Monthly Archives: March 2012

Bumpy lines

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At some point, I realised that when visiting friends’ houses and looking interestedly at the photos on their walls, I was curious to see what they’d looked like when they were younger. Not younger like when they were children, or teenagers, but on their wedding day now that they have three kids, or when they first met their spouse, or on whatever other occassions might be marked with a photo nice enough to display for random nosy guests like me. Because – here’s the thing – they, we, look older now.

For a long time, from about 20 till 35, I’d say, I felt that I basically looked the same. My haircut may have changed, I may have dropped or gained a few pounds, but my face was my face and that was that. I buy the moisturizer, I use the sunscreen, but it all seemed very hypothetical until I found myself looking in the mirror and thinking that I should buy some of that serum stuff I’ve been hearing about, because I need all the help I can get. (That’s not true. And what about ageing gracefully? I believe in that, don’t I? Still, no harm trying.)

Mabel looked at me quizzically one day and said “What are those lines?”
“What lines?”
“Those ones on your forehead where it’s bumpy.”
“You mean bumpy like this?” I raised my eyebrows. She laughed and traced the ridges on my brow with her finger.
“Those are my wrinkles,” I said.
“Do it again!” She was delighted with them. Now when she and Dash get out of the bath or the swimming pool, they examine the pads of their fingers for their own pruney wrinkles. So exciting, so fleeting.

Those diagonal lines from the sides of the nose to the edges of the mouth: they’re coming. They’re not here yet,  but I can see the shadow of where they will be, inexorably, in a few years.

It’s very odd to be approaching 40. (I’m not. I’m approaching 39, but there’s a certain inevitability about what follows.) It’s very… middley… I was thinking yesterday. I can’t honestly claim to be a young adult any more, but I’m certainly nowhere near old. I suppose they call it middle age for a reason, but I absolutely refuse to consider myself middle-aged until at least 50.

But it’s odd because I don’t feel any more sensible. I don’t feel any more boring or more staid or more responsible. I was always fairly sensible and responsible to begin with, I suppose, and it’s true that I have lost a little segment of information about what’s current in music and reality tv, but that’s only because I moved to America and stopped listening to 2FM, and because we happen to get most of our television from the Internet. I listen to the classical station in the radio because it has no ads and I like to think it calms and educates the children, not because I dislike popular music. I certainly haven’t started gardening yet. Knitting is way out. (Not that liking gardening or knitting makes you old. They’re just two things I always think I’ll probably get around to wanting to do eventually, some day in the far distant future.)

Are all octegenarians actually experienced 25-year-olds with bumpy foreheads who have lost touch with popular culture and like to garden instead? It’s not how I thought it would be, is all.

Nuggets of purest green

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It’s 11.15 (in the morning) and Mabel is 45 minutes into a nap. This is either a very good thing – nice long nap, but still early enough not to disrupt bedtime dramatically – or a very bad thing – coming down with some horrible lurgy that will afflict Dash and me too, all while B is away sampling the Waffle Houses and home-made paella of Atlanta. I mean, at a Very Important conference.

—————

The other morning Dash was singing to himself in the bathroom, as sometimes he does, a little ditty of his own creation whose lyrics went, “I am shorter than the Statue of Liberty, I am shorter than the Statue of Liberty…”

—————

Mabel, over breakfast: I don’t like it when I stick my finger into my bellybutton.
Me, reasonably: Well, don’t do it then.
Mabel, slyly: But I like it when I stick my finger into your bellybutton.
Me: [Sceptical look, because that's not happening.]
Mabel, with glee: Maybe I could stick my finger in Daddy’s bellybutton…

—————

She’s up again, and seems much happier, and in no way feverish or otherwise sick, so here’s hoping it will all work out perfectly. Considering Dash is off school for the next nine days, it may be the last nap she takes in a while (it’s very hard to get her to sleep when he’s awake, and very hard to get him to leave me alone for long enough to do so), so it’s probably just as well.

Coincidentally, blogging may be light in the coming week. May the force be with us all.

Aftermath

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And now, it’s fine . Yesterday was fine. B has gone on his trip and I’m no more than normally apprehensive about how we’ll do without him, and that has a lot more to do with Mabel’s newfound penchant for 3am sandwiches than her brother’s behaviour.

When the crazy had stopped swirling, I was able to look at the lost evening and wonder what was wrong with me. Not with him – he was a kid whose mom was being mean, and he reacted accordingly. But sometimes, when he gets antsy, and I get antsy, I start to think that the only way I can deal with this is by coming down firmly, showing him who’s boss, standing my ground, and expecting him to do what he’s told because I’m the adult and he’s the child. Otherwise, I will probably end up with a juvenile delinquent, because I was too easygoing a parent.

Today, I remember that that’s not how I do it. And there are books to back me up on this. He’s a human being and we can work it out together, the way human beings do. If I treat him with kindness, he’ll respond with … with… oh, I don’t know… glee that he’s getting away with it? Will he learn that I’m a pushover and that he can get whatever he wants by pushing? Will he, as assured me, like me and want to please me? Do I want to raise a kid who just wants to please authority figures so they’ll be nice to him? It sounds namby pamby, but if the alternative is being a sociopath, then I suppose I do.

Sometimes I hate listening to the experts. I would much rather listen to my heart and do what works for me and my child, today. I have to trust us both that it will work out for tomorrow.

Feeding time at the other zoo

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It’s very discouraging trying to feed children who don’t want food.

Last night, in particular, I was discouraged. ‘I have to leave the house for a minute and walk around outside so my head doesn’t explode’ sort of discouraged.

Most of the time, I make our (nice) dinner, I give them their (boring and simple*) dinner, and I try not to think about it. I’ve been through the guilt, the self-blame, the introspection, the angst, the , the well-intentioned expert blogs , and I’ve pretty much arrived at, “They’re fine; they’ll be fine.”

But hey, I’m their mother. The well of self-blame is infinitely deep, and whenever I choose to draw from it, a refreshing draught of guilt will be there waiting for me.

*They will not, on no account, no way no how, eat the nice dinner. Please do not tell me to offer them the nice dinner and nothing else. I know the theory. I’ve tried the theory. It does not work here.

Dash was having a large tantrum, the sort that begins with a simple request to do your homework before your TV show starts, and swirls into a galaxy of injustices that stretches out to bedtime and beyond. In the middle there was dinner, which I felt would make him feel better and help put things back into perspective, but he felt was just adding insult to injury. When he eventually decided to eat, there was something amiss with his sandwich.

Of course there was something bloody amiss with his sandwich. It’s a peanut-butter sandwich made on horrible store-bought bread (wholegrain, at least, but still fairly horrible) and you’ve been having one for lunch and one for dinner for as long as I can remember because it’s all you will eat. What’s not amiss with that? How could he choose just one thing to be wrong with it? (The bread on one side was too hard, apparently.)

Simultaneously, Mabel, who had been alternately bugging and preaching to her upset brother, was rejecting her pasta and broccoli. This too was bringing me to the brink of tears, because for the previous two nights she’d been nursing a lot (yes, yes, despite the new regime ) and I had realised it was because she was simply hungry due to not eating enough dinner.

(It’s all very well to say, “They’ll have dinner later, when they’re hungry,” but that doesn’t account for those who have a dribble of nourishment – sweet, delicious, effort-free nourishment – on tap all night. Just enough to sate them for now, so long as they have some more in another few seconds. It’s very efficient for the child, not so much for the cow. I mean, me.)

The day we went to the zoo I was fully able to blame myself: after lunch there had been popcorn, and a banana at 4.30, and apparently that’s enough to fill Mabel up all the way to bedtime and beyond. But yesterday, she’d had two cheese sticks and some toast for lunch, half a banana at 2.30, and very little since. Why, oh why, was she not eating the pasta?

At this point I left everything in the capable hands of their loving father, while I took a walk outside, put freshly laundered sheets on beds, submitted a last-minute order to the Internet, and tried hard to decompress myself. (Their poor loving father who was rather tired and sore after running, you know, a marathon, the day before.)

We worked things out. I think B probably made Dash another sandwich (I didn’t ask), sorted out the “But I have to have dessert” tantrum (somehow), and made some concessions on the matter of bedtime stories. I got Mabel to eat a piece of toast, half an apple, and two tiny yogurts. Everyone, eventually, went to bed. I had a glass of wine and a piece of cake.

Epilogue:

Mabel was still up half the night, though the first time she woke, she went back to sleep very easily with only a story and no nursing at all.

Dash and I talked about yesterday on the way to school, and agreed that we’d have to work things out better in the coming days, because – oh yes – B is going to be out of town for six days, four of which are spring break/weekend days, so I’ll have the kids all to myself all day – and night – and won’t be able to storm out for a quick breather and to let someone else make the sandwich, or to have an extra hour in bed while Mabel gets up with Daddy, and now I’m, well, apprehensive about that.

And then I saw Mabel and her father off to school this morning (he’s helping in the classroom today) and walked Dash to school, and came home all maudlin about the tragedy of sending my beloved children – my heart, after all – away from me every day.

It’s quite confusing being me. I think.

Spontanaeity

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It’s the perfect spring morning here, after last week’s excesses and the weekend’s grey chilliness (or “normal” weather, as we Irish call it) and my washing line is crying out for some sheets to billow upon it in the mild breeze. White petals are falling from the pear trees, skittering along the road in eddies and waves, looking like a host of tiny racers surging forward at the start of a marathon.

Or maybe that’s just the image that comes to mind because B was off running another one of those yesterday. Meanwhile, I stayed at home and forced the kids to watch TV while I made his birthday cake. , and I have to admit that I’m very close to getting myself a slice to go with my cup of coffee in a minute. Perilously close.

But, because grey days get me moving , yesterday we went to the zoo. (Hah. You know, I went looking for that post to link to because I remembered the title, but I had no idea that it was also about going to the zoo. Apparently I only have one activity in my repertoire. Maybe there’s something hidden in my subconscious that links drizzle with zoo trips. Maybe it always drizzled when I went to Dublin Zoo to see the incongruous flamingoes and the sad polar bear.)

It would be lovely to have arranged to go to the zoo with some friends, taken our picnic lunch, and hung out with other people. But spontaneity is where it’s at, when you have kids, and at least with two they can entertain/bug each other. I mean, if we’d arranged to go to the zoo and meet friends, the weather would have been either scorching or pelting, we’d all have slept badly, the Beltway would have been backed up, we’d have arrived late, we’d never have found a parking space, we’d have had to rush home after two barely sighted animals for Mabel’s nap.

As it was, we all got up late after a pretty good night. I decided in leisurely fashion that I could probably manage a zoo trip before I mentioned it to the kids at the vital moment to get them enthusiastic – and therefore dressed quickly. We left under surprisingly little stress, in no rush because I knew Mabel would manage without a nap today. It took us one hour to get there, front door to cheetahs, including free parking in the side streets near the zoo (score!). We wandered pretty happily, and despite the sometime drizzle and Mabel’s penchant for jumping in puddles wearing non-waterproof shoes, we saw a good selection of animals.

The highlight, again, was the orangutan who came and sat right up against the window to inspect the children ranged in front of her – clearly from her perspective, we bring the human zoo to her house for her entertainment.

Looking at that other post , I find I have to compare and contrast some other aspects of this zoo trip almost a year later:

  • Free parking: I have learned and grown as a person, and my parallel parking was awesome.
  • Mabel wet her pants in the car before we’d even got there, but luckily I had brought spares, and she did use the zoo bathrooms once, so we managed: surprisingly little progress on that front.
  • More reptiles, no lions and tigers this time.
  • Requisite fighting over statue to pose on:

We shared a popcorn, found the car again, and drove home basking in the glow of having done something, for once.

This entry was posted in adventures and tagged weather , zoo on by .

Too much, too soon

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I’m not sure I can cope with summer, especially if it’s starting now.

Yesterday, Mabel spent a happy two hours or so playing with a basin of mud at a neighbour’s house. (It started as a mini sand box, I’m assured. Now it’s a basin of muddy water, and the kids love it more than ever.) By the end, she was happily shoveling sand on a doll’s hair for her 3-year-old accomplice to rinse off with the hose. “We’re washing the baby’s head,” they said, clearly making poor baby pay for all those shampooings they had objected to in the past.

Sadly, I didn’t get a picture of the baby’s mud treatment.

So when I finally brought her home, she went straight into the bath to wash off about an inch of mud.

Today, I was persuaded that the easel should come out of its winter exile in the shed and that I should let Mabel and Dash paint when Dash came home from school. It started out excellently. Mabel painted an underwater volcano.

So did Dash.

Then I looked up from whatever I was doing, as Mabel’s sing-song narrative penetrated my thick, thick skull. She was quoting from a particularly fun we’ve had from the library recently: “So I take some red … and I paint my head …”

You can see where this is going. Straight back to the bathtub, that’s where. Meanwhile, Dash decided to do some finger-painting and ended up with completely blue hands, that dripped up the stairs and all over the basin before being washed off.

The paint is going back in the basement. The easel is going back into the shed. I’m not doing summer.
Not yet.

Just a note

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Mabel turned to me the other day and said: “Mommy, I am as-bo-lutely…” actually, I can’t remember what she was absolutely, but I was charmed by her use of the word and her little stumble over it. It’s pretty rare for her to mispronounce a word, really.

She did tell me a while ago that she likes ice because it’s “refreshous” – but that’s not a mispronounciation, it’s a very intelligent word formation.

She’s also taken to announcing, out of the blue and a propos of nothing at all, “Speaking of [whatever], I want [whatever else].”

I can’t help thinking that, even though her early-talker status is no longer so obvious these days, her language is probably still a touch more, well, idiomatic than that of many other three-year-olds.

Dash came out of school a few weeks ago brandishing a note he’d written for me, that I had to read straight away before retrieving Mabel from the tree or moving the stroller out of the way of the exiting hordes of grade-schoolers. It said “I luv yoo”, with a heart, and he was very proud of having written it without any help.

The next week he brought home a little note for each of us, that read “I luve you”. I appreciated the addition of the silent e, and thought I wouldn’t tell him about the u just yet. His father had no such qualms, and let him know, so that the very next day we all received our final verisons, with the correctly spelled message.

I’m keeping them all, but the first one is the specialest.

Dora’s Long Night

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You’ve got fourteen minutes. Go!

Oh, wait. I ‘ve got fourteen minutes. If it takes you fourteen minutes to read this, well, I suppose I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you had to take some time out in the middle to make dinner or advise a presidential candidate or paint your toenails or something.

I know you’re clamouring to find out how it went last night . Did I fall at the first fence? Did Mabel submit to the will of her father? Did terror reign?

Actually, I’ll tempt fate right now by saying it went pretty well. Better than I could have imagined, though not magically well or anything. There was a moment when she’d slept a microsecond longer than usual after going to bed, when I thought maybe she’d decided it wouldn’t be worth waking up at all, and she’d just sleep through to 8am instead – but then she realised that if she did that, I’d be up every hour checking her pulse and holding a mirror and a tiny flashlight in front of her nose to see if she was breathing, so she decided to spare me that. Thoughtful child.

So Mabel went to sleep, as is fairly usual for a day she has napped, at 8.30 last night. I nursed her to sleep, though there were also two batches of stories and one ritual-sending-away-of-Daddy before she was actually out. She slept until 10.30, maybe even 10.45, and woke, as usual. B went in to her. We’ve been doing this for a while now with the first waking, so it wasn’t a surprise, and sometimes she falls back asleep while waiting for me to come after he’s persuaded her to lie back down, because that’s all he’s good for as far as she’s concerned. (She doesn’t know about the paying-bills part yet.) But last night, probably because we’d talked about how the mumeet would be not forthcoming during the night, she wasn’t falling back asleep. B passed the metaphorical baton to me and I squared my shoulders against the coming onslaught as I entered her room, who knew when or in what condition to ever leave again.

But! Miracle! She asked for mumeet, was told there would be none, and after some fairly rudimentary protests, lay down and said I should tell her a story instead. I got two-thirds of the way through Goldilocks, adding some long pauses for dramatic effect, and lo! she was mostly asleep again. I had to wait quite a while before she was asleep enough for me to actually leave, but it was much, much easier than I had been expecting.

The same thing happened at 1am or whenever it was she woke next. I didn’t bother sending B in, because (a) he was fast asleep, and (b) what was the point? If she knows I’m in the house, she’s going to want me to be the one with her, even if I deny her what she wants most. She has to hear it from the source, I suppose. This time, again we had the formal protest, but half of The Three Billy Goats Gruff was enough to get her back to sleep. (I don’t actually know what the biggest billy goat said to the troll, or what the troll said to him, because I didn’t get to that page of the book when I read it to her at school yesterday, so it was good that she fell asleep before my ignorance was exposed.)

The third time – and to be honest I can’t even remember if I went back to my own bed before this one or just stayed where I was – she was more insistent, more upset, and louder. She was still awake after two long and involved Dora and Diego stories (and I have to say that even half asleep in the middle of the night, I can compose a more logical and interesting Dora story than the ones we’ve had from the library), so I made an executive decision to call it a night and give her what she wanted. “Five seconds,” I said, but that never works with her the way it used to with her brother, so it was a very long five seconds on one side, and an actual five seconds on the other, and she went back to sleep.

The next time she woke it was probably 7.30, I could see daylight at the side of the curtain, and I let her have her way with abandon.

Tonight, we’ll see what happens. I was proud of us both – but mostly of Mabel, to be fair – for getting as far as we got last night, and I don’t regret giving in when I did. If I don’t nurse her between bedtime and 3am, that’s still a huge step forward from where we were, and we’ll get to where we’re going in the end.

Batten down the hatches

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Pull up a chair. Have some cheese. I’ve got the whine.

I can tell already this is going be one of those posts that gets the “Best intentions” tag. That one goes on plans I make and tell you about so that you can all point and laugh two weeks later when things go horribly, predictably awry. Or the next day, even. But if you never even try, you definitely won’t get anywhere, I suppose.

Two nights ago was a bad night for Mabel. I happened to look at the clock at the relevant times and discovered that I left my own bed to go to her at 12.00, 2.00 and 4.00. I came back to my own bed at 1.00 and 3.00. And I wouldn’t like you to think we were all sleeping soundly from 4am until reluctant waking up at 8.00. No, she was probably latched on again from 5.00 to 6.00 or so, before getting up and leaving me in blessed, blessed peace, around 7.00.

To be honest, that was pretty standard except that usually I don’t stay awake enough at 3am to do anything as active as bothering to get myself up and trot down the hall to my own bed. But sometimes she’s hogging the whole (twin) mattress and the call of the cool sheets on my side of the big (queen) bed is a siren song. I know I’m lucky to be able to be able to go back to sleep – usually – pretty quickly every time – this situation couldn’t possibly have persisted if that wasn’t the case.

Last night, then, there was something in the air, or the water. Maybe there was a full moon. Maybe it was because of the equinox. More likely it was the incipient thunder, but a lot of people on my Facebook feed this morning seemed to be complaining about how badly their kids had slept. Dash, my great sleeper, woke twice with a bad dream. The first time, I had just come back from Mabel and was able to lie down with him for a few minutes until he dropped off again. The second time, I had to call in reinforcements because I was already dealing with Mabel again, so I’m not sure how long that took. (There was a third time, but apparently I dreamed that one. I could have sworn I heard him call out, heard him get out of bed and come down the hall, and I was already flapping a hand at him to warn him not to wake his precariously asleep sister when I opened my eyes and found he wasn’t actually standing beside me at all.)

Mabel, having gone to bed early at 7pm after no nap, had woken as usual at 9.45 and gone back to sleep easily enough. Then she woke around midnight and – well, it all gets fuzzy, but at some point much later it felt like she’d been latched on all night and it crossed my mind that perhaps she was hungry. “Are you hungry, Mabel?” I asked. She nodded. “Mummy, I’m huuuungry!” You could have told me two hours ago and saved us all that not-sleeping, you know? I went downstairs and got her a waffle. At least it was only 3.15 and not 5am as I’d feared. She gobbled up a frozen waffle in the dark, whispering something about Goldilocks and the three bears to her doll as it went, and of course then she was wide awake, wanting water and stories and Daddy and to go downstairs and play there…

I got her to lie down and have some more mumeet and she was out in pretty short order. So we all went to sleep … until the thunder rolled in around 5am and the rain around 6 and though the kids were asleep, I heard it all so I don’t think I was, entirely.

Coming back from school this morning, I told Mabel that mumeet at night was going to have to stop. That I would gladly let her have some before bed, and again when she wakes up in the morning, and that someone will go in and lie down with her to help her get back to sleep, but the all-night buffet is closing down. I asked her if she’d rather Daddy went into her or I did, when she woke in the night but wasn’t getting mumeet, and she opted for Daddy. I think this is because she expects Daddy to read her stories at 4am, and she’ll get a bit of a shock when all he wants to do is turn over and go back to sleep.

I was surprised that she agreed, and I know she’ll be eating her words tonight when I try to enforce it, but it had to happen some time, and we’ll see how it goes. Maybe two bad nights in a row have worn me down enough to help me stay strong in the face of full-force Hurricane Mabel. Maybe our success with cutting out daytime nursing will convince both of us that I can say no and she can learn to live with it. But it’s going to be hard, and there will be tears, and I just hope we don’t wake the neighbours.

Victory! (Um, victory?)

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Mabel got a new baby yesterday. “What, woman?” you ask. “Have you no sense? Have you no willpower? Have you an infinite amount of space in your house – and your heart, [sob] – for more babies? When will you say no?”

Don’t worry. This was a special baby. This was her potty-training sticker-chart baby.

Some time back in January or so, I had a brainwave. Which I didn’t even mention here, for fear of having to eat my words yet again. I told Mabel that when she saved me enough money on pullups by wearing underpants, we could spend that money on a baby. Some rough calculations led me to believe that if a box of Pampers at Target costs $20, then half a box costs $10. (With me so far?) And there were many attractive babies in the toy aisles that could be purchased for such a price. Including the one Mabel had just set her heart on.

It appeared that she was using about three pullups a day (night-time was off the table at this point). So to save 30 pullups, or half a box, should take only about ten days of solid underpantsing. It worked like magic for five days, but then the novelty started to fade. She’d wear underwear at school and then not take off her naptime pullup all afternoon. I let it slide, especially as we were off to Ireland and I really didn’t want to try getting her to go commando on a plane or during days of jetlag again . Every now and then she’d wear underpants for a whole morning or a whole afternoon, and we’d add a sticker to the chart.

At some point during our trip away, I think, she started pooing in the toilet whether she was wearing a pullup or not. I was, you can imagine, pretty happy about this development. We were given some hand-me-down (but very clean) underpants from a friend, and Mabel suddenly loved them. Hey, whatever it takes.

So on Friday, the last sticker went into its place on the chart, and Mabel was pronounced officially potty trained. We went to Target yesterday morning and she’s now the devoted mother/big sister of Princess Bonny, who came with a tiara and a “baby list” (that is, an ad for all the other baby princesses you can buy). She’s meant to be Aurora, the Sleeping Beauty, but Mabel says (scathingly) that Sleeping Beauty doesn’t have a tiara, and she thinks Bonny is a prettier name. Take that, Disney Corporation.

She’s also wearing a pullup right now, and plotting her next sticker chart. Clearly, I have triumphed.