Monthly Archives: December 2010

Snow chance

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It’s snowing. Falling gently, persistently; far from a blizzard but more than a flurry. I’ll allow that it’s very pretty. If it stops us from getting to the airport tomorrow I will be less forgiving, but there’s only one to three inches forecast, so I think we’ll be okay. We’re actually metroing all the way to the airport, and the metro station is five minutes’ drive from home, and we have a four-wheel drive with manual transmission, so I think, all in all, we should be fine. I just don’t like to have anything thrown in the spokes of my finely tuned preparations at this late stage in the game. (We will not talk about yesterday, when I was convinced we would all go down with some horrible highly contagious bug at the last moment, causing us to miss the flight and all of Christmas and forefeit enormous amounts of money. That was just the paranoia talking.)

In Ireland, even one to three inches would probably be enough to grind the country to a halt, at least temporarily. People from other, snowier, countries can’t understand how the Irish are so ill-prepared for the bad weather they’ve been having lately; how they send their children out to play in the snow in jeans and sneakers with a tea-tray to slide on; how they stand waiting for the train in freezing temperatures wearing snow-absorbing coats and no hats; how they try to walk on icy footpaths in slippy leather shoes or idiotic high heels; how an inch or two of snow causes schools to close and cars to crash.

Thing is, despite the fact that it happened last year too, this sort of weather just isn’t Irish. Irish winters are all about the chill, the wind, the rain – but not the snow. Ireland never has a white Christmas, even though the bookies will always give you odds on it and the weatherman on the telly (or -lady, Evelyn Cusack) will tell you every Christmas Eve what the chances are (usally slim to none).

When I was little, snow was mostly a thing of fairy-tale and legend. Every couple of winters a few flakes would fall, and the refrain that rang through every child’s heart was “Will it stick? Is it sticking?” It never stuck. The ground was always too wet, the temperature just a little too high. We’d stand outside staring straight up, marvelling at the tiny dots swirling out of the empty white sky, sticking out our tongues, hoping against hope that this might be the year that it would stick, that school would be closed. Once every three years, perhaps, it would stick for a day, or an afternoon. Time enough for everyone to enjoy the magic of time standing still; not long enough for anyone to run out of toilet paper or even turf briquettes. Before your jeans were even dry from your tray-top adventure, wet grey concrete was probably reclaiming the soft whiteness outside, and tomorrow would be another boring snowless day.

Once every ten years or so there was a big snow. The winter I was 6, I remember trudging up through snow so deep that in some places it went over the top of my wellies. (Then again, my legs weren’t very long in 1980.) The year I was 17 there was wonderful snow the weekend before we were due to go back to school, and all we future exam candidates rejoiced perhaps a little too hysterically happily. There were throngs of people on the local hill, sliding on tyres and binbags and every now and then an actual sled (I had one, thanks to having a dad who liked to make things out of wood). In between those years, I remember heavy frosts and maybe an inch or two of snow that stuck, but that’s really all we got.

This is why Irish people don’t know how to dress for snow. We know that layers are good against the cold, we persist in using umbrellas in strong winds, but nobody lays in stocks of snow dungarees and snowboots for their constantly growing kids – why would you do that? Snow gear is not readily and cheaply available the way it is in other places (viz, to wit: my children’s $15 snow boots from Target) because it’s only found in Pamela Scott on Grafton St, where the people who go on ski holidays shop, or in The Great Outdoors on Wexford St where the mountain climbing enthusiasts buy their expensive goretex jackets and carabiners.

Maybe after last winter’s snow, Dunnes Stores has laid in stocks of inexpensive, warm, wetproof, non-slip footwear and jackets and bottoms. Maybe people decided to buy that stuff in case this winter turned out like last winter. (But historically, as you can see, that wasn’t likely.) Maybe people are believing the experts who say that heavy snowfall in November/December is a portent of more of the same in January and February. Or maybe every time we Irish see snow, and see it go, we assume that’s it for another few years. By which time the kids will be three sizes bigger, so why would we buy stuff now?

Well, I’ve packed our cheap snowboots and Mabel’s snowsuit (from a yard sale), and we all have warm jackets, and I’m giving my dad a set of non-slip thingys to attach to the soles of his shoes so that when he insists on going to the shops in the Arctic conditions, he’ll have a fighting chance of staying right-side-up. Somehow I still don’t believe it’ll be snowy in Dublin, but I’m trying to pack for it anyway.

Now my biggest dilemma is how to keep the children indoors and away from the fluffy white stuff this afternoon, so that I can leave their snow gear clean and dry in the suitcase, where it belongs.

Filler

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For once, my to-bed-putting has ended before B’s, and so I’m downstairs first, kettle on, listening for the thud above of Monkey jumping into under his covers (he likes to do it dramatically when B leaves), and thinking I should get my blog post in quickly before I’m distracted by Buffy or whatever other televisual delight my thoughtful spouse has lined up.

Monkey has taken to requesting that I go and bring him food before I have my coffee. The problem with this is that every other night he’s fast asleep before I tiptoe past his room on the way from Mabel’s, because she usually takes longer to drop off than he does. Yesterday he was demanding that if that happened, I should open his eyes and wake him up to give him some frosted mini-wheats. Yes, great idea, that’s what I’ll do. He’s convinced that he doesn’t actually ever sleep. He thinks that he lies awake all night waiting for it to be morning.

If he was actually hungry, he could ask B to get him the cereal, but much as he likes to employ Mabel to convey messages to me when he’s in the bathroom, he prefers to use his father as a go-between in the evenings. Cutting out the middleman is not his forte. He’s obviously made for upper echelons of management. Or else we’ve been reading too much Milne again.

The king asked the queen,
And the queen asked the dairymaid,
“Could we have some butter for the royal slice of bread?”
etc .

There’s the thump. Gotta go.

That’s no lady, that’s my babysitter

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On Sunday we did something amazing: we got a babysitter and went to a movie.

It had occurred to me recently that while going out in the evening is still a pipe-dream, owing to Mabel’s sleeping – that is, waking – habits, we could perhaps get someone to watch the kids of an afternoon and skip out to a matinee. And that if it was an actual babysitter whom we paid with actual money, I would be more willing to do it instead of feeling that I was constantly depending on the kindness of friends to mind my horrible offspring.

In the end we did a bit of both. I arranged that one of the teaching assistants in Monkey’s school would come and babysit on the day in question. But then Monkey threw a wobbly at the idea of having someone – anyone, even someone he’s known and trusted for over two years now – come to his house and stay here while we, his beloved parents went where he was not. And while some of you may think that he should just suck it up, I decided that this is all one with the pre-five stage, including the crippling shyness he’s been exhibiting at parties lately (hiding not just behind my back hanging onto my cardigan, but periodically under it; crawling beneath the table instead of walking around it to get to the bowl of chips on the other side without being looked at by anyone; cowering behind his arm if anyone should point a camera in his direction), so I thought I’d give him a pass and arranged for him to go play at a friend’s house for the duration. It made him happy, it meant I could relax, and I didn’t feel like it was so much of an imposition as sending both of them to a friend. Economically it made no difference, and, most importantly, we got to initiate the use of a babysitter with the more people-friendly-aged Mabel so that when she’s four-and-a-half she won’t throw a wobbly about it.

In fact, Mabel had the time of her life. Three hours with the undivided attention of Miss P, whom she normally only sees in the hallowed region of Monkey’s school, from which she is always given the bum’s rush at dropoff and pickup. Three hours in which to show off, to delight, to entertain a totally captive audience, who would never just plonk her in front of Blues Clues or try to update Facebook instead of playing with her. Miss P was a bit bowled over, I think, by The Mabel Show.

At one point, Mabel was showing Miss P one of her babies, and Miss P asked if it was a boy or a girl.
“She’s a baby.” Mabel refuses to acknowledge that babies can be boys or girls as well as babies.
Miss P decided to investigate further.
“Do you think I’m a boy or a girl, Mabel?”
Mabel had to think about that one, because she’s not used to grown-ups being referred to as boys or girls. Also, Miss P has close cropped hair and a boyish figure. Eventually Mabel decided she was a boy. Miss P was amused.
They continued to plumb the depths of the 64-count box of Crayolas.
Then Mabel leaned in to Miss P and asked, in a whisper,
“Miss P, are you a lady ?”

Miss P was tickled pink by this, as evidenced by the fact that she’s told me the story several times now. I think partly she finds it so funny because she didn’t expect Mabel to say “lady”.

Which brings me to my discussion point for the evening. Maybe it’s a cultural thing, but somehow calling someone a woman to their face sounds a bit rude to me. A bit, well, biological , perhaps. I mean, we all know that small children are wont to describe total strangers, out loud, in their hearing. And not just with the classic “Why is that man so fat, Mommy?” My kids both started early on pointing out people in the supermarket or on the street, and just as an only-just-older toddler will announce “Baby” when they see a smaller one, my two would also announce “Man” while pointing blatantly at the person right behind us. And they needed a word for the other sort of person, and somehow I didn’t want them saying “Woman” about random females to their faces, so the word I chose to give them was “lady”. That way I can converse with them about the nice lady in question without feeling appallingly rude.

But am I being rude by doing just that? Does this make me a bad feminist or something? I know some people have a problem with being called “lady”, but as far as I’m concerned it’s just a politer, fancier maybe, way of saying woman. Like saying “ma’am”. I suspect it’s in large part geographical, so maybe it sounds perfectly normal in Ireland but peculiar in the US. Miss P is from Tanzania (I think), so I really don’t know what the appropriate word would be to her.

Care to weigh in with an opinion? What do your kids say when they talk about the woman behind you in line at the post office? And can you ever show your face there again?

Presently

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I’m just back from kindergarden information night. The realisation that our son will be entering the American public school system in a few months is a bit daunting. At least for me. He’ll probably take it in his stride.

I’m sure my teachers, way back when, had timetables and lesson plans and so on, even for junior and senior infants (as the first two years of school are called in Ireland, equating roughly to pre-k and kindergarden); but I had no inkling of this, and neither, I’m sure, did my parents, so they didn’t have to be intimidated by it. My mum asked around when I was three, heard the local national (state) school was good, and sent me there the following September. Which is more or less what I’ve done here.

I’m sure it’ll be fine. It’s just another step towards being here forever, though, like we never intended.

——————-

Monkey likes to employ his sister as his little minion, to do his bidding, whenever he can. Which is cute, if annoying. When he’s sitting on the toilet, majestically producing his majestic productions, he calls her in to entertain him by clambering in and out of the cupboard under the sink. I’m surprised he doesn’t have her putting on an all-singing, all-dancing show while standing in the sink, but I probably shouldn’t mention that for fear that she’ll think it’s an excellent idea.

He also uses her to relay messages to me, like that he’s done and ready for me to come and help with the wiping of the majestic bottom. (Which he can actually do perfectly well himself, but I have to keep the wipes out of reach so that Mabel doesn’t yank them all out and use them to shine all her crayons, one by one.)

Today she was taking a break from the entertaining and busy with something or other in the family room when Monkey summoned me, from the bathroom, to send her to him. I told Mabel that her brother required her presence. She jumped to attention, said “Yes, yes, I have presents for him,” and scrabbled together a bundle of goodies in her blanket. Then she ran into the bathroom and declared, “Here are your presents,” producing a small plastic shark, a tiger, an aeroplane, and a baby.

Then he sent her out again to tell me that he was done, and ready for his close-up.

Sock shock

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Monkey is not very good about dressing himself these days, though he’s perfectly well able to do it when something enticing enough is dangling on the other side of clothedness. And because I am Bad, and also Impatient, I usually just do it for/with him. My reasoning, apart from the fact that I am congenitally averse to being late, is that at some point he’ll start to do it himself, so I may as well save us all the stress and just help him out now. (That’s called the “He won’t be doing it when he goes to college” defence. If I’m still dressing him when he’s 17… well, shoot me now.)
The dressing mostly doesn’t bug me, but the shoes and socks do, especially when they have to go back on multiple times a day and I’m always trying to wrangle the same things onto a very wriggly toddler who’s likely to throw them off and take the trousers with them for good measure, if I don’t get her into the car, stat.
So the other afternoon, when we didn’t have to be anywhere in a hurry and Mabel was feeling amenable to clothing, both inner and outer, I decided to take a stand and get Monkey to at least try to put on his own shoes and socks. He faffed around finding them for an age, dancing over and back tantalizingly close to the items in question, as I summoned my inner zen and waited, calmly repeating my request to put them on, or even to sit down and try, and ask for help if he needed it.
Eventually, along with all the other superpower-related burbling and excuses, he said, “I don’t like it when the words come out upside down…”
Aw, I thought. What a poet. He’s trying so hard to express his true feelings.
“You don’t have to talk about them; you just have to wear them,” I said, quite pleased with my pithy response.
“ No .” As withering a look as you can get from a four-and-a-half-year-old. “The writing. On the socks. Is supposed to be on the bottom. They get twisted over and I can’t get them straight.”
Oh. Right. The non-slip text they put on the soles of kids’ socks. So much for my poet.
However, with a little help from me to orientate them correctly, the socks went on, followed in fairly short order by the shoes. A tiny triumph for patience, just for one day.

To give than to receive

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Yesterday the question of the day in Monkey’s classroom was “What do you like most about gifts?” with options of “Giving them”, “Getting them”, or “Both.” I read the question out, and while he pondered the matter, took the opportunity to expound quickly on the merits of giving, on how lovely it is to make others happy, yada yada… Without further hesitation, he plumped for “Getting them.” I made a mental note that it might be time for us to have The Talk again. The one about the meaning of Christmas.

So this afternoon on the way to Target to pick up a couple more presents (one of which being an advance bribe for the booster flu shot Monkey has to get next week), I reminded him that we give presents at Christmas as well as getting them, and asked him if he could think why we might do that. He drew a blank. I mentioned how nice it is to show our friends and family that we love them by giving them thoughtful gifts.

Then I had to go and bring Jesus into it. (Atheism is hard, says Heathen Barbie.)
“Do you remember whose birthday we celebrate at Christmas?”
“No.”
“Baby Jesus. Remember the story of the nativity?” (We have a gorgeous edition with beautiful pictures and very high-falutin’ words. , actually.)
“Oh, yeah. Is that real? Did he exist in real life?”
“Yes. Yes, we know that he did, almost certainly. Even if the story didn’t happen exactly like in the book.” I try to be scrupulously honest when explaining God and religion, but it’s complicated when you’re an agnostic Catholic trying to pay due respect to matters of fact vs faith and probable vs propaganda.
“Oh wow. Oh wow.” Clearly bowled over by this amazing fact/fiction crossover.

That was the easy part. Now how to get from there, across the minefield of God/Son of God; bypassing the whole died-for-our-sins aspect, into which I so did not want to get; to the point, whatever the heck it was, in simple terms and preferably in a single, pithy sentence so as not to lose his already-wandering attention. I leapt across the great schism straight to “… and he was a very good man who wanted everyone to be nice to each other, so we give each other presents at Christmas.” Feeble.

After a little more in this vein, we were about to enter the hallowed aisles of Target, so I thought I’d wrap it up for now with a final pop quiz.
“So why do you think it’s nice to give presents at Christmas?”
“Because then I’ll get presents back.”

Note to self: Try again tomorrow.

The Santa Clause

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It’s the most morally ambiguous ti-i-i-ime of the year.

At least, that’s how I feel sometimes. I know a lot of people don’t agree with me on this, but something about the whole Santa Claus palaver makes me wiggy. (Sorry, I’ve been watching a lot of old-school Buffy lately. Look out for late-90s Joss Wheedon phraseology.) There’s the magic of Christmas, the wonder in their wee sparkling eyes, yada yada; but it’s also mass deception of children by adults. Ratified, sponsored, and encouraged whole-heartedly by the media, egged on by the economy, which of course has no particular stake in this.*

Originally, we thought we might get away without doing Santa at all. B was more in favour of this than I was – I had practical misgivings about being the parent whose child had ruined the holiday season for his entire class with a well-timed sceptical comment to a sensitive fellow five-year-old. As time went on I realised that TV, the mall, and even such innocent and educational props as the seasonal table in the library make it impossible to ignore Santa and all his trappings. Sure enough, by the time he was three, Monkey had figured it out for himself, with little or no input from us. We never sat down to tell him that a man in a red suit would bring him presents on Christmas Eve; then again, so far we haven’t sat him down to tell him that it’s all a fabrication of the Coca-Cola Company either.

Our vague and fairly ad-hoc tactic is this: to underplay the Santa element as much as possible, and worry about answering concrete questions when they come up. So we don’t visit Santa at the mall, we don’t write a letter to Santa (at least, not so far), and we haven’t talked about him very much at all yet this year. We do stockings, and they are nominally from Santa, who came down the chimney, but any serious investigation into the physics of this would fall at the first hurdle since my parents (at whose house we have Christmas) have a closed fireplace.

I know some people (in real life, even) who tell their kids that Santa is a game parents play with their children. I wholeheartedly admire this approach, but until faced with a point-blank question, I’m not going to bring it up myself.

Jessica at Balancing Everything (who used to be VeryMom), had a lovely post about this subject. You should read it, but the gist is that her five-year-old knew Santa wasn’t real, but she could see that he really wanted to believe, so she helped him recover a little of the magic for a couple of years; but not without some misgivings. I know Monkey would want to believe too, the way he wants to believe in superheroes, the way I always wanted to believe in a little bit of magic; that maybe, just maybe, there had been an extra present at the end of my bed that was a surprise even to my parents the next morning.

We had a close call a few weeks ago when Monkey asked from the back of the car whether the tooth fairy was real, but luckily he didn’t wait for an answer. Possibly he knows that some questions are better left unasked.

*And don’t get me started about the Elf on the Shelf (as described here , because I never miss a chance to link to my favourite bloggers). I know some people swear by these magical critters for getting their kids to be all kinds of beautifully behaved coming up to Christmas, but I just think it’s all wrong. (No offence if you have one and love it. My blog; my opinion.)

I read about someone (in the comments on that post of Linda’s, actually) whose teacher got one for the class: that presses all the wrong buttons for me – how can you insist that schools have non-denominational “winter celebrations”, and then think it’s okay to tell the kids that this here elf will report back nightly to Santa on your behaviour until Christmas, so you’d better watch out. If that happened in my kid’s class, I’d be pretty peeved.

Take a memo, Miss Mabel

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I am really quite tired of chasing my two-year-old around the sofa like a 50′s boss after his besweatered secretary. Though I imagine the 50′s boss usually wasn’t brandishing a onesie, except in particularly special professional relationships.

And then, when she’s finally dressed, there’s the huge thrice-daily hissyfit over socks, and shoes, and a coat. I miss summer. The other evening we went out to a school fundraiser at 5.30, which was a particularly challenging hour to leave the house. I ended up stuffing a shrieking toddler into her coat, wondering if I was the cruellest mother on the planet (she’s teething, into the bargain), but five minutes later she was happily removing her footwear in the back seat and got through her ketchup with a side of fries and all the way to bedtime quite happily.

I am also tired of the thin-skinned four-and-a-half-year-old who can’t be denied a cookie or told to wash his hands without bursting into hysterical tears and ear-piercing wails. Part of me wants to cut him some slack because I know it’s a phase , and at least somewhat beyond his control. The other part of me thinks he’s big enough to know better and needs to get with the program, stat.

This morning he had a breakdown because his sister was given a wet wipe before he was. She leaned over his sobbing form and said, as sweetly as pie, “I’m sorry, Monkey, I didn’t know you wanted it. I was just blahblah blurble…” [descends into unintelligible babytalk and starts dancing around comically]. Even Monkey had to laugh. Before remembering himself and going back to the wailing.

It would be so nice if they weren’t in these phases right now, when we have to take them home to Ireland for their annual fortnight of being paraded for due admiration by aged relatives (and non-aged ones, but it’s more the judgement of the aged ones that I’m worried about). There’s an outside chance, I suppose, that Mabel will be between molars right for those two weeks, but it’s a lot more likely that she’ll reaching the apex of misery with all four at once or something. And there’s no way that Monkey will be over his four-and-a-half-ishness by then. It’s unfortunate that his birthday falls in April so he’s always right in the middle of the second-half-of-the-year retrograde phase when we go home for Christmas.

But still. Who doesn’t love an adorable naked two-year old laughing maniacally as she runs around the house and dances on the tables? Only the most scroogey of Scrooges would deny us all such entertainment. Especially when they’re not the one trying to get the clothes on her.

Desperately seeking a sense of perspective

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Or, how not to step away from the Facebook:

One day, after careful consideration, you may decide that world domination by blog is too slow in coming and that it’s time to expand your readership a tiny bit. So you think you might use the privacy controls you’ve recently discovered in Facebook to send the link to a few carefully selected friends – just the ones who might possibly be interested in your parental ravings, and not, by any means, the ones who are your nephews and nieces or aged uncles or ex-co-workers whose friend requests you felt too guilty to turn down. Those people do not need to know about the current deployment of your boobs, which apparently is all you blog about these days.

So you carefully click on the Make Group link in the sidebar, and slowly, deliberatingly, you compile a list of those friends you think might possibly, some day, be people who might not mind being told about your blog. You run your mind over all your blog entries to make sure you haven’t inadvertently insulted any of these people in a blog post at some point in the last five years.

There. You’ve made a group. Hmm.

Then, just as you’re wondering how you do the next thing, you get an e-mail from one of those people saying she saw you put her in a group about your blog, and what’s its address please?

You panic, thusly: Shite. Not a group, it should have been a list. How do I delete a group? Here? Here? Did everyone get a notification that I put them in a group called “People I might tell about my blog” or something? Now will they all get a notification telling them that I just removed them from a group called “People I might tell about my blog”? Arrgh.

You delete the group and post a hasty general update about how people shouldn’t mix up groups and lists. Silly old you. Silly old Facebook. Ha ha ha.

So you take a deep breath, go back to the start, and make a list instead. You select the same people as before and put them on a list of your own. You go to your update box and type a carefully worded self-deprecating introduction to your blog and add the link. Your four-year-old wanders in looking for a cookie just as you press Share.

And you realise that you just shared that link with all 135 of your closest Facebook buddies.

You hyperventilate, remark calmly to the child that you’ve done something silly, and grope wildly (if you can grope with a trackpad) for the tiny x that brings relief. You click the tiny x and see the blessed words “Delete this update?” appear, to which you click in the affirmative. You look in vain for the “Turn back time so this never happened at all” button. You wonder how many of your friends were watching their Facebook news feed at just that moment, and what exactly they saw, and how long it persists for. The four-year-old continues to ask for a cookie.

Finally, you have managed to (a) give him a damn cookie, (b) retype the self-deprecating introduction, and (c) send the update only to the people on your list. You make another cup of tea to help the shakes dissipate. You are not cut out for a position of high-pressure and time-sensitive computer finagling.

And then you potter about updating your profile and blithely adding “Blogging” to your interests. All 135 of your friends are told that you have just done this, and at least one of them immediately comments to ask where they can find your blog.

You rest your head on the table and try to remember that this isn’t nearly as big a deal as you think it is.

Baby steps

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I type this with my fingers and toes crossed, touching wood (laminate? does that count? maybe I should go sit in the other room with the hardwood floor), throwing salt over my left shoulder, humming, “La la la…” to look nonchalant and distract nemesis (much as I do when driving through a very orange light), and doing anything else you can think of to avoid tempting fate to clobber me for what I’m about to say.

But it appears, maybe, that a tiny step forward has been taken by Mabel towards sleeping better.

As I may have mentioned, when she was a small baby she would have to be re-settled 20 minutes after I put her down for the night. (Which really put the kybosh on trying to cook dinner right then.) After a while, this stretched out to 40 minutes, so that she woke up just as I was sitting down to eat the dinner that I had managed to cook without interruption. Progress. For a long time now, she’d been waking at the 60 minute mark. Each time, I could usually re-settle her quickly enough with a shot of the boob, and after that she might last till 9.30 or even 10.00 before the next summons.

In the past couple of months, I would say, I’d noticed this 60 minutes stretching out to an hour and a half, though I didn’t want to say anything for fear of jinxing it. And for over a week now, not every night but more often than not, she has gone right through and slept from her bedtime (lights out at 7.30, fighting over turning the light back on for half an hour, asleep by 8 if I’m really lucky or 8.30 if I’m not – there’s teething going on again) all the way till my bedtime or beyond. Last night she didn’t wake for the first time till 11.30.

I know this is a tiny, tiny development; and everyone out there with a baby who sleeps is laughing hysterically and slapping their thigh at the notion of this poor sap (me) who has been at her darling’s beck and call for two years now. But to me, it’s a huge relief. It’s a light at the end of a long tunnel, and gives me hope that she really will learn to sleep all night on her own, eventually.