Don't call her cute

Don't call my daughter cute.

I don't mind. I think she's cute too, sometimes. But she'll have your guts for garters if she hears you.

A particularly chatty (and somewhat clueless) fellow customer in the supermarket made that mistake a week or so ago.

"You're just so cute," she said, in a cutesy-wutesy voice.

The five-year-old was unimpressed. "I'm not cute," she countered, with a steely gaze.

I asked her later why she doesn't like it - not because I disagreed with her stance, but just because I was interested in her reasoning.

"Cute means small. I'm not small. Babies are cute. I'm not a baby."

Fair enough. Much like Thumbelina, in her heart she's six feet tall. It's not her fault that grownups are all still bigger than her.

On Friday, the dentist's assistant tried to call her cute. Mabel was nervous about the visit, but I could tell this was galling her, so I came gallantly to her defense:

"She doesn't like to be called cute, actually."

"Oh? Well, what would she prefer?"

I took the opportunity to put some words in her mouth, since she wasn't feeling quite as perky as she had been in the supermarket, and I suggested, "How about, I don't know, smart?"

The dental assistant took that on board, though it's not as easy to believably tell a child you just met and who won't meet your eye, never mind talk to you, that she's very smart.

But you know what, you wouldn't tell a stranger you'd never met that she was very pretty. (Unless you were in a bar and trying to score, and bolstered by alcohol, and even then she might not appreciate it.) So how about you stop making superficial remarks about children in front of them, and instead, wait for them to talk to you first? That way, if they want to tell you about their new shoes or the fact that you're buying their favourite snack because it's their birthday next week, or that their favourite animal is the proboscis monkey, then you can legitimately have a conversation, at the end of which you might just be able to remark with sincerity that they are, indeed, a smart kid.

And then I will try to help them learn to take a compliment graciously, with a smile and a Thank you.

The homework debate

My second-grader is doing his homework. It's quick and easy and it doesn't take long. But I started reminding (/asking/exhorting) him to do it when he got home from school at 3.45. He finally began at 7.20pm, after some outside playtime, some TV time, dinner, dessert, some more outside time, and a glass of milk. I've come to accept that this is how it is with him, and for now it's working. He knows that ultimately he is responsible for his homework being done. I worry about how things will go next year, when they say the homework load really ramps up, and when if he starts at 7.30 he won't finish till long past bedtime. I suppose he'll live and learn. He's not one to stress over his homework; I'm lucky that he's a relaxed kid who loves school for its social aspects and has not yet been turned off learning for its own sake.

People used to think that we should show children it's a tough world from the outset. Some people still feel that way, on one matter or another. You shouldn't pick up your crying baby. You shouldn't tolerate tantrums. You shouldn't let that five-year-old sleep with the light on. They need to learn that life's hard, and people are mean, and they need to buckle down and do their work; and the sooner they figure that out the better.

I think we should be kind to our babies and love them while we can, because life is short - and childhood shorter - even more than it's hard; and because they will find out the rest soon enough.

And so I'm thinking about homework again. I'm not saying that people who expect children to do homework are cruel, Dickensian types, or that making a kindergardener come home from six hours of school and asking them to sit down and do homework is like forcing a three-month-old baby to cry it out - but then again, maybe one day in the future it will be seen that way.

I'm not big on research. I like to read the headlines and let other people do the heavy lifting. But I can tell you a few things I've seen recently that have stuck in my mind:

• Studies show that homework is of no benefit for younger children (or maybe any children).
• There is a ton of research proving that children currently do not have enough time for free play, for exercise, for being outdoors, or even for the sleep they need to grow.
• Some schools have made the decision to remove all homework or vastly reduce it. (I don't count reading in this - I agree that reading to children and having children read every day is vital.)

Homeschooling is a wonderful option for many people, but I am not one of those people. I like our local public school and I want to be part of it. My son loves school. I enjoy sending him to school every day and picking him up at the end of it. I don't enjoy bugging him to do his homework for an hour or more every day while he strings me along with promises of "Yes, yes, after this," and finally sits down to do it right when it's dinnertime, or maybe bedtime.

I really don't like the conversations I've had with other parents who have more intense children who burst into tears crying "I just want to play" when it's time for homework, or whose studious third- or fourth-graders won't hear of stopping after 45 minutes even when their mom says they'll write a note because that's long enough.

And on the whole, I know that my household has it easy right now. So far, the amount of homework he has had has been very reasonable, his teachers have been undemanding, and he's not the type to stress over schoolwork. Once he finally sits down to do it, it goes pretty quickly these nights. Additionally, our school has said that roughly ten minutes per grade is as much work as they should be doing - 25 minutes for my second-grader, then; under an hour for a fifth-grader. (Does that mean zero minutes for a kindergardener?)

Children are not miniature adults. They are not just university students in training. Their minds and bodies are still developing and they have more learning to do than can be taught in school. Childhood is not the time for them to learn how to buckle down and work for a further two hours (or even 45 minutes) when every fibre of their being tells them they should be running and jumping and climbing trees and playing soccer and organizing skipping games with the other kids on the street and finding out what it is they love to do. They've spent six hours clamping down on their wild sides - or having them clamped down for them - when they get home it's time to do the other thing.

I want there to be no homework. Not just less, but none, for the sake of our quality of life four nights a week, and my children's childhoods. And I'm almost fired up enough to do something about it.

Slippery slope (A grammar rant)

You know what annoys me?

Well, okay, plenty of things. The sun is too sunny, mosquitoes bite, I have no cookies in the house and yet can't bring myself to make any because then I'll eat them all; but no, something else.

The plural of euro, that's what.

I know, I just lost most of you. Never mind. Come back tomorow, I'll talk about kids or something.

The euro is the currency of many countries of Europe, and has been for several years now. It was introduced in Ireland only a few months before I left the country, which is why I still have to hunt and peck in my purse to find the right coins whenever we're back there. At the time I was fully and gainfully employed as an editor - in a whole department of editors, no less - so the issue of how to properly refer to the new currency was discussed in a professional capacity, as it were.

We looked into it. It was discovered and agreed upon that the official word was that the plural of euro (in English) was to be "euros." Sensible and obvious, since to make a plural in English we pretty much always do just add an s, especially when the singular ends in a vowel.* 

So why is it that, since that time, the entire country of Ireland decided, en masse and seemingly of its own volition, with no editiorial consultation, that if you had ten of these new units of currency, you would not have ten euros? No, no, of course you wouldn't. You would have ten euro.**

I've tried to be good. Lord knows, I've done my damndest to hold the line, even from this distance. I talk about euros whenever I can, even in Ireland. All it has done is to make me sound like one of those crazies who insists on saying "fort" instead of "fortay" because it's a French word, not an Italian one. (This may be another argument for another day.)

Apparently, much as has recently - heinously - happened with the definition of literally - about which I am figuratively hopping mad - common usage has triumphed and what was wrong has become acknowledged as right just because it's what most people do.

I hate that. Talk about a slippery slope. One minute it's euros, the next minute people will be advertising banana's and apple's and how its over their in the lady's department and nobody will know where they stand and they'll have to abolish the apostrophe all together, as well as common decency and saying thank you and not farting audibly in public.

*Collins still says this:
euro. (n.d.). Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 10th Edition. Retrieved August 20, 2013, from Dictionary.com website: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/euro

** Dictionary.com is a flipping flip-flopper that refuses to have an opinion, so it says that the plural is either euro or euros.

Too old

Lately, I've found myself saying to people that I'm too old for that.

It's a good thing.

I'm not telling them I'm too old to dye my hair pink (should I so desire) or bungee jump off the Sydney Harbour Bridge (sure!) or wear a short skirt or exercise or eat dessert or read teen fiction or have lilac toenails. Quite the opposite, in fact.

I'm too old to spend time worrying about what other people think, because I trust my own judgement.

I'm too old to care about what other people are wearing, because I'll wear what I feel good in.

I'm too old to bother with fake tan, because I'm finally learning to love my fair skin.

I'm too old to worry about what the bitchy girls are saying.

I'm too old to even take the time to figure out who the bitchy girls are.

You don't have to wait till you reach the illustrious age of 40 to embrace this liberating mantra. You can be too old for all that at 20, or 30, or even 16, if you're really ahead of the game. But I have to say it seems to come more easily as the years go on.

Chubby

I would like to excise the words "fat" and "thin" from the English language.

Flashback: As we drove home with my tiny newborn daughter pinkly in the back seat, I allowed myself a few moments of fear about raising a girl: body image and self esteem were right there at the top of the list. But then I got over it and enjoyed my beautiful tiny snuggly baby.

Last night, my daughter - my four-and-a-half-year-old daughter - pulled me close to her and asked me in the whisper she uses when she's being very serious, if she was a little bit too thin. She wanted to know if thin was good or fat was good.

My heart broke a tiny bit. Maybe more than a tiny bit.

"You are exactly perfect and beautiful," I told her, perhaps a bit too fiercely. "Remember that always. Exactly perfect."

And I told her that thin and fat are not bad and good things. Good is fresh air and exercise and being strong and healthy. Bad is, well, nothing, so long as you don't overdo it. At least, I tried to tell her, but she probably went off at a tangent about something else entirely before I'd said even a quarter of all the important things I have to say - that it's my duty as her mother and a woman who was a girl - to tell her.

I just have to keep telling her, don't I?

Legitimately a little chubby, perhaps.

*She learned the word "chubby" from the movie Tangled. I wish she hadn't.

Mind, body, baby

Your head is connected to your body.

This is something that apparently didn't occur to me when I had my first baby. I decided to try believing it for my second, and it turned out to be true. Stop the presses.

To be fair, we're not used to thinking about things this way. When you fall off your bike and scrape your knee as a child, you can't stop the bleeding with the power of your mind. When you slice into the top of your thumb cutting a bagel, no matter how hard you concentrate you're still going to need a band-aid. And because we're conditioned to think of giving birth as a medical situation - because, you know, it happens in hospital, attended by doctors - we assume that we can't just think the baby out either.

Okay, so you can't actually, necessarily, think the baby out. There are a lot of factors you have no control over in the great rollercoaster ride of giving birth, but there are also elements where your mind has more influence than you might understand. It's just that birth has become so medicalized, so much treated as an illness - a great hurdle with which a woman's body cannot cope unless aided by drugs, interventions, surgeons perhaps - that the fact that you do actually have some influence over your own body is often forgotten.

Worse than that, even, I had the vague impression that anyone who told me my mind could help me give birth was in league with the hippies. You know, the hippies. The crazy women who want to paint their feelings and eat placenta paté and wear their hair in a centre parting and probably give birth naked.

Well, I'm a civilised modern woman and there's no reason not to use the drugs that the good Lord got the doctors to invent for us and I'll certainly be keeping my clothes respectably on when I give bir.... oh.

You have to take your clothes off to have a baby. At least, the ones you're most used to keeping on. You may as well divest yourself of all your other preconceptions, while you're at it. Giving birth, as I have mentioned before, is an elemental, visceral, down deep and dirty business, and you have to get in touch with your inner cavewoman.*

Your inner cavewoman is a hippie. Of course.

So remember what the hippies say, and believe it with all your heart, because it's true:

• A woman's body is designed to give birth. If this was not the case, the human race would never have made it this far.
• Once labour has started, your state of mind has an effect on your cervix. It really does. 
• Visualization and verbal affirmations do make a difference. Because your mind is connected to the rest of your body, and just as I can tell my fingers to type these words, I can control what's happening inside. The problem is simply that we're not used to telling our cervix what to do, and we can't see the results in front of us, so we suspect that it's all just crazy touchy-feely claptrap.

If you're pregnant, read Ina May Gaskin's Guide to Childbirth. Disregard the 80's-esque photos and let the words sink in. Read the birth stories and remember that these are real stories of real women who simply chose to believe in their own bodies. Look into something like Birthing from Within or HypnoBirthing or (if you're in Ireland) GentleBirth. They are not as kooky as you might think. In fact, they might not be kooky at all.

Read happy birth stories and stop watching all those TV shows where women give birth lying on their backs strapped to monitors in hospital beds, screaming in agony and finally, probably, being wheeled off for an emergency c-section.

Giving birth for the first time is a totally alien experience for most of us in the modern world, where birth tends to be hidden away from all but those immediately involved. It's scary and weird and like nothing you've ever experienced before: a new human is about to burst forth from your nether regions, after all. Hire a doula, if you possibly can. No matter how well prepared you are, having someone who knows what's going on - with your body, with the environment, with the medical professionals - who's there solely for your benefit, is like having a GPS where previously you had only a candle.

 Trust your body. It's trying to bring this baby into the world. Work with it, not against it.

Baby Dash, just born or thereabouts

PS: No, I'm not contemplating another birth of my own. A friend had a baby and it made me think, again, that's all.

PPS: Of course, you can do all these things and believe in your body and be the biggest hippie on the block and still need intervention, and then isn't it wonderful that modern medicine exists for just these times? I'm not advocating that you run off to the backwoods to have your baby beyond ken of mortal midwife, because that's not terribly sensible. I'm just airing some thoughts and discoveries that I wish someone had stuffed down my own gullet the first time I was pregnant.


* I don't think I came up with the inner cavewoman thing, but I can't remember where I read it. If you know, and especially if it was you, please tell me and I'll put in an appropriate link.

Pope-ular

Yesterday I had to leave the house at 3.00 to get Dash from school, as usual. The new pope was due to be announced and I had the tv on, but even though I waited - "Come on, it's two minutes past, where is he?" - I had to leave without finding out who it was.

Not that I even knew who the contenders were. Dougal wasn't one of them, neither was Grumpy Cat, and they were the only possibilities my Facebook feed had informed me of in the past weeks; but suspense is suspense and the Vatican knows how to play up a theatrical moment. I asked my friend-and-neighbour, as we bumped into her on the way up the road, if she knew, and we reminisced about past popes, as you do.

"When Ratzinger was elected I was teaching middle school..." she started to tell me.

Hang on. What? But she was a teacher a lifetime ago, and Ratzinger is almost new. I know it's a lifetime ago because her kids are the same age as mine, and she taught before they were born. I was ... wait, I was in southmost Texas, so it was my kids' lifetimes ago too, but I feel like the election of the last pope is still a pretty recent event because I blogged about it.

Which just goes to show that I've been blathering on here for a long time. For more than a whole pope, you could say, using the ancient and irregular unit of measurement.

Everyone's saying - where "everyone" is the people I know who might discuss these things - that they hope this pope is more open to change and more forward-looking and more willing to let in tiny things like, say contraception or women priests to the Catholic church. I said it myself yesterday.

But I've changed my mind.

The thing is, if the Catholic church did all those things that I and many other Catholics and ex-Catholics want it to, things like accepting contraception, and considering married clergy or even women priests, and acknowledging that it's okay to be gay (not even touching on the more controversial topics like abortion and euthanasia), it wouldn't be the Catholic church any more. So I think I actually agree with what Benedict said about wanting a "smaller, purer church."

If all the people who genuinely disagree with the church's teachings but still wish to participate in organized religion voted with their feet and left, heading instead for some more inclusive and accepting place (Anglicanism is not a huge stretch), the church would be much smaller - and perhaps have fewer resources and therefore less influence.

So many people stay in the church for the sake of tradition: because they were raised that way and it's what they know, and they like the warm familiarity of the hymns and the responses and doing what they always did at Christmas and Easter. Maybe because your mother would be devastated if you didn't, because you've never heard of anyone moving church - sure one's as good as another, even because your in-laws wanted to know when the party was when you had the first baby, so you had a christening even though you hadn't been to mass in years, and things just snowballed from there.

But unless you're particularly attached to the other things that only come with Catholicism - transubstantiation and venerating Mary and the saints are all I can think of right now - maybe it's time to move on. My mother was never a big fan of "a la carte" Catholics who take what they like and ignore the rest, and I'm starting to come around to her opinion, albeit from the opposite direction.

I know many people talk about working for change from within, which is laudable indeed. But the Church doesn't want to be changed. The Church would rather you left, actually, if you want things like equality and contraception. God is God, and I'm firmly convinced that he/she/it doesn't care what religion you adhere to and whose rules you follow so long as they're not hurting anyone else.

Then again, I'm an atheist 85% of the time, so you can feel free to disregard my opinions on God altogether.



Disclaimer: As always when I talk about religion, I don't wish to offend anyone and absolutely acknowledge your right to believe whatever you want so long as you respect everyone else's point of view too. The flying spaghetti monster endorses this post.

Labels, schmabels

When Dash was born, before we left the hospital they brought us one last paper to sign. It went something like this:

DECLARATION OF INTENT: PARENTING STYLE

Please accept or decline the following.

We hereby declare that we will raise this child entirely according to the principles of Attachment Parenting, never deviating from the laws set out by Dr Bill Sears in his canonical volumes, including but not limited to the following basic tenets:

• always wearing the baby and/or child, never pushing them in any type of wheeled conveyance 
• breastfeeding on demand, at every peep, day and night, for the entirety of the first two years and thereafter as long as you possibly can
• sleeping like a big happy pile of puppies in a family bed until the day the child decides they want to sleep alone
• never, ever, allowing the baby to cry. At all.

On receipt of this signed declaration, you will be issued with an Attachment Parenting card. The Attachment Parenting Police may stop by your house unannounced at any point and your card may be revoked if such things as a stroller, a crib, or an open tin of formula are found in your possession.

Sign here: ____________________

Then there was a note:

Alternatively, you may wish to join the Evil Parenting movement. In this case, you will need form 666B, wherein you will avow to eschew slings, wraps, and carriers of all types; to wean the day your baby turns six months old or starts solids, whichever happens first - or to use formula from the get-go; to leave your baby in a crib in a dark room down the hall from your bedroom from day one and never ever nurse him/her to sleep; and to generally follow faithfully the principles laid out by either Ezzo or Gina Ford to the letter.

In big letters along the bottom, it said: THERE IS NO MIDDLE WAY.

Oh, wait. No, they didn't.

We left the hospital with a new baby and a few ideas about how we wanted to look after him. When one thing didn't work, we tried another. We ended up doing what worked, until it stopped, and then we looked at our options, read a variety of books, and tried again. After a while, the baby got bigger and those things were easier and different things were important. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Parenting is a journey, not a label.

Now can everyone please just go back to whatever they were doing last week?

Wherein I confess how ill-informed I really am

If we didn't have children, I'd be a lot better informed. Or, perhaps, if B and I went on more dates - but not ones to see a movie.

Backing up to explain my point. (Beep beep beep.) I'm not good at politics. My brain tends to curl up in a little ball (even more, I mean) and sing "la la laaaa" when people talk about politics. I don't know why, but it's always been this way. When I read the newspaper, in hard copy or online, I scan the headlines and look at the pictures, and then skip to the Style section. I am much more likely to retain a quote I saw in passing about Christian Louboutin's red-soled high heels than who has dropped out of the Republican race and who's still in the running.

(Partly, and I have to parenthesise even more here in a whole paragraph of its own, this is because they all have stupid pretend names that I can't distinguish from one another. I mean: Mitt (short for Mitten?), Newt (short for Lizard?) - what's the difference? I only discovered this morning that Rush Limbaugh is not actually another candidate - he sounds like a candidate, doesn't he? And I know Rick Santorum because of the Dan Savage thing years ago, but I still have no clear idea of how their policies stand or what they're like as people. Admittedly, this is because I don't read the articles, but it's also because even if I did I'd forget whether I was reading about Mitt or Newt or some other guy. As far as I'm concerned they're all crazy right-wing Republicans, and that's all I need to know. Surely none of them will ever actually get into power.)

The average member of the Irish general public knows a lot more about the American political situation than I do right now. This was made painfully clear when B's uncle asked me while we were in Ireland what I thought of the candidates, and I really had nothing to say. I mean, I still have nothing to say. What is there to think, other than that no reasonable person would vote for any of them? Do I really have to waste time finding out more? I tried to fall back on a joke, saying that I look to my husband for guidance in such matters, but unfortunately I was seated on the side of the uncle's deaf ear, and by the time I'd repeated it clearly, it made me sound like just the sort of wife these candidates seem to want me to be, which I promise was not my intention.

But the thing is that B is one of the few people (as well as all of you, now, but you don't exist in real life, do you?) to whom I'll admit the depths of my ignorance on subjects like this, and let inform me of all the things most people know already. He's very good at explaining things from first principles, which usually leads to more information than one needed, but in this case is exactly what I want. I mean, I know the basics of Democrats v Republicans, and which one Obama is and which one the Bushes were, but beyond that whatever you can tell me is probably good information. And I respect B's principles and we have pretty much the same views on things, so to be honest, if he told me how to vote I'd probably find after doing some research that I came to the same conclusions.

And then, of course, there's the fact that as non-citizens, neither of us do have a vote of any type in this country. As non-residents, we don't have a vote in our home country either, as Ireland does not do postal votes. But there's an unofficial online voting campaign that has happened for the last two elections, and I have researched the candidates running in my home constituency and decided who I would vote for there. Exercising my right to vote has always been important to me, even if all I could do for sure was to help try to keep the obviously crazy candidates out of power.

So when I see headlines like this one (pulled from my Facebook feed just now): "Alabama State Senator Proposes Legislation to Prohibit ‘Women and Non-Whites’ From Voting," I go, "Oh, come on," and don't click it because I don't even want to validate its existence by reading about it. And, I suppose, as a married woman for whom another pregnancy would not be a wholesale disaster, I'm in the happy position of not feeling too immediately personally affected by all the utter bullshit that the old white men are trying to come up with right now. But I have a daughter, and if the US turns out to be more backward about women's reproductive rights than even my home country,* I'm going to have to start paying attention.  

(*Did you know that abortion of any kind is still illegal in Ireland? (Read this. It's an eye-opener.) Before 1985 you needed a prescription to buy a condom there. Divorce came in in 1996. Most of the schools are run by the Catholic Church... all this I'm used to, this I can deal with, though it's far from ideal.) 

Which brings me to today. Today I put on what I believe are called "dress trousers" - that is, the sort of thing I used to wear to my semi-casual workplace, and a necklace (and also a top and a cardigan, and a bra too, but I'm just not mentioning that because I do usually wear a bra and also a top, as opposed to the other things which are less frequently disported these days) and boots with a bit of a heel, and tried to look like a responsible adult, because B and I went to talk to a lawyer about doing that ultimate responsible adult thing of making a will. (Finally. After meaning to do it for six years or so now. I know, I know.) I suppose I could have gone in my jeans and my sneakers just like any other day, but I felt the need to be in my "professional" guise. It's funny, it had been so long since I'd dressed that way that the word that came to mind when I looked in the mirror was "mannish". I changed my cardigan for a lighter colour, put on the jewellery and some lipstick, and hoped for the best. I think it was just the unfamiliar silhouette that wierded me out.

Anyway, we dropped the children to their respective schools and went to meet the nice man, who turned out to be the perfect conjunction of older enough to make us feel like he knows what he's talking about, and not so old that we felt he'd be better engaged polishing up the codicils of his own will rather than ours. As we left, he congratulated us on doing the responsible adult thing. I felt like wailing, "But we're nearly 40!" At what point do we actually become responsible adults in the eyes of the older generation?

And then, since we still had half an hour to kill, we went and had a coffee date at Starbucks and pretended to be having a business meeting like the other businessly-dressed people there. I have no idea when the last time I sat and had a coffee in public with my husband without fielding constant demands for chocolate milk and lemon pound cake was, and it was very nice. It also enabled him to give me a quick overview of the Republican candidates, and a quick update on the fact that Rush Limbaugh isn't actually one of them.

As soon as we got Mabel from school though, the discussion was peppered with "Mummy!" and "Stop talking!" and "When I was in the sandbox I looked for Anne but I couldn't find her..." and "Nobody is allowed talk!" and other such imperious demands. Which is why we don't usually get to have conversations.

Now, where's that babysitter's e-mail again?
___

Note: I hope I haven't offended anyone with my offhand dismissal of all Republican politicians as crazies. Your views are your own, and mine, as I am pointing out, are all but non-existent. I'm trying to remedy this, so that I have actual opinions the better with which to offend you. I mean, other people who aren't reading this.

Doin' it rong, cos I don't like right

I read advice columns sometimes, but sometimes I should really know to leave well enough alone and stop at the title. This morning I made the mistake of reading this one, and it's possible I took it a mite too personally.

Amy is a favourite blogger of mine, and has three boys: Noah is a few months older than my Monkey, Ezra is just a month older than Mabel, and - well, there ends our uncanny bloggy connection, as she just had Isaac (Ike) this past June, and I - I'm fine, thanks all the same. She's a great mom and gives good, heartfelt, well-reasearched, and sensible advice.

On the other hand, her boys, so far, have been great sleepers, and neither Noah nor Ezra was as devoted to the boob as my children were/are. (Since Ike is only two months old, I'll give him a pass.) This particular entry in her advice column isn't even about sleeping or breastfeeding - it's about a toddler who asks for a midnight snack - but, of course, I was able to read deep into the subtext and divine that, once again, I'm doing it All Rong.

Of course I am. This is not news, it's just that I prefer to leave these things unsaid and not have people blare them onto my laptop right during my quiet time. Of course Mabel wakes up multiple times a night and demands to nurse, because I have programmed her to do so. Of course she's not going to change this habit of her own volition, because it's too cushy. Even though I constantly find patterns where patterns are not and decide, for example, as I did last night at 3am, that she's dropping a waking all on her own - she normally wakes at 10 and 12 and 3, but last night she woke at 11 and then not till 3 - it's probably not really true. Anyway, then she latched on again at 4.30 and didn't seem to come off till she got up at 7.30, so it wasn't really an improvement.

But have you met my daughter? Maybe you haven't. She's feisty. She's loud. When crossed, she goes full-on Exorcist. When crossed and tired, she's ear-splitting and tragic and I just don't have the resources to deal with that at 3am. She's strong and determined and will be a great woman to have in your corner in a few years' time, but right now she's in nobody's corner but her own because a) she's 2, and b) at 3am, who isn't?

And you know, it doesn't matter. I don't care (much) that I'm doing it all wrong. I'm not dropping from exhaustion because I co-sleep for half the night and my body is perfectly used to it. I'm not wasting away from all the breastfeeding, and I get to eat a bunch of good stuff without putting on weight. In a few years' time, both my children will be grade-schoolers, running around with their friends and barely giving me the time of day, and I'll have new things to be doing wrong, like homework enforcement and peer-pressure defence and computer time and figuring out when it's reasonable for a kid to have their own phone these days. And nobody will be asking me how long it took before Mabel slept through the night or when she weaned or when she potty trained.

So yes, I'm a sap, and a mug, and maybe some day I'll start doing it right. But I doubt it.

Apostrophizing

Every night since we came back (that's, ooh, twelve nights now) I've wondered if this will be the one when Mabel goes to sleep without a trip downstairs or three for a drink/waffle/book/talk to Daddy. So far, apart from that one evening when I wasn't home till after nine because of a committee meeting, that night has not yet come. Maybe it will be tonight.

No. No, it's not tonight.

Meanwhile, let's talk about possessive plurals.

About three of you said "Yes, let's," and everyone else's index finger is slowly migrating north to that suddenly more attractive Next Blog link. Well, fine. Go if you want, but you might miss something. I'm just warning you.

It all began with the Presidents Club, which was something dreamed up by the Sales Department of the software company I used to work for, to entice its members to sell, sell, sell our product. The sales people were all (mostly) in the USA, and I was in Ireland, where head office lay. And somehow we in the Editing Department, desperate for work so as not to be downsized, had got our tentacles on Marketing Stuff and I was faced with proofing some internal baloney about how if you sold Lots and Lots of computer-based training courses, you too could become a member of the prestigious Presidents Club and go on a special trip to New Orleans next summer.

This may be something that all US-based sales departments have, but I was not US-based and had never been in sales, and I was very hazy as to what on earth all this was about. I sent confused e-mails back to someone in California asking what president this was, and how many presidents we were talking about here, and in what sense was this or was this not the club of/for/by/about one or more presidents. And whether they could not just call it something less ambiguous, please, instead?

Now that I'm older and wiser and know about Presidents Day, I am more forgiving of the presidents club. I passed more than one third Monday of February in this country before I acquiesced to those who forwent the apostrophe. I wanted it to be the day of all the past presidents, and therefore to be Presidents' Day. But no! It's not the day of them, it's the day celebrating them, about them, if you will. So no possessive needed.

Looking back, I would now charitably assume that whoever invented the damn Presidents Club was modelling it on the eponymous Day, and I would just leave well enough alone. But that was then, and I can only apologise so much for apostrophes inserted where none were due.

But every week now for half the year, twice a week at least, I'm faced with a similar - but not similar enough, more's the pity - conundrum, as from May or June on, I begin to see signs pop up on random street corners for a market where farmers gather to sell their produce directly to the public. A farmers' market. Or a farmers market? Is it a market of the farmers, by the farmers, or about the farmers? I think we can all agree that it's not a farmer's market, unless it's particularly tiny, but beyond that I'm no longer as decisive as I was in my confidently dogmatic youth. Perhaps the sign is merely telling me that farmers market. Yes, they do.

I'm not even going to try to tell you about the confusion that arose in my mind when I encountered the phrase "Laissez les bon temps rouler" in the same internal sales brochure. If only we'd had Wikipedia in 1999.

I'll have what she's having

Having a baby is quite a lot like having sex.

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

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

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

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

I'm just warning you.


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

Unasked-for advice

If some poor soul asked me, not realising how much and how long I can go on about such things, what wisdom I had to impart about having a baby (a first baby, I mean), I would tell them, first, and then in great detail, how it is utterly impossible to underestimate the amount that this will change everything, totally and for ever.

Which isn't surprising, really, considering you're talking about being in charge of a new person, from scratch, just you and (if you're lucky) your partner. But we humans, we get the baby urge and we go all gurgly around small ones, and we tend to play down this aspect of procreation. It's Darwinian - if we thought about it too hard, nobody would ever reproduce. I'm (belatedly) reading Anne Lamott's Operating Instructions, and at one point she confesses that she thought having a baby would be a little more like having a cat. I think we all did, probably.

But then I would tell the person who had asked and was now probably already regretting it, especially if I was telling them in e-mail form because they'd get several chapters' worth in reply, probably replete with ennumerated, or at least bulleted, lists; on the other hand, I'd never know if they just closed the window and went on their merry way - at least until the pop quiz arrived the next week - I'd tell the person that they should do as I say and not as I do about this next bit.

Try to keep some things that don't change, I'd say. Whether it's some semblance of an exercise routine, or going shopping with your best friend, or having a date night, or even all three and something else as well, you should do your utmost to continue with some regular activity that was part of your life before the baby, albeit a bit less often. But not as un-often as I've managed to do this: to wit, taking two years to go back to my one puny weekly exercise class ("not that there's anything puny about advanced pilates, thank you," says my core; also "ow"), we've averaged about two date nights a year so far, and my shopping-companion best friend is still in Dublin, so we have an annual shopping trip, if lucky.

It's the guilt, you see. The maternal guilt. On the rare occassions when I'm out of the house and away from the children, even with them in the very capable hands of their father, I constantly feel like an escapee from the asylum, liable to be caught and returned at any moment, and that if I tarry one minute longer than the shortest time possible, something terrible will happen. The only time the guilt subsides is when they're asleep, and my entire body relaxes and and a Pavlovian desire for a cup of tea and something very chocolate rushes over me. Even then, there are so many things I should be doing in this "down time", from blogging to laundry to relaxing and reading a book (Books. I remember them.) that it's not long before the nagging feeling comes back. Oh for the days when I had one thing to be doing at one time (work, or drinking, or lying on my bed listening to my new CD) and even extra time in there when I had to invent things to do, like trying on all my clothes (not at once) or playing with eyeshadow or reorganizing the bookshelf according to publisher/edition.

These are not those days, is what I'm trying to say. Some day, no doubt, I'll be bored again. Until then, my books will remain in haphazard order and I'll just be happy if they're not chewed on. Too much.

Gracious in defeat

The experiment has been called off. You could call it Mabel winning, but I prefer to think of it as me coming to my senses.

Last night I only lasted till 9.00, despite my best intentions of duking it out with her till ten. She was more tired than the previous day, and the night before had taken its toll, so that by 8.30 she was into some concentrated crying; abject misery ahoy. Her body so badly wanted to sleep, but she had no idea how to go about it without the mumeet. I wasn't just depriving her of a crutch she no longer really needed; I was taking away her life support.

Winning pathetic quote from the first night: "Why is it raining in my bedroom?" "It's not raining, Baby, you're crying."

So yes, no more of that. Which leaves me feeling (a) sorry that I put her through it, but (b) at least I know and will stop thinking about this as a possibility for a while, but also (c) like a wuss who is totally pushed around by her baby. Sleep training just isn't for me.

Hah. I bought the Marc Weissbluth book, Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child, when I was delightfully innocent about babies, and pregnant with Monkey. I had all these great intentions of getting it right from the start, so that I would lose as little sleep as possible, because sleep was important to me. If you had told me then that five years later I'd be resignedly getting up several times a night, I might have shelved the entire idea of having children. It's amazing how adaptable the human body is.

Weissbluth had some useful things to say, especially the fact that most newborns can't/shouldn't stay awake for more than two hours before needing to nap again, and the 2-3-4 pattern for babies who take two naps (if that's even where I read about that); but he is basically a proponent of crying it out, though on a less cruel scale than Ezzo, whom I've never even read. We tried his methods (Weissbuth's, not Ezzo's) a little when Monkey was young, but they had no effect and I wasn't willing to keep trying. After that I read every sleep book on the block (or in the library, as well as the ones I leafed through standing up in Barnes & Noble) with equally little success.

The Sleep Lady's technique, of moving your chair a little nearer the door every three days until you'd left the room, was particularly laughable. I remember reading large chunks of Harry Potter in what I hoped was a soporific drone to Monkey as he yelled from his crib - from the moment I put him in, there was never a point when he wasn't crying to be taken out again, so the notion of softening the blow by moving gradually a little further away was totally pointless. Eventually I just left the room and shouted to him every now and then so he knew I was still around. He would fall asleep, but it was pathetic and never got better. One day he finally conked out kneeling up hanging onto the bars of the crib, with his face all smushed up against them. It was the saddest thing I'd ever seen, but kind of hilarious too. We stopped after a while.

Mabel is even more disinclined to sleep than Monkey ever was. If I remove myself from her orbit too soon, even though she's 98% out, she'll rear up like a zombie, eylids fluttering heavily open, and demand the other side. She's always been a light sleeper, so my creeping back to my own bed in the middle of the night is enough to rouse her a little, so that five or ten minutes later, just when I've got comfy, she'll wake again. This is really the first time I've tried to go against her will with sleeping, as after our experiences with Monkey I was happy enough to take the easy (quiet, angst-free) road for a long time with Mabel. I'm pretty sure if I'd tried to do it sooner the result would have been just the same, albeit with less conversation. We'll try again in a few months, or maybe - hey, I'm an optimist - she'll just grow out of it.

The truth is that nobody who wrote a sleep book had my babies. And even if I wrote a book, nobody who read it would have my babies either. Some things work for some babies, but mostly you just have to grope your way in the dark (often literally) towards the best solution for your family - for now, or for the future. Good luck.

 

Probably one of the few times he slept in his crib. Which is why I took a picture. 

And I can guarantee you that he did not go in there awake.

Cereal offender

When I first moved to the USA, I was baffled and bedazzled by the supermarket aisles, with their millions of unfamiliar foodstuffs in such enormous quantities. The cereal aisle, in particular, took my breath away. I've always been a fan of cereal - Rice Krispies for breakfast every morning of my childhood, two Weetabix after I came home from school, a packet of Kellogg's Variety mini boxes for a treat every now and then, with Coco Pops as the highlight of the week. As I got older, I embraced Special K - because the very act of eating it makes you thinner; and Crunchy Nut Cornflakes are like Frosties for grownups.

But cereal in America didn't taste the same. Between the extra sweetness of even my favourite old reliables, and the funny taste of the milk - no matter what percentage I got - it tasted weird. The milk here is different from my beloved Avonmore SuperMilk of yore, but I think a major part of the difference can be boiled down to four little letters: HFCS.

When I found out about high-fructose corn syrup, I decided I didn't like the sound of it very much. Call me insular, but I felt it would be better for my palate and my health to try to keep the basics of my diet in the US as much like my Irish diet as I could.

Initially, this was because I didn't want to move home and find that nothing was sweet enough for me any more. Now that I have two small people relying on me for their nourishment (directly and in-), I'm continuing to avoid HFCS as much as I can in our everyday foods. At first I felt that my reasoning was a bit feeble: if I didn't grow up with it, and if they wouldn't get it in Ireland, I don't want them to have it here. Then I read about Michael Pollan's book and discovered that one of his rules for eating is that if your grandmother wouldn't recognise it, it's not food. So I felt vindicated, because I'm pretty sure neither of my grandmothers would have an iota what that sickly sweet stuff was, or what it would be doing in bread, crackers, yogurt, or corn flakes.

I'm not obsessive about what my children eat: they're not allergic to anything, and if there's candy from Easter or Halloween or parties, they can have it; but since Monkey's diet in particular is so limited, I do try to rein him in on the blatantly anti-nutritious goodies while I still can. I've managed to eliminate HFCS from the bread, cereal, crackers, yogurt, ketchup, ice cream, and even the cookies that we buy on a regular basis (the kids don't get the cookies: I do). If Monkey has Cinnamon Toast Crunch or Ritz crackers in school for snack, I'm not going to make a fuss, but I don't buy them for home consumption. When he has chocolate milk, I try to make sure it's the sort without HFCS.

I don't spend hours reading labels: I just find the item I want, and then it becomes part of our regular shopping list. Did you know, for instance, that Kellogg's Frosted Mini Wheats have HFCS in them, but the Safeway own-brand ones don't? Isn't that strange?

So. (That was just the back story.) As you may know, we like to go to IKEA every once in a while. (Though I must admit that since the buying-things-for-the-new-house frenzy has calmed down, I find fewer excuses to go.) Now, it's not that I think of IKEA as a bastion of health food, but they do make a big deal of their kids' food options. The chocolate milk there is HFCS-free, so that's something, and usually, assuming I could run the gauntlet of ice-cream demands, I would get the children a yogurt each and be happy with a sticky bun for myself.

But lately, it has seemed that every time we go to IKEA, Mabel ends up like a whirling dervish, acting like someone who's an hour past her naptime even when there's still an hour to go. The last time this happened, it finally dawned on me that maybe I should be putting two and two together. The yogurt in IKEA is Trix yogurt: a small pot aimed directly at the jugular of youth, with pink and yellow dairy product together in one HFCS-enhanced sludge. I looked it up when we got home. If you google "Trix yogurt," the first two hits after an ad for "Nutrition to help your kids grow up strong" and some images, are a series of blog posts detailing how horrible Trix really is, how it's a big old pile of nothing good for you complemented by totally unneccesary additives and colourings.

So maybe, just maybe, that's what sets Mabel off like an increasingly intractable rocket each time we go there. It could be the HFCS itself, since she's not used to it, but it's more likely the infusion of Red #40 and Blue #1 as well as the unnamed artificial flavourings.

I'd have been better off letting them have the ice-cream, except that now I want to know what they put in that, and it doesn't come with an ingredients list printed on the cone.

Bedtime for Frances

I wore my contact lenses today and was horrified by the filth of the house when I see it unencumbered by my crappy glasses. I really need to call those people about laser surgery, if only to find out that I'm not a candidate and stop wondering about it. I also really need to hoover the stairs.

(Now accepting bets on which will happen first.)

There's a story called Bedtime for Frances, which is an endearing little number (if a tad tedious, but I think that's part of the plan) about a badger who doesn't want to go to sleep. She comes out to her parents as the night goes on with various demands and worries, eventually waking her father to tell him the curtains are moving in the wind. (I particularly like the bit where she comes downstairs to find her parents having tea and cake in front of the TV. As if that would happen.) He is, understandably, not happy to be woken, and tells her that he has to get up in the morning and go to work, because that's his job, and that moving the curtains is the wind's job, and that going to sleep is Frances's job, and that if she doesn't go back to bed, she will get a spanking.

Every time I read it, we do fine until that part, where I cringe slightly and move swiftly onwards. Usually I'm reading it to Mabel, who doesn't comment, but one day recently Monkey was listening in too. "What's a spanking?" he asked, inevitably.

Such a funny moment. Surely at the age of almost five, even obedient, sheltered I knew what a spanking was, and had even been given one or two. Isn't it strange, and nice, and sad, that my son had to ask - and that I had to tell him? It sounded so peculiar and primitive, even as I chose my words, to explain that some parents would hit their children to try to get them to behave. (I didn't say "hit" because that sounds far too violent. I demonstrated by slapping his hand gently and telling him a spanking would be like that only harder, so that it hurt.) He was a little bemused, but took it on board.

I'm not saying there have never been moments when I wanted to thwap him one on the side of the head, or that I'll always manage to restrain myself in the future. I'm certainly guilty of yanking an arm too hard on occasion, and not being terribly sorry if something got bumped on the way. But if a cardinal rule in the house, and the school, and the child's society as a whole is "Do not hit," then hitting them to enforce that or any other dictat is surely illogical. (Jim.) And will compromise our credibility as the ones doing the enforcing.

The next day I was reading The Tale of Tom Kitten to Mabel. When Mrs Tabitha Twitchet finds her kittens in the garden with their fine clothes nowhere to be seen and company about to arrive, she pulls them off the wall and smacks them. "'Spanks,' you mean," said Monkey, knowingly.

How soon they learn. One more balloon of childhood innocence rudely popped by beloved children's authors.

Welcome to the dollhouse

Monkey's pinkeye was noncontagious (and totally cured, for that matter) just in time to attend a classmate's birthday party on Saturday. On Friday afternoon it occurred to me that I should procure a present.

Me: What should we give A____ for her birthday, Monkey?
Him: Ummm. Something with princesses.
Me: Oh, is she into princesses?
Him: Or something pink. Because she's a girl. And girls like ... girly things.

I think it's possible he just formed that adjective off his own bat, because I try not to refer to particular things as girly (or boyly, which is of course the alternative). But he managed to insert exactly the expected amount of scorn for all things pink and princessy into it that you would expect from an almost-five-year-old boy.

So off I went to Target the next morning with a special dispensation to shop alone so long as I didn't take too long about it, to trawl the aisles for something suitable and pick up milk and bananas and maybe a couple of other things (tra la laa... I tripped and fell into this dressing room and I just happened to find a t-shirt in my hand) on the way. But seriously, it took a lot of thought just to get the darned present.

Because the choice of a birthday present for someone else's child is rife with potential hazards. Especially when you're shopping in Target instead of some adorable independent toystore full of overpriced German wooden toys and also plenty of cute stuff you'd actually like your children to receive (coughFranklinscough). You don't want to be That Parent who started the child on a year(s)-long obsession with something unsuitable - ever, or just at this early age - like, say, Bratz dolls, or Barbies, or even Disney princesses, unless you know that they already like and own some of it already (and you have the parent's blessing).

I stomped around the store getting all het up about how, as soon as you've passed the baby and toddler toys, everything is strictly segregated by gender: two aisles of unmitigated pink pink pink, followed by three aisles of cars, guns, and lego. Even outside the toy department, I was assailed by licenced characters on most of the kids' items: you'd be hard pressed to buy so much as a pair of underpants (not that I think Monkey should go round giving the girls in his class new underpants for their birthdays) or an insulated water bottle without encountering the damn princesses or some other my-little-pony-esqe design.

In the end, I was pleased to find an oversized pearl necklace and matching crown for dressing up, with no branding beyond that of the basic Target toys. Admittedly, it was pink and girly, but I'm pretty sure A___ enjoys dressing up (if my stints in the classroom are anything to go by), and I thought it would pass muster with her mum too. (And I managed to remember to get a gift receipt for once, despite the rookie employee on the register who had no idea what I was asking for, let alone how to make one come out of the machine.)

Anyway, the whole experience made me realise that for some reason, I have much more scorn for the princesses, and a great desire to keep Mabel away from them and all things Barbie for as long as possible, than I do for the boyly (see?) obsessions like Spider-Man and Batman that we have running rampant in the house already. But is this just because I've been worn down by two years of superheroes, or is there something innately worse about the girly stuff? For instance, I was very close to buying Mabel a pink Batman t-shirt the other day (but they didn't have her size), but I would never ever spontaneously buy her a princess t-shirt - at least not until that point in the future when I'm worn down by nagging and whining and I see a cute one.

Thinking back, this is how Spider-Man started with us. It crept in insidiously, a found action figure here, a pack of bribery underpants there, a comic-strip t-shirt on the sale rail. In each instance, I weighed the attractiveness of the item in question (I'm mostly talking about clothes here) against the delight I knew would follow its reception. (The underpants were unmitigatedly hideous, but they were hidden. And in a good cause. I just bought him Lego Batman ones to replace them with the other day. Also ugly, but I don't care so much any more. See? Beaten down.)

At a yard sale a few months ago, I paused for a moment at a box of old Barbies, and then decided that there's no rush: she loves her dolls for now, and at some point someone will give her a Barbie (or a Sindy: I had two Sindys and loved them hard for many years) and that will be okay. I'm not going to be all "nothing but anatomically correct dolls made of biodegradable materials dyed in earth tones and fashioned by authentic Nepalese peasants for my precious snowflake" about it, and I don't have moral and feminist objections to the princesses (as some people, perhaps very sensibly, do). Since we already own The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast, I'd be a bit late on this front, though Mabel hasn't seen either of them yet. (The reason we have them is a long story. Let me just say that where other people's husbands see their children as the perfect excuse to pick up on (or, let's be honest, continue with) their Star Wars obessions, my husband is not only a comic-book geek but is also rather fond of some Disney soundtracks. So certain movies get added to the "kids'" collection much as my father bought "me" a fishing rod for my tenth birthday. Anyhoo. Moving on. Not bitter at all.)

I think it's kind of cool that Mabel likes Batman and plays with the action figures just as much as she does with her dolls. (Wolverine and Aquaman can be babies too, you know.) We have one Tinkerbell book (at Monkey's request, actually, a year or two ago), but that's as much Disney fairy dust as has been sprinkled on our household so far, and I'm not eager to add more before I have to.

Today it was raining and Mabel pulled out Monkey's old, broken Scooby-Doo umbrella. They both fought over it all the way to school, and I ended up promising Mabel that we'd go and buy her an umbrella of her own soon. She was delighted to hear it. And then she asked, "Can it be pink?"


You can take the girl out of the pretty, but you can't take the pretty out of the girl, it seems.

Cultural exchange of information

Some facts about St Patrick's Day in Ireland that American readers might not know:

- St Patrick's Day may be called Paddy's Day, but never, ever Patty's Day. Ever.

- St Patrick's Day is the national holiday, so it's a day off school and work for everyone. But it's also a holy day, because of the Saint bit, so you have to go to Mass. Before Mass you get a little bunch of shamrock, preferably with a clod of earth still attached, and you affix it to your lapel, like a very agricultural corsage. (I don't know where you get it. From your mother, usually. She gets it from her dealer, over a cup of extra-milky tea and some contraband custard creams. I suppose.)

- If you don't go to Mass, you miss your chance to sing the hymn of the day, Hail Glorious Saint Patrick, which is wheeled out just once a year, and which you've been practising in school all week.

- On Saint Patrick's Day you have a special dispensation from on high to break Lent. This means that if you've given up sweets for the 40 days prior to Easter - within which March 17 always falls - you are allowed to buy a large bar of Cadbury's Dairy Milk and eat it while watching the parade. If you've given up the holy trinity of sweets, crisps, and chocolate, you can have a pack of Tayto as well. And maybe a bag of Milky Moos, but only if you go to the cinema.

- Depending on the weather, you may choose to go home and watch the parade on telly. This is allowed. If you decide to brave the rain/hail/sleet anyway, you will be rewarded with the sight of all the poor Texan majorettes in their short skirts and flesh-coloured tights failing to mask the goosebumps wondering why they came. But, to be honest, you can see that on telly too, so I'm not sure what the point is, except to feel like you earned your Dairy Milk. If your fingers aren't too numb to break off the squares.

- There are no leprechauns. If there are leprechauns on St Patrick's Day, they are deeply, deeply ironic ones. The Irish are a cynical, sardonic, hard-bitten race, and we know that the only thing at the end of the rainbow is rain, and banks lining their pockets with tax-payers' money.



Some facts about St Patrick's Day in America that Irish people might be interested to hear:

- Americans think we eat corned beef and cabbage all the time. I've explained numerous times this week that it's meant to be bacon and cabbage, if we ate it at all, which most of us don't. Corned beef is the Irish-American substitute because you can't get the right sort of bacon here.

- If you don't wear some item of green clothing on the 17th of March, people are allowed to pinch you.

- Americans have shamrocks and four-leafed clovers inextricably mixed up. Because four-leafed clovers are lucky, and shamrocks are Irish, and luck and Irish go together, so... that makes perfect sense.

- On the 16th of March children all over the USA are hard at work making leprechaun traps. The next morning they come downstairs, or go to school, to find that a mischeivous sprite has wreaked a little havoc with the toys or in the kitchen, maybe left a few green footprints, and possibly a peace offering of some green cookies or cupcakes.

I don't know why Americans find it necessary to give their children imaginary nighttime visitors so often: I've already carped about Santa Claus, and the tooth fairy will soon be breathing down our necks, but I didn't realise till last year that the Easter Bunny was also a real, live, fictional character whose cover I wasn't meant to blow while parents sowed the lawn with pastel plastic eggs - and now this. I'm a bit appalled. I may be That Parent if this sort of thing is perpetrated next year. (Monkey missed school today due to continuing pinkness of eye.) And I'm a big old curmudgeon, I know.

Happy Day of Greenness. I dressed the children in yellow and pink, and we had red lentil coconut curry for dinner.

By any other name

When I was a child in Ireland, lo these many years ago, grown-ups were called by their last names: Mister this and Missus that; and Miss the other, in the rare instance of an unmarried woman (such as my recorder teacher and her sister, the infamous Misses K__ of D__ [I'm going for a Jane Austen approach here. Is it working?]). My teachers and my friends' parents all went by this rule. My parents' friends were a bit more of a conundrum: my parents would refer to their friends by first and last names, in almost all instances - well, when everyone you know is called either John or Catherine, I suppose you have to clarify; personally I favour a return to descriptive names like Big John and John the Shoe and John from Wicklow, but some people seem to like given monikers.

Anyway. I grew up, left my days of Mrs Quinn and Miss McDonagh and Mr Dunne behind, and started work, and was always instructed to call my bosses by their first names. I worked for Liam, and Teresa, and Helen, and TG and Kate. Generation gaps were smoothed away as I, first a teenager waiting tables and later a graduate in my early twenties (and not waiting tables, thank you), blithely addressed my elders and betters as if they were my best friends. At least, I'm sure that's what my mother would say. She's not a fan of all this pally-ness. She likes to be addressed as Mrs. Lastname. She will view you with some suspicion if, on first meeting, you try to call her by her first name.

And now I am here. You can tell me, if you like, whether this is a function of the country I'm in, or the part of the country I'm in - Maryland is technically the South, if barely - or the generation I'm in, but many children here address adults as Miss/Mr Firstname. At first it sounded peculiar to me, and while I'm getting quite used to being referred to as Miss Maud on occasion (as much as I'm used to being addressed by four-year-olds as "Monkey's Mom"), the male version - Mister Steve, or whatever, still sounds odd and a little forced to my ears.

And I am bad. I know I should adhere to the When In Rome rule, but not being a dyed-in-the-wool Southerner, or anything remotely like it, I don't insist that my children preface every other adult's name with a title. I sort of play it by ear - if a friend has their child call me Miss Maud, I try to reciprocate with my children. If a friend hails from Alabama, say, f'rinstance, I can be pretty sure this will be the polite thing to do. But with others I'm more lax and let the kids go with just first names. I certainly bear no ill will towards little 'uns who call me whatever they want to call me, so long as it's not Hey Stinkyface.

What do you think? Will civilization crumble if children don't address their elders with an honorific? Is this a regionalism, or the norm in all of the US? Do your children call everyone by their first name, last name, or do they have courtesy aunts and uncles up the wazoo? (And how painful is that, anyway?) Should I beat some manners into my kids quick smart before they kick me out of the country? Or are good manners just an outdated concept? (Don't worry, I know the answer to the last one. I'm just not sure how vital this particular aspect is.) Set me straight, why don't you?

Granola

I really like this town. It's just crunchy enough for an aspiring hippie like myself, without being overpoweringly hemp-and-tie-dye and I-can't-believe-you-vaccinate.

For example. At our regular Wednesday lunchtime playground session a month or two ago, there was a newcomer with her two-year-old and her burgeoning bump. She said they'd moved to the area fairly recently and, wanting a natural birth, she'd looked up midwives in the yellow pages (or Googled them, more probably) and found a place called Special Beginnings in Annapolis. She wondered if any of us had heard of it.

We looked around the table, did a quick headcount, and said, "Well, three out of the four of us had our babies there." The fourth had gone to a birthing center attached to a hospital nearby. She was delighted to find such good recommendations. I just thought it was amusing how many of us had had non-mainstream births.

That day wasn't particularly an anomaly, though there could easily have been others at the table who had gone the more "normal" route with a planned epidural or a c-section at a hospital; and of course those who despite hoping for a drug-free birth may have ended up with something else instead. No matter what your birth plan, you have to allow that the baby, or nature, sometimes has other ideas.

But "normal" in this context is such an odd word. If we were in The Netherlands or Germany, a normal birth would be at home, or less commonly in a birthing center. Even in Ireland, where I always assumed I would have my children, and where hospital births are the norm, they are mostly attended by midwives. Giving birth is not an illness or an injury: the notion that it should happen in a hospital has only been around since the 1950s or so, and even then, clearly not everywhere.

Mabel's birth was so quick and "easy" - that is, not remotely painless, but very straightforward - that I always said if I had a third I would do a home birth. The idea of being able to just lie back down in my own bed and go to sleep for the night with my new baby beside me, at home, is divine. Right now, the idea of a third is, while not off the table entirely, definitely mostly hypothetical. But a home birth would not be so easy to pull off, because technically such a thing is difficult (if not impossible) to do legally in this state. Ironically, it would be easier to have one in Ireland.

But if I was in Ireland, I suspect I'd qualify as a fully fledged crazy hippie, whereas here I'm just in the minor league.