Ramalamadingdong

This week is not going as planned, so far. But not all in a bad way.

Yesterday began not going to plan on Sunday night, when I realised that I was scheduled to co-op at nursery school the next morning. I had vaguely planned on going back to Target and finalizing some of the gift shopping - the gift shopping that I'd done a week earlier and that had been helpfully sitting on my bedroom floor for the next six days, waiting for me to do something else useful with it.

This problem was compounded on Monday afternoon when I discovered that that very day, not some vague date in the misty future, was the last day for posting by regular mail to Europe. Oops. Because of course 90% of the stuff in the bag on my bedroom floor was to be mailed to Europe, but I'd been waiting for this and that, for the perfect final present to present itself to me at the weekend's craft fair or some other opportune place, before wrapping it. I also subconsciously felt that B. should partake in the wrapping so that he had some input in all this shopping I'd done for members of his family, but since I didn't tell him that, and last week was busy with various meetings and whatnot, it hadn't happened.

Finally, last night, we sat down and had our gift-wrapping extravaganza, and happily we did have enough wrapping paper and tape and I had even bought a box at the post office that was the right size, all of which are no trivial matters.

So that was ready to be mailed first thing this morning, which would only be one day late and therefore practically in time, and would probably make it to Ireland before the big day anyway. Which would have been simple if this was a normal Tuesday, but then we got a snow day.
                                           
Monday had already been a delayed-start for the schools thanks to Sunday night's snow and ice storm, but then it snowed all morning here and they cancelled school entirely. It's only about an inch, and melting already, but I suppose the schools didn't want to deal with the potential mess of getting all the buses in during a snowstorm. We're not in Colorado, you know. Maryland is technically the South, and thus Not Great With Winter.

However, it was the good sort of snow day. The sort when B. has one too. Yes, yes, he was "working from home," but that also meant I could send him to the post office once the snow eased off, which it did at midday or so, and the roads had all been nicely treated so they were fine. So, BOOM, the parcel has been mailed and with a bit of luck everyone in Ireland will get their presents in time after all, and even if they don't, it's out of my hands now.

While he was doing that, I got off my arse and went through the recipes I've been meaning to try out and we made pretzels! BAM! Where's my snow-day baking award?

And Dash made a snowman all by himself for the first time. It's a little leafy, perhaps, but he's proud of it.

In the afternoon, B went out with Dash and got a Christmas tree, which we hadn't got around to doing yet, so that's something else we don't have to wait till next weekend for. DING!

It's beginning to look a lot like...

The more things change, the more they stay the same

Christmas in America is so different from Christmas in Ireland.

• In America, you go to a performance of The Nutcracker. In Ireland, you go to the pantomime.
• In America, the big shopping day is the day after Thanksgiving. In Ireland, it's traditionally the Feast of the Assumption, December 8th; because all the schools would be off and everyone from the country would come up to Dublin. After going to Mass, of course.
• In America, you have to be careful to say "Happy Holidays", in case someone is Jewish or of some other faith, because you wouldn't want to offend anyone. In Ireland, you say Happy Christmas, because offending people is a national pastime and insulting someone is a true mark of friendship.
• In America people drink egg nog and eat candy canes. In Ireland they drink whatever you're having yourself, and eat selection boxes and Quality Street.
• In America, Turkey Day is Thanksgiving; people eat all sorts of different traditional foods on Christmas Day, depending on their heritage. In Ireland, Turkey Day is Christmas Day and that's that.
• Americans bake gingerbread houses and peppermint bark; Irishers bake mince pies and Christmas cake.

And yet, my Facebook and Twitter feeds - full of people from both sides of the Atlantic - confirm that:

• Everyone is unable to believe that it's December already.
• Definitely nobody is ready for it to be 2014.
• People everywhere have either done all their shopping or are leaving it till the last possible minute.
• Christmas is becoming more commercial every year, but the Christmas spirit is still alive and well if you take a moment to look for it.
• Some people's Christmas trees are already up. Some are not.
• Letters to Santa are being written and some children, on both sides of the Atlantic, are having up close and personal encounters with the man himself. (Don't ask how. It's magic.) 

I think it's just possible we are all cut from the same cloth, after all.

Notes on Thanksgiving

That is, notes about Thanksgiving that I wrote on the day of Thanksgiving.

The point of Thanksgiving, I've decided, is that it's one holiday the whole country can get behind.(Except the Native Americans, maybe. I'm not sure how they feel about it.) Instead of trying to smush a bunch of different religious celebrations into one time of year, everyone can just eat turkey and be thankful and watch the Macy's parade on TV and lapse into a tryptophan coma at the same time. It's pretty much like SuperBowl Sunday except you don't have to watch the game. And less finger food; you'll probably need to use a fork, at least to eat your mashed potatoes.

The other point is to provide a second holiday in the winter season, so that you can spend one with your own family and one with your in-laws. In a country this big, where people often end up far from where their families live, this is a very important consideration. You can't just do Christmas Day at your house and Stephen's Day (that's the day after) at his folks', and vice versa next year, the way we do in Ireland.

Further, another point of the whole thing is so that everyone can bond on Twitter and Facebook about how much they're panicking about it, how fabulous they menu they've planned is, how they're simplifying their lives and ordering out this year, how gross Martha Stewart's Twitter photos of food are, and how they've now eaten way too much and cannot possibly move off the sofa for another week.

And don't forget the way it provides a handy entrance point to Christmas. You can complain about Christmas creep all you like before Thanksgiving, but once that's done it's jingle all the way, baby, and no two ways about it. Many people put up their Christmas decorations as part of their Thanksgiving ritual, just to hammer this fact home.

Mostly, the point of Thanksgiving is to give the poor overworked American populace a chance to take a day off, or even three, without depleting their teeny tiny vacation allowance. They will probably spend most of this time stuck in traffic, but dammit, they will have their turkey.

And pie. Pie is very important at Thanksgiving.

Happy Thanksgiving, and thanks for reading, wherever you are.

A student

This is the first year that Dash has brought home letter grades on tests and reports instead of smiley faces and stars and mostly meaningless abbreviations like IP for in progress and PR for proficient. (The checkmarks and smiley faces and stars actually followed a progression that the kids were well aware of, so they may as well have been A's and B's and C's, really. But it seemed friendlier and less pressured.)

Dash never really asked what was in his report, and I never particularly told him. I said it was fine, and that was that. It was usually a mixture of IPs and PRs and an OG for reading. (That means "on grade" level.)

Dash's first report this autumn had a lovely line of straight A's. I was happy, and feel this slight improvement can probably be credited to his vision therapy. In general, though, he's a smart enough kid who's well-behaved in class, listens to the teacher most of the time, and is liked by the staff. I'm pretty sure that these are the traits that lead to A's from your teacher when you're in elementary school just as much as your test results and your homework does. (Especially in fuzzy subjects like PE, for instance. Then it's all down to how much the teacher likes you.)

I told him he had straight A's, and he was pleased, because he knows that's a thing that people aspire to.

I would like to leave it there, but in American schools there's this little thing called Honor Roll.

Twice a year (three times? I don't know yet) in our school, all the children who have all A's and B's or higher on their reports are deemed to be honorworthy, and they have an assembly to which their parents can come to watch them be presented with a certificate saying that they're on the Honor Roll. There are bumper stickers, even, saying that this car is driven by the proud parent of an Honor Roll student at your particular school. It's all made a bit of a big deal of.

For tedious reasons, Dash didn't actually get a second report this term, and therefore was not eligible for Honor Roll this time, but his teacher assured me that he would have been on it, and apologized for the oversight. (Okay, tedious explanation: what happened was that we had to un-enroll him from school when we went to Ireland, so that his absences wouldn't count against the school and bring down their average, and so his records were all inaccessible when the reports were generated. We've done this before and it's a simple matter to re-enroll him when we get back and he slots straight back in as if he'd never left. It's fine.)

Not only did I not care about the second report; I was actually a little relieved that he wouldn't be in the Honor Roll thing. And that seemed weird, so I put some thought into figuring out why I felt that way.

As a child who enjoyed reading and tended to "lick up to" the teacher, (pretty much the same as brown-nosing), I usually got good marks at school. But somewhere along the way I took in the fact that it was bad manners to ask what someone else got in a test, because that was tantamount to bragging about my own grade. Test marks were like salaries - you don't ask, but if someone else offers information you can reciprocate with yours.

So having a ceremony where you proclaim to the whole school that we're the smart kids doesn't seem fair.

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe they're showing the value of hard work and application. Maybe that's the only way you get A's and B's; but somehow, when you're seven years old, I don't think that's really it. Maybe they're proclaiming that they're the kids with the involved parents, the families where a parent is around to help with homework, where books are read as a matter of course, and, often, where English is a first language. I'm pretty sure all those factors also contribute to high grades, and those have very little to do with how hard the kids work at their studies.

Maybe I'm wrong, and all the other kids watch the Honor Roll-ees troop off for their assembly with nothing but goodwill and ambition in their hearts, happy for their friends and newly committed to learning all their spelling words this week so that maybe next time they'll be one of the hallowed few. Maybe, in fact, half of the kids at school are on Honor Roll, and the others couldn't care less about it. Maybe some kids would actively hate to be on it. Maybe it would destroy their street cred, and is just one more reason not to bother doing their homework.

I'm not sure I see the value of grades for elementary school students at all, for one thing. In general, bragging about grades (albeit in a fully school-endorsed way) sits badly with me. If Dash ends up on Honor Roll next time, I'm sure I'll go along to the ceremony and be delighted for him, but I'm not going to be the sort of parent who pays for grades, or rewards an excellent report card with an extravagant present. Not at this stage. Maybe never.

When I googled to find that news story I linked to above, it turned out that I'm not the only person who maybe thinks Honor Roll - or even grades in general - aren't the greatest idea ever. But apparently lots of other people think that the people who complain about Honor Roll are like the ones who don't want winners and losers in kids' soccer games because they want to protect their little darlings from ever feeling "less than." My point is exactly the opposite: I don't want a group of kids to feel that they're "more than," when - in elementary school at least - I think that hard graft and dogged perseverance are not major contributors to good grades. There are way too many other factors at play in the early years.

Tell me what you think. Do you think Honor Roll helps kids do their best, or would you rather it didn't exist?

Wishes

One of the things I wanted to do on this trip was pretty easily attainable. I wanted to go for a walk up the hill. The hill that's close to my parents' house, the one we always went up for a walk, either to the quarry (turn left at the fork in the path) or the obelisk (turn right). One morning the sun was shining (intermittently) and the playground meetup I had planned was postponed and the stars aligned and this is what we did instead.

There's a broad wall to walk along most of the way, making the steps a lot more fun.

You can stop at the shop counter and sell a few twigs or a nice selection of autumnal leaves to the passersby.

And then, just before the obelisk but when you've come out to the breathtaking top of the hill, there are the wishing steps.

Walk around each level in turn, and when you get to the top you can have a wish.

Certain things earn wishes, you know. Birthday candles, of course; falling stars - but other things too, like the first strawberry of the season (also applies to rhubarb) and hopping three times around the base of a round tower. My mother has the definitive list, I believe.

They wished solemnly, to themselves. Mabel couldn't contain a secret, though, and had to tell me when she got down to the bottom again, that she'd wished for a new teddy. Because she's clearly lacking in teddies.

Dash wanted to cash it in as many times as possible. I had to decree that only three wishes could be had on any visit to the steps, because more wishers were arriving. Another family came along and we heard their mother tell them the same thing - walk around and when you get to the top you get a wish.

It's not written on a plaque or an informational leaflet anywhere. It's local folklore, it's how you tell the natives from the tourists.

It's important to know about the wishes. You never know when you might need one.

Recalibrate

Let's look at it this way: I'm lucky to call two beautiful places home. (Sometimes beauty is subtle. Sometimes you have to go away to see it at all.) I'm lucky to have family in one place and a family of friends in the other. My children are lucky to have two passports, to feel (a little bit) at home in two places, to know that America isn't the Only and that the way Americans say things or do things isn't the One True Way.

Someone asked me, or maybe they didn't but this was the question I answered, why we bring the children to Ireland every year. I want them to know their grandparents, of course, before they don't have them any more; and I want them to know their aunts and uncles and cousins too, because those relationships are real and special and not something that you can just pluck out of thin air. But apart from that, I suppose I want them to know Ireland enough that it's not a big, huge, special, once-in-a-lifetime place for them. I want it to be a normal place, somewhere they're used to being and where they feel, to a degree, that they can belong if they want to.

And maybe I look too far into the future when I declare that I don't want to grow old here where my roots are not, and that I don't want to give my children another place they could belong, in case they decamp and have my grandchildren there, far from me. Maybe I should just chill about that sort of thing, because they might move to Australia or have no children or never move out at all, and I might be unhappy about any of those eventualities too.

Maybe everything is just fine, and I'm lucky.

I know I'm lucky.

Shift

After two weeks in the country, my American twang has settled down and I sound pretty much Irish again. (All my American friends are wondering what I'm talking about. As far as they're concerned I don't have any American accent.) It just takes a little time for the shift to occur, as my ear gets reaccustomed to the intonations and the vowels and the nice crisp consonants.

I've been obsessed with black boots while we've been here. I've watched people go by from the ankles down, mostly. I've been to the Clarks shop at least three times. I've ascertained that shoes here are habitually a measurement wider than the regular size in America, which means that everything in the shop should fit me. I have to take advantage of this, because in the States I always have to order shoes off the Internet.

I cruised around the clothes shops a few times, but before I could commit to anything, I had to wait for my eye to shift fashion-wise too. And then I had to be realistic about what I would buy and wear if I lived here versus what I'll actually wear once I return to my jeans-and-tops real life in America. I bought a pair of black trousers that are slim-fitting enough and of soft enough material that they will function as leggings, but with more heft to them. They'll go inside my boots, and under long tops.

Then, eventually, I bought a pair of black ankle boots, after trying on every pair in the shop. I was delighted with them for a few hours, until they started to hurt my feet. So I brought them back and today, with my Irish money apparently burning a hole in my wallet, bought a different pair. These ones are less biker and more arctic, but they're definitely comfortable and will suit my needs better, as well as going with my skinny jeans and the black not-leggings in a very casual, not-dressy way. Which, to be honest, is the way I need them to be, for my casual, not-dressy life of grocery shopping and school pickups and the odd committee meeting.

Tomorrow we shift once more, back to Americans. And so it goes.

Dublin bloggy meetup

Meeting other bloggers is a funny thing. They may look like their profile photos or have unaccountably cut their hair since, but that's really the only aspect of them that you'll probably find to be in any way as you expected. Last time I met up with some other bloggers, I wasn't familiar with their online voices, so what I noticed was more superficial. But on Saturday I met up with some of the Irish Parenting Bloggers in Dublin, and was delighted and surprised by how similar or different people can be in person when you know them best (or only) through an online medium.

In writing, you can't tell an extrovert from an introvert. You can't tell a Dublin accent from Cork from Texas. You might have an idea who would command the floor if a group got together in person, but you might not be right about that at all.

When it comes to socializing, having an online persona doesn't exactly level the playing field, but it definitely changes the game. A bloggers' meetup is a bit like a gathering of rock stars in reverse: far from looking for the limelight, many writers, by nature, tend to shy away from attention and want to deflect instead. We prefer to interact on the page, on the screen, where we have time to consider our words and where we're never too far from the delete key.

So the fact that a bunch of us dared to meet up at all, in daylight, with laptops left at home and phones put away, is a testament to the power of our connection online. And it turned out that we had a lot to say to each other about everything that was not blogging, as well as things that might be.

Here's everyone. From left to right at the back we have Looking for Blue Sky, Laura from My Internal World, Mind the Baby, Lauren of The Dare Project, Sadhbh from Where Wishes Come From, Caitriona from Wholesome Ireland, yours truly, and Office Mum. The front row has BlueSky's daughter Smiley, then Lisa of Mama.ie with adorable baby, Lucy of Learner Mama, Muuka of One More Pair of Boots, and Glitter Mama Wishes.

Welcome

Mild is not a word that's ever applied to the weather in America. In Ireland, it implies an element of grateful surprise that it's not any colder. The weather is mild right now, which is lovely. It's not warm, but it's warmer than we have any right to expect at this point in October. It can be mild and raining at the same time, of course, but if it's mild and breezy and the clouds are scudding past, it's really very pleasant.

The plane came in at 4.30 am and Ireland came up with its fairy lights, as Louis Macniece said, even though it's not Christmas. They were little orange dots, like Lucozade. Exactly like Lucozade.

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That was Monday, and now it's Friday. We've been pretty useful, but I still wonder how we got to the end of the weekdays without feeling like we've done more than dip our toe into being here at all. We've established that Mabel will happily exist on unlimited potato waffles while Dash would like to eat nothing but fresh-baked baguettes from the local shops. Along with milk and chocolate biscuits, these will form the basis of their diets for two weeks, and I'm sure they won't die or develop rickets in that time. Probably.

I've also been reminded that while Dash in personality is very attached to schedule and routine and predictability, in physiology he adapts much more quickly to the five-hour time difference than his sister does. However, since Mabel has slept through, or almost through, every night - in contrast to past years when she's been wide awake and wanting to play at 3am for nights on end - I suppose I'll forgive her the screaming and kicking and hysterical "I'm not tired"-ing at 11.30 for the past two nights.

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Never mind all this talking. How about a picture or two...

Transatlantic subtleties: Homes from home

Before I go any further I realise that there are some terms that need clarification when discussing one's holidays (that is, vacation) with a transatlantic audience. This is (almost exactly) what we stayed in last week.

The campsite calls it an RV, but it's not. I wanted to call it a caravan, but it's not. It might be a mobile home if you were in Ireland, but here a mobile home would probably be bigger. So here are some parameters for your terms if you should be called upon to explain your temporary dwellings to someone from across the pond.

Tent: Fine, a tent's a tent. I'm not a camper, so that's all I have to say about that.

Caravan: I believe that if you say "caravan" to an American, they will envisage an old-timey Romany (gypsy) caravan. Or maybe a bunch of camels following each other over the dessert. To an Irish person, a caravan is a tin can with bunks in it that you can pull behind your car. This, obviously, is a lovely vintage one. Newer ones aren't quite so petite or bijou.

Adorable; but I wouldn't want to live in it

Trailer: To an American, a trailer is something large and inhabitable that you can pull behind your car - an Irish caravan, in fact. To an Irish person, it's a base with a tow-hitch and wheels that you would put something like a boat on to transport it.

An Irish sort of trailer

Mobile home: To an Irish person, a mobile home is a large caravan, possibly with the wheels taken off. What we stayed in last week was an Irish-style mobile home. To an American, a mobile home is can have actual rooms and a deck built on it and be mobile only in the vaguest of meanings. That it can be easily moved by a tornado, for instance.

This home is "mobile", if you're American

RV: This stands for a Recreational Vehicle. It's one of those huge caravans with a built-in driver's seat so you don't trail it behind your car but might trail your car behind it. Some Americans sell up the family house when they retire, buy an RV, and travel the length and breadth of the continent for some or all of their remaining days. Others just have one to go on vacation with. I cannot imagine trying to drive one on European roads, but I think they're called motorhomes there.

I have no idea where a camper van fits in all this, or what you'd consider one to be. Is it the orange VW Beetle "bus" my cousins had in 1976?

Just add (Little Miss) Sunshine

One other thing occurs to me. If you get rained out of your campsite, you might want to check in to a more permanent establishment. Hotels and motels and guesthouses are fine, but B&Bs might cause a hiccup of misunderstanding.

In the US a Bed & Breakfast is a particularly nice guesthouse. It's usually quite fancy and some of them don't take children. We will probably never stay in one en famille. An Irish B&B, on the other hand, is usually a private house that rents out a bedroom or two to tourists. Generally speaking, Irish B&B's are a good budget option and very family-friendly. The one thing both types of B&B have in common is that with any luck the breakfast will be good.


Transatlantic subtleties is an occassional series of posts, to which I add whenever the mood moves me. You can find the others by clicking on the link in my tag cloud on the right.

Naturalist

American robins are ginormous.

Or, for the other half of my audience, Irish robins are teensy.

The problem with moving away from where you grew up is that you become a total ignoramus - not just when strangers try to ask you directions, but also when your children innocently ask you what sort of bird that is. And you have no idea. Not only that, but you're not sure what sort of tree this is or - what the heck is that creature at the bottom of the garden? (Hint: It's a groundhog. They're big.)

I'm actually not too bad at nature, so long as I don't have to spend extended periods of time in it. I mean, my mother knows the names of trees and flowers and birds, and every now and then I look at something growing and a word pops into my head. Sometimes it's "purple" or "spiky" but other times it's more useful, like when I noticed a flower in our yard recently that made the word "hellebore" trip lightly across my mind. Followed closely by "belladonna," "Socrates," and "poisonous." And "Oh, that's nice, the kids are making pretend dinner in the frying pan I gave Dash because he watched Tangled again recently and wants to have his very own frying pan to fight bad guys with."

I digress.

But wherefore the red-berried Cotoneaster of my youth? The fluffy Leylandii and shiny Griselinia hedges, the pink-belled Fuchsia of the Irish garden? (See, I know all the fancy names. But I had to look up the spellings.) The shy robin red-breast, blue tit (no jokes, please), and ubiquitous blackbird? The birch and beech, sycamore and horse-chestnut? I recognize all those. This country - this part of this country - has other stuff.

So the most common bird around here seems to be a sturdy mid-sized brown bird with an orangey front. I knew it wasn't a cardinal - the bright red, very exotic-looking and smaller bird that makes me wonder just what sort of colour-blind predator ensured its evolution - but it was only this year that my friend-who-knows-about-birds told me what I saw was an American robin.

 

American Robin (image from Wikipedia)

Apart from the reddish breast, it's nothing like an Irish (or British) robin, which is a tiny, delicate bird. I presume the poor pilgrims were so homesick that they decided this was the closest thing this land could manage when they named it. Or that everything in America was bigger.

European Robin (image from Wikipedia)

The other day the children were playing at the front of the house. I saw Mabel climbing in the smallish rhodedendron bush and decided nothing bad would happen if I went indoors. Two minutes later she ran in after me -

"Mummy, look what I found!"

 - and handed me a beautiful, tiny, greeny-blue, warm, egg. Intact. Before I had time to formulate an answer, Dash was behind her showing me a second egg. Apparently none of our parent-child discussions had yet covered what to do if you find a nest in a tree you happen to be climbing.

I took the two eggs very gently and told the children as unfreakingoutly as I could that they had to go back in the nest straight away, so that the mother bird wouldn't miss them. To be honest, I thought that she'd smell us on them and abandon the nest forever, but we had to try. Dash said there were other eggs in the nest too, so I thought at least there might be hope for them.

The poor stupid bird had built her nest at just about seven-year-old head-height, right in front of a big gap in our half-dead, surprises-me-with-blooms-every-year, crappy rhodedendron bush. I'm amazed Mabel managed to climb in there at all without immediately stepping on it. But we put the eggs back and hoped for the best. Mabel got very angry with me for saying that the baby birds might not hatch, so I knew she was feeling bad about it and I tried my best not to sound as if I was blaming her. She honestly didn't know the right thing to do.

So we talked about leaving nests alone and never touching eggs in future, and some helpful friends on Facebook told me that probably the mother bird would not actually fly away and leave her eggs to their unsatupon fate, and lo the next day I looked out the window and saw her happily back there, sitting on her stupidly low and exposed nest. She's still there, intermittently, and I have great hopes that in a few days? weeks? how long do eggs take? we might even see baby birds from the comfort of our own front room, where we have a great view and won't disturb anyone.

I don't know if you can make it out, but that's Mrs Robin in there

And I've given Mabel the task of making sure the neighbourhood cats stay away, any time she sees them outside. She's taking it very seriously.

Getting to first base

At some point a long time ago, in my teenagehood, I suppose, I met the terms "first base," "second base," and so on - in a romantic sense, let's say. In a book or a film or something. I had a vague idea of what they referred to, but I wasn't so hot on the specifics. A lot of questions remained unanswered for many years: Which way did the sequence go - was "first" the very beginning or the final target? (First is the winning place, after all.) But then if first was the start, how many bases were there - was this an open-ended thing? Could you define your own bases, perhaps, to infinitely frustrate the boys?

The problem was that while I read American books and watched American films, I had no knowledge of American sports. Sure, I've seen Bull Durham and Field of Dreams, I can say something came out of left field or talk about home runs, but I'd never actually been to a baseball game. And those phrases, it turns out, about the bases - they're talking about baseball. Well, except when they're not, obviously.

And then. Dash took up baseball this season. He's playing "machine pitch," which is what they do for the seven- and eight-year-olds. It's slightly harder than T-ball (where the ball is propped up on a stand to be struck) but easier than expecting the kids to pitch a hittable ball as well as hit it - a machine sends the balls at them in what's supposed to be a steady stream of nicely centered, not-too-fast pitches.

Looking good

But after a couple of practices, B. pointed out to me that the poor boy has no notion what he's meant to be doing, beyond the hitting and the catching (which are not as easy as they look). He's never even watched a game on the TV, never mind in real life. So we decided we should take in a game.

I've never been one for sports, really, and I'm lucky enough to be married to a man who is also not very interested in watching the game, whatever game it might be. I'm pretty sure that the only time I've ever been to a professional sporting event before, it was (ironically enough) an exhibition game of American football in Dublin that we got free tickets to, and it was incredibly boring and totally incomprehensible.

Maybe I had lumped baseball with football and decided that it too would be incredibly boring. Maybe I felt that not going to a game was the last bastion of not being American that I wished to hold out on. Maybe I just had no reason and no interest. But however it came about, after ten years in the country, yesterday I finally went to a real actual proper ballgame.

Looks authentic, no?

Not the big leagues, of course. We started small, with a minor league game close to home - but still professional baseball. The weather was just right - warm enough but not too hot or sunny. The game was well-attended but not too crowded. Dash wore his shorts in case they needed an extra player at the last minute.

Dash demonstrates his swing

The genius of the people who plan these things, though, is that they understand that baseball is sometimes not the most thrilling of spectator sports. So it's not like you're watching Federer serve at Wimbledon, being shushed by the umpire if you sneeze. The place had lots of families, babies, dogs (is that a thing, or was it a special bring-your-pooch-to-the-game day yesterday?), and the players just did their thing regardless of whether my children were running up and down or clambering over the seats or wailing because their giant ice-cream cone was dripping all over their hands. 

"Need some help with that?"

And when they got too bored to keep watching, and we'd done the pizza and the ice-cream and refused the cotton candy, there was a carousel and a bouncy castle and pitching and hitting games right there to help parents donate even more dollars to the nice baseball people, and then hot dogs and popcorn. Not to mention the between-innings competitions and adorably bad pre-game show and requisite toe-curling rendition of the national anthem. And I think I'd even have quite enjoyed watching the baseball players if I'd had more than five minutes to pay attention to what they were doing.

We stayed for about an hour and a half before calling it quits just as a sprinkle of rain was beginning. I think we'll probably do it again, it was that good.

What's more, I would probably be able to reliably go back in time and let my teenage self know what was what with the bases. Just in case she ever needed to know.

I heard the news today, oh boy

When I would come downstairs in the morning, the radio would be on in the kitchen, with my Dad listening to RTE 1. My mum would probably be listening to the same thing on her little "wireless" (yes, they still say that word in my house, and it has nothing to do with the Internet) in the bedroom. On the hour, Dad would approach the radio and stand right beside it, listening intently to the headlines, and anything I happened to say would be summarily shushed.

At nine o'clock every evening the news had to be watched, no matter what else happened to be on telly that might have pushed through that hour. In fact, we didn't tune into programmes that started at odd times like 8.50 on Channel 4 or 8.15 on BBC 2, becuase we'd just miss the end when it came to 9.00 and it was time to turn over to RTE 1 for the nationwide news.

I'm not there any more, but nothing else has changed. I can guarantee you that my Dad was standing by the big radio in the kitchen listening to the news this morning, and will be tuning in again at 1pm (lunchtime news) and watching the TV at nine this evening.

As a child, I didn't really understand this compulsion to find out what was going on. It was only ever boring news (a redundancy of terms, I thought) about another person killed in Northern Ireland - which might as well have been on the other side of the world as far as I was concerned, insulated in South County Dublin - or budget cuts or politicians talking about whatever it was they talked about. Now and then an earthquake or a hijacking to keep it interesting, but nothing that was relevant to me. Certainly nothing that worried me. The only times I remember being affected by headlines are when a family would die in a house fire. I would lie in bed plotting my fire escape route, planning to leap from my bedroom window to the flat roof of next-door's extension.

In this house, where I am the parent, we don't listen to the radio and we don't watch news on TV, unless there's a tornado watch and I have the weather channel on. We get our news from the Internet, at whatever time is convenient, and the children are none the wiser. They barely know what an actual newspaper looks like, so infrequently does one appear in our house.

It wasn't a conscious decision, more a change inspired by lifestyle long before there were children. When I moved here from Ireland I was dazzled by the news channels that either seemed too parochial or bombarded me with constant non-news. I trusted The Irish Times online more than any American news source; though I learned to listen to NPR in the car, and became quite attached to Morning Edition on the way to work each day when we lived in Texas, the unpronouncable names of their announcers, the global reach of their reports, and the warm, comforting voice of Frank Deford, whose amusing takes on sports managed to interest even know-nothing me.

Once Dash was born, though, and went through that inevitable car-hating phase that seems to last for ever, the last thing I wanted was more noise in the car. I started tuning into the classical music station in the hopes that Mozart might calm him down, or at least increase his brain power while he was turning himself red in the face and waving his arms hysterically, breaking the heart of his baby-wearing, co-sleeping mama, trapped a million miles away and trying to keep her blood pressure under control in the driver's seat.

Seven years, two babies, three moves, and one car later, the radio is still mostly stuck on classical NPR, though in the brief moments when I might be driving alone, I'll switch over to the news channel and try to increase my IQ a tiny bit by listening to sensible adults discussing far-reaching things. The last time we heard the news in the car, probably looking for a weather update or something, two minutes of broadcast led to the six-year-old asking, "What's gang rape?" So we won't be doing that again any time soon. (We didn't tell him. I'm all for answering children truthfully, but some things... Just no.)

So my children don't know about the Newtown shootings or the Boston marathon explosions. When B and I want to discuss breaking events, we resort to our pathetic store of Irish vocabulary, or silently motion towards the laptop screen. To be honest, thinking about my own reactions to horrific news - the Enniskillen bombing, for instance, happened when I was 14; Lockerbie, when an aeroplane fell out of the sky onto Scottish people in their beds, a year later - it might all seem distant enough to shrug off. On the other hand, it might terrorize them (mostly Dash, given age and personality), or just gnaw away at them in the dark, like those house fires did to me. The facts that Dash is a first-grader, that we have been to the Boston marathon, might make it seem scarily close, just as they do to me. I don't really know what their reactions would be, but I don't feel the need to find out.

This. So much this.

Will my children be less interested in current events because they don't hear the news every day? I certainly had no interest, and no amount of hearing the news could inspire any, apparently. Should we be discussing the news at the dinner table? At what point will they start hearing the news - when they start reading news websites for themselves? When they have Twitter accounts? I suppose at some point they'll have a Civics class that encourages them to find out more about what's going on, and maybe then we'll finally have to tune in the radio.

How does it work in your house? Do the kids see the news, or do you talk about it? Do you think an interest in current events and/or politics is inborn or cultivated? Did exposure to news events when you were a child go over your head or give you nightmares?

Would we all be better off with less information? Sometimes it certainly feels that way.

St Patrick's grump

I don't know exactly why, but this year St Patrick's Day in America is bringing out the curmudgeon in me. As a family, we've never really observed it here, by going to a parade or anything, though I suppose we could. It seems too hokey altogether to do that sort of thing. Next thing you know I'd be putting Mabel in a wig of red ringlets and sending her to step-dancing classes.

I'm also quite unjustifiably narky today about other people appropriating Ireland and deciding it's something in the name of which they should get to wear green and drink alcohol and play tricks on their children.*

Mostly, my grump should be directed straight at Hallmark, who fairly reasonably - perhaps, in as much as they're just in it for the profit - decided that nothing was happening in mid-March - Valentine's is over; Easter isn't here yet - and so all of America should push out the boat, dye it green, and decide to be Irish.

It was pointed out to me today, just as I was about to complain that nobody else's national holiday is celebrated all over America, that it's just the same with Cinco de Mayo (that's the fifth of May, Mexico's day of celebration). Any excuse for a party, all the better if it has some sort of food/drink/colour that can work into a theme for an eye-catching display of chips/dips/chocolate/trinkets in the supermarket, especially when half the country is still miserably buried under a thick blanket of snow.

In nursery school this week Mabel's class have been decorating large shamrock-shaped pieces of card with green paint and green feathers and pompoms and furbelows and whathaveyou. Her two teachers, who hail from India and Africa, called them clover and didn't know what the significance was, but that's what they were doing all the same. This irked me, perhaps more than it should have. (I'm irkable, you may have noticed. Irk me at your peril.)

So I don't think we're doing anything special tomorrow. We're not attending a potluck at the local chapter of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, if there is one; we're not planning to drink Shamrock Shakes at McD's; and I don't have a single potato in the house. If we wear green it will be by accident.

Maybe it's because tomorrow is the day when it's not remotely special to say you're Irish in America.


*The tricks thing. Read my previous post about what Americans do for St Patrick's Day.

Compare and contrast

It's a very Irish-looking day here in America, with the rain, no rain, torrential rain, less rain, no rain until you go out in it, and some rain going on all morning. Looking out the window I'm hard pressed to say what makes it America at all.

I see tall trees, taller than my house in suburban Dublin would have around it, but no taller than some in other parts of Ireland might be. They're still winter-spindly with no sign of spring, but some of the others I noticed this morning have a tiny amount of pink fuzz, just enough to make you gasp in relief, finally heralding a change. The air is softer today too; mild, we'd call it, which is an oft-used word in Ireland for any day when it's not bitter. Those are pretty much our extremes, I think.

The grass is wrong, I know. The grass in my back yard is dead yellow, with tufts of new-growth green in between. That doesn't happen to Irish grass: it stays lush and dark all year. You never understand why the tourists all exclaim over the greenth of the country until you've had a winter somewhere else, or a summer somewhere else for that matter.

There are still dead leaves wet at the bottom of the garden, in the corners and crevices. We're probably supposed to scoop them up, but more likely they'll stay there and turn to mush, to loam eventually, perhaps. We can keep hoping they'll blow away instead. Ivy climbs up the treetrunks, looking just like Irish ivy, dark green on craggy wood against a grey sky. My garden shed does not look like a garden shed. It seems here you can have two types of shed: the sort that looks like a miniature house, or the sort that looks like a barn. Mine looks like a barn, because it's an Amish shed, I'm told. Irish sheds are not Amish. They look like sheds. (If you need further explanation, you're not Irish. I'm not going to try.)

We have a deck, which is unIrish, and a rotary clothesline exactly like the one that still adorns my parents' back garden. I have wooden clothes pegs and plastic ones, but my parents only have wooden ones that are blackened  and thin with exposure and use - becuase in Ireland if you miss the start of the rain, you may as well just leave the clothes out there until the wind starts blowing them again. Here, I am lazy and use the clothes dryer in the winter. I blame it on my Reynaud's, which makes my hands painfully numb doing things like that in cold weather, but the truth is that we have the luxury of large American appliances, and I bask in that luxury and exploit it.

It's lashing again. Torrential. Floods, cats and dogs, Datsun cogs as the old joke goes; pissing, we'd uncouthly say in Dublin. Good for spring, I suppose. A couple more weeks and we'll be surrounded by the beautiful blossoms of the pear trees that line our streets here in the neighbourhood, and the days will be sunny and more than mild and the sky will be blue, and America will look nothing like Ireland once again. Except for my clothesline, the constant.

Oral tradition

There are things I say just because my parents said them. If it's foggy outside, I'll announce that it's a mishty moishty morning, as my father would if he saw it. Any mention of Delaware will have me humming "What did Della wear, boys, what did Della wear?" even though I've no idea how the rest of the song goes, because I know that if you say Delaware to my mother, that's what she'll do. (The state of Delaware doesn't come up much in Irish conversation.)

Sometimes I wonder which of my parents' sayings came from their parents. There must be some. I'd like it if I knew, so I could make a point of passing those ones in particular on to my own children. An oral history family-tree, we'd have.

When my parents came to visit us in Texas we took them to the zoo. When I rounded a corner and saw a bison ahead of us, I whispered to B that if he asked my Dad what that was, he'd say it was a biffalo buffalo bison. Sure enough, those were the first words out of my father's mouth when he saw the hulking shaggy brown creature.

My parents regularly employ the following words without irony: wireless, slacks, plimsolls, the mail boat*, hanky, cardi, serviette. I don't say any of these words, even ironically, because they're not things I need to say, or sometimes because I decided I didn't want to be someone who says "cardi." 

Ireland is another country, and so is the past. My children will be at two removes from these words, and since they don't see their grandparents more than once a year, they're unlikely to remember them unless I do it for them. (My granny would offer me a chocolate from her ubiquitous box - people were always bringing her boxes of chocolates, because old ladies don't need anything - and say "Would a duck swim?" That's the only phrase I have that's uniquely hers in my mind. I wish there were more.)

I always feel that my syntax becomes more mobile when I'm in Ireland, my vocabulary a little more vernacular, my pronouncements more colourful. In America I bland it down, even it out, try not to confuse. I'm sure my friends and neighbours here will tell you that I still sound Irish, that I still say things that leave them scratching their heads on occasion, that I'll never just blend in: nor would I want to. But I feel a certain richness - if I ever had it, and I'm a very mild sort of Irishwoman really, from well inside the Pale - is lost, and maybe my new melting-pot land is the poorer for it. 



*The ferry into Dun Laoghaire from Holyhead; it hasn't brought the mail along with its passengers for many a year, and why it's mail not post I don't know, now I come to think about it. Maybe it was used by the Royal Mail, back in the day.

The Irish news

My American readers might be blissfully unaware of any brouhahas going on in European circles, so I feel it's my duty as one more connected with things happening on the other side of the Atlantic to update you every now and then.

Thing is, it turned out a few weeks ago that some beefburgers for sale in an Irish supermarket were not all beef. In fact, they were as much as 30% horse. Everyone choked on their breakfast sausages and vegetarians all over the country had a quiet chuckle. The rest of Europe thought we were all big gombeen eejits for not realising we were eating the geegees - until it turned out that horsemeat (and possibly donkey) was being substituted for beef in frozen lasagnes and ready meals sold all over Europe, and in fact the Irish were the cleverclogs who had uncovered these horrible shenanigans, which are starting to look like a Sopranos-style scam of the highest order, lining the pockets of some very crafty somebodys somewhere. Probably somewhere on a beach in the Bahamas.

I'm on Twitter these days (follow me! there's a button over there ->), and it's interesting to see how much more immediate and reactive it seems to be than Facebook. There were suddenly a lot of tweets about people being so hungry they could eat a horse.

Meanwhile, of course, the Pope resigned. That was news everywhere, and there were plenty of memes going round Facebook about how he was giving up the papacy for Lent and how the Queen thought he was a big ol' wuss for throwing in the towel. The Irish meme brigade were out in force with Dougal from Father Ted; because when you've a national cultural icon that's suddenly relevant (sort of) to global news, you photoshop the heck out of that.

Source: http://gingerbrownies.com/

If you don't know what Father Ted is, you haven't been paying attention. Let's just say it's spawned more catchphrases for the Irish population than Friends, Seinfeld, and Frasier put together.

Naturalized

Things I did not say to the nice people at this morning's very important appointment: 

All right, fine, I'll be part of your country then.

Can I just skip the first line of the oath? I don't really like this abjuring part.

Oh, look, there's a gun in my bag! [on discovering Dash's noisy plastic blaster]

Are you sure I can wear brown boots with grey pants?

Oop, time to get Mabel from school. You go on without me. I'll do it some other day. [Don't worry, B. went and got her and brought her back, whereupon she squirmed and asked about cookies in a very loud whisper for the rest of the time. I hadn't thought it would go on so long.]

Why is it called naturalization anyway? Was I not natural enough before?

Things they did not say to me:

A good American citizen would support the economy by buying a new pair of trousers for this important event instead of wearing ones she's had for nine years.

Wait a minute, you bought those before you had children and they still look good? Nice one.

But grey with brown? Hmmm.*

Your daughter's hair has clearly not been brushed in more than two days. You may not become a citizen of our country.

You have a large zit in the middle of your forehead. Concealer ain't fooling no-one. We prefer our new citizens zitless, thank you.

This photo on your naturalization certificate looks like a mugshot. I hope you weren't planning on showing it to anyone.

Things I did say:

Cookies? Sure I'll have a cookie. Cookies are a good thing about America.

It's great that you gave me two miniature American flags, because both my kids like those.

Thank you.

 ----------

 Well, I don't feel any different. And the cookies were delicious. So that's that over with.




*This is because my friend Helen's Mom assures me that brown and grey is an okay thing. And was also the one who pointed out that I should be proud of those trousers.

Point of origin

I forgot to mention it here because I said it elsewhere, but I've been in the US for ten years this month. I think my anniversary was last Sunday, actually. I emigrated without even feeling like that was what I was doing - I was just moving in with my boyfriend. The fact that I had to painstakingly win the visa lottery, go through the green-card process, and move across an ocean to do it was just details, once it was all under the bridge.

For my writing course this morning I had to describe fifteen important minutes of my life. Tricky. I mean, I suppose they had to be minutes in my life, not just minutes that affected my life, because otherwise I'd have been duty-bound to envision my own conception, which is really not something anyone wants to have to put any amount of imaginative thought into. And they had to be minutes that were important to my life, not someone else's - because who knows if something I said offhandedly in a supermarket queue or at a playdate or online had a deep and lasting effect on someone else's life? I mean, it's unlikely, but not impossible.

So I had to come up with a fifteen-minute episode that made a difference to my life. There are the birth stories, of course, but I've already written those. And the thing is, once the baby's in there it has to come out one way or another, so while the births were great and life-affirming, they didn't really change things. Finally, although it's the epitome of cheese and terribly obvious, I found I had to go back to that house party in 1993 when I calculatedly but nonchalantly wandered into the kitchen after the boy who'd gone looking for a corkscrew, because I thought he was cute.

I won't give you the blow-by-blow account here, but it was probably a pivotal moment. It's possible that the same moment could have come later, or earlier, since we had a mutual good friend and would probably have encountered each other again if we hadn't that day - if I hadn't gone to the party, or he'd chatted up the Australian girl for a few more minutes, or he'd been wearing the sweater with the duck, for instance - but that's how it happened.

There were probably lots of other important moments or sets of moments: when we broke up (numerous times), when we got back together (numerous times +1), when I filled in the visa application form, when some random-number-generator or bikini-clad lady pulled my application number out of the hundreds of others, when we dated other people and found them not measuring up to previously set high standards. But the fact stands that if things had gone differently that evening in Rathmines, I very easily might not be sitting here, emigrant, immigrant, runner's wife, mother of these two particular amazing/appalling children. I might be writing somewhere, wherever, but that's about the only thing that would be the same.

I don't think I have to mention, do I, that I'm pretty happy with the way it has turned out so far?

Biting and writing

Things and stuff, things and stuff. It's nice to be back here with my things and my stuff and all the Christmas decorations put away since I never put any out to begin with. Dash is at school and Mabel is napping, since she woke up at 3.30am thank you jet lag. I think I might bake something soon.

Speaking of which, it is an excellent idea to bake something just before you go away and leave it in the freezer so that when you come back and you're mainlining tea to keep awake, you have something nice and homemade to go with it just 15 seconds in the microwave away. The only thing I did wrong was to leave only six chocolate-chip pumpkin muffins waiting for us, because they didn't last long.

Other things you might have missed because I didn't mention them here include the fact that Dash lost his first tooth (not counting that one he knocked out as a baby, a mere month after it came in, great maternal trauma):

It (the bottom one - the top opposite is the gap he's basically always had) was wobbly, and wobblier, and I thought Santa might be bumping into the Tooth Fairy but it held on a few days longer and then he and Mabel and their dad and their cousins, but not me because I escaped to meet a friend and also had bashed my toe a la Amalah that morning*, all went ice-skating and when they stopped for an ice-cream break his father pointed out that his tooth was gone. And Dash said "Is it?" and so we think he swallowed it but maybe it's out there on the ice somewhere waiting to trip someone up.

Then there were some negotiations and a note was written to the Tooth Fairy (by me, which is a little ironic) explaining that Dash would like dollars, not euros, and also that he had swallowed the tooth, and I had to tell him that the Tooth Fairy had left her dollars in Dublin where we were not at that moment, so also that he would like to get his money tomorrow night instead. I think he was a bit jaded by the whole charade, but he wanted his dollars, dammit, and luckily for him the Metro ticket machine had given me dollar coins just before we left the country, so it all worked out. Though the writing notes to myself was a bit surreal.

........

I did some writing (elsewhere, to which I'd rather not link because it has my real name, but if you came here from there that's lovely and I'm thrilled to see you, please stick around) and got lots of nice comments and some off-the-wall ones that made me think about, well, how you can never tell the full story, I suppose. Maybe what I'm trying to do here is to make you understand me, but that's nonsense because there's always more, there are always qualifications, provisos, quid pro quos (thank you, Genie from Aladdin), ways in which I have to explain that I didn't mean what you thought I meant, I meant something else.

Clarity; I like clarity. That's why I'm an editor. I disambiguate. But eventually you have to just leave it alone and accept that you can't get everything across to everyone, and you wouldn't actually want to.

So I will continue to offer snippets of what the ex-pat experience is for me, and how Ireland feels and how America feels, and try to find words that explain how the cold hard sunlight outside my window parches the grass of the backyard in winter in an entirely different way from the soft air of my homeland, where you don't understand why they talk about how green it is until you go somewhere else and then come back.

........

Other items of note: I now have a Search tool (over there -> under the tag cloud), and you can sign up for e-mail updates whenever I post, if you like that sort of thing. And I made some tabs and put all the links to other people's blogs on one, so you should take a look at that.

And if I can gently remind you here that liking me on Facebook and/or following me on Twitter makes me very happy and gets you extra bits of wit and wisdom and cute photos sometimes, as well as links to new posts, I'll do that too.

........

Time to read a book and bake something and wonder when I have to wake Mabel in order to pre-emptively rescue bedtime.


* My toe was not actually broken. I wasn't limping at all by the next day. But still, ow.