Monthly Archives: November 2012

Homework, by popular demand*

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*at least, one Lovely Commenter asked for it. But this is the abridged version – I took out a big wodge of irrelevant ranting and self-doubt.

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Oh God, Homework. I spent all afternoon yesterday stating my expectations – that Dash would start his homework now. Now after this snack. Now after this one game. Now in time to watch the TV show. As soon as dinner was done. He agreed, or said nothing, and then he just ignored it, and me, over and over and over. I threw in the towel.

I hate homework, but maybe there’s more to it than that. I am the sort of person who does things first to get them out of the way: I used to eat my vegetables first so I could enjoy my dinner once they were gone; I used to do my math homework first to get it over with. To me, this seems like a good way to work, and the ethos and habit I want to pass on to my children.

But I know not everyone functions this way. (Their father did his math homework first too, but in his case because it was his favourite. I’m not sure what he did with his vegetables. Probably dropped them stealthily under the table.) Maybe Dash is just the sort of person who needs to leave things till the last minute. Maybe he’ll pull spectacular all-nighters in college. Maybe he’ll work up to the wire on every deadline and his work will be great because of it.

I just don’t believe that can be true. How can you work up to the wire and have time to make your work as good as it should be? Is this a case of nature not nurture, or can good work habits be instilled at an early age to avoid all that nasty fussing over last-minute deadlines later?

This morning, Dash did his homework after breakfast, for his father (I was still in bed; Mabel slept well but I had insomnia), with little or no fuss. My new plan is two reminders an evening that homework exists, and one in the morning. If he sleeps late and doesn’t have time for it, that will be his problem, not mine.

Will report back. In the meantime, I’d really like to know your opinions. Are you an in-good-time-er or a last-minute-er? Do you think you could be the other if you tried hard enough, or is it hard-wired?

Basters and boobies

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I just wrote a big rant about homework and intransigent six-year-olds, but I think we’ll leave that for another day. Maybe I just needed to write it.

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The morning before Thanksgiving, I found myself in the unhappy position of having to do the shopping with two children. It was my own fault, as on Monday when I should have done it I frittered away my time instead with more enjoyable pursuits; also, I hadn’t yet planned enough to know what I needed.

But it wasn’t so bad. They’re at their best first thing in the morning, and we actually got out of the house by 9.30, which still counts as first thing in my book. They got a bagel each to keep them quiet, and things progressed without too many not-on-list items being added to the trolley.

As we processed down the rice-and-beans aisle (also peanut butters, honey, and juice boxes), Dash came running after me:

“Mummy, Mummy, look! Look! Can I get one of these? I’ve always wanted one of my very own to play with. Pleeeeease, Mummy?”

I looked to see what he was brandishing. It was a turkey baster.

On balance, I think I got away lightly with a pack of chocolate-milk straws and a bag of chips.

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It was colder this afternoon than it had been in the morning, and though I did get Mabel to wear her coat, she didn’t have her gloves as we waited for Dash to get out of school. I was holding her (my side of the bargain that got her to put the coat on), and she was putting her hands inside my top to warm them up. Then her hands went a little further down … down… I had to let out a shriek-laugh as I pushed her hand away.

 ”I just wanted to find the…”

I stopped her before she could remember the word “nipple” – or anything like it – but I’m pretty sure the other mom I was chatting to knew exactly what had happened. It’s possible that most of the school heard the squawk and knew she’d hit the spot. Letting your four-year-old get to second base with you in public is just never appropriate. (You probably knew that already.)

Duvet vous?

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The baby has stolen my blanket.

By which I mean that the four-year-old has taken the supersoft espresso-brown blanket that lives at the foot of her parents’ bed for the express purpose of keeping me, her longsuffering mother, warm at night – because I run about ten degrees colder than everyone else in this house, apparently – and is currently snuggling her tow-headed little self under it, fast asleep and away with the fairies to boot.

Not to mention the fact that she has a perfectly good duvet of her own, from Ikea, inside a very attractive duvet cover, also from Ikea, and additionally a big bright red fleece blanket purchased in Target not two months ago because she wouldn’t wear her coat in Chicago. So she’s sleeping on top of the red blanket, under the brown blanket, shunning the duvet, and sentencing me to another night of being just slightly not warm enough in bed. (This is the third night in a row.)

The things we put up with.

Meanwhile, in the parental bed – don’t worry, I’m not going into any salacious details: this is about linens – the sheet war is being waged with all the silence and indignance two tired parents can muster over such things. See, there’s a sheet under us, and a sheet over us, between us and the comforter. Raised as we were in a part of Europe that came late to duvets, but not as late as America, we’re not entirely used to the top sheet – but I really like my down comforter, and I’m not going to wash it every week, so that’s why the sheet is there. The sheet is turned down over the comforter when we sleep, but somehow – due no doubt to my inept bed-making skills – it doesn’t want to stay there and tends to flip up over our faces. I can deal with this. I calmly flip it down again. But B gets all pissy with the sheet in his sleep and ends up with it mangled and twisted and generally not where it should be.

At some point in the night, inevitably, I come back to bed from my sojourn in Mabel’s room, and, as I slip myself into the half-warm bed, I notice that the sheet on his side needs fixing. I pull it up and flip it neatly back where it should be. I suspect he thinks of me as the midnight sheet nazi. In turn, I grumpily wonder, every night, why he can do physics for the government but he can’t work a simple bedsheet.

Luckily for all of us, there are more important things in life, and by morning we’ve forgotten it all again. This morning I dreamed that I tweeted to Mabel the fact that it was 5.15 when I left her bed, and then regretted it because it was bound to wake her up.

Happily, she didn’t get my tweet because she stayed asleep for another hour, and all was right with the world.

A Half-Baked Auction

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Bake sale! Buy baked goods for Christmas! Contribute to a good cause! Help victims of Hurricane Sandy!

Go to A Half-Baked Life today or tomorrow and bid on some delicious home-baked goodies to fill in that awkward gap between Thanksgiving and Christmas, to give to your loved ones, or to pass off as your own creations.

The white-chocolate-chip-cranberry cookies and the gingerbread muffins are my contributions, but I also highly recommend JeCaThRe’s oatmeal cookies, and I bet everything else listed is just as good, if not better.

Sorry, no overseas shipping. If you’re in Ireland, maybe we can do a deal over Christmas, though.

Many thanks to JHL for organizing this in aid of a great cause.

Feast report

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Today we went to the zoo. Surprisingly, quite a lot of people seemed to think Black Friday would be a good zoo day, but the weather was perfect as it so rarely is for the zoo, and we did well. We saw a cheetah and the lions, some distant gorillas and a sad orang-utan (do they ever look otherwise), the reptiles and some indolent sea lions. The absolute highlight, however, was the naked mole rats.

Thanks to this , which we have from the library, the children had heard of naked mole rats. But when I told Dash we could see them at the zoo, he reacted as if I’d just told him the unicorns would be coming up on the left.

“Ha ha.”
“No, really. They’re in the small mammal house.”
“You’re just being silly.”
“I promise. They exist.”
“Really?”
etc.

When we finally got to the small mammals we had to charge past all the (many and various) tamarins, pausing briefly at the two-toed sloth (who looked like nothing so much as a black labrador poking his nose out from under a comatose afghan hound), to get to the perspex tubes (to simulate tunnels) of naked mole rats. They weren’t all that exciting in person, but the children were thrilled by their mere existence.

That’s a lion in the distance. Left of the tree. See?
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But that’s not why I’m here, and that’s not why you’re here either. You came for the food, didn’t you? Well, the food is what you’re getting. A report on yesterday, that is.

As we had no company for Thanksgiving, and we don’t particularly like turkey, and we don’t feel any weight of tradition on this culturally-not-ours day, I usually try to do something different. This year I saw a recipe for ribs , and the photo was so enticing that I decided to pull the slow-cooker out of the enforced retirement it’s been in since its disastrous maiden voyage in 2004.

I’m here to tell you that it was a roaring success, and I might have to use the crockpot more often than once every eight years now that I’ve discovered this.

To accompany, we had baked potatoes and lemony green beans, and a nice shiraz which is probably the wrong thing to go with ribs, but we’re not fussy.

Of course, I had to make a pie, even if I am anti-tradition. Apple, if you please. It was delish.

Pastry hearts. Because hearts symbolise Thanksgiving, right?

Then I was left with half an hour to spare and some extra pastry, so I took the half-can of pumpkin that was sitting in the fridge, looked up some recipes, and made mini pumpkin pies too. Mostly because Mabel had announced at her school feast on Tuesday that she loved pumpkin pie. She didn’t like mine, of course.

Splats of pumpkin
The jury’s still out on these, I admit.

The little things

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My aim, as I sit here on Thanksgiving afternoon, is to get the children out of the house with their father so that I can read a book, or write something, or just veg out, under the guise of doing Very Important Cooking That Will Affect Their Dinner. Since it’s 2.20pm and Dash is only now, finally getting dressed – at least, I think that’s what he’s doing upstairs, and the Superman and Spider-Man costumes he was sporting before don’t count – it’s taken a while to get to this point. But I’m still aiming for it, and at least B is outside supervising Mabel now, as she climbs trees barefoot in a tutu.

The tutu, if I may digress, has become ubiquitous lately. She has one that’s almost legitimately skirt-like, and two that came from parties and are really just a lot of tulle on an elastic waistband. I don’t really care so long as she has underpants on. She wears different tops and tights or leggings underneath every day, and she will countenance a dress in between times; but no trousers have been worn for months, and jeans are totally verboten.

Personally, I can’t imagine life without my jeans. Pry them from my cold dead hands (legs) if you can, but until then I’ll be happily denim-clad. Despite all my overthinking , and all the plans I may have for honing the perfect capsule wardrobe for our three weeks of festivities in Dublin, and whatever I end up buying – or planning to buy, or thinking maybe I can buy when we get there – I know that I’ll end up packing a selection of jeans (bootleg, flare, skinny), a bunch of tops that all more or less go with the bottoms, a few cosy cardigans, and a dress or two just in case I get the opportunity to wear them. And then I’ll end up in the same old jeans and the same comfy shoes 90% of the time anyway, and nobody will notice.

Speaking of which. I was inordinately pleased with myself the other day simply because I employed some shoe polish for its intended purpose and it did what it says on the tin. (Maybe I need to get out more.) But shoe polish is the sort of thing I tend to feel is only necessary for men of a certain age, or people who are a little too fussy. Tim Gunn, for instance, or my father, who has shined his shoes weekly – or perhaps morningly – for his entire life. At home we had a little basket containing polish (black and brown), brushes (one hard and one soft for each colour) and a cloth for final buffing. My dad showed me how to use them many moons ago, and every now and then I’d give my black-or-brown lace-up school shoes or mary-janes with brass buckles a bit of a swipe.

So last Spring I got a pair of blue mary-jane flats that were obscenely comfortable. As soon as sandal weather was over, in about October, I re-embraced them – but was sad to see that all the blue had been scuffed off the tips of the toes. They looked pretty shabby, and I feared that I’d have to abandon them. I wore them anyway, but felt less than – aha! – polished. What to do, I wondered. Was this the untimely end of obscene pedal comfort? And then inspiration struck – polish! I needed shoe polish!

A mere three weeks later, I finally remembered to look for navy shoe polish when we were somewhere that might sell it. And lo, I bought it and used it (because luckily my husband also owns some little shoe brushes and a rag for buffing), and my shoes are like new again. Hooray!

It really is the little things that can make you happy, if you’ll let them. So today I’m thankful for shoe polish.

I’m also thankful for my beautiful crazy family, and all the luckiness I have in my life. And the Internet, which has made things much better in many ways than they would otherwise be.

And now Dash is dressed, Mabel is probably ready to come in again, and I have to legitimately busy myself with something to do with pie.

Happy thanksgiving, everyone, whether you celebrate it or not. Thanks for being here.

A qualified first

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Mabel fell asleep last night without nursing.

I have to qualify that statement a whole lot, but it’s still a first.

  • She has fallen asleep at bedtime without nursing before, for her father a few times, and for the babysitter once – though not for a long time.
  • She falls asleep without nursing in the car, in the stroller, and even in the middle of the night. It’s just falling asleep at bedtime that’s been the sticking point for, well, ever.
  • She did nurse yesterday evening, but (because she’d had a nap) was then wide awake again (demanding waffle, water, music, etc) before finally falling asleep.

But last night, after wailing and crying and demanding and protesting that she couldn’t, she finally lay down and let me start Cinderella, and in very little time, before Cinders had even got to the ball, I’d say, Mabel had yawned twice and her breathing was regular and I was pretty sure she was out. I got as far as losing the slipper before I stopped and gingerly sat up and crept away, but it was a done deal.

Given all those reservations, I’m sort of surprised by this – but all evening I have to admit that I had an odd sense of impending freedom.

Would you take fashion advice from this girl?

Nothing compares

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It’s been thirteen hours and seventeen days
Since they took the hour away from me
I go out every night from my bed to yours when you call me at 5am or before
And now you’ve messed up my Sinead O’Connor tribute poem too

Okay, fine, never mind. But my point is that it’s been more than two weeks since the hour went back and Mabel still doesn’t seem to have adjusted in the mornings. She broke a run of horrible nights last night by sleeping soundly from bedtime till morning, but morning came at the unreasonable hour of 4.50am, which is not what I would call morning. I nursed her for an hour and then I was drained dry and she was her father’s problem and I got about an hour’s sleep before I had to get up and find out what all the shouting was about.

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That moment when you’ve said “Fine, just get in the car naked then,” and your four-year-old leaves the house resplendent in underpants and trailing a big red blanket, and you throw her clothes in the car for when you get there, and then the neighbour across the road comes out and sees you and laughs. And it’s late November, of course. That moment. It’s funny, but only because she’s my second child.

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Mabel likes to put her feet in Dash’s shoes and stomp around declaring, in a deep voice as if he’s, you know, at least ten years older than her instead of two and a half, “I’m Dash.” Then she says “I’m really strong,” and “Daddy shouts at me,” to add verisimilitude.

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Since the hour’s been gone I can do whatever you want
I get up whenever you choose
I can never eat my dinner in a fancy restaurant
But nothing
I said nothing can take away these blues
`Cause nothing compares
Nothing compares to you

I don’t think we’re having a turkey on Thursday

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I spend a few days thinking about jeans and shoes and suddenly it’s Thanksgiving week and there’s no food in the house.

Ah well. Food comes and goes, you know, but boots are good for at least two years, I’d say. I have a pair of boots upstairs that I bought in 1999, actually. I wore them at least once last year. (I’d wear them more often if I had any call for 2.5-inch heels on a regular basis. But somehow I never feel that first-grade pickup is the right time. Or daylight, for that matter.)

The reason I’m suddenly getting all twitchy about how untrendy I am is, of course, that we’ll be going home to Dublin for three weeks at Christmas, and while not exactly the fashion capital of the western world, the stakes are a tiny bit higher than they are here. The season that’s in it gives rise to opportunities to dress up, for one thing, and people there do tend to dress up a bit more. I just want to look like I’m not totally submersed by my soccermom lifestyle, that’s all.

[And then I thought: submersed isn't a word, you idiot. It's submerged, or immersed. But I looked it up and it is a word and it means just what I meant it to, so that's nice.]

And when you only see people once a year, or there’s the chance you’ll be meeting up with people you haven’t seen for ten years, or meeting people you’ve only interacted with on the Internet, not to mention the fact that the tiny statistical probability of bumping into an ex-boyfriend is raised by at least 75% if I’m walking down Grafton Street rather than to first-grade pickup, you want to look at least reasonably not awful.

[Yes, I know I just changed from second person to first and back again in the same paragraph-long sentence. I did it on purpose. So I did.]

Anyway. Back to food. It is slowly dawning on me – these things take time to percolate through, as my friend Thrift Store Mama was just talking about today – that my fruit and vegetable intake is not really up to recommended standards. I always thought, if I thought anything about it, that I wasn’t great on fruits but my vegetables made up for it. It’s true that I do like vegetables, but it’s also true that breakfast and lunch are often quite vegetable-free meals for me. Breakfast is basically a free pass: I see it as an opportunity for guilt-free carbing. Lunch would have a vegetable if a vegetable happened along, but all too often it’s some riff on a ham and cheese sandwich, with maybe a crescent or two of apple that Mabel didn’t eat. So that leaves dinner, when I probably get in two servings of vegetables easily enough, but that’s still three away from even the most basic daily requirement.

This train of thought began when I read Jamie at Light and Momentary mention that she was aiming for nine servings of fruit and vegetables every day. Nine? How could anyone eat that much food, I wondered. Well, hey, apparently that’s my recommended daily intake. And here I was thinking I was failing at just five, when in fact I’m failing miserably at nine instead.

Oh well, I thought, I’ll just eat nine servings a day and I’ll be slender and full of energy in no time. And yet, thinking did not make it so. I think I had one and a half extra servings yesterday, and one today, and they all involved baby carrots and hummus, which are quite nice but not nine servings nice. (Also, I don’t think I’m meant to eat eight servings of carrots every day. I’d turn orange.)

The difficulty is that vegetables, and fruit for that matter, just don’t have that fluffy or crunchy or dough-like baked consistency that goes as well with a nice cup of tea as, say, muffins do. Or cookies. Or a piece of cake or a scone or a brownie. Nobody sits down for a cuppa and some broccoli florets. Or coffee and a carrot. (Stick of celery? Brr.) Even a quarter cup of raisins just don’t cut it with a hot beverage, unless they’re liberally surrounded by oatmeal and sugar and baked into some sort of, let’s say, cookie-type vehicle.

So far I’m batting about 50/50 on whether I think “Now I’ll have a cup of tea and something chocolate” or “Now I’ll eat a healthy snack,” but even if I add one serving a day for this week, it’s a start.

I think this is one for the “Best intentions” tag, don’t you? I probably need to start a “Went awry” tag too.

Sartorial

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I am a child of the 80s, no doubt about it. I was 12 in 1985, so my most impressionable, most peer-influenced, most painfully needing-to-conform years were right then.

It took me a long time to recover. I was still wearing tapered-leg jeans in the early 90s, when all my friends were moving towards the straight leg. (I remember – here’s a thing to amaze my children with – the first time I saw a fleece jacket. It was strangely bobbly and brightly coloured and I wasn’t sure it was nice. Little did I knew what a ubiquitous piece of wardrobe it was poised to become. But I digress.)

Anyway, time passed and I embraced the boot-leg with all the passion of one whose thighs are not more slender – or even as slender – as her calves. Even though Ireland, with its persistent rain and perma-puddles is the worst place to have yards of denim flapping round the soles of your shoes, I left my jeans legs outside my boots, soaking up the moisture and passing it, by osmosis, halfway up to my knees every time I left the house. This is how we must suffer for our art, we fashionistas. With wet socks as soon as you take off your shoes.

Now I think of it, I also remember clearly that moment when taper moved to boot-cut. It was 1988 and we had a Spanish exchange student in the class. She wore her jeans outside her boots. We were flabbergasted by her audacity and certain that she was wrong, but in hindsight, the Spanish are always more to the forefront of the cutting fashion edge than those of us on the waterlogged fringes of the continent.

It also takes longer for global trends to get to the US. I think they start in Japan, actually, because in Sydney in 2007 I was already seeing flat slouchy pixie boots with skinny legs, and thinking they looked horrible. Now, a mere five years later, the look has reached the shores of America. (Okay, maybe it got here sooner. But it’s only now that I’m getting inured to it.)

Which is really my point: what a long time it takes to come around to the idea of wearing something again. I know the shillouette this time is subtly different from that of the 80s: skinnies are not the same as tapered legs, and shoulder pads are not yet mandatory – but when the legs inside the jeans are more tapered than drainpipe-shaped, it sort of ends up looking the same. After so long liking the idea that my legs looked the same width at the bottom as at the top, it’s hard to see myself getting narrower all the way to the floor and not zone in on my hips as an overly-wide widest point.

Last winter I bought a pair of not-too-skinny skinny jeans, and wore them a few times, with boots. Last week, I apparently lost the run of myself entirely and bought a pair of red quite-skinny skinny jeans. Now I’m obsessively trying to figure out what shoes to wear with them, because I’m not convinced the boots are the best thing after all. And what tops, and what coats, and generally everything. It has occasioned a lot of Google image searches and Pinterest wanderings and Zappos trawling and I may not find the perfect accompaniments until next year.

But that’s fine, because then when I put on last-year’s jeans, by comparison they looked much more like something I could cope with, being just a teensy bit wider and also dark denim instead of tomato red. My eye is adjusting to the new shape, slowly and reluctantly.

It’s a fine line, trying not to look as if you spent the last ten years under a rock but also acknowledging that you’re no longer 25 and even when you were 25 you didn’t have legs that were four feet long and shaped like drinking straws. I just need the perfect pair of shoes to convey all that.