Monthly Archives: March 2014

Other children

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Last night I stood at the top of the stairs and identified with nobody so much as Mrs Doyle on the windowsill, because it seemed for a moment that the best way to get down would probably be just to launch myself skywards and hope for the best. Which is to say that my thighs are only slightly less painful today and I’ve given myself a rest day from exercise.

(Skip to 0.11 if you don’t see how this is relevant. I couldn’t find a shorter clip.)

I’m quite pathetic. You’d think I’d run a marathon at the weekend instead of done the teensiest bit of exercise. And of course my lovely husband who had actually run a 10K race on Saturday was being very kind and not taking the piss out of my situation at all. But lunges really are evil.

I am out of inspiration for writing other places so I’ve come back here to blather more personally for a while. Thank you for being the people who let me blather. It’s nice to have my own blathering space.

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I find other people’s seven-into-eight-year-old boys quite terrifying. They’re bigger than mine, they’re more sophisticated than mine, they know about Minecraft and pop music and a lot more swear words than mine does, and they seem inclined to do all sorts of dangerous things. (I know you’re thinking mine knows the swear words and just isn’t telling me, but I’m pretty certain he doesn’t. We’ve talked about it.) In comparison, I tend to think that mine is really remarkably sensible and at least listens when I tell him something’s dangerous.

Maybe other people’s children are always unnerving when you’re used to your own. It’s nice, really, because it makes you appreciate what you’ve got when they go home. I can think, “Well, he won’t eat dinner, but at least he likes my cookies.” Or whatever.

It being now just about April, it’s time to think about his birthday party. He wants to go to laser tag, which he’s done just once before. I think rather than a whole (expensive) birthday party at the laser tag place, we’re going to let him take two friends to laser tag and then have a party separately at home, so he can invite whoever all his best friends are and I don’t have to worry about numbers and no-shows and RSVPs and transporting cakes and children and … and all I have to worry about is feeding and entertaining an unknown number of scary eight-year-old boys in my own home… how hard can it be?

Don’t answer that.

Entertainment value

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I lost the run of myself entirely yesterday and started the 30-day shred again. I was so achy this morning after it that I misguidedly decided the best thing to do to loosen up my poor muscles was to keep at it. Now I can barely sit down, stand up, or go up or down the stairs, so it didn’t exactly work the way I’d hoped. I think that’s how they reel you in, and then you’ve a few days under your belt by the time it stops hurting and you think you can’t stop now. So maybe I’ll keep it up for a few more days.

Makes a change from the sore back anyway, and I’ve officially graduated from the chiropractor, so my mornings have freed up again. (Fine, it was only half an hour twice a week and it’s right beside the supermarket anyway, but it felt like it was the impediment to any exercise.)

That’s not what I was going to say.

It’s been raining steadily all day, except for when it turned to sleet. In the afternoon we half-heartedly offered to take the kids to the new Muppets movie, but as predicted they decided it would be more fun to stay in their pyjamas and play with a large cardboard box. (Otherwise known as “Stunt Box”. It has its own theme tune.)

So I went to Target instead, which was very relaxing except for when it was oddly difficult to get into the car (see above re muscles) and I had to sort of lean over it and then fall in the right direction with a little squeak. I hope nobody was watching.

And, even though it’s nobody’s birthday and certainly not Christmas, B suggested that I pick up Frozen on DVD, now that it’s out. Tis far from such profligacy I was raised, I’ll tell you, but I felt it would be churlish not to, seeing as how it would solve the perennial DVD selection problem for another week. And because secretly (or not so much) we’re all dying to watch it again.

When I got home (with, in addition to the DVD, a maxi dress for summer, some shoes for Mabel, some plastic tubs for yet more storage solutions because I am married to a man who believes all storage can be solutioned, and sundry groceries) nothing had changed on Walton Mountain. By which I mean the kids were still watching TV, jumping on a box, surrounded by soft-toy chaos, and in their pyjamas. I thought I should at least leverage the situation.

“I have a treat for you, but you have to get dressed and go out and get some fresh air before you can get it,” I announced. I really didn’t think it would work, but their respective imaginations went into overdrive wondering what amazing chocolate/iPad/toy I might have picked up in Target, and they sped upstairs. Mabel came down first, put on boots and raincoat, and dutifully went out into the “wintry mix” (which is what they call horrible rain that can’t decide whether it’s snow or sleet or what). She zigzagged down the driveway, walked in ever-decreasing circles for about three minutes, and came back in. Dash went outside after her, counted to 28, and was done.

Since B and I hadn’t even set foot outside while they got their “fresh air,” we couldn’t really demand any more than that. We produced the DVD (Mabel was delighted and Dash was a little resentful that it wasn’t a more him-appropriate treat, but he got over it) and we all very much enjoyed the movie for the third/fourth time.

Light relief

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When I took this photo I thought Mabel was looking adorably Alice-in-Wonderland-ish and studious in the hairband and her almost-matching “party” dress, reading a book so seriously.

Mabel reads a book

Then I looked at it again and it seemed a little, well, ghoulish. Especially since that’s the First-Aid manual she’s perusing so carefully, finding out exactly what it looks like when a broken bone pierces the skin, for instance.

So if they’re remaking The Addams Family any time soon, I think I’ve found the new Wednesday.

The trouble with writing parenting articles

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The thing about writing serious parenting posts is that nobody really wants to read them. You might happen to catch someone just there at the point where they’re either pregnant and reading everything they can get their hands on, or going through exactly that problem and wanting to learn about it. But mostly people just want to read things that support what they’re already doing. Nobody wants to read an article slapping them on the wrist about the way they’re parenting badly. They’ll just click away. They want to be validated. They want to be told that the kid is like this because they’re a kid, that’s all. And that they’re doing the right thing. And possibly that they should trust their instincts, because that’s the same as saying “You were right all along.”

I know this is true because it’s how I approach articles. I read them if they appear, by the headline, to be confirming what I already believe. If they fall into the category of “other”, I might skim them in order to see if I can ridicule them, but I’m more likely to just ignore. I don’t want you to tell me all the things I’m doing wrong. I probably know about them already anyway, and I don’t surf the internet because I’m not feeling guilty enough already.

In fact, the longer I go on reading parenting articles the more likely I am not to bother reading any new ones at all, because I know what they’re going to say. Even if I write them myself (my favourite kind, of course, because I agree with every word), it’s all getting pretty boring and samey at this stage of the game. So unless you have genuinely come up with a new angle that I haven’t thought of yet – and can convey that to me before I decide not to bother reading your piece – I’m probably not going to bother.

If you’re funny, mind you, I might stick around. If you have nice pictures, you might reel me in. If you make pop culture references that I understand but are just niche enough for me to know not everyone will, you will make me feel smart, and I will listen more closely to what you have to say, because you think I’m smart.

So I’m unlikely to change anyone’s mind with anything I write. My bubble of Internet is one big circle of self-validating parents, high-fiving each other for our good choices and making in-jokes about Republicans/Gina Ford/people who don’t watch Doctor Who.

Converting others, then, is a lost cause. We may as well all just flex our tolerance muscles and stick to entertaining each other as best we can.

Super(non)taster

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The good news is that dinners at the table continue to go swimmingly. I’ve been “forgetting” about the star charts for ages now, and everyone still shows up in their seat at 6.00. Thanks to the light in the kitchen going kablooey and needing a call to the electrician to replace, we’re even eating in the dining room, which adds to the formality of the occasion and makes it more of A Thing. Which is nice.

The bad news is that Dash has taken agin his peanut-butter sandwiches somewhat, in the last couple of days.

If you’re new around here, you won’t know about Dash and his food issues. He has Food Issues. He takes picky eater to new heights. Which is really what I want to talk about, but let me preface it by asking you not to send me to Ellyn Satter or It’s not about nutrition or any of those other great resources out there for helping you get your child to eat. Chances are I’ve already seen it. I’m also over and done with blaming myself for starting him out the wrong way by giving him solids too early or too late or too mushy or too whole or too much grains or too much fruit or all the other things you might suspect. It’s not my fault. It’s the way he’s built. (I know this because my second child is a perfectly normal picky eater and I did much the same with her.)

Anyway, with that said, I will skip over all of Before and get us to Now. If you want to read about Before, search for posts tagged “Eating.”

A while ago someone told me about supertasters and I got all excited, because I thought maybe Dash was one, and that that would explain everything. Supertasters basically taste at a higher level than the rest of us, so regular tastes seem far too strong for them. It’s not a medical diagnosis or anything, but I thought it would be nice to have a label for him that would help other people get that we’re not just letting him eat ice cream all day because he doesn’t like his veggies. (We’re not.)

Then I reconsidered, because when he tastes pasta he spits it out and complains that it’s “too plain.” I didn’t see how I could reconcile that with being a supertaster. First things are too strong, then they’re too bland. Was he just being stubborn for the sake of it? Because he really wanted to subsist on nothing but peanut-butter sandwiches for ever?

Then I heard from someone whose son is a grownup supertaster that he said bland foods can also taste terrible, just in a different way. She said he would never eat rice or pasta. BINGO! I thought. I read some more about it today and a lot of things rang bells: not liking carbonated drinks, finding orange juice horribly bitter, running a mile from broccoli and kale… (okay, so he’s not the only child to do that). There was a test you can do with food colouring and a hole punched in a piece of paper. You’re meant to count how many little bumps on the tongue you can see through the hole. If you have 35 or more, you’re a supertaster.

I borrowed a tiny vial of blue food colouring and we were quite excited to do the experiment. I wasn’t quite sure about Dash’s result, so I did it on myself as well. By my count, we both come out as “non-tasters”, he slightly moreso than I. But I couldn’t see how anyone could possibly fit 35 or more papillae in that tiny space. And since I’m pretty confident that I taste quite well, thank you, I wonder if we did it wrong. (B has offered himself as a third guinea pig. I will let you know how that turns out.)

So maybe that theory has been exploded too. It was nice while it lasted. Apart from the general coolness factor of being a super-anything, it would have explained a lot that I find it hard to explain to people otherwise.

I suppose he’s still super-picky, but that doesn’t quite have the same ring to it.

That one time he almost tasted some pizza.

Words beget words

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You know, here’s the thing: there are always more words.

I used to be afraid I’d use up all my words and there would be nothing left when it came time to write my magnum opus. That the infinite number of monkeys with the typewriters would have said it all first. That there must be a limit to the permutations and combinations, and that all mine would be used up too soon. I felt I needed to mete it out, gingerly.

(I once worked in a department of editors, who are funny, intelligent, witty people who happen to enjoy a good hyphenation discussion just as much as the next oddly obsessive person. One of them proposed that when we get a new recruit we hand them a page covered with punctuation marks and tell them that was their quota of commas and full stops for the month.)

But words beget words. If you run out of words, you go for a walk and you read a good book and you stop trying, and the words replenish themselves. They’re all there and they keep coming, and even if there are only seven stories in the world and however many possible combinations of the eight notes in the scale, people keep telling new stories and people keep writing new songs and our well of invention is deep and infinite.

There are also plenty of commas, if you need commas.

Where I am

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Something interesting is happening.

You may have noticed, maybe, if you keep tabs on me, but probably you don’t, that I’ve been posting less here lately. I was posting almost daily there for a while, filling this little space with words and words and words as if I’d explode with them. And then, poof! Not so much.

But you might know, or maybe you don’t, that it’s because at the moment I’m writing a lot for Parent.ie . If you flip over to there on any given day you’ll probably find something from me, and some other things from some other great and hilarious and thought-provoking and well-informed writers. (When I say “other” there, I’m not including myself in all those adjectives. I am just sometimes faintly some of those things.)

I’m pretty sure that in a while things will re-balance, and I won’t have quite so much stuff streaming out of me and onto the screen over there, and then I’ll probably come back here a bit more often again. For the moment, I’m going with it and really enjoying the new platform and the new challenge and the different angle.

The interesting thing is that something has flipped and I am thinking of myself more as a writer. It’s given me a legitimacy, maybe, in my own mind, that a personal blog just didn’t. And I’m hoping that the re-balancing will include my writing more of the other things I’m theoretically working on. Because that’s what writers do, and I’m one of those.

Playing tourist

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Saturday’s lovely weather inspired me – me, the effort-averse home-lover – to suggest we go downtown. B, of course, was all for it. (He loves effort and has no problem with taking on a day-trip that may be doomed to failure from the start.) But the gods were smiling upon us and on the whole, the outing was pretty disaster free.

We hadn’t been to the monuments for quite a long time, because they’re unaccountably far from the metro stations (in relative terms, when you’d like there to be a metro station every two blocks in every direction as in Manhattan, I mean). But we girded our loins and tried to stop the kids from climbing every tree they passed and got down to the Tidal Basin without too much ado.

Looking for a good tree.

All the trees here will burst into beautiful cherry blossoms in another two weeks or so, and then the place will be thronged with tourists and we will avoid it like the plague. With great beauty comes great numbers of people with oversized cameras, as the saying goes. But yesterday there were just a modest number of people, and me with my little point-and-shoot, and we posed on rocks. And trees. And monuments.

Jefferson Memorial in the background.

Around the basin a little way we came to the Martin Luther King monument, which was erected nearly three years ago and I had never actually seen. (We clearly need more visitors. I can’t believe it’s been that long.) It’s large, white, and impressive. I really liked the low curving marble wall leading up to it, riverlike. Mabel liked sliding down it, slidelike.

Mabel sitting on MLK's name carved in a wall

B started to tell them the history of civil rights in America starting with slavery. It went on for a while. Dash managed not to ask me if I’d been alive when there were slaves, so I’m giving him bonus child points for that.

Part of the MLK monument

We continued back across the road towards Lincoln, stopping for a break and a sandwich under a tree. There were plenty of people at Lincoln, and Mabel had stopped wanting to pose for me, but she did look as if she was listening while B read the Gettysburg Address out to them.

Good audience

Then, looking for an elusive bathroom because Dash had suddenly come over all OCD and claimed he couldn’t eat his sandwich without washing his hands, we ended up walking all the way back up Constitution Avenue and going into the Natural History Museum, where he had his sandwich and an Incredibly Expensive Cupcake. (The Smithsonian museums are all free, which is wonderful; but they recoup their costs by charging the earth for the food, and I shouldn’t resent that but I do.)

On the way we found Einstein, who also gets a memorial. Obligatory physicist posing ensued.

A giant among scientists. Har har.

There were Irish flags along with the Stars and Stripes all along the street, for the weekend that’s in it, I suppose.

There’s also a red and white striped flag in the middle which is the DC flag, but you can barely see it here.

The whole area near the museums and the White House features curbside vans selling sweaters, hats, scarves, tourist kitch, hot dogs, and ice cream. The kids know that these vans have ice cream, and Mabel, pretty tired after all that walking, began a sustained campaign for an ice cream once we left Einstein behind. I refused, because Dash couldn’t have an ice cream till he’d eaten his sandwich, and he had to (apparently, not my rule, I’m not that hygienic) wash his hands first, and I am not such an idiot that I would buy an ice cream for just one child. Also, I hate those vans on principle because they cause my children to have tantrums, so I don’t want to buy anything from them. (There may be some circular logic at work here.)

A piggyback did wonders for her mood, and the tears stopped until we got into the museum, where the security guard not unreasonably told us that we’d have to leave Mabel’s stick outside. She had, of course found the Best Stick Ever along the way. There were wails and despair and scenes of torture as we wrenched the stick from her little hands and B went back outside to hide it. I’m sure the guard went home and regaled his family with tales of the fearsome stick he saved the museum from.

Mabel with her stick in front of the statue of Lincoln

The stick in question, which was much more interesting than Lincoln.

But we retrieved it safely on the way out, so all ended well. And so back to the Metro and home via some ethical burgers and frozen yogurt . All in all, the sort of Saturday that should qualify me to do nothing at all on Sunday.

The sporty one

Just us, then?

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The sun came out this weekend and I shaved my legs. It was quite an event. I may need a new razor. That’s all I have to say about that.

I bought a gallon of milk at Target yesterday morning, and forgot to take it inside. It sat in the trunk/boot of the car until I glimpsed it as I took the kids to go skating about three hours later. We were already at the rink, so I said “Never mind, I’m sure it’s spoiled already. I’ll just get more milk.” By the time we got home (after a stop off at McDonald’s for ice-cream sundaes, which are apparently what you need after skating) I was too lazy to buy more, so I just put it in the fridge anyway. When I tasted it, it was fine. So does American milk never go off, or are we all going to die a slow and horrible death?

About to make dinner, I discovered that we needed an onion, so I ran out of the house ten minutes before the supermarket closed and bought an onion, a jar of sesame seeds, and some naan bread. I did not buy milk. I am living on the edge, people.

The rear-view mirror in our car falls down every time there are extremes of temperature. This means we spend all summer gluing it back up, and now, apparently, all winter too. You would think someone would have come up with a better design. The glue says not to use it when the temperature is below freezing, so we haven’t even tried lately. I’m very good at using my wing mirrors, but it occurs to me that it’s possibly illegal to drive without a functioning rear-view mirror. The last time it fell down it landed on the gearstick and shattered itself, too, so we now need a whole new mirror. Does this happen to anyone else, or is it just us?

Awfully Chipper

Optimists think they have more fun

Monthly Archives: March 2014

Other children

Entertainment value

Light relief

The trouble with writing parenting articles

Super(non)taster

Words beget words

Where I am

Playing tourist

The sporty one

Just us, then?