Points of things

Sky, sea, land

Tomorrow is the first day of the last week of the summer holidays. Mabel doesn't go back to school till after Labor Day, but Dash starts second grade on August 19th. The second-grade thing isn't phasing me, but the fact that the summer is almost gone is a bit stunning. This year seems to be going faster than any one before. If this keeps up, by the time I'm in my eighties, I imagine days will fly by like seconds. No wonder my mother is confused.

I partly feel like I'm just getting back into the groove of our nice laid-back summer (after the disruptions of going away, two weeks of camp, and then BlogHer) but on the other hand I'm looking forward to a bit more peace and the opportunity to throw away some of all the crap that's been piling up around here. Because apparently I can't do that when the kids are in the house.

I went to Target on my own for an hour yesterday and realised why I like shopping: it gives me a chance to center myself and plan things, whether it's figuring out what might help for organizing the house a little more (I bought an in-tray!) or deciding what I want to, um, invest in this autumn. (Found a dress I want as a shirt, decided to e-Bay a bag I never use and buy one I fell in love with in Marshall's; also tried on boots, but that's not relevant ahem as I was saying...)

I thought I'd missed my Dad's birthday and blamed it on the fact that apparently now I only know it's someone's birthday when Facebook tells me about it, and my Dad (needless to say) is not on Facebook. But then I realised I just had no idea what the heck date it was in August, and I hadn't missed it at all. So that's good.

I might have a freelance editing job lined up for when the kids go back to school. You might not get so much blathering from over here if I find I'm actually working instead.

In the last week both kids have started swimming underwater, Mabel for the first time ever and Dash for the first time since a little last summer. My kids have never been those ones who don't seem to notice whether they're on top of the water or the water's on top of them - they would always crane their necks to keep their faces out of the water, even with goggles on for extra protection. So to see them whooshing around underneath all of a sudden is pretty cool. I told Mabel I didn't do that till I was twelve, and she was well chuffed.

Technically, I finished the 30-day shred yesterday. That is, it was the tenth day I've done the level-3 workout. However, I did take off about ten days in July when I was sick and then away, and almost another two weeks from BlogHer until yesterday, and I spent a few intervening days working back up to it by doing levels one and two a couple of times. I don't feel any different, though it's not as hard as it was at the start, so I must be at least a tiny bit fitter and stronger. Dash says I look taller, which has to be a good sign. The scales still say I'm a few pounds lighter even though at no point did I stop eating all the muffins I usually eat. I will try to keep going until I get totally bored or something else happens or they go back to school and I try running again.

Since we didn't do anything today, here are some photos from last weekend, when we took in some history by going to Fort McHenry in Baltimore. A decisive battle of the War of 1812 took place in Baltimore Harbor, and as the poet Francis Scott Key watched to see which flag would be flying over the fort as dawn broke the following morning, he wrote what would become the lyrics of The Star Spangled Banner.

Teeny little flag up high; huge enormous flag down low

Walking the battlements

A singular sensation

A strange thing happened when I came back from BlogHer. I felt very small.

Not that I go around feeling like a great lumbering giant every day, but I usually feel comfortably right-sized in my space. But at the start of last week I found myself looking in the mirror and thinking I was a mere wisp of a thing; that a breath of air would knock me over; that I was lacking weight, significance, heft.

Small in a not-good way, then. Maybe it was the exhaustion that hit me when I got home, a combination of post-excitement, post-travel tiredness and a bit of an extended hangover. Maybe it was because I'd hung out with some women who were taller and bigger than me - but that was by no means the majority. At 5'4 and a US size 8, I'm pretty much average, and certainly not tiny. I am not a wisp.

I think perhaps it was a physical manifestation of the fact that I'd been such a small fish in such a huge pond at the blogging conference. I don't mind not being in the limelight; I don't want to be top of the heap. I have very little ambition, and I'm fine with that. I have no illusions that my blog is secretly a Big Deal. I don't think anyone's going to jump out of the alcove and present me with a trophy for being the biggest little blogger that could, I really don't.

So I don't know why, honestly. It was an odd and unsettling sensation. But I'm happy to say it's wearing off, and I'm feeling pretty much normal again.

Which probably means I should get back to that 30-day shred thing if I want to keep fitting into my size 6 Gap jeans. (Which we all know are just like size 8s anywhere else.)

New-obsessions week: Day 1 - Exercise

When Jillian Michaels says "Just a couple more," she means ten. When she says "Nearly done" she means "Halfway through, maybe." When she says "You're well on your way to being shredded," it's true, but maybe not exactly the way she wanted. As I lay panting on the floor this morning with drips of sweat running into my eyes, those are the things that came to mind.

You know, this might be hard to believe but before last week I didn't really know who Jillian Michaels was. This is what comes of not having had cable TV for three years. Apparently I never really watched The Biggest Loser because I was too busy watching Top Chef and Project Runway when we did have cable, and I think I had her a little mixed up with some red-headed chick in the UK who tells people what they should eat. Is she a different Gillian, maybe?*

Anyway, I heard once again recently about this 30-Day Shred thing that's only Very Old News, and, always being last to run after the bandwagon and try to jump on board just as it's leaving town, I decided to give it a go, with my self-imposed motivator of BlogHer attendance coming up apace. It checked a lot of boxes straight away:

• Not all lying down like Pilates, so the kids have less opportunity to jump on me
• Level 1 available free on YouTube; I bought Level 2 for just 1.99 from Amazon downloads this morning
• Indoors in the heat and humidity of the summer
• Quick - half an hour and I'm done, and I can actually do it with the kids in the house and no extra adult for distracting/restraining

Not that that last is easy, mind you. The first day I had the seven-year old pacing me jumping jack for jumping jack during the entire aerobic part of the workout, and he barely broke a sweat. Which was great for my ego, of course. In between times he was bugging me to have a turn of the weights (I have measly 2lb ones that the kids love to swing around terrifyingly) and getting between me and the screen.

Sometimes the four-year-old would come and try to snuggle up beside me as I lay on the floor trying to do my reverse crunches or my arm flies (see how well I can say all the words now?), and generally my panting would be interspersed with the following monologue:

"Put down the weights. No. At least, don't hold them there. Move them AWAY from the computer. Don't hold them over your head. Fine, just do it that way. Yes. NO. No, don't drop them on the hardwood floor. No... okay, now I need them again."

At least it distracted me from the pain of the lunges, I suppose. Also, my feet are too small to do lunges without falling over. Some might say it's bad balance, but I'm going with the small feet thing.

Anyway, the point is that this morning I started level two, which means I have been working out for 30 minutes a day for ten of the past eleven days, and I'm quite pleased about that. I also stepped on the scales this morning and may possibly have lost some pounds too. If things are really spectacular, I might have some before and after pictures in another 20 days, but don't get your hopes up because I might totally chicken out on that front.

Tomorrow in my new summer obsessions: coffee. Wait and see.

*Aha. That's Gillian McKeith. Verrry different Gillian, apparently.

Star charts, episode umpty: A new hope

Sometimes I wonder when having kids became this intricate tango of bribery that you can't call bribery and reward systems and star charts and calculated praise and natural consequences and parenting strategies and whatever else it is we do to try to outwit or outmaneuver these small people. I'm sure when I was a child - ah, when I were a lass - my parents just said "It's time for bed," and off I trotted like a good little girl. (Actually, my dad gave me a piggyback upstairs and read me my stories, but then I turned over and went to sleep and that was that.)

I did not have star charts, I did not have rewards or punishments or a naughty step or time outs. I was spanked a couple of times, but mostly the threat of parental disapproval was enough to keep me on the straight and narrow. (I did have a penny taken off my 20p pocket money every time I said "Yeah" instead of "Yes" for a while, and I admit I went into negative equity pretty quickly on that one.)

So, what? Children these days, eh? Parents these days, more like, being one of them myself. I blame some amount of my good behaviour on my lack of siblings, having seen for myself how much better behaved my kids are one at a time rather than both together, when they egg each other on and rile each other up and kick each other and love each other simultaneously in ways I, a sibling-deficient only, could never even begin to fathom.

But I do keep thinking it should be less complicated. We should just tell them what they have to do, and they should just do it. I'm sure I'm not remembering it wrong. I'm sure my parents had it easy.

-----------

And so the summer vacation begins and I haul out a new star chart, a new System, a new set of bribes and routines and things to aim for and fun in return for no fun (also known as cooperation). I am suffused with hope, shot through with organization, filled with plans, inspired by lists.

It'll probably all fall apart in a couple of weeks, assuming it even gets off the ground. My goals won't be SMART enough, or my menus won't be planned enough, and I'll be winging it daily and we'll all be yelling at each other and then there'll be another reset when we're on vacation, and for camp, and for the second half of the summer.

But we have to start somewhere, right? We can be shiny with optimism and glowing in the delight of our no-failure-yet for a little while longer.

Exposition

So what happens nowadays (by which I mean this week, probably; my memory is short and constantly renewing itself) is that every few mornings I put on my sexxay workout gear and I flit around the house doing the normal before-school morning things like eating cereal and making Dash's lunch and nagging people to get dressed and checking my Facebook in case something important happened on the Internet overnight. The children are slightly confused: "What are those jeans?" Dash asked me this morning.

And then I bring Mabel to school and then sometimes I actually do something like exercise and other times I have what my cousins taught me is called a French workout, when you dress for the gym but don't go. And they should know, because they live in California where you have to at least pretend to go to the gym.

The something like exercise I'm tending towards at the moment is a 20-minute "extreme burn" pilates workout DVD. It doesn't sound like much, especially when you realise that extreme burn is an extreme exaggeration (except for my abs, which, ouch), but it's more than nothing and I think that's the point.

I've also been known to take a bike ride or even just a brisk evening walk lately, since my Stupid Toe won't let me run any more. (It's much better. I don't even notice it, unless I try to run half a mile or so, and then I start limping, which is unpleasant and makes me grumpy and despondent.) I loved the yoga class I went to a few times in the new year, but it takes too much of a chunk out of my brief, brief window of morning. By the time I'd got home and showered it was time to go straight back down and pick up Mabel, because she's all done with formal education at 11.30 every morning. And formal education has about had it with her by then too.

The prospect of going to BlogHer bang smack in the middle of the summer is actually more of a motivator than the idea of the local swimming pool opening up at the end of this month. My swimsuit, after all, is stretchy, and I've basically got into the habit of switching off all my mortification circuits on entry, as a self-defence mechanism. Anyway, all the other people I run into there are similarly uncovered, and we're mostly all imperfect one way or another.

But BlogHer is another story: I'll be meeting a whole passel of new people, mostly women, all of us trying to make the best first impression possible but look like we didn't have to try very hard because we always look this way. I won't lie - it's a scary notion. But in reality it will probably end up much like the swimming pool - we're all imperfect, and we'll all focus on the pretty, whether it's someone else's shoes or their necklace or their smile that lights up the room.

I'm really quite excited about BlogHer, you know. Apart from giving me a little more impetus to get fit(ter) and a rock solid excuse to buy some new clothes, I have a cool and lovely roomie whom I'm looking forward to getting to know a bit better, and for the first time since I've had children, I'm going to be doing something that's just for me. For three whole days.

It's a milestone of sorts. I don't know exactly what I expect to get out of it - I'm not fired up about any particular conference session, though I may learn great things or hear great people at whatever ones I end up attending. I'm not dying to get spectacularly drunk at any of the parties (though it may happen). I'm just looking to expand my blogging network a bit, meet some new people who like the same sort of things I do, get some new readers, and - most of all - take a step towards establishing who I am when I'm not being someone's mom.

It's been a long time coming. It's going to be good.

Weekend edition

I have a confession. I hate weekends.

At least, I'm really bad at them. I suppose it's a leftover inclination from all those years when weekend meant something different, and less taxing, than Monday to Friday. But now all it means is that we have no particular schedule and are required to either have some of that holy grail - quality family time - or else feel guilty for failing.

I am also hampered by my extreme lack of ambition, outing-wise. The museums downtown are great, but we've seen the child-friendly ones quite a lot now, and they don't change the dinosaurs all that often. I'd like to go to the art galleries, but the children don't enjoy those much. A nice walk in the great outdoors would be excellent for our mental and physical health, but dragging our offspring to walk somewhere and look at scenic nature is doomed from the get-go. You can try to bribe them with hot chocolate afterwards, but they'd much rather have the drink right now and skip the nature, thank you.

Today we even considered pushing the boat out and going to see a film.

Us: Hey, guys, how about we ... [thrill of anticipation]... go to see a movie this afternoon?
Them: Nooooooo.
Us, grasping at straws: There'd be popcorn.
Them: Nah.

They'd much rather sit at home watching tried and trusted episodes of Curious George on PBS than see something new and exciting and potentially scary on the big, noisy screen that you can't get away from.

It almost makes me yearn for the old days, when they were little. Okay, so you had to pack the entire contents of your house and fridge before you could get out the door, and someone always had a huge up-the-back-of-the-onesie blowout just as you strapped them into the car, but the decision-making was up to you. If you said "Right, we're going to have a lovely walk and see a waterfall!", they'd be pretty much powerless against your bundling them into their coats and carseats and stroller and Ergo and just going there. Apart from the poop and the requisite tantrum, I suppose.

But nowadays, everyone's buy-in is essential just to get people out of pyjamas, never mind wearing shoes and socks and coats and sitting voluntarily in the car.

Honestly, sometimes I almost want to have another, just so that I can get someone doing what I want instead of what they want. (Don't worry. I know that's just an illusion.)

So today, despite everyone being already dressed by 9am (thanks to the remaining snow, that needed to be played in before it dissipated entirely), despite our having a conversation about what we should do today quite early on, despite discussing museums and cinemas and walks in the park, we ended up getting into the car at 3pm and going to that most exotic of destinations, Target.

Not just our regular Target; a slightly more distant, newer one. We bought one thing we needed and a few things we decided we probably needed, weathered tantrums about Christmas presents never received as we perused the toy department for someone else's birthday present (never a good move), spent $3 per child on a "small, inexpensive" treat, and finally sat down in Starbucks for our reward for getting out of the house: latte, latte, vanilla milk, smoothie, and one slice of lemon cake split four ways.

And now we have to figure out something to do tomorrow. I'd like to curl up with a good book, but that sort of weekend is both behind and, I hope, ahead of me yet.

Lower your expectations

My ambitions for this week are not so lofty as most people's, I think.

You may be training for a 5k or a triathlon, eating paleo or wheat-free, or implementing all sorts of wonderful screen-free, eating-at-the-table rules in your house, and maybe I thought I would be too, but actually I'm just trying to keep us all on an even keel as body clocks return to normal. Since B decided to add an extra three hours to his jetlag by heading to California for a three-day conference on Sunday afternoon, I get both the bedtime and waking-up ends of the messed-up-sleep stick, which strikes me as a little unfair. The fact that his hotel room was upgraded so that now he has an ocean view and can see the Queen Mary liner from his pillow-top mattress with plush down comforter is just rubbing salt into it.

Tomorrow, I lie in, is what I'm saying. No matter who's stealing whose markers or hiding whose Barbies or pulling down whose pants.

[At some point while we were away my children discovered the delight of the moon. Not the celestial orb, you understand, but the fact that you could pull down your pants and wiggle your backside at someone and it would be the most hilarious thing ever invented. I hope this is over soon. Maybe in ten years, if I'm lucky.]

So we are unpacked, the laundry is under control, the kitchen is clean(ish), and I have baked and given away most of half a batch of peanutbutter cookies, but other than that chaos reigns. It doesn't matter: sleep is a priority, and getting everyone back to square one is the vital thing.

I'm sure I'll get round to training for the 5k and overhauling my diet next week.

Resolute

Carr's Cheese Melts are either mankind's greatest invention or the item that will lead to the fall of civilization. I haven't decided which yet, but in the meantime I seem to be mainlining them like they're going out of fashion. I shall blame my sister-in-law, since it's her kitchen I'm sitting in, and therefore her crackers I'm bogarting.

I was feeling very noncommital about the whole new year's thing yesterday. I've really only got used to it being 2012, and now I'm expected to remember a whole new number? That's a bit demanding, for a woman who can probably tell you either what day it is or what date, but never both at the same time. I wasn't really getting into the spirit of the year-in-review thing or the looking-forward thing. I decided it was just another day.

However, with no particular sense of resolution, I have just submitted a tiny piece to the newspaper (and had it accepted) and signed up for a writing workshop. That seems quite motivated, somehow. Maybe it's subliminal.

Meanwhile, as we sat in McDonald's* this afternoon savouring the guilt-free taste of pure bribery, I asked the children if they'd made any resolutions. Then I had to explain what resolutions were, which ended up something like this:

Me: ... and so, sometimes people decide to try to change something in the new year, to make themselves a better person.

Dash, a little confused: But Mummy, I'm already a great person.

Once we got past that, they were all gung-ho about things they could do. Dash plans to try pasta again (again? he swears he used to eat it, but I know very well it has never passed his lips) and to read more books. Mabel is going to do more sit-ups (um?), eat carrots, and not scratch or bite her brother.

That final item didn't last the day, but maybe something will stick, some time. I find that going back after a trip away is often a good time to instigate a new rule, so maybe next week will find us all eating dinner in the kitchen instead of in front of the TV. That would certainly be a start.

Now, if I can just get the last of these cheese melts out of the way, I will also resolve to start running again.

*McDonald's in Ireland has bendy straws. And I'm sure the food is much less unhealthy than it is in America.

I don't think we're having a turkey on Thursday

I spend a few days thinking about jeans and shoes and suddenly it's Thanksgiving week and there's no food in the house.

Ah well. Food comes and goes, you know, but boots are good for at least two years, I'd say. I have a pair of boots upstairs that I bought in 1999, actually. I wore them at least once last year. (I'd wear them more often if I had any call for 2.5-inch heels on a regular basis. But somehow I never feel that first-grade pickup is the right time. Or daylight, for that matter.)

The reason I'm suddenly getting all twitchy about how untrendy I am is, of course, that we'll be going home to Dublin for three weeks at Christmas, and while not exactly the fashion capital of the western world, the stakes are a tiny bit higher than they are here. The season that's in it gives rise to opportunities to dress up, for one thing, and people there do tend to dress up a bit more. I just want to look like I'm not totally submersed by my soccermom lifestyle, that's all.

[And then I thought: submersed isn't a word, you idiot. It's submerged, or immersed. But I looked it up and it is a word and it means just what I meant it to, so that's nice.]

And when you only see people once a year, or there's the chance you'll be meeting up with people you haven't seen for ten years, or meeting people you've only interacted with on the Internet, not to mention the fact that the tiny statistical probability of bumping into an ex-boyfriend is raised by at least 75% if I'm walking down Grafton Street rather than to first-grade pickup, you want to look at least reasonably not awful.

[Yes, I know I just changed from second person to first and back again in the same paragraph-long sentence. I did it on purpose. So I did.]

Anyway. Back to food. It is slowly dawning on me - these things take time to percolate through, as my friend Thrift Store Mama was just talking about today - that my fruit and vegetable intake is not really up to recommended standards. I always thought, if I thought anything about it, that I wasn't great on fruits but my vegetables made up for it. It's true that I do like vegetables, but it's also true that breakfast and lunch are often quite vegetable-free meals for me. Breakfast is basically a free pass: I see it as an opportunity for guilt-free carbing. Lunch would have a vegetable if a vegetable happened along, but all too often it's some riff on a ham and cheese sandwich, with maybe a crescent or two of apple that Mabel didn't eat. So that leaves dinner, when I probably get in two servings of vegetables easily enough, but that's still three away from even the most basic daily requirement.

This train of thought began when I read Jamie at Light and Momentary mention that she was aiming for nine servings of fruit and vegetables every day. Nine? How could anyone eat that much food, I wondered. Well, hey, apparently that's my recommended daily intake. And here I was thinking I was failing at just five, when in fact I'm failing miserably at nine instead.

Oh well, I thought, I'll just eat nine servings a day and I'll be slender and full of energy in no time. And yet, thinking did not make it so. I think I had one and a half extra servings yesterday, and one today, and they all involved baby carrots and hummus, which are quite nice but not nine servings nice. (Also, I don't think I'm meant to eat eight servings of carrots every day. I'd turn orange.)

The difficulty is that vegetables, and fruit for that matter, just don't have that fluffy or crunchy or dough-like baked consistency that goes as well with a nice cup of tea as, say, muffins do. Or cookies. Or a piece of cake or a scone or a brownie. Nobody sits down for a cuppa and some broccoli florets. Or coffee and a carrot. (Stick of celery? Brr.) Even a quarter cup of raisins just don't cut it with a hot beverage, unless they're liberally surrounded by oatmeal and sugar and baked into some sort of, let's say, cookie-type vehicle.

So far I'm batting about 50/50 on whether I think "Now I'll have a cup of tea and something chocolate" or "Now I'll eat a healthy snack," but even if I add one serving a day for this week, it's a start.

I think this is one for the "Best intentions" tag, don't you? I probably need to start a "Went awry" tag too.

Fortunately/unfortunately

(Format shamelessly stolen from the children's book of the same name.)

Unfortunately, Mabel decided she didn't want to go to school today.

Fortunately, my husband's job is delightfully flexible, so he was able to stay with her while I set out for the run I had planned for after I dropped her off.

Unfortunately, I only got as far as the end of the road before I ran out of steam, decided fighting with Mabel had sapped the energy from my very bones, and went home again. (There probably wasn't much energy there to begin with.)

Fortunately, this gave me plenty of time for a nice long shower with the new shower gel and to shave my legs for the first time in about a month.

Unfortunately (for Mabel), you don't get to watch TV if you stay home for no good reason.

Fortunately, she just got a belated birthday present of some new Lego, so she was able to entertain herself pretty well all morning.

Unfortunately, I still didn't feel like carting her to the supermarket, so I didn't do the shopping.

Fortunately, I can probably cobble something together for dinner from what we already have, even if it's just (not from a box) mac 'n cheese and roasted broccoli.

Unfortunately, our babysitter can't come this weekend so we're not going to get to see the new Bond film as I was hoping.

Fortunately, her mom sent me the number of a friend who has three daughters who would love to babysit.

Unfortunately, Mabel won't countenance the idea of any other babysitter.

[...Maud bursts into tears at the idea of Daniel Craig carrying on without her...]

Unfortunately, I can't find a picture I wish to endorse here, because his magnetism does not work for me in stills. When I first saw him (in Munich, with bad hair) I couldn't figure out why I found him so attractive, but every time he was on screen my eyes just wouldn't look anywhere else.

If the picture's not working, you can go here and feast your eyes on whichever one you like best.

Fortunately (for you), I got over it and found this one anyway. You're welcome.

No muffins

Mabel is at a playdate across the road, and I have an extra hour and a half to mess around with this morning. Except for the part where I had to go down to school to get her anyway, find that she'd re-changed her mind (it's her prerogative) about going home with her friend, install her carseat into my friend's car even though she had a perfectly good brand-new one there for Mabel to use, and kiss her goodbye. Then we both drove back up the hill home and got out of our cars on either side of the road. She unloaded three happy children into her house, and I unloaded nobody at all into mine.

Tomorrow, I'll return the favor, but hopefully with 100% less redundant driving around, since Mabel's friend fits perfectly in Dash's (otherwise empty on this trip) carseat and is not nearly as fussy as she is.

Meanwhile, I'm slowly trying to use my free time - now that my "two children, two schools, five mornings" fantasy is actually coming true - to impose some sort of order on this place and my mentality. There's a very gradual hint of meal planning, winter-clothes sorting, and even house-cleaning starting to make its way into the way things are being done. I've even gone running again and started back at my old pilates class.

Which is just as well, because sorting winter clothes has led me to discover that I have far more pairs of jeans than anyone needs, and that too many of them are too small, because I seem to be taking up more space than I was at the start of the summer. Since Mabel is now nursing a lot less and I didn't exercise when the weather was warm - so much for those good intentions - this is not rocket science, but it's still disappointing. I'll probably never again be as skinny as I was when I had an 18-month-old nursing every five minutes (or so it seemed) and I know there are good things about that, but it's a pity that now I have more freedom to go out (a) shopping and (b) socializing, it's harder to look in the mirror and be thrilled with what I see.

So I have two options: I can stop looking in the mirror and tell myself that it's not important; or I can try to take a little exercise a little more often, stop giving myself the same size portions as the marathon runner in the family, and lay off the cookies.

One of these things will probably happen, but I'm not making any promises. (Because I function best on reverse psychology, so vowing to become thin and waif-like would lead instantly to telling myself to go take a short walk off a long pier and find some muffins wherever I land.)

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.

Going solo

I sat here yesterday - okay, not exactly here, because right now I'm forming a pinchproof barrier between the children as they watch TV - starting to type some annoyingly smug blog post about how well things go when I'm solo-parenting because they're older and because when it's just me, I have to commit to doing things for the kids rather than trying to get my own stuff done.

And then we spent the rest of the day sniping at one another and not doing anything fun at all, until a very belated trip to the pool redeemed things a bit.

A lot of that was down to my sleepless night the night before, which was mostly not due to Mabel, for a change, but because the night went something like this:

10.30: I go to bed.
10.30 - 12.00 or so: Today's youth park outside my house to attend a house party down the street.*
2.30: I finally acknowledge the period pain I've been trying to ignore, so I get up to take some ibuprofen.
2.30 - 3.00: Today's youth return to their cars, chatting and sometimes singing opera.
3.30: Mabel wakes up. She'd been asleep since 7pm, so that was a great night, for her. But she was hungry and I had to get her a frozen waffle.** She went back to sleep pretty quickly once she'd eaten it.
5.00: I go back to my own bed.
6.00: I hear Dash wake up. I go to forestall him before he barges into Mabel's room looking for me and wakes her too. I tell him that he has to entertain himself until 7.00. He's not happy about that. I don't care much, so long as he's quiet.
6.35: Mabel wakes up. She joins me in the big bed and after a while everyone's up and the day has begun, against my better judgement.

So many things to discuss further here, but first let me dwell for a moment on the way my children constantly seem to demand food and water. Why aren't they self-sufficient yet? My fridge doesn't have one of those automatic water dispensers, and mostly I'm glad, because if it did we'd be swimming around the kitchen or skidding on ice all day, but on the other hand then they'd be able to get their own damn drinks. I've put the glasses where they can reach them, but they can't lift down the heavy filter jug and pour it themselves, so that's no help. And they won't drink unfiltered water from the tap - which they can't reach either anyway - because they're demanding little so-and-so's.

* Someone down the street is away, and the college kid they have house- and pet-sitting is Taking Advantage. We can't hear the actual partying from here, but because our street is usually so quiet, and because my bedroom is at the front of the house and the windows were open, I could hear every word as if they were standing beside my bed. They weren't yelling or raucous, they weren't even audibly drunk going home - except for the guy belting out arias, probably, though for all I know he does that sober too - but the whole thing just felt like such an affront to civilized society. Because I'm sure I never attended any house parties as a student. Nope. Didn't, for instance, first kiss my husband-to-be at one.

** Urgh. Feeding children in the middle of the night. It's against my principles, but it's also the quickest way to get her back to sleep, so I do it because the alternative is having her nursing all night. I really don't want to wake at 3am because her body expects a waffle, but she just won't go back to sleep hungry. I try to be sure she eats a good dinner to avoid this, but there's no way to make her eat if she's not interested, and she has the appetite of a gnat most of the time. Telling her "I won't get you a waffle at 3am if you wake up hungry" has no effect. And not just because she knows it's not true.

Back to wherever I was. Grumpy yesterday, that's where. But before the grumps, we did some watercolour painting and some knitting. (Long story. Dash wants to learn to knit. There, that was quick.) I felt like the crafting-est (rather than craftiest, you understand) mother this side of Martha Stewart.

Such concentration. This was at the start, before Mabel began to suck water out of her paintbrush.

I think my point, now that I look back and see if I can winkle one out of this diatribe, is that I've run the gamut of parenting in the past 24 hours or so, from sleeplessness to indulgence to home-schooling. Today we went back to our regularly scheduled light-saber fights and running around the street with friends, and everything was better again.

I also got a lot more sleep last night - so maybe the whole watercolours and knitting thing was just a product of my fevered imaginings.

A quick run down

• Time Mabel went to sleep last night: 9.30 pm
• Time Mabel woke up last night: 2.30 am (that's actually quite good, you know)
• Time it felt like it took to get her back to sleep: 2 hours, give or take (that's not good)
• Time somebody decided to ring our phone before changing their mind: 5.15 am
• Time I actually got up: 6.45 am
• Amount I felt like running a race: Not even a little bit
• Time I left the house: 7.10 am
• Time spent loitering around once I'd attached my number to my t-shirt with safety pins and my chip to my shoe: 30 minutes
• Time the race started: 8 am
• Number of runners who streaked ahead of me very quickly: Most of them
• Number of walkers still behind me: A few, I hope
• Number of runners who passed me clearly already on their second lap while I was still completing my first: About 6
• Number of times we went around the lake: 2
• Number of fluffy ducklings I saw: 6
• Number of chipmunks who dashed across my path: 1
• Number of toddlers who mistakenly thought I might be their mama: 1
• Number of times I did not stop running: Any
• That is, because the former seems ambiguous, amount I walked: 0 cm, inches, meters, rods, poles or perches
• Number of family members I was delighted to see as I rounded the final bend: All 3 lovelies
• Amount I was surprised to find I could speed up to make a big finish: Quite a bit
• Number of kilometers I ran: 5, Baby

This is me approaching my waiting supporters
(I don't know what the guy in the grey is doing, but he's going the wrong way.)

How that's going

You might remember that for Christmas, I got running shoes. And then I surprised nobody more than myself by using them, not just once, but on a fairly regular basis. I decided to sign up for the nursery-school fundraiser 5k race in May, thinking that surely almost five months was enough time for anyone to get themselves from zero to five.

The race is next Saturday. Just in case things don't go well for me on the day, I went for a run last Saturday and beat my previous personal best by a whole mile, bringing me nicely up to 3.25 miles altogether. Which just happens to be a shade over 5k, so whatever happens on the day will be a mere technicality.

My aim has been three times a week, or two runs and one something else, like that dance exercise class I was doing. I certainly haven't been faithful to that aim ever since January, between travel and illness and (even) injury (I twisted my ankle quite painfully in the playground two weeks ago; not exactly a training injury, more an occupational hazard); but I've kept it up, and for some reason I haven't wanted to stop.

It's been encouraging, too, to find that when I do stop for a week - or three - my body bounces back to where it was before much more quickly than it took to get there in the first place. So I might go out the first day and run less than a mile before limping home, disconsolate;  but I can add back the distance half a mile or more at a time. Muscle memory is a wonderful thing.

I'm not a shadow of my former self or anything. I don't think I've lost so much as a pound after all this, but then it's not as if I've been laying off the muffins either. Perhaps the reason I keep going this time is because for once it's not about weight-loss, though of course that would be nice; it's really about being healthy. I want to show my children that everyone exercises, not just Daddy the marathon man, and I need to find a new normal for myself that includes regular movement further than from kitchen table to couch, or around the aisles of Target. And it would be nice to go (ever closer) towards my 40s as a woman who could, perhaps, outrun the zombie uprising, so long as the zombies can't run any further than three miles at a nice leisurely 12- or 13-minute-mile pace.

(To put my wussiness in perspective, my husband got up at 3 a.m. the other week, with a headcold, went out in the dark, and took a bus with a bunch of strangers to run 26.2 miles up the California coast, just for fun, in under four hours. And here I am worried that if Mabel has a less-than-stellar night I might not be able to go a whole 3.2 without having to stop and walk.

(Not that there's anything wrong with stopping and walking. It's just that once I stop it's immeasurably harder to start again, so I prefer to keep going.)

) <- end of digression. And other digression. Though if you can call it a digression when it comes at the end I'm not sure. Maybe it's just a tangent. Like this one.

Tiny increments of betterment

Is it time for an update on the sleep situation? I suppose it is.

Let's start with the good news. Mabel is definitely toilet trained. Pull-ups are strictly for night time, not even for naps. (I put a waterproof crib mattress pad under her at naptime just in case, but mostly she doesn't need it.) My diaper-totin' days are over. I am in no way tempting fate by saying this.

Okay, okay, that's not sleep.

Last time I took you down this fascinating road of good intentions, I was trying to night-wean the three-year-old; something many people do when their babies are six months old, or maybe twelve, or perhaps two years. But I'm a slow starter, and I dislike confrontation.

The first few days went startlingly well: Mabel would go back to sleep without nursing at her first wake (10pm or so) and skip her second wake (midnight-ish) entirely. By the time the formerly third wake happened (3am) I was so impressed, and she so frantic, that I would happily give her what she wanted, and we'd all go back to sleep.

But then she started not eating dinner. Which made her wake up hungry in the middle of the night. Which was not conducive to staying asleep or being content with an inane story about Dora and some butterflies instead of the much-desired boobie.

(She has started to say "boobie" instead of "mumeet". I am not happy about this development. When I'm on the phone to my mother and Mabel starts to shout "Give me your boobies!", there's little I can do to dissemble about what's going on.)

So we had some frustrating evenings while B was away, and we're just getting back into the swing of things now, remembering to send him in when she wakes the first time, even though she's not yet back to ever going back to sleep without me. But still, some times, more often than not - almost always, I'd say optimistically - she will go back to sleep without nursing at the first wake. The night before last she went back to sleep the first two wakes without nursing. Even. But she's still waking - that is, enough to start calling for me and escalate if ignored - as much as ever.

Still. I'll take what I can get, for now. It's a start.

Batten down the hatches

Pull up a chair. Have some cheese. I've got the whine.

I can tell already this is going be one of those posts that gets the "Best intentions" tag. That one goes on plans I make and tell you about so that you can all point and laugh two weeks later when things go horribly, predictably awry. Or the next day, even. But if you never even try, you definitely won't get anywhere, I suppose.

Two nights ago was a bad night for Mabel. I happened to look at the clock at the relevant times and discovered that I left my own bed to go to her at 12.00, 2.00 and 4.00. I came back to my own bed at 1.00 and 3.00. And I wouldn't like you to think we were all sleeping soundly from 4am until reluctant waking up at 8.00. No, she was probably latched on again from 5.00 to 6.00 or so, before getting up and leaving me in blessed, blessed peace, around 7.00.

To be honest, that was pretty standard except that usually I don't stay awake enough at 3am to do anything as active as bothering to get myself up and trot down the hall to my own bed. But sometimes she's hogging the whole (twin) mattress and the call of the cool sheets on my side of the big (queen) bed is a siren song. I know I'm lucky to be able to be able to go back to sleep - usually - pretty quickly every time - this situation couldn't possibly have persisted if that wasn't the case.

Last night, then, there was something in the air, or the water. Maybe there was a full moon. Maybe it was because of the equinox. More likely it was the incipient thunder, but a lot of people on my Facebook feed this morning seemed to be complaining about how badly their kids had slept. Dash, my great sleeper, woke twice with a bad dream. The first time, I had just come back from Mabel and was able to lie down with him for a few minutes until he dropped off again. The second time, I had to call in reinforcements because I was already dealing with Mabel again, so I'm not sure how long that took. (There was a third time, but apparently I dreamed that one. I could have sworn I heard him call out, heard him get out of bed and come down the hall, and I was already flapping a hand at him to warn him not to wake his precariously asleep sister when I opened my eyes and found he wasn't actually standing beside me at all.)

Mabel, having gone to bed early at 7pm after no nap, had woken as usual at 9.45 and gone back to sleep easily enough. Then she woke around midnight and - well, it all gets fuzzy, but at some point much later it felt like she'd been latched on all night and it crossed my mind that perhaps she was hungry. "Are you hungry, Mabel?" I asked. She nodded. "Mummy, I'm huuuungry!" You could have told me two hours ago and saved us all that not-sleeping, you know? I went downstairs and got her a waffle. At least it was only 3.15 and not 5am as I'd feared. She gobbled up a frozen waffle in the dark, whispering something about Goldilocks and the three bears to her doll as it went, and of course then she was wide awake, wanting water and stories and Daddy and to go downstairs and play there...

I got her to lie down and have some more mumeet and she was out in pretty short order. So we all went to sleep ... until the thunder rolled in around 5am and the rain around 6 and though the kids were asleep, I heard it all so I don't think I was, entirely.

Coming back from school this morning, I told Mabel that mumeet at night was going to have to stop. That I would gladly let her have some before bed, and again when she wakes up in the morning, and that someone will go in and lie down with her to help her get back to sleep, but the all-night buffet is closing down. I asked her if she'd rather Daddy went into her or I did, when she woke in the night but wasn't getting mumeet, and she opted for Daddy. I think this is because she expects Daddy to read her stories at 4am, and she'll get a bit of a shock when all he wants to do is turn over and go back to sleep.

I was surprised that she agreed, and I know she'll be eating her words tonight when I try to enforce it, but it had to happen some time, and we'll see how it goes. Maybe two bad nights in a row have worn me down enough to help me stay strong in the face of full-force Hurricane Mabel. Maybe our success with cutting out daytime nursing will convince both of us that I can say no and she can learn to live with it. But it's going to be hard, and there will be tears, and I just hope we don't wake the neighbours.

Goings-on ongoing

Once again, this morning, I didn't go for a run.

One way or another, the fates have conspired against me for the past week, and between weather, and days off school, and weather, and my period, I haven't had a chance to go out for ages. I hate this - not because I'm a runner, all champing at the bit for activity and pacing up and down like a caged tiger; but because it makes me afraid that I'll never get back out there and my tiny bit of motivation will desert me and I'll be back to being a blob who wasted money on good shoes for nothing.

On the other hand, it's novel, if irritating, for me to actually want to exercise and be prevented by outside influences. I'm almost completely certain I'm not just using them as excuses. And B has been very good about not bugging me, because he knows that the one thing certain to make me not go is someone telling me that I should. (Mabel? My daughter? What? I see no correlation here.)

I have gone to the not-aerobics class for the past two Saturdays, even last week when there was fresh snow on the ground (all of half an inch) and only the die-hards were there (and me), so all isn't entirely lost. I can do a sexy march with the best of them. (No. No, I can't. But I'm learning.)

****

The wearing of the underwear was going really well until I bragged about it to a friend, whereupon Mabel immediately went through two pairs of trousers, peed on the aforementioned ice, and is now wearing a pullup. I suppose we'll get back on the horse soon, but I'm not talking about it. If you see me start to talk about it, put your fingers in your ears and sing la la laaa at the top of your voice.

****

Yesterday, in a fit of something or other, I bought a bag of mini croissants. (This is what happens when I go to a different supermarket. All sorts of odd things seem perfectly reasonable purchases.) Dash was excited but wished they were chocolate croissants, and I said we could probably do something about that. So when we got home I cunningly sliced along the top of one, put in a few chocolate chips, and heated it for five seconds in the microwave. He was quite pleased.

Today, somehow, there are two...one...oh, look at that, the mini croissants are all gone. Mabel just asked for the last one, let me put three chocolate chips carefully in it, and said she didn't need it heated up. Then she fished the chips out again, sucked each one into happy oblivion, and told me I could eat the croissant.

****

Dash came home today with a big picture of a penguin captioned in his writing with "My penguin and I like to fly." His teacher had stuck on a post-it in response to my e-mail of this morning, saying that the children had used their IMAGINATIONS to think of something they would like to do with their penguins. (Hmm. That sounds dodgy. She didn't put it quite like that.) Dash has recanted his earlier statement about there definitely being a flying species of penguin and now says the movie they watched was a cartoon. I'm still a bit confused, but I think we can be confident that his teacher was not using BBC April fools jokes as source material, and that you can't always take what a five-year-old says at face value.

No news there, then.

Food for thought

Dash seems to be having a growth spurt. Which is very annoying. Because even though he's always hungry for more, the only more he's hungry for is the same more as always. Somehow, I've made peace with him having a sandwich for lunch and another for dinner, but when he then demands a third sandwich mid-afternoon or for his after-dinner snack, I see a missed opportunity as it skids by me and lands in the peanut-butter, and get all enraged about it.

He's been dutifully tasting things, and getting stars on his chart, though when he got to a dollar he said in a relieved manner "Phew! I've finished!" and was not so happy to hear that I expected this to go on ad infinitum. Money isn't really very meaningful to him yet, so perhaps it's not a great incentive. We need to go to Target and pick something he wants to work towards, I suppose.

But I'm getting frustrated. I know it takes up to 15 tastes before a kid might like something, and that licks and spitting things out still count towards getting familiar with a food, but when he licks a carrot, again, and wants it to count as his "taste" for the day, or gingerly touches his tongue to a cut piece of sausage and annouces "yuck", or spits out a mouthful of applesauce, for heaven's sake, and says it feels dry in his mouth, well, it's a little wearing on the spirits, you know. He's starting to act as if it's our duty to come up with new and desirable things for him to taste every day, as if we should say "Hey, I know, why don't you try this caramel-flavoured ice-cream for today's thing" and then give him a big round of applause for his great effort.

And then I read something like this and get all discouraged because we are so far from having either child eat what the adults eat that it's not funny. Unless the adults are eating sausages and plain pasta, or pizza, in which case Mabel will happily play along.

But then. If I list the things Dash has tasted (/licked, spat out, whatever, sigh) in the past two weeks, compared to all the nothing new ever he would even consider looking at before then, I should be impressed, and keep on plugging away. So I will. Carrot (raw, steamed, roasted), cheese, applesauce, baby spinach leaf, sausage, banana, tinned peach, a new type of cracker, cauliflower, pasta.

See? That's pretty impressive. Except that he has yet to meet anything he likes. Even tinned peach. Come on, who doesn't like tinned peaches? And he thinks that having tasted something once should give him the benefits of its nutrients for life. I try to explain that he has to keep eating them, and more than just a micro-bite, and that the food you eat doesn't have to be your favourite thing all the time, it just has to be okay, and you eat it because you're hungry. Damn, that sounds depressing. No wonder he sticks to what he likes best.

And he's started making his own sandwiches, so really, what am I complaining about? Gah.

Revolutions

I introduced Dash to the idea of new year's resolutions today. He liked the concept and immediately announced we should resolve to give more cookies to everyone. Laudable, though maybe not exactly somethijng that will jibe nicely with other people's weight-loss or healthy-eating aspirations.

Ironically, I think deciding to run - jog, whatever - on a regular basis and actually doing it might be the easiest of my resolutions. The other changes I want to make depend more on my children and less on just me; except for those that are good for the kids and make my life harder, like the one about letting them watch less TV.

But then there are the things I want to get the children to do, like getting Dash to eat more foods, and getting Mabel to sleep better. This is trickier, and requires wiles. (You'll note I say nothing about toilet training. She's on her own for that one at the moment.)

Dash and I decided that he's going to try a new food every day, even if it's just a tiny taste that he spits out, or another taste of something he didn't like before. If he doesn't, his regular bedtime game of superheroes won't happen. If he does, he'll get the superhero game and also a star on his chart. After ten stars, he'll get a dollar. So far today he's tried a cracker he didn't like before, and carrots; steamed and plain, and steamed and tossed in butter and salt. He didn't like any of them, but it's a start.

So there's that. The ultimate threat to keep him on track is that if he doesn't make an effort, we'll have to take him to a doctor or a therapist or someone, because I do think he's a lot worse than the average picky eater. I don't see that a therapist would be able to do any more than what we're trying now, but Dash would hate it, so the concept serves its purpose. (I found an SPD (Sensory Processing Disorder) checklist yesterday and really, though a few of the many behaviours listed could have applied to him at times in the past, he doesn't send up big red flags for anything, even in the "Oral Defensiveness" section, except this one:

picky eater, often with extreme food preferences; i.e., limited repertoire of foods, picky about brands, resistive to trying new foods or restaurants, and may not eat at other people's houses

Yes, that's my kid. And lots of other kids too, I think.) 

Then there's the sleeping and the Mabel. For the past two nights she's been up till almost 10pm, after protracted nursing-not-to-sleep, leaving alone to yell a bit, sending up Daddy, more nursing, more yelling, finally bringing downstairs because I wanted my coffee, and eventual dropping off. I think this means it's time to nix the nap. Much as I love my hour of peace in the middle of the day, and much as I think she can still use it, I need my sanity and my two hours on the sofa at the end of the day even more. We'll work through the afternoons of crazy until she gets used to it, and when Dash is back at school it should be easy enough to instigate an hour of quiet play (though not in her room, I fear) after lunch.

I reviewed my options, discussed it with friends and spouse, and decided to start with the tactic that's probably least likely to work, but involves the least crying. Because I can't take the crying, and in the middle of the night I know exactly which of us is more likely to back down. We're going to try putting them together tonight, on mattresses, both in Dash's room. For a sleepover. Yay! Sleepover! Mabel said that she won't need me to go to sleep with when she has Dash there. So it must be true.

You may see I've created an entirely new category for this type of post, called Best Intentions. So you needn't point out that I'm always promising to do things that don't pan out. I'm painfully aware of that. But here I am again, writing from the point of view of unalloyed optimism, as we've yet to try which means we've also yet to fail. There's probably only a tiny chance it will help, but heck, here goes nothing. Again.