Boom! Spring

And then, with barely a day's grace, it was not so much spring as a full-blown dress rehearsal for summer.

At least, I hope it's just a dress rehearsal, because I'm not ready for leg-baring and constant sunscreen just yet. I demand that we have some days in the 60s and lower 70s, because taking us straight from 50s to 80s is not helpful.

Now all my Irish readers are putting their best sarcastic faces on and saying "Pity about ya" because their best chance of seeing 83 degrees all year is inside a mug of tea; but it has its drawbacks, this weather.

And now in best Irish tradition, I will proceed to find things to complain about:

1. I've had to start hanging the washing on the line again, because my tiny shred of environmental consciousness won't let me use the dryer in this weather. Though I did cheat by putting the socks and underwear in the dryer because hanging up 265 individual socks with clothes pegs drains my will to live and uses up all my good Facebooking time.

1b. You know what's a little annoying? When you spend all that time hanging out the washing and taking in the washing and find that out of a huge big load there are no more than five items that actually belong to you. And three of those are socks.

2. It's too hot. I'm getting sweaty. I haven't been sweaty since October, and I like it that way. Ugh. Armpits. Yuck.

3. Sunshine. It's giving me a headache.

3b. Sunscreen. Children. Sigh.

4. Birds. Damn birds, singing chirpily all over the gaff. I don't mind, mostly, except that I left Mabel's window open last night because it was so mild/stuffy, and she woke up at 1am, 2am, and 5am, and I'm blaming at least one of those on the deafening dawn chorus.

5. Water. I have to start bringing water everywhere for the children, or - preferably - making them carry their own. But they can't reach the filter jug in the fridge, so I'm still the one constantly refilling it and pouring the water and washing the water bottles with their annoying multiple straw parts and why can't they just be dehydrated and like it, like we did? (Do Irish mothers tote water everywhere for their children in the summer nowadays? I think not.)

The ritual imbibing of the water

 6. My feet. Aaaghhhh the state of my feet. I've put on the ritual first coat of toenail polish, but they're still crying out for a pedicure. Or just your basic amputation, that might make them look better.

6b. Sandals. I have sandals, actually. I bought the same pair that I loved last year when I found them on sale in February. How's that for forward planning? Of course, I'm still wearing the old ones because I want to keep the new ones nice and new-looking. Maybe I need more sandals.

7. The annual putting on of clothes I haven't worn for six months and discovering that, well, they pretty much still fit. But not as well as when I bought them. On the other hand, now that I'm not brewing a pot of tea every five minutes to keep me warm, maybe my muffin consumption will slow down. Just as soon as I get this loaf of banana bread and chocolate bunny out of the way.

New nails, old sandals. (Stupid toes.)

But I suppose we'll just soldier on and make the best of it, until proper spring comes back and we can complain about something else for a while.

Judicious use of all caps

I was somewhat miffed to discover yesterday that we all needed dinner AGAIN, and that I would have to go back to the supermarket AGAIN to buy more milk and more bread and more frozen waffles and that I'd have to continue to make dinner ALL WEEK AGAIN because apparently throwing a big (-ish) party doesn't stop everything from just continuing to happen in exactly the same way as before.

So here I am putting on laundry AGAIN and tripping over toys AS ALWAYS and wondering when I'm going to sort out all those maternity clothes in the box that need to be laundered and ironed before I can consign them (IRONED? Come on!) and realising that I STILL haven't applied for the passport, and now I get to plan Dash's birthday party YAY.

(I should point out that nobody in my family is demanding that I make dinner, and they would all be fine with takeout pizza or spagetti and sauce-from-a-jar all week. But at the very least we still need milk for our cereal and bread for the peanut-butter sandwiches. And apparently I show my love by cooking for people, NO SHIT, SHERLOCK.)

So now I will stop and give myself the rest of the morning off, perhaps. Because Spring Break starts on Thursday and then I'll have even more not-getting-stuff-done to complain about.

St Patrick's grump

I don't know exactly why, but this year St Patrick's Day in America is bringing out the curmudgeon in me. As a family, we've never really observed it here, by going to a parade or anything, though I suppose we could. It seems too hokey altogether to do that sort of thing. Next thing you know I'd be putting Mabel in a wig of red ringlets and sending her to step-dancing classes.

I'm also quite unjustifiably narky today about other people appropriating Ireland and deciding it's something in the name of which they should get to wear green and drink alcohol and play tricks on their children.*

Mostly, my grump should be directed straight at Hallmark, who fairly reasonably - perhaps, in as much as they're just in it for the profit - decided that nothing was happening in mid-March - Valentine's is over; Easter isn't here yet - and so all of America should push out the boat, dye it green, and decide to be Irish.

It was pointed out to me today, just as I was about to complain that nobody else's national holiday is celebrated all over America, that it's just the same with Cinco de Mayo (that's the fifth of May, Mexico's day of celebration). Any excuse for a party, all the better if it has some sort of food/drink/colour that can work into a theme for an eye-catching display of chips/dips/chocolate/trinkets in the supermarket, especially when half the country is still miserably buried under a thick blanket of snow.

In nursery school this week Mabel's class have been decorating large shamrock-shaped pieces of card with green paint and green feathers and pompoms and furbelows and whathaveyou. Her two teachers, who hail from India and Africa, called them clover and didn't know what the significance was, but that's what they were doing all the same. This irked me, perhaps more than it should have. (I'm irkable, you may have noticed. Irk me at your peril.)

So I don't think we're doing anything special tomorrow. We're not attending a potluck at the local chapter of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, if there is one; we're not planning to drink Shamrock Shakes at McD's; and I don't have a single potato in the house. If we wear green it will be by accident.

Maybe it's because tomorrow is the day when it's not remotely special to say you're Irish in America.


*The tricks thing. Read my previous post about what Americans do for St Patrick's Day.

Weekend edition

I have a confession. I hate weekends.

At least, I'm really bad at them. I suppose it's a leftover inclination from all those years when weekend meant something different, and less taxing, than Monday to Friday. But now all it means is that we have no particular schedule and are required to either have some of that holy grail - quality family time - or else feel guilty for failing.

I am also hampered by my extreme lack of ambition, outing-wise. The museums downtown are great, but we've seen the child-friendly ones quite a lot now, and they don't change the dinosaurs all that often. I'd like to go to the art galleries, but the children don't enjoy those much. A nice walk in the great outdoors would be excellent for our mental and physical health, but dragging our offspring to walk somewhere and look at scenic nature is doomed from the get-go. You can try to bribe them with hot chocolate afterwards, but they'd much rather have the drink right now and skip the nature, thank you.

Today we even considered pushing the boat out and going to see a film.

Us: Hey, guys, how about we ... [thrill of anticipation]... go to see a movie this afternoon?
Them: Nooooooo.
Us, grasping at straws: There'd be popcorn.
Them: Nah.

They'd much rather sit at home watching tried and trusted episodes of Curious George on PBS than see something new and exciting and potentially scary on the big, noisy screen that you can't get away from.

It almost makes me yearn for the old days, when they were little. Okay, so you had to pack the entire contents of your house and fridge before you could get out the door, and someone always had a huge up-the-back-of-the-onesie blowout just as you strapped them into the car, but the decision-making was up to you. If you said "Right, we're going to have a lovely walk and see a waterfall!", they'd be pretty much powerless against your bundling them into their coats and carseats and stroller and Ergo and just going there. Apart from the poop and the requisite tantrum, I suppose.

But nowadays, everyone's buy-in is essential just to get people out of pyjamas, never mind wearing shoes and socks and coats and sitting voluntarily in the car.

Honestly, sometimes I almost want to have another, just so that I can get someone doing what I want instead of what they want. (Don't worry. I know that's just an illusion.)

So today, despite everyone being already dressed by 9am (thanks to the remaining snow, that needed to be played in before it dissipated entirely), despite our having a conversation about what we should do today quite early on, despite discussing museums and cinemas and walks in the park, we ended up getting into the car at 3pm and going to that most exotic of destinations, Target.

Not just our regular Target; a slightly more distant, newer one. We bought one thing we needed and a few things we decided we probably needed, weathered tantrums about Christmas presents never received as we perused the toy department for someone else's birthday present (never a good move), spent $3 per child on a "small, inexpensive" treat, and finally sat down in Starbucks for our reward for getting out of the house: latte, latte, vanilla milk, smoothie, and one slice of lemon cake split four ways.

And now we have to figure out something to do tomorrow. I'd like to curl up with a good book, but that sort of weekend is both behind and, I hope, ahead of me yet.

Sinking

Sometimes I feel like I'm functioning just a knife-edge away from mutiny, and that all I can do is to keep the crew (inmates, whatever) happy, whatever the cost, because if they lose it, then we're all down the tubes.

This is not a good long-term parenting strategy.

As captain/first-mate of the ship, I should wield some authority. But that assumes my crew is formed of rational adults who chose the job. In fact, the inmates almost in charge of the asylum are immature, irrational, and incapable of the simplest actions of self-preservation (eating food so that you don't go ballistic, for instance; sleeping during the night so that you can function reasonably during the day; using the bathroom when your bladder's full, for pete's sake). Not to mention the fact that they didn't ask to be born, not that anyone has thrown that one up at me yet, but it's only a matter of time.

So empathetic parenting is only part of the battle. There's also the part about teaching them to be reasonable human beings, doing things that are judged to be civilized and acceptable to the rest of society.

Sometimes I'm hanging on by my fingertips, wondering how I'm going to get myself out of this one, wondering who would win if it came down to just sitting it out, wondering why, with all my years of education and experience more than they have, it's not easier.

Maybe tomorrow will be better.

Burnt out

I haven't slept all night for six years, give or take, but now that I finally am, sometimes, getting a solid five or even six hours at a time - and the right hours at that, not the very unhelpful 7pm to midnight stretch that I remember complaining about Dash doing many many moons ago - I'm exhausted. I think my body has taken its pent-up resentment about not getting to sleep for so long and is throwing it back at me, finally, now that it can.

I would think it was my imagination, but a friend told me it happened to her too - when she weaned her two-year-old and her four-year-old finally started sleeping better, she found she was going to bed early every night to catch up on all those years of missed sleep.

I think it's probably the end-of-summer doldrums too, though. Even though we're out of the 95-degree days, for this week at least, it's still hot and humid and sweaty and sunny, and I'm tired of it. We're all far too jaded to bother greasing up the children with sunscreen these days, and are relying on the natural protection they've built up on their lovely tanned limbs to see them through. The mosquitos are having a field day, or several, and my ankles and poor Dash's legs are currently sprinkled lavishly with their itchy little love-bites. Little feckers.

And the fact that Dash is already back at school almost - not quite, mind - adds insult to injury. I still can't get anything done, because I have Mabel all the time, but I'm also starting to get the feeling that I don't want to do anything, and that when she finally does get out of my hair (4th September not that I'm counting) I'll just slump into a mouldering heap rather than do anything constructive with my surfeit of time and space, because constructive things are hard and require energy.

I think I'll have to ease myself in gently by taking a little trip to Target. Or maybe Kohl's.

Taking my lumps

I got delivered a smackdown from the Internet today, in the form of some mild criticism/advice on parenting on a discussion board where I had specifically asked for (or at least put myself out there for) such. I metaphorically burst into tears, and then I had to spend the rest of the day analyzing my reaction as well as the criticism and whether it was reasonable or not.

You know, I'm bad with criticism, because I lack practice with it. I'm a people-pleaser, a good student, and extremely non-confrontational. I also shy away from things that are difficult or I'm bad at. I do all this, basically, to avoid criticism.

When required to describe me, my teenaged classmates could come up with nothing more interesting than basically "Not a bitch". Which felt like damning with faint praise, and even this mild comment sent me into a spiral of self-examination back then, when my skin was translucently thin, just like every other 15-year-old.

My skin's a bit thicker now, but I have also surrounded myself with people who are too nice, or too polite, to be mean to me (or, you know, tell me the truth if it's anything but flattering). So dealing with criticism doesn't really come up often, except when I am so silly as to put myself on the Internet where total strangers can tell me whatever they like, working with whatever small subset of relevant information I may have provided to come to possibly erroneous conclusions.

If my blog had a bigger readership maybe people would pop up here to tell me that I'm crazy or terrible or a bad person, but I think for the most part, readers of blogs like this one are a pretty self-selecting lot: if they don't like it, they don't read it, and they certainly don't bother to comment. It takes a certain type of hater with a lot of time on their hands to read a blog they hate just to make nasty comments.

So when I read what someone said today, my first instinct was to get on the defensive. But you don't understand ... you don't know ... you haven't even met me so you are unaware of what a nice person I am ... let me give you more information. Also, to convince myself that the critic has vastly different views on parenting from mine (possibly true) and that they're an idiot anyway (probably not true, but I am as much as stranger to them as they are to me, so who knows).

Then I took a few hours to let it rattle around my head. It's still rattling, to be honest. Maybe tomorrow I'll wake up with my faith in myself and my processes restored; it's not that I think I'm the most fantastickest parent on the block, or that my kids are the most perfect humans ever produced, but most of the time I'm pretty happy with the way things are going along, and willing to overlook my small defects in the areas of keeping floors clean and serving vegetables at every meal (for instance). (Those were not things that were criticized by the critic, but maybe they would have been had I provided that information.)

Mostly I have faith in my children's genes, which are good ones from good people, to triumph over the day-to-day foibles of their minder; and in my own intentions, which are for the best.

It's a little too easy, with fingers bouncing on keyboard, to say things you'd never say to a stranger standing in front of you, without taking the time to make them a little more palatable by coating them in manners and prevarication and the benefit of the doubt. Sometimes that makes the Internet a refreshingly frank place to be, but mostly it just hurts people's feelings and makes them less receptive to whatever it was you were trying to tell them.

So there. I've taken my criticism and turned it right back around. Hah. It's much easier to give it out than take it.

Fed and clothed

It's 92 degrees outside and I'm having a nice cup of tea. Proper tea, the Irish sort. Hot tea, if you really need me to specify. I'm sorry, (for you, and for myself too) but cold drinks just don't cut it. There's a point I arrive at after lunch, or mid-afternoon, or at some stage in the day, when only a cup of tea will suffice. I probably just need to get with the program and assimilate, but it was hard enough for me to leave the "--me" off "program", never mind anything else.

When I've been solo-parenting for a few days, I sometimes self-deprecatingly remark that I've kept the kids fed and clothed, and anything else is a bonus. But you know, even that much can be pretty hard. (Wearing a spider-man costume counts as clothed, right? Because that's how Mabel went to the playground yesterday. If her brother had tried to do that at a similar age, I would have put my foot down, unless it was within two days of Halloween. But that's second children for you - you've been beaten down and your personal goalposts shift a bit. Besides, I thought she looked cute.)

But I have the utmost respect for anyone who actually feeds children - especially their own - on a daily basis. I mean, people who do it properly, not the "throw some things out of the fridge and see who can catch them" technique I tend towards myself. Because tossing off "fed" as if it's a simple thing implies that children are like normal human beings in ways that mine - and yours? tell me it's not just mine - are not. Normal humans, mostly

1. eat more than three different things.
2. acknowledge when they're hungry rather than losing their mind in the loudest and most inconvenient way possible.
3. are prepared to eat at mealtimes because that's when people eat, so that they won't be hungry later. Because later it will be not mealtime and you will be nowhere near food that is in any way nutritious or inexpensive, and you will then ruin whatever the next proper meal was supposed to be.

But Maud, I hear your fingers clackety-clacking, Ellyn Satter! But Maud, nutritious snacks at proper intervals! But Maud, don't pander, don't short-order cook; don't offer, don't refuse. (No wait, that's weaning. Wrong rule.) It's your job to put the food on the table, and the rest is up to them.

YES, I KNOW. Save your fingers. Put down the spacebar. If you do all that and it works, I'm so happy for you, and I'm sure if I did it right it would work for me too. (Except I'm not, but that's what you need to hear. Maybe it's just not in my nature to do it right.) It's okay. I'm not looking for advice today. I just want to whine, in a perhaps-slightly-amusing way. If you find it as hard as I do to keep your kids just damn well "fed," by all means leave me a comment commiserating, so we can all whine together.

My kids are growing. They're healthy and the doctor is not worried about them. I try not to feed them too much sugar, to keep them away from high-fructose corn syrup, to limit the juice. I try not to give them a complex about eating too much, or too little, but to educate them about foods and what's good and bad for their body.

It will all come out in the wash.

(That's a metaphor. I'll talk about my broken washing machine tomorrow.)