Or is it the other way around? You be the judge.
Every set of parents needs a secret language. I know learning a second language early on opens up all sorts of wonderful neural pathways and gives your kids advantages in many fields … but have you considered how important it is to remain able to make parenting decisions in their presence without their input, even after they can spell? (And really, who wants to have to spell out entire sentences? Or put the letters together at the other end? I find I’m much quicker with the spelling than the understanding.)
We – B and I – are lucky, to have the Irish language as part of our culture and our heritage. It’s a rich tongue, steeped in metaphor and poetry, and we’re both pretty crap at it. But it serves its purpose when we need a quick conference over whether Monkey is, in fact, allowed a piece of Halloween candy as dessert after only having eaten half his sandwich, or whether it’s a bath night tonight or not. (Mabel gets all excited at the prospect of a bubble bath, so you don’t want to mention the possibility unless you’re planning to follow through or she’ll be upstairs running the water and divesting herself of clothing before you can say Ahoy, Matey*.)
Most of our Irish revolves around stock phrases that we learned early on and employed in every essay thereafter: “off with her as fast as the wind”; “it broke into smithereens” ( ina smidiríní – a phrase imported from Irish into English; did you know that?); “he fell in a heap and lay there without knowledge or words”; “it was a fine summer morning and I awoke early”; that sort of thing. These snippets are not always exactly what we need these days, but we interpolate a few words of French, Spanish, German, or Italian as the mood takes us, and the message is somehow transmitted. (We also have a strong psychic link. It helps.)
I should note that our grasp on all of the languages mentioned above, lest we sound like genius polyglot types, is mostly basic to abysmal. I have (had, a million years ago) pretty good Spanish, B learned it for three years; we both had leaving-cert French; he did some German evening classes, I did some Italian ones; we’ve been to all those countries at some point. If I wanted to order two beers ( dva pivo ) or warn you to mind the doors which are about to open, without the kids knowing, I could actually do it in very approximate Czech, too.
I like to think that although we don’t have an actual second language to gift our children with, they’ll be exposed, badly, to many different tongues. My parents used to use French (from school) or German (from Austrian ski-ing holidays) to discuss me within my hearing. I remember once I was acting a bit out of sorts on a road trip. They exchanged an incomprehensible sentence or two in the front of the car, and I rose zombie-like from the back seat to announce indignantly, “I’m not sick!”
The advantage of using an almost-dead language from a country in which we do not live is that unless they go to great lengths, the kids will probably never understand what we’re saying. As soon as I went to secondary school and started to learn French, my parents were limited to German, and suddenly all their secret conversations were about Gluhwein . The funny thing about Irish, mind you, is that you can never be sure who might understand you: almost everyone has a story about how they once used the mother tongue to discreetly pass a remark regarding the couple in front of them in the queue at Disneyland or the restaurant in Mauritius, only to have one of them turn around and retort in more fluent Gaeilge themselves.
Use it wisely, my friends, and keep your children pure as the snow on the mountains of Kerry in their ignorance of your secret language, whatever it is. It will serve you well.
*Irish joke. Never mind.
So we had our first Thanksgiving in the new house, and didn’t invite anyone over. We sat at our real dining table, using our proper crockery and our Waterford glasses (though I was too lazy/busy cooking to go upstairs and fish out the actual cloth napkins; maybe next year). The chicken was moist and tender (but not pink), the roast potatoes were a vision of golden crunchiness, and the vegetable was broccoli because the beans hadn’t looked great. Then there was apple pie and custard, and some stilton with cranberries to cleanse the palate. And a nice bottle of red. It was a reasonable, low-key Irish-American Thanksgiving.
Monkey had no interest in partaking, but Mabel downed her chicken enthusiastically and called it pasta. She had more pasta several times.
Earlier in the day, B took Monkey to see Tangled (the new Disney retelling of Rapunzel) while Mabel napped and I lazed indolently about, before realising that I should probably start cooking because a roast chicken, while not a turkey, still doesn’t get on the table in 20 minutes like most of my dinners.
Sadly for B, they had to leave before the film was over, because Monkey wasn’t enjoying it. In fact, he was refusing to watch any of it, and had been hiding obsessively behind B’s hands since the opening credits. Not the most successful trip to the movies ever, then.
He’s been before, to Toy Story and Toy Story 3 , and enjoyed them both. But in general, I must admit that he’s not the most adventurous viewer. (As I type, he’s hiding behind my back watching/avoiding an epsode of Rupert Bear .) I hear of other kids of a similar age who love Star Wars and even Star Trek : I can’t even get Monkey to see Finding Nemo – we got it last Christmas; he watched it once and won’t let me put it on again because of the sharks. (I had carefully skipped over the traumatic opening scene. I can hardly watch that myself.) Even his once beloved Little Mermaid is verboten now because the impending scary bits – which he used to just get me to skip over – weigh on his mind so heavily that he can’t stand the tension of the in-between parts. Cars is the only film he’s ever watched from beginning to end (once or twice or three million times in the past year), and I have to give it kudos for having no scary parts at all. His father is waiting impatiently for the day he can show Monkey the Indiana Jones trilogy, but so far, no dice.
In fact it seems, in some ways, that our little rough-and-tumble bruiser is – dare I say it – sensitive. I know other boys far quicker to cry at a physical injury, more likely to protest their mother’s leaving the classroom of a morning with a tear in their eye, generally giving off a far wussier vibe; but for all his bravado, Monkey has a soft, squishy interior, and I think finding stories and films scary probably goes along with his vivid imagination and rich internal monologue. (That’s what I call it when he spends a good five minutes making his index fingers argue with each other about who gets to flush the toilet.)
On the other hand, maybe it doesn’t mean anything. As a teenager I spent plenty of time trying hard to believe I was the sensitive, highly spiritual, artistic type. Also, willowy, slender, and ethereal. This was all about as true as you might imagine for a kind of square-shaped (at least in my school uniform) eminently sensible pragmatist. I blame Anne of Green Gables .
In my 20s, when I briefly held a low-level managerial position that put me supervising five or so of my peers, it soon became clear to me that I tended more toward the rhino-hided than the thin-skinned. I had to run things by my more-feeling best-friend/colleague to make sure I wasn’t going to upset people; and even then, on occassion someone would come to me in tears after a staff meeting because my throwaway comment about a new project keeping them busy had apparently made it sound as if they were a bone-idle waster the rest of the time. (For instance. Ahem.)
And yet, I hate scary movies too. I’ve never watched a bone fide horror, and even thrillers have to be, well, worked up to a bit. I am adept at looking away and humming just when the gory scene happens in, well, anything. I did not like the end of Braveheart , and not just because I was sick of Mel Gibson and blue paint by then. So maybe there’s hope for Monkey in this hard-as-nails world after all. Still, I fear for his teenage years and his heart which will get stomped upon and broken into a million pieces by some unthinking girl who hasn’t noticed his devotion.
Ah, it’s all ahead of us. What a thought.
Happy Thanksgiving to USA-ians; happy Thursday to everyone else.
Last night Mabel slept soundly from her initial going-to-sleep (around 8.00, or earlier; I think I dropped off there for a few minutes myself) all the way to past 11.00. This may not sound like much to you, but she has been religiously needing to be re-settled first 20 minutes, then 40, then stretching to an hour after she first went down every night for her Entire Life. Maybe there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. Either way, it was a tiny Thanksgiving miracle. She took what felt like the rest of the night to get back to sleep again, and then at 4am I had to go and comfort Monkey, who’d had a bad dream about Pippi Longstocking (as you do), so it wasn’t the best night ever, but it was a start.
However, the wee small hours are not the tiny moments I was thinking of.
Yesterday we went to one of the local playgrounds before it got too dark. This one has a small carpark right beside the playground itself, with the carpark “road” running around its perimeter, so kids still can’t just run from car to swings without looking. I had to change Mabel’s unsuitable shoes for her runners, and as Monkey was already out of the car, and since there was nobody else around and there were no other cars in sight, I told him he could go on over to the playground without us. But, to make the point, I cautioned him still to make sure he was crossing safely.
As I glanced up, I saw him stand conscienciously at the edge of the marked spaces and look carefully right and left in the deserted carpark.
When we joined him on the other side, he was chuffed. He beamed at me. “Now I can do that all times.” I didn’t want to deflate him, but I had to add some caveats: only when I say you can, and not even every time at this playground, only when it’s empty enough. It was such a tiny thing to me to give him – the chance to walk a few yards unaccompanied – and yet to him it was the opening up of a whole new world of responsibility and grown-upness.
I don’t particularly want to talk about the fact that Monkey barfed up all his apple juice and cheerios just before we left for school this morning, meaning that we didn’t get to leave for school and Mabel and I also didn’t get to meet up with friends at the playground on this, possibly the last day of lovely mild weather before it gets cold again, and how instead I spent most of the day lounging in front of the tv, gingerly enquiring as to the state of his tummy, and finally feeding them both ice cream at IKEA, which may not go down in history as the healthiest turned-out-to-be-dinner ever.
Okay, so the end part wasn’t so bad. And when he’s lying inert on the sofa Monkey is really very sweet and it stops him jumping on his sister. But still. Not the day I’d envisaged to lead us into the five-day weekend (from his school’s point of view). He even missed their Thanksgiving feast, not that he cared as he wouldn’t have eaten anything and had missed most of the run-up to it last week. I was working hard on priming him to try some cornbread, but now we’ll never know…
You know, it’s funny that I never needed a “sick kids” tag before last week. Just as well I’m not drawing any correlation between his finally totally weaning and all this getting sick he’s been doing lately. To be fair, I don’t think this even was a virus; I think it was just all the snot he’d been swallowing all night, plus a lot of coughing in his sleep, that finally revolted in his stomach and decided to come up again.
[We had discussed how it might be a stomach bug that he had caught or could pass on to other people. Later in the day, when he was still feeling a bit fragile, he said to me: "I think maybe there is a beetle in my tummy."]
You may think that ice cream is not well-advised food for someone with a dodgy tummy. You might be right; we’ll see. But I distinctly remember that, when I was small and had a pain, I used to ask for ice cream because that would make it better. My parents, naturally, thought I was trying one on. The thing is, they must have given in, at least some of the time, because I know that it always worked. That was what I was thinking of when I agreed that we could go to IKEA just for ice cream this afternoon. We even went in the exit doors to do it, because sometimes you have to rebel just a little.
I was halfway through a terribly worthy and insightful post when I realised I’d said most of it before . So here’s something completely different that I wrote and put elsewhere around this time last year. Apologies if you’ve read it already, but maybe it bears repetition.
1. Don’t.
2. Or at least wait a few years, till they’re big enough to enjoy it and not keep needing naps.
3. Or a few years after that, when they can go on a school trip and you can catch a show and go out to dinner like real people.
4. If you must go now, try to pick a weekend with good weather.
5. When lamenting that you planned for snow but not for rain, while observing your sodden and wailing baby and mentally waving goodbye to that Best Parenting award, take a moment to check your bag and see if there might just be an umbrella in there after all.
6. Do bring a spare pair of gloves. For everyone.
7. Aim low when planning what you’ll get to do.
8. Now aim even lower.
9. The queues will be insane so don’t plan to do anything that other people might like to do too.
10. Remember that you have to pay money and queue up just to sit down in New York in December.
11. And that they charge in to museums in New York, because they’re not the lovely Smithsonian museums of DC, so don’t try to go into MOMA just to find a quiet place to sit down.
12. Especially if it’s sleeting and everyone else thought the same thing.
13. Also note that you’ll have to stand in line to get into FAO Schwartz, the famous toy shop where they have the giant piano that Tom Hanks played on in Big .
14. Which will then be out of order.
15. [There is even a queue to get into Abercrombie on Fifth Ave, who knows why, not that you'd ever want to go in anyway. They must have been giving away drugs, or free Robert Pattinsons or something.]
16. Do acknowledge that the most fun your three-year-old has might be riding the subway, so make the most of it.
17. Do not get crown tickets for the Statue of Liberty, because your three-year-old will languish spaghetti-like after the first two steps of the 150 or so up to the platform, and need to be carried all the way. The crown is another 300-odd after that.
18. Don’t worry. So long as you come home with the same number of children you set out with, the trip was a roaring success.
Have a great time!
Me with a pretty miserable Mabel, just before the rain began.
Despite the increasingly willful two-year-old (and it’s not like she was ever a pushover), it’s still the preschooler who drives me to distraction, swearing, and feeling like a very irritated big sister instead of a mature and dignified (who me?) mother on a daily basis.
For one thing, he seems to have started tantrumming. At 4.5, that it’s a bit late in the game, but when things don’t go his way, he has a new response: drop to the floor and shriek, repeatedly. I’m trying to assess whether it’s really a beyond-his-control toddler-style response or if he’s just decided it’s effective. I tell him I don’t like the noise, and I don’t pander, and I hold him and comfort him if he seems over-tired or I think it’s because he’s still getting over being sick, but sometimes I just close the door and leave him to it. Like, for instance, this morning at 5.30am, when he didn’t want to be asleep any more and he’d woken the baby, who’d only recently – it seemed to me – gone back to sleep after her 3am waking. If this is the coming-up-to-5 regression, I don’t like it, because I have no intention of putting up with it for five more months.
When I’m in a particularly even-tempered mood, I can see that we’re making progress on the toilet front. Since I cut out the daily tiny dose of laxitive, which I had thought was essential, he makes it intact to the bathroom and his underpants are delightfully free of skidmarks. This is great; really, it is, and I make sure to make an effort to tell him so.
But. (Aaarghh.)
He seems to be participating in the “how long can you go” competition, and I’d say he’s beating whoever the other participants are hands (sorry, pants) down. On a weekday we make him go before school, and by the time he gets home he really needs to go again. But he usually holds it until after nap/quiet time, at which point he’s dancing around and shimmying so much he can scarcely unbutton his jeans, never mind aim.
(Another point of progress: since some time last week he’s opening his eyes again. This is excellent, even if he’s resolutely focusing on a point well north of the location in question.)
Today, being a weekend, nobody bothered to make him go in the morning. It’s 2pm and he has just now evacuated his bladder. For the past two hours he has been driving me absolutely demented with the wiggling and the denial and the inability to stand still and the craziness. Then he finally dances up to me, or perhaps sends his minion, Mabel, to inform me that he needs to go, and I have to hold his ears as I promised. So I stand behind him, venting my frustration again by telling him: “See, it would be so much easier if you had gone hours ago,” and “Watch what you’re DOING; ” and then I remember that I’m the one blocking his ears, so he probably isn’t catching all my pearls of wisdom.
When I was first pregnant, my sister-in-law told me that I’d never sleep through the night again. She may have been right.
At three in the morning, every morning, I am wide awake. Poised to leap, gazelle-like, from one bed to another, proffering solace here, laying on hands there. My sonar is highly attuned, alert to the smallest pre-waking mumble, the creak of a bed being sat up in, the cough of a child who is no longer sleeping through it.
At six, every morning, I am an inert blob, deep in slumber and heavily invested in dreams of taking buses from one vaguely recognised part of a city to another, or having to walk all the way home from Sandycove in the dark, or other things that rarely involve the care and feeding of small people. I think my dreams are trying to reclaim the me that’s just me, before I get up and become the me that’s such a seemingly vital part of everyone else, again.
[The title is from a great song by an Irish band called The Stunning. Very early-90s. Very not Nirvana. You can hear it
.]
When the nurse comments on your new haircut, it’s probably a sign that you’ve been to the doctor’s office too often recently.
Monday of last week, we went to the doctor because I was afraid Mabel had an ear infection. As she’s had a cold For Ever, can’t yet blow her nose (she thinks she’s doing it, but she’s just putting her lips together and blowing out between them to make a noise; she’s so pleased with herself at this achievement I hardly have the heart to tell her it’s not working), and has a history of symptomless ear infections, I’m always alert to this possibility; and she had said her ear hurt. It turned out there was some fluid and a little redness, but no infection. The doctor gave me a scrip in case it got worse, but I never filled it.
The following day was her scheduled two-year checkup. So we went, she’s fine, her ears were perfectly healthy, she got two shots, she looked betrayed, that was that.
Monday of this week, as I may have mentioned , we were there again, this time for both kids to be diagnosed with some very obvious pinkeye. Prescription issued, filled, about 3% actually used. Flu shot for Monkey. More betrayal. Recovery enused. So far so good.
Yesterday – Thursday – Mabel woke early from her nap and, after some standard ‘I shouldn’t be awake’ nursing and moping, suddenly started some serious crying, pulling on her ear, and totally unprompted complaining that her ear hurt. Something about her tone, or her face, or the fact that she’d woken up with a Brand New Iteration of the cold, made me call the doctor’s office straight away rather than doing my usual “Let’s sit on it and see how she feels in the morning.” She was clearly in pain, and I couldn’t imagine letting that continue overnight.
Luckily, the pediatrician said that they had a cancellation at 5pm – and with our regular doctor, even. I dosed Mabel up with Motrin (infant ibuprofen) and by the time we got there the kids were in fine fettle, chasing each other up the corridors and happy as clams. I felt a bit silly. Then the doctor found a red and raging infection in both ears. I felt less silly. Poor Mabel.
The Motrin wore off at exactly the six-hour mark each time, and I redosed her twice more last night with happy, not to say miraculous, effects. This morning she didn’t need another dose and hasn’t yet complained of pain. I have filled her prescription but not yet given her any, since it’s every 12 hours so I want to wait till bedtime. (So really I didn’t save any time by going to the doctor yesterday, except to give myself peace of mind about what was up and license to dose her to the gills with pain reliever.)
We shall not discuss why Monkey felt it necessary to wake up for the day at 3am and sentence his recently returned, even more recently gone to bed, father to be up with him, playing Go Fish at 4 in the morning. He is now sleeping.
*For my Irish or other non-American readers, I should explain that co-pay is what you pay at each doctor’s visit. Your insurance pays the rest. Thus, I am in the happy position of only having to pay $15 every time we go, which means I willingly take them along if I suspect something, for my own peace of mind. If we were in Ireland, where your health insurance covers a trip to hospital but not basics like office visits, I’d be seeing the nice people a lot less often. While everyone agrees that the health system in America is broken, it’s not exactly fixed in other places, and this is one of the things I’m very grateful for while I have small children.
They love each other to bits, these two. According to the chapter on siblings in NurtureShock, their constant interaction, whether they’re being sweet or jumping on each other, bodes well for their future relationship. But I think I could see that without being told.
This morning, after I had perpetrated some terrible injustice on Monkey – refused to give him a new hand towel all for himself now that his pinkeye is gone and there was a perfectly good towel-for-everyone in the bathroom, I believe – I spent some time heartlessly ignoring his tantrum. (He elected not to go to school today even though he’d been white of eye for the requisite 24 hours. Given this particular overreaction, he probably was still feeling a bit under the weather.) While my back was turned, Mabel approached him sympathetically and asked, “What’s the matter, Sweetie?” When I looked, she was straddling his supine form, stroking him adorably and trying her best to make him feel better.
We’ve had a spate of knock-knock jokes recently, to add to the chicken crossing the road joke. Monkey has been trying to invent some of his own, with limited success (unless you find surrealism particularly hilarious). He’s known the orange one for a while, the one that goes
Knock, knock.
Who’s there?
Banana.
Banana who?
Knock knock.
Who’s there?
Banana.
Banana who?
[Repeat for as long as you can stand it.]
Knock, knock.
Who’s there?
Orange.
Orange who?
Orange you glad I didn’t say banana?
But he can’t quite get the hang of why this is funny, so he thinks that any repeated word will work. Which leads to Mabel telling me jokes like this from the back of the car:
Knock, knock, Mummy.
Who’s there?
Tree.
Tree who?
Tree you glad I’m not a tree.
Humph. Sigh. And then I have to explain to Monkey why it’s funnier when Mabel tells it than when he does.
I taught them the interrupting cow joke this afternoon, as we failed to find a fancy new supermarket and instead ended up going to our old faithful Newest Target You’ve Ever Seen (it’s a long story). It goes like this:
Knock, knock.
Who’s there?
Interrupting cow.
Interrupting cow wh –
Moo.
Peals of laughter from the back row.
I’m an only child. All this is uncharted territory for me. This sharing of genetic code, of household in-jokes and linguistic shorthand, and having someone who’s been there since the day you were born – or the day they were born. Almost all my friends had siblings, of course – come to think of it, they all had more than one, which is probably why I feel like just one is only just enough, but maybe it’s all that and a bag of chips. Maybe it’s just exactly right. My friends had little brothers who were a nuisance; other people had big brothers whose friends provided romantic fodder; but it never occurred to me that brothers could be best friends to sisters. I always thought you had to have two of the same sex for that to work.
But maybe here, as in so many other things, my children will prove me spectacularly wrong. I hope so.