherin two expert chefs were paired with two members of the public to create a delicious meal from random ingredients from a supermarket bag. Actually, I learned a lot from that show. Ah, Ainsley. Though for this to be more realistic, you'd need to add a jar of anchovy paste and a mango, probably, and some Cockney bloke saying "Well, I had no idear what it was, so I fought it would be interestink."

Anyway. I tossed the cauliflower with olive oil, lemon juice, and garlic, and roasted it. I boiled the potatoes and mashed them, and although it looked pathetic, they ended up being just the right amount for two people who never do anything good with leftover mash.

And I fried the chops with some steak seasoning and my trusty meat thermometer to tell me when they were done.

Not the most gourmet of meals, but a little more balanced than carbonara (maybe? depends how much broccoli I might have had, I suppose) and not bad for an off-the-cuff dinner.

Cliff Hanger

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

Our efforts go something like this:

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

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

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

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

MTV generation

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

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

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

Of course it was.

Summertime blues

We are at that point in the summer where I swear that next year I will be signing Monkey up for summer camp, come hell or high water.

Which I probably will, because he'll be well able for it at that point. And because if I have any sense at all I'll look back on this and remember that no, the fact that I have one at home anyway doesn't mean I may as well have both of them. It may be more fun for them, but it comes down to a lot more headaches for me, and who's in charge here anyway? (Don't answer that.)

Monkey has not got any better at entertaining himself. Levels of "What can I do now?" are reaching epic proportions, and B and I have been badgered to make every conceivable item out of cardboard, from a Monkey-and-Mabel-sized, fully functioning Batmobile (with added flying power) to a gas mask (currently under construction). He's also going through a very irritating attention-seeking phase where he bugs me every time I try to talk to another adult and jumps all over Mabel and me every time I sit down with her for some mumeet. (Hmm. That last isn't so much a phase.) The TV-time amnesty that began when we came back from our trip has been gradually winding back down to the limits that were in place before we left, but for the sake of my sanity we're not all the way there yet.

On the bright side, though: we had a babysitter last night! I went, in the company of my husband, of all people, to the cinema (the cinnamon-man, as Mabel calls it) and saw the last Harry Potter movie (great, but intensely grim with little opportunity for light relief). The babysitter arrived at 7.00 - she's only 13, but the kids like her exactly because she's not in that grown-up space in their given designations - and Monkey, by choice, was already in bed, stories read and on the way to sleep. Mabel stayed up till we came home, as there was no point trying to get her to sleep. She watched a DVD and demanded a waffle and presumably entertained the babysitter the entire time, and so long as there are no tears I don't care how long she stays awake.

So that's a long-overdue first. I think that was B's birthday treat (his birthday was in April March) so we still have mine to go. When's the next must-see blockbuster coming out?

For their viewing pleasure

Yesterday I made the mistake of letting myself add up just how much TV is being watched these days. And came to the conclusion that it was Way Too Much. I decided that the least I could do, maybe, is try to cut us down to two hours a day, beyond which children become obese and their brains turn into little puddles of mush. Allegedly. It might be too late already, but I suppose better than never.

I told Monkey this morning that he'd have to pick the four programs he wanted to watch because that was all he could have, and I encouraged him to turn it off at breakfast time so we'd have more viewing time later, when we really need it. Surprisingly and impressively, he was able to do that, and we came to an amicable arrangement without bloodshed. (Mabel whined, but I ignored her; Monkey is by far the worse perpetrator of TV viewing around here.) So now - during Mabel's naptime - he's going to watch one 15-minute Gofrette, one 15-minute, My Friend Rabbit, and all of Rupert. Later on, before dinner when I will desperately need them to sit down and chill out, they can watch Pearlie and Zula Patrol before bed.

That sounds like an awful lot, doesn't it? (Though Zula Patrol is downright edumacational, with all the planet and outer-space stuff.) I won't tell you how much it was on before. The problem now is that he's going to be bugging me much more often during naptime, and I won't get so much blogging done. Right now I was supposed to be documenting last night's dinner, and instead here I am drivelling on about television.

I have given him an egg whisk and he has gone away. For 30 seconds. I fear I'll be offering up a lot of kitchen implements to the gods of no-TV this summer. Monkey is, and always has been, incapable of just playing with his toys. Even when he sits down with some action figures or a couple of toy cars, he's usually trying to dismantle them or use them to pry something else open. When Mabel was a baby I was amazed to discover that she would actually play with baby toys as advertised, just like the babies in the photos on the box, whom I had always assumed were drugged or stuffed or something.

And now I'm having Cheerios for lunch. Still haven't really got this summer thing down.

This is not what I was going to say

Naturally, because I wrote about it, Mabel decided it was time to let me know in no uncertain terms that the only change I have effected is one of creating more laundry for myself. Still. We're in it for the long haul, and it has begun. That's all I have to say about that.

Monkey just jumped off a too-high bay windowsill one too many times and bit his tongue pretty badly. I know he really wanted an ice-pop, but there are less painful ways to get one. He's lying beside me on the sofa, still sniffing pathetically at intervals, but the bleeding has stopped and he'll be fine. I offered to put on a DVD, as some sort of special treat, but he said, "No. I love Qubo." What a testimonial for public TV.

Yesterday he told me he thought I should make another baby sister, a smaller one. And that it said in his book about the human body that I could make one every month. When I reminded him that Daddy would have to be involved as well, he said "Oh yes, you have to do that special hug. Well, you can do it in there, in the family room."

Which led to a bit more of a conversation about s-e-x (he was unimpressed and mostly uninterested), and how grown-ups like to do it even if they're not making a baby, and how sometimes they do things to make sure that they don't make a baby, and that if we wanted to make one we'd stop doing those things. But that we probably aren't going to because we're probably good with just two.

And yet, part of me wanted to say, "Oh well, since you asked so nicely and you clearly mean it, then I suppose you can have a new baby sibling. Just wait a minute till I've finished my lunch." Because that's a good reason.

I probably shouldn't tell you this next part, but it's too good to keep to myself. It was probably inevitable, given all the, um, region-specific acrobatics Monkey was doing, that something interesting would happen. He discovered that he could make his penis go all straight and standing-uppy. I happened to find him doing this when trying to hurry him up in the bathroom one afternoon, and I thought I should let him know that it's perfectly normal and something that happens to all boys, in case he was worried in any way. Far from it: I think he was a little disappointed to find out it wasn't just him. He probably thought it was a fabulous new superpower.

Now, from what he said to me yesterday, he apparently has a whole scenario in which his penis is a monster chasing things... I was trying not to listen, really, but as his father said when I regaled him with this latest, he'd want to refine his notions a bit before he starts trying to interest the girls.

I begin to see where all this male idolatry of the penis stems (ahem) from - as far as a five-year-old is concerned at least, it's a magical animal all of his own. But then, some men, as we've seen all too clearly in recent days, never really progress from the five-year-old stage, do they?

Oscars, vegetarian lasagne, and IKEA pencils

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

This was the third night. There is no more.

Sanity, rallying for

I am the last person who would want to go to a political rally: I'm terrible at keeping up with current affairs and have almost no political views past keeping the good guys in and the bad guys out. I always voted (when I could - I have no vote here and Ireland doesn't do postal voting for emigrants) because even if I didn't really know who the best candidate was, I wanted to have my say in keeping the crazies out of government.

But when Jon Stewart of The Daily Show, and his nemesis Stephen Colbert, announced that they would rally with anyone who showed up willing in DC this Saturday, in an effort to reclaim sanity for the everyday person, I knew this was something I wanted to be a part of. The idea was an apolitical rally, for people who don't usually go to rallies because they don't have strong views one way or another. One part big huge in-joke, one part very serious statement on behalf of those of us who don't make statements (except on our blogs).

So on Saturday morning, right after Monkey's last soccer game of the season - he got a trophy! they all got trophies! he was so pleased with himself! - we and a friend whose wife was out of town and desperately sorry to be missing the action headed down to the metro station to get in on the action.

And promptly turned around, because there were no parking spaces left.

B dropped us off, took the car down the road to park at the nearby supermarket, and walked back up. There was a HUGE queue of people snaking halfway round the car park up to the station entrance, but we realised to our great relief that these were people who didn't have SmartTrip cards - out-of-towners who'd made the journey this far and weren't going to let a little thing like a mile-long queue stop them partying with Jon. Good for them. We hung around near the other side of the entrance and, once B showed up again, waltzed in, pausing only to swipe our SmartTrip cards like pros.

Happily, we live at one end of a metro line, because once everyone on the platform with us had boarded, the train was pretty much full. I don't normally nurse Mabel much in public any more, but I willingly did so on the train (and later, in the station as we missed one jammed train home after another) because it was coming up to naptime, and I'm sure anyone sane would prefer a quiet nursing toddler on a crowded train to a screaming, writhing one. And in a tiny way, I felt that was the sort of thing we were rallying for, anyway: the right to not be judged by people whose business it is not.

We got out at Chinatown and as we walked down 7th Street, the traffic began to cede to the people and the view before us was just a mass of bodies.

A bit like this.

The rally had started at noon, and by the time we got there it was probably close to 1pm, so we hadn't a hope of getting onto the Mall. We got to where we could hear the loudspeakers - sort of - and basically wandered along in the throng, up one side, round the back of the stage - a strangely calm area - and down the other side a little bit, munching our packed lunch as we went, stopping to climb a tree beside a museum here and there, generally just admiring the costumes, the signs, the bonhomie, and enjoying the spectacle. Monkey was bored, but stayed put in the stroller with a sandwich to keep him occupied; Mabel napped on her dad's back for an hour or so; and there we were, at a rally.


This is the best view we got of the stage. We couldn't make out anyone on it.

A few highlights that will stay with me:

• All the lovely people we chatted to on the train, especially the ones who had come far - I met a couple from Brooklyn on the way down, and a couple from Connecticut on the way back - who were planning to drive back that night. (They say the trick is to go through Manhattan in the middle of the night.) They were the really dedicated ones, compared to those of us who just meandered over to our local station and popped downtown as we might any other Saturday. (Well, not exactly.)

• The guy trying to climb a tree who had a whole section of the crowd applauding for him.

• When the giant marijuana leaf offered to hug Monkey:

"What's that, Mummy?"
"Hmm. I think it's some kind of plant. It looks a bit like a cactus, doesn't it?"
"Why does the giant cactus want to hug me, Mummy?"
"Let's just keep going. Oh look, there's a good tree for climbing."

• People dressed as various superheroes (to Monkey's delight - we saw fully grown Spiderman, Batman, Captain America, and several others, in a cohort), a gorilla in a suit, lots of Where's Waldo/Wally-s, PacMan and Miss PacMan, and a topless lady (not a costume: actual boobies).

• When Mabel, who had woken up, decided the most fun way to use the leash was to dangle from it as her father hoisted her into the air. (I had her on a leash as soon as she was out of the Ergo: even though I'd written my cellphone number on both kids' arms before we left, I wasn't taking any chances. There are some people, apparently, who view children on leashes as cruel and unusual punishment: all I can assume is that they've never been in charge of an active toddler in a crowd. They're a godsend. And if your kid doesn't like the leash, it won't work, so if you see a leashed child walking along beside its parent, chances are they're - wait for it - perfectly happy to be there.) Anyway, Mabel was greatly enjoying being carried this way, so much so that if you tried to pick her up into your arms she'd wriggle and scream until she was put down, but once you tried to walk she'd go ragdoll again and wait to be lifted up. The people we passed thought this was hilarious, and there was nudging and pointing and giggling and I really wanted to shout, "She likes it, you know." I just pretended I wasn't with them.

• Lots of hilarious signs, none of which I can remember now. There's a good collection here. I really wanted to make ones saying "Down with this sort of thing" and "Careful now", but I don't think a lot of people there would have got the Father Ted reference.
  

I have nothing to compare it to, but it did seem to be a particularly goodnatured crowd. They say, though such estimates are notoriously biased, that there might have been 220,000 people there. I'm really glad we went, just to be counted.

Control issues

When we moved house we bought a new TV but decided to drop our cable provider entirely. Instead, at the suggestion of a friend of mine, we spent a massive $12 or so on a digital antenna, which gives us the most basic of basic channels. The only thing we use the TV for now is PBS Kids (and DVDs, because it has a mega-handy built-in DVD player). (No more Top Chef and Project Runway for me. See the sacrifices I make.) (I can put something else in parentheses here if you like, but that might be overkill.)

TV. Yes. I fully admit that my children watch too much TV, but at least I feel better if it's all PBS. For one thing, no ads, so no more Monkey pestering me to buy him "Boominators," which would make him fly. These turned out to be Luminator sneakers, which appeared to give the boy in the ad the power of flight. When I told Monkey that that part was just to make them look cool so people would want to buy them, he was somewhat disillusioned. But still wanted them. (Didn't get them. I am perhaps unfairly averse to buying my children shoes that light up. It's not as if the shoes would be a bad influence, or give them cavities, or make them run across roads without looking, but for some reason I feel I have to make a principled stand against such fripperies. Maybe it's because they usually have a licensed character attached, and I am somewhat more reasonably against turning my kids into free advertising for Disney or Marvel or Pixar or whatever. (Yes, I know he has umpteen Spider-Man things. But only tasteful or retro ones. Which the shoes are not. Leave me to my illogical justifications, please. They're all I've got. Sniff.))

Sorry. My paragraphs keep getting away from me. Anyway.

A couple of weeks ago I read Amalah's post about this new fad among the pre-school set for things called Pillow Pets. (Go and read it, she's very funny. And her kids are cute.) I had never heard of them, but the gist is that her kids saw the infomercial and pestered her for these stuffed-toy-pillow things until eventually she somehow ended up buying them one each, through no fault of her own. Hah, I thought in a superior manner, no such problems for me. I live in an advert-free house. I am so clever.

The very next day, from the living room as I sat down with a cup of tea, out of the blue as far as I was aware, came the yell, in the tones of one who has been having this conversation - though perhaps only inside his head - for quite a while now: "Mummy! I need a Pillow Pet."

What? What? Have you been reading my blogs? Have you been setting up conference calls with Noah? Skyping him, maybe, to be shown his new ladybug Pillow Pet? How do you know about this? Who got to you?

Then I realised that sometimes they watch the Qubo channel, which does have ads. And indeed, there was a cotton-pickin' Pillow Pets ad right now.

As of today, we don't yet have Pillow Pets. I have steered us past the oh-so-helpful stalls right in the middle of malls covered from top to bottom in the furry abominations, pointing enthusiastically at something imaginary in the opposite direction. We will see how long this lasts. But my ad-free superiority complex is well and truly blown.

Famming goos

Mabel talks in sentences of six or seven words now, and conjugates and uses pronouns and all sorts. This morning she said, "Maybe Daddy took it." She used the word "earlier" correctly last weekend, and will answer "because" when you ask why. (She's not so clear on what comes after because.)

At the crack of dawn the other morning she could hear B and Monkey downstairs and got up to join them, leaving me metaphorically in the dust. (Or for dead, whichever.) I rolled over and buried my head a little deeper in the pillow, as she cheerily announced, "Bye, Mummy ... have fun."

We don't have a huge number of (non Disney or Pixar) kid DVDs, but somehow we acquired two of the nauseating songs and animals and children dressed in "fashions" from the early 90s (why does that not sound as long ago as it is?) type baby DVDs, and I grudgingly have to admit that someone must have really done their research, because it seems babies really like them. Mabel has discovered the Baby Animals one, and the other day was transfixed by the baby flamingoes section. Why flamingoes? I don't know - personally I find the baby lion cubs a lot cuter, but she has suddenly started to demand the "Famming goos" at all hours. When we're sick of the DVD we bring out the big word book, which contains a picture of a famming goo, but after that she's on her own.

Wait till I put on Potty Power for her. I shudder in anticipation.