Category Archives: anecdotes

Frozen, the art project

4 Replies

Mabel might have possibly inherited some artistic talent from her grandfather, or something. I mean, it’s hard to tell, because she’s a typical little girl who likes colouring and drawing, and who has much better fine motor skills than her brother before her – though he has his moments , but mostly at this age he favoured bold sweeping gestures in black. But she goes through phases of producing masses of artwork, and even though I should make her use the scrap paper I tend to turn a blind eye when she nips down to the basement and steals some “clear paper” from beside the printer, because hey, it’s not TV.

Mabel drawing

Prolific

Yesterday she created a narrative tale of Frozen , including never before seen scenes such as “Anna in Her Mummy’s Tummy” and “Elsa Wants Anna’s Ice-Cream.” I had to record them for posterity. Also because her figures, at the moment, bear an uncanny and delightful resemblance to Hyperbole and a Half ‘s people.

Child's drawings

The Early Years

We can move swiftly through the first set of four. “Before the Fall”, if you like. From top left, we see Elsa as a baby, with Anna still in utero (plenty of room for growth there). Next we have Elsa aged three years with new baby Anna (11 weeks exactly, I’m told). Then we have Elsa alone in bed, and finally a happy portrait of the young sisters.

Child's drawings

Sad Elsa, twice

Things start to change. Anna gets an ice-cream cone but Elsa has none, hence her sadface. Later on, Elsa and Anna are on different sides of a door… foreshadowing…?

Child's drawing

The Fall

The piéce de resistance. The central scene of young Elsa and Anna’s life, with Anna (in pigtails) unconscious at Elsa’s knees between piles of magic snow. Their parents rush in through the big double doors and their father’s mouth makes a giant “O” of horror

Child's drawing

Elsa’s coronation

Things have changed in the palace. The girls grew up and got fancy updos, but Elsa’s still sad and Anna’s still happy. Note the golden orb and sceptre (one each). Also, Elsa is made of zigzaggy lines because she’s trembling with fear at this pivotal moment.

What will happen next? Will we be treated to scenes of Kristof or Hans? I don’t think Mabel’s so interested in the boys. Maybe a reindeer and a snowman. I’ll keep you posted.

Non-native

7 Replies

My poor American children do suffer somewhat from having parents who don’t quite speak the vernacular.

It’s rare that I encounter a word these days that I really just can’t find the American equivalent for, but I was pulled up short this afternoon when I found Mabel denuding the toilet roll of its paper in the bathroom halfway through a playdate.

“Stop messing,” I told her, exasperated.
“Is she making a mess?” her little friend asked me.
“No, she’s just … messing.”

I really couldn’t come up with the right word for what Irish people call messing. Messing about? Being mischievous? Up to no good? Cruisin’ for a bruisin’? No, I’m back to Dublinese there. In any given class at school there are the messers – everyone knows who they are and what it means. They’re not bad (or “bold”, for that matter); they’re just … exuberant.

“You speak English with an accident,” her friend told me.

That about covers it.

 

Surprises

4 Replies

Sometimes your children surprise you.

Fine, we all know that. The “I thought you were past the biting phase” surprise, the “Hasn’t unrolling the toilet paper lost its thrill yet?” surprise, the “I swear you know to look both ways” surprise.

But sometimes, I mean, they surprise you in a good way.

The other night Dash lingered over his homework, as usual, choosing to watch TV before dinner and not get down to working till after dinner, as usual, and was angry when it was 7.30 by the time he was finished and I said there was no time for playing outside. All the other kids had gone in and it was getting dark. He went out anyway, followed, of course, by his sister.

He had put on his helmet, because he’s very responsible, and was riding his scooter. As he hadn’t had any outdoor time at all, and the weather was nice, and we’re still getting used to this daylight after dinnertime concept, and – crucially – I was doing bedtime alone, I let it go and said they could have five minutes.

Five stretched to fifteen and it was definitely getting dark. I tried shouting a bit, but nobody ever hears my shouts. Apparently I have a very soft voice. It doesn’t help lend me any sort of air of authority. After a few minutes Mabel agreed to call it a day, but Dash was still whizzing by me infuriatingly. I took Mabel inside, calculating that one out of two was a win and he’d probably come in soon.

He did. I tried to impress upon him, again, as usual, that while I want him to have outside time and I want him to play and I like when he gets fresh air, he also has to do his homework and has to do his reading, and the time for playing needs to come out of TV time rather than work time.

The surprising thing was that he listened. I could see him thinking about it. He came back to me a little later and got me to clarify what I’d said to make sure he understood it. Then he announced that he was going to get dressed early in the morning so he could play outside before school, and that he was going to do his homework as soon as he gets home instead of watching TV so he could play after that, when the other kids are out and before it gets dark.

For the last two days, that’s what he’s done.

I’m under no illusions that this will last forever. But it was a quicker turnaround of disobedience > talk > understanding > good action than I’ve ever seen before. It’s as if it’s a sign of maturity or something.

 

 

Entertainment value

4 Replies

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.

 

Proudly nerd parenting

3 Replies

I was going to write a long and edifying post on the trip to the art gallery we took this afternoon, but then I decided that the salient points were neither the wonderful free museums nor the exorbitant prices of the food in said museums nor even how the children did not express a newfound love and appreciation for art, but simply the following two episodes.

I took Mabel into the bathroom and had a proud moment as she remarked, in her clear piercing voice as I hung out in the two square inches available in her stall, “Mummy, it’s hard to decide who the main character in Star Wars is.” Then we discussed whether a baddie could be the main character, how there aren’t often girls as main characters, and how (and whether) both Anna and Elsa could count as main characters in Frozen . If you have to have a long conversation with your pre-schooler in a public bathroom, all this rates a lot higher than a repeated chorus of “Have you finished?” “ Now have you finished?”

But my nerdly pride was not yet satiated.

After a quickish look at the French Impressionists and some other British and American artists (not too bad considering we mostly let the kids direct what we looked at and how long for), it was time for lunch. After sustenance we were planning to go on to the modern-art side of the museum (though it turned out to be mostly all closed, so we didn’t) and I was trying to explain how this would be different and, you know, interesting.

“After a while artists stopped trying to paint what looked real and started painting other things,” I said. “So you could look at a picture and say what you think it looks like, but there’s no one right answer.”

“Oh!” said Dash, not quite getting the point, but ready to apply it to something he had heard about recently from his father. “Like that thing in Star Trek when there was a test the captain couldn’t get right because there was no right way to do it?”

Now, your nerd quotient might not be high enough to recognize this as a description of the test in Star Trek II ( The Wrath of Khan ) called Kobayashi Maru , but I’ve been acquainted with my husband long enough to know exactly what Dash was talking about, even though I couldn’t swear to you that I’ve seen the movie. (Not while awake, anyway.) But I pretty much brimmed over with vicarious pride (B had gone to the bathroom when this happened, so he couldn’t do it himself) in my well-schooled little nerdling.

I like to think we’re just keeping that whole discovery-of-art thing  fresh for them  so they can impress the opposite sex with their sophisticated prints of Dali and Klimt on their college dorm walls. Whereas knowledge of the Star Wars and - Trek universes will stand to them much earlier.

IMG_7499

Back issues

9 Replies

Sometimes, like when I decided to move the blog – sorry about any broken links, by the way; still working on figuring out the redirects – I take action remarkably swiftly. Other times, not so much.

For instance , she said ominously:

I’ve had a vaguely sore back for a while. I put it down to carrying a heavy toddler, and bending the wrong way, and having children jump on my back for the pure hilarity of my reaction whenever I happened to be crouched down doing something, and all those things that you do in life. I certainly didn’t have a car accident or fall off a horse or crunch someone in a rugby tackle. I kept assuming it would wear off after a while. It would come and go and some days I’d be gingerly loading the dishwasher sideways because I couldn’t bend straight forwards and others I’d be fine. Lately it had taken the form of a sore back that would appear after a few hours in bed, bug me enough to wake me up and make me painfully change position, and make me hobble like an 80-year-old getting up in the morning. But by midday or sooner it would have worn off and I’d put off doing anything about it. Again.

When I had my annual doctor’s appointment in October or so I had mentioned it to the doctor. She was supremely unhelpful and said I could find some exercises to do for that on the internet. I basically ended up thinking that I was 40 now and maybe that’s just how life is. Or that maybe we need to buy one of those nice squishy mattresses that you can rest your wineglass on without fear of spillage while a rhinocerous jumps on the other side.

At some point – actually, I know exactly when it was; it was when we went to Ithaca last July – we drove past a building that said “Acupuncture, Chiropractor” and I wondered why those two would go together. In my mind, a chiropractor was a special and important and very wonderful type of doctor who did something that was not clear to me, while acupuncture was sticking needles into you, which might somehow help but was definitely on the alternative side of the medicine scale.

This set off a long train of thought that buzzed away in the back of my mind over months and months. I began to notice that the two types of practice often went together, and that chiropractors were definitely also in the “alternative medicine” box, in this country at least. Maybe it’s different in Ireland, but I know my parents used to speak in hushed tones of the revered chiropractor. (My mum had had a bad back many years ago, and my dad had a badly broken leg in 1971 that has given him pain on and off ever since.) I always assumed the chiropractor was just as much a doctor as a surgeon or anyone else in St Vincent’s would be. Maybe he was.

So it gradually began to dawn on me that maybe I should take my back to a chiropractor. But if they’re alternative , then does insurance pay for it? And will they dupe me? Maybe they’ll pretend to fix it but actually only partway fix it so that I have to keep coming back.

Eventually, I asked my local Facebook friends if anyone could recommend a chiropractor in the area. They could – several mentioned the same one. I put that at the back of my mind, because Ireland, and Christmas, and everything else. Every night in bed as I winced and rolled over, I would resolve to make the call the next day; every morning I’d put it off because now I was fine, and it’s not so bad, and I have an irrational disinclination towards making phone calls.

Finally, in my fit of proactivity on Wednesday, I called up, and they took my insurance details just like any regular doctor’s office and gave me an appointment the very next day.

Of course, Mabel decided that Thursday morning was the time to throw a fit about going to school, or staying for lunch, or whatever she could sling at me, and I was working so hard at promising her that I’d consider thinking about letting her skip lunch the next day that I left the house without my wallet. So when I’d hurriedly peeled her off me and left her wailing at the feet of her teacher, I was not only consumed by parental stress and guilt but also had to rush home to pick up my stuff before trying to get to the optimistically scheduled 9:15 appointment.

I got there only a few minutes late, filled out all the forms in the world, had some interesting tingly electric massage thing, talked to the lovely man about my back – feeling a bit of a fraud since on the 1-10 scale of pain I hadn’t called it more than a 3 at its worst (but then, as a friend pointed out, once you’ve given birth without an epidural, the pain scale sort of shifts and it’s hard to tell what’s considered bad) – and he did some interesting maneouvers on my hips. (Phwoar.) He also took some x-rays, just to make sure there wasn’t anything funny going on with my bones, and told me to come back this morning to discuss the results.

I wasn’t convinced anything useful had happened, because nothing felt any different. And then in the middle of the night I roused a little and wondered at my lack of pain. I wasn’t feeling anything. I turned over with the greatest of ease and not a wince in sight, and went happily back to sleep. When I woke up I got out of bed like a 20-year-old and did not have to creep in an elderly manner to the bathroom as I usually do.

“I’m cured!” I announced, with jazz hands.

So I went back to tell him he was a miracle worker, and he showed me my x-rays, which demonstrate an odd lack of cartilage between the bottom two lumps (technical term) of my spine. Not none at all, just much less than there is between the other ones.

“So, it hurts because there’s actually something wrong?” I felt somehow both vindicated and utterly amazed. How strange that my body manifests a problem with pain. Huh.

So  now I have to go have an MRI next week to see if I have a bulging disc or a herniated disc or I have no idea what else it might be but I probably shouldn’t google it. Ever had an MRI? What should I expect?

And I suppose I should have gone and done something about this sooner, but on the other hand I’m glad I did it eventually instead of just believing that once you’re 40 your back starts to go and there’s nothing you can do except maybe buy a new mattress and yell at the kids to get off your lawn.

 

A little flight of fancy

6 Replies
My grandmother met George Bernard Shaw once. This is not how it happened, but this is what I imagined before I knew more of the story.
———————
The young woman with the thick chestnut hair wore a long skirt and a high-necked blouse with big sleeves. It may have been fastened at the neck with a cameo brooch.   She stood behind the long wooden counter of the bookshop, coming around the front from time to time to re-shelve a hardback or reorganize the display on the table. I don’t know what bookshops looked like then, so I may be taking some liberties here. There may have been a ladder on wheels attached to the shelves lining the walls, but perhaps her boss didn’t let her scale it. She was only 19 or 20, still unmarried. Perhaps she had already met her fiance, the handsome Tom Doran, also a Londoner of Irish descent.
She looked up as the bell on the door rang, smiling to see one of her regular customers enter. He was accompanied by a bearded gentleman who looked distinguished and carried a cane. It was raining; they were happy to come into the warm shop. Their heavy coats steamed a little and smelled of wet wool.
“Good afternoon, Mr Russell,” the shopgirl said. “Lovely weather for ducks.”
“Indeed, indeed, Miss Wall,” he replied. They were on second-name terms, though she wore no name badge. He was always happy to see her friendly smile and suspected she had a dry wit, though that was not an appropriate trait for a young lady to display.
“My friend, Mr Shaw, is looking for a particular volume,   Miss Wall. I wonder would you be able to assist him?”
“Yes, of course,” she replied, looking at Mr Shaw and wondering if she’d seen him before somewhere. His impressive beard seemed more and more familiar, now that he’d taken off his top hat and unwound his thick scarf in the warmth of the room.
Mr Shaw, with a cultured accent that had more than a hint of Irish to it, began to describe the book he needed; he wasn’t quite sure of the title, or the author, but had a definite feeling for the content and was almost certain the binding had been red. Miss Wall did her best, looking at her shelves and mentally cataloguing their contents until she had its probable location narrowed down to one particular section. She made a suggestion; it was shot down. She tried again. Mr Shaw paused, reflected, laughed a short “Hah!” and agreed. The binding was blue, but the contents were as he had remembered. He was grateful.
“Miss Wall, you will go far,” he announced.

The Star Wars connection

1 Reply

We went to the playground on what turned out to be the last day before the weather got properly cold. We had nowhere else to be and nothing else to do. It turns out that if you stay long enough at a playground, the children will find friends.

Dash was hogging the digger in the sand area. I hate those diggers – the little kids are desperate to have a turn, but once they finally get their little bums up in that coveted seat, they find that their arms are too short and their feet don’t reach the ground and they have no leverage to dig the sand, pivot, release. So they frustratedly have to return it to the big boys. I don’t know why nobody makes miniature ones for the poor two-year-olds.

A small four-year-old boy hovered in the background, and eventually Dash was persuaded to give him a turn. As I predicted, he didn’t last long before ceding it again, and I suggested that he help bank up the pile of sand from the ground instead. A few minutes later he was helping Mabel bury herself under a thin layer of fine, cold, fallen-leaf-riddled sand.

And then the three of them were off to the swings, and somehow Star Wars came up in conversation.

“I’m not so much interested in Star Wars,” said Mabel. “I like Ponies.”

Our new friend, the small four-year-old, turned out to have quite an extensive knowledge of Obi Wan and the others, and soon, in spite of their difference in ages and heights, he and Dash were firm friends. They all ran to the slides next. Mabel and Dash encouraged the friend to climb up the inside of the enormous tunnel slide.

I sat nearby, beside a very groomed mother, reminiscent of Annette Bening or Miranda from Sex and the City, and we laughed in unison as the dialogue floated down the tunnel and over to us. Mabel was encouraging the younger boy:

“Just a few more steps. You’re nearly there…” They were about a fifth of the way up the huge tunnel at this point, but she was lying through her teeth and he was gamely giving it his all. Then a kerfuffle and a wobble in the middle of the tunnel, and they all came down in a happy pile, like puppies.

“Let’s go back to the sand pit,” said Dash, employing the Irish vernacular.
“Where?”
“The sand pit, where we first met,” he clarified romantically.

Miranda and I were enchanted.
“You wore blue,” I said.
“All those years ago,” she reminisced.

And they were off again in the autumn sunshine.

Under a rock

8 Replies

Can we just talk about how far under a rock I have lived for the past several years? Because it’s a long way. The trouble with living under a rock is that you don’t know you’re there because if you knew about the popular culture things you’d missed, well, you wouldn’t have missed them. To put things in perspective, I still think Adele is new and trendy, and I’ve heard of Scissor Sisters but I don’t think I’ve ever heard them . It was sheer luck last year that I ever managed to know about Gangnam Style and Gotye and Call me maybe.

But still. There was the Miley Cyrus thing, which I heard about because it was all over my Twitter and my Facebook feeds, but I’d never heard of this other person in the striped suit that she was lap-dancing all over (much more briefly, in fact, when I finally watched the clip today, than it was made out to be by all the scandalized media outlets). And then I found out his name was Robin Thicke and that he used to go by the stagename Thicke, which I dunno maybe I’m old but that just sounds like a terrible name to me.

So I’d seen reference to his song, called Blurred Lines, which sounded to me like something ponderous and worthy like Tubular Bells (not that I’ve heard that either, to my knowledge, but it’s all instrumental, right? Not right?). And I saw the lyrics to it somewhere and it was all terribly misogynistic and horrible and not something any right-minded feminist could condone.

Then a couple of days ago in the car, completely unrelatedly, I happened to swing by a radio station that was neither Classic Rock nor Classical NPR, and I heard an eminently summery catchy tune. I tried to remember the words so I could maybe find it again, but they seemed to be something awfully generic about a “good day” and “having fun” or whatever. I was afraid I’d never manage to remember, and, as predicted, by the time I was home I had no idea what I’d heard.

You can see where this is going. On a whim this afternoon I put “Blurred Lines” into You Tube and discovered that the nasty lyrics and the catchy tune went together like carrots and peas. And then I watched the video and was duly apalled by all those women cavorting in flesh-toned dental floss without a single underwire between the lot of them, while Mr Thicke remained fully clad, letting us know exactly what he thinks a good girl does. Gross. I feel yucky.

The thing is, if you watch the Jimmy Fallon version, the lyrics aren’t nearly so egregious. Could we all just agree to do that, and maybe Thicko (as he’d be known in Dublin) will learn the error of his ways?

Ancient history

7 Replies

I like Connie Willis. If you’ve never heard of Connie Willis, well, you’re just like the guy in my local bookshop, except that you probably don’t work in a bookshop so the fact that she’s a really great and popular and quite prolific fantasy writer is not a travesty. But he , he was a travesty. I don’t know why Books-A-Million is still alive when all the Borders Books in the area have closed down.

Anyway. This is a very long lead-in to what will probably turn out to no longer be a remotely funny anecdote when I finally get around to it. And I’m not there yet, you’ll have to wait.

I don’t get in a lot of reading these days, and when I do it goes in fits and starts. It’s usually an author I know and love, because I don’t have the patience right now to try out books that might be anything less than great. I’ll happily re-read old favourites rather than attempt something new – hence the total revisiting of Harriet Vane and Peter Wimsey’s relationship earlier this year. But I discovered that Connie Willis had written a new* book – in fact, two – and put them on my birthday list. B gave me Blackout for my birthday, and I saved it to read on the way to BlogHer. I finished it last week and discovered that it’s not so much the first in a series of two, as half a story, the other half of which is another whole (even fatter) book called All Clear . So of course I had to get my hands on All Clear ASAP, without even waiting for Amazon.

This is why we ended up visiting two bookshops in two days, and why Dash ended up getting two new books in two days, even though there’s a perfectly lovely library with plenty of reading matter right there in our town. (Mabel also got one new book.) The first bookshop didn’t have any Connie Willis at all (see above), but Dash still had to get something, and he chose a National Geographic Kids book on tigers. The next day in a much better-stocked Barnes & Noble, he picked up a National Geographic Kids book on Martin Luther King and was all excited, so who was I to deny my son the reluctant reader such an educational item?

[Here, just to keep up the thrilling suspense (ahem), let me mention how great those National Geographic Kids books are. Dash is a bright, curious kid with a great vocabulary, but his reading level is not high. So trying to keep him engaged with a book that's easy enough for him not to stumble over every word is often a struggle, because so many of the first readers are insultingly simple. He likes the "I Can Read" superhero books, and they are at a good (easy) level for him, but he also has a selection of the National Geographic ones, and those are what he looks for now in the bookstore.

National Geographic Kids titles ]

Oh God, now I’ve built it up so much that I’m afraid to tell my piddly little story.

Anyway.

Schoolkids in America know all about Martin Luther King. The Civil Rights Movement is heavily featured in kindergarten, if not before. Even the nursery-school attendees know about him, thanks to Martin Luther King day in January every year. As an Irish schoolchild, I did not have Martin Luther King anywhere on my radar, but I must have heard his name somewhere along the line.

So at the start of secondary school (seventh grade) our history teacher began by looking at the pictures on the front cover of our textbook, Renaissance and Reformation, I think it was called, and asking if anyone knew what was depicted. Looking at a drawing of an oldy-timey man with long hair hammering a scroll to a wooden door, something I had seen or read elsewhere came back to me, and I tentatively raised my hand.

“Yes, Maud?”
I was diffident but smug: “Is it Martin Luther… King?”

As I said the first two words, it had occurred to me that there was often another one appended. Adding the “King” was an afterthought, really. I thought it would make me sound even cleverer.

Sadly, one word makes all the difference. My teacher went from admiration to amusement in the space of that single syllable. (Though really, she should have been doubly impressed: I knew two historical people, after all, even if I didn’t realise it myself.)

This morning I was recounting the story to B, who somehow had never heard it before. Dash wanted to know as well. “You knew about Martin Luther King too ?” he asked, incredulous.

Whereupon B had to get all smartypants: “Martin Luther King TWO? There’s a sequel? ‘He’s back and he’s mad .’”

*New as in three years ago, apparently.