Category Archives: lists

Strengthening exercises

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Step 1: Tell the chiropractor that yes, you do (probably, still,) have an exercise ball because you used it when you were pregnant (and in labor, for that matter). He is impressed, and gives you a sheet of exercises that you can do using it.

Step 2: Come home and find the exercise ball, deflated, in its original box, pretty much exactly where you thought it would be in the basement. Since you moved house 1.5 years after the last time you used it, this is quite an achievement.

Step 3: Find a pump and the plug right there in the box along with the deflated ball.

Step 4: Let the five-year-old help you inflate the ball.

Step 5: Watch the  five-year-old bounce the ball around until you can finally use it for its intended purpose, briefly.

Step 6: Pick up the second-grader from school. Have the five-year-old refuse to go to dance class even though it’s dance class day and in spite of your best efforts, bringing her all the way there and making her tell the teacher herself that she’s not coming to class today.

Step 7: Suggest that the seven-year-old do his homework straight away when you get home, just as he would have done in the library while his sister was at dance class. He will agree, but he won’t mean it, and as soon as he comes in the door it will be mayhem times two with the exercise ball until you banish it to the basement, amid wails and gnashing of teeth.

Step 8: Wonder when next you’ll bother your arse to get it back upstairs and do your exercises.

Maybe it’s my resolve that needs strengthening, just as much as my back muscles.

Exercise ball in basement

Glass containing some proportion of liquid

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All the things I have not done that were on my to-do list for January:

  • Made the children write thank-you notes for Christmas [hangs head in shame; no excuse for that]
  • Booked the summer holiday. [Was just about to do this last night when Mabel wet the bed and all the information I had just entered and selections I had made timed out. Then when I tried again the flights had disappeared. I gave it up as a bad job and will try again tonight.]
  • Contacted my so-called contracting job to see if they might ever again need my services, for money, that they would pay me, that I could use to go to the hairdresser, for instance. Or pay for expensive summer holidays.
  • Planned dinners, preferring to continue to fly by the seat of my pants and make a lot of something-with-pasta.
  • Made muffins, because I need to do that today.

Things I have, however, managed to do, so it’s not all bad, you know:

  • Gone to the chiropractor, which is an ongoing adventure but I’m glad to have started it because I do officially have a bulging disc and it’s good to know about that so that some day when I accidentally bend sideways to pick up a dropped pencil and it suddenly agonizingly herniates, I’ll know what’s going on. Now do I have exercises which will “take the pressure off my spine.” Which is not all that reassuring when you wonder where else you can lean the rest of your body if not on your spine. And it’s nice, you know, when they tell you that it’s great because it’s not your whole spine. Just one little bit of it. So yay.
  • Acquired an audition for Listen To Your Mother, as promised, which was very easy to do once I knew it was a thing, because I wrote my piece and then when they said auditions would be happening I just sent an e-mail and they gave me a timeslot. So that will be this Saturday and I will tell you all about it afterwards so that if you do it you can be forearmed. (But not four-armed.)
  • Got anything done at all, such as keeping milk and cereal and toilet paper in the house, considering all the snow days and polar-vortex days and two-hour delays we’ve been running up against for the past few weeks.
  • Continued to make a renewed effort to, if not exactly prioritize, at least not let fall entirely by the wayside, writing that is not on my blog. By which I mean I have done a little of it and there are more words on the page than there were before. Chipping away at all that white space, I am, sentence by sentence.
  • Oh, and I did do that moving to WordPress thing I had planned for. And my stats are looking more realistic and yet not totally non-existent, so I suppose that’s good too.

 

Snow way snow how

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Time for a bullet post to clear my head of the thoughts jumbling up in here.

  • Snow. We have it. Also coldness. Coldth. It is very. Tomorrow it will be less so and we are fervently hoping that there will be school. Also my MRI is tomorrow morning and I already rescheduled it once.
  • My favourite warm fuzzy brown cardigan that I like to wear around the house disappeared at new year’s. Three weeks later to the day I found it exactly where it should have been (maybe a little further over) in the closet. I think this is indicative of nothing except how rarely I actually hang things up where they belong.
  • Sometimes your seven-year-old isn’t just shouting random math questions out the bathroom door at bedtime, he’s actually trying to calculate how many inches long the roll of toilet paper is. For which you must give him some sort of credit.
  • When you tell that same seven-year-old to put on his swim shorts under his regular clothes while getting dressed, remember to check that he did so before you drive in the snow to the pool, because otherwise you’ll have to drive back home again to get them because he will swear that you never said any such thing.
  • If by any chance you’ve forgotten any of the words to Do You Want To Build a Snowman? from the Frozen soundtrack, I have a five-year-old here who will knock on a door/wall/window and sing it all, in a different voice for each verse as Anna gets older, wearing a specially selected dress, sitting down with her back to said door/wall/window with her legs out exactly as happens in the movie. So that’s comforting to know.
  • Also, if you’ve forgotten the names of the fifty states of the USA, in alphabetical order, I have someone here who can sing them for you, many many times, so long as you don’t mind some tunelessness to go with the belting out and the particularly dramatically drawn out last line.
  • Finally, if you have any aspirin I’d be obliged.

 

This entry was posted in lists , random thoughts and tagged Frozen , Snow on by .

Weather permitting

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It’s clearly unfair that in America the concept of the snow day – when work or school is cancelled because of too much snow for your particular part of the country to handle – even exists. Ireland needs some days. I came up with a few you might like to try using on the establishment.

  • Rain days, for when the rain was pelting so hard against the window all night that you couldn’t get a wink of sleep.
  • Wind days, for when the wind is blowing your front door shut so you can’t leave the house.
  • Sheep days, for when the wind and rain are blowing the sheep sideways across the roads, causing a traffic hazard.
  • Mist days, for when you can’t see as far as the car in your driveway, let alone a bus stop. It would clearly be dangerous to venture out looking for it.
  • Radiance days, for when you’re blinded as soon as you go out by a strange shining orb in the sky. You’d better go straight back inside and take it easy in a darkened room.
  • Temperate days, for when it’s much too nice to go to school and you just have to play hooky.

Let me know how you get on with that.

Snow, trees, cars, houses

Life skills

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It’s never too early to teach your children some vital life skills:

  • Putting on your own socks.
  • Zipping up your own coat.
  • Getting each little finger into the right part of the glove.
  • Getting a tissue and blowing your own nose.
  • Throwing the tissue away instead of handing it to your mother.
  • Procuring your own bowl and spoon.
  • Opening the freezer and taking out the ice cream.
  • Pouring from the gallon jug of milk without spilling any.
  • Finding the chocolate powder in its secret hiding place.
  • Standing on a chair to undo the bolt at the top of the basement door.
  • Snaffling a piece of brand-new paper from the ream beside the printer in the basement because nobody likes using the scrap paper that’s only blank on one side.
  • Finding the TV remote on the high shelf and knowing the number for the kids’ channel.
  • Hiding the TV remote down the side of the sofa so that the rest of the family is held hostage to your whims.
  • Making sure your sibling is left in no doubt about the time you got a treat and they didn’t.
  • Checking the mailbox outside the front door; sorting real mail from junk mail.
  • Locking your big brother out of the house, with hilarious results.

On second thoughts, I’m not sure I taught them any of these things.

So, benign neglect for the win, then.

Right?

Mabel putting on her own shoes

Round trip to Melodrama Central

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Things Mabel had a meltdown about this morning:

  • 7am: I wouldn’t go downstairs with her. Daddy was already downstairs. I wanted to stay in bed for five more minutes. This was unacceptable.
  • 8am: She was asked not to sing Frozen songs loudly while jumping on the sofa in the room where Dash was trying to read. This was completely unfair. Also, she wasn’t hungry and didn’t want breakfast yet.
  • 8:55am: She doesn’t want to have to walk to school (in clement weather) when she goes to Kindergarten next year. That will be just too hard and she doesn’t like exercise.
  • 8:59am: Her best friend insists that he’s in charge when they play together. He never lets her be in charge and won’t even take turns. He says his mom says he’s in charge.

Things I believed this morning:

  • None of the above.

How happy am I that my county did not call a two-hour-delay on school this morning, even though we had freezing rain and they probably should have?

  • Very.

Booking it

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I know the calendar says it’s seven days from Christmas to New Year’s, but it doesn’t feel that way. Those last few days of the year slip away in a blur of mince pies and gingerbread and brunch and late lunch and no-point-making-a-proper-dinner again today, and before you know it everyone’s posting reviews of the year about-to-be-ended and resolutions for the next and we’re all only raring to tear down the decorations and see the lovely white walls and feel clean and unsullied and eat a lot of broccoli; but first I’d better finish up these cookies and there’s all that cheesecake still to go and you may as well have a glass of wine while it’s here.

Last year, everyone annoyed me by listing the books they had read in 2012, and I was mostly annoyed because I had hardly read any, and had no record of them, and had never heard of all these books other people were reading. So, of course, I decided to keep my own list this year.

I didn’t keep it online on LibraryThing or GoodReads or even in a draft post or a Word document. I kept it in the notebook where I keep my lists, under the small notebook for shopping lists, on top of whatever other sheets of paper I happen to have shoved into that corner of the kitchen for “safekeeping.” And I kept it safe all year and even remembered to add to it as time went on.

Here it is, complete with Mabel-addendum at the bottom of the page. I read 23 books in 2013. It’s not many, but it may be more than I’ve read any year since 2006. (Dash is 7. You do the math.) Much as my in-theatre movie viewing dropped dramatically after April of that year, so did my book consumption. But there’s hope for both: I have been to the cinema three times this Christmas break. (Twice for Frozen and once for Catching Fire .)

And this is the transcript, in chronological order:

Ian McEwan: Sweet Tooth
Sara Gruen: Water for Elephants
Rumer Godden: The Greengage Summer
AM Homes: May We Be Forgiven
Emma McEvoy: The Inbetween People
Philip Pullman: The Golden Compass , The Subtle Knife , The Amber Spyglass
F Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby
Dorothy L Sayers: Strong Poison , Have His Carcass , Gaudy Night , Busman’s Honeymoon
Connie Willis: Blackout , All Clear
Marian Keyes: The Mystery of Mercy Close
Dick Francis: Flying Finish , Break In
Marian Keyes: Anybody Out There
Eoin Colfer: Artemis Fowl
Melissa Ford: Life From Scratch , Measure of Love
Susan Cooper: The Boggart

To make this more interesting (for me), I expressed my thoughts on this reading in pie charts. Because pie improves everything.

The main thing to note is how many of these books were not new to my eyes. In fact, this is a pretty high percentage of first-time reads for me; normally I retreat into authors I know and love for much more of the year. I feel I branched out this year.

The branching out was in part due to last year’s Christmas presents – some of the early books in the year featured in the pile o’ books we brought back from Dublin last January -

… and also because I am apparently at the age where people I actually know in real life have written books. I went to school with Emma McEvoy, and met Melissa Ford at BlogHer. (She writes a great blog too.)

I like teen fiction, or even tween fiction. I’m looking for things Dash might enjoy soon, or in a while, so I picked up the first two Artemis Fowl books at a sale and have just started the second. I took The Boggart out of the library when I saw it was a new(ish) Susan Cooper.

I’m not counting books I read with the children, though I have recently gone through all of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and Prince Caspian with Mabel, as well as some book about rescue princesses. ( Charlotte’s Web didn’t stick after the first few chapters.) We’re on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory at the moment, and that’s going well. In general, I read to her at bedtime and B does Dash. I probably should have kept a record of their books this year too, because it included The Hobbit and all of Narnia , as well as The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy , quite a lot of Dahl, and two Swallows and Amazons books.

What’s the best book you read this year? I have to put the two Connie Willis volumes (which make one story) at the top. I devoured it and look forward to reading it again. Maybe next, actually …

Things that are put on the high shelf

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  • All the Nerf guns, one by one, having been confiscated
  • The TV remote control, because you’ve had enough TV time for now
  • The craft project that I really don’t want to bring down until you’re old enough to read the instructions and do all by yourself
  • One notebook that was fought over
  • A packet of highlighter markers, because you have enough markers for now and those aren’t even washable
  • The glockenspiel, until you can make music instead of just hitting each other with the mallets
  • The lighter for the grill
  • My tin whistle
  • The Ikea piggy bank you wouldn’t let go of when you were two so I bought it, but then it became a dangerous projectile so it’s been up there so long that we’ve forgotten it even exists
  • The TV digital antenna, because we’re like in the dark ages, man

What’s on your high shelf?

Things about me

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But first I have to steal one of my husband’s points about himself, because it’s so wonderful that it deserves a wider audience:

For some period around the age of 7, I became convinced I was actually Orinoco Womble. The Wombles merchandising at the time included chocolate bars, and I would look at my miniature pointy-nosed face in confusion when visiting the newsagents.

For full enjoyment of this fact, you have to know what both parties looked like: 



Stunning resemblance, no? (Also, clearly there’s no argument about whose son Dash is.)

Now that there’s no topping that, here are some much less interesting random facts about me.

1. I played Miss Prism in selected scenes from The Importance of Being Ernest in high school. I knew everyone’s lines.

2. Around the same time that my future husband was posing as a womble, I used to hide behind the sofa when the Daleks appeared.

3. As soon as the weather gets cold, I lose all blood from my fingers and toes, which is very useful when I want to dress up as a corpse for Halloween but otherwise annoying.

4. I had three boyfriends in first grade, but not one more until after I turned 18.

5. I can still recite, phonetically and probably unrecognizably, the “We are now approaching a station; please mind the gap” phrase from the Prague city train system. I can also ask for two beers in Czech.

6. I have not, and never did have, any wisdom teeth. This does not mean that I am less wise than you, but rather that I am more highly evolved, so there.

Tell me a random fact about yourself.



Traveling by air with children: a quick checklist for the concerned parent

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  • The day before you leave, give everyone a backpack and tell them to pack the toys they want to bring. After they’ve gone to bed, remove 65% of whatever they stuffed in there. Add a couple of very small new things to generate goodwill and distract from what’s missing.
  • Everyone with a luggage allowance gets a rolly suitcase. This eliminates a lot of fighting over who gets to pull it; however, make sure you can fit the child one on top of an adult one for when they inevitably tire and have a hard time just carrying themselves.
  • If traveling with a stroller, remember that you’ll have to empty and fold it to go through security, and again to get on the plane. Do not stuff every last thing in there as if it were the trunk of your car. It is, however, invaluable for holding coats and backpacks once you’ve checked in. Sometimes you may even opt to let a small child sit in it – but then you’ll have to carry the coats.
  • Abandon hope of getting people to eat healthy snacks in the airport. Airports are for McDonalds opportunities. Burger King if you’re pushing the boat out. If you must bring healthy snacks, save them for the plane when children are trapped and the options are fewer.
  • A new coloring book or sticker book for the plane is a nice idea, and might even keep a child occupied. If you give a child under five a sticker book, be prepared to spend much of your journey pushing up the stickers from behind the page so that they can lift them off. Don’t forget a nice new pack of crayons or markers for the coloring book. The ones you already have at home will definitely not suffice. A brand-new pack of eight for each child will do nicely.
  • Being read aloud to is an option that many children are happy with. Choose a book you’re comfortable reading in front of adults as well as children, because all your fellow passengers will be listening. (Alternatively, I believe audiobooks are a thing you can get. I’d look into it, but I think my husband secretly likes the attention.)
  • Bring a large backpack for your own carry-on. On the outward journey it should contain 1) Secret new presents, only to be produced at the gate or on the plane, 2) Clean under/outerwear for children and/or adults in a large ziplock bag. 3) Diapers and wipes as needed. More than you think could possibly be needed, just in case. 4) More wipes, in the most easily reached pocket, in case you can’t find the other ones. 5) Adult emergency chocolate/granola bar. 6) Book, Kindle, or magazine, if you’re an optimist and think you might get a chance to read something.
  • On the way back, most of this space will be filled with Christmas presents, birthday presents, large stuffed animals, baby dolls, new boots, or duty free alcohol. The children will manage just fine without extra new airplane presents at this point. Try to remember the baby wipes, though.
  • If all else fails, feign ignorance. Those children? No, they’re not mine. Perfect your gaze into the middle distance and don’t forget the earplugs.