The Star Wars connection

We went to the playground on what turned out to be the last day before the weather got properly cold. We had nowhere else to be and nothing else to do. It turns out that if you stay long enough at a playground, the children will find friends.

Dash was hogging the digger in the sand area. I hate those diggers - the little kids are desperate to have a turn, but once they finally get their little bums up in that coveted seat, they find that their arms are too short and their feet don't reach the ground and they have no leverage to dig the sand, pivot, release. So they frustratedly have to return it to the big boys. I don't know why nobody makes miniature ones for the poor two-year-olds.

A small four-year-old boy hovered in the background, and eventually Dash was persuaded to give him a turn. As I predicted, he didn't last long before ceding it again, and I suggested that he help bank up the pile of sand from the ground instead. A few minutes later he was helping Mabel bury herself under a thin layer of fine, cold, fallen-leaf-riddled sand.

And then the three of them were off to the swings, and somehow Star Wars came up in conversation.

"I'm not so much interested in Star Wars," said Mabel. "I like Ponies."

Our new friend, the small four-year-old, turned out to have quite an extensive knowledge of Obi Wan and the others, and soon, in spite of their difference in ages and heights, he and Dash were firm friends. They all ran to the slides next. Mabel and Dash encouraged the friend to climb up the inside of the enormous tunnel slide.

I sat nearby, beside a very groomed mother, reminiscent of Annette Bening or Miranda from Sex and the City, and we laughed in unison as the dialogue floated down the tunnel and over to us. Mabel was encouraging the younger boy:

"Just a few more steps. You're nearly there..." They were about a fifth of the way up the huge tunnel at this point, but she was lying through her teeth and he was gamely giving it his all. Then a kerfuffle and a wobble in the middle of the tunnel, and they all came down in a happy pile, like puppies.

"Let's go back to the sand pit," said Dash, employing the Irish vernacular.
"Where?"
"The sand pit, where we first met," he clarified romantically.

Miranda and I were enchanted.
"You wore blue," I said.
"All those years ago," she reminisced.

And they were off again in the autumn sunshine.

Under a rock

Can we just talk about how far under a rock I have lived for the past several years? Because it's a long way. The trouble with living under a rock is that you don't know you're there because if you knew about the popular culture things you'd missed, well, you wouldn't have missed them. To put things in perspective, I still think Adele is new and trendy, and I've heard of Scissor Sisters but I don't think I've ever heard them. It was sheer luck last year that I ever managed to know about Gangnam Style and Gotye and Call me maybe.

But still. There was the Miley Cyrus thing, which I heard about because it was all over my Twitter and my Facebook feeds, but I'd never heard of this other person in the striped suit that she was lap-dancing all over (much more briefly, in fact, when I finally watched the clip today, than it was made out to be by all the scandalized media outlets). And then I found out his name was Robin Thicke and that he used to go by the stagename Thicke, which I dunno maybe I'm old but that just sounds like a terrible name to me.

So I'd seen reference to his song, called Blurred Lines, which sounded to me like something ponderous and worthy like Tubular Bells (not that I've heard that either, to my knowledge, but it's all instrumental, right? Not right?). And I saw the lyrics to it somewhere and it was all terribly misogynistic and horrible and not something any right-minded feminist could condone.

Then a couple of days ago in the car, completely unrelatedly, I happened to swing by a radio station that was neither Classic Rock nor Classical NPR, and I heard an eminently summery catchy tune. I tried to remember the words so I could maybe find it again, but they seemed to be something awfully generic about a "good day" and "having fun" or whatever. I was afraid I'd never manage to remember, and, as predicted, by the time I was home I had no idea what I'd heard.

You can see where this is going. On a whim this afternoon I put "Blurred Lines" into You Tube and discovered that the nasty lyrics and the catchy tune went together like carrots and peas. And then I watched the video and was duly apalled by all those women cavorting in flesh-toned dental floss without a single underwire between the lot of them, while Mr Thicke remained fully clad, letting us know exactly what he thinks a good girl does. Gross. I feel yucky.

The thing is, if you watch the Jimmy Fallon version, the lyrics aren't nearly so egregious. Could we all just agree to do that, and maybe Thicko (as he'd be known in Dublin) will learn the error of his ways?

Ancient history

I like Connie Willis. If you've never heard of Connie Willis, well, you're just like the guy in my local bookshop, except that you probably don't work in a bookshop so the fact that she's a really great and popular and quite prolific fantasy writer is not a travesty. But he, he was a travesty. I don't know why Books-A-Million is still alive when all the Borders Books in the area have closed down.

Anyway. This is a very long lead-in to what will probably turn out to no longer be a remotely funny anecdote when I finally get around to it. And I'm not there yet, you'll have to wait.

I don't get in a lot of reading these days, and when I do it goes in fits and starts. It's usually an author I know and love, because I don't have the patience right now to try out books that might be anything less than great. I'll happily re-read old favourites rather than attempt something new - hence the total revisiting of Harriet Vane and Peter Wimsey's relationship earlier this year. But I discovered that Connie Willis had written a new* book - in fact, two - and put them on my birthday list. B gave me Blackout for my birthday, and I saved it to read on the way to BlogHer. I finished it last week and discovered that it's not so much the first in a series of two, as half a story, the other half of which is another whole (even fatter) book called All Clear. So of course I had to get my hands on All Clear ASAP, without even waiting for Amazon.

This is why we ended up visiting two bookshops in two days, and why Dash ended up getting two new books in two days, even though there's a perfectly lovely library with plenty of reading matter right there in our town. (Mabel also got one new book.) The first bookshop didn't have any Connie Willis at all (see above), but Dash still had to get something, and he chose a National Geographic Kids book on tigers. The next day in a much better-stocked Barnes & Noble, he picked up a National Geographic Kids book on Martin Luther King and was all excited, so who was I to deny my son the reluctant reader such an educational item?

[Here, just to keep up the thrilling suspense (ahem), let me mention how great those National Geographic Kids books are. Dash is a bright, curious kid with a great vocabulary, but his reading level is not high. So trying to keep him engaged with a book that's easy enough for him not to stumble over every word is often a struggle, because so many of the first readers are insultingly simple. He likes the "I Can Read" superhero books, and they are at a good (easy) level for him, but he also has a selection of the National Geographic ones, and those are what he looks for now in the bookstore.

]

Oh God, now I've built it up so much that I'm afraid to tell my piddly little story.

Anyway.

Schoolkids in America know all about Martin Luther King. The Civil Rights Movement is heavily featured in kindergarten, if not before. Even the nursery-school attendees know about him, thanks to Martin Luther King day in January every year. As an Irish schoolchild, I did not have Martin Luther King anywhere on my radar, but I must have heard his name somewhere along the line.

So at the start of secondary school (seventh grade) our history teacher began by looking at the pictures on the front cover of our textbook, Renaissance and Reformation, I think it was called, and asking if anyone knew what was depicted. Looking at a drawing of an oldy-timey man with long hair hammering a scroll to a wooden door, something I had seen or read elsewhere came back to me, and I tentatively raised my hand.

"Yes, Maud?"
I was diffident but smug: "Is it Martin Luther... King?"

As I said the first two words, it had occurred to me that there was often another one appended. Adding the "King" was an afterthought, really. I thought it would make me sound even cleverer.

Sadly, one word makes all the difference. My teacher went from admiration to amusement in the space of that single syllable. (Though really, she should have been doubly impressed: I knew two historical people, after all, even if I didn't realise it myself.)

This morning I was recounting the story to B, who somehow had never heard it before. Dash wanted to know as well. "You knew about Martin Luther King too?" he asked, incredulous.

Whereupon B had to get all smartypants: "Martin Luther King TWO? There's a sequel? 'He's back and he's mad.'"


*New as in three years ago, apparently.

Alexander is his middle name, after all

Poor Dash had a bad day.

There was a substitute teacher at school, so he didn't get to advance to a three-star math general, as he had been hoping he would. (The sub still knew about the spelling test they were due, though.) They didn't get to do their usual Fun Friday activities, and recess was cancelled becuase it was 99 degrees outside. (Really? I mean, it's 92 right now but I'd be surprised if it had been all the way up to 99 today.)

He also fell off his chair and hit another one with his cheek on the way down, which I'm sure was entirely not his fault and nothing to do with leaning back in a way not officially sanctioned by either his regular teacher or the sub, I bet.

Now I tell him that it's the nursery school picnic tonight but instead of my usual lemon scones (which he loves) I cruelly made rhubarb snacking cake, even though I know he won't eat any of that. (The fact that there will be plenty of cookies and/or cake that he will like is not holding much sway here.)

But the worst thing, from my point of view at least, was that at around 2pm I was getting Mabel a piece of toast, and thinking as I opened the new loaf bag that I hadn't seen a slice of bread yet today. Which meant maybe I hadn't made Dash's lunch. A quick consultation with his father revealed that neither did he. Usually one or other of us does, or it's realised and thrown together at the last moment before they walk out the door. Today the shock of Dash being ready to leave the house in good time apparently discombobulated us both so much that we forgot to think of lunch.

"Are you going to move to Australia?" I asked him, after apologizing for the oversight and hearing about all the other terrible, horrible, no good, very bad things that happened today.

"No. They say it happens there too."
_________

This crazy kid can't hold a grump for long. He just discovered that his top tooth is a tiny bit wobbly. He also has a lower tooth that's a tiny bit wobbly.

"I bet I'm the first person ever to have two teeth wobbly! This is the BEST DAY EVER!"

I tried to get a grumpy picture, but it didn't work

Why on earth did I not try this before?

Scene: Yesterday, getting into the car to go to school. I open the passenger door to put something on the seat. Mabel takes her chance to jump in the "wrong" way.

Me: Don't... oh, okay, fine, just don't squash my stuff in the bag there.

Mabel notices the bag and purposely smushes a fist down on top of the carefully ironed and folded clothes I'm bringing to the consignment store.

Me: Sigh.

Mabel switches direction and heads for the driver's seat instead of her own.

Me: [lightbulb moment] Mabel, don't sit in your seat.

Mabel looks at me, confused.

Me, more clearly: Mabel, whatever you do, you're not allowed to sit in your carseat. Don't come over here.

Mabel gives me a tiny grin and clambers very purposefully towards her seat. She sits down beautifully.

Me, doing up her straps: Don't sit here. You'd better not sit here.

...

We get to school and Mabel shows signs of reluctance.

Me, wondering if it can possibly keep working: You're not to go to school today. You'll be in big trouble if you go into that classroom.

She gets out of the car, eager to break a rule, and heads for the building, and down the corridor, having the time of her life as I call after her.

Me: Don't go inside. You'd better not go through that door...

And so on. Her courage failed her when it was time for me to leave, and I did have to read a story and then have her teacher peel her off me and distract her with snacktime plans (muffins!), but it worked amazingly well. 

Just something to keep in my arsenal and pull out only ocassionally, I think, in the hopes that it might save us all a meltdown some other day.

-----------------------

(I can't find a video clip, but here's the audio for exactly what this calls to mind, just to save anyone from having to go and look for it.)

Sacrifice

Generally speaking, I'm the chilly one in the house.

I mean, I get cold more easily than my husband, and the children take after him. I'll have four layers on and be pulling another cardigan round me and making another cup of tea while Mabel throws her clothes off with abandon and tries to run out the door barefoot. So we have a hot-water bottle, and I like to take it to bed with me on especially cold nights.

(Hot-water bottles seem not to be the ubiquitous bed-warmers here in the US that they are at home. In Ireland, I'm pretty sure I could walk into any chemist/pharmacy/drugstore and find a nice red or blue or even orange rubber receptacle for hot water, with which to take the chill off the sheets of a winter night, but over here they're a bit harder to track down, and  sometimes, extremely offputtingly, come with attachments for giving yourself a nice little colonic irrigation while you're at it. I don't really understand this part. I don't want to understand. Here's a more normal one. Phew.)

Anyway, since I never remember that it would be nice to have another hot-water bottle while I'm browsing Amazon for more interesting items, we only have the one in the house. I know there are such things as electric blankets, but that's so high-tech, you know. And I only want my bed to be warm at the start of the night. Later on, when my toes are finally toasty, I like my sheets to be soothingly cool. I'm an enigma, you see, a woman of intrigue and mystery.

So, and gosh but it takes a long time to get to my point tonight, I have found it a little annoying lately that Dash has decided he needs the hot-water bottle. Even though he's regularly found in bed with little beads of sweat on his nose (probably from insisting on falling asleep under the direct glare of his bedside lamp), he professed to be cold and to need it. And since every parent's prime directive is to get the children to go to sleep ASAP so they can finally enjoy a glass of wine and watch an R-rated movie in peace, we gave it to him.

Then, one night, he was so hot that he couldn't sleep. The duvet was taken entirely out of his duvet cover, but he was still too hot. B filled the hot-water bottle with cold water, and that seemed to help. He finally conked out. The next night he was still hot and wanted the cold bottle again.

The following night, B asked what sort of water bottle his majesty might desire, and I found him in the kitchen filling a lukewarm water bottle. Yes, Dash wanted his bottle neither heating nor cooling, but just body temperature. The better to keep his bed, um, the same.

So off I went to bed again that night in my socks and my cosy pyjamas, burying myself under mounds of down comforter and extra blanket, because my son was using the one and only hot-water bottle for nothing at all except to be a pleasantly squishy neutral-temperature thing in the bed beside him.

The things we do for our children.

Magical optical

Dash had a four-day weekend because of the teacher training day on Friday and then Martin Luther King Day and the presidential inauguration on Monday. On Saturday, I asked him where his glasses were. Like this:

- Dash, it's time to do some reading. Where are your glasses? I remember you didn't wear them reading last night.
- Where did you leave them, Mummy?
- Where did I leave them? I didn't have them. Aren't they in your backpack?
- No, you put them somewhere.
- No. No, I didn't. Are they at school?
- No, I brought them home.
... etc.

Dash was sure they were in the house, and I was sure they weren't. We'd brought them safely across an ocean and back, not to mention running the daily gauntlet of leaving them in the kitchen of a house containing three teenagers, but apparently now they'd disappeared. (They come with a great warranty. It says that if you break the frame or the lenses, you get the first new ones free and subsequent ones for just $25. But if you lose them entirely, you just have to go and buy new glasses.) I also realised we hadn't put his name on them or even on the case.

I decided to assume that the glasses were in school, hopefully sitting on his desk or somewhere else in his classroom, even though he assured me that they'd come home with him on Thursday evening and I had put them somewhere mysterious.

Yesterday when he came out of school the first thing I asked him was if he'd found his glasses.

- Yes! Somehow - poof! - they were in my desk, even though they'd been at home and I didn't bring them back into school with me.

As if by magic! Wonderful. I particularly liked the poof! part.

We have the follow-up at the optician's tomorrow. His father and I are not convinced that the glasses make a whit of difference, other than perhaps as a rather expensive placebo that enticed Dash to do his homework more eagerly for the first week of having them. Maybe the eye doctor will be able to magically tell something when he peers into Dash's eyes and whirr-clicks the lenses into the machine and asks him to read the lines of letters.

Or maybe his reading is just improving slowly the old-fashioned way, with practice.

No shirt, no shoes; no shame

Mabel is a tactile person. She likes textures. Specifically, the thing she likes most is to remove (almost) all her clothing and wrap herself up in my big espresso-brown soft fuzzy blanket. She tends to do this at the most inopportune of moments, though, like right before we have to leave the house to get her brother from school.

For the past week we've had the same problem every day: three o'clock comes and Mabel has no intention of putting her clothes back on. I've dealt with it variously by tossing her (almost) naked self plus blanket into the car and dressing her when we get there, sitting on her to get her dressed (not so successful), or just going with it.

Today I just went with it: she sat cross-legged in the stroller with a crib-size knitted blanket covering her completely, like a cheerful orange shroud. Underneath she was clad in nothing but underpants and a fine layer of black (washable - I'm not stupid) marker, to which she was adding for most of the ten-minute promenade. She poked her head out once or twice, but mostly was content to stay thus concealed while I chatted to my friends, retrieved Dash and our neighbour who we were also getting today, and walked back home.

I had her clothes in the basket underneath, should she have wanted to get dressed. (If she'd decided to set foot out of the stroller, dressing would have been mandatory.) And it is quite mild today, though threatening rain, so I wasn't too worried.

One day last week, though, the school counsellor, who oversees the dispersal of the pupils outside school, was definitely giving me the hairy eyeball as she watched Mabel cavort shoeless and coatless, but perfectly happy, as we waited for her brother. That child should have more clothes; where is her mother?, she was clearly thinking. Then my neighbour arrived and shrugged in my defence: "It's not so cold. I've seen her barefoot in much colder weather." I didn't know whether to be proud or mortified.

But I'm glad Mabel didn't venture out of her blanket today to further scandalize the counsellor. I might have been called in for some counselling of my own.

A slideshow and a cautionary tale

Mabel and I played with PhotoBooth yesterday. Then I spent all this evening wrestling with iPhoto and iMovie to turn the photos into a slideshow I could put here, and to turn off the damn Ken Burns effect. (If you have no idea what this is, you're lucky. I hope you don't have to find out.)

So you can think of this as a whole bunch of mummy mugshots, and it's not even Monday. It's true I'm reluctant to put myself on my blog; not from any sense of anonymity (seriously, if someone I knew in real life happened upon my blog without my sending them there, I'd be more chuffed than miffed; it's very unlikely to happen) but more because I think my kids are cuter than I am.

Still, it's always easier to smile for the camera when you have a prop, and Mabel and a miniature My Little Pony make good props.

********

In contrast to the past few days, the most exciting thing I did today was to park incredibly badly.

Three o'clock struck in the Chipper household, which meant it was time to swoop out the door with Mabel in the stroller and pick Dash up from school. But no! Mabel ran the wrong way, hopped on the loo, and demanded a game of Who Am I? Which meant she was there for the long haul.

"But Mabel," I pleaded, "we have to get Dash."
"I'm doing a poo."

Five minutes and one very misleading game of Who Am I? later, I realised we would be driving to school. It's only two minutes up the road in the car. Eventually, Mabel was done, hands were washed, shoes were on, baby cheetahs were wrapped up in blankies, and we were on our way. We weren't really late, but it's my only excuse for what was to follow.

Usually, you see, I pride myself on my parallel parking. It's not fabulous, really, because I don't get nearly the amount of practice I used to when I could shoehorn my wafer-thin mint of a car into a space the size of a postage stamp in the middle of Dublin city, and I was never anything like as good as my best friend, who would leave herself with about an inch leeway at both ends in double-quick time, but compared to most Americans, I'm pretty decent.

More importantly, I'm better at it than my husband, usually. I instinctively know which way to turn the steering wheel to maximize the infinitesimal movement of the car backwards and forwards into the spot until I'm right beside the curb. This knowledge is especially helpful when I sit beside him, shaking my head and making useful motions with my hands to show him which way he should be turning the wheel at any given moment in his parking efforts.

Except today, my parking karma deserted me. There was a perfectly good space between two other cars near the school entrance. I reversed in, taking it a mite too tight on the first go, as I am wont to do. I moved forward. I moved backwards. I thought "Isn't it nice the way the front of the car is never quite as far out as I'm afraid it might be from here?" I saw the car in front of me rock. "That's funny," I thought, moving back and twirling the wheel blithely, by instinct rather than design. The next time I moved forward, it rocked again. "Oh shit," I thought but did not say out loud. "I hope there's nobody sitting in that car," I did say out loud. "Why?" asked Mabel.

In some sort of insane stress-fuelled frenzy, I very gently bumped the car in front about twice more before I belatedly concluded that this wasn't going to work. I couldn't get out again forwards, so I gunned it in reverse and felt my back wheel mount the sidewalk, as I had intended. My front wheel came up against the curb. I realised I had lost all sense of which way to turn the wheel at any given moment. There were about ten feet between me and the car behind; ten milimeters the other way.

"Right," I said cheerfully to Mabel. "Let's just leave it like this."

First I checked that the car in front was indeed empty (it was an SUV, so I couldn't see from where I'd been sitting), and that its bumper was totally undamaged. Then I sheepishly remarked to the woman getting out of the next one up that I seemed to be having a bad parking day. Finally, I hustled Mabel out of the car and we moved away from the scene of the idiocy as quickly as I could, hoping that anyone who saw it would assume it was somebody else's pale green Subaru Outback, not mine.

Five minutes later when we returned with Dash, my car and the one in front were the only ones still there. I was afraid I'd angled my front wheel in such a way that it couldn't reverse at all, and that we'd embarrassingly have to sit there until the driver of the car in front returned to liberate us in a forward motion - which could be all afternoon if it happened not to be someone picking up from school at 3.15 - but - jubliation! - my karma returned and I turned the wheel the right way first time without even thinking about it, and we were reversing and then we were away, gliding smoothly as on wings of pure delight (except for that first bump when the back wheel came down off the footpath).

So here is my lesson for you: never parallel park while stressed. That should be easy, right?

Charting success

As soon as Mabel started school this year, the immediate challenges that came to light revolved around the bathroom. At school, not unreasonably, they try to get the children to use the bathroom after snacktime. Mabel did not like being told when to go. She, further, did not like the fact that when she went, the teachers wanted her to - most unreasonably - keep her underpants round her ankles and her shoes on her feet. She was used to kicking everything off so she could straddle the seat comfortably, and though I'd tried to instigate some keeping on of stuff before the school year began, because I wasn't exactly blind to the fact that this was going to be an issue, it hadn't really gone down well.

I don't know how this had resolved itself last year, but somehow it wasn't a problem then. She was toilet trained by about March, so she'd clearly spent about three months using the bathroom, or being allowed refuse to use it, in her old classroom without incident. In September, though, - new classroom, new teachers, new people to inculcate in the ways of Mabel; or vice versa.

Mabel and I spent a fraught few mornings before she'd agree to darken the door of the classroom working out some sort of compromise whereby I would tell the teachers that she would go if she needed to, and they wouldn't make her. They agreed, but tried to make her anyway. She refused. Stalemate was reached, but they gradually realised that, like her brother before her, she has a bladder of steel and doesn't need to go all morning.

Meanwhile, though, I thought we should tackle the pants-round-ankles business as soon as possible, and the most direct method seemed to be some form of bribery. A star chart might do the trick, I thought. So I drew a few lines on a piece of paper. While I was at it, I thought I'd add a column for cleaning up, and of course there'd have to be a complementary chart for Dash too, because heaven forefend she have even the prospect of some new thing if he didn't too. Casting about for something to fill the other side of Dash's chart with, I decided maybe he could do some reading practice.

And so, the new chart was affixed to the fridge. Mabel's prize, if she ever tidies up anything again in her life, will be - surprise! - a new baby. Dash filled in his prize suggestions himself, so they might be a little hard to read, but it says "Litsaber" [light saber], "woch" [watch], "new shoes!"

As you can see, the toilet practice was a total success. In fact, after about three days she was happily keeping her knees together (such a lady) and her shoes on, which I'm very pleased about even if she never actually uses these new abilities in school. With winter approaching, it's a good thing in general.

Dash's reading practice also went really well - I told him ten minutes' reading was enough to get a star, and he was totally motivated to pick up a book any time I could sit down with him. Sadly, once those stars were filled in the habit didn't persist, but maybe I can start another one for something else. When he'd finished with the reading stars he started trying to earn clean-up stars as fast as he could, only just stopping short of making a mess in order to be rewarded for cleaning it up. (No need for that. There's always a mess around thanks to his sister's habit of playing with a small subsection of every different thing at once. Though I did have to stop him from cleaning up when she was still in the middle of playing.)

So, on Sunday, the chart reached the dizzying heights you see in the picture, with all of Dash's stars filled in. (Please excuse the crumple marks. Mabel was making her displeasure known one day.) I knew we were in for trouble. Dash spent all morning mooning around asking when we'd be going to Target to buy his new thing. Mabel spent all morning telling me earnestly how it wasn't fair if Dash got a new thing and she didn't. Pointing out that when (when? if ever?) she fills in her side of the chart, she'll get a new thing and he won't, did nothing for me. We did not go en famille to Target for the purchasing of the object; I sent Dash with his father and instructed them to pick up a small item from the $1 section to appease The Unappeasable One.

Dash came home with not a light saber, not a watch, and not shoes, but a new Nerf gun (oh joy); and they brought Mabel a tube of glow bracelets, which kept her happily entranced all afternoon.

So that worked out better than expected. Next chart: back to eating vegetables, perhaps.

BunBun II: The fluffening

The rest of the story is a bit of an anticlimax, but there are cute pictures, so stick around.

Nobody has claimed the bunny. Nobody has called the local shelter or the police to report a missing fluffy wabbit. Nobody has read the neighbourhood mailing list to thrill at the retrieval of their beloved pet. Nobody has posted "Wanted: Woolly lap-warmer" signs on nearby lampposts. Maybe BunBun escaped from indentured servitude or a mitten factory, or a house with no phones and no internet.

First thing this morning, we rang the local shelter and ascertained that they would take the bunny later in the day. It's a no-kill shelter, lest anyone accuse us of heartlessness, and will keep him until he's claimed, or adopted if nobody claims him within a reasonable time. Once that was done, I felt it was safe to let the children know there was an animal on the premises.

They were excited to hear there was a surprise - that we would not be keeping - in the basement, but once they saw it they were understandably puzzled.
"It's a dog!"
"It's a cat!"
"Here, BunBun!" I said, trying to coax the fluffball out of its cage so we could change his newspaper.
"It's a ... bunny?"

We took BunBun upstairs for a look around.

Mabel was more interested in sorting out the family of wrenches she'd found in the basement.

Dash wanted me to take a photo of his newly decorated new pencil box.

I think B was the one most taken with the rabbit.
"You love him!" I accused.
"He's just so fluffy," replied my very macho husband, cradling him like a baby.

Actually, I think I was trying to keep my distance so I wouldn't start loving him myself. When you see him from this angle, he's pretty darn adorable. And very, very fluffy.

So this afternoon, BunBun (Bunster, says Dash) went to the shelter. We might visit him in a few days' time, but we're not planning to adopt him when and if he comes on the market. I really hope he finds his family. For one thing, I want to know what his name is.

It's probably Arthur. 

BunBun

It's one of those times when I have to blog the start of a story without knowing how it ends.

But for once, it's not the story of how I tried to get Mabel to sleep all night, or do without the booboo (that's what it's called around here these days; mumeet is long gone), or talk Dash into eating more than one nibble of baby carrot every three weeks. Though baby carrots are involved, come to think of it.

This morning, B had gone for his run when the kids and I left to go to an open gym, followed by some playground time. When we got home I was a little surprised to find him still there, only just out of the shower, but sometimes he works from home if it's quiet, so it wasn't that unusual. His demeanour was a bit odd, though, as he acted guilty/excited and told me to look downstairs and see what he'd brought home. Just temporarily, he said.

This is what I found in my basement:

It seemed we had acquired a large wire cage, some newspaper pages, half a cabbage, and a very fluffy thing with a snuffly, twitchy nose.

"What the?" I inquired sotto voce when I got back upstairs. Luckily, the children were too busy telling Daddy about their time on the trampolines to listen in on our conversation. (This is very unusual: most of the time, Dash is the nosiest child on the planet and won't let anyone make the most inconsequential of throwaway remarks without a thorough investigation into exactly what they said and why they said it.)

Not to mention "Whence?" and "When is it going back?"

"It's an Angora rabbit," B said, all knowledgeable about this. I'd left a physicist in my kitchen at 8.45 and come home to a lagomorphologist at 11.15, apparently. (I had to look that up. I was going to say lepidopterist, based on the fact that I knew that was a word, and rabbit is lapin in French so that seemed close enough; but no, a lepidopterist studies butterflies and moths. Aren't you glad you came?)

Could've fooled me. Looks more like a fluffy Yorkshire terrier. I still haven't worked out if he actually has shorter ears than a regular bunny or it just looks that way because of all the fur. But it's a very different shape from your regular common-or-garden Flopsy, Mopsy, or Cottontail.

Anyway. What had happened was that at some point along the road on his morning run, B had seen this animal in the undergrowth, and realised immediately that it was not a groundhog or a racoon, or any of the other middle-sized mammals you might meet in this neck of the woods, nor even a Persian cat out for a stroll, but some poor, terrified creature who did not belong in the wilds at all. Seeing a man nearby getting out of his car, B asked him if he knew of anyone near there who might have lost a rabbit. The man turned out to be vaguely familiar to B  - in fact, he proceded to take his daugher, who is the same age as Mabel and so I run into them at the playground now and then, out of the car - and he was the one who knew it was an Angora.

Between the two of them and another neighbor, who provided the cage, Bunny was brought back to our house, to repose in the basement while his owners are sought. B went out to the pet store in the afternoon and brought back some grassy stuff for him to nibble on, and he has fresh water and we've changed the newspaper twice now. He is not interested in the lettuce and baby carrots from the fridge, and a single strawberry remains untouched. We took him out a few minutes ago and he hopped around checking out the foam light sabers from Dash's birthday party and the bag of wrapping paper and the boxes of baby clothes that I'm gradually whittling down and the other assorted crap we are storing mindfully in the basement area.

The terrible thing is that there has been a rabbit in the house practically all day - a real, live, fluffy snuffly twitchy-nosed rabbit - and we haven't told the children. They went to the dentist (no cavities, yay!), got things at Target (I went in for milk and toothpaste and spent $75, you know how it is), and spent the afternoon fighting over who got which identical plate, just like any other day, and there was a bunny in the basement the whole time. I think when they get to the therapist's couch, this is the thing that will be burning a hole in their psyches.

I would like to tell them, but not until the bunny is leaving. If we don't hear from his owners tomorrow (by which time everyone on the neighbourhood mailing list will have to have seen the posting), he's going to the local animal shelter, because we are not set up for a bunny. We have no desire for a bunny. We are not bunny people. The fact that B calls him Sampras and I call him Snuffles does not mean we have named him and therefore must keep him. And anyway, when it came to it and I had to coax him out of the cage this evening, I ended up addressing him as BunBun. I'm sure he was highly offended. He could be a she, for all I know.

So that's not the end of the story, and I don't know yet what the end is. But when the universe drops a fluffy reason to blog right in your basement, you can't always wait for things to be neatly tied up before you pass it on.

Tune in tomorrow to find out what happens to Mr(s) BunBun Sampras Snuffles.

Gubblebum

This morning at the supermarket I apparently lost the run of myself and was so delighted to have all the shopping done by 10am, in spite of my two little helpers, that I bought a pack of bubblegum for Dash.

"This is the best thing that ever happened," he beamed.

After chewing-gum-gate, otherwise known as his sixth birthday, the allure of chewing gum sort of wore off, but bubblegum was still veiled in a glittering shroud of mystery. He'd accidentally swallowed two pieces of gum - almost three, but then it turned out he'd never put that one in his mouth to begin with, so he hadn't swallowed it after all - and we said maybe he should wait a while before having any more. His green pack of Eclipse is still sitting in the kitchen, mostly untouched, until he feels like coming back to it.

So he'd been campaigning, now and then, for some bubblegum, and I'd been saying no mostly because I thought it was probably much sugarier than the stuff that's ostensibly meant to make your teeth cleaner. But this morning, there was a lovely pink pack of Orbit sugarfree bubble gum, and without even considering what Mabel would get to keep the tally even - the sibling tally of who got what when I didn't get anything, you know the one - I took it off the shelf beside the register and put it on the conveyer belt.

Since then, he's unwrapped the cellophane and carefully thrown it away, opened the pack, and been shown the cunning slot that enables the owner to reclose it neatly. He's counted the sticks and calculated (with fingers, he admitted) that three rows of five sticks makes fifteen sticks. He's unwrapped a stick to see what it looks like, causing the delicious scent of fake pink to permeate the whole car. Then he carefully wrapped it up again, put it back in its row of five, and slid the tab into the slot to close the box.

Every now and then he takes the pack out of his pocket to admire it, and then puts it tenderly back.

I don't think I need to worry about him swallowing any for a while yet.

Happy families

It was bedtime, but Mabel had a 15-minute nap in the car at 4pm or so, which will probably push back her sleep time by 30 (60? 90?) minutes, so I wasn't quite giving her the bum's rush to bed just yet. While Dash performed his interminable evening ablutions, she had finished leaping hyperactively from coffee table to sofa and had settled down at my feet to play with a doll. I was concentrating on something important (getting a halfway respectable score against my husband in Words with Friends, if you must know) and mostly let her babbling wash over me.

After a while, the dialogue of her story made its way through to me. She sounded as if she was playing with several small dolls, making them be a family, wheedling and scolding and whining and being polite and being impolite as families do. I glanced down to see which dolls she was using for these lifelike people.

She was playing with Tatiana, the soft doll I bought for Dash when I was pregnant with Mabel:

Just Tatiana. That's funny, I thought. Where are the others?

Then I looked more closely at Mabel's hands as she voiced the Mommy, the Daddy, the sister and the brother. The two big pink ribbons on Tatiana's hat are Mommy and Daddy, the two little ones holding up her tiny topknot are brother and sister. They danced around, wiggled in her fingers as they talked to each other, and fell perilously into the decorative crevices of the coffee table when they didn't heed their parents' warnings.

I really don't know why we have shelves full of toys, when one child plays with nothing but lightsabers and the other can happily put on an elaborate production given just four small pieces of ribbon.

Iron man

We all know that it's Dash's long-held ambition to be a metal-maker when he grows up, so that he can fashion jetpacks and Iron-Man-like suits to his heart's content. So when we visited a replica Elizabethan ship at Roanoke Island on our vacation, and then found it came complete with model settlement site with real people doing real jobs like, for example, a real live blacksmith, he was pretty thrilled.

He was fascinated to see the forge in action (while the rest of us wilted in the record-breaking midday heat), and overjoyed when the smith presented him with a newly hammered, bent, black, iron nail.

Dash (far right, dodging the camera) in the settlement village. The forge is that structure at the back.

The nail is his new most prized possession. If you asked him to chose between his blue light saber and the nail, he might be hard pressed to answer. But, just like the light saber, he keeps misplacing the nail, and at an inch and a half long, it's that much harder to find.

With a quarter, for scale

The first night, he took the nail to bed with him. So sweet.

Not so sweet at 4.15 when he appeared by our bed with a piercing, "Daddy! Daddy!" I took him on, since I was half-awake anyway (probably just recently back from Mabel's bed; Mabel's not sleeping well just now), and B clearly was not.

"Daddy's asleep. It's the middle of the night. Tell me."
"No, I have to tell him."
"No, tell me. What is it?"
"I can't find my naaaaaiiiil."
"Right."
"..."
"Okay, I'll tell Daddy, and in the morning we'll find the nail. I promise."
"Can I get into your bed?"
Sigh. "Up you come."

Shortly thereafter I was called away again, and left him snoring peacefully beside his insensible father. The nail was located in the morning. He's only lost it several million more times since then, but not, so far, in the middle of the night again. Today he got a small plastic pill box to keep it in, which will make it about 2% easier to find, perhaps.

In its box

Fight or flight

I write to you from 35,000 feet in the air, somewhere over Colorado, with 1340 miles still to go. I am sandwiched between my two beloved children, but I have to say that if you have to fly with kids, I highly recommend a six year old and a three year old. Dash is playing Angry Birds (or Angry Pigs, as Mabel called it this morning), and has far surpassed the adults in his technique, and Mabel was happily engrossed in an episode of Diego, but has now gone to meet the four-year-old sitting beside her father, leaving me with a chance to blog. 

(Not that I can press publish, of course. I'm just typing up a word document right now.) 

I know I haven't even told you about the party yet, and we'll get back to that, but from the plane I will tell you plane stories. 

****** 

In the past, when I've flown with my kids, I've never had anything less than lovely experiences with the people sitting near us. At the worst, they've been uninterested, which of course is a terrible slight when I have the two cutest, cleverest, best-travelled children on the plane, but we can cope with that. This time, it was different. On Thursday, I got Bitch-Lady. 

Our encounter began badly, I admit. I had put my backpack up above the seat, and got Mabel settled in beside me in her carseat. She had the window, I was in the middle, some as-yet unknown person (Bitch-Lady, as it happened) was going to have the aisle seat, and then B and Dash were by the window on the other side of the aisle. Like this: 

[Window] Mabel | Maud | Bitch-Lady -----  Some Guy | B | Dash [Window]  

Clearly, not ideal. But most people would make the best of things, no? Or figure out some way to swap. At least she had the aisle. She was even traveling with the man in front of Mabel's seat, so I don't know why she hadn't tried to swap with his neighbour in the first place. 

Anyway. Mabel and I were sitting down and B-L had just arrived and taken out a pack of wet wipes (should have been a clue), when I realised that the New Toy To Distract Mabel On The Journey was still in my backpack. I indicated politely to B-L that I needed to stand up and get something from overhead. So I stood in my seat - the middle one - and tried to reach into the bin, which had already been closed by some eager beaver. My small backpack had been pushed right to the back behind a big bag belonging to said eager beaver. I couldn't get it out from where I was standing, so I - politely - indicated that I might step onto her seat, so I could reach better without inconveniencing the people who were still filtering down the aisle to their seats. She looked at me as if I had suggested that she just hold my dog poop for a second while I find a baggie.  

"No. Absolutely not. I just wiped it. Stand in the aisle and get it from there,"she said. "But I can't reach from the aisle," I replied, reasonably. She was shorter than I; I thought she would have understood that. I moved into the aisle, stood up in the seat behind hers, where nobody had yet arrived to prohibit me, and finally fished out the bag. I couldn't close the overhead bin again on her large carry-on, but I didn't consider that much of a problem. The attendants always close them when everyone's done, right?  

No, apparently that was a problem. She ostentatiously stood in the aisle repeatedly trying to close the overhead bin, remarking to anyone who would listen that it had been closed already. She finally managed it, sat down, took her wet wipes out again and proceeded to wipe every part of her seat and table. Her little bottle of hand sanitizer stood at the ready on her tray table, to be used frequently. I really, really wanted to hand her my snotty three-year-old and ask her to help blow Mabel's nose, but I forebore. 

So, we got through the flight. Every now and then Mabel needed to use the bathroom - our first flight without diapers, and she was a superstar - or wanted to go and visit Daddy, and Bitch-Lady would make a great show of sighing and unbuckling her seatbelt, and then standing in the aisle until we came back. At one point she was chatting to her companion in the row in front, clearly gesticulating though I didn't understand the language, showing that we were a constant parade of in, then out, then in, then out... A couple of times I needed to hand something across to B or take something back. She didn't like it, I could tell. She probably wanted to sanitize the air through which my hand had moved. 

Mabel wanted to go and visit Daddy at one point. B-L sighed pointedly, and I said, "You don't have to get up. I can just hand her over." I had clearly offered to pass a vat of bubbling lava across her lap, or maybe a steaming pile of horse manure, judging from the look she gave me. 

To be honest, I wish they had child-free airplanes too, so that people like her didn't have to sit beside people like me. I don't mind sitting near other people's kids, because what goes around comes around and every parent knows that if their kid isn't the one screaming today, it's only because they were that other time, or they will be the next time.  If B-L had been beside the two-and-a-half-year-old in the seat behind Mabel, who was wearing a diaper but had obviously decided that visiting the bathroom was more fun than trying to take a nap, and so went out about four times in twenty minutes, she would have been even more disgruntled. As young children on planes go - and I've seen my share - Mabel was a delight. She entertained herself for long stretches of time, only visited the bathroom three times in five hours, did not scream or cry at takeoff or landing, or in between, and - I can't stress this enough - didn't throw up or even pee herself. Given the gamut of possible bodily fluids, a little snot on the sleeve is pretty mild.  

When we arrived at our gate for the return flight this morning (Monday) the first person I saw was Bitch-Lady, coincidentally also having spent four days in the Bay Area. I smiled cheerily and greeted her in a friendly manner. She was deeply aghast. 

 I sort of wished we were sitting beside her again, just to piss her off, but mostly I was glad she was far, far away at the other end of the plane. Anyway, Mabel wasn't nearly so snotty today. 

Denouement

But the water bottle, you ask. What happened with the water bottle?

Funny story, actually.

That afternoon as we waited for our little darlings to exit, be-stickered and suitably exercised, from their dance class, one of the other mothers asked me "So, was the bottle there?"

First I had to recover from the shock of having someone from My Life Version A (real life, that is) reveal that they are also privy to My Life Version B (the blog) - not that it was a terrible surprise, since I have told a carefully selected group of my friends and acquaintances - the ones who have kids, whom I think might conceivably enjoy reading such things, and whom I can count on to probably not judge me too harshly in person - about the blog. Every few months I get crazy and publish a Facebook update to just those people, telling them about it and also how clicking the Facebook Like button here (have you noticed it?) will make fluffy bunnies hop all over their screens in an endearing manner or some such enticing nonsense. (It's true. Just try it and see.) It's called marketing, I believe, or shameless self-promotion, and like many other secret/semi-secret bloggers, I'm never quite sure how I feel about it.

Anyway, my friend had, in one fell swoop, payed me the compliment of letting me know that she read the blog that day and that she was engaged enough in the story to want to know how it turned out. So I told her that the bottle had still been in the playground when we went by a little earlier.

Our third friend wanted to know what on earth we were talking about, so I had to explain. The condensed version, for people who aren't waiting for me to fill a whole page with little black words:

"I found a water bottle at the playground, and I took it home because I thought I knew who it belonged to, but I was wrong so then I had to put it back, and it's still there." As I said it, a thought ocurred to me, but very slowly, like molasses, or perhaps a glacier.

"Like yours. You know, the expensive one your sister gave you."

At this point, you would think that I would have put two and two together. Not a hope.

We discussed further how fancy those bottles are and how my friend felt her life as a SAHM of two always-grubby little boys did not merit one. She lives across the road from me. Her son is in Mabel's class. I probably talk to her every day, as we watch our kids zoom around on each other's bikes or I return a purloined plastic frog to her playroom, that sort of thing.

Later that evening, I had a text from her:

"You know that water bottle you found - was it white? Because the last time I remember having mine was at the playground on Monday evening..."

You would think I might have mentioned at dance class that it was white - not just like, but exactly like the one her sister gave her. Apparently I hadn't. And she hadn't realised it was missing at that point - she assumed it was in one of those places things usually are, like the stroller basket or the car or being buried in the sandbox by some stray tyke.

So there you have it. She got it back. The blog saves the day.

A cautionary tale

A woman pulls up her car by a deserted playground, gets out, and walks purposefully to the baby swings. She stands a rather nice drinking bottle carefully in one of the swings, turns around, gets back into her car, and drives away.

What would you think? What crazy drug-running scheme, what secret coded message, what clear-liquid time bomb was this?

Friends, I was that woman. Listen to my story so that you, one day, may avoid the puzzled glances of passing cyclists.

Yesterday Mabel and I went to get Dash from school, as usual. We passed a playground on the way, and waved at a fellow parent who was pushing her adorable baby girl in the swings. At school, Dash boinged out of the building to us, and we turned around smartly to go back whence we had come. As I turned, I noticed the daughter of the fellow parent still waiting, and assured her that we'd just seen her  mom and she'd be here any minute. Sure enough, a few yards further on I saw the mom pull into the parking lot.

Five minutes later we're back at the playground, where we'd arranged to meet some friends. In one of the two baby swings, I spot a rather nice drinking bottle - the glass sort with a wide neck and rubberized stuff over it to make it grippy and less likely to break on impact. Pretty much this one, actually. (So, a $20 water bottle, give or take. Not the sort you want to leave behind.)

I thought it probably belonged to my friend the fellow parent, so I decided to take a chance and bring it home with me, so that I could give it to her the next day at school pickup rather than leaving it in the playground for some unscrupulous person to purloin. (You can see where this is going now, can't you?)

Two hours later, when we got home - after leaving the playdate early because Mabel announced she needed the bathroom in a way that could not be decently taken care of behind a tree - never mind the fact that the city seems to have chopped down any trees big enough to go behind - or provide an iota of shade in the summer for that matter - near that playground - and then finding when we got back to our street that she'd rather play with the neighbour kids than do the poo after all - I Facebook messaged the other mother to let her know I had her drinking bottle.

Nope. I didn't. I had someone else's drinking bottle. Oops.

So, on the way to my board meeting last night I stopped by the playground to put the bottle back where I'd found it, hoping its owner would return again even if they'd already been by once and cursed the unscrupulous person who had taken their $20 water bottle. And I got some pretty curious glances from the cyclist who'd stopped to take in the view and was obviously wondering what on earth I could possibly be doing.

I wonder if it will still be there when we go past this afternoon.

Too much, too soon

I'm not sure I can cope with summer, especially if it's starting now.

Yesterday, Mabel spent a happy two hours or so playing with a basin of mud at a neighbour's house. (It started as a mini sand box, I'm assured. Now it's a basin of muddy water, and the kids love it more than ever.) By the end, she was happily shoveling sand on a doll's hair for her 3-year-old accomplice to rinse off with the hose. "We're washing the baby's head," they said, clearly making poor baby pay for all those shampooings they had objected to in the past.

Sadly, I didn't get a picture of the baby's mud treatment.

So when I finally brought her home, she went straight into the bath to wash off about an inch of mud.

Today, I was persuaded that the easel should come out of its winter exile in the shed and that I should let Mabel and Dash paint when Dash came home from school. It started out excellently. Mabel painted an underwater volcano.

So did Dash.

Then I looked up from whatever I was doing, as Mabel's sing-song narrative penetrated my thick, thick skull. She was quoting from a particularly fun book we've had from the library recently: "So I take some red... and I paint my head..."

You can see where this is going. Straight back to the bathtub, that's where. Meanwhile, Dash decided to do some finger-painting and ended up with completely blue hands, that dripped up the stairs and all over the basin before being washed off.

The paint is going back in the basement. The easel is going back into the shed. I'm not doing summer.
Not yet.

Disappointment

The boy across the road, who is in second grade, said as he passed us on our way home from school today that he'd play light sabers with Dash. "As soon as I've done my homework," he told us.

Once we were home, after a quick milk-and-cookie (and can I just say that I'm thrilled to see my kids both drink a glass of milk and eat a homemade cookie, because so many things would have stopped Dash from doing that simple thing a while ago - he would only drink milk if it was chocolate; the walnuts I snuck into the cookies would have sent him running a mile), Dash hooked his light saber to his belt, donned his bike helmet for protection, and we all went out to wait for M to finish his homework. (Dash doesn't have homework on Fridays.) After twenty minutes, Dash was lying on the chilly grass, Mabel was climbing the rhodedendron, and I was getting cold. I suggested we go inside again and watch out the window to see when M would be ready to play. Dash reluctantly agreed.

After another half hour or so inside, with Dash bugging me to look out the window every minute (while I told him to go and look out the lower window in the other room, but he was afraid he'd be missing something if he didn't have the full range of views), Dash suddenly announced "He's coming out!"

Hooray. "...with his dad and his brother. His dad's getting into the car..." Dash continued. I looked out the window. There was no sign of anyone, except the kid's mother coming outside with something that the others had evidently forgotten, and deciding not to get into her car and drive after them with it. No sign of M.

"I think he's gone with his dad, Dash. I'm sorry."

Poor Dash was quietly crushed. I could tell because he didn't say anything. He didn't cry, but all the excitement had drained away and he was just a kindergartener who wasn't getting to play light sabers with a second-grader again today.

There's always tomorrow. I hope M comes out to play tomorrow.