Debunking

Sometimes life just writes my blog posts for me. The post about Mabel's dentist visit segued into Dash's prosaic encounter with the tooth fairy; and then this happened...

After school yesterday, out of the blue, Mabel and I had this conversation:

"Mummy, is Santa real? A___ told me today that it's just the parents giving presents."
"Oh really?" said I, playing for time.
"I know from the way you said that, he's not real."
"What?"
"You used that voice you use."
[Oh crap. Really? I'm that transparent?]

Then we had a little conversation about whether it's more fun if Santa's real or not real, and she admitted it's more fun if he is real, but she still wanted to know the truth. So I told her the truth. And followed it up swiftly with the Very Serious Admonishment that now that she's in on this big secret, she must be very careful to keep the secret from the other kids.

I admit, I felt a twinge of sadness at the passing of the belief. But mostly I felt relief. I never did very well with the double standards required by Doing Santa. When you're reassuring your kids on the one hand that giants don't exist and dinosaurs are extinct and fairies are only in stories and there are no goblins, and then encouraging them on the other hand to write letters to the man who'll come down the chimney and leave them presents in some totally magical manner... well, I've nothing against anyone who does it, but I found it tricky.

Anyway, there are great things about having Santa finally debunked:

• I don't have to explain how come Santa only shops at Target.
• I can put useful things in their stockings that Santa couldn't possibly have known they needed (and certainly wasn't asked for).
• I don't have to be careful to remember which presents we gave them and which ones Santa did for years to come.
• Santa doesn't get all the credit for the great gift ideas that were really mine.

Don't worry, Santa will still be coming to our house. Probably until the children are grown-up, and maybe even then a while. But if he slips up now and then and brings the wrong thing ... well, I suppose the kids will know exactly who to blame.

Tooth of doom

Almost exactly two years ago, Mabel got a filling in a molar. She had just turned three, and it was not a fun experience. The dentist had intended to give her a crown, but she was wriggling and crying so much, in spite of the nitrous oxide, which didn't seem to be doing anything much, that he left it at a filling.

I had taken her for a checkup as soon as her second set of molars were in, which was only about a month earlier. That seemed like a good time to start the dentist's visits, and had been what I'd done with her brother, whose teeth have no holes. But I'd noticed a little spot on one of Mabel's upper teeth, so I wanted to get them checked out. Sure enough, we were sent off to the pediatric dentist for a further look.

Everything had been fine at the two checkups after that filling, and then last spring Mabel took agin the dentist and decided not to open her mouth at all. I didn't push it. She's four-and-a-half, I said, because we've been through the four-and-a-halfs before, and they're tough; she'll be fine when she's five. We went back a month ago and she was a lot more cooperative. And lo, the dentist could see that there was a new hole in the tooth with the filling.

So we went off to a new pediatric dentist (not that I had anything against the old one, but this one was closer and we had the referral for her) and they took some x-rays and saw that not only did she definitely need a crown, but also a baby root canal. I did ask later why they wouldn't just pull the whole tooth: as this was a molar that isn't due to fall out till she's ten, the dentist felt that for spacing reasons it would be best to leave it in.

Taking x-rays was not a trivial procedure, because Mabel didn't like the thing in her mouth that they use to x-ray just one area. She said it hurt the roof of her mouth; having a small mouth, I can empathize because I hate that too, but being a grown up I have learned to just do it and get it over with without gagging. She point-blank refused, crying piteously. Finally, they said they could try the all-round x-ray machine, and by bringing it down to the lowest level and finding some phone directories for her to stand on, they got her positioned just right. The dentist said usually this is harder for small children, because they have to stand perfectly still while the machine moves around their head, but I was proud of Mabel for swallowing her tears and standing like a statue so the machine could get a perfect photo of all her teeth, in and out of the gums. It was very cool to see all her adult teeth waiting inside there for the time when they'll nudge the others out of the way and burst forth.

(Dash's teeth are bursting forth all over right now. He lost his third this morning, and the adult incisor that's front and centre is about to come down through the top gum where he's had a space since he was a baby and knocked out the tooth. He's going to look odd with one big and one little tooth until the second one comes out, but seeing him with a mouth full of teeth at all will be a new experience for us all.)

I told the dentist about Mabel's previous experience and how the gas hadn't seemed to work at all. She said she could give her some oral medication first to make her more relaxed from the outset, which would let her inhale the nitrous better. Then we had to postpone the appointment twice because she was congested with a cold, and we finally got there on Friday morning, the day after Thanksgiving. Yes, when you were all making turkey sandwiches and planning trips to see Frozen, or recovering from your Black Friday early-morning outings, I was pumping my baby full of drugs and watching the dentist drill out pretty much the entirety of her molar.

Again, the first hurdle was the worst, because she didn't like the taste of the diazepam. After a million tiny sips and some crying and a break to watch tv, I eventually syphoned it up into a syringe and squirted it into her mouth. She swallowed some and spat out some and we called it done. In a few minutes she was amusingly floppy and having difficulty talking. ("I...an..not... [drool]...")

Then it was into the chair and to be wrapped up in the special hugging blanket ("So I shouldn't call it a strait jacket then?" I'm not sure they appreciated my humour, but I was pretty sure Mabel wasn't in a position to notice, and has never heard of a strait jacket anyway) and under the elephant nose that dispenses the gas, and open wide so we can count your teeth...

Little kids must wonder why it takes dentists so very long to count teeth, and why they can never seem to remember from one opening of their mouth to the next exactly how many are in there. I sat by her head to keep the gas thing on ("Does it smell of strawberries? Or is it more like chocolate? Take a big sniff in and see.") and to make sure no little hands wormed their way out of the huggy blanket in spite of velcro restraints.

After a lot of drilling (sorry, "buzzing") with the little drill and the big drill, the poor molar was literally just a shell. Then it was scraped out and packed and a shiny crown put on top and boom, done. Mabel got to sit up and be unwrapped and I had to carry her to the car because she was still a bit wobbly on her pins, but we still went straight to Target (which was conveniently just across the parking lot) and got a new doll, because that was definitely a princess-worthy ordeal.

By contract II

I suppose I should mention this: I'm no longer a nursing mother.

If you're new around here you might not be surprised by that - after all, for most mothers whose youngest is five years old, breastfeeding is something that happened way back in the mists of babyhood; toddlerhood at least. But here's the thing: my babies were reluctant to stop. And I mean that most understatedly. They reacted to the idea of giving up the boob with screaming and terror and horror and gnashing and wailing of teeth, and frankly it was much easier for me to go along with that than to face their wrath.

I didn't go into breastfeeding with the intent of carrying on until my babies could write their own thank-you notes. I certainly have no opinions about how long anyone else should keep it up, any more than I have opinions about what you should have for dinner or how often, if ever, you should shave your legs. Eat food you like; shave when you feel like it. Nurse your baby for as long as it suits you and your child.*

I had been telling Mabel that we would stop when she was five ever since she turned four and a half and we didn't quite stop. We cut down from morning and evening to just morning at that point, and when I went on my Big Trip Away to BlogHer in July (for three days) she was just fine without. But our trip to Ireland was nicely timed to happen just before her birthday, and as I had hoped, the distraction of the different, of sharing a room with her brother and being in a new place was enough to break the habit quite easily. She only thought to nurse three mornings out of fourteen while we were there, and on the morning of her birthday was quite easily put off with a simple "No, you're five now. You don't need it any more."

So we're done. I'm not sad or sorry. I have no regrets about nursing for as long as I did, and I have no regrets about that part of my life being over. My babies and I had a mutually beneficial relationship for a long time, and though often the "mutually" felt more like "completely one-sided" in their favour, it was never enough for me to call a halt sooner than they were ready for. I'm not a martyr - far from it. I was always simply too lazy to make a stand against their will, because when it came down to it, the convenience outweighed the inconvenience.

So I can finally lay to rest the "Weaning" tag that I've used so often over the years here, as I considered, and attempted, and gave up on, and tried again with, and gradually approached the nirvana-like state of no longer breastfeeding. I've been wearing proper bras for a couple of years, actually, so I can't even go out and indulge in some fabulous lingerie; and I doubt my alcohol consumption will see much change.

It's a big milestone, but it's been so long coming that I really don't even notice the difference. Perhaps that's as it should be. We're looking ahead, not back.

* I'm talking here mostly about extended nursing. I do think you should start out by trying to breastfeed, if you're medically able to. I think that's a no-brainer. But if you don't continue for very long, for whatever reason, I'll assume that you did what you could and ended up making the best decision for you and your family. It's not my business to have an opinion on that.

Another five

Mabel turned five on Monday, and I'm only now thinking to mention it on my blog. You can blame second-child syndrome, but it's mostly to do with all the other posts that have been brewing while we've been away. And the way she defies description, this child. I can't pin her down with a few choice words, because she is always so much more, so contrary that she'll be the opposite of whatever I say, so impossible.

My impossible girl. Impossibly loving, defiant, demanding, thoughtful, intransigent, accommodating, everything.

I have a soft spot for four and seven and twelve. I don't know why, but those ages hold magic. So I'm sorry to see my four-year-old grow up and on and become a five-year-old - or I would be, if it didn't mean that I get a five-year-old who is so much easier to deal with in so many ways than her one-year-ago incarnation.

Mabel is direct, I can tell you that. She knows her mind, and she tells you about it. She doesn't understand dissemblers; she's not one for subtlety. And yet - sometimes she'll pull my sleeve and bring my ear to her mouth and tell me something she can't keep in, but she knows she shouldn't say out loud. She's learning, and she's sharp like a knife, this girl.

And she's funny and smart and inventive and can craft a pun or a metaphor or a rhyme that impresses, and she's going places.

I can't wait to see where those places will be.

Love is...

I love that we can ask Dash if he's a little concerned and he knows we're quoting The Princess Bride.

I love that Mabel just spelled the word "sad" all by herself, and said she knew it was an A in the middle because it's the same sound as in "cat", which is the only word she knows how to spell apart from her name.

I love that Dash is reading an honest-to-God chapter book for his nightly reading these days. A simple one, but a chapter book nonetheless. Before vision therapy, the idea of his reading that much text on a page was unthinkable. The words don't go blurry any more.

I love that Mabel keeps announcing things like "Mummy, three and three more is six!" The wonder of math, afresh.

I love that B is reading The Hobbit to Dash at bedtime these days. I thought it might be a bit ambitious, but so far it's going well.

I love that when Dash criticized Mabel's drawing of a dinosaur, she replied, "When you say that, it makes me feel as if I'm not important." He apologized. I high-fived myself in the kitchen.

I love that Dash is finally old enough to make his own damn cardboard swords instead of bugging us to do it.

I love that Mabel can brush her teeth all by herself.

I love that we can take public transport into the city, walk around, do a museum, and get home again WITHOUT A STROLLER. Escalators and steps are so much easier than finding the hidden elevator every time.

I do love babies, but I love having big kids too.

Moments in independence

On Thursday, Dash rode his bike the half-mile to school. When Mabel and I showed up in the car at 3:20 to pick him up, I'd forgotten that, but it was no biggie - we can put his bike in the back. Except he didn't like that idea, and Mabel had already enraged him by telling him about the lollipop she got from the lady in the bank.

( Me: You don't have to tell Dash about that lollipop.
Mabel: Yes I do. )

So I told him that he could ride his bike home and we'd take the car and meet him there. At first he was wary. He thought it was illegal.

"I can't do that. You're not allowed let me."
"Yes, you can. I am."
"But the rule. I'm not eight."
"The rule says you can't stay at home alone until you're eight. It doesn't say you can't go home on your own. I say you can. I trust you to be a responsible cyclist."

He was pretty stoked. Off he went. There are only two places where he has to cross the road, one of which has a crossing with signs and stripes on the road, and I think I was the only car he encountered on the way.

The same thing happened the next day. I'd let him come home on his own every day, but I like seeing the other moms at pickup time.

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

On Friday, Mabel and I went to the mall. Oh wait, first I have to tell you how that works.

Step 1: Order a couple of next-summer things for the kids on clearance from Land's End. Include a pair of trousers that probably won't fit for yourself, just because you can. 

Step 2: When trousers arrive, ascertain that they are indeed mom jeans, look horrible on you, and you don't like the colour anyway. No biggie, because you can easily return them to Sears and thus not pay any postage. 

Step 3: Go to Sears at the mall. Return the jeans. 

Step 4: Pass unavoidably through the kids' section of Land's End in Sears. Find two pairs of summer leggings on sale and an adorable dress at 25% off that you and Mabel both just love. 

Step 5: End up spending more than you got back.

This right here is why the economy is doing just fine. Anyway. After that whole debacle/triumph, we had some lunch at the food court. Mabel got pizza and then we moved over to the next food outlet so I could have a tasty hummus/chicken/chickpea wrap thingy. This left me with two trays and only two hands. So I put both drinks on my tray and asked Mabel to carry hers (with just a paper plate holding the pizza slice). She demurred.

"I can't."
"You can. It's just like carrying a plate, only bigger."

She gingerly reached up to the tray and put her hands on either side. She lifted it down and carried it to the nearest table, as I carried the other tray beside her. The pizza slid a little on the plate, but nothing disastrous happened.

After we'd eaten, I asked her to clear away her tray. She picked it up again and I showed her how you have to let all the paper on top slide into the trashcan while keeping hold of the tray, and then put it on top. She could just about reach the pile of trays on the top, on her tippy toes.

As we walked towards the toystore she said quietly, with a smirk, "I'm a little bit proud of myself."

Life with Mabel

Life with Mabel has been really quite peaceful of late. I just wanted to acknowledge that, because sometimes when times are good you are still complaining about the little things that are bugging you, which are in fact mere buzzing mosquitoes rather than circling hyenas or angry tigers, so you forget how much worse things could be.

I happened across a blog entry from earlier this year and was really surprised by how far she's come in a short time. Some random highlights might include the following:

• She is outside right now and she has her shoes on. What's more, she put them on herself, voluntarily and without being told, before she left the house.
• She isn't hitting people for fun and/or profit these days. She's not even hitting them out of rage very often. She hasn't bitten anyone for almost a year, so I think I can actually declare that horrible phase over. If you have a biter, take heart. And buy them a chew toy.
• She sleeps all night some nights. When she wakes up she goes back to sleep quickly if someone just lies down beside her. She goes to sleep at bedtime with a story, not nursing. Okay, so 9:30 pm seems to be her natural bedtime right now, but I'll take it. Begrudgingly. (That one's a very buzzy mosquito.)
• She walks places, for a reasonable distance, without demanding to be carried. As recently as last Christmas she was still very much not wanting to walk anywhere, but it changed like flicking a switch. I'm not saying we'll take her on a three-mile hike any time soon, but there's been a distinct improvement. I think, in fact, it might be time to sell the stroller, which is only being used to turn upside down and play rocketships with these days.
• She puts the toothpaste on the toothbrush and brushes for herself before letting me take a turn, and then she rinses and spits and doesn't swallow the toothpaste just to annoy me any more.

In two weeks she too will be back at school, and I should be savouring her last year of nursery school, before next year's big upheaval of kindergarten. She's worried about going back to school, for nebulous reasons that she refuses to pin down, but which all come down to the fact that it's not at home with me. She probably doesn't like being told what to do at certain times, she is not a big fan of cleaning up, and she is not the gregarious people-pleaser her brother is. School is not her natural element as it is his. I anticipate some difficult mornings, again, as usual; but I know that she'll be fine, that the teachers love her and know her and will take care of her, and that overall she'll thrive there.

She's growing up, our baby girl.

Four point five cake

Saturday was Mabel's four-and-a-halfth birthday. I like to make a bit of a thing about half birthdays, because a year is a long time to wait, and also Cake, any excuse for; and because sometimes I can make it into enough of a milestone in their minds that they'll do something, or start doing something, or stop doing something, just because now they're whatever-and-a-half.

So Mabel is no longer having boo(b) in the evening. At all. This is great.
Also, she is going to start trying to wipe herself after a poo. All I'm asking is that she tries, that she's willing to give it a go, which will be a lot better than the point-blank refusal I've had up to now. And she has been trying, since Saturday. So that's great too.

On the other hand, she had a fit of the screaming collywobbles at drop-off this morning, and I very much hope that's not indicative of how four point five is going to go. I know it's a tough age and I'm prepared for some backsliding in behaviour and/or willingness to try new things, but I would really like to be able to bring her to school without the clawing and the screaming and the tearing at my heart, because it's nice when that doesn't happen.

Oh well. Onwards to five, which everyone agrees is The Golden Age, rivalled only by eight.

More importantly, cake.

I made half a batch of Burnt Butter Brown Sugar cupcakes (Nigella, How to be a Domestic Goddess) topped with Dark Chocolate Icing (Darina Allen, Easy Entertaining), and they were, if I say it myself, rather gorgeous. I haven't done the brown butter thing before even though Smitten Kitchen and others have been raving about it for a while. It was really easy and I'm pretty sure that's what I have to thank for the fact that these buns are still moist and soft two days later.

(I know, why on earth do we still have any two days later? That will be remedied, don't worry.)

Seven

... And seven years later, I have a seven-year-old.

I have plenty of memories of seven. I was in second class, with our cool just-graduated-from-college teacher who played the guitar and taught us the words to songs from Jesus Christ Superstar. That summer was a standout one because we went on holidays to Corfu (a Greek island), which was my first plane trip, my first experience of a different language and a foreign culture and heat in the air and warmth in the seawater.

I learned to swim there, and had my first taste of scampi. I was a fussy eater and when my parents found that I loved the scampi, they said hang the expense and I ate it every dinnertime. It was idyllic (except for the mosquitoes, which freaked me out in the middle of the night) and it's seared on my memory.

I would love to give Dash an experience like that, one that sticks fast and never leaves him, so that he can still conjure the smells and tastes when he's forty; but maybe you never know what's going to be the thing that remains, or maybe we've given him too much already for him to have one of those standout summer trips.

Or maybe whatever you do when you're seven stays with you for always, because you were seven.

Happy birthday, Dash.

Milestones, tangentially

I am solo-parenting right now because B is at a conference in Denver. The night before he left, bedtime was horrible and went on for hours, and I was a bit worried about the state of my sanity if trying to go it alone for five nights in a row, but the next morning I stocked up on dollar-store bribes and so far we're doing well. When he comes home then we'll have the problem of trying to continue the peaceful bedtimes without bribes, but I'm prepared to cross that bridge when I come to it. This is known as willful ignorance, or ostrich parenting. (I shall write a book and rake in the profits.)

In my bid to exhaust the children, leading to easier bedtimes, I had to take them swimming today. Whereupon Dash swam underwater (with goggles), which I'm pretty sure I don't remember him doing before, and Mabel took her first ever strokes without wearing a floatie or keeping a toe on the bottom. At not quite four and a half, she beats her brother by a little over six months, her mother by more than three years, and her father by some enormous amount. I need to find my milestones list* and add this.

The reason bedtimes are harder again at the moment - I realise I haven't told you this - is because I don't nurse Mabel to sleep any more. Not ever. (I know, she's only almost 4.5. Don't think I hadn't noticed.) Not even in dire circumstances like having nobody to spell me when telling her stories for hours on end. I don't nurse her back to sleep in the middle of the night either, and she's sleeping much better (sometimes) (andIdidn'tsaythatpleasedon'tsmiteme) and slept for ten hours straight last night. Alone, in her own bed. Other nights she wakes up twice and then again at 5.15, but she doesn't get any booboo until 6am, when it's waking-up boob rather than going back to sleep boob. (Okay, if she happens to nod off again and we all get some extra shut-eye until 7.45 I'm not going to quibble. But mostly, it's waking up.)

Then we rode our bikes to the playground at Dash's school - which is very close but was a novelty for two out of the three of us - and Mabel swung all the way along the monkey bars for the first time too. I think her arms will be aching tomorrow.

The weather this weekend was exactly perfect and the way it should be and I want to marry it and have its babies. If it could just stay this way until, maybe, at least July, that would be ideal, thanks.

Blossom, blossom, everywhere

*My milestones list. Don't you have one? It's like a baby book, except it's just a page from a notebook that I started writing on a long time ago and somehow have managed not to lose. I had a baby book once, but it was too nice to write in, so I gave it away.

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.

Dental

This evening, as Dash was telling me something at close range, I found myself thinking that his teeth used to be a bit more even along the bottom row than they looked now.

"Do you have a wiggly tooth?" I asked him.
"No," he said.
I put my finger on the tooth and gently rocked it back and forth.
"Yes you do!"

He was thrilled. He spent the next twenty minutes wiggling it cautiously with his finger and telling me how he didn't want to wiggle it all the way out. Not yet.

"I'm really getting old," he told me at bedtime. "Now I'm almost six and three-quarters and I'm getting glasses and I have a wobbly tooth."

I'm fine with him being six and a half, but that's it for now. He's not six and three-quarters till the end of next month. I'm definitely not ready to have a seven-year-old.

I remember seven. I was in second class. Our teacher, Miss O'Sullivan, was twenty-one and fresh out of teacher-training college, and she was trendy and wore jeans and played the guitar. She taught us songs from Jesus Christ Superstar and she would eat an orange peel and all. I don't remember learning anything much apart from "... red and yellow and pink and orange and BLUE!" (that's Joseph's amazing technicolour dreamcoat), but those were the salient points. In a school where the principal was still an old-fashioned scary nun in a long, black habit (but not a wimple; I'm not that old), and where our previous teachers had been at least our own mothers' ages if not older, Miss O'Sullivan was something new and exciting.

I don't really remember losing my baby teeth, though. At least, bits and pieces, but not the first, not what it was like to be missing my two front teeth, not how sharp and big the new ones must have felt in my mouth when they came through. Not any of the things you'd think I'd remember.

I do remember how it felt to rock a tooth with your tongue, further and further, until it was holding on by a thread so that you could take it between your finger and thumb and twist it around, and then really the only decent thing to do was just give it a quick yank and put it out of its misery. I think I remember that. And I remember how it felt to gingerly probe the bloody, congealing hole with your tongue - but that memory might be due to all the teeth I had pulled before they put my braces on. That was a lot later, when I was 14.

I remember a note from the tooth fairy, who had forgotten to come, or didn't have any change and had to give me an IOU, or something. But this was later too, when I knew who the tooth fairy was, so I wasn't surprised that her handwriting and her little flower sketch looked so much like my dad's handiwork. (I think that was the same year Santa left me a note because I'd changed my list at the eleventh hour. Poor Santa couldn't keep up.) I don't remember the thrill of finding whatever the fairy had left for me earlier on, when I must have believed, when I lost the first few teeth. I don't know if I got 10p or 50p, but I think probably 10. Only very flaithúlach* tooth fairies would give out 50p pieces, and this was well before the introduction of the would-have-been-handy 20p coin.

We'll do the fairy, of course, when the time comes, even though Dash delights in telling me in a stage whisper that he knows it's really the parents. He's a stickler for tradition, as am I, and certain rituals must be followed.

And I imagine I'll end up keeping all the fairy spoils, and eventually find myself wondering what to do with them, as happened to a friend recently. If you look in the comments there, you'll see I provided her with a nice - and totally fabricated - alternative option. Maybe I should follow my own advice.


*Generous, to the point of rashness, perhaps. Pronounced "fla-hool-ock".

Unfuzzy

I dropped Mabel with a friend on Tuesday, picked Dash up from school, and high-tailed it down the road to the eye-doctor's, where the nice man flicked lenses and spun letter charts expertly in front of Dash's eyes, while Dash described at length how it was when he tried to look at something but he coudn't see it properly and how it happens with the visualizer too and do you who invented this machine because it's really cool and I invent machines too I can make a phone, you know?

Clearly (hah) something was amiss with what he was seeing, but I couldn't really tell what it was from my vantage point on the chair in the corner. I could see the letters Dash was trying to read - they were pretty small, but not tiny. He'd read the first one and then hesitate. The doctor would swipe it away and put up a different one, click a new lens into place in the machine, cover one eye and reveal the other, asking quick decisive questions and letting Dash's unceasing monologue fall over him like gentle snow.

The verdict gave me a certain sense of vindication: he needs glasses! But not because he's long-sighted or short-sighted. No, I like to think that in fact, my boy's eyesight is an overachiever. His eyes are overcompensating when they focus together, and in consequence, things he tries to look at appear blurred. (Please forgive my layperson's understanding of it. I think that's the gist of what he said; I don't think there was any technical term mentioned.)

So Dash will have glasses to wear for the classroom and for reading, or any close-up work. In six weeks we'll go back and the doctor will be able to tell if they're helping. So they might prove merely corrective, or a more long-term thing - we don't know at this point.

And then we went back outside into the store and chose some groovy blue frames with arms that flex 180 degrees and Dash got marginally pleaseder about the notion of having glasses, so that by the time he found out that he'd get not only a free case to hold them in but also a free wiping cloth thingy he was pretty much very excited. He listened intently to the fact that they would take 5 to 7 days to arrive, and every day since he has been telling me how soon they will be here and asking if they might be here sooner than that.

I'm sort of delighted, I have to admit. I know the proof of the pudding will be in the reading; but I can't help assuming that if whenever you tried hard to look at something and read it, it went all fuzzy, you wouldn't really be able to imagine ever doing that for very long, and certainly not for fun. I think it answers a lot of my questions about why reading takes Dash so long, why he doesn't seem to recognise the same word when he sees it again in the next line, why he's great at spelling but hates writing, why he won't do his damn homework. (Okay, maybe not that last one. But let me dream, for now.)

Maybe it won't change anything, or anything much, but I'm really looking forward to finding out. Watch this space.

A qualified first

Mabel fell asleep last night without nursing.

I have to qualify that statement a whole lot, but it's still a first.

• She has fallen asleep at bedtime without nursing before, for her father a few times, and for the babysitter once - though not for a long time.
• She falls asleep without nursing in the car, in the stroller, and even in the middle of the night. It's just falling asleep at bedtime that's been the sticking point for, well, ever.
• She did nurse yesterday evening, but (because she'd had a nap) was then wide awake again (demanding waffle, water, music, etc) before finally falling asleep.

But last night, after wailing and crying and demanding and protesting that she couldn't, she finally lay down and let me start Cinderella, and in very little time, before Cinders had even got to the ball, I'd say, Mabel had yawned twice and her breathing was regular and I was pretty sure she was out. I got as far as losing the slipper before I stopped and gingerly sat up and crept away, but it was a done deal.

Given all those reservations, I'm sort of surprised by this - but all evening I have to admit that I had an odd sense of impending freedom.

Would you take fashion advice from this girl?

Fork 'andles*

I have decided that all birthdays of my older child are like my birthdays before I was 25, while all the birthdays of my younger child are like mine after I turned 28. (I was ambivalent about 26 and 27, apparently.) I mean, with the first child you're always looking ahead, excited for the next thing; but for the last it's more backward looking, with nostalgia, not quite sure you want to be here just yet.

So Mabel's four now, and I don't have a three-year-old any more.

Four started out to be all I'd hoped for and more (once you get past the early waking which, astoundingly, did not change this morning despite the fact that we were all supposed to "fall back") - she wiped her own bottom, she put on her own clothes, she even walked quite a few tens of yards before remembering that she often demands to be carried. We were full of the joys of things four-year-olds can do, and it was lovely.

Happy morning birthday girl

Sadly, it seems that four-year-olds can't nap, so things went downhill in the afternoon, when it turned out that four-year-olds are often just as demanding of having their noses wiped and equally prone to screeching fits of disapproval as their previous-day's selves. Ah well.

Last candle

Apparently she didn't get enough presents, and I made the wrong sort of chocolate cake, and she wanted lemon scones instead of strawberry ones. But she did say thank-you to me very nicely, and unprompted, on digging into her slice of deep, dark, chocolate deliciousness, and I think that's a good start for four.

* Just watch this.

Oncoming four

The sell-by date on the milk I bought this morning is November 6th.

That's a long way off, I thought. By then, I'll have a four-year-old.

I really love three, for all its intransigence, it's got to be the cutest age (apart from 18 months, and 2, and all the other cute ages); but then, I love four too. It's so grown-up. Maybe it's because I remember being four, or because in Ireland four is when you start school, but to me, it seems like the real start of childhood. I remember being thrilled when Dash turned four, to have such a big kid.

But then. Mabel isn't Dash. Maybe I don't want a big kid just yet. She certainly doesn't want to be a big kid - not if it means giving up booboo (not altogether, just at bedtime, just maybe), or getting injections at her checkup, or having to walk instead of being carried. Even the thrill of a new carseat and a princess (and prince) party at which she can wear her party shoes and the prospect of lots of presents doesn't quite offset all that. Next thing you know I'll be getting her to wipe her own backside, and that will be entirely unsupportable.

I can see her point, to be honest. Dash is all about doing things himself (things he wants to do, that is; come to think of it, putting on his own socks or wiping his bum didn't really apply), but Mabel likes to be waited on hand and foot. "I need a tissue," is a common refrain in these germ-infested days of October, as she sits and waits for some disembodied hand to wipe her nose, and god forbid she should go to the trouble of blowing, no matter how often I explain that it will mean less wiping in the future.

I am bad at delegating. I'm bad at letting someone else make a hash of something when I know I can do a better job myself. Parenting is one long lesson in letting go, and I'm not good at learning it. I should probably leave her alone until the snot runs down her face and she comes and gets her own tissue and uses it by herself, but then, she might just decide to lick the delicious snot away, or wipe it on the cushions, or use it as glue. And then - she's right - I'm the one who'll be sorry.

Two more weeks, and I'll have a four-year-old. And everything - and nothing - will have changed.

Productivity

This is the pile of schoolwork and artwork that Dash brought home from school in the Spring, more or less, with a few things of Mabel's thrown in. It's been sitting there all summer, leering at me. (I leered back.)

This morning, Dash went to school and in ten minutes of concentrated activity, while Mabel watched some nice educational My Little Pony (ahem), I turned the pile into this:

Yes, I could have done it at any point during the past two months - though not with Dash in the room telling me that every single worksheet had sentimental value - but somehow I was never inspired to. It's now sorted into (mostly) recycling as well as a few folders containing some representative pieces of writing or artwork from his kindergarten year, a couple of stray school reports I should have put  elsewhere in the first place, and about fifteen love notes to me, his father, and even his sister. (Awww.)

If you were here last year, you might remember that Dash took a while to settle in to elementary school. Let's just say he fears change. On the first morning he clung to me piteously, and I left the classroom with him crying under his desk, where he remained for two hours until the teacher told him it was against the rules to be under the desks.

Today, I was pretty confident that he'd be fine. He took the new room and the new teacher in his stride, and wasn't fazed by the fact that none of his particular friends from kindergarten or nursery school are in his class this year.

And he looked just as happy at the end of the day. His teacher gave him a candy ("a sugarfree candy") for walking the right way, and she taught them a song about keeping their hands by their sides and their feet straight ahead, and he ate all his lunch, and there was a fire drill at recess but he still found his old best friend from last year in the playground.

So first grade is looking good on all fronts.

Gubblebum

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Submariner

When Dash was a baby - or, at least, a toddler, we did some swimming classes. I had always meant to take my children swimming from an early age, but the first time I discovered how slippery a wet wriggly baby is and how many hard surfaces glared at me in the changing room, I decided to wait until he could at least stand up on his own before going again. So he was perhaps 17 months when we took our first Aqua Tots class at the local pool.

It was quite fun, and he liked the splashy wheels on the bus, but when it came to going under, he just didn't want to. We'd sing Ring Around the Roses (or Ring a Ring o' Rosies, as I would rather call it), and the instructor would instruct us to blow on the babies' faces at the last line, to make them close their mouths when we dipped them under for All Fall Down.

"Why does that make them close their mouths?" I asked her.
She had no idea. "It's just what we're told to do," she said a tad sheepishly.

Well, whatever, but it wasn't working on Dash. So I didn't dip him under, I just swooped him gently down a little way. I didn't see why he should be submerged if he didn't like it, and he didn't.

The next summer we took some more classes, but by then Dash's stubborn streak was showing, and it turned out he didn't really want to put on his swim diaper and his swim shorts, because he knew that if he did that, next thing he'd know he'd be in the pool and we'd be trying to make him put his face in the water again, blowing bubbles or looking for rings, and generally getting water in his eyes just like he hated. So I'd cajole and threaten and ambush and he'd whine and cry and kick and we'd finally get into the pool in time for the last ten minutes of class. By the second-last day I decided to give us both a break and not bother even trying.

When he was four, he was finally old enough for a class I didn't have to get into the water and partake in, so I happily signed him up. He got into the pool willingly enough, but spent most of the time glued to the rail, or sometimes just sitting on the side. I decided enough was enough, and we didn't do any more lessons after that.

When we moved house that year we joined the local pool for the summer, and Dash slowly went from clinging limpet to confident mover-about-in-water-wearing-a-flotation-device. Last summer, aged 5, he started to doggy paddle, all self-supporting. And today, he put on a pair of goggles and put his head underwater.

He'll get there. He'll get to the moon and back, that boy, if we just give him some time and some space.

Mabel rides

Two years ago, for his fourth birthday, Dash got a two-wheeler, with training wheels. One year ago, when he was just five, we took off the training wheels and he was off like a shot, more or less. Yesterday, his three-and-a-half-year-old overacheiver sister caught up with him.

This astounding precociousness is down to two things: personality and a balance bike.

Thing the first is that Mabel is a much less cautious child than her brother. He tests the waters gingerly; she dives in. He takes it slowly, wary of pitfalls; she forges ahead. Sometimes it's because she has him to show her how it's done, because he's done all the hard work of worrying; but often it's just because she's not so much a worrier as a doer. She climbed all the way round the climbing-frame dome before he ever did, when she was two and he was four point five.

She also happens to have an innately good sense of balance, I think, because for all her rushing in and scaling unsuitable objects, she rarely comes a cropper. (Skiing is probably next on her list.) I have to admit that though "sporty" is probably the last adjective anyone would ever come up with to describe me, I was a bit of a tomboy, mountain-goat, wannabe-gymnast as a child, and I did have a bike just as tiny as hers which I insisted on learning to ride without training wheels. I remember a lot of scabby knees, but I think I was four when I was riding alone.

But the other thing that led directly to this development was the balance bike. Last year when Dash was zooming all over our cul-de-sac with his newfound skills, Mabel was desperate for a bike of her own, with two wheels, not three. I finally found a balance bike (no pedals, just for gliding along with one's feet) small enough for a petite two-and-three-quarter-year-old on Craigslist, and brought it home triumphantly. The nice lady threw in a little pink scooter for another $20, and it turned out to be the scooter rather than the bike that Mabel fell in love with and has been using to get her speedy thrills ever since.

Until about a month ago, when she nonchalantly picked up the little pink balance bike and started whizzing around on it. She knew what to do all along, but it just seemed to fall into place and she was sitting on the saddle and pushing along with her feet and balancing, just like that. When her little boyfriend across the road got a pedal bike (that's too big for her, because although only two months older he's quite a few inches taller), it turned out she could actually ride it pretty well, with an adult to start and stop her.

So Facebook came to the rescue, as I sent out a quick APB for a 12-inch-wheeled bike for Mabel, and a friend responded within the hour that she had one her daughter had never used, taking up space in the shed, needing a good home. We brought it home yesterday, pumped up the tyres, lowered the saddle all the way, Mabel jumped on, and that was the last we saw of her.

Well, sort of. She still needs help starting off, but thanks to the balance bike she's very good at putting a foot down when she stops. (Dash, in contrast, used to the training wheels holding up the bike in repose, would forget to take his feet off the pedals and just sit there and promptly fall over sideways.)

It seems to be a tiny generational gap between her brother and her. In just two and a half years, balance bikes have gone from being European wooden models that only Germanic types had (because this is how kids learn to ride on the Continent) to much more easily found metal ones. I saw two of her classmates whooshing around on Strider bikes last year before I went looking for Mabel's one, and since then I know of at least five other local children her age who now have pedals on two-wheelers, and several others who are proficient with their balance bikes but don't feel like taking the next step just yet.

It is odd, though, watching your baby pedal off, unsupported, seeing wings sprout from under her shoulderblades and take her away from you, as fast as her little legs can carry her.