And then I asked her to clean up a mess and she found the cutest little family of sweeping brushes.
Then again, maybe it’s because all the babies were napping.
I walked to school this morning with two happy six-year-old boys, watching them alternately run ahead and lag behind, jostling each other and both claiming to be the winner for half a mile in the chilly dry air that brought a glow to all our cheeks. The lined-up pupils had just started to enter the building when we got there, so I left the two as they scurried up the ramp into the warm, welcoming place where they’re both content to go every day.
I let her father take the intransigent four-year-old to school. She didn’t sleep well again last night.
The elementary school is having a lock-down drill today. It’s three months since the Newtown shootings, and they’ve never had one before. I suppose I’m glad they’re addressing the need, but I wish the need was not there. This is a county-wide thing, spurred perhaps by a shooting at a high school not a million miles away last week.
When I heard about it I told Dash what they’d be doing, in the broadest possible terms. I reminded him that they have fire drills for when something happens and they need to go outside, and told him this is the sort of drill for when something happens that means they all have to stay inside.
Dash: “What sort of thing?
Mabel: “Like when magical unicorns are outside the school?”
Me: “Yes. Like that.”
I wasn’t going to go any further into it, not with the four-year-old standing there taking it all in. We left it at unicorns and nobody was worried. I don’t know what they’ll tell them at school today. I don’t think unicorns will be involved.
[I don't remember ever even having a fire drill at school. One memorable time, the principal came on the intercom to tell us that nobody could leave yet because there were BOYS outside. With EGGS. It was rag week (somewhere; not that we had any sort of official rag week) and our sixth-years apparently had made connections in the neighbourhood with some disreputable types who had ditched school early to come over to the not-conveniently-situated girls' school to egg someone, or anyone. The nuns were having none of it. We did not shiver in our shoes but instead mocked the staff who had decided boys were scary. (I was secretly relieved.)]
Every day we send our hearts out into the world for other people to take care of, to carefully avoid with their cars, to not harm. It becomes so routine that we don’t even remember that’s what we’re doing, until something happens. Something not like magical unicorns, and not like teenage boys armed only with eggs, either.
It’s completely irrational, but I keep wanting to drive past the elementary school today to make sure they’re all okay in there.
So many disjointed thoughts to impose some sort of order on, as I sit here having third breakfast which just happens to be the same as last night’s dessert minus the custard and plus some coffee. It’s got apples and oatmeal in it, so the cake part can be disregarded (but enjoyed, of course). Also, I went for a walk/run, so I’m allowed.
Mabel gatecrashed my weekend, basically. Friday night and Sunday night were supposed to be kid-free zones, and somehow they ended up including a certain four-year-old. This morning I dragged her kicking and screaming to school and left her there, where she stopped screaming as soon as I left the room. When I came back at pickup time I was told she’d thwacked her best friend in the face with a shovel. So that went well.
Last night I packed the children off to bed early and tuned the TV in to one of its rarely watched non-kid channels and spent a happy hour or two making snarky comments about the Oscars on Twitter and Facebook, and even paying attention to the show now and then between frantic typing. Just when they were FINALLY getting to the interesting awards, Mabel woke up and wanted to come down and see what we were watching. Getting her back to sleep made me miss the rest of the show, which was probably just as well since it was after 11pm and I had a raging headache, but it was still a bit of an anticlimax.
Oscar thoughts, randomly:
Other thoughts:
|
| Watching Tangled with the Rapunzels |
I had Mabel’s parent-teacher conference yesterday. I was pretty sure there wouldn’t be much of import to say, but thought I’d better go along anyway just to make sure they didn’t need to tell me she was a sociopath in training or anything. (They didn’t.)
Her teachers opened procedings by assuring me that on the mornings when I pry her off me and leave her wailing in the classroom, the yells have stopped before I’m down the corridor and I’m not to worry at all. Which was nice.
I countered by explaining that those are the mornings when she hasn’t had much sleep. I explained how bad a sleeper she is (though of course I’ve noted this on those days too when handing her over) and how she’s often wide awake for an hour or so in the night, and how I have to go to her and try to help her get back to sleep.
Which left the field open wide for them to tell me what I should do about that. Silly me for mentioning it. They advised not going. I chuckled. (Maybe it was more of a snort.) Or at least a Supernanny-style putting-back-to-bed with no cuddles, over and over, until it sticks, they said.
I nodded and smiled and didn’t say “Well, I’d prefer to go to my child when she wakes and calls for me, because she might actually need me. She might be sick, or have had a nightmare, and I don’t want her to think that she’s all alone and banned from my company just because it’s dark outside.” I only thought of that afterwards.
“No cuddles,” repeated her teacher. Of course, I hadn’t mentioned the booboos component of the putting back to sleep. No need to confuse matters. Oh, fine, okay, so I’m a little embarrassed and don’t want to tell her teachers we’re still nursing at night. If they think I’m a soft touch to be cuddling with her every night, can you imagine what they’d say when I mentioned that she still partakes of the nectar too? Besides, it’s none of their business. But I was conscious of being a bad extended-lactivist.
I nodded and smiled some more, and we talked about Mabel’s “academic” progress (she can cut with scissors!) and social progress (needs encouragement to clean up; needs to work on peaceful conflict resolution, yada yada, four-year-old-cakes), and I took my leave.
It was only later on last night that I realised that Ms S’s references to “cuddles” were code for booboo. Because of course, she’s talked to Mabel about this, and Mabel has no self-censoring device, and Ms S. is no idiot, and hadn’t she just told me that you can have a good, sensible conversation with Mabel? (Not like me, then.)
She should have winked and cocked her head a lot more obviously if she wanted me to understand that she meant “No more booboo.” I’m sleep deprived, so I’m a bit slow on the uptake.
Recently, a parent who’d been helping out in Mabel’s classroom the day before stopped me, and said: “Oh, hey – I have to tell you, Mabel…”
“What?” I was pretty sure it was going to be a positive comment, but decided to pave the way for an apology just in case she’d viciously pinched his son in a disagreement over the plastic animals: “Is she horrible?”
“No, no, she’s not horrible. She’s amazing. At her letters, I mean. She can write them all. I was amazed when I saw her. Does she practice at home?”
“Oh. Yes, well, I suppose. Not all of them, only the uppercase ones, most of them, and her S’s are just squiggles that don’t stop… She doesn’t practice, I mean, we don’t make her, but she likes to write things. She has a big brother, you know, and so she sees him doing his homework and … “
I blushed and babbled. I didn’t want the other parent to feel his child was lagging behind. His son is exactly Mabel’s age, and a very typical four-year-old boy who likes to play with the big blocks and the trucks and couldn’t be less interested in writing his name or wondering which way round a letter goes. I had one of those too – I know how they are.
He didn’t care. He thought it was the best thing ever and that I should be praising her to the skies.
The thing is, I am proud of her abilities, but the fact that she got to this point earlier than some others might isn’t really any reflection on our parenting, or even her personality. It’s a combination of fine-motor-skills development, gender, birth order, genetics, and inclination that leads her to like letters and want to write them and be able to do so at this age.
But to be honest, I would far rather he had stopped me to tell me that she did something generous or kind, or even that she’d said something clever or funny or sweet, or displayed great powers of deduction or memory, than to praise her writing ability. She does say clever and funny things, and can even be sweet and kind on occassion, and those are the traits I’m more concerned with her learning (and displaying) at this stage of her schooling.
She’s not in nursery school to learn to write, or read, or do math; those are just things she’s picking up along the way, and call me crazy but I don’t really want her to get them too soon. She’s there to learn how to rub along with her fellow man, to relate to her peers, to develop a healthy respect for authority figures, and perhaps find some non-disruptive ways to let her crazy-silly-funny-clever personality shine through in a classroom setting.
Of course I’m proud of my precocious little girl, for many reasons. But next time you see a child make a generous gesture or use her good manners, be sure to tell her parents, because that’s what really makes a mother’s heart glow.
Generally speaking, I’m the chilly one in the house.
I mean, I get cold more easily than my husband, and the children take after him. I’ll have four layers on and be pulling another cardigan round me and making another cup of tea while Mabel throws her clothes off with abandon and tries to run out the door barefoot. So we have a hot-water bottle, and I like to take it to bed with me on especially cold nights.
(Hot-water bottles seem not to be the ubiquitous bed-warmers here in the US that they are at home. In Ireland, I’m pretty sure I could walk into any chemist/pharmacy/drugstore and find a nice red or blue or even orange rubber receptacle for hot water, with which to take the chill off the sheets of a winter night, but over here they’re a bit harder to track down, and sometimes, extremely offputtingly, come with for giving yourself a nice little colonic irrigation while you’re at it. I don’t really understand this part. I don’t want to understand. Here’s a more one. Phew.)
Anyway, since I never remember that it would be nice to have another hot-water bottle while I’m browsing Amazon for more interesting items, we only have the one in the house. I know there are such things as electric blankets, but that’s so high-tech, you know. And I only want my bed to be warm at the start of the night. Later on, when my toes are finally toasty, I like my sheets to be soothingly cool. I’m an enigma, you see, a woman of intrigue and mystery.
So, and gosh but it takes a long time to get to my point tonight, I have found it a little annoying lately that Dash has decided he needs the hot-water bottle. Even though he’s regularly found in bed with little beads of sweat on his nose (probably from insisting on falling asleep under the direct glare of his bedside lamp), he professed to be cold and to need it. And since every parent’s prime directive is to get the children to go to sleep ASAP so they can finally enjoy a glass of wine and watch an R-rated movie in peace, we gave it to him.
Then, one night, he was so hot that he couldn’t sleep. The duvet was taken entirely out of his duvet cover, but he was still too hot. B filled the hot-water bottle with cold water, and that seemed to help. He finally conked out. The next night he was still hot and wanted the cold bottle again.
The following night, B asked what sort of water bottle his majesty might desire, and I found him in the kitchen filling a lukewarm water bottle. Yes, Dash wanted his bottle neither heating nor cooling, but just body temperature. The better to keep his bed, um, the same.
So off I went to bed again that night in my socks and my cosy pyjamas, burying myself under mounds of down comforter and extra blanket, because my son was using the one and only hot-water bottle for nothing at all except to be a pleasantly squishy neutral-temperature thing in the bed beside him.
The things we do for our children.
Years ago, years and years ago, we took a few days in the Wesht of Ireland, and we drove there in my tiny wafer-thin car, and at some point along the road to Clifden, or Roundstone, or somewhere like that, I conjured up our imaginary future children in the back seat and made some brave, foolhardy even, remark about how young Ermingarde and Lavinia would react to whatever nonsense had just been said. Not to mention the little fella. We had to think for the little fella’s name, but settled on Murgatroyd, which is the name of a duck, for reasons that are not actually clear to me.
To be honest, I don’t even know if Lavinia was Lavinia, though I know Ermingarde was definitely Ermingarde, unless she was Ermintrude.
That was probably the first time we discussed our imaginary offspring. No, that’s not true. We first discussed names when we’d been going out only a few months, less than a year, certainly; and at the tender age of not yet 21, that’s a long time to be dating and still early on for such weighty discussions. We were in Lisbon, on a bench in the gardens of the Monastery of Jeronimos, I believe, though that’s not important; I’m just giving you a sense of place. B had mentioned that he was partial to a particular girl’s name, and I commented that, since putting it together with his last name would make the name of a famous film star, that would not be practical. Our friend appeared around the corner just as I was saying, “Well, if we have a girl, I’m not naming her that,” and was justifiably a little concerned, no matter how much I reassured her that the whole conversation was extremely hypothetical.
But by the time we were driving to Roundstone it was eight years later and it was all just that little bit less hypothetical, even though at that point our permanent residences were an ocean apart and we hadn’t quite figured out how to get around that fact. This was the trip where we both agreed that we wanted to get around it, although it took another 18 months for events to conspire to let that happen.
And I think it was then, after conjuring Ermingarde and Murgatroyd and their sister, whoever she was, that we agreed that 2.5 was a good number of children. Two and a half. Very sensible, though maybe not entirely practical. Two, with an option on a third, was how we left it.
And thus it stayed, for a long time. But the option has never been taken up, and it’s due to expire very soon, if it hasn’t already done so. Maybe it’s because I can’t remember what the other girl was called. Maybe it’s because I can’t even imagine having another girl or another boy; or not having one or the other. By which I mean, that if a hypothetical third child was a girl, I’d still be sorry about the boy she wasn’t. And if it was a boy, likewise.
So I think two is it. And two is perfect, because we have two perfect children, no matter how much and how often they drive us both demented, individually and one at a time, and we want to run away and drink a lot of wine and sleep forever. We’ll still keep ‘em.
This post is part of a virtual baby shower in honour of two of the Irish bloggers who have welcomed and are about to welcome their own perfect second children. Many congratulations to Aine of (the currently on hiatus) AndMyBaby and Lisa of
Mama.ie
.
Yesterday’s post in the bloghop was by Laura at
My Internal World
, and tomorrow’s will be from Kieran at
Go Dad Go
.
And today’s mystery letter is S.
My American readers might be blissfully unaware of any brouhahas going on in European circles, so I feel it’s my duty as one more connected with things happening on the other side of the Atlantic to update you every now and then.
Thing is, it turned out a few weeks ago that some beefburgers for sale in an Irish supermarket were not all beef. In fact, they were as much as 30% horse. Everyone choked on their breakfast sausages and vegetarians all over the country had a quiet chuckle. The rest of Europe thought we were all big gombeen eejits for not realising we were eating the geegees – until it turned out that horsemeat (and possibly donkey) was being substituted for beef in frozen lasagnes and ready meals sold all over Europe, and in fact the Irish were the cleverclogs who had uncovered these horrible shenanigans, which are starting to look like a Sopranos-style scam of the highest order, lining the pockets of some very crafty somebodys somewhere. Probably somewhere on a beach in the Bahamas.
I’m on Twitter these days (follow me! there’s a button over there ->), and it’s interesting to see how much more immediate and reactive it seems to be than Facebook. There were suddenly a lot of tweets about people being so hungry they could eat a horse.
Meanwhile, of course, the Pope resigned. That was news everywhere, and there were plenty of memes going round Facebook about how he was giving up the papacy for Lent and how the Queen thought he was a big ol’ wuss for throwing in the towel. The Irish meme brigade were out in force with
from
Father Ted
; because when you’ve a national cultural icon that’s suddenly relevant (sort of) to global news, you photoshop the heck out of that.
| Source: http://gingerbrownies.com/ |
If you don’t know what Father Ted is, you haven’t been paying attention . Let’s just say it’s spawned more catchphrases for the Irish population than Friends , Seinfeld , and Frasier put together.
Last night, all over this great continent, some people were primping and priming themeselves and their wardrobes in preparation for today’s celebration of love. Others were scrambling to order flowers online or find a card at the second-last minute. But everyone I know was cursing their children’s classmates for their hard-to-spell names and their sheer numbers, and wrestling with printers or glue or tape or stickers, and wondering just how upset a class of three-, four-, five-, six-, or seven-year-olds would be if they didn’t get a Valentine’s card from every single other classmate.
Well, I’ll tell you this afternoon, becuase my two went in with nary a card to their names. (That means nothing.)
Last week, as I think I mentioned, I was delighted to find some cute pre-made Valentine’s cards in the local store. I got a pack of superhero ones for Dash, princess ones for Mabel. They, in turn, were also delighted, and sat down forthwith to write in the “To” and “From” names and seal them with a sticker. That was all they had to do. Crafts are for the birds, I thought. This is perfect.
They both got about halfway through their class lists. “That’s great,” I announced. We’ll do a few more each day and by next Thursday they’ll all be ready.”
“Not so fast,” said Fate to me.
The next day, Dash’s teacher sent home a note saying that everyone should bring in 24 blank envelopes and a packet of candy hearts on Thursday. The blank envelopes confused me for a while – should there be anything inside them? How would the cards get to the right people if their names weren’t on the outsides? Also, our cards didn’t come with envelopes. Also also, I try to minimize the candy, especially the no-redeeming-features sugar-and-Red-40 type candy. If everyone brings in a pack, there’s going to be a lot of candy in the classroom. (They plan to use them for math before eating them. So that makes it fine, right?)
A short consultation with Facebook enlighted me about the envelopes: what she meant was that the Valentines should have a sender’s name but no recipient’s name, for ease of distribution. Which makes it only almost, but not absolutely entirely, pointless. But Dash had done half the names already. Should he finish up the rest or not?
The decision was made by Dash deciding not to do any more, and not to bring any in. Mabel also fell off the wagon and gave up on her cards, so this morning I said:
“Right, are either of you bringing in Valentines today?”
“No,” they chorused cheerfully.
“Okay then.”
I did not say “Well, how will you feel if you’re the only child who doesn’t give cards in your class?” For one thing, the four-year-olds won’t notice. For another, the six-year-olds probably won’t either. And for the most part, I don’t like being held hostage by Hallmark, the craft industry, the school, and some imaginary set of judgemental parents for yet another thing to think I should nag my children about if I want to be a good mother.
My children did not bring in any cards today. I’m fine with that. (But if I meet you I’ll probably apologise profusely, just to be on the safe side.)
I panicked at Target this morning.
So many of Target’s success stories probably start out that way. And by success stories I mean times they parted people from way more of their money than they went in intending to be parted from.
So I went in to get a pack of crayons for Dash (yes, we have eleventy million crayons in the house, but he needed a new pack for school, and taking some brand-new practically unused crayons out of our big box and putting them into a smaller box would not do, in spite of the fact that he and his sister scorn everything but markers at home but I digress) and maybe a couple of other school supplies his teacher said they were running short on (scissors; how do kids run out of scissors? What are they doing with them? Using them to cut up other pairs of scissors?) and some toothpaste because he won’t use the new “clean squeeze” tube I just got because it’s too minty, damnit, even though he likes mint, and then I thought maybe some new bathtub foam letters for Mabel to keep the grand universal scales of “you bought something for one child” level…
… and then I got to the Star Wars section of the toys and suddenly worried that Target would stop promoting Star Wars all of a sudden, because maybe something else is the next big thing and now that Disney has Star Wars (even though with JJ Abrams at the helm everyone knows that it’s going to be absolutely the thing to see, but maybe the 6-year-old set aren’t so well up on JJ Abrams’s oeuvre, not having watched all of Alias , probably) perhaps the cool kids won’t want lightsabers by April so I bought the damn Darth Maul red double-blade lightsaber that Dash has been begging for since some time last summer.
(I got into big, huge, trouble with him one night a few weeks ago when he suddenly remembered that he had thought he might get one for Christmas and then he didn’t, and I was the worst, cruelest mother on the planet (and probably also on Alderaan and Tatooine) for not giving him a double-blade for Christmas when I had promised I would (note: I hadn’t) and I should go out the very next morning and get him a double-blade to make up for it and when I wouldn’t agree that this was clearly the correct way for me to atone for my sins, he threw a long, long hissy that still gets revisited from time to time when he remembers to be very upset about the whole incident.)
So there, fine, now he’s getting his double-blade for his birthday (at the end of April; never say I don’t plan ahead), because you can’t just go out and buy people big presents when it’s not Christmas or birthday or the culmination of some long-worked-for sticker-chart extravaganza.
(In related news, Mabel is plotting how she can get another baby sooner than her November birthday. She asked me the other day if we could do another star chart for her using the toilet, since that worked so well the last time. I pointed out that she knew how to do that now, so no, that wouldn’t work. I wonder how I can leverage this desire of hers into some sort of necessary behaviour?)
But despite having the entire cave of wonders at my child-free-browsing disposal, I still didn’t manage to find anything nice or unexpected or quirky or even predictable to give my beloved husband on the occassion of tomorrow’s Annoying Hallmark Holiday. Looks like he’s getting two delightful children. Again.
Hey, this year they’re potty trained. It gets better.
