Things about me

But first I have to steal one of my husband's points about himself, because it's so wonderful that it deserves a wider audience:

For some period around the age of 7, I became convinced I was actually Orinoco Womble. The Wombles merchandising at the time included chocolate bars, and I would look at my miniature pointy-nosed face in confusion when visiting the newsagents.

For full enjoyment of this fact, you have to know what both parties looked like: 

Stunning resemblance, no? (Also, clearly there's no argument about whose son Dash is.)

Now that there's no topping that, here are some much less interesting random facts about me.

1. I played Miss Prism in selected scenes from The Importance of Being Ernest in high school. I knew everyone's lines.

2. Around the same time that my future husband was posing as a womble, I used to hide behind the sofa when the Daleks appeared.

3. As soon as the weather gets cold, I lose all blood from my fingers and toes, which is very useful when I want to dress up as a corpse for Halloween but otherwise annoying.

4. I had three boyfriends in first grade, but not one more until after I turned 18.

5. I can still recite, phonetically and probably unrecognizably, the "We are now approaching a station; please mind the gap" phrase from the Prague city train system. I can also ask for two beers in Czech.

6. I have not, and never did have, any wisdom teeth. This does not mean that I am less wise than you, but rather that I am more highly evolved, so there.

Tell me a random fact about yourself.

How to blog in the summer vacation

• Send the children on a treasure hunt. Forget to bury the treasure.
• Start a game of hide and seek. Don't seek.
• Blog one sentence at a time.
• Actually, just turn your whole blog over to your Twitter account.
• Recycle old posts from when nobody used to read your blog. Pretend you just had that baby last week.
• Send the children out to forage for food instead of going to the supermarket.
• Make the children cook your dinner.
• Drunkblog.
• Send them to camp.
• Send yourself to camp.
• Hire a mother's helper.
• Hire a ghost writer.
• Get all your friends to write guest posts.
• Ask famous people to contribute guest posts. (This entry actually written by the Dalai Lama.)
• Sacrifice your half hour of TV a night to a noble cause. 
• Or use that time to blog.
• Blog while watching TV. You won't be Jon Stewart's so funny distracted at all.
• Stop doing Sporcle quizes.
• Stop playing GeoGuessr.
• Embrace the chaos. Liveblog the children's fights.
• Photo entries. Lots of photo entries.

The momentous and the mundane

Oh, dinner, how you tease me with your needing to be made, every single damn night, unless I was organized and made lots the night before, which works well with winter dinners like chilli and lasagne but somehow rarely manages to cut it in the summer, when I have all these leaves and tomatoes and things.

I don't know what we're eating, don't bug me. There's hours yet to dinner time. Well, one hour, maybe. Dash has a baseball game to which his father will take him, and Mabel and I are on track for an early bedtime, seeing as how yesterday was one of those thankfully-not-common nights when I held her for several hours because she has a phlegmy cough (sorry, were you eating?) and was borderline feverish and I felt she needed to be propped up in bed but couldn't engineer that unless she was actually on me. Which is not so conducive to me sleeping either. It was like old times with a snurfly newborn. Except she didn't nurse. Which really is quite lovely and amazing, because it would have been a lot more tedious this time last year (or even a few months ago) when she'd have been latched on all night as well.

And you know, the funny thing is that she seems (seems, I say, not counting any chickens) to be dropping the morning nurse as well, the only one we have left, the one she was so adamant to keep. A few non-standard mornings have distracted her from remembering at the point when she normally would, and it's possible - just possible - that we will have weaned at four-and-a-half after all. Which is nicely matching her brother's age of weaning, and let me emphasize this may mean that I will soon be no longer lactating for the first time in seven years. Seven straight years. That's a long time. For all I know, my boobs might schlurrpp themselves into tiny fried eggs when they figure out what's going on. Or, more probably into the sort of things I could helpfully roll up before stuffing into a bra. Sigh.

This is not what I was going to say, but is it ever? Stream of consciousness, baby.

Oh, I know.

There are only thirteen and a half days left of school before summer. Hold me.

Gratuitous photo of Mabel, hiding around the corner the more safely to watch a scary part of The Princess Bride.

Rule of blog

There's this thing about blogging. A sort of an unwritten rule. If something's going wrong in your life, you're not allowed blog about it until you've fixed it. If you do, you're just a whiner and you're bringing everyone down and that's depressing and nobody will want to read about it.

Or else, which is sometimes worse, you do blog about it, just this once, and everyone thinks you were asking for advice, which you may or may not have been doing but you're going to get it anyway, and nothing makes you feel more of a big fat failure than lots of helpful advice telling you to do the things you know you should do, but the whole point was that you don't want to do them, or you can't for whatever reason that may or may not be basically laziness or disinclination. Like if I said "Waahh, my sentences are too long," and you said, "Well, there's this great thing called a full stop," and I said, "But I don't wanna stop it there, I just wanted to whine for a minute."

So while we all want to remain human and mortal and real in the eyes of our readers, we also want to present our best faces, the public ones - or semi-public - wherein if we get things wrong we then figure it out and pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, by jimminy, and our lives get better because we're Doing It Right, and what's more, You Can Too.

It's a bit of a no-win situation, to be honest. You want to be cheerful, you don't want your readers to leave in droves because every time they click over to your blog you're whinging on about that thing again, and if they wanted to hear whinging they could go talk to their own four-year-olds thank you very much. On the other hand, you don't want to be one of those insufferable bloggers who has the perfect decor and the perfect children and the perfect life and the perfect housekeeping skills because we all hate those people. And if you only blog about the perfect and ignore the imperfect, that's as good as pretending to be perfect, which is just as bad only duplicitous as well.

I have nothing wise to say on this subject. It's just something I've thought lately. A blogger narrates their story as they choose, it's our prerogative. We are unreliable narrators, of course, because we can't see ourselves from above, and because we can't tell everything even if we wanted to. As a reader, you takes what you gets, and you build a picture that might be true or false or somewhere in between. You impose your own expectations and assumptions and irrational likes and dislikes on what I've said, and I have no control over what you end up with. That's your prerogative.

And somewhere way back along the line, all we wanted to do was pass the time, writer and reader both. Life is complicated.

Happy camper

I'm filling in summer camp forms for the children. I want them to take Mabel as well as her brother, so I'm just going to leave some sections of hers blank, I think.

You can figure out for yourselves which parts of this I'm not really submitting.

• Child's likes and dislikes: Likes: active play, imaginary play. Dislikes: You, probably.
• Enjoys these physical activities: Climbing (trees, onto the top of the car), bike riding (barefoot), balancing precariously and swinging upside down over concrete surfaces.
• My child has difficulty with these activities: Cleaning up, being polite to authority figures.
• Things my child might need help with: Drying/dressing after swimming.
• Fears and concerns of the participant: That you might not operate entirely according to her wishes.
• Specific behavioural concerns: That she might be horrible to everyone.
• Triggers of the specific behavioural concerns: Crossing her in any way, thwarting her will, etc.
• What behavioural techniques have been successful that can be maintained during the program? Flagrant bribery with new dolls, Barbies, trips to Target, ice cream. 

I tell myself that she's perfectly fine (mostly) at school and camp is just like school only more fun (probably). She'll be a model camper.

Right?

(And I'll get two weeks of six blessed hours' peace Every Day.)

Do they have s'mores at camp?

Judicious use of all caps

I was somewhat miffed to discover yesterday that we all needed dinner AGAIN, and that I would have to go back to the supermarket AGAIN to buy more milk and more bread and more frozen waffles and that I'd have to continue to make dinner ALL WEEK AGAIN because apparently throwing a big (-ish) party doesn't stop everything from just continuing to happen in exactly the same way as before.

So here I am putting on laundry AGAIN and tripping over toys AS ALWAYS and wondering when I'm going to sort out all those maternity clothes in the box that need to be laundered and ironed before I can consign them (IRONED? Come on!) and realising that I STILL haven't applied for the passport, and now I get to plan Dash's birthday party YAY.

(I should point out that nobody in my family is demanding that I make dinner, and they would all be fine with takeout pizza or spagetti and sauce-from-a-jar all week. But at the very least we still need milk for our cereal and bread for the peanut-butter sandwiches. And apparently I show my love by cooking for people, NO SHIT, SHERLOCK.)

So now I will stop and give myself the rest of the morning off, perhaps. Because Spring Break starts on Thursday and then I'll have even more not-getting-stuff-done to complain about.

Motivation

Mabel has had two good nights in a row* and I have done at least half the things on that to-do list, which is pretty good going for me. Okay, so the pile of papers has been sorted through and moved to a new location but not actually put away yet, but things are in train. Shopping has been done for the party on Sunday, and I'm starting to feel as if it might actually all come to fruition in a timely manner.

The trouble with getting things done is that it's all about priorities. And I can't prioritise everything. So either I'm trying to exercise a few days a week, or I'm sorting out piles of paper. I'm writing a blog entry (or even something else) or cleaning the bathrooms. I'm planning a party or trying to figure out how to store our piles upon piles of soft toys or applying for a passport. But I can't do all those things, or even remember that I wanted to do them all, at the same time. No matter how much of a multitasking fool I am - and yesterday I was baking two types of bread, registering to vote, buying Dash a new coat**, filing, drinking a cup of tea, AND bragging about it all on Facebook - I can't hold in my mind the intention and urgency of getting everything done that has to be done.

So this week any notion of exercising went out the window and I skipped blogging a few days and as a result I have accomplished other things. I need a rotating cycle of prioritizing. Maybe I can make myself a star chart for that.

(We are knee-deep in star charts here. Mabel completed one, for good behaviour at school, got her new baby, and immediately demanded a new chart so she can buy all the baby's other sisters. So I concocted a huge new one that covers many aspects of her life, and then Dash wanted one too because if she gets something from Target when there he is in great need of a new light saber and with more than a month to go before his birthday, he should have one too. His is for getting ready in the morning and stopping playing computer games when his time is up. We'll see who gets their next trip to Target first.)

Watching TV with new Baby Belle. Baby Aurora is a little jealous.

So I could have a week for organizing, a week for cleaning, a week for writing, a week for exercising, a week for shopping, a week for baking, and then back to organizing. And if I get all my stars I can buy myself a babysitter, maybe.



*I am not blogging about this for fear of jinxing it. This does not count as blogging about it, okay?

**Long story, but I accidentally broke the zip on Dash's winter coat by closing the car door on it. That makes two coats two years in a row that I've buggered on him. At this rate he'll never wear a coat that fits him, because I keep ruining them before he's even grown into them. The new one is an age 8, and even though he's about to turn 7 he's only just growing out of his 5s. The sleeves will be down to his knees. Ah well. There's not much winter left*** and it'll fit better by next year.

***There'd better not be.

Increasingly long-winded thoughts on Twitter, which is why I'm not very good on Twitter

Thoughts on Twitter, from the perspective of one who came from Facebook.

• It's very good for my editing, trying to get what I want to say down to 140 characters.
• But it's a terrible way to have an actual conversation.
• The people, myself included, are more fickle. Because there's no mutuality, you can follow and unfollow guilt-free. I follow someone famous for a while, their too-frequent, or too-boring tweets annoy me, I unfollow them. I suppose in FB we just hide the status updates; unfriending is a lot more drastic.
• The people are more willing to listen to total strangers. On FB, generally speaking, I won't friend someone I haven't met unless I know exactly who they are and feel I have some sort of connection with them on a message board or through blogging. On Twitter a whole bunch of total strangers follow me. I don't even know why, but it's all very ego-stroking. (I mean, I don't know why they follow me. I do know why it strokes the ego.)
• And then, even more surprisingly, total strangers seem willing to engage with me in some sort of exchange. A usually frustrating one if I'm trying to actually impart information (see point 2 above) but not a bad one if we're just tossing quips back and forth. Or insults. Whatever.
• I've had a Facebook page for the blog for a couple of years now and it's just creaking up to 73 likes. I've been on Twitter since January of this year and already I have 80 followers. How does that work? And then some of my followers are corporate-type things that, what, think I'll just blindly follow them back? Does anyone do that? How is that good for business?
• And then, I don't understand how people can follow thousands of others. The Bloggess, to take a "famous" blogger, for example, has 320,000 followers. Lucky her. But she follows 19,000 herself. She can't read 19,000 people's tweets. Even if some of them don't tweet much. I doubt if she even clicked the "Follow" button 19,000 times, for that matter. So how does this happen, and what's the point? Do people just follow people to be nice, and then ignore them? I follow people whose tweets I want to see, but maybe I'm doing it wrong.

In summary, I'm finding Twitter surprisingly nice. It connects me with old and new people in the blogging community in an oddly different way from Facebook, in Ireland and the US (and elsewhere too for all I know). I thought it would just be covering the same ground again, but it's complementary rather than duplicatory. So, um, go click the button over there and follow me.

Dilemma

I want to bake something, but I don't know what to bake.

It needs to be delicious, obviously.

But preferably quick to make and not requiring more than two bowls, max.

It should probably have chocolate in it, because if it doesn't I'll end up scouring the kitchen for something else that does.

It should have some sort of vaguely redeeming healthiness about it, so that I don't feel too bad about making it (and eating it).

But if it's too healthy, then it's not going to qualify as a) delicious or b) chocolatey.

If it's too healthy, or lacks chocolate, the children will not eat it.

But if it's too delicious the children will fight over it and I'll regret making it at all.

I could make it and hide it from them, but that requires tricky logistics.

And if I make it and hide it from them I'll end up eating it all, which won't be good for me.

It's going to be pumpkin muffins (with chocolate chips) again, isn't it?

I suppose there are worse things.

Room in my head

I love trying to bring up a memory that's hidden deep in my mind. I sometimes set out to find one, or to expand one further than I think I know. There's a knack to it, and it doesn't always work, but you have to hook onto a thread of something - from your childhood, probably, when your memory was an open plain to be filled - and tease it out, pulling, pulling, gently, looking around and delving inwards, until you produce a gem that you didn't know was there.

Today I noticed that a particular room I remember has become a location in more than one book I've read. My brain is a theatre filled with dusty sets and props - every now and then a new production pulls out the old stuff again and it's been so long that everyone's forgotten they were used before.

This room was in the home of a friend of my parents. Only children tend to be taken where plural children are not; they are unlikely to create mischief alone in a room full of adults, and given a book or some paper and crayons, can probably entertain themselves for a while; failing that, they can be precocious and entertain the adults while their parents attend a grownup gathering, drink wine in the afternoon, gently flirt with people who are not their spouse while observing their spouse doing the same thing across the room, and pretend that their life hasn't changed all that much.

So while I also visited this room on quiet afternoons with just my mother, what I remember most is tucking myself away in a corner while the adults mingled and jested and nodded and guffawed and tried out this newfangled wine-in-a-box. I remember the Russian dolls that lived in this house, dolls that I was always allowed to play with most carefully, and how the biggest one squeaked painfully every time her belly was wrenched open along its slice to disgorge her daughters and granddaughters and greatgreatgreats. I remember getting to the point where I would seek out my mother and pull her sleeve and ask, "Pleeeease can we go now?"

I think I remember, too, curling up on the spare bed in the front bedroom, with its soft black woollen coverlet of some sort of holey 70s knitting, and going to sleep there during an occasional evening party; at the end of which my parents would just hoist me up, toss me in the back seat of the car, and drive home. I do remember how the streetlights looked from my horizontal position, cosy in my sleeping bag, watching them flick past against the black; restful orange or bright white, hurting my eyes and sending out spears of light when I squinted.

And then we'd turn into the second-last road and then there'd be a sharp corner and I could always tell our hill by the gradient, as gravity pushed me against the join where the bottom of the seat met the back. Then a quick swing around (my father was quite the rally driver) and the same again as he backed down the steep driveway to the hidden carport at the back of the house.

And then I'd be picked up and I'd pretend to be asleep, and I'd be fireman-carried into the house and up the bumpy stairs and plopped into my own bed under the eaves, under the wooden ceiling, where I belonged.

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.

Present disculpatory

Apparently I was a little distracted when putting Mabel to bed last night. She wrapped herself up in my big brown blanket and I totally forgot that we hadn't put a nighttime pullup on her. So at eleven thirty she woke up all wet and it took a long time to get her back to sleep.

My big brown blanket is now in the wash.

I'm busy. Which is good. I like to be busy when it's just the right amount - not overwhelming, not stressful, just busy enough to give me a sense of purpose and a good excuse when the children come wanting me to be a mommy cheetah. (I said "Miaow," but apparently cheetahs don't miaow. They don't roar either. They make a high-pitched chirping noise. I find this hard to believe. I am suspicious of my children's television-acquired knowledge.)

I'm busy getting us back to normal, whatever that is, but also trying to start exercising again - running and yoga, I've decided, this year/semester/term/week - and doing a small freelance job, as well as the writing course I'm taking from Alice Bradley (the wonderful, hilarious Finslippy, and I only partly said that because she might be reading). [Alice Bradley is reading my blog. Hyperventilate, hyperventilate, spend an hour browsing past posts to try to read them with a stranger's eye; fail.]

And then I had to restock our supplies of peanut-butter and tinned tomatoes and boxes upon boxes of Cheerios (they were on special offer), as well as trying to keep the house from falling into a state of absolute squalor (some squalor is fine, just not absolute), and have a cup of tea every now and then and eat a muffin (somebody's gotta do it) and also see above re laundry, and so that, what I'm trying to say, is why I didn't update the blog yesterday.

Ramblin'

Gah. I'm sitting here trying to remember the great idea I had for a blog post last night in bed, and I know it was about two things that were like each other but different and I could draw parallels and... uh...I don't even know if it was a real idea or one of those things that sounds perfectly practical when you're about to fall asleep but actually involves a minature elephant and twenty-five pints of purple rubber and won't work in real life because I don't live in Mongolia anyway.

I'm sure it would have been great. A literary gem. Instead, let us give thanks for bullet points:

• My new phone just arrived and I'm waiting impatiently for the battery to charge so I can play with it. It's sort of a smart phone - in that it has a touch screen and can use the internet and appy things - but I'm still pay-as-you-go so I'll only use the Internet at home and in places with free wi-fi. I know, this seems kinda stupid, but it made sense to me. I don't need a real smartphone because I'm mostly at home within five feet of my beloved laptop with an actual keyboard.
• The weather is ridiculously warm and I've hung the laundry outside again, which I only do when it's warm enough for my fingers not to go numb. Which usually means I use the dryer from October to March. 
• I spent this morning baking cookies for KeAnne, who bid for them in the Hurricane Sandy fundraiser. I hope she likes 'em crunchy, because they're crunchy. And sweet. And buttery. (We've sampled a few. Just to be sure.)
• I was delighted with myself for finally booking dental checkups for the kids and for myself. The reminder postcards had been floating around the sideboard for months. Then I found myself reading an old blog entry (what? it's like leafing through your own photo album, you know?) and discovered that they went to the dentist as recently as last August so they're not overdue at all. However, I suspect Dash has a cavity (on a brand-new adult molar! it must have come up that way) so I think we'll keep his appointment anyway.

Now I have to figure out how to package these cookies so that I can mail them tomorrow. (I'm told popcorn is the answer. I also have bubble wrap.) So if you'll excuse me, I'll be back tomorrow, maybe even with some purple rubber and an elephant.

Duvet vous?

The baby has stolen my blanket.

By which I mean that the four-year-old has taken the supersoft espresso-brown blanket that lives at the foot of her parents' bed for the express purpose of keeping me, her longsuffering mother, warm at night - because I run about ten degrees colder than everyone else in this house, apparently - and is currently snuggling her tow-headed little self under it, fast asleep and away with the fairies to boot.

Not to mention the fact that she has a perfectly good duvet of her own, from Ikea, inside a very attractive duvet cover, also from Ikea, and additionally a big bright red fleece blanket purchased in Target not two months ago because she wouldn't wear her coat in Chicago. So she's sleeping on top of the red blanket, under the brown blanket, shunning the duvet, and sentencing me to another night of being just slightly not warm enough in bed. (This is the third night in a row.)

The things we put up with.

Meanwhile, in the parental bed - don't worry, I'm not going into any salacious details: this is about linens - the sheet war is being waged with all the silence and indignance two tired parents can muster over such things. See, there's a sheet under us, and a sheet over us, between us and the comforter. Raised as we were in a part of Europe that came late to duvets, but not as late as America, we're not entirely used to the top sheet - but I really like my down comforter, and I'm not going to wash it every week, so that's why the sheet is there. The sheet is turned down over the comforter when we sleep, but somehow - due no doubt to my inept bed-making skills - it doesn't want to stay there and tends to flip up over our faces. I can deal with this. I calmly flip it down again. But B gets all pissy with the sheet in his sleep and ends up with it mangled and twisted and generally not where it should be.

At some point in the night, inevitably, I come back to bed from my sojourn in Mabel's room, and, as I slip myself into the half-warm bed, I notice that the sheet on his side needs fixing. I pull it up and flip it neatly back where it should be. I suspect he thinks of me as the midnight sheet nazi. In turn, I grumpily wonder, every night, why he can do physics for the government but he can't work a simple bedsheet.

Luckily for all of us, there are more important things in life, and by morning we've forgotten it all again. This morning I dreamed that I tweeted to Mabel the fact that it was 5.15 when I left her bed, and then regretted it because it was bound to wake her up.

Happily, she didn't get my tweet because she stayed asleep for another hour, and all was right with the world.

The little things

My aim, as I sit here on Thanksgiving afternoon, is to get the children out of the house with their father so that I can read a book, or write something, or just veg out, under the guise of doing Very Important Cooking That Will Affect Their Dinner. Since it's 2.20pm and Dash is only now, finally getting dressed - at least, I think that's what he's doing upstairs, and the Superman and Spider-Man costumes he was sporting before don't count - it's taken a while to get to this point. But I'm still aiming for it, and at least B is outside supervising Mabel now, as she climbs trees barefoot in a tutu.

The tutu, if I may digress, has become ubiquitous lately. She has one that's almost legitimately skirt-like, and two that came from parties and are really just a lot of tulle on an elastic waistband. I don't really care so long as she has underpants on. She wears different tops and tights or leggings underneath every day, and she will countenance a dress in between times; but no trousers have been worn for months, and jeans are totally verboten.

Personally, I can't imagine life without my jeans. Pry them from my cold dead hands (legs) if you can, but until then I'll be happily denim-clad. Despite all my overthinking, and all the plans I may have for honing the perfect capsule wardrobe for our three weeks of festivities in Dublin, and whatever I end up buying - or planning to buy, or thinking maybe I can buy when we get there - I know that I'll end up packing a selection of jeans (bootleg, flare, skinny), a bunch of tops that all more or less go with the bottoms, a few cosy cardigans, and a dress or two just in case I get the opportunity to wear them. And then I'll end up in the same old jeans and the same comfy shoes 90% of the time anyway, and nobody will notice.

Speaking of which. I was inordinately pleased with myself the other day simply because I employed some shoe polish for its intended purpose and it did what it says on the tin. (Maybe I need to get out more.) But shoe polish is the sort of thing I tend to feel is only necessary for men of a certain age, or people who are a little too fussy. Tim Gunn, for instance, or my father, who has shined his shoes weekly - or perhaps morningly - for his entire life. At home we had a little basket containing polish (black and brown), brushes (one hard and one soft for each colour) and a cloth for final buffing. My dad showed me how to use them many moons ago, and every now and then I'd give my black-or-brown lace-up school shoes or mary-janes with brass buckles a bit of a swipe.

So last Spring I got a pair of blue mary-jane flats that were obscenely comfortable. As soon as sandal weather was over, in about October, I re-embraced them - but was sad to see that all the blue had been scuffed off the tips of the toes. They looked pretty shabby, and I feared that I'd have to abandon them. I wore them anyway, but felt less than - aha! - polished. What to do, I wondered. Was this the untimely end of obscene pedal comfort? And then inspiration struck - polish! I needed shoe polish!

A mere three weeks later, I finally remembered to look for navy shoe polish when we were somewhere that might sell it. And lo, I bought it and used it (because luckily my husband also owns some little shoe brushes and a rag for buffing), and my shoes are like new again. Hooray!

It really is the little things that can make you happy, if you'll let them. So today I'm thankful for shoe polish.

I'm also thankful for my beautiful crazy family, and all the luckiness I have in my life. And the Internet, which has made things much better in many ways than they would otherwise be.

And now Dash is dressed, Mabel is probably ready to come in again, and I have to legitimately busy myself with something to do with pie.

Happy thanksgiving, everyone, whether you celebrate it or not. Thanks for being here.

Wishful thinking

In an ideal world, one could take a photo of whatever one's child accomplished today and tweet it to the teacher, or post it on Facebook and tag her, and that would be homework done. Dash will voluntarily write a thank-you card to his sister for a picture she drew of them together, but he won't damn well sit down and do his assigned homework until all else has failed and all bargains have been deployed and everything is an hour behind schedule.

That's a love heart up above them. And so is that one in between them. It's a practice one.

 

 

 

 

 

In an ideal world, I wouldn't have this headache that's been loitering around my right eye socket all day and is now doing handstands on the bridge of my nose.

It would also be nice if the front door would unlock itself when I point the car keys at it and press the blue button. I don't know why it hasn't got the message yet, since I do it at least once a week.

It gets better: Swamped parent edition

I posted an impromptu photo of myself with Mabel on Facebook the other day, and was amused to see someone comment that I looked "groomed". From where I was sitting, I just had clothes on. And maybe my hair was on one of its good days. (When it's newly washed, it's fluffy. When it needs to be washed, it's flat. There's about half an hour in the middle there when it looks quite nice, if you ignore the grey bits.)

Oh, fine, here's the picture. Judge for yourself.

But the commenter has two tiddlers. I mean, toddlers. I mean, two under four, or so. She's probably lucky if she can find some clothes, never mind brush her hair of a morning.

So today I'm here to tell you that you do get out of the trenches eventually. You get to take someone to school and leave them behind, at least for a couple of hours. And then one day you get to take both of them to school and go off on your own and do the shopping and think about what you're going to cook for dinner right there while you push the trolley around the supermarket. That's a great day, so 'tis.

The day will come when you can have a shower even though you're the only adult in the house and both children are in residence. And not only will nobody be crying when you come out, but there won't even be someone sitting on the toilet seat eyeing you balefully through the wobbly glass, or squeezing your toothpaste all over the basin or brushing their hair with your toothbrush. (Okay, this only works with the TV on some thrilling show, and I probably wouldn't risk shaving my legs as well as washing myself, but it's a start.)

In fact, some glorious day, in the dim and distant future, the baby swings will be a thing of the past and your children will be able to pump for themselves on the big-kid swing, and beyond an initial push you'll be rendered pretty much superfluous in the playground.

And then you'll smell someone's new baby's head and you'll think, wow, that was a long time ago.

Baby Mabel, going on for four years ago

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 lick and a promise

Ugh. I just put my hand on about half a tube of chapstick, that Mabel dug carefully out of its home with a pin and smeared all over something. She was being quiet so I left her alone, riffling through the contents of the "not for kids" bowl that lives on the kitchen counter and is full of sharp implements, lipsticks, and broken pieces of things that need to be fixed. Except that now we don't know what they belonged to, and we can't throw them away because as soon as we do, we will find the thing they were part of and it will be indispensible.

( I always thought "riffling through" was pronounced like rifle. The second f went unnoticed by me, becuase riffle is a flitting word, like whiffle or sniffle, whereas to rifle through denoted a sense of urgency and seriousness that I felt always went with the action. Nobody slowly riffles through the contents of a drawer in a leisurely manner to find the vital clue, or takes their sweet time riffling through a sheaf of documents in search of the deeds to the mansion. So I persist in saying rifle, even if I spell it the other way.)

Okay. Here's a thing. Apparently I haven't blogged since Tuesday. So I'm going to do a week of dinners again, starting tomorrow with tonight's dinner. I have no idea at this point what tonight's dinner will be, and I'm not even sure what's in the cupboard, so it will be a truly suspense-filled, spontaneous experience for all of us. Come back tomorrow and see what happened.

Grrrls

Mabel was hell on wheels this morning at playgroup, for no apparent reason. When I asked her why, in the car on the way home (I mean, I asked her in the car, she didn't do it in the car; and yes, for your information, it is much easier for me to just keep typing than to back up with the delete button to clarify things), she had felt the need to fight with her friend and push over her friend's little brother, repeatedly, she told me it was because she hasn't had a nap. Which is fine, except that this was at 9.30am. I need to stop excusing bad behaviour with lack of naps, it would seem.

Now she's napping, and I feel like I need one too. I didn't think last night was particularly bad, but perhaps we were both sleepwalking up and down the corridor for hours and neither one of us remembers.

I think she was just very excited to be there this morning, and wanted to show off to everyone that these are her particular friends whom she sees outside school/ organized playtime events, and she felt the best way to do that was with overenthusiastic belligerent physical contact. Interspersed with taking toys away from smaller children just for the heck of it and/or because they weren't doing it right.

I don't know if this is a girl thing, but it's exactly what Dash's friend (known here as Helen) used to do every time we had a playdate, and here's Mabel being her second incarnation all over again; and it's not as if her first incarnation isn't still out there wreaking havoc - I mean, being sweetness and light and growing up at twice the speed of Dash, it seems whenever we see her - so I'm not sure population of greater Washington DC can deal with the sheer force of another one. Or that I have the fortitude to cope with it.

So is it girls in general, or those two in particular?