Goosebumps

I go for a walk or a run, and I think, "This is great, recharges me, gets me into nature; I must do this every day." After about a week and a half I go again and think the same thing. Will I never learn?

Today I saw a flock of geese land on Greenbelt Lake. I don't know if they were coming in from Canada for the season or if they were just back from their morning consititutional, but I'm inclined to think it was a more momentous landing. First just a few, five or seven maybe, came in without too much ado, splashing down nicely and then just sitting still and looking calmly around as if they'd been there for hours. No panting or drama or exploring the new surroundings. Very un-human.

They were the front-runners. Then more small groups, one after another, swooping more dramatically low over the water as if they might change their minds up to the last second, when it was do-or-die moment and they had to either commit to the water or swoop up high over the trees for another loop.

Finally a big group, fifteen or twenty or maybe thirty at once all came down together, and the honking afterwards was much more pronounced. These were the also-rans, the hangers-on, the rabble. I imagined their arguments and complaints went something like this:

"Mom, mom, are we there yet? Is this where we're going to stop for winter? I'm tiiiiired."
"Do we have to stop here? There's a really nice lake further on. Can't we go all the way to the harbour? I want to keep going."
"No, this is where we're staying. Your aunties are all here already."
"He bumped me. You bumped me. I was coming in for a perfect landing and you messed it up."
"I did not."
"I was here first. Nyah nyah."
"Where are the snacks? Has anyone got the snacks? I want a worm."

And so on. It was worth going out for.

Shut down

I keep trying to write about the shutdown, and I keep stalling out. Politics and economics are not my things, and I don't want to get something wrong, and it's not directly affecting me; but still, it's happening and I feel that it would be irresponsible of me to ignore it. So let me try one more time.

The American government has shut down. You can read much better informed explanations of why elsewhere, so I'm not going to try to do that here.

All staff members deemed "nonessential" have been sent home and told they are not allowed work. Here in the suburbs of Washington DC, this affects a huge number of people - I don't think I'd be exaggerating to say probably more than half the families I know have at least one person out of work over this. It's been going on for two weeks now, and that's 14 days too long.

We are lucky and not much has changed in our household. My husband is a contractor who works at a government facility. As such, he is expected to continue working (and will continue to be paid) but he can't go into his office, because it's closed. Nor can he access most of the big computers he usually remotely logs into to do his work, because they've been taken offline. He's working from home when it's quiet here, and from Starbucks when the kids come home from school.

This whole thing is insane. The government is holding the people hostage. The thing is, I'm not sure the government actually knows what sort of effect it's having, so I don't think it's working. All the people in the top offices are probably considered "essential," so it's business as usual for them, only worse, I imagine. They're not seeing the regular people, the moms and dads who are unaccustomedly picking their kids up from preschool and walking around the park and playing video games in the middle of the day and taking the opportunity to paint the hall and trying to quell that gnawing, nagging voice that keeps them awake at night asking "Will I get paid? Will the bank let us pay a reduced amount this month? What if I don't get a check at all? When will this end?"

The knock-on effects are enormous - restaurants and cafes that rely on lunchtime trade from the huge NASA or FDA office campuses, daycares whose children are not attending because their parents are home from work; people whose livelihoods are in jeopardy, and who might not recover even if the government reopens tomorrow. (It won't.)

And then I read about the Antarctic.

This is stupid. It's farcical. It's not the way a country that sees itself as a world leader is supposed to behave towards its citizens, its working people, its families. Be in charge, dammit, Government. Bring the people back and let them do their jobs.

Come on, Mr Obama. I know you're in there.

Stick police

Things that go through your head when your kids start playing with someone else's kids at the playground:

Isn't that nice, they're all playing together.
My children are so well socialized, obviously.
They're playing a nice game of tag.
Wait, where did that stick come from?
Oh, that's okay, they all have sticks.
Wait now, that's not a stick, that's half a small tree.
Is the other parent here? He must be the man in the car. Where does he stand on the stick issue? Should I say something? Am I a helicopter parent if I wade in yelling "No sticks!" or am I a negligent parent if I don't? Is he judging me?
Okay, they're in teams. That's nice.
No, wait, you can't exclude the little one.
Uh oh. Here comes the little one to talk to her dad.

... 

Maybe I'll just go have a word with them. Make sure they're all playing nicely together.

"Hi! What's your name?"
"Sarah, this is Mabel. Mabel's four. Are you four? Is that your brother? He's in second grade like Mabel's brother? That's nice. Now you can be friends. Be careful with the sticks. Maybe we should put the sticks down. Dash, how about playing tag with no sticks? Hmm? No, you don't have to defend yourself. Well, yes, I can see that the other boys have sticks ... Fine, just everyone play nicely, right?"

...

Well, that cleared everything right up.
Girls against boys?
No, but, the girls are four and the boys are seven or eight and that's three against two... oh good, she wants to be on his team...but now it's everyone against the little one again...
I should not be policing this.
But that father is sitting there in his car.
Judging me.

...

He wasn't judging me. He looked out his car window and we had a nice conversation about how you should let the children just play, but that it's always hard to know where another parent might draw a line that you don't. And then I decided that playing dodgeball with sticks was probably a good moment to draw a line, and announced that it was time to go home.

Free-range parents v. the Lorax

One of my favourite things about our neighbourhood is the Sunday morning farmers' market. We show up some time after ten, the kids get chocolate croissants, we get coffee, we sit on the grass, friends appear, kids run around, we chat, it's nice. I buy some vegetables, usually.

The children all like to climb two trees nearby - one in particular is sturdy and child-friendly, branches low enough to the ground for a tall five-year-old to boost themself up, spread wide enough to hold four or more at once. They play monkeys, and baby birds, and jungle animals, and every now and then a parent is called over to put up or take down a smaller child and be drawn into the game.

Yesterday morning was just the same.
"Where's Dash?" B asked me.
"In the tree," I said, waving vaguely in that direction, where I could see a flash of blue Superman t-shirt between the green leaves.

A few minutes later Dash and his friend came back to us. The friend was looking upset and as she sat on her mother's lap and began to cry, I asked Dash what had happened, afraid she'd hurt herself.

"She's a bit unhappy because a lady told us to get out of the tree," he told me.
"What lady?"
"The lady over there."
"Why? Were you doing something wrong?"
"No, we were just in the tree."

My friend (also a mom of tree-climbers) and I went over to see what was what. The children all came with us, six of them, all a little unsure and wondering what was going to happen. We told them that they were allowed climb in the tree, because all their parents said they could. We told them it wasn't against the law. We put those who wanted to climb back up in the tree.

The elderly lady approached us, looking disapproving. We thanked her for her concern. We said that we allowed our children to climb the tree, that they were doing it no harm, that they played here every week.

She told us they shouldn't, that they were damaging the tree. We said they weren't. They all know not to put their weight on branches that are too slim to bear it. It was a face-off, it really was.

"Make them come down, or I'll... I'll call the police," she wavered, beginning to rummage in her fanny pack for a phone.
"Okay, " we said. "Call them."

We stood there putting one child and another up and down according to their whims, as she ambled away and then back, and then took up sentry duty sitting on a nearby rock. She glowered. The children were a little worried and kept telling us she was still there. "That's okay," we said. "You're allowed be in the tree."

A few minutes later, when most of the kids had tired of the tree and run off to play hide and seek, a police car rolled up and came to a halt in that corner of the parking lot. The lady began to talk to the officer. As I approached from the other side, I heard him say "...it's not illegal..."
He looked over at me enquiringly.

"Thank you," I said. "We just wanted to confirm that it's not illegal for children to climb trees."
"It's not," he said, and I gave him a little thumbs up and a smile.

There was just one four-year-old still in the tree at the time. Then the officer leaned out of his window and asked his mother to take him down, because of "citizen complaints." So she did, because we are all good law-abiding citizens who do what the police tell us, even when we were abiding by the laws the whole time.

We were pretty disappointed in that. The policeman probably took the path of least resistance, and decided that appeasing a cantankerous old lady by removing a child from a tree was the easiest thing to do.

But it leaves us in limbo and with unanswered questions from our children. If it's not illegal, why should they have to stop doing it? Why should the cantankerous old lady win? Should we just take our children to a purpose-built playground structure if they want to climb so badly? But what if we want to enjoy the market at the same time?

And I feel bad for the old lady, who may be many years away from remembering how much fun it is to climb a tree, or even how it's nice to watch your children climb trees instead of playing computer games; who might feel that a tree like that, in a public place, is a treasure that must be protected from little limbs and weighing-down torsos, from children who are little more than vandals and their parents who are jumped-up rebellious teenagers in her eyes.

And I admit that there was a little thrill there, in standing up to an old lady. We tried to be as respectful as we could while letting her know we disagreed and felt she was overstepping the line. We tried to model - what? good rebellion? - for our children. We tried to show our children that we were the grownups who knew the right thing to do, that they could always trust us to be their moral compasses even when others who saw themselves as authority figures might have different messages.

Climbing trees is more complicated than you might think.

----------

To be clear, I don't want to make the old lady the villain of the piece. She has her opinions, and one of them is that our children shouldn't be climbing that tree. Like the Lorax, she speaks for the trees. And I don't blame the policeman, really, for asking us to get the kids down. His job is to keep the peace, and he probably knows that old ladies with nothing much else to do all day are more likely to disturb his peace than busy families who can just head on elsewhere.

It's just a funny story, really, about the day the police came to tell the children not to climb a tree.

That said, we'll all be back there next weekend, I think, and if the kids want to climb the tree, we'll be letting them.

Leisure Day

I sat behind the loudly splashing veil of water that tumbles off the "mushroom" in the outdoor pool and squinted through the droplets at my family laughing and shrieking in the blue. The late-afternoon sunshine and the water in my myopic eyes made lens flares JJ Abrams would have envied, and it was one of those perfect moments that I have to write to remember because my camera is not waterproof.

The weather is contractually obliged to be hot as Hades for the long weekend of Labor Day, and I will be very miffed if it's still this hot tomorrow, though it might be. We've had three days of carnival, volunteer obligations, and parade participation, and summer has been closed with a flourish, whatever atmospheric conditions may prevail from now on.

I have great plans for tomorrow, when both children will be back at school. I could sort my paperwork. I could throw out all the broken toys that can't be touched when they're here. I could take a bag to the thrift store or mop the kitchen floor unmolested. I could make pastry. I will probably go to Target and ceremonially wander around aimlessly enjoying the solitude and the absence of short people pestering me for toys.

Disappearing pizza and itchy fingers

I'm starting to get itchy fingers. I think I'm at one of those Points In My Life.

See, here I am churning out acres of verbiage - garb(i)age verbiage perhaps, but still - every day, and I seem to have a surprising amount of time to do it in, once I ignore the siren songs of cleaning the bathrooms and vacuuming the playroom and paying attention to my quite self-sufficient younger child; which is hard but, you know, I love you all so I do it.

However. I can't help thinking all this energy in my fingertips could be put into something more, well, I hate to be crass, but lucrative. Or meaningful or fulfilling or something. Not that this isn't... oh, you know what I mean. If some of the time I did something I was paid for, then I could pay someone else to clean the house now and then, and then I could continue to ignore the housework with impunity. It's a glorious tiny circle of capitalism.

Yesterday (this seems like a detour but bear with me, it'll get relevant), my dinner plans went a little off kilter, and B offered to pick up pizza on his way home. Which was lovely, except that when I tried to order online from our local pizzeria, it had disappeared from the Internet. It had also disappeared from the phone network, as the number listed brought me to the next town over's Domino's, and then the man on the other end couldn't hear me anyway. 

Fine, I said snottily, and made carbonara, which is what I should have done to begin with.

And then when I was asking local friends where our Domino's had gone, someone humorously suggested that I should rent the now-empty location and start a cafe from which I could sell my home-baked goods.

It is indicative of my state of mind that I almost considered considering it seriously.

In one way, it's lovely. I mean, the idea that yes, I could do this, that even though I'm not the entrepreneur "type" and that I've never considered being a small-business owner, I could probably do it in real life. My life is not over just because I've had kids. I never opened the second-hand bookstore/coffee shop I've been musing about since I was twenty before I had childrnen, but that doesn't mean I can't do it afterwards. Maybe it's something to do with the headlights of the oncoming forty that makes me so cavalier in my assumptions, but I do actually think I could.

But there's plenty of time for that, and right now it's not actually what I want to do. I think if I had to bake for a job rather than enjoyment, I'd very soon get sick of churning out the goods. Not to mention all the headaches that go with owning a small business. Not at the moment, thank you, though I won't write it off forever.

On the other hand, it seems like I do have a little time on hand and maybe I could actually do something else with it. I could start small and look for some freelance editing work. What I'd really like is for someone to pay me to write, but then I'd have to work out what it was I was going to write, or write things other people tell me to, and I'm not certain how to do either of those. I do want to capital-W Write Something, but I can't do that while Mabel's flitting around the house begging every five minutes to watch My Little Pony on my computer or actually putting on Sesame Street in the background. That particular project will have to keep growing at the snail's pace it's coming along at, for the moment, if I want it to be any good.

----

And then I had to go and, you know, actually parent or something, and make dinner and take in the laundry, and in between I checked my LinkedIn profile to make sure it didn't have any misspellings and then I put out the word on Facebook and Twitter that I am, in fact, in the market for some freelance proofreading, copy editing, taking words and making them prettier/clearer/correcter*. 

Sure, what's the worst that can happen? I'm deluged with offers and have to turn people down? Or nothing at all. I think I can cope with both eventualities, but something in between would be ideal.

*Not actually a word. I do know that, don't worry.

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.

Cycles

Yesterday, Mabel gave me a tiny crumb of hope for the human race. Or at least for the portion of human race that we're raising in this house. She was spontaneously thoughtful.

But first, I'll tell you about the walk home from school.

When Dash started at the elementary school, Mabel was almost three. His dad brings him to school most mornings, but Mabel and I walk up to collect him at 3:20 every day, unless the weather's horrible. This meant that Mabel would be in the stroller, post-nap, and I would be pushing. Sometimes she'd hop out and run, and on the way home Dash would perch himself on the front till I yelled at him, and thus not so beatifically, we'd finally get all the way home again. I think I blogged about my frustrations.

When he went back to school this year, with Mabel now the proud owner of two bicycles and a scooter, I started encouraging her to bike to school sometimes. It worked pretty well, though we didn't abandon the stroller entirely. When she biked I'd end up breaking my back to push her halfway home up the slight incline you wouldn't even notice without a bike. Some days she was unhelpfully naked at 3:00 and it was as much as I could do to stuff her into her wheeled throne, put a blanket over her, and throw some clothes in the basket for the point when she was ready to emerge into the public gaze.

Since Christmas, though, she's been biking pretty consistently and the stroller has stayed at home. We took things up a notch last week, when both children suddenly looked too big for their bicycles at the same time - and with Dash's birthday coming up, we decided it was time to buy him a new one and let Mabel inherit his old one. Since the old one is purple, she was happy. Dash got a shiny new big bike and is looking terribly large and moving awfully fast all of a sudden.

And he's started riding his bike to school. Mabel doesn't need a push any more, and is learning to use the brakes - rather than her feet - going downhill too. So now, my view of the daily commute looks increasingly like this (below this paragraph that keeps getting longer), and I'm going to have to unearth - and inflate the tyres on - my own bike if I don't want to have to run home every day. (Which would be good for me, but my stupid foot is still a little sore* and I'm not dressed for running at that time of day.)

And now the nice bit. On the way to school yesterday Mabel was stuck cycling slowly behind a woman pushing a toddler in a stroller. She didn't pass the woman out, and soon stopped to wait for me. I told her I liked that she'd not barged past, and said she could use her bell or say excuse me if she wanted to get by.

"I didn't want to ring my bell in case it scared the baby," she said to me.

The clouds parted and angels sang. My little tyrant, thinking of someone else? Maybe, just maybe, the extreme self-centredness is just a phase. (I've always been fairly sure it was, but I'm an optimist and there's always the chance that you're the one raising Genghis Khan.)

The way we're doing it, the Chinese-water-torture drip, drip, drip, keep-telling-them-about-how-to-behave-nicely, observe-and-praise-the-good-behaviour: it does eventually penetrate, and just when you're starting to think you should maybe have been spanking them soundly on a daily basis and twice on Sundays, they surprise you. Maybe, in time, she'll turn out to be a decent member of civilization. Butterfly, chrysalis, yada yada; springtime metaphors abound. Sigh.

*Sore but improving. Apparently what I should have done to fix it was not bring it to the doctor but simply blog about it. I might escape the nun shoes for a while yet.

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.

Geo

The children are ... where are the children?... upstairs, maybe getting dressed, maybe something else... it's Sunday morning, Paul Simon is crooning about a train in the distance, and I feel I should be waxing lyrical. Maybe it's the fault of the music, maybe it's the day, I don't know. The husband is out running, checking out part of the route for his marathon in a couple of weeks' time.

I can't write to music, though; at least not music with words, and I don't really see the point of the other sort. I mean, it's nice, but if I'm just going to try to shut it out so I can concentrate, then I may as well not turn it on. I've never been one of those people who studies with music in the background. Maybe it's because my house was always quiet, so I didn't need to drown out other people to get my homework done. Another of those unnoticed advantages of onlychildhood.

If you gaze out the window for about ten minutes, concentrating hard, you might just catch a snowflake surruptitiously sneaking out of the sky. It's too warm for snow, but for some reason that's what the atmosphere wants to give us, so beyond the bare branches is the colour of nothing and now and then something escapes in the form of a six-sided crystal. I don't know why.

It was doing this yesterday too, when we pulled ourselves out of our Saturday-morning decline/recline and stopped putting on the kettle for another cup of tea and remembered that we have a national park five minutes down the road so there's no need to drive for half an hour and pay a king's ransom to get into a zoo or something. We went geocaching instead.

The kids know about geocaching. They know that sometimes we find little plastic boxes in the woods and sometimes they have toys in them. You're supposed to take a little thing and leave a little thing. We hadn't brought any little things to leave. So we took a pterodactyl from the first box, with B promising to run by and put in something else in return the next day. Then we exchanged the pterodactyl for an orange not-T-Rex in the next one, and finally went home with a green lambeosaurus from the last one. Mabel is particularly pleased because she has a tiny blue lambeosaurus already, who must have been missing her mommy.

Finding the first one went like this:

B: Look, I think this is it.
Mabel: Toys, toys!
B: Not toys. A cache.
Mabel: It's not cash, it's toys.

We had to admit that it was. Anyway, we were outdoors and the children were walking on their own feet and nobody complained and we found nature-y things like rotten logs and deer droppings and a hollow tree trunk and a lot of sticks and it was really quite nice and we should do it again.

Bare brick and polished wood

Mabel was wide awake for THREE AND A HALF HOURS last night, alternately wailing "I caaaan't get to sleeeeeeeeep withouuuuuut boooooobboooooo" and "Reeeeeead meeeee a boooooooook", and I had the theme tune to Go, Diego, Go stuck in my head; and I was all set to rant about it at length but then it ocurred to me that just maybe it was something to do with the booster vaccinations she got yesterday, and lo, apparently a possible side effect of the Varicella vaccine is insomnia, so I'm going with that because otherwise she's been sleeping unprecedentedly well and I didn't even want to talk about that for fear of breaking the streak, so we'll just move on now...

I just made Dash an appointment for an eye exam, because I noticed that he's holding the book very close to his face when he reads, and on questioning he said that he finds it hard to make out what's on the visualizer in school (I think this is the projector thingy that saves the teacher actually writing on the board). Genetically, glasses are highly likely if not inevitable, though I hoped the kids would manage not to need them for a few more years yet. However, it would be lovely if something as simple and fixable as that suddenly turned reading and writing from a chore to a pleasure for him, and I am now fantasizing that being able to see clearly would also make him so happy that The Rage would be a thing of the past and homework would be a breeze.

Just let me dream, okay? If he needs glasses, he'll get glasses, that's all. (Not like the last time.)

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

Meanwhile, what I was going to say...

Yesterday we had ocassion to go to the local high school, because they were offering free flu-mist vaccinations (the sort they squirt up your nose instead of an injection), and both the children needed them. I'd never been on the premises before, though I drove past it multiple times a day before we moved up the road to this house. In fact, I've never been in any American high school before.

I know high schools tend to be big, and this is a particularly big one, but I was still surprised by the memories that were kindled when we walked through the doors: not thoughts of my secondary school (grades 7 to 12), but instead a strong sense of the Arts Building in my alma mater, UCD. (That's University College Dublin, not the University of California at Davis or the University of Colorado, Denver.) Partly it was the size, but mostly it was the architecture: the late-1960s style and exposed brick made me feel that if I opened a door I'd be faced with not a classroom but a vertiginously terraced lecture theatre.

I loved the UCD Arts Block. (That's Liberal Arts, if you're American.) It was my place in the world from October 1991 till May 1995, when I left partly because I feared if I didn't go then I never would. I might have stayed, and done a master's in Spanish Linguistics, or English Lit, and ended up... well, an unemployed MA instead of an unemployed BA, I suppose. In the Arts Block, I could roam the halls with impunity and claim a sun-drenched low, wide windowsill to read in, or snooze in, or, if lucky and with boyfriend, canoodle in. From the overpriced Finnegan's Break (oh, har har) cafe to the orange lockers in the LGs, past Dramsoc at the bottom of the stairs and sashaying to the strains of the jukebox from The Trap, where those majoring in pool hung out, to giant Theatre L for my English lectures or an L&H debate on a Friday night, and upstairs again to the Modern Languages corridor where the secretary of the Spanish Department was never around if you needed her, I was on home ground.

There was a wooden set of sculptures in the middle of the building that people could sit on, or around, or arrange to meet up at. The first time I saw them they struck a particular chord, somewhere deep in my memory, and the informative plaque confirmed it: the piece is called Pangur Bán, by Imogen Stuart, and it was first displayed in Dun Laoghaire Shopping Centre in 1976.

When I was three and four years old, I had regularly climbed that very sculpture, peered through its low-down spaces, found the tiny mouse hiding in a corner, delighted in stroking its smooth, cool, dark wood and laying my cheek against it - and here it was in a new location, stirring my sense memories a decade and a half later. It felt like a special, personal discovery, linking me to this new place before I'd even arrived. (Me and every other student from South County Dublin, maybe. But I don't know if they all remembered it the way I did.)

I felt like a very obvious interloper if I ever ventured into the Engineering Building, I'd only been in Ag once, and Science - despite the fact that my father had helped design it, the ugliest building on campus (it was the 60s; they couldn't help it) - was just about somewhere I was allowed be once I was dating one of its number, but the Arts (and Commerce, I suppose, grudgingly) Block was mine.

I didn't realise how right I felt there until I was about to leave. Just standing between the double set of doors at the main entrance by the "Information" desk (I use the term lightly), I knew that I couldn't hold on to it - I had to move on and make room for the students coming after me. I had no grand plans for the future; I didn't really know yet what I'd be doing in September, but it was time to go. Closing a chapter, wondering where the next one would open.

Jack o'

And the fun just keeps on coming, until today, when it stopped and left us with nothing but a pile of contentious candy to give Mabel something to constantly bug me about.

By which I mean that no sooner was Sandy over than Halloween was upon us. In fact, Halloween started before Sandy arrived, because our neighborhood costume parade was last Friday. I'd found suitable underpinnings for Luke Skywalker at the eleventh hour in the thrift store, we'd been lent a Jedi cloak, and Mabel had her dress all ready and waiting.

Here they are, posing for all they're worth. Note the Skywalker furrowed brow and the Princess one-foot balance.

We walked around all the stores, collected candy, posed briefly for the judges, who were not much impressed by such lack of originality, and watched the magic show afterwards. A good time.

On Sunday we bought a family of baby pumpkins at the farmer's market for Mabel, and one large one for Dash to carve. Mabel already had one from her pumpkin patch field trip earlier in the week. As soon as we got home, before we could even make lunch, the pumpkins had to be carved. I did the dirty work (the gouging) and let Daddy do the artistic bit.

On Wednesday morning, after two days sequestered in the house due to weather events, everyone was happily (on my part anyway) dispatched to school. Mabel's school doesn't do costumes on Halloween, which may be a little disappointing for some, but I think is a great decision on the whole, given the proclivities of preschoolers to sometimes lose their tiny minds when "fun" is thrust upon them.

Dash's school does a "book parade" wherein you are required (advised? requested?) to dress as your favourite book character and bring the book to prove it. Without much forethought he was happy to do the same as last year - Peter Parker. He wore his Spider-Man costume under his regular clothes and carried a camera. It may have been a little subtle - I'm not sure many people realised he was dressed up at all. The red mask was peeking out of his jeans pocket, but even that might not have given the game away to any but the most tuned-in of observers.

The final nail in the coffin of Halloween was, of course, last night's trick-or-treating. Coming off two days of napping (and associated late bedtimes, because for every hour-long nap, she goes to bed two and a half hours late) Mabel did not, on no account, get a nap yesterday. So by 5:30, when the time came to suit up, she was a little fragile. First there was a breakdown over the fact that I was trying to get her to wear a thin fleece sweater under the princess dress, and then a total loss of sanity over the fact that Mummy wanted to stay at home with her glass of wine to hand out candy while Daddy took the kids around the houses. We compromised with a thinner long-sleeved top and a bowl of candy left on the front step beside our flickering jack o' lanterns.

One jaunt up and down the street, a lot of candy in two bags, not too much sampled as soon as they got home, and eventually, not so late as it might have been, the whole spectacle was over for one more year.

Apart from the candy, which will drag on and on and on, well into the Christmas season, one dessert at a time. This morning Mabel asked for breakfast dessert. I suspect the disappointment will be just as piquant tomorrow morning.

A Few Good Minutes

Mabel went to a friend's house this afternoon while I took Dash to his dance class. I dropped him off and wandered over to the shops to buy some toothpaste and some cheese. I'm used to being child-free in the mornings, of course, but in the afternoon it's different. I kept thinking I'd forgotten something, someone. I didn't know what to do with my hands, with nobody to hold on to. I greeted passing squirrels, forgetting that lone adults don't usually do that. I felt strange without my small-child armour, distractor, attractor and detractor of attention (to herself and away from me, that is).

We want the peace, but the truth is, we can't handle the peace.

I went into the library and tried to browse the adult side of the room, the side I never usually get to go into, because it's not quite so forgiving of small children chasing each other up and down the bookshelves, twirling on the shiny high stools. But I couldn't concentrate, lacking direction, focus, motivation. The pressure to Make Every Moment Count isn't quite so strong nowadays, since I do spend a couple of hours alone each morning, but idle wandering still feels like wanton frittering.

If only I could take those quiet moments and dole them out to myself when I really need them - this morning at 7am when Mabel was dancing on my head and insisting that I come downstairs, for instance, would have been the perfect moment to really indulge in twenty minutes of alone time. 

Harvest bounty

When I was cooking for myself, all those years ago when I shared a flat in Dublin, I had a basic repertoire of vegetables. Fresh broccoli, red pepper, onions, and mushrooms were about the size of it, with a few tins of tomatoes or beans, and frozen peas, to augment. Along with a protein and a starch, dinner was made, day in, day out, rain or shine, summer and winter. Those were my basics.

Which is fine, but takes no account for the seasons.

I suppose you can argue that in Ireland nothing local is ever in season anyway, except potatoes and turnips and carrots (and parsnips and spinach and kale and cabbages and rhubarb and gooseberries, perhaps), so perhaps that's why it never even occurred to me to try to eat with the seasons. I'm pretty sure my mother bought the same things regardless of the time of year, too - apart from, say strawberries, which were clearly a summer treat, and new potatoes, likewise. (You always got to make a wish when you ate your first strawberries of the year, or the first anything else, it seemed like. It made it special, even if it was gooseberries.)

Anyone American is probably wondering what on earth a gooseberry is right about now. I'm not sure you get them over here, but they're little hard, smooth, light-green berries with stubble on them, and faint stripes running from pole to pole. You stew them with lots of sugar and stick them under a sweet crumble topping and they still make your mouth pucker with the sourness, but somebody somewhere decided they were a fruit and therefore worthy of dessert. They flourish in the Irish climate in the late summer.

It probably wasn't until we were living in Texas that I noticed certain vegetables were cheaper at particular times of year. The asparagus, for instance, was $3.99 a pound until suddenly, in June, I could get it for $1.99 instead. My inner skinflint rejoiced, a friend mentioned that asparagus was delicous when roasted, and suddenly I had a new favourite veg. I began to pay attention. Watermelons and avocadoes were plentiful all year round because we were so far south, but other produce clearly had its moment in the sun (so to speak).

Nowadays I try to get as much of our greenstuff (and red, yellow, pink, orange, and purple stuff) as I can at the local farmers' market, which runs from late May to late November. This year, with extra inspiration from my new best friend Smitten Kitchen, I've been making an effort to cook seasonally. There was the asparagus and the strawberries, the rhubarb (oh happy day) and the corn, the blueberries (we picked our own) and peaches and zucchini (that's courgette) and summer squash.

Picking blueberries in July

This morning's market was bursting with all my favourite things: red peppers, big sweet onions, broccoli and cauliflower, curly kale, heirloom tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, grape tomatoes, roma tomatoes, green, yellow, orange tomatoes; eggplant (that's aubergine) in purple and white, butternut squash, acorn squash, sweet potatoes, and big iconic pumpkins. I didn't buy one of everything, but I bought a bundle.

The last time I was at a farmers' market in Ireland (which was probably also the first time, as they're a bit of a newfangled invention over there), I was delighted - until I discovered that they were selling vegetables grown in Peru and Mexico, to name a couple of venues. It seemed to be more of an outdoor novelty supermarket than what I'd expected - an opportunity for local vendors to sell freshly harvested local produce straight to the customer, cutting out the middleman and passing on both quality and savings. Maybe that's just impossible in Dublin, unless you want a market full of little beyond carrots and spuds. (And great meat, excellent cheese, freshly caught fish... so many opportunities missed.)

So I'm appreciating what we've got here, and enjoying the colours, the flavours, the textures, and the chance to cook with the freshest food I can find. I'll leave the Peruvian asparagus in the supermarket for now.

Blame it on

Dash and Mabel are both doing dance classes again this term. Mabel's is called "Pre-Dance," a step up from last Spring's "Creative Movement" but with much the same group of children and much the same activities. Dash's is called "Pre-Jazz" and he's one of two boys among a bevy of girls. He loves it, and I hope the girls realise how sought-after a boy is in a dance class. (They probably don't.) He took his umbrella to the farmer's market on Sunday morning, hoping for rain so he could do a spot of Gene Kelly. It was only very slightly overcast, but he wouldn't leave it in the car and I spotted him twirling it later on.

On Saturday there was a blues festival in our local downtown. We went down, town, to see the goings-on and get Dash a haircut. While the boys went to the barber's, Mabel and I procured some bread and an apple and sat on a step watching the band. They were pretty good.

The sound of a saxophone always does something to my tummy. The good sort of something, like you used to get remembering a particularly good kiss the night before with your new boyfriend. Jazzy bluesy saxophoney electric-base-guitary music is probably my favourite sort of sound, especially when it makes your hips wiggle and your toes twitch. But children have no respect for art, and once Dash emerged - with the side parting he'd requested making him look like a quintessential English schoolboy of the 1940s - they both wanted to be climbing trees rather than sitting around watching old men in Hawaiian shirts plunk and plink and croon and badum-tssshhhh.

We moved on, up to a playground for a while, and then back down past the music again towards the car in the hopes of finding some holy barbeque for dinner. (Local Catholic church fundraiser.) On the way we met some friends and there was some more delay. We were behind the stage now, but the music was still loud and clear in the area where we were. Dash, in a dark-blue t-shirt and tan shorts, was at the top of a flight of fire-escape steps. His father (as it happened, wearing a mid-blue t-shirt and brownish chinos) was at the bottom. They boogied towards, and away from, and back towards each other again, one going up and the other down, to meet in the middle; and if a jealous Mabel hadn't been physically turning my head away so that I couldn't enjoy the spectacle, I would have been very much enjoying it.

Another of those moments to capture, really, only this time I needed a video camera and I didn't have a thing. It's enough to make one covet an iPhone, really. I love a man who can dance.

You are here

Don't think I'm not writing. I am writing. You're just not seeing it. I have no fewer than four posts at the draft stage that just aren't coming out of it, because they're not working for one reason or another. Too boring, too uninteresting, too irrelevant, too not-quite-saying-what-I'm-trying-to-say.

I know Mabel is tired today because she's spent an indordinate amount of time rolling round on the floor and chewing on non-food objects. Also because it's only 1.20 and it feels like it should be much later. As early as 9.30 this morning she had installed herself on the sofa with all the cusions, numerous blankets, a bath towel and a dragon doorstop (from IKEA; you probably have one too) and asked me to turn on the TV because she was tiiiiiired.

She's tired because I went to a meeting last night and even though she was well ready to fall asleep at 7pm, because I wasn't there with the magic boobies, she was still wide awake at 8.45 when I got home. She'd had the books, she'd had the stories, she'd been lain down with, she'd been left alone ... she has no idea how to go to sleep without the magic boobies. Not yesterday, anyway, even though she's done it before, and she goes back to sleep in the middle of the night very well these days. (I DIDN'T SAY THAT STOP LOOKING AT ME FATE HERE'S A CHICKEN I SACRIFICED EARLIER.)

It's lovely having Dash back at school now that we're used to it and the homework gets started straight away. I've even cleaned a couple of things and baked a couple of things, so it looks like I'm getting out of my doldrums and back to normal.

It will be even more lovely next week when Mabel is back at school too, at least until the existential angst starts to get me. In between, we have the local Labor Day Festival (that's "festible" to my children) to get through/enjoy, with duties to be discharged for both the nursery school and the elementary school as well as many rides to be ridden on and oh look it's going to be 90 degrees on Saturday. Lovely.

So that's where we are. Where are you?

Tempus

The National Arboretum happens to be just a 15-minute drive from our house, in good traffic. And yet, we don't go very often, because once you've fed the koi, there isn't all that much for the kids to do - adults like the herb garden and the bonsai exhibit, and it's a great place to bring your mother, if your mother is like my mother, but for the children it usually lacks a little je ne sais quoi, where quoi is probably a playground.

But this morning we went with some friends and found that there is a playground, or at least a play area, with big logs to sit on and jump off, and a place to dig, and some sand to sit in, and the kids all enjoyed themselves mightily and we felt smug for exposing them to Nature so well.

Then I came home and wandered through the photos: these are from the first time we went to the arboretum. Mabel was about three months old, and beginning to smile enough for me to capture it on film digital.

And Dash (not yet three, back when he was Monkey around here) was running up the water feature by the columns that are meant to make you think it's the Acropolis of Washington DC or something.

This was today, at the bottom of the same water feature.

Time. Doing that passing thing it does. Crazy.

BunBun II: The fluffening

The rest of the story is a bit of an anticlimax, but there are cute pictures, so stick around.

Nobody has claimed the bunny. Nobody has called the local shelter or the police to report a missing fluffy wabbit. Nobody has read the neighbourhood mailing list to thrill at the retrieval of their beloved pet. Nobody has posted "Wanted: Woolly lap-warmer" signs on nearby lampposts. Maybe BunBun escaped from indentured servitude or a mitten factory, or a house with no phones and no internet.

First thing this morning, we rang the local shelter and ascertained that they would take the bunny later in the day. It's a no-kill shelter, lest anyone accuse us of heartlessness, and will keep him until he's claimed, or adopted if nobody claims him within a reasonable time. Once that was done, I felt it was safe to let the children know there was an animal on the premises.

They were excited to hear there was a surprise - that we would not be keeping - in the basement, but once they saw it they were understandably puzzled.
"It's a dog!"
"It's a cat!"
"Here, BunBun!" I said, trying to coax the fluffball out of its cage so we could change his newspaper.
"It's a ... bunny?"

We took BunBun upstairs for a look around.

Mabel was more interested in sorting out the family of wrenches she'd found in the basement.

Dash wanted me to take a photo of his newly decorated new pencil box.

I think B was the one most taken with the rabbit.
"You love him!" I accused.
"He's just so fluffy," replied my very macho husband, cradling him like a baby.

Actually, I think I was trying to keep my distance so I wouldn't start loving him myself. When you see him from this angle, he's pretty darn adorable. And very, very fluffy.

So this afternoon, BunBun (Bunster, says Dash) went to the shelter. We might visit him in a few days' time, but we're not planning to adopt him when and if he comes on the market. I really hope he finds his family. For one thing, I want to know what his name is.

It's probably Arthur. 

BunBun

It's one of those times when I have to blog the start of a story without knowing how it ends.

But for once, it's not the story of how I tried to get Mabel to sleep all night, or do without the booboo (that's what it's called around here these days; mumeet is long gone), or talk Dash into eating more than one nibble of baby carrot every three weeks. Though baby carrots are involved, come to think of it.

This morning, B had gone for his run when the kids and I left to go to an open gym, followed by some playground time. When we got home I was a little surprised to find him still there, only just out of the shower, but sometimes he works from home if it's quiet, so it wasn't that unusual. His demeanour was a bit odd, though, as he acted guilty/excited and told me to look downstairs and see what he'd brought home. Just temporarily, he said.

This is what I found in my basement:

It seemed we had acquired a large wire cage, some newspaper pages, half a cabbage, and a very fluffy thing with a snuffly, twitchy nose.

"What the?" I inquired sotto voce when I got back upstairs. Luckily, the children were too busy telling Daddy about their time on the trampolines to listen in on our conversation. (This is very unusual: most of the time, Dash is the nosiest child on the planet and won't let anyone make the most inconsequential of throwaway remarks without a thorough investigation into exactly what they said and why they said it.)

Not to mention "Whence?" and "When is it going back?"

"It's an Angora rabbit," B said, all knowledgeable about this. I'd left a physicist in my kitchen at 8.45 and come home to a lagomorphologist at 11.15, apparently. (I had to look that up. I was going to say lepidopterist, based on the fact that I knew that was a word, and rabbit is lapin in French so that seemed close enough; but no, a lepidopterist studies butterflies and moths. Aren't you glad you came?)

Could've fooled me. Looks more like a fluffy Yorkshire terrier. I still haven't worked out if he actually has shorter ears than a regular bunny or it just looks that way because of all the fur. But it's a very different shape from your regular common-or-garden Flopsy, Mopsy, or Cottontail.

Anyway. What had happened was that at some point along the road on his morning run, B had seen this animal in the undergrowth, and realised immediately that it was not a groundhog or a racoon, or any of the other middle-sized mammals you might meet in this neck of the woods, nor even a Persian cat out for a stroll, but some poor, terrified creature who did not belong in the wilds at all. Seeing a man nearby getting out of his car, B asked him if he knew of anyone near there who might have lost a rabbit. The man turned out to be vaguely familiar to B  - in fact, he proceded to take his daugher, who is the same age as Mabel and so I run into them at the playground now and then, out of the car - and he was the one who knew it was an Angora.

Between the two of them and another neighbor, who provided the cage, Bunny was brought back to our house, to repose in the basement while his owners are sought. B went out to the pet store in the afternoon and brought back some grassy stuff for him to nibble on, and he has fresh water and we've changed the newspaper twice now. He is not interested in the lettuce and baby carrots from the fridge, and a single strawberry remains untouched. We took him out a few minutes ago and he hopped around checking out the foam light sabers from Dash's birthday party and the bag of wrapping paper and the boxes of baby clothes that I'm gradually whittling down and the other assorted crap we are storing mindfully in the basement area.

The terrible thing is that there has been a rabbit in the house practically all day - a real, live, fluffy snuffly twitchy-nosed rabbit - and we haven't told the children. They went to the dentist (no cavities, yay!), got things at Target (I went in for milk and toothpaste and spent $75, you know how it is), and spent the afternoon fighting over who got which identical plate, just like any other day, and there was a bunny in the basement the whole time. I think when they get to the therapist's couch, this is the thing that will be burning a hole in their psyches.

I would like to tell them, but not until the bunny is leaving. If we don't hear from his owners tomorrow (by which time everyone on the neighbourhood mailing list will have to have seen the posting), he's going to the local animal shelter, because we are not set up for a bunny. We have no desire for a bunny. We are not bunny people. The fact that B calls him Sampras and I call him Snuffles does not mean we have named him and therefore must keep him. And anyway, when it came to it and I had to coax him out of the cage this evening, I ended up addressing him as BunBun. I'm sure he was highly offended. He could be a she, for all I know.

So that's not the end of the story, and I don't know yet what the end is. But when the universe drops a fluffy reason to blog right in your basement, you can't always wait for things to be neatly tied up before you pass it on.

Tune in tomorrow to find out what happens to Mr(s) BunBun Sampras Snuffles.