Category Archives: neighbourhood

Ode to suburbia

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This is the time of year when I really love where I live. The streets are lined with trees drooping heavy with pink and white blossoms, like big fat balls of cotton wool, raining their petals down at the bump of a branch. The weather is my absolute favourite type: jeans-and-sandals temperature. Not too hot, but definitely warm. The sky is blazing blue, I can hear a woodpecker somewhere in the trees, and we’re digging out the shorts and wondering if last summer’s Keens might possibly still fit.

This neighbourhood is an oasis of small-town life in deepest suburbia. Once you venture beyond its bounds, you’re on the big anonymous roads with ugly strip malls and chain stores – Target, Safeway, Giant, Payless Shoes… nothing fancy, just the basics. They’re pretty soulless and indistinguishable from any other Targets, Giants, Safeways, Paylesses. But inside the bounds, it’s a village. We have a selection of one-of-a-kind establishments: a (really) greasy spoon, a takeout pizza joint, a barber’s, a shop that sells Keno tickets and hats, a Lebanese cafe that’s a live music venue too – and a co-op supermarket that’s not part of a chain. The first time I stepped inside it, I was transported back to supermarkets in the west of Ireland, the sort you went to when you were on your summer holidays, where they sold things with funny-looking labels and there was a distinctive smell and if you were lucky they had soft-serve ice cream.

Our local Co-op doesn’t have soft serve (at least, I don’t think it does) but it has that same distinctive smell, and exactly the same ladies at the cash registers – except instead of soft Galway accents they have Maryland ones. I don’t get that same spine-tingling thrill of nostalgia every time I walk through the doors any more, because I’m there at least twice a week; but I do still appreciate how special it is to be in a supermarket that’s not a chain, that’s different from everywhere else, that has wine and beer (not the norm in this state), and where I’ll usually see someone to say hi to around at least one turn of an aisle.

My mother stopped shopping at her local supermarket because she didn’t want to meet people she knew. Not that she’s anti-social; I think more because she’d stand there chatting for half an hour and the whole morning would be gone. I think I’ve already heard my children announce, in a deprecating tone that sounds oddly familiar, “…and then Mom met someone.”

But that’s what I love about it. I love that on any weekday morning I’ll drive the girl to school and pass at least two cars whose drivers I can wave hi to. I love that I’ll bump into a mom I know in the supermarket (to whom I can chat at length, or just say hi). I love that I know the fruit guy in Safeway and that the meat-counter lady asks where my baby is – followed by a laughing acknowledgment that she’s not a baby any more.

Much as I miss where I used to belong, I love that we belong here, because that makes it a home.

Blossoms

Spring in the suburbs

Goosebumps

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I go for a walk or a run, and I think, “This is great, recharges me, gets me into nature; I must do this every day.” After about a week and a half I go again and think the same thing. Will I never learn?

Today I saw a flock of geese land on Greenbelt Lake. I don’t know if they were coming in from Canada for the season or if they were just back from their morning consititutional, but I’m inclined to think it was a more momentous landing. First just a few, five or seven maybe, came in without too much ado, splashing down nicely and then just sitting still and looking calmly around as if they’d been there for hours. No panting or drama or exploring the new surroundings. Very un-human.

They were the front-runners. Then more small groups, one after another, swooping more dramatically low over the water as if they might change their minds up to the last second, when it was do-or-die moment and they had to either commit to the water or swoop up high over the trees for another loop.

Finally a big group, fifteen or twenty or maybe thirty at once all came down together, and the honking afterwards was much more pronounced. These were the also-rans, the hangers-on, the rabble. I imagined their arguments and complaints went something like this:

“Mom, mom, are we there yet? Is this where we’re going to stop for winter? I’m tiiiiired.”
“Do we have to stop here? There’s a really nice lake further on. Can’t we go all the way to the harbour? I want to keep going.”
“No, this is where we’re staying. Your aunties are all here already.”
“He bumped me. You bumped me. I was coming in for a perfect landing and you messed it up.”
“I did not.”
“I was here first. Nyah nyah.”
“Where are the snacks? Has anyone got the snacks? I want a worm.”

And so on. It was worth going out for.

Shut down

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I keep trying to write about the shutdown, and I keep stalling out. Politics and economics are not my things, and I don’t want to get something wrong, and it’s not directly affecting me; but still, it’s happening and I feel that it would be irresponsible of me to ignore it. So let me try one more time.

The American government has shut down. You can read better informed of why elsewhere, so I’m not going to try to do that here.

All staff members deemed “nonessential” have been sent home and told they are not allowed work. Here in the suburbs of Washington DC, this affects a huge number of people – I don’t think I’d be exaggerating to say probably more than half the families I know have at least one person out of work over this. It’s been going on for two weeks now, and that’s 14 days too long.

We are lucky and not much has changed in our household. My husband is a contractor who works at a government facility. As such, he is expected to continue working (and will continue to be paid) but he can’t go into his office, because it’s closed. Nor can he access most of the big computers he usually remotely logs into to do his work, because they’ve been taken offline. He’s working from home when it’s quiet here, and from Starbucks when the kids come home from school.

This whole thing is insane. The government is holding the people hostage. The thing is, I’m not sure the government actually knows what sort of effect it’s having, so I don’t think it’s working. All the people in the top offices are probably considered “essential,” so it’s business as usual for them, only worse, I imagine. They’re not seeing the regular people, the moms and dads who are unaccustomedly picking their kids up from preschool and walking around the park and playing video games in the middle of the day and taking the opportunity to paint the hall and trying to quell that gnawing, nagging voice that keeps them awake at night asking “Will I get paid? Will the bank let us pay a reduced amount this month? What if I don’t get a check at all? When will this end?”

The knock-on effects are enormous – restaurants and cafes that rely on lunchtime trade from the huge NASA or FDA office campuses, daycares whose children are not attending because their parents are home from work; people whose livelihoods are in jeopardy, and who might not recover even if the government reopens tomorrow. (It won’t.)

And then I read about the Antarctic .

This is stupid. It’s farcical. It’s not the way a country that sees itself as a world leader is supposed to behave towards its citizens, its working people, its families. Be in charge, dammit, Government. Bring the people back and let them do their jobs.

The White House
Come on, Mr Obama. I know you’re in there.

Stick police

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Things that go through your head when your kids start playing with someone else’s kids at the playground:

Isn’t that nice, they’re all playing together.
My children are so well socialized, obviously.
They’re playing a nice game of tag.
Wait, where did that stick come from?
Oh, that’s okay, they all have sticks.
Wait now, that’s not a stick, that’s half a small tree.
Is the other parent here? He must be the man in the car. Where does he stand on the stick issue? Should I say something? Am I a helicopter parent if I wade in yelling “No sticks!” or am I a negligent parent if I don’t? Is he judging me?
Okay, they’re in teams. That’s nice.
No, wait, you can’t exclude the little one.
Uh oh. Here comes the little one to talk to her dad.

… 

Maybe I’ll just go have a word with them. Make sure they’re all playing nicely together.

“Hi! What’s your name?”
“Sarah, this is Mabel. Mabel’s four. Are you four? Is that your brother? He’s in second grade like Mabel’s brother? That’s nice. Now you can be friends. Be careful with the sticks. Maybe we should put the sticks down. Dash, how about playing tag with no sticks? Hmm? No, you don’t have to defend yourself. Well, yes, I can see that the other boys have sticks … Fine, just everyone play nicely, right?”

…

Well, that cleared everything right up.
Girls against boys?
No, but, the girls are four and the boys are seven or eight and that’s three against two… oh good, she wants to be on his team…but now it’s everyone against the little one again…
I should not be policing this.
But that father is sitting there in his car.
Judging me.

…

He wasn’t judging me. He looked out his car window and we had a nice conversation about how you should let the children just play, but that it’s always hard to know where another parent might draw a line that you don’t. And then I decided that playing dodgeball with sticks was probably a good moment to draw a line, and announced that it was time to go home.

Free-range parents v. the Lorax

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One of my favourite things about our neighbourhood is the Sunday morning farmers’ market. We show up some time after ten, the kids get chocolate croissants, we get coffee, we sit on the grass, friends appear, kids run around, we chat, it’s nice. I buy some vegetables, usually.

The children all like to climb two trees nearby – one in particular is sturdy and child-friendly, branches low enough to the ground for a tall five-year-old to boost themself up, spread wide enough to hold four or more at once. They play monkeys, and baby birds, and jungle animals, and every now and then a parent is called over to put up or take down a smaller child and be drawn into the game.

Yesterday morning was just the same.
“Where’s Dash?” B asked me.
“In the tree,” I said, waving vaguely in that direction, where I could see a flash of blue Superman t-shirt between the green leaves.

A few minutes later Dash and his friend came back to us. The friend was looking upset and as she sat on her mother’s lap and began to cry, I asked Dash what had happened, afraid she’d hurt herself.

“She’s a bit unhappy because a lady told us to get out of the tree,” he told me.
“What lady?”
“The lady over there.”
“Why? Were you doing something wrong?”
“No, we were just in the tree.”

My friend (also a mom of tree-climbers) and I went over to see what was what. The children all came with us, six of them, all a little unsure and wondering what was going to happen. We told them that they were allowed climb in the tree, because all their parents said they could. We told them it wasn’t against the law. We put those who wanted to climb back up in the tree.

The elderly lady approached us, looking disapproving. We thanked her for her concern. We said that we allowed our children to climb the tree, that they were doing it no harm, that they played here every week.

She told us they shouldn’t, that they were damaging the tree. We said they weren’t. They all know not to put their weight on branches that are too slim to bear it. It was a face-off, it really was.

“Make them come down, or I’ll… I’ll call the police,” she wavered, beginning to rummage in her fanny pack for a phone.
“Okay, ” we said. “Call them.”

We stood there putting one child and another up and down according to their whims, as she ambled away and then back, and then took up sentry duty sitting on a nearby rock. She glowered. The children were a little worried and kept telling us she was still there. “That’s okay,” we said. “You’re allowed be in the tree.”

A few minutes later, when most of the kids had tired of the tree and run off to play hide and seek, a police car rolled up and came to a halt in that corner of the parking lot. The lady began to talk to the officer. As I approached from the other side, I heard him say “…it’s not illegal…”
He looked over at me enquiringly.

“Thank you,” I said. “We just wanted to confirm that it’s not illegal for children to climb trees.”
“It’s not,” he said, and I gave him a little thumbs up and a smile.

There was just one four-year-old still in the tree at the time. Then the officer leaned out of his window and asked his mother to take him down, because of “citizen complaints.” So she did, because we are all good law-abiding citizens who do what the police tell us, even when we were abiding by the laws the whole time.

We were pretty disappointed in that. The policeman probably took the path of least resistance, and decided that appeasing a cantankerous old lady by removing a child from a tree was the easiest thing to do.

But it leaves us in limbo and with unanswered questions from our children. If it’s not illegal, why should they have to stop doing it? Why should the cantankerous old lady win? Should we just take our children to a purpose-built playground structure if they want to climb so badly? But what if we want to enjoy the market at the same time?

And I feel bad for the old lady, who may be many years away from remembering how much fun it is to climb a tree, or even how it’s nice to watch your children climb trees instead of playing computer games; who might feel that a tree like that, in a public place, is a treasure that must be protected from little limbs and weighing-down torsos, from children who are little more than vandals and their parents who are jumped-up rebellious teenagers in her eyes.

And I admit that there was a little thrill there, in standing up to an old lady. We tried to be as respectful as we could while letting her know we disagreed and felt she was overstepping the line. We tried to model – what? good rebellion? – for our children. We tried to show our children that we were the grownups who knew the right thing to do, that they could always trust us to be their moral compasses even when others who saw themselves as authority figures might have different messages.

Climbing trees is more complicated than you might think.

———-

To be clear, I don’t want to make the old lady the villain of the piece. She has her opinions, and one of them is that our children shouldn’t be climbing that tree. Like the Lorax, she speaks for the trees. And I don’t blame the policeman, really, for asking us to get the kids down. His job is to keep the peace, and he probably knows that old ladies with nothing much else to do all day are more likely to disturb his peace than busy families who can just head on elsewhere.

It’s just a funny story, really, about the day the police came to tell the children not to climb a tree.

That said, we’ll all be back there next weekend, I think, and if the kids want to climb the tree, we’ll be letting them.

Leisure Day

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I sat behind the loudly splashing veil of water that tumbles off the “mushroom” in the outdoor pool and squinted through the droplets at my family laughing and shrieking in the blue. The late-afternoon sunshine and the water in my myopic eyes made lens flares JJ Abrams would have envied, and it was one of those perfect moments that I have to write to remember because my camera is not waterproof.

The weather is contractually obliged to be hot as Hades for the long weekend of Labor Day, and I will be very miffed if it’s still this hot tomorrow, though it might be. We’ve had three days of carnival, volunteer obligations, and parade participation, and summer has been closed with a flourish, whatever atmospheric conditions may prevail from now on.

I have great plans for tomorrow, when both children will be back at school. I could sort my paperwork. I could throw out all the broken toys that can’t be touched when they’re here. I could take a bag to the thrift store or mop the kitchen floor unmolested. I could make pastry. I will probably go to Target and ceremonially wander around aimlessly enjoying the solitude and the absence of short people pestering me for toys.

Disappearing pizza and itchy fingers

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I’m starting to get itchy fingers. I think I’m at one of those Points In My Life.

See, here I am churning out acres of verbiage – garb(i)age verbiage perhaps, but still – every day, and I seem to have a surprising amount of time to do it in, once I ignore the siren songs of cleaning the bathrooms and vacuuming the playroom and paying attention to my quite self-sufficient younger child; which is hard but, you know, I love you all so I do it.

However. I can’t help thinking all this energy in my fingertips could be put into something more, well, I hate to be crass, but lucrative. Or meaningful or fulfilling or something. Not that this isn’t… oh, you know what I mean. If some of the time I did something I was paid for, then I could pay someone else to clean the house now and then, and then I could continue to ignore the housework with impunity. It’s a glorious tiny circle of capitalism.

Yesterday (this seems like a detour but bear with me, it’ll get relevant), my dinner plans went a little off kilter, and B offered to pick up pizza on his way home. Which was lovely, except that when I tried to order online from our local pizzeria, it had disappeared from the Internet. It had also disappeared from the phone network, as the number listed brought me to the next town over’s Domino’s, and then the man on the other end couldn’t hear me anyway. 

Fine, I said snottily, and made carbonara, which is what I should have done to begin with.

And then when I was asking local friends where our Domino’s had gone, someone humorously suggested that I should rent the now-empty location and start a cafe from which I could sell my home-baked goods.

It is indicative of my state of mind that I almost considered considering it seriously.

In one way, it’s lovely. I mean, the idea that yes, I could do this, that even though I’m not the entrepreneur “type” and that I’ve never considered being a small-business owner, I could probably do it in real life. My life is not over just because I’ve had kids. I never opened the second-hand bookstore/coffee shop I’ve been musing about since I was twenty before I had childrnen, but that doesn’t mean I can’t do it afterwards. Maybe it’s something to do with the headlights of the oncoming forty that makes me so cavalier in my assumptions, but I do actually think I could.

But there’s plenty of time for that, and right now it’s not actually what I want to do. I think if I had to bake for a job rather than enjoyment, I’d very soon get sick of churning out the goods. Not to mention all the headaches that go with owning a small business. Not at the moment, thank you, though I won’t write it off forever.

On the other hand, it seems like I do have a little time on hand and maybe I could actually do something else with it. I could start small and look for some freelance editing work. What I’d really like is for someone to pay me to write, but then I’d have to work out what it was I was going to write, or write things other people tell me to, and I’m not certain how to do either of those. I do want to capital-W Write Something, but I can’t do that while Mabel’s flitting around the house begging every five minutes to watch My Little Pony on my computer or actually putting on Sesame Street in the background. That particular project will have to keep growing at the snail’s pace it’s coming along at, for the moment, if I want it to be any good.

—-

And then I had to go and, you know, actually parent or something, and make dinner and take in the laundry, and in between I checked my LinkedIn profile to make sure it didn’t have any misspellings and then I put out the word on Facebook and Twitter that I am, in fact, in the market for some freelance proofreading, copy editing, taking words and making them prettier/clearer/correcter*. 

Sure, what’s the worst that can happen? I’m deluged with offers and have to turn people down? Or nothing at all. I think I can cope with both eventualities, but something in between would be ideal.

*Not actually a word. I do know that, don’t worry.

Naturalist

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American robins are ginormous.

Or, for the other half of my audience, Irish robins are teensy.

The problem with moving away from where you grew up is that you become a total ignoramus – not just when strangers try to ask you directions, but also when your children innocently ask you what sort of bird that is. And you have no idea. Not only that, but you’re not sure what sort of tree this is or – what the heck is that creature at the bottom of the garden? (Hint: It’s a groundhog. They’re big.)

I’m actually not too bad at nature, so long as I don’t have to spend extended periods of time in it. I mean, my mother knows the names of trees and flowers and birds, and every now and then I look at something growing and a word pops into my head. Sometimes it’s “purple” or “spiky” but other times it’s more useful, like when I noticed a flower in our yard recently that made the word “hellebore” trip lightly across my mind. Followed closely by “belladonna,” “Socrates,” and “poisonous.” And “Oh, that’s nice, the kids are making pretend dinner in the frying pan I gave Dash because he watched Tangled again recently and wants to have his very own frying pan to fight bad guys with.”

I digress.

But wherefore the red-berried Cotoneaster of my youth? The fluffy Leylandii and shiny Griselinia hedges, the pink-belled Fuchsia of the Irish garden? (See, I know all the fancy names. But I had to look up the spellings.) The shy robin red-breast, blue tit (no jokes, please), and ubiquitous blackbird? The birch and beech, sycamore and horse-chestnut? I recognize all those. This country – this part of this country – has other stuff.

So the most common bird around here seems to be a sturdy mid-sized brown bird with an orangey front. I knew it wasn’t a cardinal – the bright red, very exotic-looking and smaller bird that makes me wonder just what sort of colour-blind predator ensured its evolution – but it was only this year that my friend-who-knows-about-birds told me what I saw was an American robin.

 
American Robin (image from Wikipedia )

Apart from the reddish breast, it’s nothing like an Irish (or British) robin, which is a tiny, delicate bird. I presume the poor pilgrims were so homesick that they decided this was the closest thing this land could manage when they named it. Or that everything in America was bigger.

European Robin (image from Wikipedia )

The other day the children were playing at the front of the house. I saw Mabel climbing in the smallish rhodedendron bush and decided nothing bad would happen if I went indoors. Two minutes later she ran in after me -

“Mummy, look what I found!”

 - and handed me a beautiful, tiny, greeny-blue, warm, egg. Intact. Before I had time to formulate an answer, Dash was behind her showing me a second egg. Apparently none of our parent-child discussions had yet covered what to do if you find a nest in a tree you happen to be climbing.

I took the two eggs very gently and told the children as unfreakingoutly as I could that they had to go back in the nest straight away, so that the mother bird wouldn’t miss them. To be honest, I thought that she’d smell us on them and abandon the nest forever, but we had to try. Dash said there were other eggs in the nest too, so I thought at least there might be hope for them.

The poor stupid bird had built her nest at just about seven-year-old head-height, right in front of a big gap in our half-dead, surprises-me-with-blooms-every-year, crappy rhodedendron bush. I’m amazed Mabel managed to climb in there at all without immediately stepping on it. But we put the eggs back and hoped for the best. Mabel got very angry with me for saying that the baby birds might not hatch, so I knew she was feeling bad about it and I tried my best not to sound as if I was blaming her. She honestly didn’t know the right thing to do.

So we talked about leaving nests alone and never touching eggs in future, and some helpful friends on Facebook told me that probably the mother bird would not actually fly away and leave her eggs to their unsatupon fate, and lo the next day I looked out the window and saw her happily back there, sitting on her stupidly low and exposed nest. She’s still there, intermittently, and I have great hopes that in a few days? weeks? how long do eggs take? we might even see baby birds from the comfort of our own front room, where we have a great view and won’t disturb anyone.

I don’t know if you can make it out, but that’s Mrs Robin in there

And I’ve given Mabel the task of making sure the neighbourhood cats stay away, any time she sees them outside. She’s taking it very seriously.

Getting to first base

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At some point a long time ago, in my teenagehood, I suppose, I met the terms “first base,” “second base,” and so on – in a romantic sense, let’s say. In a book or a film or something. I had a vague idea of what they referred to, but I wasn’t so hot on the specifics. A lot of questions remained unanswered for many years: Which way did the sequence go – was “first” the very beginning or the final target? (First is the winning place, after all.) But then if first was the start, how many bases were there – was this an open-ended thing? Could you define your own bases, perhaps, to infinitely frustrate the boys?

The problem was that while I read American books and watched American films, I had no knowledge of American sports. Sure, I’ve seen Bull Durham and Field of Dreams , I can say something came out of left field or talk about home runs, but I’d never actually been to a baseball game. And those phrases, it turns out, about the bases – they’re talking about baseball. Well, except when they’re not, obviously.

And then. Dash took up baseball this season. He’s playing “machine pitch,” which is what they do for the seven- and eight-year-olds. It’s slightly harder than T-ball (where the ball is propped up on a stand to be struck) but easier than expecting the kids to pitch a hittable ball as well as hit it – a machine sends the balls at them in what’s supposed to be a steady stream of nicely centered, not-too-fast pitches.

Looking good

But after a couple of practices, B. pointed out to me that the poor boy has no notion what he’s meant to be doing, beyond the hitting and the catching (which are not as easy as they look). He’s never even watched a game on the TV, never mind in real life. So we decided we should take in a game.

I’ve never been one for sports, really, and I’m lucky enough to be married to a man who is also not very interested in watching the game, whatever game it might be. I’m pretty sure that the only time I’ve ever been to a professional sporting event before, it was (ironically enough) an exhibition game of American football in Dublin that we got free tickets to, and it was incredibly boring and totally incomprehensible.

Maybe I had lumped baseball with football and decided that it too would be incredibly boring. Maybe I felt that not going to a game was the last bastion of not being American that I wished to hold out on. Maybe I just had no reason and no interest. But however it came about, after ten years in the country, yesterday I finally went to a real actual proper ballgame.

Looks authentic, no?

Not the big leagues, of course. We started small, with a minor league game close to home – but still professional baseball. The weather was just right – warm enough but not too hot or sunny. The game was well-attended but not too crowded. Dash wore his shorts in case they needed an extra player at the last minute.

Dash demonstrates his swing
The genius of the people who plan these things, though, is that they understand that baseball is sometimes not the most thrilling of spectator sports. So it’s not like you’re watching Federer serve at Wimbledon, being shushed by the umpire if you sneeze. The place had lots of families, babies, dogs (is that a thing, or was it a special bring-your-pooch-to-the-game day yesterday?), and the players just did their thing regardless of whether my children were running up and down or clambering over the seats or wailing because their giant ice-cream cone was dripping all over their hands. 
“Need some help with that?”
And when they got too bored to keep watching, and we’d done the pizza and the ice-cream and refused the cotton candy, there was a carousel and a bouncy castle and pitching and hitting games right there to help parents donate even more dollars to the nice baseball people, and then hot dogs and popcorn. Not to mention the between-innings competitions and adorably bad pre-game show and requisite toe-curling rendition of the national anthem. And I think I’d even have quite enjoyed watching the baseball players if I’d had more than five minutes to pay attention to what they were doing.
We stayed for about an hour and a half before calling it quits just as a sprinkle of rain was beginning. I think we’ll probably do it again, it was that good.
What’s more, I would probably be able to reliably go back in time and let my teenage self know what was what with the bases. Just in case she ever needed to know.

Cycles

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Yesterday, Mabel gave me a tiny crumb of hope for the human race. Or at least for the portion of human race that we’re raising in this house. She was spontaneously thoughtful.

But first, I’ll tell you about the walk home from school.

When Dash started at the elementary school, Mabel was almost three. His dad brings him to school most mornings, but Mabel and I walk up to collect him at 3:20 every day, unless the weather’s horrible. This meant that Mabel would be in the stroller, post-nap, and I would be pushing. Sometimes she’d hop out and run, and on the way home Dash would perch himself on the front till I yelled at him, and thus not so beatifically, we’d finally get all the way home again. I think I blogged about my frustrations .

When he went back to school this year, with Mabel now the proud owner of two bicycles and a scooter, I started encouraging her to bike to school sometimes. It worked pretty well, though we didn’t abandon the stroller entirely. When she biked I’d end up breaking my back to push her halfway home up the slight incline you wouldn’t even notice without a bike. Some days she was unhelpfully naked at 3:00 and it was as much as I could do to stuff her into her wheeled throne, put a blanket over her, and throw some clothes in the basket for the point when she was ready to emerge into the public gaze.

Since Christmas, though, she’s been biking pretty consistently and the stroller has stayed at home. We took things up a notch last week, when both children suddenly looked too big for their bicycles at the same time – and with Dash’s birthday coming up, we decided it was time to buy him a new one and let Mabel inherit his old one. Since the old one is purple, she was happy. Dash got a shiny new big bike and is looking terribly large and moving awfully fast all of a sudden.

And he’s started riding his bike to school. Mabel doesn’t need a push any more, and is learning to use the brakes – rather than her feet – going downhill too. So now, my view of the daily commute looks increasingly like this (below this paragraph that keeps getting longer), and I’m going to have to unearth – and inflate the tyres on – my own bike if I don’t want to have to run home every day. (Which would be good for me, but my stupid foot is still a little sore* and I’m not dressed for running at that time of day.)

And now the nice bit. On the way to school yesterday Mabel was stuck cycling slowly behind a woman pushing a toddler in a stroller. She didn’t pass the woman out, and soon stopped to wait for me. I told her I liked that she’d not barged past, and said she could use her bell or say excuse me if she wanted to get by.

“I didn’t want to ring my bell in case it scared the baby,” she said to me.

The clouds parted and angels sang. My little tyrant, thinking of someone else? Maybe, just maybe, the extreme self-centredness is just a phase. (I’ve always been fairly sure it was, but I’m an optimist and there’s always the chance that you’re the one raising Genghis Khan.)

The way we’re doing it, the Chinese-water-torture drip, drip, drip, keep-telling-them-about-how-to-behave-nicely, observe-and-praise-the-good-behaviour: it does eventually penetrate, and just when you’re starting to think you should maybe have been spanking them soundly on a daily basis and twice on Sundays, they surprise you. Maybe, in time, she’ll turn out to be a decent member of civilization. Butterfly, chrysalis, yada yada; springtime metaphors abound. Sigh.

*Sore but improving. Apparently what I should have done to fix it was not bring it to the doctor but simply blog about it. I might escape the nun shoes for a while yet.