Another five

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

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

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

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

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

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

Baby update

The babies have been earning their keep lately, you'll be pleased to hear.

They've been going to school.

Some of them are exemplary students.

And they all have their names on flashcards.

After a hard morning's learning, it's time for a snack and some TV.

Pinterest-worthy?

I needed a storage solution for all the stuffed toys. Mabel has amassed a large number of stuffed toys, because she likes to put families together. This means that one stuffed dog/horse/cheetah is not enough: the more the better, but at least three or four so there can be a mommy, a daddy, a little sister and a big brother. Aw.

So the stuffed toys were growing out of the red box we had them in and proliferating all over the already laden shelves.

On a trip to Ikea I spotted the perfect thing: light, flexible, see-through, inexpensive laundry baskets. We got one for the playroom and one for Mabel's bedroom, but after the one upstairs migrated downstairs several days in a row, I'm putting up with just having both of them down here all the time.

Isn't that great? Don't you think you too should use an Ikea laundry basket as stuffed toy storage?

Because then your children can chuck the stuffed toys all over the room and pretend they're caterpillars turning into butterflies.

(This is curiously reminiscent of the bottom picture here. They're a little bigger now.)

Promise

The trees are holding next week's blossoms tightly furled and fuzzy in the palms of their many hands, each one ready to burst forth given just a little more sunshine, a little more warmth, a little more time. They are a beautiful dark red, waiting to explode into pink.

The sky is grey, briefly blue, streaked with white, then grey again. A flurry of snowflakes, a handful of gravelly graupel, some rain that starts and stops and starts again. It's a particularly hard March, and that's just on this side of the Atlantic. At least here I can be pretty sure that eventually spring warmth will come - and after that (with luck, not too soon after) the hot and humid days of summer. In Ireland, though the flowers will bloom and the trees will sway green and lush in the breeze, warmth is what you yearn for and heat will probably only be found somewhere further afield. It will come, the warmth, but not as much or for as long as everyone might like.

 
It's the grey first day of spring break and already the children have dropped their bikes and invaded the neighbour's house, where the toys are better and the snacks more plentiful. I just had a phone call from across the road to ask if they could eat a piece of leftover birthday cake. I was a little surprised that I was being asked such a no-brainer.

Purveyor of Cake: "Dash suggested I call and make sure it was okay to give you some."
Me: "Ah, isn't that sweet of him? What a good child."
P of C: "Mabel suggested she'd have some even if you said no."

That there pretty much sums up the children's personalities at the moment. Up and down; a little give, a lot of take; potential everywhere: just like spring.

Ersatz

Sometimes I don't know why we bother with toys. I know it's just another riff on the baby-loves-boxes theme, but this is what I found Mabel playing with this afternoon, after she'd raided the kitchen for implements.

And then I asked her to clean up a mess and she found the cutest little family of sweeping brushes.

Then again, maybe it's because all the babies were napping.

 

A lucky escape

They are thick as thieves, these two, these days. The terrible twosome, double trouble, a handful indeed - at times, two handsful and then some.

She has some clothing on, I promise. You just can't see it.

Remember last summer, when I was a little wistful because Mabel was in a hating phase, experimenting with mean words and cruel actions, and pushing her brother away? Since then she has definitely discovered the power of cooperation, the delights of teamwork and also how much fun it is to gang up on one defenseless parent. At bedtime. When the other has gone to a meeting. For instance.

I had a big long whiny rant here about how tired I am and how hard it is and why am I supposed to not just lock them into their rooms at bedtime to avoid all that undignified crying (of mine), but luckily for you, then I uploaded the photos and would much rather show you some more of those instead.

 

Then they noticed the snow.

Hooray for hand-me-down coats, thrift-store snowboots and yard-sale snow pants. Hat from Dunnes Stores.

Not enough for snowmen, but just about enough to make a grassy snow angel.

There's a fence there before the big drop, you just can't see it.

The snow brings all the kids to my back yard. (That's Mabel and Dash on the left.) After half an hour's sledding there was hardly any snow left on the grass, so they were forced to abandon sled and go to school instead.

A slideshow and a cautionary tale

Mabel and I played with PhotoBooth yesterday. Then I spent all this evening wrestling with iPhoto and iMovie to turn the photos into a slideshow I could put here, and to turn off the damn Ken Burns effect. (If you have no idea what this is, you're lucky. I hope you don't have to find out.)

So you can think of this as a whole bunch of mummy mugshots, and it's not even Monday. It's true I'm reluctant to put myself on my blog; not from any sense of anonymity (seriously, if someone I knew in real life happened upon my blog without my sending them there, I'd be more chuffed than miffed; it's very unlikely to happen) but more because I think my kids are cuter than I am.

Still, it's always easier to smile for the camera when you have a prop, and Mabel and a miniature My Little Pony make good props.

********

In contrast to the past few days, the most exciting thing I did today was to park incredibly badly.

Three o'clock struck in the Chipper household, which meant it was time to swoop out the door with Mabel in the stroller and pick Dash up from school. But no! Mabel ran the wrong way, hopped on the loo, and demanded a game of Who Am I? Which meant she was there for the long haul.

"But Mabel," I pleaded, "we have to get Dash."
"I'm doing a poo."

Five minutes and one very misleading game of Who Am I? later, I realised we would be driving to school. It's only two minutes up the road in the car. Eventually, Mabel was done, hands were washed, shoes were on, baby cheetahs were wrapped up in blankies, and we were on our way. We weren't really late, but it's my only excuse for what was to follow.

Usually, you see, I pride myself on my parallel parking. It's not fabulous, really, because I don't get nearly the amount of practice I used to when I could shoehorn my wafer-thin mint of a car into a space the size of a postage stamp in the middle of Dublin city, and I was never anything like as good as my best friend, who would leave herself with about an inch leeway at both ends in double-quick time, but compared to most Americans, I'm pretty decent.

More importantly, I'm better at it than my husband, usually. I instinctively know which way to turn the steering wheel to maximize the infinitesimal movement of the car backwards and forwards into the spot until I'm right beside the curb. This knowledge is especially helpful when I sit beside him, shaking my head and making useful motions with my hands to show him which way he should be turning the wheel at any given moment in his parking efforts.

Except today, my parking karma deserted me. There was a perfectly good space between two other cars near the school entrance. I reversed in, taking it a mite too tight on the first go, as I am wont to do. I moved forward. I moved backwards. I thought "Isn't it nice the way the front of the car is never quite as far out as I'm afraid it might be from here?" I saw the car in front of me rock. "That's funny," I thought, moving back and twirling the wheel blithely, by instinct rather than design. The next time I moved forward, it rocked again. "Oh shit," I thought but did not say out loud. "I hope there's nobody sitting in that car," I did say out loud. "Why?" asked Mabel.

In some sort of insane stress-fuelled frenzy, I very gently bumped the car in front about twice more before I belatedly concluded that this wasn't going to work. I couldn't get out again forwards, so I gunned it in reverse and felt my back wheel mount the sidewalk, as I had intended. My front wheel came up against the curb. I realised I had lost all sense of which way to turn the wheel at any given moment. There were about ten feet between me and the car behind; ten milimeters the other way.

"Right," I said cheerfully to Mabel. "Let's just leave it like this."

First I checked that the car in front was indeed empty (it was an SUV, so I couldn't see from where I'd been sitting), and that its bumper was totally undamaged. Then I sheepishly remarked to the woman getting out of the next one up that I seemed to be having a bad parking day. Finally, I hustled Mabel out of the car and we moved away from the scene of the idiocy as quickly as I could, hoping that anyone who saw it would assume it was somebody else's pale green Subaru Outback, not mine.

Five minutes later when we returned with Dash, my car and the one in front were the only ones still there. I was afraid I'd angled my front wheel in such a way that it couldn't reverse at all, and that we'd embarrassingly have to sit there until the driver of the car in front returned to liberate us in a forward motion - which could be all afternoon if it happened not to be someone picking up from school at 3.15 - but - jubliation! - my karma returned and I turned the wheel the right way first time without even thinking about it, and we were reversing and then we were away, gliding smoothly as on wings of pure delight (except for that first bump when the back wheel came down off the footpath).

So here is my lesson for you: never parallel park while stressed. That should be easy, right?

Wishful thinking

In an ideal world, one could take a photo of whatever one's child accomplished today and tweet it to the teacher, or post it on Facebook and tag her, and that would be homework done. Dash will voluntarily write a thank-you card to his sister for a picture she drew of them together, but he won't damn well sit down and do his assigned homework until all else has failed and all bargains have been deployed and everything is an hour behind schedule.

That's a love heart up above them. And so is that one in between them. It's a practice one.

 

 

 

 

 

In an ideal world, I wouldn't have this headache that's been loitering around my right eye socket all day and is now doing handstands on the bridge of my nose.

It would also be nice if the front door would unlock itself when I point the car keys at it and press the blue button. I don't know why it hasn't got the message yet, since I do it at least once a week.

Diorama drama

Never mind the politics, what happened with the diorama, you want to know. Or maybe you never even heard about the diorama, but here I am to tell you all about it. A few weeks ago Dash struck terror into my parental heart by bringing home his first project assignment - for that most iconic of American elementary-school items: a diorama. 

Now, I had only heard of dioramas in The Simpsons and the like, and never really knew what they were, other than something schoolchildren were required to make. Luckily, Facebook and Google came to my rescue when presented with a requirement for one of our very own, and I soon discovered that for these purposes a diorama is a 3-D scene presented in a small space, for example a shoebox.

As luck would have it, Dash's project was to be just that, and we even had a shoebox in the house already. (Several of my friends suggested that I might have to go out and buy a new pair of shoes in order to get it, and wouldn't that have been just terrible, but no, we were all set. Ah well. Maybe next time.) It was to portray a habitat, and should use recycled materials as much as possible.

I was afraid this marked the beginning of a long career in doing my children's science projects, something I really didn't want to ever get roped into. But Dash, to my delight, seemed to know exactly what he had to do, had a clear vision for his art, and would barely even stop to listen while I read the instructions and gave a little advice. I didn't press him to look at the photos I'd found online, since he obviously knew what he wanted. Apparently all those years of pestering us to "help him" make masks, robot suits, jet packs, Thor's hammers, wings, swords, shields, and rockets out of cardboard boxes were not for naught.

A couple of days later notification of an extended deadline came home, along with a "rubric" for the marking of the diorama. (I can only assume that some of the parents felt they needed more information for their masterpiece.) We were told that two points would be awarded for having the correct plants and animals in the habitat, two each for labelling at least one plant and one animal, two for labelling the whole thing with the name and location of the habitat, and two for neat presentation. Right, then.

So without more ado, and with great pride, I present Dash's first diorama, made entirely by himself, aged almost six-and-a-half, with no help from adults.

The only input I had was suggesting a way to make the butterfly on the top stand up, and remarking that he could write the labels for the plant and animal on white paper and stick them in, to make them easier to read.

Close-up for detail. I didn't say anything about the missing 'n'. I thought it added a nice touch of authenticity. He was so enthusiastic, so certain about exactly what he wanted to do, I was just standing back and staying out of the way, lest I accidentally say anything to break the spell.

I suspect it should say "Rainforest", but what's the diff, really? I may also have helped him spell "South", when asked. Because that's a tricky one.

I happened to be in the classroom yesterday, so I saw all the dioramas on display. I'm pretty sure there was more parental input than just spelling advice on the ones that had printed labels, for example. Sheesh.

Dash's may not have been the neatest, the one with the best writing, the most realistically drawn, the one with everything spelled correctly, or the most beautiful; but by heck it's the best first-grade diorama I've ever seen.

I hope his teacher can see that too.

Postcards from Chicago

 

First, to show you what angelic travellers our children are, here's Mabel on the metro to the airport, listening to some music.

Here she is doing some colouring in her new colouring book (five crayons at a time) while we wait at our gate.

Here are Dash and his father making some paper aeroplanes to pass the time. (Who thought a book of paper aeroplanes were a good idea? More to the point, why do I keep typing "airplanes"? How long have I been in this country anyway?)

Chicago! This gorgeous thing is called Cloud Gate, but known locally as The Bean. For obvious reasons.

 

I took a lot of photos of it. This was close to the middle, underneath, looking up.

At this point Mabel had shed her shoes and socks, of course. That day saw the end of the warm weather, but she spent the rest of the trip refusing to wear a coat and trying to take her shoes off again anyway.

Dash admiring the view from the 96th floor of the John Hancock building. That's Lakeshore Drive, looking north.

On a bus to the Museum of Science and Industry. This photo is much more representative of our trip than any of the others, but you need to add a soundtrack of exasperated parents telling them to leave each other alone and sit quietly and fine do you want to watch another episode of Word Girl on the iPod?

 Dash down a coalmine, because the museum is just that cool.

On the L (the El?), plotting our route to support the runner on the morning of the marathon. Well, no, actually I just gave them the maps to entertain themselves and they were mostly just figuring out how to fold them back up again. (Then I had to tell them how being able to fold a map up properly is a very important disappearing art, like reading a map, for that matter.)

Also, please note that Mabel is sporting tights-as-leggings here, because she refused to put on anything further. I hid her under a blanket in the stroller and when she finally got out, I managed to coax a pair of trousers onto her.

But by then, she was barefoot again. Sigh.

My drawers (fnar, fnar)

A few bad nights for Mabel meant I mostly fell off the exercise and housework wagon this week, but I'm proud to announce that our winter clothes are more or less sorted out. (Not B's; he's not included. He wears the same thing all year, minus some shorts and plus some sweaters in the winter. And if he wants them organized he can do his own.)

But my closet looks like this now:

The box holds bags/purses, and the tops/sweaters are organized thus: short sleeved, 3/4 sleeved, long sleeved, wool. The chunky wool ones are on top or hanging. Three pairs of boots are to the right of the box. I don't use a lot of hanging space because it's mostly dresses, skirts, and jackets, and I don't have a lot of any of those. You can see from this that I will be wearing a palate of mostly greens and dark reds/purples this season. Just like every season, because that's what I like.

I didn't take a before picture of the closet, but this is what my pyjamas/stuff drawer still looks like, so you can extrapolate from that:

I'm not saying this is all I have: most of my days are spent in jeans (stuffed-full jeans/chinos drawer not pictured), and I have another of yoga pants and one of underwear and one of nicer clothes I might wear once in a blue moon, and a whole suitcase full of things that don't fit but I'm not ready to give up on, and some more odds and ends in an under-the-bed storage thingy; but the important part is this - this is all the stuff I'm getting rid of:

See? Even the stuff I'm getting rid of is greens and dark reds.

The trash bag holds six pairs of shoes, one of which dates from pre-emigration - that is, more than 10 years ago. The toppling pile has about twenty t-shirts, tops and sweaters, and one pair of jeans that I never liked much. This has now been joined by some summer clothes Dash and Mabel have grown out of (that aren't nice enough to pass on to friends), and a few shirts B is discarding. All this will go to the next yard sale we're involved in, or the thrift store.

I got Dash to try on about twenty pairs of trousers, took away a few, and ascertained that my six-and-a-half-year-old still has 5T-length legs, just about, though his hips have grown out of the slimmest-fitting pants. Since he also refuses to wear any shirts that come below about mid-fly (because they might look like dresses and people might think he's a girl, yaknow), he doesn't need anything new.

(No photo because his room is dark like a man-cave, and his stuff is all stashed in drawers that don't make nice pictures.)

And then, I sorted out my box of things that might fit Mabel this season and reorganized her shelves. She can't reach everything herself, but she's getting more inclined to choose her own clothes, and I'm trying hard to hold my tongue if her choice is reasonable. At least I've put away the high-summer stuff so she'll be less tempted to try to wear a sundress or short shorts on a morning when it's 49 degrees outside. (That's about 9 celcius.)

Her clothes are in IKEA dividers (like this) that are supposed to separate things within drawers. When we moved in here, I had no dresser for Mabel and wasn't using these metal shelves for anything, so we stuck them in her closet and I found the dividers handy (since her clothes were still practically baby things that took up so little space). But her clothes still don't take up much space individually, and though I'm always on the lookout for a small white chest of drawers for her room, this system works fine for now. From the top, L-R, they hold pyjamas, socks, leggings, long-sleeved tops, capris/long shorts, t-shirts, underpants, bottoms/pants, and skirts/dresses that aren't hanging up. There are some chunky sweaters in the basket at the very bottom. The top shelf is a mess of hand-me-down shoes that don't fit yet and summer clothes awaiting sorting.

I could do with another box for the tights stashed on the top left, and I should think about bringing all the upper stuff down so that she can reach it more easily. She needs more dresses, especially since she's lately become very partial to them; I'm working on that and have enlisted e-Bay. I was very disappointed to miss a really good local used-children's-clothing sale last weekend, and I'll miss our local clothing swap next weekend, so my opportunities for snagging the perfect thing are reduced to the thrift store (always there) and the nursery-school yard sale in a few more weeks' time. And the clearance racks at Old Navy, Target, and Gap, of course.

In case you were wondering, this is what the other side of Mabel's closet looks like:

I wouldn't bother showing you, except for my genius sorting system comprising those two boxes. The brown one says "Too big; next season" and now holds summer things from this year that might still fit next, and any summer age 4 stuff I have. The Pampers box says: "Too big; distant future" and contains everything else I've amassed for her that will fit at some point when she's bigger That way I don't have to re-mark the boxes every year when they're no longer holding 4s but now 5s and 6s (Mabel, fitting age 6 clothes? Inconceivable!), and so on. 

Personally, I'm just pleased that I'm the sort of person who uses a semicolon when labelling a box of clothes. I think it says something about me, don't you? Yes. Well.

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.

Two boys, six years, three continents

Thanks to the wonders of modern air travel and funding for conference attendees, Dash has met his friend Moose every summer (and a couple of times in between) since they were born, in places both far flung and more domestic. Here's a quick history.

Can I eat him? wondered Dash

With a giant two-month lead, six-month-old Dash was way ahead of the little Moose. At least, he could sit up without listing to the side. This first momentous encounter took place in Delaware, of all places.

Feed us, zoo people

Things had evened up a bit by the next summer, here waiting for lunch at the Sydney Zoo, Australia. Someone asked us how old they were. We replied "That one's 14 months and this one just turned 12 months." "Oh, are they twins?"

A cheeky little vintage, this 2008 stuff

On top of Gaudi's La Pedrera in Barcelona, two-year-old Dash and Moose stopped for a sophisticated water-and-crackers break.

Ireland calls for sweaters

At almost three, a colouring challenge was issued in Cork. (Dunnes Stores gleaming enticingly in the background there.)

Mooom, he's touching me

 By four, Spider-Man just needed to chill out in Maryland.

Three still fit in one chair

Suddenly, just a year later, we had two great big five-year-olds (and a small girl) in Wales.

It's called "mafs." "No, it's math." "No, mafs." Etc.

And now they're six and yesterday they were together again, playing Angry Birds, having lightsaber fights, and pillow fighting on the sofa (not simultaneously). See you next summer, Moose!