Category Archives: madness

Saturday night

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- Let’s have a sleepover!

- We want a sleepover!

- Okay, you can have a sleepover, since it’s Saturday. But Dash has to do his reading first.

- I’ll read to her!

- He’ll read to me!

- Okay, up you go, then.

Later…

- First I ‘ll read to you . I know all the words in this one.

She starts to read Red Hat Green Hat.

Later…

- I’ll go up and see what they’re doing.

Dash is trying to thread a giant IKEA fake flower through his sister’s hair.

- That’s not reading. But your hair is lovely.

- I’m styling her for the doggy show.

- Woof woof.

- Right. So you’re not reading to her, then? You can play for ten minutes and then you have to come and do your reading. I’m setting the timer, okay?

- Okay.

I go up again. They’re tying their legs together with a piece of ribbon.

- This is for the three-legged race. We have to have a three-legged race.

- Okay, race to downstairs, and then Mabel has to come back up while Dash does his reading.

Long pause at the top of the stairs as the ribbon comes untied and must be tied again. I help, eventually. Then I go down and designate the finish line.

- Yay! You won the race. Right, upstairs with you, Mabel, I’ll give you a piggyback. There’s your book, Dash.

Mabel insists on tying her legs together so she can have a two-legged race back upstairs. I help her hobble thus up the stairs, bring her to bed, read two chapters of her book. Dash comes up, having read his chapter.

- What about our sleepover? We’re still having a sleepover.

- But I want to have it in my bed.

- Your bed’s too small. You have to come into my room. [Dash has a small loft bed with a spare mattress on the bottom, so it's like a set of low bunk beds.]

- But I’m scared on the bottom of your bed. It’s dark and strange.

- But I don’t fit in your bed. I know, you can be in the top of my bed and I’ll be in the bottom.

- Okay.

Mabel goes into his room, with duvet and stuffed toy and doll, and installs herself in the top bunk. Dash brushes his teeth and puts on pyjamas.

- But I want to cuddle with you.

- Okay, you can cuddle with me.

Dash gets into the top bunk with her, which is exactly the same size as Mabel’s bed that he wouldn’t sleep in because it was too narrow for two. But never mind that. Daddy reads them a chapter of Dash’s bedtime book.

Not thirty seconds after Daddy leaves the room with the two of them snuggled up in Dash’s top bunk, Mabel follows him downstairs at speed.

- Mummy, I need to go to the bathroom.

- Okay. Come on.

- And then I want to go to sleep in my bed.

- Right.

Poor Dash. Another foiled sleepover. Maybe next weekend.

 

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

Injustices perpetrated upon her

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Miss Mabel is having trouble with bedtime at the moment. The biggest problem with bedtime is that it’s not fair.

Nothing about bedtime is fair, but in particular the fact that she has to wash her hands and brush her teeth is not fair. It’s not fair that she has to brush her teeth because now, after all those books I read her, she’s hungry.

And it’s not fair that there are strawberries in the freezer and she can’t have any because all I’m giving her is a waffle. It’s particularly not fair that I won’t read her book upon book before she brushes her teeth and it’s not fair that when she finally does brush them, she still doesn’t want to.

It’s not fair that she has to get up again and go and wash her hands because she didn’t wash them earlier but she knows she has to wash them. (Note that I did not say she had to. At this stage, I really didn’t give a monkey’s uncle what she did so long as she lay down and shut up.)  It’s also extremely not fair that her hands get wet when she washes them because it takes so long to dry them and that’s just not fair.

Sweet child, you need to save some of this not fair for when you’re a teenager, because then you’re really going to need it.

Mabel looking grumpy

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.

Sibling revelry

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Mabel had a tantrum over the little teddy bear beside the checkout in the supermarket that I wouldn’t buy for her. I was being wonderfully patient and gentle with all my “No’s” until finally I just had to wrestle her to the floor and pry it out of her hands. Perfect.

I’m reading Siblings Without Rivalry just now. I was trying to write up my notes to make a useful post for you lovely people (and for me to come back to, seeing as how it belongs to the library) but the children are thwarting me at every turn.

I tried to keep the TV turned off today when Dash came home from school, because TV time has been expanding exponentially lately and we need a moratorium. Pretty soon, he was complaining of boredom. I decided to use some of the techniques from the book:

“I know that you are a resourceful and smart person, Dash. You can think of something new to do.”
“How do you know I’m resourceful? Give me an example of a time when I was resourceful,” he countered.
What is this, a job interview? I don’t know. Probably some time when you got up to mischief and didn’t want me to know about it. Sheesh. I didn’t say any of that, but it was admittedly tricky enough to think of something. Evidently all the TV has been quashing his opportunities for resourcefulness.

I ignored him and Mabel some more.

Then there was some interval when they were both standing on the kitchen table, which hardly seemed safe, and the next time I looked into the room Mabel was throwing off all her clothes while Dash held her upside down by the legs.

I turned the TV on. Some days it’s the only thing that stands between us all and bodily harm.

Peas and carrots

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Mabel: Me and A__  just … fit together.

Aw, I think. What an adorable sentiment about her bestie.

Mabel: Like, he likes fire engines and ambulances, and I like it when people get hurt.

******

I keep trying to twist this around to getting her to say that she wants to be a doctor to help all these hurt people, but we haven’t got there yet. At least she’s not actively saying that she likes to be the one doing the hurting. No, she’ll just be over there observing your horrible accident.

A little ghoulish, perhaps, but not downright psychotic. I think.

Rat’s arse

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This morning it was still so humid that it was positively smelly outdoors, and I put on capris and a t-shirt and sandals again and complained loudly. Since then the deluge has reached us, the lawn (ahem) is dotted liberally with yellow leaves from the trees behind us, and everything’s a lot more autumnal. I made soup for lunch. It’s still humid, but getting better.

———————

I went to a local clothing co-op used clothes/books/toys sale at the weekend, and I had to take the kids with me because their father was out on his Saturday morning long run. I promised they could each get a toy so long as they let me look in the big room with the clothes first. I was in search of one thing: snow boots for each child. I found a perfect pair for Mabel, but the price I paid was more than the $5 I happily forked over to the nice lady at the desk, because in the toy room a disgruntled Dash found the most horrible toy in the world, and I was powerless to refuse, since it cost a mere two dollars.

It’s a plastic rat. It is remote controlled, and its little red eyes light up as it whizzes around the kitchen floor. It is the embodiment of evil. And now it lives in my house.

————————

My body is rebelling against the computer by giving me a sore wrist. It can’t really tell me any louder that I need to lay off the Facebook and go and read a book. And yet, here I still am. I’m getting better at surfing with my left hand, mind you.

This entry was posted in madness and tagged autumn , , thrifting , toys , weather on by .

Baby update

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The babies have been earning their keep lately, you’ll be pleased to hear.

They’ve been going to school.

Some of them are exemplary students.

And they all have their names on flashcards.

After a hard morning’s learning, it’s time for a snack and some TV.

Ersatz

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Sometimes I don’t know why we bother with toys. I know it’s just another riff on the baby-loves-boxes theme, but this is what I found Mabel playing with this afternoon, after she’d raided the kitchen for implements.

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.

This entry was posted in madness and tagged photos , playtime , video on by .

Sacrifice

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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.