The hustler

What you might call our first date was, I believe, an arrangement to meet up at our university (in the last week of Easter break) and play some pool. With a friend, probably. To the uninformed viewer it might have seemed casual in the utmost. We might have had lunch in the totally unromantic UCD canteen first. Or maybe we pushed the boat out and got one of those little pizzas on the second floor. I should remember, but I don't.

What I remember is the pool table. We went down to "The Trap", which is what everyone called the pool tables and juke box in the basement of the Arts building, beside all the lockers, and put some coins in a table. I think we found our mutual friend (through whom we had first met two weeks earlier) down there; we certainly weren't alone. It being the holidays, the place wasn't thronged with students avidly avoiding lectures, but it wasn't deserted either. Some people could reliably be found in The Trap no matter what the season or semester.

Now, don't be imagining I'm some sort of pool shark. Tom Cruise and Paul Newman would wipe the floor with me in half a second flat. But ever since my friend and I used to push the white ball around the empty table in the Dunlaoghaire Motor Yacht Club with our hands, or watch the coloured balls lining up with those lovely clicks through the little window to the table's innards, or even when my late lamented Uncle Brian tried to show me how to hold a cue at the age of about seven, I've had a sort of affinity for the game.

(My granny used to watch the snooker on TV. That took some concentration, before she got the color set.)

So B was the one who showed me how to play. (I won't say "taught me" becuase that would imply that I have learned and am now able to do it.) I know the rules and can slide the cue towards the white ball and almost always make it hit one of the others. Something usually goes in a pocket eventually. I don't really care. I love watching the skill of others, the ones who do know what they're doing. I love the almost-frictionless roll of ball towards pocket, watching an engineer calculate the angles, or pretend to, hearing the satisflying click (or the rumble when the white goes down and you wait for the table to send it back to you).

So there we were on our date, having a nice game of pool, not exactly knowing where this was going or how to move things forward. I leaned on the table. I put my hand a little too close to where his hand was also leaning on the side of the table as we waited for our friend to take a shot. The sides of our little fingers touched, and a tiny electric shock went through me. That was enough. The direction was set. Fate was on notice.

Wednesday will be our ninth wedding anniversary, by the way.

We used to play a game of pool now and then, whenever we were in a bar with a pool table, with a couple of friends or just the two of us. I didn't get any better, but I still enjoyed it. Last week on our vacation we had an early dinner one night in a not-very-Italian restaurant attached to a very American bar. We passed the pool table as we walked through the bar to our booth seats. I made a mental note of it. When dinner was over and ice-creams had been screamed for and ordered (politely) and said thank-you for (politely) I suggested we might just see if the pool table was still unused on our way out.

It was. Probably we should not have stopped for a quick game of pool in a bar with our seven year old and our four year old, but we did, and nobody cared, and it was fun. It was fun to impress the kids with this thing they had no idea we would ever do. It was fun to let them chalk our cues and retrieve the white ball and suggest what we might aim for next. They were just about old enough to keep their hands off the balls and the other cues for long enough for B to wipe the floor with my pathetic effort (it takes me most of a game to get my eye in, and it had been a few years) and clear the table, clonk clonk clonk, like a pro.

Or maybe I'm still just easily impressed by some people.

Not to scale

Transatlantic subtleties: Homes from home

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

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

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

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

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

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

An Irish sort of trailer

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

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

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

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

Just add (Little Miss) Sunshine

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

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


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

Those crazy (upstate) New York summer nights

There's nothing like spending seven nights in an 8- by 28-foot space with your nearest and dearest and a very flaky internet connection to make you appreciate the comforts of home. We had fun, we did stuff, but people kept sleeping when they weren't meant to and then not sleeping when we would have preferred that they did.

Camper living

A brief overview of our vacation by the nights, goes like this:

Night one:
I knew we had to bring bedding but I didn't think to ask if that included pillows as well as pillowcases. I was going to get the kids to bring their pillow pets, but then I forgot. So we spent the first night with no pillows. Now I'm pretty sure when I was 22 I spent an entire summer in London sleeping without a pillow to my bed, but apparently now that I'm Very Old I can't deal with that any more. Between the bumpy mattress and the strange place and the no pillow, I felt as if I barely got a wink. Dash fell from his pull-out sofa bed onto the floor, but didn't notice a thing.

Night two:
We spent a large chunk of the next day finding a Sears to buy pillows. One each for the grown-ups and one for Mabel. Dash said he didn't need one. Insert violas of foreboding here. We all slept relatively well, and I am passionately in love with my new pillow.

Night three:
Dash woke up that morning with a massive crick in his neck. Being not prone to downplay any possible illness or injury, he maximized the melodrama and the whining for the next two days, culminating in the middle of night three when he moved (on his new pillow) and the crick woke him up with a wail of agony (pseudo-agony). Which of course woke his sister as well as his parents. Everyone had to be gently massaged back to sleep over the course of the next hour or so.

Night four:
The previous nights' discomforts paled into insignificance when we were woken by three long beeps of some sort of alarm at 4am on night four. The trailer/camper/mobile home was fully equipped with a smoke alarm and a carbon monoxide alarm, and we had no way of telling which one had beeped, or why. I put Mabel back to sleep, stepped over the still-sleeping Dash, and conferred nervously with B. We cycled the A/C and opened windows, and nothing further happened, so we lay down again, gingerly. BEEP BEEP BEEP said the alarm again, piercingly. There was no smoke, so we thought it might be the CO alarm. This was not the annoying blip of I-need-new-batteries. I didn't want to risk it. We got the children up and put them in the car, and all sat there glaring balefully at the camper/trailer/mobile home of DOOM, as the birds started to sing and dawn came creeping in. We tried to call the emergency number for the campsite people, but our phones didn't work there. We didn't know which trailer they lived in.  Our own residence continued to fail to blow up or do anything remotely dangerous, but the alarm still beeped every twenty minutes or so. The children did not go back to sleep. Neither, therefore, did the parents.

It turned out to be the smoke alarm, saying that it did, indeed, need batteries. I was not amused.

Night five:
You'd think we'd have slept exceedingly well the next night. We would have, except for the hour or so I spent getting Mabel some water, evicting a moth from her bunk alcove where it was fluttering all over my face (urgh), and finally microwaving her a waffle. Which she rejected.

Night six:
Night six was fine once the massive thunderstorm that rolled in at story time rolled away again, leaving me wondering how people in campsites don't have trees topple on them every time there's a storm.

Night seven:
Everyone slept pretty well. We'd finally settled in. Which meant, of course, it was time to leave.

Clutching her new pillow for the trip home

Blargh

I'm tired of seeing the same post every time I open my blog, and I have several things almost written but who knows when they'll be fully written or at what point I'll just say oh what the heck and press publish anyway, so here's a very quick update for you and I even put some commas in there so don't complain about this long sentence. Stream of consciousness, baby. Chanelling Joyce.

I'm sure I would be more prepared for our upcoming "camping" vacation (not real hardcore camping because everything is on site, which is very normal in Europe but took a bit of concentrated Googling to find in this country) except yesterday I was struck down in my 40-year-old prime by a stomach virus/fever thing that made it impossible for me to stop the kids watching TV because I just had to nap on the sofa all day and the whole experience left me with a renewed respect for old people and people with chronic ailments because damn if life isn't much harder and more full of no fun when everything's an effort.

Contrary to my belief that it would probably last forever and I was probably dying of something horrible, as always comes upon me when sick, my fever disappeared around midnight last night and today I feel much better but after a burst of energy this morning (library, Target, laundry) I'm now a bit tired and prone to being grumpy and can't figure out what would be a good thing to eat and generally wishing I could put these children into suspended animation for a day. Or a week.

So that's why it's been quiet.

Notes from the beach

When I was seven-almost-eight, we went to Corfu for a holiday. (It's a Greek island, sort of shaped like a seahorse, mostly off the coast of Albania. My father pointed across the sea and told me that I was looking behind the iron curtain, but I didn't know what he meant.) It was the first time I'd been on a plane since I was two, the first trip abroad (apart from to England, which doesn't count) that I could recall, and it left me with a host of wonderful memories that were purely my own, not merely things recounted by others or pasted into a photo album that I might think were half memory, half family lore.

Will Dash remember our trip to the beach this summer like that? Is it sufficiently different from daily life? Is he old enough? What will be the parts that stick, that live forever in his mind and come back with startling recall?

Last week I sat on the sand where the waves came in, showing my children how to dig a moat around a sandcastle and wait for the water to fill it. I showed them how to make mud pies with their hands, how to wriggle their feet down into the sand as the ocean recedes, how to turn their backs to the waves so they don't get splashed in the face. By our third day on the beach, I watched my son wander away a little (a very little) on his own, intent on collecting smoothed shell particles, dragging out a channel in the sand with his heel. I showed his sister that I could write her name in the sand, and how the ocean would erase it mercilessly. It was all new to them, and I was the keeper of wonderful discoveries. 

The sea has always been a part of my life, since I grew up with a view of Dublin Bay from my bedroom window (up a hill, half a mile or so from the coast). My school was so close to the sea that  seagulls would wheel outside our windows looking for scraps of sandwich. When bored (or just plain lost) in maths class, I could gaze out at the horizon, watching a cargo ship make its way slowly across the bay, or the ferry head off to Wales from nearby Dun Laoghaire. 

When I was feeling antsy and adolescent, full of pent-up stuff, and the need to be great, or do something, or justify my lonely existence [dramatic flounce], I'd walk briskly to the harbour road and pick my way down to the rocks, where I could sit with nothing further between me and the small island just off our shore. The Irish Sea is not a very pretty or spectacular one - it's not the romantic, exotic Pacific; the sparkling, freezing Atlantic; or the softly lapping Mediterranean - but it has its moods of grey stillness or glorious blue-green or angry energy all the same. I'd sit there until the swell had taken my feverishness and smoothed me over, and then I'd walk up the hills home again.

I've always been drawn, when looking at maps, to the end places. The tips of land, the pointy bits. So when I first saw the Outer Banks, those long sandbars down the coast of North Carolina, punctuated by lighthouses, I decided we should go and visit them some day. Of course, when we got there my somewhat romantic expectations of a verdant and windswept isle were somewhat dashed - after all, one long sandy beach is pretty much the same as another, whether it's Brittas Bay or South Padre Island in Texas or Duck, NC - and with two small children in tow, we didn't get to drive as far as any of the lighthouses, to find out what these particular end points of the world looked like.

But still. I introduced my children to this side of the Atlantic Ocean, the other side of which laps up against such hospitable shores as Roundstone and Achill Island and Dingle, sites of my own family holidays many moons ago (and not in Greece). I showed them how to make mud pies and moats, and they tasted the salt water for themselves and watched the sand crabs scuttle as the waves receded. It's enough.

Iron man

We all know that it's Dash's long-held ambition to be a metal-maker when he grows up, so that he can fashion jetpacks and Iron-Man-like suits to his heart's content. So when we visited a replica Elizabethan ship at Roanoke Island on our vacation, and then found it came complete with model settlement site with real people doing real jobs like, for example, a real live blacksmith, he was pretty thrilled.

He was fascinated to see the forge in action (while the rest of us wilted in the record-breaking midday heat), and overjoyed when the smith presented him with a newly hammered, bent, black, iron nail.

Dash (far right, dodging the camera) in the settlement village. The forge is that structure at the back.

The nail is his new most prized possession. If you asked him to chose between his blue light saber and the nail, he might be hard pressed to answer. But, just like the light saber, he keeps misplacing the nail, and at an inch and a half long, it's that much harder to find.

With a quarter, for scale

The first night, he took the nail to bed with him. So sweet.

Not so sweet at 4.15 when he appeared by our bed with a piercing, "Daddy! Daddy!" I took him on, since I was half-awake anyway (probably just recently back from Mabel's bed; Mabel's not sleeping well just now), and B clearly was not.

"Daddy's asleep. It's the middle of the night. Tell me."
"No, I have to tell him."
"No, tell me. What is it?"
"I can't find my naaaaaiiiil."
"Right."
"..."
"Okay, I'll tell Daddy, and in the morning we'll find the nail. I promise."
"Can I get into your bed?"
Sigh. "Up you come."

Shortly thereafter I was called away again, and left him snoring peacefully beside his insensible father. The nail was located in the morning. He's only lost it several million more times since then, but not, so far, in the middle of the night again. Today he got a small plastic pill box to keep it in, which will make it about 2% easier to find, perhaps.

In its box

The blog post it would have been nice to read before our trip to the Outer Banks, North Carolina

So you're going to the beach. Here are a few tips from those of us who just got back.

• Remember that you are not the only people leaving the greater Washington DC area in a southerly direction on the Saturday morning before the 4th of July. Or on any given Saturday in summer, for that matter.
• Don't panic. Not absolutely everyone else in that particular traffic jam is headed straight for Duck, NC.
• All the people you encounter in the dead-stop traffic five miles from the bridge to the Outer Banks, however, are. Be prepared to add another couple of hours for the last twenty miles of your journey.
• Maybe next time, consider getting a rental that starts on Sunday, and/or leaving earlier than 9.30 in the morning. Yes, that means you'd have to actually make some effort to pack a little more the night before. Deal with it.
• Never forget - don't worry, you won't be allowed - that a vacation with children is not so much a vacation as a relocation of all your daily hassles to a new and less purpose-built area. If you have to eat out, they won't like the food. If you're self-catering, you've just brought all your food-preparation requirements to a new house with an empty fridge and bare cupboards. If you're lucky, there might be a sharp knife, a can opener, and a decent chopping board.
• So let the kids eat fries for dinner every night if that's all there is. A week of it won't kill them, but a week of trying to feed them properly might kill you.
• Leave the Internet behind if you like, but don't unplug so much that your rental has no TV. In fact, cable TV will provide a world of wonder to children who are accustomed to nothing but PBS.  Do try to make sure your accommodation has cellphone reception, though. (Ours didn't.)
• Think of bringing a stepstool so the kids can reach the basin. It's the one thing your rental  almost certainly isn't equipped with.
• Be advised that the a/c will be set for somewhere near freezing, to ensure that nothing moulds in the excessive humidity, and to drive you outside to the beach or the town after a little while inside. You are not allowed mess with the a/c settings, so do bring a cardigan.
• If you lose one of the house keys, don't panic until it hasn't turned up in the load of washing you just put on.
• Come to think of it, if you're bringing seven of everything so you all have enough clothes, why bother doing laundry? Either skimp on packing, or avoid the laundry room entirely. You'll spend most of your time in your swimsuits anyway.
• Your place will have an outside shower so that you don't track sand onto the carpets and into your bedsheets. Don't bother trying to get the kids into it. Just send them to the pool, and don't worry about the signs telling you to wash off any sand before entering. Nobody else did.
• Let the kids know that it's okay to pee in the ocean. Impress upon them that it's not okay to pee in the pool. And this doesn't mean that they should get out of the pool and pee standing beside the pool.
• It's hard to predict how much the sunshine and the water will tire everyone out. Instead of trying to estimate when the kids will be tired, just keep going until they all collapse in a screaming heap of devastation, then bring them home and put them to bed.
• Stop complaining about how it's as hot as hades and as humid as the inside of a tumble dryer, and just go to the beach. That's why you're here.
• Avoid hurricanes, wear hats, and don't forget the sunscreen.

And then my camera got a teensy bit damp and now I can't see anything on the screen, even though it still works, but I have to look through the viewfinder as in the olden days, which is very vexing.

Hippo birdy

It hasn't been the most eventful of birthdays, I have to admit. Mostly, we've hidden indoors lest the sun shrivel us to a crisp, venturing out only to make the one good use of this weather - hanging some laundry on the line or bringing it back in again.

I say "we" because the children have been with me all day, of course, but they weren't the ones doing the laundry. They were the ones climbing the clothesline, pulling towels off, trying to set up a tightrope, and generally hindering my progress in trying to pack for our week at the beach.

I should probably be thinking deep introspective thoughts about what I've done in the past year, how I'll improve in the one to come, and how awful it is that I'm one year closer to forty. Mostly what occurs to me is to wonder whether, as next year my birthday will fall on a Saturday, I'll be contractually obliged to throw myself a Fortieth party. I'd really rather throw one for B in March, but his birthday falls midweek. Not that one has to have the party on the exact day, but it does lend itself to parties, and only happens once in seven (if that often).

We did get a babysitter last night - who managed to get Mabel to sleep, wonder of wonders - while we went to the movies and then for a very quick drink. And tonight an Indian takeout is winging its way homeward as I speak. (You might think I would rather have a nice salad when it's 102 degrees outside, but I will leverage my air conditioning and eat the food I like.)

Hippo birdy to me, as Sandra Boynton would say.

Transatlantic subtleties: Holiday v. Vacation

This is an easy one, right? Americans say vacation where UK/Irish people say holiday.

Almost. But then.

In Ireland you go on holidays (or on your holidays), when you go away from home and stay somewhere else for a while. You are on holidays when you don't have to go to school or work for a while. That much translates directly to "vacation", except for the plural.

Holiday, in the singular, is where one might get confused, because Americans use that too.

A holiday in the US is a public day off, such as July 4th or Labor Day. A holiday weekend is the weekend one of these days is attached to. A typical conversation at work when I first moved to America might go like this:

- How was your holiday?
- What holiday? I didn't go anywhere.
- Monday. Was a holiday. Remember?
- Oh, you mean my bank holiday.
- What's a bank holiday?

In the UK/Ireland, a bank holiday is what we generally call a public holiday, and that weekend (when it falls on a Friday or a Monday), is a bank-holiday weekend. Confusingly, there is actually a distinction between bank holidays and public holidays, and sometimes the bank is closed when everyone else has to go to work, but mostly they're all just called bank holidays. Because if the bank is closed, it's time to party. Apparently. (I bet it's Angela Merkel's fault.)

"The holidays", in America, means the Christmas season, which you aren't allowed call Christmas for fear of offending people who celebrate Kwanzaa or Hannukah or Solstice or whatever else it might be. Hence "Happy holidays", which to an Irish person would evoke images of sun-drenched beaches, and fruity libations, possibly in Spain. To an American it means snowflakes and ice-skating and gingerbread cookies and other secular wintery goodnesses.

If in doubt, just call it a break.

Beachbound

In a few weeks I have to pack for a week at the beach. We've never taken the kids to the beach, beyond a couple of chilly afternoons in Dublin and one at a sort of oily man-made sand-depository on the banks of the Chesapeake. I'm really looking forward to letting them just sit in the sand for hours on end and find out what happens when the water moves into the holes you dug.

Dash and Granny on a typical late-June day at the beach in Dublin

I'm optimistically thinking that Mabel is old enough not to have to be watched like a hawk every single second. By which I mean not that we'll be ignoring her and getting stuck into some riveting beach fiction and our mojitos, but more that at least we won't have to physically steer her away from running joyously straight into the waves the entire time. Or maybe we will, who knows.

Dash can swim, after a fashion, but is very leery of getting his face wet. I hope the extra buoyancy of the salt water will be a pleasant surprise, and that the odd splashlet from a wave won't be a huge tragedy. They both have "floatie" jackets that they wear at the pool part of the time, which gives me a greater sense of security. On the other hand, I wouldn't want anyone floatie-ing away from us - the no-boundaries ocean will be a bit of a shock on that front.

So I wanted to ask you, what should we bring? We're renting a condo for the week, in the Outer Banks, North Carolina, which I've wanted to visit ever since I saw it on a map.  Beyond some very basic sandbox buckets and spades, all we have are swimsuits and a few towels. Do I need to beg/borrow/steal a shade tent or canopy-thingy, and if so what sort is best? Should we bring the kids' bikes or scooters along? What sort of toys are good for the beach, that I might not think of?

A less-typical Dublin beach day; don't be deceived - the water was freezing

Where are my bonbons?

I have been thinking it's Friday since Tuesday, and it's still only Thursday.

It's not even as if we've had a particularly arduous week, or that last weekend was in any way weekday-like, but this particular five-day set seems to be dragging its heels, at least in my head.

My house is a mess, because I can do (partially) clean or somewhat tidy, but not both at the same time. I can keep the kitchen clean, the fridge somewhat stocked, and the laundry up to date, but not the bathrooms scrubbed too.

(When we arrived in the first of our three hotels on our recent California trip and looked in the bathroom, Mabel marvelled at how shiny and white everything was. A girl could get used to that sort of thing, if she never had to keep it shiny and white herself. When I got back into our own car at the airport, I have to admit it looked awfully dusty compared to the enormous rental vehicle we'd been driving for the previous few days. And then the added exertion of having to lift one's foot to the clutch and actually change gear... sigh. But I digress.)

Mabel was amusing herself nicely this morning, and at one point I found her lying on her tummy on the hardwood floor.

"I'm just blowing a dead bug across the floor," she told me.

Time to sweep downstairs too, maybe.

Go, Dash, Go

It's still Spring Break, you know. I mean, the husband came home and all that, which was nice because now I feel like I can breathe again - not that I was asphyxiating for lack of him, but just that when it's me and only me with the kids, there's no safety net, no room to manouevre, no end of the day in sight - but on the other hand, now he's at work and I'm still here with two children, one of whom might be asleep for a scant hour in the afternoon if I'm lucky. At least the weather's nice.

------

We were given a copy of Go, Dog, Go for Mabel's second birthday. It was sort of an in-joke from the friend who gave it to her, because her son loved it and was always excited to go to a party because the dogs in the book go to a party in a tree at the end. He was thrilled to be invited to her birthday party, so we got the book. To be honest, I didn't think much of it - boring, basic, and without even a rhyme to pull it along for the poor benighted adult reader. I saw it as inferior, wannabe Seuss.

But now, I get it. Dash is at the point where he can sound out three-or-four-letter words pretty well, but even our "Beginner" I-Can-Read book was too hard - and babyish - for him, with its proliferation of hard words like "whose" and "mouse". He was badgering me to make a book for him on my computer, composed entirely of words he knows. (And what a thrilling epic that would be.) But then I thought that we must, surely, have some books that would work that way. One Fish, Two Fish, maybe, or Go, Dog, Go.

So I pulled it off the shelf a week ago, and this morning, after three or four sessions, he finished it. (It's quite a long book, you know.) Okay, so the narrative isn't exactly engaging for those of us used to something more at the level of historical fiction or true crime, but as far as he's concerned, it's the best book ever written. And watching him work through from the first, simplest page through the antics of those crazy dogs with their hats and their boats and their cars - well, I have a new appreciation for the story. More importantly, I can see how each page's words build on the learning in the pages before, so that he learns "out" and on the next page comes to "around", with the same -ou- sound, but a bit more of a challenge.

I'm not saying he got every word himself right off the bat - I helped when he got stuck - but the repetition within the book, and created by starting at the beginning again every time, made it easier for him. This morning he ran upstairs excitedly to find the book and reached the very last page, jubilant.

As boring books go, I'm starting to really like this one.

Young padawan

If I had to pick one thing I want for Dash to look back on his spring break and remember, it's not any elaborate trips to the city or organized events, not finishing* the original Star Wars trilogy (as we did last night), not any new toys he may or may not score on a milk-run to Target, not the haircut I swear we're going to get tomorrow, and certainly not the optional homework packet that I have no intention of downloading from the school website. I want him to remember that he spent lots of time outside in windy, sunny playgrounds, riding his bike on the street with his friends, playing like a kid, doing nothing like a kid - outside, with other kids, without recourse to television.

He's outside right now, while Mabel naps. We live on a quiet court, so he's allowed be out without a supervising adult if he wants. I look out the window every now and then and can usually see what he's up to. A little earlier he was pacing up and down behind the seven-year-old from across the way, with the three-year-old from two doors down following both, the three of them looking very serious; two small disciples following their preacher, who was probably intoning deep thoughts on the various colours of the Power Rangers and what each can do. Then he was lying on his stomach beside the three-year-old watching him dig intently in some mud, no doubt filling him in on all the Star Wars spoilers he can lay his mind on, passing down the sacred creeds from one to the next, as the older boys have done to him.

*If it can be called "finishing" when there were quite a few bits we fast-forwarded past. He didn't want to watch the rest of Return of the Jedi, but I desperately needed to use it for speedy-bedtime-preparation bribery, so I promised to skip all of Luke's battle with the emperor and any and all further scary/exciting bits that might crop up. With the result that every time he and Mabel asked, "What's happening now?" I had no idea, because we'd missed all the explanatory dialogue, and I don't really know the stories too well myself once you get past the basic premise as explained in the lyrics of Star Wars Cantina.

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And then we ended up going to Target for bread (got milk, thanks) and buying him a new, blue, Anakin Skywalker light sabre, which has now been secreted away for his birthday in three weeks' time.

Giveth, and taketh away

When we arrived last week, we were immediately able to borrow the car of my best friend, who was serendipitously leaving for a quick hop to Toronto just as we were coming in. Because she is amazingly thoughtful and a gift-giver extraordinaire, there was a little magazine and free gift for each of the kids waiting for them in the back seat. Dash's present was a nerf gun with three bullets, which he adores, and sings odes to, and spontaneously wrote her a Valentine/thank-you card for as soon as we got to the house. Mabel's was a Peppa Pig pretend iPhone. She was ecstatic.

"I'm so glad I have a gun, now I can be like a spy," announced Dash as we negotiated our way through Dublin tolls at dawn on zero-to-two hours' sleep.

"I'm so glad I have an iPhone, now I can be like a normal person," said his sister.

(Please note that neither of her parents have iPhones. We are clearly abnormal.)

A minute later she said, puzzled, "My iPhone doesn't seem to work properly."

Progress, no progress

This morning before midday Monkey had eaten three bowls of cereal, two peanut-butter sandwiches, one bagel and almost a whole lime yogurt. That's practically running through his entire repertoire of foods. While we were away he had the somewhat questionable victory of adding McDonald's fries back in there, but I'm not sure how I feel about that. At least I can feed him in an away-from-home emergency, I suppose. But he's mostly making up for two-and-a-half weeks of living on peanuts, rice krispies, and toast fingers. (Dry toast, crusts cut off. Fingers were replaced by "squirals" - a square spiral, you understand, concieved by his father - when the novelty of the former wore off.) I think he's a bit hungry, poor boy.

So I suppose I could make a list of Things I Learned on Holiday:

• Monkey will now eat thin fries and also chocolate croissants.
• The children can be left with a babysitter. Monkey will complain pitifully all day and then go to sleep with no trouble at all. Mabel will stay up until she finally conks out where she sits. I will have a night out and several glasses of wine and probably talk the ear off some poor lovely stranger about - of course! - babies. I think I need more practice.
• One month is not long enough to potty train Mabel before going away and disrupting everything.
• The number of days it takes me to admit this and head straight back to the pull-ups is two.

There are four pairs of jeans hanging on the line outside. Won't need those again till October, I imagine. Same goes for socks.

So now the great dam of Vacation has been swept away and I'm faced with a deluge of Things Coming Up: things that will happen regardless, like the start of kindergarden and the nursery-school cleaning workshops (where I have to be in attendance most of the time for a few days, in my new capacity as Housekeeping (snortcough) Chair) and hosting a book club meeting and on into September with the Labor Day Festival and Mabel starting nursery school; and things that I have to orchestrate sooner than that, like laundry and procuring food and making dinners and setting up mother's-helper time so we don't lose our newfound Great White Hope For Nights Out, and playdates and avoiding the weather until it's safe to go outside.

Onward, then, with the rest of summer.

Redacted

And now I have to take it all back, because the weather all weekend was just gorgeous.

On Saturday, Dublin Bay looked like this.

So we did this.

And then, in traditional manner, we went and did this. 

If you're not from around here, Teddy's sell famous ice-cream cones. They even had a "Recession Special" family deal of two grown-up 99s and two kid-sized 99s for a mere 6 euros.

(A 99, if you're still not from around here, is a whipped-ice-cream cone with a stick of Cadbury's Flake inserted for good measure. History does not record why they're called 99s. When I was small, they cost 50p and were already called 99s, so it's not about the price. They looked a bit like this after I'd stood around in the sunshine holding all four while I waited for B and the kids to circle back around and pick me up - the problem with Teddy's on a sunny day is that there's nowhere to park. I did what I could to save them, but they may have been a little smaller when they got to their final recipients.)

Glass walls, class wars

SCENE: The kitchen, looking out to the back garden where the builder is paving the new patio. (Not my kitchen.) (In case you thought it was.)

CAST OF CHARACTERS: Maud, Monkey (5), Moose (5), Mabel (2-and-a-half), Len the Builder

STAGE DIRECTIONS: French door to patio is halfway open. Len sits down to have a quiet smoke. The children and Maud are sitting inside the french doors having a snack and a cup of tea respectively.

Monkey: Why is the builder using a cigarette?
Mabel: What's a cigarette?
Moose: I know what that is, it's a cigarette! Smoking is Bad For You!
Monkey: Yes, it makes black stuff go in your lungs.
Mabel: Mummy, what's the man doing?
Maud, cringing, knowing Len can hear every word: Well, sometimes grown-ups smoke. But it's not very good for them.
Monkey: It's very dangerous!
Moose: Yes, it's very bad!
Len, interjecting from outside to kindly put me out of my misery: That's right, Mum. You tell them. It's a filthy 'abit.
Monkey: But, but, how can he get one? Doesn't it cost lots and lots of money?
Maud, realising that Monkey is mixing this up with that talk we had about illegal drugs and how some people do bad things to get money to buy drugs, all stemming from that time his friend's dad was mugged, which may or may not have had anything to do with drugs at all, but how do you explain to kids that some people just hurt other people for kicks?: No, you're allowed to buy cigarettes. I mean, grown-ups are. They're a bit expensive but not very. Sort of like the way we're allowed to buy wine...
Len: Ah now, are you taking my drink away from me too?
Moose: But why do people use them if they know they're bad?
Maud: [Sigh. Ugh. Why do I get into these things?] Well, at first somebody might just smoke a cigarette and think it's okay. But after a while, their body starts to want one even though they know it's bad for them, and then it's much harder to stop.
Monkey and Moose, sanctimoniously: Well, my body's never going to want a cigarette.
Mabel [comes over and insinuates herself onto her mother's lap; stands up and bounces happily]: When I'm a grownup, my body's going to want a cigarette.

I am so in trouble when that girl turns 14.

How you know when it's summer

Ah, July in Ireland.

When you don't always need to wear a coat.

When the little girls only need leggings or tights under their dresses, not both at once.

When you might be too warm in that fleece.

When you don't have to turn on the heating (so long as you still have your cosy dressing gown and slippers for breakfast time).

When socks are optional, so long as you can hide the blue tinge of your toes under some nice bright nail polish.

When it's 99 degrees in DC and today's high in Dublin is a balmy 61 F.

Banking karma

I'll just take a little break from my break, while I have a quiet house (Quiet! House!) at my disposal, along with a cup of tea and my husband's laptop, to get you all caught up on our travelling saga. Because of course, there had to be a travelling saga.

We were due to fly out of DC on Friday. As we were leaving from the one airport out of three that's actually on the Metro line, taking public transport was a no-brainer. (We object to paying airport parking for the guts of three weeks, and feel that buses and trains are character building.) So on Friday we drove our two children, one (small) stroller, one large rolling suitcase, two small rolling suitcases, one large duffel bag, and four small backpacks to the local Metro station, where we can park as long as we want in the long-term parking section for the price of a single day - or free if we happen to return on a weekend.

I had timed the whole thing to perfection. (Ever since the time we set off from Central Pennsylvania - just the two of us, a long time ago - for Pittsburgh airport to fly to Vegas, both casually assuming the other had looked up exactly how long the drive should take, to find out that neither of us had and we would only just squeak into check-in on time with a tailwind and lucky parking, I don't leave such things to chance, or to husbands, any more. If you want something done, go and do it.) The train left, with us on it. We changed to the yellow line after a few stations, and arrived at the airport with ten minutes in hand before the one-hour mark I had been aiming for. (The first flight was domestic, just to Boston, so we only had to be an hour early. At this point I must note how far from my upbringing I have strayed. In such circumstances my father would certainly plan to arrive no fewer than two hours in advance, and would probably have come in the morning and eaten lunch at the airport just in case.)

At this point, Mabel had missed her nap, as we had left the house at 12.30 exactly. She was bearing up well. The kids were very excited to have their own rolly cases, and she cut an adorable figure pulling her tiny green-with-pink-butterflies zoocase (as she says) all over the airport. Monkey was also happy that his was bigger, as befits his Much Stronger Person.

We checked in, we did the security-line dance, we proceeded in an orderly fashion to our gate, we procured some snacks, Mabel ate some goldfish to keep her happy in her nap-missing state, we boarded the plane. At this point I felt, as you probably do too, that we must have come at least halfway to our final destination (which was Cardiff, Wales, UK, by the way) by now, what with all the planning and packing and decision-making and hoping trains would show up on time and so on that had happened by now.

So, as you can imagine, it was a bit of a disappointment to sit on the plane for an hour while it rained lightly nearby and the captain told dire tales of thunderstorms elsewhere, and then be returned, unmoved, to our gate, to await developments. It was really a make-your-own-developments situation, as B waited for the airline to call him back and it transpired that we were just going to have to do it all again the next day, assuming that the storms had passed by then.

Then we had to wait another hour to get our luggage back. By now it was 6.30 and Mabel was metaphorically hanging on by her fingertips, skating all over the filthy floor of the baggage hall in her socks and then just rolling around on it for good measure.

We took a taxi home, which may not have saved much time, but was infinitely easier. We're not totally crazy, after all. B had to jog down to the Metro station to retrieve our car the next morning.

Being me, I had found some bright sides to our predicament. We didn't really have to do anything new for our extra 24 hours at home, since everything was already organised. I could view Friday like a dry run. I now knew that Mabel's runners were too small and could be left at home. We got to use up the milk and some other bits and pieces that had been left in the fridge. We discovered that the a/c had inadvertently been turned all the way off instead of just down (up?) a little. I even finished the last few pages of my book. And sleeping in our own beds was a lot more restful than a hotel room would have been. The next day we were rested and rejuvenated and ready to take the whole tedious thing on again.

(I gloss over the part where I had to come downstairs at 3am to try to make a phone call to the UK to cancel our non-refundable train tickets from London to Cardiff in the one-hour window of time between their helpline opening at 8am local time and the train we were missing departing from Paddington station. I couldn't get through. I had to book new, more expensive tickets. I was not so pleased.)

Saturday morning: take two. This time, we left with renewed confidence. We had ironed out every tiny glitch in the process. We knew it would all work perfectly. The sun was shining and the storms had passed on.

What we didn't think of was the fact that the Metro functions differently at the weekends. So for a start, the station we changed to the yellow line at wasn't running yellow-line trains that Saturday, but for some reason our green-line train driver didn't think to announce that tidbit before we'd got off and sat there for a while. We cursed mildly and got onto the next green-line train, to disembark further down the line at a more central station that certainly was running yellow-line trains.

Except, after standing on the platform for 15 minutes or so, it transpired that the yellow-line trains were all delayed. They do work on the lines at weekends, see, when nobody has to get anywhere in a hurry. Everyone knows that. Except those of us who have lived in the environs of DC for five years now but never used the Metro to get to work.

Usually, when travelling, I make a policy of not looking at my watch. It doesn't make anything move any faster, and just frustrates me. I'll get there when I get there. I realised it was time for desperate measures, and looked at my watch.  We had ten minutes to our designated check-in time and we were still standing on a bloody underground platform miles from the airport.

"We need to go upstairs and take a taxi," I said to B. He never wears a watch. I had forgotten that. So the burden of knowing just how late we were running was all on me.

And we were suddenly in oh-crap-it-might-be-time-to-panic mode. We dragged the children along the suddenly interminable corridors of the large Metro station. We took the enormous escalator despite all our wheeled stuff and stroller, because the lift turned out to be all the way in the direction we'd just come. We emerged, at the top of more steps, into the bright sunlight and scorching temperatures of midday DC, not onto a busy street with taxis flying this way and that, as I had assumed, but into a small, deserted, back road. I squinted against the sun, carrying a flagging Mabel in one arm and pushing a loaded stroller with the other hand, as B forged ahead pulling the big suitcase and encouraging/chivvying Monkey (who, to his credit, did a great job keeping up and pulling his own case all the way), hoping blindly that we were heading in a more traffic-heavy direction. I suppose we could have called a cab, but we don't have any city-center cab numbers, and stopping to find our phones would have wasted time.

It was around this point that I seriously began to wonder if we would miss the flight altogether. Perhaps somebody, somewhere, felt it would be best for us not to leave DC today, or this summer. I've never missed a flight - at least, apart from that one time in Spain when it turned out I really did need a passport to travel even within the EU; and that other time at Christmas of which we will not speak; I've never missed a flight just by not making it to the damn airport in time, I mean - but I suppose there's a first time for everything. We trailed on, crossing deserted underpasses, placating whining children with as few syllables as possible, and sweating profusely.

Someone we asked said there was a hotel just up there, at the lights, across the road. As we got to the busier intersection, B ran ahead to see if they had a taxi rank or could call one for him. Just as he disappeared, I saw a cab with its light on across the road, and waved frantically. He indicated, to show that he'd seen me, and I dialled the mounting panic down a teensy notch. I didn't dare look at my watch, but started digging for my phone to call B back, if he even had his phone on him rather than in his jacket, which was on the stroller that I was pushing. I couldn't figure out how to use my phone. I decided we'd find him one way or the other. The children were a little concerned that we now seemed to be going to the airport without Daddy, but I promised them we wouldn't, even as he appeared running back down towards us.

I told the lovely taxi driver that we had to check in in five minutes. He was nonchalant. Luckily, the airport is surprisingly close to the city center, so we didn't have far to go. (After the previous night's adventures, I had stopped bothering to worry about putting the kids in taxis without proper car seats. We die, or we get to the plane; one or the other.) We tumbled ourselves out of the taxi at the other end, frantically oriented ourselves inside the building, and marched briskly to the check-in queue. A sign said: "Flight check-in will end 45 minutes before departure." I had to look at my watch again. Zero minutes to go, minus one or two. In panic mode, my inclination to queue is vastly diminished, British father or not. I basically elbowed my way past the black stretchy line-definer tapes and stood myself in front of an employee, waiting for her to draw breath in her sentence to the woman she was dealing with.

"Our flight is at 3pm and we just got here. Can we check in right now?"
She looked suspicious. "Did you just jump the line?"
"Yes. Sorry, but it says check-in ends 45 minutes before the flight leaves, and that's now. If they're all going on later flights, would it be possible to take us first? Please?"

(In Dublin airport, they always go around asking if anyone else here, in the long long queues, is waiting for the flight they're about to close. I guess they don't bother doing that in Reagan National.)

I cast an apologetic look at the people ranged in front of me, all decent, God-fearing, standing-in-line types who didn't arrive at the last minute and presume they could just skip the queue, all entitled-like. I hoped the fact that I was clearly at my wits' end and had two small children who could potentially unleash terrifying screams at any moment, and I was being as polite as I could, would work in my favour.

Luckily, the gods were smiling. Finally. Probably laughing their heads off. The woman relented, asked the other people if anyone was waiting for a 3pm flight, and took us first. I remarked to the lady beside me that we'd done all this the day before. "Did you miss it then too?" she asked. I somehow thought everyone in the country should know that the flights had all been grounded the previous afternoon, but it was news to her. I expounded on the cruel irony of the fact that the previous day we'd been in perfect time. It's not as if I'd almost miss the same flight twice in a row.

After that, things went pretty much to plan. At least, you can't plan how a two-year-old will sleep on a red-eye, so while the fact that she went straight to sleep on takeoff from Boston was great, the fact that she woke up less than two hours later, as they were serving dinner, and didn't sleep again until the connector train from Heathrow to Paddington (and thank goodness I took the Ergo, which we hadn't used since Christmas but saved our bacon in the clincher) - well, that wasn't ideal, but didn't stop us catching any particular mode of transport, and we were met at Cardiff Central by our friends, even though a week later my phone has yet to find a network.

I'm really hoping that the remaining parts of our travel plans will set our travel karma straight again. Somebody up there owes me, bigtime.

Road-trip weather

Sunny weather and blue skies make me feel like a road trip. America feels like it did when I was a visitor, full of giant roads and old-fashioned-looking highway signs and anonymous roads to nowhere and run-down diners with elderly waitresses who refill my cup and call me "hon", and trees, trees, trees.

No, this isn't quite the usual tourist impression of America: to Irish people, America comprises New York (with an addendum of Boston) and LA/San Francisco. Possibly Chicago and Florida. There isn't really anywhere in between the coasts, unless some remember JR Ewing and bring Texas to mind. And admittedly, my introductions to the US were via Boston, New York (briefly), and San Francisco, respectively.

But the road trips I'm thinking of mostly, the memories that make me inhale the clear bright air and feel like hitting the asphalt, were when I visited central Pennsylvania to see my on-again, off-again boyfriend; the one I married, eventually. They were charged with emotion - excitement, anticipation, sideways glances on the long road out from the airport; a vaguely sickening feeling of imminent depression (and a red-eye flight) while trying to squeeze every last drop out of being together on the road back again a week later. Maybe that's why I remember so piercingly clearly in the in-between seasons (when the air tickets were cheaper and the weather was nicer) how it felt to look around and see big-sky, big-tree America, at once movie-familiar and unexpectedly alien, before I lived here and it became no more than the place we are all the time.

So sometimes I look up from the local highway that's now as familiar to my hands on the steering wheel as the roads of suburban south Dublin once were, and try to recapture that feeling that maybe, just maybe, the rest of my life was waiting somewhere out there on the unknown roads. And other times, when the sun shines out of a cloudless blue sky and the trees are waiting for their leaves, that feeling ambushes me unbidden and makes me catch my breath with a swoop of ten-years-ago me. And I want to hit the road and teach the kids all the words to the Chicago soundtrack and all the good Billy Joel songs and the contents of all the other cassette tapes that are gathering dust in the basement.