Monthly Archives: January 2012

Spice of

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The existence of lesbians is giving my mother a crisis of faith. Apparently.

She said that the news at lunchtime today was all about lesbian weddings in Ireland.
“Where were all the lesbians when I was growing up?” she asked me. “None of the girls at school were, or in the bank [where she worked before she got married], or on the road where I lived. Where did they all come from?”
“Well, they weren’t invented in the last five years, Mother. They’ve always been around. People just didn’t talk about it in those days.”
“But I don’t understand what God was thinking about. Why did he make them?”
I decided not to tell her that I can’t answer that because I tripped and fell into a vat of atheism.
“Maybe he just likes variety.”

Grrrls

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Mabel was hell on wheels this morning at playgroup, for no apparent reason. When I asked her why, in the car on the way home (I mean, I asked her in the car, she didn’t do it in the car; and yes, for your information, it is much easier for me to just keep typing than to back up with the delete button to clarify things), she had felt the need to fight with her friend and push over her friend’s little brother, repeatedly, she told me it was because she hasn’t had a nap. Which is fine, except that this was at 9.30am. I need to stop excusing bad behaviour with lack of naps, it would seem.

Now she’s napping, and I feel like I need one too. I didn’t think last night was particularly bad, but perhaps we were both sleepwalking up and down the corridor for hours and neither one of us remembers.

I think she was just very excited to be there this morning, and wanted to show off to everyone that these are her particular friends whom she sees outside school/ organized playtime events, and she felt the best way to do that was with overenthusiastic belligerent physical contact. Interspersed with taking toys away from smaller children just for the heck of it and/or because they weren’t doing it right.

I don’t know if this is a girl thing, but it’s exactly what Dash’s friend (known here as Helen) used to do every time we had a playdate, and here’s Mabel being her second incarnation all over again; and it’s not as if her first incarnation isn’t still out there wreaking havoc – I mean, being sweetness and light and growing up at twice the speed of Dash, it seems whenever we see her – so I’m not sure population of greater Washington DC can deal with the sheer force of another one. Or that I have the fortitude to cope with it.

So is it girls in general, or those two in particular?

Wordation

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I would love to record Mabel playing by herself and play back it for you (or, you know, for someone who would hear it and declare her a genius), because it’s very entertaining. She not only does the voices, she also narrates the whole story. So she might be holding a Strawberry Shortcake doll and a dinosaur, or a small pony and a squishy frog, who will be each other’s sisters, or mother and daughter, or some such relationship, and I’ll hear:

…[Squeaky voice] No, you can’t do that. You’re not allowed to. Becuase it’s naw-dy [American accent coming out there] and dan gewous.
- [Other squeaky voice] But mother, I want to do it. I’ll be vewy careful.
- [Normal voice, a bit sing-song] And then she went upstairs and climbed on the shelves and she fell off and hit her head. And she said [Squeaky II] Ow, my head.
- [Narrator] And her mother came upstairs to see what was going on and said [Squeaky I] Oh, sweetheart, are you all right?…

And on and on and on, only much funnier than that. If I listen carefully I hear her go over things we’ve been talking about, or things she wants to do, or things that are on her mind – going to sleep on your own, the ever-present little sister role, working out the concept of death, even. It’s also a little unnerving to hear your own words coming out of someone else’s mouth, and makes me very happy that I’ve managed to excise swearwords from my vocabulary, because I know she’d be using them right now if she’d heard them.

Speaking of which. Dash has taken to saying “Aw, nuts ,” when something frustrates him. After listening to this for a while I decided it was probably not the most gentlemanly of expressions, and I asked him to say something else instead. More importantly, I thought he should know what it was he was saying, so I told him what it was a slang expression for, so that he didn’t think he was just talking innocently about squirrel dinner. He said he’d say “Oh, brother” instead, which I can’t find any objection to. So now Mabel is saying “Aw, nuts,” and I’m a little afraid to stop her for fear she’ll decide to say it all the more.

As I may have mentioned before, I grew up convinced that rude words had been invented in the 1980s and my parents had never heard any of them. My father’s worst expletives were Damn and Blast, and I got into a fair amount of trouble with my mother the day I tried to say either of those. When I was about 13, the word of choice at school seemed to be “crappy,” and one day I used it at the dinner table. To immediate and shocking effect. I had no idea it meant anything other than, well, you know, crappy. Bad. Not nice.

Which is why I would rather Dash knew what he was saying. Then it can be his own decision, though of course I can let him know that some words are not for use around his elders and betters, or his youngers and more impressionables either.

Mabel has also taken to exclaiming “Good Lawd!” if she needs to express dismay. I suppose I need to start saying Good Gravy instead. Maybe with a side of Heavens to Betsy or Holy Mackeral. It would, after all, be amusing to hear her come out with those while sorting out the members of the dollhouse at school some day.

And then it occurred to me that perhaps fudge and fiddlesticks and sugar are things people say not because they’re granny-types who never said anything stronger in their lives, but from many years of not-in-front-of-the-children last-second adjustments.

Running into trouble

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I’m sorry if you’re only here for the pictures of children in boxes , but I have to gab on about running again for a minute. I’ll bring it back to the children, I promise.

This morning I went out and I ran a whole mile without stopping. When I came back I told B that it had taken me 15 minutes to run it, and by the way he looked at me I could see that he was wondering how that was physically possible. “I lay down between each step,” I added, to reassure him. But after my shower he told me that I’d read the watch wrong (he lets me use his fancy GPS running watch) and my pace had in fact been a much more respectable 12 minutes.

Just to put that in perspsective, his “slow” pace is about a 9-minute mile, and in marathons he’s aiming for 7.5 or so. For all 26.2 miles. I will never be running marathons, is what I’m saying, but on the other hand, apparently I didn’t lie down between each stride either.

It turns out that my limiting factor is mostly getting a stitch: if that doesn’t happen, I can keep going till my legs get tired, which is about a mile as of this morning. I have yet to figure out how to not get a stitch: is it random, has it something to do with fitness, or is it about how much coffee I drank how soon before I left the house?

And I have to get all soap-boxy about it for a second and say that if you can walk, you can run, so you may as well give it a go. It’s over sooner, it gets your heart rate going faster, and it makes you think you’re the bee’s knees. (Bees’ knees? How many bees are we talking about here?) But, three words: Buy A Bra. (Unless you’re one of my two male readers. Probably, you don’t need to. But hey, whatever floats your boat.) Don’t think that the one you wear for yoga will do; don’t pick up a cheapie in Target or Dunnes Stores; choose a heavy-duty one in the right size, take it into the changing room, and jump up and down a few times. If you bounce, move on until you find the right one, and don’t begrudge the money. The difference between running while bouncing and running while being properly reined in is astounding.

So there I was, pootling around the lake this morning – I’ve decided I need a better word for what I do, because it doesn’t yet aspire to running, and a good quantity of it is still walking, but it’s walking in a good bra, you know – and thinking why it is that I eschew those app-y things like Couch to 5K that tell you when to run and when to walk and are roundly praised by people like me who start from negative levels of fitness and want to go a bit faster and a bit further without falling down. Basically, it’s because I don’t like to do what people tell me to. In fact, I am positively motivated to not do what they tell me to.

Ooh, look, once again running (pootling) helps me understand how my children’s minds work.

But, historical revisionism, ahoy. My mother says I was never any trouble. How can this be, if I am so programmed for rebellion? Did I develop this characteristic late in life? Or else, 

(a) I was Trouble, but my mother has forgotten
(b) I was Trouble, but my mother didn’t find out
or (c) I wasn’t any trouble, because my desires meshed with my parents’ desires

This last may have been true once I was older and decided it was fun to get good grades – because if there’s one thing I hate more than doing what people tell me, it’s getting answers wrong. And since I didn’t know where the boys lived or how to find them, I had nothing else to do but my homework.

I suspect I was Trouble, but both (a) and (b). Also, it’s possible that my mother was more canny than she gives herself credit for, and manouvered me into doing what she wanted me to do while making me think it was my idea.

Or perhaps my parents just left me alone and I turned out okay. Free-range parenting in the eighties? What a concept.

Goings-on ongoing

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Once again, this morning, I didn’t go for a run .

One way or another, the fates have conspired against me for the past week, and between weather, and days off school, and weather, and my period, I haven’t had a chance to go out for ages. I hate this – not because I’m a runner , all champing at the bit for activity and pacing up and down like a caged tiger; but because it makes me afraid that I’ll never get back out there and my tiny bit of motivation will desert me and I’ll be back to being a blob who wasted money on good shoes for nothing.

On the other hand, it’s novel, if irritating, for me to actually want to exercise and be prevented by outside influences. I’m almost completely certain I’m not just using them as excuses. And B has been very good about not bugging me, because he knows that the one thing certain to make me not go is someone telling me that I should. (Mabel? My daughter? What? I see no correlation here.)

I have gone to the not-aerobics class for the past two Saturdays, even last week when there was fresh snow on the ground (all of half an inch) and only the die-hards were there (and me), so all isn’t entirely lost. I can do a sexy march with the best of them. (No. No, I can’t. But I’m learning.)

****

The wearing of the underwear was going really well until I bragged about it to a friend, whereupon Mabel immediately went through two pairs of trousers, peed on the aforementioned ice , and is now wearing a pullup. I suppose we’ll get back on the horse soon, but I’m not talking about it. If you see me start to talk about it, put your fingers in your ears and sing la la laaa at the top of your voice.

****

Yesterday, in a fit of something or other, I bought a bag of mini croissants. (This is what happens when I go to a different supermarket. All sorts of odd things seem perfectly reasonable purchases.) Dash was excited but wished they were chocolate croissants, and I said we could probably do something about that. So when we got home I cunningly sliced along the top of one, put in a few chocolate chips, and heated it for five seconds in the microwave. He was quite pleased.

Today, somehow, there are two…one…oh, look at that, the mini croissants are all gone. Mabel just asked for the last one, let me put three chocolate chips carefully in it, and said she didn’t need it heated up. Then she fished the chips out again, sucked each one into happy oblivion, and told me I could eat the croissant.

****

Dash came home today with a big picture of a penguin captioned in his writing with “My penguin and I like to fly.” His teacher had stuck on a post-it in response to my e-mail of this morning, saying that the children had used their IMAGINATIONS to think of something they would like to do with their penguins. (Hmm. That sounds dodgy. She didn’t put it quite like that.) Dash has recanted his earlier statement about there definitely being a flying species of penguin and now says the movie they watched was a cartoon. I’m still a bit confused, but I think we can be confident that his teacher was not using BBC April fools jokes as source material, and that you can’t always take what a five-year-old says at face value.

No news there, then.

Up and Down

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Dash has been telling us that there’s one species of penguin that can fly. He watched a movie about it at school. (Sigh. Nobody watches videos at school any more.  I suspect nobody listens to tapes in French class either. Remember when your teacher had to bring in a giant boombox and balance it on a stool beside the wall where the outlet was so that they could press play to let you listen to the fuzzy-voiced announcer telling you something impenetrable about le train que dé part à quai num é ro trois ? Now I suppose they just send an mp3 to the kids’ iPhones or something.)

But all the knowledge that Dr. Google (that’s Dr. Google, PhD in acquatic avians, not Dr. Google, MD) has put at our fingertips tells us that there is definitely no such species. I really hope Dash’s teacher didn’t inadvertently show them this BBC clip from 2008, which turned out to be an April Fool’s Day hoax.

If he comes home talking about the next week, I suppose we’ll know something’s up.

(The title is this adorable by Oliver Jeffers, which confirmed our suspicions that penguins don’t fly unless shot out of a cannon. Then again, it would lead one to believe that they’re quite partial to playing backgammon, so I’m not sure this is the ideal resource for those of you looking to find out more.)

Note to self

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For future reference, when your recently-bribed-into-toilet-training three-year-old clutches her crotch while you put on her ice-skates, don’t just let her refuse to let you take her to the bathroom. Because the quickly spreading yellow puddle on the ice is a bit of a giveaway when things go wrong.

In fact, backing up a bit, when you know that she really should have taken a nap, even though you’re trying to phase out the naps because they lead to neverending bedtimes, don’t take her ice-skating in the first place. Because while it may seem cruel to deny her the outing if her brother and her daddy are going, having her fall so solidly asleep on the way home that she takes an unwakeable hour-long nap at 4.30 is probably going to have a worse effect. On your mood when she’s still wide awake at 9pm. (Not that we’re there yet. Maybe the gods will be kind.)

Fingerwalking

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Sometimes you just have to click the button with the big pencil graphic on it and see what your fingers do.

Sometimes I don’t think I have anything to say, but something comes out anyway. Sometimes I start out saying one thing and end up telling a totally different story . Sometimes I just put it away and don’t publish anything that day, and sometimes I fall back on something funny somebody said, or what we had for dinner.

Sometimes I self-censor a blog post out of existence because it’s too personal, or too uninteresting, or about money, or religion, or things maybe I don’t want all those people I know in real life to read and be thinking the next time they see me at nursery school or a family gathering. Whereas in reality, they probably didn’t read it anyway, and certainly won’t remember it if they did. They have too many other things in their lives. But sometimes the post I’m not writing drowns out the post I might write, so that I’m left with nothing to show for it.

Sometimes one word borrows another and suddenly I’m knee-deep in reminiscences about schooldays or misspent youth, whether you wanted to know it or not. Sometimes I read another blog, one so piercingly written or side-splittingly funny , that I wonder what the point is at all. Sometimes I think my stats are all just a big lie told by Russian searchbots and nobody’s reading at all except my two friends down the road and my ever-constant husband.

Sometimes it turns out that you really just didn’t have anything to say today. Try again tomorrow.

Daughters

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I sat opposite Mabel in the food court of the mall last week, watching her chow down happily on a slice of pizza and hoping for many more pleasant outings like this as she gets older.

She’s three. It’s easy for her to delight me. All she has to do is eat the food I just bought her, not throw a tantrum, sit on her chair without knocking over her drink, grin her big grin, and I’m suckered, hook, line, and sinker. As she gets older, I suppose I’ll expect a little more from her, and there’ll be disagreements over jeans, or shoes, or Bieber, or whatever it is the young people will be wanting when she’s a tweeny bopper; but I can’t help thinking that I’ll always be delighted if my daughter – my beautiful, hilarious, vivacious daughter – is happy to be out in public with her mum.

And then I thought of the gulf between mothers and daughters and saw it from a new angle; this gulf that can be miles wide and unbroachable, or small enough to step across with a shared joke and a smile.

Perhaps I see what I expect to see, but I feel as if her relationship with me, mine with her, is already more complex than the other one, the mother-son bond of simple mutual affection. (And frustration, infuriation, impatience, all those other things.) But because I’ve been there, because I know Girl from the inside, the weight of all the things I want to teach her – tell her, advise her, show her, avoid for her – is mighty.

Did my mother think these things when she looked at me? Did I barge ahead, embarassed, tolerant, amused, or superior, according to my age or mood at the time? As she sat there, smiling calmly and knowing that some day I’d get my comeuppance? Or was she thinking that my hair was too long and my shoes were too clumpy and my table manners were lacking? It’s not a gulf, then; it’s a finely balanced scale that is tipped in one direction and then the other by the merest glance or a throwaway comment.

Do Mabel and I still have plenty of time for just enjoying each other’s company before all that hits?  

Rules for co-sleeping*

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*if you are under six and want me to continue sleeping with you, at least some of the time; rules for Daddy are somewhat different.**

  1. Do not kick off the covers. I am cold. I need that duvet. Especially, do not lie on half the duvet and kick off the rest, so there’s nothing at all left for me.  
  2. Do not stick your foot down my pyjama bottoms.
  3. Do not have sharp, pointy toenails.
  4. Do not demand a waffle at 3am.
  5. Do not barf. Ever.
  6. Do not touch the other nipple. At all.
  7. Do not hog the bed so that the smaller person takes up 80% of the space, leaving me to wake up perched on one shoulder, wedged against the wall, with my head on your unicorn pillow pet.

Thank you,
the Management

**Actually, come to think of it, rules for Daddy are mostly the same, except perhaps for number six. Ahem.