Monthly Archives: May 2011

Hot

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Listen, it’s been great. Really. This past week, some of it anyway, has been really quite fun and educational. I mean, I’ve totally sorted out Mabel’s summer wardrobe now, and her shelves are all tidy and the things that don’t fit are in boxes marked for next winter and next summer and giving away (/keeping for a long time), and I even sorted out some of my own wardrobe and I have a pile of things here over the back of a chair to be ironed (or to sit here until I get tired of looking at them, and I bring them back upstairs and just wear them wrinkled, one by one), and Monkey’s wardrobe is totally up next for overhauling. And my fruit consumption has gone up and my muffin and cookie consumption has gone down dramatically, because when it’s too hot for tea or coffee, I don’t have any reason to eat them. And we went to the pool on Saturday and we saw friends who cooked burgers for us on their grill yesterday, and that was all nice.

But look, Weather. This isn’t it . It’s not time for it . This is just a trial run, right? A little teaser trailer for summer, before you go back to where you were and ramp us up gently. We’re not doing the whole thing right now for real. We’re just not.

Because if you are, well I just refuse to, that’s all. The heat was beating back up at me off the asphalt this morning as I left the supermarket with two unruly children in tow. I have yet to figure out how I’m going to do the shopping with both of them all summer long once Monkey’s out of school, because his ability to be useful by, say, retrieving Mabel’s discarded shoes or running after an escapee sister, is directly mitigated by the extra helping of craziness they both have just by being in the same place at the same time. And the air conditioning in the house, let’s just say its most flattering angle is downstairs. Downstairs is quite lovely. But upstairs in the bedrooms, not so much. Especially in Mabel’s south-facing bedroom. At the moment I can open the windows when the kids go to bed and by the middle of the night, at least, their rooms are much more pleasant. But as summer progresses, that’s not going to remain the case. I think we might need some fans, lest our children simply melt away into small puddles of sweat that soak through their sheets and pool on the waterproof mattress protectors on each of their beds.

And then, since I spend so much of the night with young Miss Sweaty McHotterson, I can’t sleep because I’m too damn hot and the small furnace who insists on being attached to me won’t desist. Which leads to a very grumpy and tired mother, and doesn’t bode well for the coming months, as I can’t be a fun entertainments director if I haven’t had any sleep, and the children will be watching entirely too much TV if I can’t muster the energy to make the dash from air-conditioned house to instant-melt car and take them somewhere else air-conditioned, or the pool.

So, Weather. Go away. Come back in July. Give me time. Please, just a little more time…

Reaction parenting

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On Thursday, I finally did something I’ve been itching to do for quite some time. It didn’t really improve matters, though.

I slapped Monkey.

Yes, you can come and revoke my attachment parenting card now, I hit my child. I’m sorry.

No, really, I am. I mean, if I could do it over, I wouldn’t. But I can’t deny that it felt satisfying, just for a split second.

It had been a long, hot day – the temperature hit 93, by far the hottest so far this year. My body is not yet inured to such things, and I’d had a headache most of the day, partly from the heat and partly from the incipient cold I was nursing. I had given the kids a bath and spirits were high. I left them tussling in towels on the sofa while I went to put the kettle on to make the rice for dinner. In the three seconds I was gone – of course – there was a thud and a wail and the beginnings of some hard crying, and I ran back, afraid that Mabel had done a Monkey and got herself a concussion .

She had indeed fallen – been pushed – backwards off the seat of the sofa, towards the table, and Monkey was standing on the sofa, clearly guilty, saying “I’d forgotten about the head-hitting thing” in far too good-humoured a way. As I picked her up and held her close, asking where she’d bumped and wondering if it was bad or really bad, the sight of her brother all unapologetic and – frankly, tantalizingly naked under his blue dragon towel – led me to some quick and rash thinking. I ran over it in my head for a second – would I? yes, I damn well would, because I had to hold Mabel and there seemed no other way to quickly get across the gravity of the situation – and reached out and gave him a smart slap on his thigh.

It was just hard enough to hurt, and it felt good. To me, for a second. Then he collapsed down into his towel and started to cry, and words like betrayal flicked into my mind. Mabel had stopped crying – it appeared she’d hit her leg off the table rather than her head on the floor – but now I had another fire to put out, and it was one of my own making. I put my arm around Monkey and apologised. I told him how I’d promised I would never hurt him, and now I had, because I was angry and he had seemed not to care, but I shouldn’t have done it and I wished I hadn’t.

Partly, I still thought maybe he’d learn something from the experience. Something about how if you push me too far, bad things happen. Something about taking things seriously. Something about doing what I say when I say it, instead of when he feels like it. I really hope he didn’t learn that you can’t trust anyone, not even those who love you the most, or that it’s okay to hurt someone so long as you say sorry afterwards, or that the reasonable response to anger is to lash out physically. I hope he doesn’t analyse it that much.

He came closer, still crying, and hugged me. We all three sat on the sofa, me and my crying child and my no-longer crying child and my consciousness that now I’d have to own up to the Internet about it.

A few minutes later he was jumping around and flagrantly disregarding me again, just like always. So much for lasting lessons, I thought. Hopefully the learning will be mostly on my part – that it didn’t solve anything, it didn’t teach anything good, and I don’t want to do it again.

I was going to call this "Summer mugging, happened so fast" but that seems sort of tasteless

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Why does my child have such a hot head? I mean, literally. I just kissed her hair as she sat on my lap for a bedtime story, and her (not feverish) head was radiating with heat. Poor girl: hers is the warmest room in the house, and the A/C just doesn’t really reach all the way up there. Maybe her hair is actually pure cashmere, or perhaps it’s just all the brain cells buzzing furiously in there that generate it all. She wakes up sweaty headed from naps and in the morning all summer long.

Which brings me to the fact that it was 94 F out there today, and it’s not even June yet. It’s amusing that in Ireland we consider summer to begin in May, when in reality of course it never begins at all, or might take place for a week in late April or a few glorious days in September, whereas in America the official start of summer isn’t till June 21st. The fact that this date is also called “Midsummer’s Day” doesn’t seem to confuse anyone over here. Maybe it’s only called that at home.

Anyway, we are technically still in Spring, but the weather is all gung-ho for getting as close to the magic 100 as it possibly can, with thunderstorms to boot. It was a while after moving here before I could get my head around the idea that “hot and sunny” could sometimes be a negative comment. In Ireland, there is no such thing as “too hot” in weather terms: now I am all too familiar with it, along with “frickin’ hot”, “bloody hot”, and “too damn hot”. Also, “disgustingly humid”.

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A friend’s husband was the victim of a mugging last week. His iPhone was taken as he walked to work in broad daylight, and he was hit in the face for good measure. He’s pretty shaken, and my friend wakes up in the middle of the night panicking about what might have happened.

They live close to us, in what might be called a slightly less “nice” part of town, which is still “nicer” than the area a little further down the road where we lived for four years. We never had any trouble there, or saw any (though my upstairs neighbour did say I was terribly naive and that there were drug deals going on on people’s front stoops every day).

It does give one the heebie-jeebies, when someone blatantly disregards the social contract like that. I mean, we all exist here in some sort of harmony because we mostly agree to be nice to each other. If that’s taken away, then it’s just a free-for-all. Statistically, my friend’s husband was just horribly unlucky; but emotionally, when something like that happens close to home, it makes you start thinking that every day you make through unscathed is amazingly lucky. It shouldn’t have to be that way.

Anyway, Mabel heard about the incident and it’s moved to the top of her list of things to perseverate about, along with why that boy fell off the slide, and the time Monkey had his face painted, and why Grandad hurt his leg (in 1971). The conversation goes something like this:

- Why did someone take his phone?
- Because they wanted it.
- They should have asked him for it.
- Well, he probably didn’t want to give it to them.
- But he has to share it.
- Well, I don’t think they were going to give it back.
- But why did they take his phone?
- They were just bad people, Mabel.
- I don’t know why they took his phone. Maybe the bad guys should have just played checkers.

Yes, that’s the solution to the world’s problems. If only the bad guys would just work out their differences with a nice game of checkers, and we could all feel safe.

The lost boys

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Poor Monkey had a five-minute trauma yesterday.

We had gone into Marshall’s looking for socks for him, and were trundling around the shop/store picking up a dead cute pair of red-pink Converse low-tops for Mabel (not yet – next size up, but she might get to wear them to school next year and drop paint on them) and looking at this and that, since Mabel was sitting fairly contentedly in the trolley/cart so I didn’t have to hot-foot it out. This may have had something to do with the baby in a box she had picked up in the toy department; I told her she wasn’t buying it, but she could hold it till we finished up.

(See how I’m helpfully giving you the Irish and US vocabulary here? I don’t want to alienate my Irish readers by making them think I’ve gone over to the dark side of sidewalks and vacations altogether, but I don’t want to confuse and puzzle my poor American readers with peculiar terms they use for other things. If you’re from somewhere else, I’m afraid you’ll just have to muddle through.)

Anyway, Monkey was being a super-secret spy or something, following on behind me, but hiding around a corner or in a clothes rack any time I looked around. He probably had a theme tune going in his head. (This is a reference to The Emperor’s New Groove , but we’re probably the only family who has watched it enough to get it. An under-appreciated Disney: I highly recommend it.) I’d watch for long enough to make sure he’d seen where I was, and then continue without him, apparently unconcerned.

Sadly, it bit him in the ass, so to speak. The cash registers had been hidden behind a high display of summer tchotchkes, and I waited for him to appear before turning Mabel around the corner into them. Of course, this being Marshall’s, I had to wait a few minutes to get to pay. (Marshall’s, if you’re not familiar with it, is a discount retailer ike T.K. Maxx in Ireland, though this particular branch is fairly small – a big square space too full of rails and rails of clothes.) As Mabel prattled on about the baby and its accoutrements, and I made sure she wasn’t ripping the packaging of this item we were about to not buy, I craned my neck to watch for Monkey’s face to peer around a corner at us. It didn’t happen, but I couldn’t lose my place in the ever-increasing queue to go and check on him, and I reasoned that all he had to do was listen for Mabel’s crystal-clear babbling to pinpoint us.

Just as the customer in front left and the cashier beckoned me forward, a red-faced Monkey pushed through the display and ran over to me. He wasn’t crying, but something wasn’t right, and as he reached me he started to hyperventilate and burst into tears. I buried his head in my mid-section and tried to comfort him while explaining that no, we weren’t taking the doll; yes, we were taking the socks and the shoes; and swiping the swipe and punching the numbers. Transaction completed, we headed towards some chairs by the door and Monkey said, between sobs, “Sorry, Mummy. I got some snot on your t-shirt.”

I sat and held him for a while as he calmed down, but he was clearly very shaken and had been quite panicked. Someone had noticed and asked if he was lost just as he spotted me, so I don’t know how he would have dealt with interacting with a stranger at that point. We talked about how I would never, ever leave a shop without him, and what he should do if he was lost in the future (we have covered this in the past, but not recently, and it’s never been a real possibility to him before), and Mabel annouced that if he gets lost again, she’ll go and find him and bring him back. That’s all I would need, I imagine.

(When I was four, I got lost in Dun Laoghaire shopping centre with Simon from up the road, who was a lofty five. He panicked and blubbed. I clearly remember sitting in the little back room with the nice security people, telling them our names, as they announced over the intercom that two small children had been found. Our mums, shopping together, who had probably been frantic with worry, came to get us. I was sanguine and practical about the whole thing, and felt a certain scorn for Simon for a long time afterwards. Until now, maybe.)

Then Monkey and Mabel and I went next door to Target and christened the new Starbucks there by getting the victim of the incident a chocolate milk and a slice of lemon cake for us all to share. When he laughed about the giant dripping cardboard ice-pop suspended from the ceiling, it was with the pure sunshiny joy of one who’d been given a second chance at life.

Mus. App.

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My children have a limited musical repertoire. Beyond the regular nursery rhymes and such fare, I mean. I blame myself for not playing music around them, but honestly, the noise around here is such on a daily basis that if I have anything else in the background, it just pushes me over the edge. I used to love to cook to music on the radio, but now my soundtrack to dinner is more often a loop of “She hit me!” and “He grabbed my horsie!” and “GET OUT OF THE KITCHEN BEFORE I DROP A HEAVY OBJECT ON YOUR HEAD ACCIDENTALLY ON PURPOSE.” Adding Amy Winehouse to the mix just wouldn’t help matters.

We will not discuss how far behind the times I am with current music. I have probably not heard of anyone popular, beyond Lady GaGa, who I mostly know for her bizarre clothing choices. If I heard one of her songs in the mall, I probably wouldn’t recognise it. I understand now how people earn the scorn of their children for being so behind the times: I won’t know a single hit of the late noughties when they’re all golden oldies.

In the car I sometimes put on the classical station, and Mabel likes to ask for the violins (she’s been watching some Little Einsteins , bless their cotton socks and conductor’s baton and stacatto jumping over icebergs). Until recently, Monkey wouldn’t countenance anything that wasn’t the theme to the cartoon or Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, but there are a couple of other songs that have been in their orbit for so long that they never sounded new: namely, Don’t Fence Me In (the slow one by Ella Fitzgerald, or the by David Byrne) and what Mabel likes to call “Bum Bum Bum” – otherwise known as . (Listen: you’ll see why.)

I love to hear Mabel suddenly break into a few bars of “Mister Sandman, b’ing me a dweam…” as we go round the supermarket. Gives her such an air of sophistication, I think.

Recently, however, I was trying to broaden their horizons a tad and had put on some Beatles. Monkey suddenly professed to think Ticket to Ride was the best song ever, and has been asking for it since. Today in the otherwise deserted playground, as he slowly spun around belting out, “She’s got a ticket to ra-ad. She’s got a ticket to ra-a-ad…” and Mabel picked it up from the swings: “…She’s got a ticket to ri-hide, and she don… doesn’t care.”

That’s my gramatically correct two-year-old. My heart, it overflows with editorial pride.

Monkey sings along to Ella. Don’t miss the big finale.

Field trip

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This morning, Monkey’s nursery school class visited the local elementary school to see what kindergarden looks like. Serendipitously, I was scheduled to co-op today, so I got to tag along for my own introduction to the next however many years of our lives.

For my non-American readers, kindergarden is the first year of elementary school. Children start when they’re five. In Ireland – and the UK, correct me if I’m wrong, someone – we usually start at four and have two years before First Class/Form. First Grade here is roughly equivalent to First Class there, because it also happens when you’re six. Perhaps they learn more in that extra year of schooling over the pond, but I’m pretty happy to have it this way for us right now: I think Monkey will be a whole lot more ready for the big transition at five and a half than he would have been a year earlier, and I don’t feel there’s any great advantage to teaching kids to read and write and do sums as soon as they pop out of the womb – they’ll all get there in their own sweet time, given a conducive home atmosphere and interested parents. I’m more concerned that my son, at five or six or seven, gets time to play outside, than that he has an hour a week learning how to use a keyboard and a mouse.

But we’ve signed on for the public school and that’s just how it is. And what I saw today, while terrifying because it seems to indicate that my children are going to keep getting bigger and bigger and older and more independent, was good. It’s a big, bright school, with corridors full of artwork and geography projects and directions to the shad presentation (yes, shad, as in roe, I presume). It has things my primary school never dreamed of, like a counsellor and a lunch room and a library and a nurse. (In my school, the library was some books in a cardboard box at the back of the room. Or on a bookshelf, if you were lucky.)

But the kindergarden rooms we saw had comforting, familiar things too: cubbies for backpacks and lunch boxes, alphabet letters on the wall, scissors and gluesticks and pencils and easels, and nice friendly teachers. The children sat in groups at big tables, just like we did way back when, and it didn’t seem like they had to stay there glued to the seats in total silence as they traced one giant cursive a after another – there was plenty of jumping up and down and moving around and talking when they shouldn’t. Unless they were just putting it on to lull us into a false sense of security, and went back to a more Stepford-esque military precision as soon as we filed out the door.

And then we all had cut-up blueberry muffins and apple slices sitting on the grass outside the school, and wended our way back downhill – a train of green-scarved children caboosed by a sturdy wagon to trundle the snack materials, under the shade of tall trees, stopping at playgrounds as we went, along footpaths between the houses, leading to a tunnel, made so that the children of the town could walk safely to school without crossing any major roads. (That school, the original one, is the building that now houses the nursery school, among other things.)

Monkey took the visit in his stride, I think. He was interested, and didn’t seem intimidated, and asked a question in the counsellor’s office in a nice clear polite voice (I was proud), and I think he’ll be fine when the time comes around. Me, I’m getting a little sniffly just thinking about it.

Una vida a medias

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I’m living half a life, I thought last night, and built a blog post around it.

That’s a bit melodramatic, I thought this morning. But let’s see where it goes anyway.

I did spend quite a long time only living half a life. First I was in Dublin living one half of a long-distance relationship, not doing much, waiting to move. Then I was here, living a life that could be packed up and returned across the Atlantic as soon as the word was said. It took some commitment, to not acquire things, to pay no attention to local news, to maintain a presence at home and abroad.

A lot of people do it: the country not moved to, the job not taken, the man not married, the baby not born … the road not travelled, whether by accident or design. We all have parallel lives where we did the other thing, to which our minds wander every now and then to wonder which way we’d be better off, how things would be different, how we’re going to deal with the fact that they’re not.

I spent a long time living lightly, noncommitedly, waiting for things to get going. I used to be yelled at by the hockey coach in school for keeping my distance from the ball: “Stop saving yourself, Maud!” she’d bawl, justifiably irritated by my habit of staying safely back, claiming that I was waiting to spring into action when the ball might come close enough to need to be repelled by me, but otherwise mostly retreating from the fray. (I was a terrible hockey player.) Things have now got going, and I’m in the thick of it, and yet there’s still a small percentage of me that’s lying low, waiting, watching what’s going on on the other field, in my other life where I live in Ireland.

I still look idly at the property section of the Irish Times, marvelling at how prices have dropped, fantasy shopping for some gorgeous redbrick in D6 or a delightfully updated cottage in a secluded road just outside the heart of Dalkey. B reads the letters page. We still have our Irish bank accounts, our Irish drivers’ licences, our wedding-present gift tokens for Irish department stores (dammit).

(You know, it has just now occurred to me that they probably ship to America. I think next time we’re home I should just go up to the third floor of Brown Thomas, choose a nice piece of Le Creuset, and have them send it here.)

Of course, I also still have the co-sleeper, the baby stroller, the bouncy seat, and a big box marked “Maternity Clothes” downstairs in the basement. I’m no more – or less – likely to need those (aside from lending them to friends now and then) than we are to move home, but I’m not ready to let go of the possibility. Not quite yet.

When we moved into this house a year ago, the people doing the kitchen asked, “Well, how long are you going to be here? A few years, or forever?” “Yes,” we said. “One of those.” We still have no idea whether we’ll end up here or there or somewhere else, and if so when.

For now, we’re here, and a part of me is there. If we moved back, the opposite would be true – we’ve been in this country too long now for it not to leave a mark. Such is always the lot of the emigrant, or the returned emigrant, or the renewed emigrant. But you have to take the half of life that you have and run with it, because nobody gets to have both halves – the thing that happened and the thing that didn’t – … oh crap, I just wrote Sliding Doors , didn’t I?

A prize (of my admiration) goes to the first commenter to tell me the source of the title quote. (It’s not Sliding Doors .) (My husband is not eligible. Anyway, he already has my admiration.)

Saturday miscellany

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Sunday Miscellany is a long-running “music and musings” (as they call it) programme on Irish radio. Every Sunday morning of my life, until I moved out (even, come to think of it, if I was hungoverly drinking a cup of tea at my boyfriend’s house because I’d, ahem, missed the last train), it was the soundtrack to breakfast before going to mass. It features soothing or energising pieces of music interspersed with short memoir-style essays, usually read by their authors. Its theme tune is probably one of the most comforting sounds I could ever wish to hear.

It was many years before I connected the written word “miscellany” with the missal-eny (missal, obviously, because it was church day) I’d heard about for so long.

I don’t have any soothing music, and right now it’s still Saturday, but here are some snippets anyway. Imagine them being read by the author while you eat your rice krispies and wait for the toast to pop.

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Hooray! A new person likes me! I’ve been stuck at 12 on my Facebook likes for ages, and suddenly tonight it’s 13. It’s been particularly trying, because the first day I set it up, I got 15 likes straight away, and I thought, “This is easy! I’ll have 50 or 60 luvvies in no time,” but then it wasn’t working properly and I had to take it down and start from scratch the next day, and I’m still not back up to the original 15. So, you know, if you’re on Facebook and you’d like to like me, please do. If you don’t want the updates, you can always hide them, but otherwise it’s an easy way to get a notification whenever I write a new post. And you get bonus super-secret only-for-FB-likers updates every now and then (but not annoyingly often) too.

I’ve just finished Operating Instructions ; a book that I’ve seen recommended as new-parent reading ever since I was pregnant. It was good: somewhat surprisingly God-filled, but in a very diffident way. Americans (I generalize; forgive me) are so much more out there about their faith. Every time I click Next Blog on Blogger (which I have to do quite often because they’ve sneakily set it up so that to get to my dashboard I have to go forward and then back again; I won’t object because presumably other people have to click to my blog for the same reason, and what goes around comes around), I’m amazed by how often God is invoked in the next blogger’s About or Description or something. Irish people keep quiet about their beliefs even when they’re strong – especially when they’re strong, I’d say. The prosletysing life is not for us. Evangelical Irishmen are few and far between, except when drunk. (I generalise, but I’m allowed.)

It was quite similar to Anne Enright’s Making Babies , I thought, which was given to me when I was pregnant. I started it and tailed off, but when Monkey was about six months old I picked it up again and every word resonated with me, hilariously or sentimentally. If you enjoyed the one, I recommend the other.

Mabel didn’t nap yesterday, and in consequence went to sleep in a swift ten minutes at bedtime. She always falls asleep with me on her right, with her feet hanging off the side of the bed. Tonight we are not so lucky; I’m currently listening to her on the baby monitor, conning Daddy into singing songs and reading more stories.

My new glasses have been hurting the bridge of my nose, making me look – when I take them off – even more like my grandmother than I usually do. Her not-inconsequential nose was pinched at the top not by glasses but rather by old age, the rest of her flesh having dropped a little around the cartilage, leaving little indents on either side. (My nose is not the impressive Roman one of my maternal grandmother and some of my cousins, but it’s a mini version of it.) I took them in to have the small, hard pads replaced by some more cushy silicone ones.

The nice (but not cute) Jason-Long-wannabe hipster nerd who had sold them to me was there again, spieling his spiel to some other poor sightless fool. He had been helpful, offering opinions and bringing along new selections, one of which was the pair I ended up with. At one point I tried on a pair, looked in the mirror, and remarked, “A little too Lisa Loeb, don’t you think?” He laughed encouragingly, but even before I said it I thought that I probably had ten years on him and wondered if he’d know what I was talking about. Then I rationalised that she was more popular over here and probably had more hits than just the one I know, and that the glasses were a fairly constant part of her image, as far as I knew. So I said it anyway. It’s amazing how many thoughts you can fit in the instant before you make even the most offhand of comments.

So none of us got raptured today. Did you? When we came home from Monkey’s soccer game this morning (wherein the reds massacred the purples by about ten goals to nil, but none of them were scored by him; he’s more into defence, which he pronounces in the American way with the accent on the “dee”, to my chagrin) the Jehovah’s Witnesses were making the rounds of our neighbours, and I wondered if it would be interesting, or politic, to bring up the whole notion of the world ending this afternoon with them. But they didn’t call to our door, even though they must have seen us arrive. Maybe we looked beyond redemption, one way or the other.

Message in a bottle

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These are the halcyon days, the days we were longing for back when it was cold and nasty; the days we’ll be harking back to when it’s hot and muggy; the days we’ll be waxing lyrical about when the children are grown and gone, or even just grown and adolescent and all too present. It’s glorious outside – t-shirt weather but not hot: just right for a five-year-old to ride his bike round and round and round while his sister and his mother prowl through the too-long grass looking for creepy crawlies.

And of course, instead of doing that, I’m inside at the computer, doing my best to ignore the children. More than one friend has remarked lately on the Groundhog-Day -ishness of life at the moment: every morning we’re surprised not to hear I Got You Babe blasting from the radio, because everything else just seems to be happening over and over and over, every day the same as the day before or the week before.

I suppose the lesson here is that we humans are never bloody satisfied, and it’s just as well we don’t have pots of money and a little place in the Bahamas and designer shoes and a housekeeper, because we still wouldn’t be happy all the time.

The other day a squirrel scampered through the damp playground, and Monkey shouted after it, “Hello, my friend the squirrel!” I realised that I hadn’t heard him talk about his friend the spider, who used to show up in daily conversation, for a long time. It’s the sort of tiny thing that you think will happen for ever, that you’ll never need to remember because it’ll never stop happening, and then it’s gone and forgotten. That’s why I write these things: photos only tell half the story of a childhood, if that. I want to recall the sounds and scents and essence of these fleeting days, in all their tedium, so that in the distant future when I don’t even appreciate having a half-hour to myself again, I can open the bottle and take a sip of how it used to be.

Apples of my eyes

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Posting has been sparse here this week because I’ve been donning my travel-agent hat and figuring out planes, trains and automobiles (ferries, actually) in and between England, Wales, and Ireland for our trip this summer. I think I have us sorted out now, so all I have to do work out exactly what mechanism we’ll use to tote the smaller child without having the larger child hijack it all the time (I’m thinking Ergo, or maybe a tiny stroller he wouldn’t fit into – the dolly stroller, perhaps), arrange some car seats to borrow in Dublin, and plan a party where we get to see everyone but we don’t have to do any work. Potluck, anyone?

Right now, at 8.30pm, Monkey is the golden child. He’s basically a miracle baby. This is because he’s asleep. B says goodnight, Monkey lies down, closes his eyes, and goes to sleep. Then he stays asleep until tomorrow morning. (And then he wakes up B, not me.) He’s everything I ever dreamed of in a child. (Back when I used to get to dream.)

Mabel, in contrast, is the demon child. She’s still awake. She escaped and ran downstairs twice. She wanted books. She didn’t want books. She wanted little Batman. She wanted mumeet. She wanted the big side. She wanted the other side. She wanted the other big side. She wanted to play with her doll’s house. She wanted medicine because her tooth hurt. I’m hoping it kicks in soon and she lets me put her to sleep, because I’m tired and I have other things to do, like taking pictures of my new glasses and posting them on Facebook.

At her naptime this afternoon, Monkey disturbed my Very Special Quiet Time – during an ad break, because that’s what he does during my quiet time – to insist that I send a message on my computer to the people who make plastic because he’d figured out, for once and for definite this time, how to fly. He just needs big plastic wings, five big, that I can ask the people to make to his exact specifications, which involve the very important detail that they need to be as sharp as the edge of a door.  I clicked a link to read about how Queen Liz on her historic visit to Dublin didn’t drink her complementary pint of Guinness but Prince Philip nearly did – clearly the much-needed light relief; now I understand his role and why he makes famously silly comments – it’s because One is so terribly terribly serious and solemn and queenly all the time – and Monkey, in great relief, announced: “That’s it. Done.” I don’t think he understands how Internet commerce works at all.

Anyway. My glasses. When last we left this thrilling train of thought, I was hurtling towards maybe possibly finding out about getting laser surgery . Then the nice man from the laser surgery people rang me back to say that I couldn’t even have the initial examination to see if I was a candidate until six months after I’d stopped breastfeeding. Well. Since that won’t happen till the middle of the century or so, I went the more sensible route and booked a local eye exam with a view (har) to getting new glasses after all.

I dumped Mabel on a helpful friend (who let her spend the morning sitting on the front lawn watering a ceramic frog and most of her own clothing with the hose attachment, but heck, it was warm and she was happy, and the frog was very clean by the end of it) and went off unencumbered to look at red lights and green lights and points of light and wiggly lines in my peripheral vision as well as the traditional ever-decreasing A D F S thingies, and it turned out that rather than being a mere two years since my last pair of glasses, it was more like four. (Actually, he said, “Your last visit was in ’07,” and it took me several moments to figure out what that meant and where it was in relation to the present day.) So I felt totally vindicated in going the whole hog and ordering a pair of prescription sunglasses too, to replace the ones I use in the car that are probably ten years old and perhaps I’m guilty of missing things I should be seeing, like maybe other cars or short people or speed-limit signage.

And now I have, for perhaps the first time in my life, a pair of glasses that look pretty good. Cool, even. They’re not trying to blend in and disappear: I decided it was time to embrace the sexy librarian within and be a Girl Who Wears Glasses without shame. They’re purple, to boot. (I would take a photo but the daylight is gone. Maybe tomorrow.)

What’s more, everything is sharper. I’m not sure how much I should be celebrating the fact that now I’ll be able to see more clearly just exactly how badly my bathroom floors need to be cleaned.