Monthly Archives: July 2011

Shoeless Jane and the Injured Party

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In Cardiff, two weeks ago now, we were staying with friends. We all went to a park very close to their house one evening to let the children play in the wilderness of non-playground-land. I took the opportunity to have an actual conversation with a grown-up and let B and the other dad watch the kids, since I’d been doing the watching all week while they swanned around their conference admiring each other’s i -prefixed devices and eating hors d’oeuvres, or whatever it is these people do at conferences.

“Blah blah yadda yadda,” quoth I.
B runs up, panting and less than gruntled, carrying Mabel, semi-shod.
“Take her. She’s lost a shoe. I have to go and look, and I can’t do it holding her.”
Mabel kicks off the other shoe and says, “There’s my shoe.”
B heads off again for the bushes, muttering, “Whose idea was this place anyway?” rhetorically and not nearly so much under his breath as you might have thought.

The boys (both five) and Mabel, who can’t be left behind, had gone to play in one of the “dens” – one is at the top of a very muddy bank behind the pond, but this was the more accessible one that was formed by a bank of tall bushes and trees along the side of the park, with hidden space behind, up against the railings. It was somewhere in all this that Mabel’s shoe had come off.

I was not best pleased, as this was (a) an expensive shoe, a Keens sandal bought with my REI member’s rebate, not just any old Target or yard-sale acquisition; and (b) one half of the only wearable pair of shoes she had with her, since the other two pairs were suddenly too small when I started packing for our trip.

We wandered down towards the site of the commotion, where the boys were still climbing and the fathers were searching the undergrowth, and the overgrowth, for a small pale-pink sandal. I carried Mabel’s other shoe, and Mabel, for safe-keeping. As I walked I whispered to myself (which was stupid, really, but I wasn’t thinking very hard), “Bugger, bugger, bugger”.
“Why you say ‘Bugger, bugger, bugger,’ Mummy?” asked Mabel in her loudest, most piercing tone.

Then there was a shriek and a wail and Monkey fell out of his tree.

Visions of broken arms floated before me, but happily (for me; painfully for him) he just had a big graze all down one side, where the tree branch had scraped along under his t-shirt. It started to rain. We decided to call off the shoe hunt and take our ragamuffin children home.

Having carried the injured party all the way back to the house, B turned around and went straight out to search again, got caught in the downpour, and returned triumphant. Mabel spent the next week doing her darndest to lose at least one shoe again, if not both, but so far so shod.

Supersize everything

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When we got home from our trip (this home, the other home, the home that is our house in America, I mean), my immediate reaction on coming in the door, apart from “warm” and “not too smelly” and “ceiling hasn’t caved in , so that’s good”, was that this is a lot of space for just us chickens. And that we have a lot of stuff. Why do we have so many saucepans?

I’m sure this isn’t the first time I’ve remarked that everything is bigger here. The houses, so the furniture. The roads, so the cars, so the parking spaces. The plates, so the portions, so the people. The fridges, so the number of things that must be kept in the fridge. (Or maybe that’s the other way around.) The ovens, so the cookie sheets. The number of channels; the hours of day or night during which children’s programming is available.

And sometimes it makes no difference, but sometimes it makes life just that bit easier. Driving is easy, because the roads are wide and well signposted, and fuel is cheap, and you hardly ever need to reverse into a parking space with only three inches to spare on either side. We do take public transport, but we don’t take public transport to the public transport: that is, we always drive to the Metro station rather than taking the bus that stops at the end of our road. I don’t even know how often the bus goes past – that’s how much we have never considered taking it.

I’m certainly not trying to imply that Americans are lazy; far from it. They work harder than any other people I can think of, with worse conditions as standard – no statutory vacation, no mandatory health insurance, no damn maternity leave at all.

And yet, I can’t help thinking it’s not good for people – my children, let’s say – to grow up with all this largeness. Taking these things for granted and viewing the other, the things they see when they visit Europe, as the oddity; the quaint tinyness of things that are not American. Wouldn’t it be healthier to view the smaller item as normal and the Cheesecake-Factory-sized portion as humungous and possibly obscene? (Okay, so most people understand that Cheesecake Factory portions are completely off the charts. Don’t they?)

I think it must come down to environmental ethics and small-footprint stuff. Americans have the biggest carbon footprint of the planet, simply by living here, because we use so much of everything without a second thought. Because it’s easy, and it’s right there, and why the heck wouldn’t you? You need a certain amount of leisure time, of disposable income and peer pressure, to implement the other, more environmental option, whether it’s composting or hanging the washing on a line, or taking the bus or using cloth napkins.

Not everyone has the luxury of such things: until they (that anonymous “they” who are synonymous with communists, or at least socialists, to a lot of America, in a way that mystifies Europeans) actually make it more difficult and more expensive to live life the other way, by charging for your non-recylable trash – I think this happens in California, actually – or making a Big Mac meal more expensive and harder to find than fresh fruit and vegetables and ethically raised meat and hormone-free milk and HFCS-free everything – until that happens, most things in this country, including our collective carbon footprint, will probably continue to be supersized.

The four-dollar free lemon

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Yesterday we went to the farmer’s market, which should be a nice relaxing thing to do on the first day back to real life, when you’ve been to the supermarket in the morning but carefully not even ventured down the fruit’n'veg aisle, because you knew you’d get superior produce in the afternoon, and a nice happy family outing to boot.

Mabel was feeling existential on the way there, and kept insisting to Monkey that he doesn’t exist. He took it quite well.

It was, of course, a million degrees out. I had, of course, forgotten my hat, because it was momentarily overcast when we left the house, and I’ve been out of the country. The children were, of course, hungry and thirsty as soon as they got out of the car.

We got eggs, because the eggs always go first. I got an iced coffee because the coffee guy is beside the egg man. I bought some tomatoes or something. Then I acceded to demands and headed for the lemonade and doughnuts. Instead of doughnuts, though, I bought a slice of nice-looking chocolate cake, because it claimed to have stealth zucchini in it. Mabel rejected it, but Monkey liked his half and I got to eat the rest. Score.

I bought a lemonade for them to share, even though I knew Monkey probably wouldn’t drink it because it had bits in it. As I stood at the lemonade stall I realised that I’d over-enthusiastically decided in the morning that I should make my own hummus now that I have a real full-sized food processor, and had bought a tin of garbanzos for the purpose. But I had no lemon. I asked the nice man if he’d sell me a lemon, from that pile he was busy gutting for lemonade. He very kindly tossed me one, so when paying for the drink I gave him an extra dollar.

As predicted, Monkey didn’t like the lemonade. Mabel didn’t either. But it was hot, so while we watched the model trains go around the table, they both munched all the ice out of it, and moved on happily to the ice cubes left in my empty iced coffee.

So basically, I just paid four dollars for a lemon and some ice chips. I’m sure there’s a more economical way to go about this.

And I have no garlic, so I still can’t make hummus.

Progress, no progress

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

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

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

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

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

Onward, then, with the rest of summer.

Redacted

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

On Saturday, Dublin Bay looked like this.

So we did this.

And then, in traditional manner, we went and did this. 
If you’re not from around here, Teddy’s sell famous ice-cream cones. They even had a “Recession Special” family deal of two grown-up 99s and two kid-sized 99s for a mere 6 euros.
(A 99, if you’re still not from around here, is a whipped-ice-cream cone with a stick of Cadbury’s Flake inserted for good measure. History does not record why they’re called 99s. When I was small, they cost 50p and were already called 99s, so it’s not about the price. They looked a bit like this after I’d stood around in the sunshine holding all four while I waited for B and the kids to circle back around and pick me up – the problem with Teddy’s on a sunny day is that there’s nowhere to park. I did what I could to save them, but they may have been a little smaller when they got to their final recipients.)

Glass walls, class wars

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

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

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

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

I am so in trouble when that girl turns 14.

How you know when it’s summer

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Ah, July in Ireland.

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

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

When you might be too warm in that fleece.

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

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

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

Banking karma

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On summer break

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Taking a little summer break from the blogging. See you in August, probably.

Four degrees of separation

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Just for the record, so we’re all straight about this, and you’ll tell me if I’m being unreasonable, right?

  • If you are the designated person in charge of my child while I’m somewhere else, for five minutes or three hours, and he misbehaves, you are entirely entitled – nay, expected – to tell him off for it. With appropriate and not excessive force. I don’t leave my children in the charge of anyone of whom I would expect less.
  • If you are in the vicinity of my child when they do something they shouldn’t, especially – but not solely – if your child is involved as the innocent party, and I am not nearby, you may by all means tell him off for it.
  • If I’m right there but happen to be looking the other way when something happens, it’s fine for you to admonish my child – but since I’m in your hearing, you might think about doing it in a way that’s more about calling my attention to the event than about disciplining him directly. That would be tactful.
  • If I’m talking to my child, looking him in the eye and taking him to task myself, right at this moment, for acting the maggot, please do not feel that you can improve matters by adding your voice of disapproval to the fray. Especially if you just met him for the first time today.

That’s all. Kthxbye.