Monthly Archives: February 2012

A very boring entry about packing

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Every time, I say, “I’ll pack light this time.” Every time, I try really hard to pack light. This time I tried so hard that I forgot both dresses I was considering for Mabel and only had one and a half things that were formal-ish for myself (well, one and two halves, really) and I could have done with packing a bit heavier.

But still. I am, I think we can agree, experienced at transatlantic flights with young children, and I decided to blog my packing. Because that’s just how much I care about you guys. (Read that whichever way you will.)

The best thing about packing is my packing cubes . I’ve probably mentioned them before, but this time I have pictures. I have three of the “medium”(green) ones and three of the “small” (blue) ones, and between them we manage to fit most of our stuff. They’re really useful for packing several people’s clothes into just one or two suitcases, or keeping underwear or workout gear all in one place. If you tend to live out of your suitcases for a week rather than unpacking, they’re a lifesaver.

These were my two cubes – I put regular clothes in the bigger one and underwear, etc. in the smaller one. When all zipped up, they’re neat rectangles that you can squish into your suitcase as units. Thusly:

This time we travelled with one large suitcase, one slightly smaller one, and a carry-on sized thing that we also checked in. The grey one had all the kids’ stuff, and the other two held a mixture of mine and B’s.

This is the kids’ suitcase. I put Dash’s clothes into a large cube and Mabel’s into a small one. I left the clothes they’d be wearing to travel in out on the spare bed, ready for the next morning, and filled in the spaces with shoes.

Then coats and all the miscellaneous stuff that actually ends up taking all the room went on top. Call me paranoid, but I usually travel with baby/kid ibuprofen, a thermometer, and Baby Vicks chest rub. I know you can buy all those things in Ireland, but not at 3am when you might suddenly be presented with a feverish and/or congested child.

The case still closed without unzipping the extendable part, which is always my aim on the outward journey. To leave room for additional things we might come home with – a consignment of grown-out-of cousins’ clothes for Dash, some new boots for me, a large stuffed hedgehog, perhaps – I pack a foldable duffel bag and have an extra inch or two of depth available in both suitcases.

To pack all my own sundry accoutrements, I have an assortment of little bags. These held, clockwise from elephants, my shower scrunchie; jewellery; cotton balls and q-tips; all my most vital lotions and potions; contact lenses; scissors, tweezers, and nail clippers, because I’m always paranoid that they’ll pierce the contact lense foil and ruin them all; and, um, lady things that I would be needing. The little bags get tucked in the sides and between the packing cubes, and I make sure to leave room for the larger striped one.

Then we come to hand luggage, and food. I packed a lot of nice healthy snacks this trip. How much of what you see below do you think was eaten? Oh, just the packet of mints. I henceforth swear not to bother next time. They can fend for themselves at the airport like the rest of us. (For the record, the four tubs have cheerios, pistachios, honey roasted peanuts, and pretzels. I polished off most of the peanuts yesterday, two weeks later.)

For hand luggage, I have a medium backpack that is very old but only showing it on the inside. I use a lot of gallon ziploc bags to keep things separate, and try to leave enough room that I can cram my handbag in the top and not have to tote it separately if my hands are full of small child. Here, from top left (sorry about the bad lighting), you can see the food; emergency pullups and wipes; flushable wipes to go in the most accessible pocket of the bag and be whipped out at a moment’s notice; a full change of clothes for Mabel and clean underwear for me and Dash (just in case of an overnight hitch); my handbag containing wallet, camera, phone, and Irish/US money, bank cards, and sim card; and an invisible-pen coloring book for each of them, to be produced at a vital point such as upon boarding the first plane.

Oh, also, our cleverest thing. A packet of labels. If you write your destination address and phone number hand-achingly on a bunch of mailing labels – or I suppose you could even print them if you were clever with your printer – then when you are waiting to check in you can simply peel and stick them onto the luggage tags from the desk rather than frantically scribbling while leaning on someone’s back and simultaneously trying to stop a child from wandering off.

This is my finished carry-on (sorry, I forgot about what a flash does). The very top pocket holds wipes and my quart-size ziplock with the few liquids I bring onboard. The two side pockets have hairbrushes and an umbrella and tissues. With the handbag inside, that’s all I take and I have two hands free to carry a Mabel. When she was smaller I’d have her on my back in the Ergo, the bag on my front, and be pushing Dash in the stroller while B juggled both large cases and his own laptop-containing backpack. Awkward, but it meant we could get from plane to train in Heathrow, or wherever, without leaving anything behind.

B is in charge of all electrical items except my camera and phone (but including their chargers). Adapters, cables, voltage transformers for the baby monitor, the iPod, all associated dongles and whatsits. He used to keep all that stuff in a very plain black bag, but since it camouflaged itself into the floor of the plane once – with sad results – he’s started using a small purple bag, which works quite well. We also had to pack his suit this time, of course, which was folded around everything else in the blue case.

Our luggage for this trip was rounded out with a lightweight stroller (a Maclaren Volo, swapped with a friend for our Bob for the week) and the hulking great carseat in its bag. We travelled with Mabel’s carseat this time, since we’d be mostly travelling by car and could use it in the aeroplane too. (It’s easy to borrow a booster for Dash at the other end, but a toddler seat is harder to find and impossible to rent.) We have a bag that holds Mabel’s seat that you can pull along on wheels ( , but more annoying), so it’s not too much hassle in the airport – once I’ve wrestled it right way round into the bag while stuck between narrow rows of seats, trying to stop Mabel taking a dive off the next seat, kick my carry-on bag out of harm’s way, and not invade anyone else’s personal space. (I have no idea how anyone travels alone with one or more children. B does more than his fair share of toting, hauling, lifting, and piggybacking. But I’m the carseat expert in the family.)

If we’re having a more public-transport-y vacation, we leave Mabel’s carseat at home and use the CARES harness in the plane, which is infinitely more portable and has certainly been worth the money over the past five years or so between the two children, not t o mention the various friends I’ve lent it to.

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We got back last night, after uneventful flights. With unprecedented amounts of proactivity, the cubes are already unpacked and laundry is in train. We found our fridge had decided to sit down on the job while we were gone, so most of the morning was spent scrubbing fuzzy green spots off its shelves and then taking the kids out for brunch pancakes. Today they are snot-filled and sleep deprived, fragile and easily pissed off. Nothing a few nights’ sleep in their own beds and a strict diet of peanut-butter sandwiches and frozen waffles can’t cure.

And the thing about packing is that there’ll always be another chance to get it exactly right.

Notes from a funeral

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My father slept with his trousers under his mattress every night. Not for him the trouser press of upscale hotel rooms; a quick lift of the mattress, a quick smoothing out of the folded trousers, and they’d be good as new the next morning. It never struck me as odd. I don’t even know how I know he did it, except from long-ago Saturday mornings when I would see the reverse procedure while snuggling beside my mother in the comfy warmth of the big bed, and the odd night spent in a B&B on holidays when we’d all three share a room.

That has nothing to do with this, but the memory just came back to me.

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Many’s the Sunday morning my boyfriend and I would walk down to the big church at the end of his road, nursing a hangover and sore feet (on my part at least) from walking most of the way home in impractical footwear late on Saturday night. We’d go in the side door and line up in the pew beside his more punctual mother, already in situ and a lot more bushy-tailed than I. I’ve stood in the same spot with her at midnight mass on Christmas Eve too, after we were married, but before children made such things impractical.

Last Monday I stood in a pew in the center of the same church, just a few steps away and 90-degrees rotated from those seats, and tried to keep my children amused with small toys purloined from their cousins for the novelty value, and tried to pay attention to her funeral service, and tried to keep my mind off the reality of the long wooden box in front of the altar.

Then we stood in the rain – of course, the rain – in the cemetery, and it was stark. Even the wriggling, fractious child in my arms competing with the heavy funeral-home-provided umbrella couldn’t prevent tears from welling every time I looked at my husband and watched him put an arm in comfort around his sister. How can we do this to the ones we love? How can we take them and put them away, far from sight and mind, in the cold hard ground, to moulder and rot? Who decided this was the best way? Surely in this year of our lord 2012, there’s a more sanitary, more gentle method.  Or do we need to see this most elemental of disposals, the age-old sod and shovel, territory of Yorrik himself, to have it finally hammered home in our unwilling minds?

We have flying cars. (I do. I was assured I would by now, at least, so I presume it will be here any day.) Why do we not have the facility to download the brain and personality of those who have passed on, or to at least access their memory banks and find out where they left the car keys or what their grandmother’s maiden name was or how it felt on their first day of school? How can it be so sudden and so over?

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My own mother, on the other hand, is erasing herself from the present backwards, reversing ever so slowly out of consciousness. Her brain is full, there is no room at the inn for new information. You can try to pile it on top, but it just wobbles and slips off again, and no matter how hard you try to cram it in, five minutes later you find yourself beginning anew with a fresh slate. She can still tell you who married whom in the halcyon days of Hollywood, and compute her times tables with a couple of muttered phrases in Irish, but if you ask her who that lady she just met was, she’ll profess surprise that she just met a lady at all.

She’s like one of those monks who brushes clear the path in front of them before they walk; but she’s brushing clear the path behind her as she moves on, oblivious. Brings living in the present to a whole new level.

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Somebody, somewhere, needs to rage against all this dying of the light. Why are they all taking it so peacefully?

Giveth, and taketh away

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When we arrived last week, we were immediately able to borrow the car of my best friend, who was serendipitously leaving for a quick hop to Toronto just as we were coming in. Because she is amazingly thoughtful and a gift-giver extraordinaire, there was a little magazine and free gift for each of the kids waiting for them in the back seat. Dash’s present was a nerf gun with three bullets, which he adores, and sings odes to, and spontaneously wrote her a Valentine/thank-you card for as soon as we got to the house. Mabel’s was a Peppa Pig pretend iPhone. She was ecstatic.

“I’m so glad I have a gun, now I can be like a spy,” announced Dash as we negotiated our way through Dublin tolls at dawn on zero-to-two hours’ sleep.

“I’m so glad I have an iPhone, now I can be like a normal person,” said his sister.

(Please note that neither of her parents have iPhones. We are clearly abnormal.)

A minute later she said, puzzled, “My iPhone doesn’t seem to work properly.”

Bereave

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Only a tiny part of this grief is my grief. This grief belongs to her children, her brother and sister, her multitudinous friends, her grandchildren – both those who saw her often, who were watched daily by her as infants, who were picked up from school by her three times a week as recently as last month; and those others who will have missed almost all of her, whose memories will be entirely or mostly limited to photographs of themselves as toddlers and young children with a woman whose light shone out so brightly that it cannot be dimmed.

I’m sitting in her kitchen, drinking her tea.

We are in that no-man’s-land before the funeral. That time considerately orchestrated by society where there are things the bereaved must do, things to be organized and decided and planned, whereby the people who deal in death – the funeral home, the priests, the lawyers – tell you what you must do, and you obediently go and do it. And with every phone call that must be made and every repetition of the unconscionable news that she has died, you come to believe it a tiny bit more, though it cuts like a dull knife every time. But it leaves mercifully little time to sit and dwell, so you cry in the car on the way, and wipe your tears away when you arrive.

It is not my grief, mostly; so I observe, and help where I can, and stay quiet and keep the children amused, or fed, or clothed, as appropriate.

I am so glad that my husband has brothers and sisters to do this hard thing with. The day will come, inevitably, when I have to do it alone. (Although the alternative, it not coming, would be worse; for that would mean that something had gone terribly, terribly wrong.)

We are finding things to be thankful for. We are hearing lovely stories, and learning things we never knew, and everyone wants to help and it’s good to accept it. My sister-in-law says thanking people is good karma, and she will be well stocked with it when she has acknowledged every message of kindness she has received.

We will come out the other side, eventually.

Mommyfriends

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I had this sitting around waiting to go, and then yesterday my friend Lauren said pretty much the same thing, much more succinctly, in a comment. Which just goes to show that I really did pick the right friends. (But also, I wanted you to know that I thought of it all on my own.)

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What sort of parent are you? But what sort of a parent do your friends think you are? And how can you ever find out for sure while keeping your friends your friends?

I’ve noted before that differences in parenting styles can make or break a friendship. But what if, despite having a similar attitude and being on the same page philosophy-wise, you vaguely suspect that your friend thinks you’re too easygoing on your kids, and that your kids are some way to being undisciplined tearaways as a result?

Your friend is your friend, and as such is unlikely to tell you, if that’s her candid opinion of your beloved offspring. You can passive-aggressively blog about it.* You can ask her outright. But, unless you have unusually blunt and outspoken friends, or friends who are looking to get out of being your friends, such approaches will only garner reassurances that you’re a great parent and your kid is going through a particularly tough phase right now and it was also partly their child’s fault for presenting such a delicious-looking body part right in front of your kid’s bared teeth.

But then you remember that sometimes you might look less than favourably on some other people’s kids too, but when those people are your friends, you don’t hold it against them because you know they’re good parents who are doing their best to battle against the forces of chaos as presented in the bodily incarnation of preschoolers. Because friends are people who still like you even when your kids are being horrible.

* I’m not doing that. This was inspired by real-life events, but I ran the blog post by my friends before hitting Publish.

Progress, maybe

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We’re travelling tomorrow, but before I go and ruin everyone’s (read, Mabel’s) new good habits by dragging her across the ocean to a continent five hours ahead, I thought I should document them. For posterity, and because by the time we get back I’ll no doubt have more things to say.

Two Fridays ago, there I was moaning to a friend about the terrible night Mabel – and therefore I – had had, when I realised that I was now undeniably one of those annoying people who complains about a situation but never makes a move to change it. Which is fine if it’s on my blog – right? Right. – but not fair to people standing in front of me who are too polite to just throttle me for not getting on with it.

Later that morning, Mabel and I had a little conversation.
“Oh, Mabel, when are you ever going to stop having mumeet?” I sighed, and she replied, “When I’m four.” She may have said this before, and I never took her up on it because it sounded so far in the future that I was hoping for something a little better, but now suddenly, it sounded like an acheivable goal.
“Okay then,” I told her, “we’ll stop when you’re four. But we’ll have to start having a bit less, so that we don’t just stop all at once. So from now on, we’ll only have mumeet in the morning and at naptime if you take a nap, and at bedtime.” And all night, which was implied and understood, if not actually said.

“So now you’re just nursing her three times a day and all night, and that’s good ?” you ask, shaking your head to get the buzzing sound out.

Yes, because she’s finally learning that there are other ways to be happy without just grabbing a boob at the merest hint of personal grumpiness. Even though there have been days when she’s gone a long time without – from before school all the way to naptime, or even beyond if she didn’t nap and we were busy – those were probably the exceptions, and she was pretty used to having a little sumpin’ sumpin’ before lunch, or after nap, or around 5pm, or just to keep her going till bedtime.

But I made some wonderful discoveries:

  • I can say no , and if I keep saying it she will eventually go away and do something else.
  • She will accept a cuddle instead of nursing, if I stand firm.
  • She’s quite willing to take a chocolate chip and a mini marshmallow as a post-nap treat instead of nursing (this is a short-term thing that will be phased out, honest).

Of course, once she figured things out, she realised that it was to her advantage to nap, or at least try to nap, because then she gets a hit in the middle of the day. I’m happy to do this, so long as she naps reasonably early, and to take the resultant fallout of later, more long-drawn-out bedtimes for a while, as it’s all in a good cause, and really, who’s to look a gift-nap in the mouth? But if she tells me at 3pm that she wants a nap, it’s no way Jose and she has to make do with a cuddle on the sofa. And she does.

So. It doesn’t solve my night-time problem, and the wearing of the underwear has once again receded into the dim and distant, most of the time, but I think it’s a good step forward. When she’s used to it, and when we’re back from our trip, I’ll make some other change, like moving bedtime mumeet to the sofa and letting Daddy do bedtime, on days when she’s really tired because she hasn’t napped.

The other thing we’ve been doing lately is having B go into her the first time she wakes, the time that’s a paltry two hours or less since she went to bed in the first place. It’s usually around 10pm. The first night we did this, despite having been warned in advance, she cried hysterically, with the heaving and the gulping and the pushing him away and then taking an hour to calm down once I did go in. But we’ve done it most nights since and now she just grouses at him until he goes away, cries for me, and nurses to sleep pretty quickly. Once, just once*, she fell back to sleep without any further intervention, and I did a happy Snoopy dance. But even without that, since she’s accepting his presence more readily, I see progress, even if I’m not sure what exactly the progress is moving towards.

Eventually, it will all fall into place. Won’t it? 

*Update: Well, stop the presses, she just did it again! Or he did. I don’t care, so long as they can do it without me.

In Memoriam

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She was the matriarch.

She was the lynchpin. She was amazing: loving, strong, gracious, energetic, generous. She thought the best of everyone and was always looking forward to the next adventure. She loved to host a party, to read a story to her grandchildren, to travel the world, to cook a Sunday dinner for the family. She could almost always best me at Scrabble.

She was the sort of houseguest who never stayed long enough, and she always had sausages and rashers on the grill when we got in from a red-eye flight to Ireland, and it was the best food in the world. She was fearless, and she always said the right thing. She swam in the sea whenever she could. We thought she’d be around for ever; it’s impossible to imagine that she’s gone.

Saying she’s at rest sounds ridiculous. She didn’t want to rest. She was up with the lark and always on the move. Her diary filled up months in advance, but she always had time to sit and talk.

My children have her genes, and you couldn’t ask for better ones. It was a pleasure and a privilege to call myself her daughter-in-law. And it was over far too soon.

November 2011, the last time we saw her

Thursday dinner: Freezer bounty and a story

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I cooked all week, so last night it was time to mine the freezer and see what delights it would provide. In the event, it was the same thing we had from the freezer the last time I did this (though not from the same batch, I promise): red lentil coconut curry .

Microwave, basmati rice, yummy, if un-photogenic, dinner.

So I will tell you a story instead, so you don’t feel swindled by today’s post.

Mabel’s school is a co-operative nursery school, which means it’s run by the parents, and most families choose to help out in the classroom one or two days a month. This is a win/win, as far as I’m concerned, because, especially when it’s your child’s first regular out-of-the-home experience, you really want to stay connected, and informed about what they do all day. And two- and three-year-olds aren’t the most reliable of reporters, so asking them what happened at school today does not always elicit factual statements. (Not that five-year-olds are any better. Dash’s stock answer to how school was today – already – is a taciturn “Fine.”) This way, you have the fun of seeing your child interact with others in a new environment, you help ensure that the child to adult ratio is nice and low (we usually have a ratio of less than four to one in Mabel’s classroom), and you get a feel for what exactly they do all morning, as well as getting to know other parents and the staff better than you could any other way.

There are some disadvantages too, but this really wasn’t meant to be a dissertation on the pros and cons of co-op schools. My point was that one day a few weeks ago, B was the co-opping parent and I enjoyed a leisurely morning at home. At midday, he and Mabel returned. Somewhat hassled, he plonked a few things on the sideboard before going back out to the car for Mabel, among them a baby doll that had been under his uxter. (That’s his armpit, if you don’t know.)
“I don’t know why this was in the car,” he commented.
“Neither do I,” I said, taking a quick look at the doll, “considering that’s one of the school’s babies.”

Mabel stoutly denied having smuggled a baby out of school, and B said he hadn’t seen her with it. The mystery persisted.

That afternoon we had to go by the school anyway, so I brought the baby back, and one of the teachers enlightened me. “I saw your husband leaving with it under his arm. I did wonder what he was doing…”

Wednesday dinner: Squash and chickpeas with tahini

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Finally, you will be excited to hear, I make something that comes from an actual recipe. I felt it had been a pretty meat-heavy week so far, so I picked up a butternut squash with the intention of making this dinner, because everything else in it was in the house already.

Everything else in my modified version of the recipe, that is. And I’d forgotten about the lemon, but luckily I had a half one in the fridge just waiting for its moment to shine.

This is the recipe as I found it. And this is my version.

I tossed the squash in some more of my fancy garlic olive oil before roasting it, because it was quicker than chopping garlic, and there was going to be garlic in the dressing anyway.

I made the dressing as directed, with tahini, lemon juice, olive oil, water, and garlic. (I always have tahini in the frige for sesame noodles, and it keeps forever.) It came together beautifully before maddeningly curdling. This happened the last time too, and I’m not sure what the problem is, unless I just overmixed it. I couldn’t fix it, but it tasted fine. If you can think why it would happen, I’d love to hear your theories in the comments.

Tahini, lemon juice, olive oil; pre-mixing

I tossed the drained chickpeas on top of the squash for the last ten minutes or so of roasting, just to warm them up. I left out the red onion, because as we know, I had no onion in the house, and I don’t like raw onion anyway. I also left out the parsley or cilantro, which I’m sure is a terrible travesty, but I turned the whole thing with some baby spinach leaves instead, and called it done. I hoped the spinach would wilt a little in the heat of the squash, but maybe I waited a minute or so too long for that to happen. Either way is good, though.

Because I’m Irish, perhaps, and raised according to the liturgy of spud, I think dinner always has to have a starch, even if it’s half starch itself like the squash. Last time I made this I used brown rice, but yesterday I decided on quinoa, which made a nicely light but wholesome base for the salad.

The recipe says to serve immediately, but mine sat around for a good 15 minutes waiting for B to arrive – with both beer and wine, so all was forgiven – and it was still delicious. The second half, in the fridge, will also still be deliciously garlicky and is quite addictive, if perhaps a bit on the claggy side.

Tuesday dinner: vaguely Spanish leftovers

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The great thing about blogging a week of dinners is that I don’t have to think about what I might talk about today. I just upload the photos and get going. And I’m hopeful that by Friday I’ll have tons of other interesting things to tell you.

Yesterday was a using-up-leftovers sort of day. I’ve said before that I hate leftovers, but that’s because my mother’s attitude to them was to put yesterday’s dinner back on a plate and stick it in the microwave for three minutes. This is fine if yesterday’s dinner was something gloopy like chilli or curry or stew, but when you’ve got half a pork chop and a rejected potato and some grey green beans looking back at you for the second time, well, you’re not much more likely to eat it today than you were yesterday. I like leftovers if I can do something new with them.

The challenge: a sausage and a half, cooked; half a red pepper; about half a can of fire-roasted tomatoes, decanted; the tail end of a jar of pasta sauce before it went off.

The dilemma: no onion.

So I sweet-talked my friend into bringing an onion with her on a playdate, with tempting mentions of peanut-butter cookies and freshly baked bread. She arrived with two boys, an onion, and freshly baked bread of her own that put mine in the shade. (Which is kind of funny, because it was from a cookbook I had lent her.)

The playdate ended in some amount of chaos when the children broke into opposing factions and started sending raiding parties from one room to the other to purloin soft toys to be taken on either the Animal Train or sent in the Animal Truck (I think; we weren’t sure what the difference was, but the Train proponent was adament that the animals were not going on a Truck, and there was some element of (Baby) Animal Hospital going on with the Truck) and there was a lot of shouting and then they went home but were gracious enough not to take the onion back with them.

So I sauteed it in olive oil, with the chopped red pepper and a clove of garlic, tossed in the tomatoes and the pasta sauce, added a drained and rinsed tin of cannellini beans from the storecupboard, sliced up the remaining sausage and stirred it in, seasoned with paprika and oregano, and called the whole thing Spanish.

I wasn’t sure what carb to put with this – in Spain they might have had it in a bowl with some amazing bread, or on rice; but my rice is Basmati which didn’t seem quite right so I decided to use cous cous for a change. And because it’s quick. I sloshed in a glob of fancy garlic olive oil with the water, and it made all the difference.

There were leftovers to the leftovers, despite my best efforts, but in fact the garlic cous cous seemed like such a good idea that I’ve just polished that off for lunch.