Monthly Archives: October 2012

Genetics

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It’s definitely colder here since Sandy blew through. I encountered a friend at nursery-school pickup.

She said, “Aren’t you wearing gloves? I can see you’re holding your hands as if they’re cold.”
“I know,” I explained. “I do have gloves. They’re at home.”
“Well they’re not doing any good there.”
“I know. I’ll keep them in my pockets now it’s cold. But then I won’t put them on because that’s too much hassle.”
She laughed at my illogicality.
“I also hate using an umbrella,” I continued, “because then it gets wet and I don’t have anywhere to put it.”
She left me to my particular brand of crazy.

Not five minutes later I found myself having the following conversation with Mabel.
- Mummy, my hands are cold.
- See, we should have brought your gloves. For tomorrow we’ll put your gloves in your jacket pocket and they’ll be there when you need them.
- But I don’t want to have to take them out of my pocket.

Blood will out, I suppose.

The long long weekend

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It was cosy in the basement, and we couldn’t even hear the winds that were lightly battering the house (like tempura) and not actually, in the event, felling any of the surrounding trees or even tossing the neighbour’s un-put-away deck furniture at our windows. What’s more, and against all expectations, the stairs light shone all night and the alarm clock I’d optimistically plugged in beside our mattresses on the floor glowed the time redly all the way to 6:23, when Mabel could be restrained by boobies no longer and demanded that Daddy play magnetic dress-up with her.

I’d imagined that opening the door at the top of the stairs this morning would be like entering a post-apocalyptic world, with the possibility (if not the actuality) of strewn possessions, shards of window-glass and broken ornaments, maybe a huge bough coming through the ceiling, scattering wet leaves on our bed and letting the cold wind blow through the house. Maybe no house at all, just grey open sky and the leaves of a sodden paperback whipping back and forth in the cold breeze.

(Maybe zombies. Having an American house with a basement of the sort that is always spooky in movies used to disconcert me a bit. But last night, the basement was homely and comforting. Also, I’m pretty sure all the crickets down there are dead by now.)

Instead of devastation, of course, there was just the usual debris of a day spent at home with no energy left to clean up at the end. Lego people, cushions, pieces of paper with scribbled notes that must be kept forever, half crayons. A couple of dirty coffee cups, some glasses of half-drunk water, cookie crumbs on countertops. Lovely electric light emanating from the microwave and the stove and the inside of the fridge.

Nothing new, nothing dramatic. Home the way it should be, the way it always is. Lucky us.

It was pretty wild outside last night as Hurricane Sandy made landfall up the coast from us, but we didn’t flood, we didn’t lose power, and no trees fell on our house – or anywhere nearby that I can see. We’ve had two extra days of weekend in which to bake and clean and play family games and obsessively refresh Twitter. We’ll move ahead into the rest of the week – trick-or-treating tomorrow, Mabel’s birthday party on Sunday – refreshed and reinvigorated, if somewhat weighed down with too many cups of tea and oatmeal cookies.

Not everyone gets to be so lucky, and we’re thankful.

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

God Save Our Socks

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Times were hard in Dublin in 1979. I wore hand-me-downs from my cousins most of the time. I didn’t really care, as I was a bit of a tomboy and not interested in clothes, but it was a far cry from today’s “If it’s not pink I’m not wearing it” tutu-splosion in my own daughter’s closet. (Though a large proportion of her stuff is also pre-loved.)

Anyway. I remember a particular pair of knee socks that came from my cousins in England. They had Union Jacks all over them. My mother, aware that this might not be the most politically correct statement to be making, made me wear them inside-out.

I’m really not sure how much of an effect that had. These weren’t little Union Jacks randomly arrayed over white socks, that might be taken for purple dots from a distance. No, these socks were overwhelmingly red-white-and-blue, with a repeating unbroken pattern of inch by inch-and-a-half flags, one after another with no spaces in between. Add some sequins and Ginger Spice would have loved them. Even inside-out, any casual viewer over the age of seven would probably have known what it was.

I was five. So that was fine.

You’d think, in hindsight though, that perhaps we could have done without that one pair of socks. I mean, from my point of view, the murders and kneecappings and car bombs I heard about every morning on the radio might as well have been taking place in another country, as they never involved places I’d been to or people I knew; but Dublin had been bombed by the IRA the year after I was born, and murders and bombings continued in the UK and the North of Ireland until as late as 1996 (and beyond, from various factions). The late seventies were the height of The Troubles, as they were known. While nobody I knew in Dublin was a rabid Republican, almost everyone I knew was Catholic. In general, it would not have been the done thing to fly the British flag (metaphorically; literally would be totally inconceivable), even if my father happened to have been born there. (Which he was.)

(I’m trying to think how to explain this to Americans. It might be a bit like wearing the Confederate flag to school in New York. You know the way over here people fly the flag of the country of their forebears with pride, and paint themselves those colours and enthusiastically support the teams in the world cup? Well, you don’t do that in Ireland if you’re English. You certainly didn’t do it then, and I’m really not sure how loudly you would want to do it even now.)

But, in my family in 1979 at least, a perfectly good pair of socks was not to be turned down on the grounds of political correctness – not when you could just pull them the other way out and pretend nobody could tell. I suppose I should be glad it wasn’t a Union Jack woolly jumper.

That which is not happening

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Yesterday I thought for a while that I might have to fly home to Ireland for a few days as soon as this weekend, to sort out some family stuff.

This morning, I found that wouldn’t be necessary, and took myself off high alert. So that’s all right then.

A lot flew through my mind in a very short space of time, though. I’ve never left the children overnight, not even for one night, not even when giving birth to the second one – we were only at the birthing center for five hours or so before we came back again with a brand new baby. I’ve flown with my children plenty of times, but I’ve never flown without them. That would be a totally new experience.

My initial reaction, of course, when the possibility was raised, was “Noooo! I can’t! It’s impossible!” Because I am a planner who fears change, especially change that comes quickly. I don’t much like surprises, either. All the reasons why I couldn’t crowded down on me: Mabel can’t get to sleep without me; everyone has a cough and might be getting sick; Halloween; Mabel’s birthday; B can’t cook; B doesn’t know that they have to go to the bathroom before dance class and I might forget to tell him; I’m tired…

In the brief periods last night in between Mabel-waking no.1 (quick and easy), Dash needing to be shepherded to the bathroom because he’d had three last drinks of water, and Mabel-waking no. 2 (prolonged and terrible), I couldn’t fall asleep because my brain was busy outlining all the things that would need to be done, all the things that would make it impossible, and all the things I would need to remember; as well as all the things I wasn’t looking forward to or didn’t know about once I would get there.

But I cannot tell a lie: some of my thoughts drifted in other directions. What would it be like to catch a plane on my own? Could I just bring a carry-on? Should I invest in a decent pair of black trousers to look respectable and not like a harried mother of two caterwaulers? Should I bring my black boots? Might I, perhaps, pick up a neat little backpack with a padded section that would hold my laptop in REI before I left?

Would I be able to steal wi-fi from my parents’ neighbours if I asked them very nicely, assuming there was some signal I could pick up from the house, if I was staying there? Should I actually put some books on my under-employed Kindle, because I’d have a lot of time on my hands in airports? How would I cope with all that free time compounding the guilt of leaving B to cope with everyone for four whole days? And four whole bedtimes and four whole (long, long) nights?

Of course, B would be fine. He’s known these children just as long as I have, and loves them just as much, and if his culinary skills are lacking it’s only due to my own orneryness in not wanting to share my kitchen, and he’s perfectly capable of making pasta and opening a tin of baked beans, and he scrambles a mean egg to boot.

What’s more, when I floated the idea to the children yesterday afternoon, Dash was fine with it straight away. Mabel was resistant at first, but after an hour or so mulling it over she was already telling me how she’d draw me a picture to take with me and how she’d go to bed nicely for Daddy. It would probably be a huge turning point in her sleeping/weaning.

So this morning when it turned out I didn’t need to go at all, my feelings were just a tiny bit mixed.

Mostly I was relieved, of course. Relieved that the emergency was not really an emergency after all, that the sky hasn’t fallen just yet. Happy that I didn’t have to run round like a headless chicken booking a ridiculously expensive last-minute flight and trying to stock up the fridge with easily prepared food and writing excessive lists of information. Very pleased not to be trying to predict when exactly this incoming hurricane of ours would be making transAtlantic flights at best unpleasant or else totally unviable.

Suddenly, my life looked laughably easy. I could think about Halloween costumes! I could continue to plan Mabel’s birthday party! I could clean the toilets! (Yes, really, for one fleeting moment I almost thought that.)

But then, I would quite like a cute little backpack with a padded space for my laptop. Maybe for Christmas.

It gets better: Swamped parent edition

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I posted an impromptu photo of myself with Mabel on Facebook the other day, and was amused to see someone comment that I looked “groomed”. From where I was sitting, I just had clothes on. And maybe my hair was on one of its good days. (When it’s newly washed, it’s fluffy. When it needs to be washed, it’s flat. There’s about half an hour in the middle there when it looks quite nice, if you ignore the grey bits.)

Oh, fine, here’s the picture. Judge for yourself.

But the commenter has two tiddlers. I mean, toddlers. I mean, two under four, or so. She’s probably lucky if she can find some clothes, never mind brush her hair of a morning.

So today I’m here to tell you that you do get out of the trenches eventually. You get to take someone to school and leave them behind, at least for a couple of hours. And then one day you get to take both of them to school and go off on your own and do the shopping and think about what you’re going to cook for dinner right there while you push the trolley around the supermarket . That’s a great day, so ’tis.

The day will come when you can have a shower even though you’re the only adult in the house and both children are in residence. And not only will nobody be crying when you come out, but there won’t even be someone sitting on the toilet seat eyeing you balefully through the wobbly glass, or squeezing your toothpaste all over the basin or brushing their hair with your toothbrush. (Okay, this only works with the TV on some thrilling show, and I probably wouldn’t risk shaving my legs as well as washing myself, but it’s a start.)

In fact, some glorious day, in the dim and distant future, the baby swings will be a thing of the past and your children will be able to pump for themselves on the big-kid swing, and beyond an initial push you’ll be rendered pretty much superfluous in the playground.

And then you’ll smell someone’s new baby’s head and you’ll think, wow, that was a long time ago.

Baby Mabel, going on for four years ago

Sinking

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Sometimes I feel like I’m functioning just a knife-edge away from mutiny, and that all I can do is to keep the crew (inmates, whatever) happy, whatever the cost, because if they lose it, then we’re all down the tubes.

This is not a good long-term parenting strategy.

As captain/first-mate of the ship, I should wield some authority. But that assumes my crew is formed of rational adults who chose the job. In fact, the inmates almost in charge of the asylum are immature, irrational, and incapable of the simplest actions of self-preservation (eating food so that you don’t go ballistic, for instance; sleeping during the night so that you can function reasonably during the day; using the bathroom when your bladder’s full, for pete’s sake). Not to mention the fact that they didn’t ask to be born, not that anyone has thrown that one up at me yet, but it’s only a matter of time.

So empathetic parenting is only part of the battle. There’s also the part about teaching them to be reasonable human beings, doing things that are judged to be civilized and acceptable to the rest of society.

Sometimes I’m hanging on by my fingertips, wondering how I’m going to get myself out of this one, wondering who would win if it came down to just sitting it out, wondering why, with all my years of education and experience more than they have, it’s not easier.

Maybe tomorrow will be better.

Oncoming four

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The sell-by date on the milk I bought this morning is November 6th.

That’s a long way off, I thought. By then, I’ll have a four-year-old.

I really love three, for all its intransigence, it’s got to be the cutest age (apart from 18 months, and 2, and all the other cute ages); but then, I love four too. It’s so grown-up. Maybe it’s because I remember being four, or because in Ireland four is when you start school, but to me, it seems like the real start of childhood. I remember being thrilled when Dash turned four, to have such a big kid.

But then. Mabel isn’t Dash. Maybe I don’t want a big kid just yet. She certainly doesn’t want to be a big kid – not if it means giving up booboo (not altogether, just at bedtime, just maybe), or getting injections at her checkup, or having to walk instead of being carried. Even the thrill of a new carseat and a princess (and prince) party at which she can wear her party shoes and the prospect of lots of presents doesn’t quite offset all that. Next thing you know I’ll be getting her to wipe her own backside, and that will be entirely unsupportable.

I can see her point, to be honest. Dash is all about doing things himself (things he wants to do, that is; come to think of it, putting on his own socks or wiping his bum didn’t really apply), but Mabel likes to be waited on hand and foot. “I need a tissue,” is a common refrain in these germ-infested days of October, as she sits and waits for some disembodied hand to wipe her nose, and god forbid she should go to the trouble of blowing, no matter how often I explain that it will mean less wiping in the future.

I am bad at delegating. I’m bad at letting someone else make a hash of something when I know I can do a better job myself. Parenting is one long lesson in letting go, and I’m not good at learning it. I should probably leave her alone until the snot runs down her face and she comes and gets her own tissue and uses it by herself, but then, she might just decide to lick the delicious snot away, or wipe it on the cushions, or use it as glue. And then – she’s right – I’m the one who’ll be sorry.

Two more weeks, and I’ll have a four-year-old. And everything – and nothing – will have changed.

Transatlantic subtleties: pavement, dirt, and those pesky islands

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A couple of quick ones to add to this occasional series of disambiguators (that’s a word):

Everybody knows that Americans say sidewalk. What UK/Irishers say is either footpath or pavement. The former is simple, and that’s what we say to the kids because it’s pretty unambiguous on either side of the Atlantic. The word “footpath” in this country might make people think of a trail through the woods rather than a paved area beside the road for walking on, but it’ll do. Because pavement is tricky.

In the UK you walk on the pavement, but in the US you definitely don’t – it’s the road surface, for driving on. If you see a sign warning that the pavement is under repair, you’ll want to be careful in the car, not on your feet. Don’t mix them up.

As an addendum, the black stuff they put on the road is called tarmac (short for tarmacadam) in the Isles*, but asphalt (or blacktop) in the US.

************

And then, there’s dirt. To me, dirt is dirty stuff, anything that makes you unclean. But to an American, dirt is the stuff plants grow in. They say soil as well, but that’s the fancy word for it. Earth, here, is only the planet, not so much the stuff the planet is made of. 

So when Americans tell their children not to play in the dirt, they don’t mean to stop cavorting in the rubbish tip, they just mean not to get mucky.

*************

*And, for people from elsewhere, it occurs to me that this quick run-down might be handy:

The British Isles consist of the two islands of Great Britain and Ireland. (Geographical)
The UK consists of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. (Political)
(Great) Britain consists of England, Scotland, and Wales.
The island of Ireland (geographical) is composed of the six counties of Northern Ireland (or simply the North) and the 26 counties of the Republic of Ireland (the South) – (political).

Does that clear everything up? Wikipedia can tell you more , of course.

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Backsliding

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There has been some backsliding on the night-weaning issue.

I’m embarrassed to admit it, becuase it was going so well. She hadn’t had a boob in the middle of the night for so long that I was sure she’d forgotten it was even a possibility. But hey, I was wrong. How ’bout that?

When we were in Chicago, Dash was just getting over his almost-croup, and I was convinced Mabel was about to come down with it. One night she seemed warm, to the kiss test, and I suspected she was running a low-grade fever. She definitely had a cold. She woke up in the night, and I decided to hell with my principles (such as they were, the no-boob principle is always fighting against the why-shouldn’t-I principle) and gave her the boob. It sent her back to sleep quickly, it gave her antibodies, it kept her hydrated, it was just the ticket. In the morning her fever was gone and she only coughed a few times.

So I said, “It’s only because we’re away, and you’re sick.” “Once we go home, there will be no booboo at night, you know?” I said. “Only in Chicago,” I said.

Yeah, right. She’d broken the streak, and she knew it. Also, she’s still sick with a very runny nose and a crackly cough that doesn’t worry me because it sounds productive , as the pharmacist would say. I have not had a lot of luck denying the midnight boob since we’ve been back. And I can’t tell whether it’s because she’s found my weakness (you know, liking sleep) or because she really does need it because she’s sick. But I’m teetering on the edge of sick myself, with a runny nose and an incipient sore throat that never gets quite bad enough to bother about, and telling the long version of Cinderella at 3am is really not something that appeals to me when I know there’s another option.

I do try, though. Last night. Ugh. Last night she woke at some horrible hour and I recounted all of Cinderella (slightly abridged, with breaks whenever I dropped out of consciousness). Then she wailed at me for 20 minutes until I gave her one boob. Repeat for other side, even though she’d promised she’d go to sleep after just the one. (She’s like an alcoholic. I wonder has she an addictive personality, perhaps.) Then the other side, or a Mabel story, or I don’t remember what. Finally, two hours later, she said she was hungry.

One waffle and one more bloody Mabel story later, she was asleep. For, I dunno, an hour, until it was morning.

I’m a bit tired today. I’ll night-wean her again when I have the energy. Don’t hassle me, man.

Pop quiz

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Dash wanted to give Mabel a little quiz this morning. He wrote

1 + 1 = 

on a piece of paper and gave it to her.

“I’m not sure she wants to do a quiz right now,” I said, not wanting him to be disappointed, but trying to protect her from the unreasonable demands of academic life at the same time.

“Mabel, Mabel, what’s one plus one?” he asked, undaunted.

Mabel picked up her pencil and scrawled a careful squiggle after the equals sign.

“Mabel, is that a two?” he asked.

“Yes, it’s a two.”

“You’re right!”

Hooray for acing tests. And for brothers who know how to set you up for success.