The Talk

What is this "Talk" they speak of? There are so many talks you can (should? might? are forced to) have with your kids.

For instance

• How babies are made

and don't think you've got away without covering

• How babies get out of there

and of course, the quite tricky

• Why people would ever want to do that

and also

• No they don't do it at the wedding, they wait a few hours and do it in private; and they've usually done it already by then

Then then there's the whole road down which you might not want to travel that begins with

• What's a bad word?

• Why I won't give you any examples of bad words

and

• Why I think you'll probably know what I mean when you hear one

And finally (for this non-exhaustive list) there's the bathtime-inspired selection of Talks:

• Girls don't have penises

• I promise, that's not a penis

• Why you shouldn't let your sister touch your penis

• Why you definitely shouldn't encourage your sister to touch your penis

• Why I don't care that you don't mean it and won't actually let her grab it

• Enough already this bath is over get out right now

Live and let die

As we rounded the gentle curves of Dublin's M50 this afternoon, death was on the children's minds. In the abstract, probably because we visited an old graveyard in Waterford two days ago and pottered around reading the interesting headstones in the almost-rain.

(Personally, I liked this one, which went off in a big old name-dropping tangent about her brother who had sailed with Captain Cook, even though he wasn't buried there at all:

[This Stone was Erected in memory of M[iss] Mary Dinn of Passage E. a mark of her burial ground and in memory of her Father Nicholas, her Mother [indecipherable], her Brother Martin, her Sisters, particularly of her brother William Dinn (alias Doyle) who sailed round the globe with Capt. COOK  and was present at the death of that Great Circumnavigator at [illegible] and who died respected and regretted at Stoke near Devonport in England in June 1840 (?), having spent a long life as a warrant Officer in the Service of his Country.]

)

(Speaking of tangents. Ahem.)

This weekend I travelled the length and breadth of half the small country for bloggy meetups, wherein I was lucky enough to meet some of the Lovely Irish Bloggers (not their real name) and put names to faces and faces to blogs for Musings of a Hostage-Mother, Mind The Baby, Mama.ie, Proper Fud, and the currently-on-hiatus And My Baby.

As we drove back from today's assignation, during which my most accommodating spouse had taken the children to IKEA, because why not, it's like a little home from home with ice cream, we listened to the Bond theme tunes CD I had put on in the car as a tiny nod to his great service to the blogger good. So at the start of each track - or preferably just before the start, since they were playing in film order - he would announce to us all which song it would be and by what artist.

(You know the way some fathers wait impatiently for the day they can show their sons (or daughters) Star Wars? Well, Dash has seen all six Star Wars movies (in original airing order), but what his father is really waiting for is the day when they can both sit down and appreciate the full oevre of Connery through Craig, including Lazenby for completeness.)

In between these public service announcements, the children posed the following tricky questions:

Mabel: How do the dead people get into the coffins?

Dash: So, do people who go to church believe in ghosts except that they all exist in another universe?

The first was more easily answered than the second, which I think we are still working on.



(Edited after first posting to correct the date of death on the gravestone to a much more likely century. Sorry about that.)

Basters and boobies

I just wrote a big rant about homework and intransigent six-year-olds, but I think we'll leave that for another day. Maybe I just needed to write it.

*********

The morning before Thanksgiving, I found myself in the unhappy position of having to do the shopping with two children. It was my own fault, as on Monday when I should have done it I frittered away my time instead with more enjoyable pursuits; also, I hadn't yet planned enough to know what I needed.

But it wasn't so bad. They're at their best first thing in the morning, and we actually got out of the house by 9.30, which still counts as first thing in my book. They got a bagel each to keep them quiet, and things progressed without too many not-on-list items being added to the trolley.

As we processed down the rice-and-beans aisle (also peanut butters, honey, and juice boxes), Dash came running after me:

"Mummy, Mummy, look! Look! Can I get one of these? I've always wanted one of my very own to play with. Pleeeeease, Mummy?"

I looked to see what he was brandishing. It was a turkey baster.

On balance, I think I got away lightly with a pack of chocolate-milk straws and a bag of chips.

**********

It was colder this afternoon than it had been in the morning, and though I did get Mabel to wear her coat, she didn't have her gloves as we waited for Dash to get out of school. I was holding her (my side of the bargain that got her to put the coat on), and she was putting her hands inside my top to warm them up. Then her hands went a little further down ... down... I had to let out a shriek-laugh as I pushed her hand away.

 "I just wanted to find the..."

I stopped her before she could remember the word "nipple" - or anything like it - but I'm pretty sure the other mom I was chatting to knew exactly what had happened. It's possible that most of the school heard the squawk and knew she'd hit the spot. Letting your four-year-old get to second base with you in public is just never appropriate. (You probably knew that already.)

Where's Freud when you need him?

Mabel's having a bit of a penis obsession. Again.

Yesterday we had friends over for a playdate. Mabel took off her clothes and tried to show them her penis. I hid under the table.

This morning we went to Ikea.

Mabel: Peenie, peenie. I want a peenie. I love your peenie, Dash.
Dash: Mabel, say peenie again.
Me: Stop it. Both of you. Dash, you know better.
Dash: Mabel, don't say peenie.
Mabel: Peenie, peenie.
Me, darkly: Nobody will be getting any ice-cream.
Mabel: Ponnie, ponnie.
Me: That's fine.

[Five minutes pass; we are almost past the checkouts and at the double-edged sword of ice-cream.]

Dash: Mabel, don't say poopy.
Mabel, with glee: Poopy! Poopy!
Me: No ice-cream, then.
Them: [...]

Ice-cream is consumed. Lunch is deferred. Once again, I resolve never more to darken the hallowed Swedish doors.

Salt-n-Pepa

Even though I've been gone eight years, I still scan the front page of The Irish Times online every day, just to get a sense of what's going on, and what the news looks like from Outside. (To be honest, sometimes it's the only place I look at the news.) And even though yesterday I swore off advice columns, I do sometimes find myself clicking through to read John Sharry's parenting wisdom, if only to see What People Are Doing At Home.

(Unrelated, but I have to say there's an awful lot of soccer, GAA, and golf news making it to the front page. Shouldn't that stuff be kept where it belongs, on the sports pages, for people who care. Why are you trying to make me care about hurling, even if it is the national sport?)

So this column caught my eye recently. To do away with the suspense and get to my point (get to my point? why would I do that?), in it the mother of a nine-year-old says that recently her daughter asked her where babies come from, and the mother uncomfortably changed the subject.

What? What? And again, I say, what? Where did they get this "reader"? She can't be that much older than me, and yet she sounds like someone of my mother's generation, not mine. Did they invent her, and stretch the realistic age of the questioning child as far out as they could for some unfathomable reason? Are there really, seriously, parents out there in 2011 who haven't said a word to their kid about sex in a life that has spanned almost a decade, and who still aren't sure whether they should?

(Sorry, Monkey would like you all to know that the Baby Bullet now comes with a steamer that doubles as a steam sterilizer. Isn't that amazing? Don't I need one? Isn't advertising great?)

I know not all children are as questioning as Monkey. I wasn't - I had a sixth sense for potentially cringe-inducing subjects, and steered clear as much as I could. But even I remember subtly prodding my parents, almost against my better judgement, for information I half-wished, half-dreaded hearing directly from them. It would have been better than ignorance, or vague inaccuracies gleaned in the playground. How can we expect our children to have morals, values, and the like, if we don't give them first the correct information, and then our own take on how to behave? By osmosis?

I suppose in the olden days, parents relied on Religion to promulgate this information, in its obfuscatory and guilt-fuelled way. And let's not dwell on how well that worked out in my home country, among others. I think/hope we all know now that it's up to us to teach our children about sex in a timely manner, as soon as they ask and (especially, maybe) even if they don't. And to make it not so much teaching as talking, explaining, chatting, and making it a topic of conversation that is definitely not taboo.

This is not what I was going to say

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'll have what she's having

Having a baby is quite a lot like having sex.

No, I'm not one of those crazy women who find that labour is just one long wonderful orgasm, who I wouldn't believe exist in real life except that I know Davina McCall is one (go and look her up on Wikipedia, Americans) and I believe anything she says. But my sister-in-law said to me in some surprise after she had her baby, "It's very earthy, isn't it?" (or something like that; apologies if I'm misquoting anyone who might be reading). And that's the thing. It doesn't get much more gritty and realistic than having an actual human baby come out of you.

We modern people are so enamoured of our clean, sanitary, technology-enhanced lives that sometimes it's a bit of a shock to discover that some things just can't be made to be shiny and simple no matter how many European design specialists* you might employ. When you discover that about sex, it's pretty exciting - this elemental thing that connects you and your chosen one with the rest of humanity in a down and dirty sort of way. It's sweaty and you contort your face in funny expressions and things happen that you're not necessarily expecting and sometimes it goes on way too long and finally you lie there, panting and fulfilled. Just like childbirth. (See?)

Of course, with sex, you understand that this is a secret thing, to be shared only with your loved one (by which I mean the one you're with), probably in the dark and under the covers (in Ireland, hot sweaty over-the-covers sex is something that only happens about once a year; the rest of the time you only take all your clothes off because you don't want to look like a prude, but honestly you'd much rather keep all parts not vitally involved nicely insulated from draughts). The shock comes when you have a baby - the same sort of primitive, animal process, but in a brightly lit room, exposed to the four winds (or at least the air conditioning), with a whole bunch of people you only met once before parading through and peering and poking at your most delicate and intimate parts, and then asking you to do things like pee on the table.

As a girl, I was once a bit horrified by a TV depiction of birth - all that screaming and writhing and calling for hot water - and my mother, to save all hope of the lineage continuing, told me comfortingly that it wasn't like that any more: it didn't hurt these days, thanks to the miracles of modern medicine. Of course, then I went and turned my back on modern medicine and decided to have my babies as close to the old-fashioned way as I could manage, but I'm willing to bet that even with an epidural or a c-section, giving birth turns out to be a lot more like having sex on a spotlit stage (but less titillating, if that sort of thing turns you on) than you ever imagined it would. And you can't even get drunk first.

I'm just warning you.


*When I moved here I was often amused to see things touted as being of "European design", as if that would make them better. Becuase at home, we tend to think that all the newest, shiniest, coolest stuff comes from America. (It should really be Japan, but never mind that.) I didn't think that something having been designed in, maybe, Ireland, would really be all that great. But after I while I came to understand that Americans like objects that come from places like Italy (strollers) or Denmark (furniture) and will pay much higher prices for something that says it was designed by Europeans. They don't mean Dubliners, unless it's Guinness.

The birds, the bees, and the giraffes

Sorry about the radio silence yesterday: I was busy tagging all my old entries and fixing the paragraph breaks so that my new tag cloud - look! over there! - would be more representative of the blog as a whole, and to perhaps entice people to read entries that have never before seen the light of day.

So now it turns out that an awful lot of my entries are about pregnancy -  but that's just because it was seemed like an interesting thing to talk about at the time. Unsurprisingly, quite a number of others are about sleep. I'm still trying to refine the tags to make it a more useful tool, so it's still a work in progress, but at least every entry has some sort of tag now. Anyway, let me know if you have any opinions on the tag cloud - if you think it's useful/interesting/a waste of space, whatever.

**********

When I brought Monkey to school this morning his classroom was sorely depleted - almost half the class were out with a rampaging stomach bug, and I can hear the ominous strings of the Jaws music creeping up behind me as I type, sure that he'll come down with it sooner or later. We've had a good run of luck not getting puking things recently, and it's bound to end eventually. It's not so much the illness I dread, as the cleanup.

Usually when we arrive at Monkey's school, Mabel doffs her coat, I wash her hands, and she dives straight into the playdough or heads off to the kitchen area to whisk up a nice little something for the babies, before it's time to leave the big kids to their activities unmolested by two-year-olds. Today Miss B (who is her new favourite person, having looked after her on Saturday evening while we went to a fundraiser) headed her off at the pass with the lure of plastic animals rampaging among wood blocks, and Mabel was soon holding forth on what exactly was going on between the lion, the panda, and the wild boar. Then she looked underneath the giraffe, and commented: "He has a penis, like a boy baby."

Miss B looked startled, as she gamely agreed. In the universal signal of pride, I breathed rapidly on the kuckles of my right hand - hah - and polished them on my chest. That's my girl, letting no penis go uncommented upon.

Incidentally, if anyone knows where this gesture originated, I'd love to hear it.

Naked ambition

Mabel sat up in bed at 6.55 this morning and addressed me as follows:

"Daddy and Monkey have penises."

I assented without opening my eyes. She continued, reassuringly:

"When you and me have penises, we'll be able to pee standing up."

Disjointed

See, now I feel like I was being overly dramatic yesterday and today I just have a perfectly regular four-year-old boy who's a picky eater. And in case anyone [wind whistles, crickets chirp, tumbleweeds tumble] was wondering what was up with the extra-cryptic post title, that was because I had a paragraph where I was talking about "the spectrum", but then I deleted it. And forgot that it was the only thing even vaguely tying in the title. Spectrum = rainbow = through a prism: gettit? Ah well.

On to more amusing items.

Mabel has decided that when she's bigger she'll be a boy. She announced this to the man in the supermarket the other day: "When I'm grown up I'll have a penis." This sort of thing is so old-hat to me now that I hardly even blushed. I pretty much stood there to see what she'd say next. Which turned out to be: "My daddy has a penis." The poor supermarket man wisely decided to not quite understand her (though it was clear enough from where I was standing) and before she could repeat herself I hustled her out of the bread aisle back to the cleaning products.

***************

There's a style of management called Managing By Walking Around. (No, really, there is. It has its own acronym and everything. I didn't spend a year getting a Diploma in Business Studies for nothing, you know. Well, mostly nothing, yes.) On Sunday morning I implemented an innovative parenting technique known as Parenting By Lying Around. (I shall acronym it thus: PBLA.)

Monkey wanted some toast. I wanted to languish on the sofa. Thus, by employing the much-vaunted (now) PBLA method, I taught him to open the freezer, remove a loaf, open the package, take out a slice, move a chair, stand on it, put the bread in the toaster, push down the lever, and wait for it to pop up - all without leaving my supine and cushioned position.

Unfortunately, he still insists on having the crusts cut off, and there I drew the line, so I had to get up. Later, I came downstairs from my shower to find his father had embraced PBLA and had Monkey enthusiastically using a paring knife to cut the crusts off for himself.

Soon we will have a fully self-sufficient son. Or a slightly perforated one.

Goodnight kisses

Bedtime with Mabel has been a bit of an ordeal lately.

I've taken to sitting her on the potty before bed, as she's amenable, and she had started using it as a procrastination measure, dramatically exclaiming, "But I have a pew" to get out of the bedroom once we'd settled in. This way at least I can pre-empt that, even though I really have no interest in having a totally potty trained baby just yet: I like being able to change her when it suits me, not whenever the mood strikes her to drag us all to the bathroom. But I know well enough not to look this particular gift horse in the mouth, so I'm trying to go with it.

For the last two evenings, after sitting down and squeezing out a couple of drops, she's leapt up, turned around to face the potty, and announced, "I going to use my penis."
"Mabel, you don't have a penis."
"Yes I do have a penis." She peers down over her tummy.
"No, Mabel. You have lots of other good stuff, but you don't have a penis. If you had a penis, we'd be able to see it."
"Oh."

Then we're in bed. I start to nurse her. She squirms. She squiggles. She wants to lie down. She wants the other side, the "big side".
"Mabel," I sigh, "they're both the same. You just had this side."
But I shuffle over anyway.
Eventually, she straddles me, wags a finger admonishingly in my face, and says, "You stay there. Fi' minutes." She slowly gets off the bed, pretending to look for a dolly on the other side of the room. Then she slyly glances at me, sees her opportunity, and makes a break for freedom: out the door (ajar, for light), and slithering down the stairs like an eel, to run into the family room and climb up into the stroller, head down, "hiding" from inevitable retrieval.

I console myself, as I mount the stairs again with my wriggly, giggly, wide-awake burden ("I not wide-awake. I Mabel.") that her brother was a terrible sleeper too, and look at him now. Hard out with a bead of sweat on his nose because he's directly under the glare of his bedside light. Every night, when Mabel's finally asleep, I turn it off, leaning precariously over from the top step of his loft-type bed on one tippytoe. The step creaks and my sweater might brush his face, but he doesn't budge, even with the click and the sudden darkness. And there he'll stay, till 6am. There's hope for Mabel yet. I think.

Flit, flit

Flit, goes my brain. Must do that, must mail her, must make that appointment, must send that present, must put that load in the dryer, must ignore the washing up if I want to write a post, must just read someone else's blog first...

I had some things to tell you from Monkey:

"Who invented spoons?"

"I like the flavour of my snot."

"Snotstril"

"Thank you very much for the party. Nathan's Mom, I just did a huuuge poo in the toilet." [bursting with pride]

[Sadly] "I have all this Spider-Man stuff, and yet I seem not to be Spider-Man."

Him: ... [stuff about stuff from the back seat... of course I hang on his every word]... Is that great?
Me: Yup, that's great.
Him: Is that amazing?
Me: Yup, that's amazing.
Him: Is it saxy?
Me: Pardon?
Him: Is it ... soxy?
Me: What's soxy, exactly?
Him: Floppy and wiggly, like a supersuit.
Me: Hmmm.

Isn't Tim Gunn great? Don't we all want a Tim Gunn to consult every now and then, and maybe to come shopping with us? Or even to babysit the damn kids and steer us to a shop that only stocks clothes in adult, female, sizes, so that we didn't spend all our precious, precious shopping time picking up cute things for the baby next summer and the kid next winter, and even the husband, whose threads are pretty much just that because in addition to never getting near the shops, he doesn't actually want to and doesn't care about what he's wearing and works in a profession where if you're not wearing socks with your sandals or a Christmas jumper in March, you're probably next in line for promotion. (He doesn't, and yet he isn't. Must be a glitch in my logic there.)

Coherence. I strive for coherence. Also to find out how other women with small children manage to wear jewellery for more than 5 minutes at a time.

I'm too scattered. I think I have to go and do the washing up now.

Awkward subjects

Monkey brought up the subject of death again this morning. He knows that the animals in the natural history museum used to be alive and now they are not. So far, I haven't tackled the subject of exactly what happens to people's bodies when they die, and he hasn't asked outright. Which leads to things like this morning's discussion.

Monkey asks about death, blah blah, I try to field the questions in an honest but non-freaking-him-out way.
Him: When will I die?
Me: Not for a long time, when you're old, probably.
Him: But I want to die with you.
Me: No, I'm sure I'll die a long time before that.
Him: But I want to die with you, otherwise I'll be left with Daddy and he'll be scary all the time.
...
Me, in the course of telling him that he doesn't really understand what death means yet, but that as his life goes on he will start to: Probably one of your grandparents will be the first person you know to die. Grandad's 80 now, so some time in the next 10 years it's likely he'll die. (Sorry, Dad.)
Him: And then will they put him [uh oh, I know what's coming] in the people museum?
Me: No, they don't put people in the museum like that. [Carefully not saying where they do put them.]
Him: When I'm grown up I'm going to invent a building that's a people museum.

I've spent far too many minutes of my life recently watching poo exit from my son's bum. I really never needed to get this close to the action. I know I should be thankful that he's pooing on the toilet, and that he's not constipated, but really, I look forward to the day when he needs his privacy.

A while ago now Monkey asked what his scrotum was for, and was told. And more recently he asked me how Daddy had put the seed for the baby inside me. Argh. All this honesty in parenting leads to things like this:

Monkey gets the big how-babies-happen talk while in the car on the way to school. He thinks about it for a bit and then announces: "When Miss is grown up I'm going to give her a surprise..."
Me [thinks]: Great, a new topic. Phew. Dodged a bullet there.
Him: ...I'm going to put a seed inside her...
Me: [sigh]
Monkey rolls around on the floor with his baby sister: "I'm marrying her!"
Monkey looks mournful at the dinner table, as I wash up and he finishes his ubiquitous toast: "I really did want [I thought he was going to say 'a Spider-Man costume', but no...] to put a seed in you to make us get a new baby..."

Waving not drowning

The baby turned nine months old and learned to wave today. She was waggling her hand in a puzzling and new way at dinner, and I couldn’t work out what she meant by it. All done? You want to get down? Your hand hurts? But then her father came home and the hand started up again and I realised she was waving for all she was worth.

I told Monkey that Grandad was going to be 80 next week. He said “And then he’ll die?” Since I’ve told him that people get old and then they die, this wasn’t too much of a surprise.
“I hope not for a while yet,” I said, and went on to explain how we’d all die in due course, even me, in many years, and Monkey himself many years after that.
“But I’ll die with you,” he insisted. I laughed it off and we changed the subject.

Several hours later, out of the blue, he said again, “I’ll just die with you, Mummy.” I think he thinks it’s like going to IKEA or something. Maybe it is.