Phantom cluck

I don't know what variety of hormone-induced crazy I was smoking yesterday, but I spent most of the day being yelled at by my subconscious, counting on my fingers, and thinking that my children would profit greatly in terms of added independence if given a little more parental neglect by way of an extra sibling. My subconscious had conspired with my body to demand that I get pregant again, right away, and to know why, indeed had I not already had another baby. At one point I found myself asking, "Really, what's another two years of my life when balanced against the opportunity of a whole new person?" That's when I knew I was in big trouble.

Luckily, this morning I woke up to find that the inner monologue had dimmed to a faint whisper and the demanding gremlins had slunk back to their lair, perhaps for another month. As we lazed in Sunday-morning fashion in front of the TV, I considered my lap - fully occupied by two squirming, giggling monsters; recalled my sleep - disturbed, as usual, by one toddler; and looked forward with a sense of relief to the possibility (not the certainty, as nothing in this life, especially contraception, is certain) of a modicum of freedom in the months to come.

And then I finished the choc-choc-chip cookies.

Prairie living

I'm not just bad with snow psychologically. I'm bad on a physical, up-close basis too. And apparently it's genetic.

There were six inches of lovely snow all round our house for two days before I actually let the kids go out and play in it. And they hadn't exactly been clamouring to go, either. Monkey had some complicated notion about pouring water out of the garden hose onto the snow to make ice, which I wasn't about to indulge him in, no matter what fascinating science discoveries we could have made from such an experiment. (Just one more reason why homeschooling is not for me.)

For all my self-satisfaction at having procured snow boots for the trip to Ireland, Mabel is actually the only one of us properly kitted out for the snow. And all she wants to do is sit down, take off her (extortionately expensive, Irish) waterproof gloves, and eat the stuff.

Exhibit A

Mabel has lovely purple snow pants because I picked them up at a yard sale in the summer. There were no snow pants in Monkey's size at any yard sales, so he doesn't have them. He does have waterproof gloves, but prefers to keep his hands in his pockets instead of putting them on. Which means he's not very good at making snowmen (he prefers to direct operations, but my gloves aren't waterproof), he's scared to sit on a big plastic platter and slide down our tiny back-yard hill, and when he finally engaged with me in a snowball fight, I had to take us all in after three minutes because I couldn't bear to look at his red, achy hands for any longer. (He also has appalling dry skin, because having to moisturise your children is not a notion I grew up with. Hand cream was something my mother used, not something kids needed. That's not the case in this climate, but I'm slow on the uptake.)

Do Canadian and Scandinavian babies instinctively understand that you shouldn't take your gloves off in the snow? Do Minnesotan preschoolers leap onto sleds and whizz unbidden down slopes at the drop of a snowflake? I suspect correct snow behaviour is learned, not innate; but I never learned it either, so we'll all have to learn together if we're to survive in this hard new land that is not of our forefathers.

Old-Hat Reviews: Inception

(No spoilers here. Read without fear.)

This film was so good that for long chunks of time I forgot we were huddled in bed in an otherwise dark, increasingly cold house during a power cut. Thank heavens for little laptops with big batteries.

I knew it was meant to be good, and that it was directed by Christopher Nolan, beloved of my husband for the little-seen and very clever Memento, but otherwise I had gone to some lengths to avoid finding out anything at all about the story. I love coming to a good film that way, without having seen so much as a trailer. (I sometimes shirk reading the backs of books for the same reason.) I had somehow got the notion that it was a police thriller - possibly because of Leonardo Di Caprio and The Departed - and I couldn't have been more wrong, or more happy about that.

Speaking of Leo, I'm glad to find I can finally take him seriously as a grown up. For so long I could only see a chubby-cheeked fourteen-year-old whenever I watched him - it made The Aviator particularly hard to swallow. But he has at last grown into his looks, or they've grown into him, and he makes a reasonable intense, marked-by-sorrow lead. I thought Ellen Page was great in a nicely understated way and I particularly liked the Englishman, played by Tom Hardy, who is kind of cute. There's also a token Irish actor (not playing an Irish character) in Cillian Murphy. (I was always partial to the name Cillian/Killian, but couldn't use it on account of having the alliteration problem.)

Sadly, with 40 minutes to go my personal alarm went off (in the shape of Mabel waking up) and we had to keep the rest of the movie for the next night. I imagine that seen all at once, on the big screen, it would have been an Experience. As it was, I found myself thinking about it (in a satisfying, not irritating, way) until I fell asleep. It was reminiscent of various films: Vanilla Sky, Strange Days, The Matrix, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind to name a few that toy with our perceptions of dreams and reality, or reality and hyper-reality - but better done: Inception isn't trying to confuse you: it's all quite above board and explained as you go - if you can't keep up, it's your own fault for not paying attention.

And at least I've seen one thing on the Oscar list before the awards. What else (that's out on DVD) should I watch?

Way too many of these posts take place in the middle of the night

Mabel sits up in the middle of the (extra) dark, (extra) cold night.

"I have a wee."
"You're wearing a nappy, Mabel. Just go in your nappy, please."
"I have to go to the toi-wet."
"Mabel. It's cold out there. And the lights don't work."
"The lights don't work?
"There's no electricity, remember? That means the lights don't work. And it's cold."
"But I want to go to the toi-wet." [She gets off the bed.]
"..." [I groan and follow her.]
"[Blah blah blah probably something about Cuzco from The Emperor's New Groove or Mr Incredible]"
"Shhh. Mabel. Monkey and Daddy are asleep. You have to be quiet."
[Top of her lungs] "I don't want to be quiet."
[I pull down her pyjama bottoms and undo her onesie and pull down her pull-up and sit her on the toilet. Nothing happens.]
"I don't have anything."
"Okay. Let's go back to bed."
"Okay. I want the big side." [She's not talking about the pillow, you know.]

Old-Hat Reviews: Babies

[Maud thinks: Babies. Yes, this sounds like a good choice for an evening when I'm home alone and have lately been pondering the question of a third child in a manner probably not altogether un-premenstrual.]

I'd heard of the film before, but not gone out of my way to see it. Then the other day someone told me it was available for instant play on Netflix, and last night B was out and my blog post was all written and the kids were asleep, so I hacked into our account (that means I had a lucky guess and remembered the password first time) and watched it.

It's a beautifully shot story without words that follows four babies in radically different parts of the world from birth to their first steps. The babies live, respectively, with a tribe in Namibia, in a yurt in Mongolia (you'd be amazed how much furniture they fit in a yurt (I like saying yurt)), in a high-rise apartment in Tokyo, and in San Francisco.

I love San Francisco, Tokyo looks uber-cool, and the windswept grasslands and big skies of Mongolia were amazing, but it was the little Namibian girl who stole my heart - all plump chocolate limbs and mischevious eyes, growing and learning in an environment so alien to anywhere I've ever been: the phrases "third world" and "developing world" are meaningless here - these people live without money because they don't need anything that requires money (or at least that's how it's, perhaps romantically, portrayed). They laugh and chat and braid their children's hair, and the babies put unsuitable things in their mouths and imitate their mothers just like babies do everywhere.

Some highlights:

• The nurse in Mongolia parcelling up the new baby in the tightest swaddle I've ever seen, finished off with two ribbons like a present - and then his mother bringing him outside and hopping (painfully) onto the back of her husband's motorbike, swaddled infant in arms, to bring him home. And off they rode, across the fields.
  
• The unmistakeable "am pooing now" series of expressions that crossed baby Hattie's face (San Francisco) as she sat on the floor.
• Namibia baby putting out her tongue to get the dog to lick it.
• All the Tokyo mothers bringing their babies to the zoo, placing them feet from enormous gorillas and prowling tigers (separated by just a pane of glass) and seeming surprised when the babies, very sensibly, burst into wails of terror.
• Mongolia baby's big brother pushing him outside in the stroller, apparently unsupervised, and abandoning him in the field with all the cows. As if to say, "There. Now you can't come back, and I will reign supreme once more."
• A beautifully plumed rooster hopping up on the bed in the yurt and then stepping carefully around the sleeping infant.
  

My inner anthropologist seems to think that we were all meant to live around a campfire in a desert or a cave, with the rest of our tribe; that clearly the way of the tribe is the one true way for humankind. (This is not actually true.) But apart from that, the oustanding contrast to me in the lives of these babies was how the San Francisco and Tokyo babies were only/first children who spent their time mostly in the company of adults, only seeing peers in artificial, organized settings like yoga or music classes; while the two rural babies had siblings and others of similar ages around all the time; loving, teaching, and persecuting them in equal measure.

Now, I'm the last person to cast aspersions on only children (being a high-functioning only child myself) but the latter model seemed much healthier, much righter to me. It goes back to the idea that the best way to parent may be to provide your kids with other children to interact with (they don't have to be related), and then ignore them all as much as you possibly can. (Preferably while you share a bottle of wine and some good conversation with the other parents.)

Jetson

If you ask Monkey what he wants to be when he grows up, he'll say, "A metal-maker." If pressed, he will explain that he wants to make metal so that he can then make things out of metal; primarily a jet-pack for himself and all the members of his family and possibly everyone in the world. And he'll invent lots of other things that need to be made of metal too.

He is going to buy his wife (that'll be Helen, unless she makes good on her threats and marries the boy next door instead - he's seven, so he has that older-man allure, and he's a polyglot to boot) a "sew-er" (that's a sewing machine) so that she can help him in his superhero-costume-making endeavours. I don't think he has any particular notion that women should do the sewing while men do the metalwork - he's certainly not seen me put thread to needle more than once or twice, and his father is just as likely to sew on a button as I am, though I don't think he knows how to hem - Monkey just thinks that this would be a good complement to his small business.

Mabel has been told that she's allowed be a metal-maker too. She doesn't care overmuch.

I for one am looking forward to our jet-pack-enhanced future.

Winterage

It's fupping freezing, to coin a Ted-ism.

This morning we had an energy audit. That means that two nice men came over and checked out the house, inside and outside and in the attic spaces, and then they put a giant fan in the front door and sucked out all the warm air and used a thermal camera to see exactly where all the cold air was coming in. All over the place, it turns out. We have so many gaps, and so little insulation, that it's the equivalent of a 3-foot window being wide open all the time. Isn't that horrifying? Imagine how much extra money we've thrown at heating and cooling bills over the past nine months. We feel pretty silly that we didn't figure this out sooner.

On the other hand we didn't realise how much we needed it until the December heating bill came in. (I use the disculpatory "we" here, but in truth I defer to B on matters both automotive and structural. Not that he necessarily knows more than I do about them, but I can't be in charge of everything. Possibly as an architect's daughter (and former denizen of the best-insulated house in Ireland) I should have been more interested in how many inches of heat-retaining material resided in our attic space, but I chose not to ponder such matters.)

Anyway, we'll probably end up with swathes more insulation, and I don't know what else to boot, and it'll cost lots up front but we'll thank ourselves next winter (and even in the summer, when perhaps the A/C will work better too). I'm amazed that people have lived in this house for so long before us and not realised how much they could save themselves by sticking in a few rolls of extra insulation, but maybe they didn't have fancy thermal cameras to show them just what was going on. (Monkey thought the thermal camera was pretty cool.)

**********************

I'm a very bad cold-weather parent. I know I should bundle them up and take them for a walk by the lake, where we could point out, I dunno, bare branches and dead leaves and sticks and stuff, but my fingers and toes go numb at the mere thought of a walk in the woods in below-freezing conditions (and I have Reynaud's, so it really would be very little fun; more irritatingly than seriously, but it hurts in the cold). And I know some people successfully stay home without resorting to all-day TV, but I'm just not able to think up a nice afternoon-long game for my four year old and my two year old to play without my constant company, and left to their own devices there would soon be blood on the new sofa. (I leave you to judge which is the worst part of that eventuality.)

So every afternoon, post-nap, post-nap-recovery-mode, post-shoes,-socks-and-coats-application (don't discount how long that stage lasts) we pile into the car and go somewhere, even if it's just for 40 minutes. Spending 4pm to 5pm out of the house is the only thing that keeps me sane: not getting home till closer to 6.00 is even better, so long as I didn't have anything elaborate planned for dinner.

But I'm running out of things to do in this horrible weather. The groceries are procured, we've visited every Target in a 20-mile radius, and today we'll head over to Babies Is We for a big box of pullups. That's all the errands I can possibly think of. Sometimes I'll take them to one of the bigger malls just to frolic in the play area, but those are all 30 minutes' drive away (is it no coincidence that there's no nice mall in PG County?)

So tell me, what do you do with your kids when it's too cold to be out and you can't stay in another minute?

In the chill of the night

I really need to draw a diagram for this, some sort of cross-section of Mabel's bed containing her and me and covered inadequately by her duvet, which, the night before last, seemed to be letting in teeny tiny blasts of arctic air aimed directly at the gaps between my pyjama top and bottoms, and between the ends of the bottoms and the tops of my socks (yes, I wear socks to bed when it's cold; so sue me), not the mention the gaping chasm caused by pulling my top up on one side so she can get the goods; exacerbated exponentially by the fact that she, ever-warm, kept kicking all the covers off, while I (oft-chilly) was still shivering and trying to clutch them to me and tuck them under my bum and into the space between my shoulders and my neck.

It was particularly cold the night before last, and our heating system seems to be struggling to keep up (to wit, this morning it was set to 68 and it claimed that the temperature in the room was currently 57. And it wasn't doing anything to change that). Somebody's coming to do an energy audit tomorrow, which we're hoping will tell us the most efficient way to heat the house, because it sure ain't what we're doing. It may be the case that we should start using the wood-burning stove, but to do that, we'd have to get the chimney swept and buy a big pile of wood. Anyway, Mabel's room is at the end of the line as far as heating vents are concerned, and at 3am when she decided to be awake and nursing hard for an hour and a half, it felt as if there was no heating at all. When a small vampire is draining you of your last remaining body heat, and your metabolism is at its nightly nadir, and your nose is cold, well, it's hard to sleep.

So that was Friday night. On the plus side, she had gone to sleep at 8.10 or so and not woken up until almost 11.00. Which had given me hope for the following night, when I was audaciously planning to leave the house after bedtime and stay out for a whole two hours, whether she woke up or not. Of course, just because I wanted to get her to bed promptly - and had engineered a correct nap and an earlier beginning to bedtime to facilitate it - it took an entire hour to get her to sleep, including fake-out sleep, refusal to detach, sudden reversion to wide-awake, demands for medicine due to (possible) sore gums, and finally a need to go and sit on the toilet.

I eventually got my tall boots on and myself out the door and made it to the moms' night out only half an hour late - and before most of the other moms. I ate salty Mexican food and drank a beer and talked to people with whom all previous conversations have been carried out with one eye on the monkey bars and broken off mid-syllable by one or other party yelling, "No sticks!" or "Pump your legs," and/or running away to rescue or reprimand as required.

As I drove home, teeth chattering in the un-warmed-up car, I catalogued the ways in which I might be welcomed:

• worst case scenario: screaming; two children awake and disgruntled
• almost as bad: screaming; only one child awake and disgruntled
• not too bad: Mabel awake but being read to or playing quietly
• totally excellent: Mabel still fast asleep

In the event, it was somewhere between not bad and great: I opened the door to see Mabel startle awake from where she had been almost asleep on her Dad's chest in the family room. She had woken about 15 minutes earlier, looked upset when I wasn't forthcoming and she was presented with secondary-parent instead, was brought down lest she get noisy, and curled up quietly without much complaint on nice warm Daddy. When she saw me she nearly got teary again, but was too tired and just nursed back to sleep in bed without difficulty.

I might even do it again some time. The going out, not the freezing in bed. If I can help it.

In case you were wondering

The photoshoot I was planning over Christmas never happened. The photographer had to cancel because of the snow, and I realised as the time went on that Monkey was just not in a good place for a photo session with a stranger, in a strange house. He would barely let me take photos of him, half the time. We'll try to do it when we're home in the summer, perhaps, when the weather will be more conducive to outdoors and Monkey will be the magical five. In the meantime, I'll just have to content myself with taking the photos myself, and maybe remembering to ask a friend to point and shoot now and then.

Monkey avoiding the camera (but thinking it's funny, not traumatic)

Lately, Monkey has been getting himself dressed; shoes and socks and everything. Or sometimes everything except socks, but I'll put them halfway on so they're the right way round and let him do the rest. I'm not commenting on it overly, just taking it as the new normal, but I'm certainly liking it.

I just realised that I wrote this almost an entire year ago. Which basically means that for two years now (well, yes, Mabel is two, so that makes sense) I've been on the fence about a third baby - and I'm not getting any less impaled as time goes on. I'd be lying if I said I don't think about it pretty much every day - but not in the sense that I desperately want another baby. Most of the time I'm very happy not to do that, very happy to stick with two; but I still can't get myself to the point where I'm willing to close the door on the possibility of that one final flirtation with fate and genetics. I'm a little afraid that when Mabel heads off to school three mornings a week in September, I'll take one look at the notion of starting to work for money and decide that I need to preclude myself from such activities for a while longer. Which would be, you know, impractical, imprudent, and uneconomically sound.

Is there anything else you need me to catch you up on?

The Little Penguin Pinot Noir, as it happens

My posts are very boring these days. Yesterday's was only rescued from the brink of disaster by some sweeping editing involving deletion of entire paragraphs - and once a paragraph is written, it's my baby; I don't erase willingly - though there is a certain sense of recklessness about removing whole swathes of text that fell from your very fingertips, and a thrill of freedom that comes with it - anyway, point is, sometimes I bore myself in the middle of writing a long and involved post about something that I once thought might be worth telling you about; and then I put it on ice and start something else like this instead.

I've opened the wine. Mabel is asleep early, having sprouted more nap-repelling snot earlier in the day, and B is upstairs putting Monkey to bed early too, since he was almost out in front of the TV half an hour ago. I have no idea why he's so tired, but he was certainly acting like it all afternoon, what with refusing to go to the pet shop and then cowering behind me as we walked to join friends at the playground. (He loosened up a bit after a while, and even was heard to tell somebody's Dad how very fast he is on the roundabout whatsit. He loves making it go faster and faster, but unfortunately we're nearly always there with a posse of two-year-olds who can't be trusted to hold on, when up, or not walk straight into the spinning wheel of doom when down.)

So, nice glass of pinot. It's touch and go as to whether I'll get to eat my chicken quesadilla before Mabel wakes up again - I can hear her coughing right now (how's this for liveblogging - are you on the edge of your seat or what?); on the other hand, if Monkey's doing a poo I could be up and down again with her resettled before B ever makes it to the table. The only casualty would be the quesadillas, which I perhaps optimistically just made and are now getting nice and lukewarm. But I don't want to go ahead and eat mine alone, because when the universe hands you a child-free dinner with your husband and a bottle of red, it's a shame to mess with it.

So that's what I'll be doing. Just sitting here, sipping my wine, waiting to see what happens first.

By any other name

When I was a child in Ireland, lo these many years ago, grown-ups were called by their last names: Mister this and Missus that; and Miss the other, in the rare instance of an unmarried woman (such as my recorder teacher and her sister, the infamous Misses K__ of D__ [I'm going for a Jane Austen approach here. Is it working?]). My teachers and my friends' parents all went by this rule. My parents' friends were a bit more of a conundrum: my parents would refer to their friends by first and last names, in almost all instances - well, when everyone you know is called either John or Catherine, I suppose you have to clarify; personally I favour a return to descriptive names like Big John and John the Shoe and John from Wicklow, but some people seem to like given monikers.

Anyway. I grew up, left my days of Mrs Quinn and Miss McDonagh and Mr Dunne behind, and started work, and was always instructed to call my bosses by their first names. I worked for Liam, and Teresa, and Helen, and TG and Kate. Generation gaps were smoothed away as I, first a teenager waiting tables and later a graduate in my early twenties (and not waiting tables, thank you), blithely addressed my elders and betters as if they were my best friends. At least, I'm sure that's what my mother would say. She's not a fan of all this pally-ness. She likes to be addressed as Mrs. Lastname. She will view you with some suspicion if, on first meeting, you try to call her by her first name.

And now I am here. You can tell me, if you like, whether this is a function of the country I'm in, or the part of the country I'm in - Maryland is technically the South, if barely - or the generation I'm in, but many children here address adults as Miss/Mr Firstname. At first it sounded peculiar to me, and while I'm getting quite used to being referred to as Miss Maud on occasion (as much as I'm used to being addressed by four-year-olds as "Monkey's Mom"), the male version - Mister Steve, or whatever, still sounds odd and a little forced to my ears.

And I am bad. I know I should adhere to the When In Rome rule, but not being a dyed-in-the-wool Southerner, or anything remotely like it, I don't insist that my children preface every other adult's name with a title. I sort of play it by ear - if a friend has their child call me Miss Maud, I try to reciprocate with my children. If a friend hails from Alabama, say, f'rinstance, I can be pretty sure this will be the polite thing to do. But with others I'm more lax and let the kids go with just first names. I certainly bear no ill will towards little 'uns who call me whatever they want to call me, so long as it's not Hey Stinkyface.

What do you think? Will civilization crumble if children don't address their elders with an honorific? Is this a regionalism, or the norm in all of the US? Do your children call everyone by their first name, last name, or do they have courtesy aunts and uncles up the wazoo? (And how painful is that, anyway?) Should I beat some manners into my kids quick smart before they kick me out of the country? Or are good manners just an outdated concept? (Don't worry, I know the answer to the last one. I'm just not sure how vital this particular aspect is.) Set me straight, why don't you?

In which I expose all the ways I do it wrong, in the hopes of maybe making someone feel better about they way they're doing it wrong too

Yesterday I happened upon It's Not About Nutrition. As I perused a few posts, I could see that this lady knew what she was talking about. When I got to one called For extreme fruit and vegetable avoiders, I was inspired to leave a comment, in the vague hope that she would solve all my problems - because Monkey is nothing if not an extreme fruit and vegetable avoider. (Unless he's an extreme meat, fish, eggs, and cheese avoider. Or a superhero obsessive. He goes by many names, my son.)

Here's my somewhat sad and pathetic question:

Hi Dina. I like what you have to say and would be most grateful for your input in my situation. My son seems very sensitive to smells. He's also a stubborn four-year-old, so I'm not sure exactly what issues I'm dealing with, but ever since he started solids he's been mostly uninterested in food (looooved the boob for a long time) and has refused to even try almost everything other than carbs. He now lives basically on peanut-butter sandwiches (wheat bread, natural pb), breakfast cereal (not the terribly sugary ones), apple juice and milk.

He's never eaten meat, fish, eggs, cheese, or vegetables. He used to eat apples, but hasn't gone near any fruit for a long time. I can't even get him to sit at the table when we're eating other food - especially if it smells of, well, food - so putting something on his plate is a lost cause. I know I've gone wrong, but there never seemed to be an opportunity to go right. Where do I start? (His little sister is a better eater, so I know it's not all my fault...)

And look at this - she answered me:

I'm not an expert on smell sensitivity but I do know that the basic approach is to gradually broaden your son's exposure. But, it sounds like you have other things going on as well. Most importantly, your son is very strong-willed, as you point out. It sounds like there is a lot of control going on too.

I recommend that you start switching up what foods you feed him within his limited diet. If you need to use breakfast foods for lunch, or dinner foods for breakfast, do it. Tell him that now he's old enough to eat like a big boy he has to eat different things for different meals. Don't introduce anything new. Use this technique for a few weeks to break the routine.

Then, slowly start making him stay in the vicinity of food he doesn't want to eat. Start with foods he used to eat, and especially, foods that aren't smelly. An apple is a good example. Insist on good behavior. Make clear the consequences of a tantrum (a timeout or some other appropriate correction). It's ok to reward good behavior too. For instance, every time that he doesn't have a tantrum around food he doesn't like he can earn a star towards something desirable. Remember, don't ask him to eat anything (it's behavior you're rewarding) and don't use food as the reward.

Once these two steps are in place you can begin thinking about how to introduce new foods. Let me know if you want to talk on the phone further about any of this.

Best of luck,

Dina

Isn't that nice? Don't you just love the internet, where you can ask experts random questions and get responses really quickly? The interesting part - to me - maybe you don't care about my thought processes, but you're here, so you get to hear about them - is that I thought I knew what she was going to tell me, and I had already decided that I didn't want to hear it. (Stubborn? Where would he get that from?) I thought she'd tell me that I had to make him sit at the table while we ate our food, even if he ate nothing - which I suppose is what she's aiming for, but she starts out more gently than that.

Leaving aside the practicalities of "making" him do anything - we had a star chart once, but it didn't really go anywhere - I agree that I could discuss it with him and try again, but like an addict, he has to want to get better, and he really couldn't care less if he lives out his whole life eating nothing but peanut-butter and bread. In fact, that probably sounds ideal to him, especially if once he's grown up I won't be able to deny him all the cookies and candy he'd like too.

Sorry, that sentence got derailed back there. Leaving aside the practicalities of "making" him do anything, as I was saying, I don't know if I feel like disrupting our lives that much right now. Here's where you get to feel all superior, because I bet you're stricter about this than I am.

After about three-and-a-half years of angsting and blaming myself and not weaning because it was the only nourishment he got (among other reasons) and searching desperately every day for something to feed him, some time last year we arrived at quite a nice calm place in our mealtime routine. Monkey has breakfast cereal and half a cup of apple juice for breakfast. He has a peanut butter sandwich for lunch, and apple juice, and a tiny dessert item of black-bean brownie or pumpkin bread. He may have a snack in the afternoon - something carby, no doubt, and often a drink of honey milk. And for dinner he has the same as lunch. Vitamins every day. Now and then something different like a bagel or french fries - hey, that's a vegetable! - and now and then some junk for a treat. He doesn't get junk often, but I don't ban it entirely, because that's just asking for trouble. Also, hypocritcal.

These days he usually eats on the step between the kitchen and the family room - my compromise between not letting them eat in the carpeted family room but allowing them to sit and watch the TV sometimes. Now he prefers the step to the table, even with the TV off. Sometimes, if what we're eating is particularly fragrant, he takes his food into the dining room, and I think how lovely it is to have a dining room.

I admit I've fallen off the "dinner at the table" wagon with him. Mabel eats at the table, but usually earlier than B and I eat ours. But here's the thing: I don't care all that much right now. This is not a failing that eats away at my soul and burns into my brain in the wee hours of the morning. I do, very much, value good table manners, and I want children who will sit politely at a meal in a restaurant or someone else's house, and use their cutlery properly, and quietly leave on their plate whatever they don't eat, and eat with their mouths closed and not talk with their mouths full. But this is so far, so very very far ahead of us, that I'm not going to stress myself out about it right now.

Right now I will settle for letting us get through our meal without killing each other, for not throwing knives across the room, for not standing on the table. At home or in public. The rest will come in time.

So will I implement Dina's advice? I'll think about it. I'll discuss a star chart with Monkey and see what we come up with. I'm happy she answered me and didn't say, "Get thee to a psychiatrist stat because that sort of behaviour is documented to go along with psychosis and spawn-of-satan children."

I know I'm not the strictest of parents, and there are many areas where I constantly vaguely intend to do better, and constantly fail (hoovering the family room, for instance). But my Monkey is a bright, interested, loving, thoughtful kid who's finding his own way in this confusing world; I have faith in both of us that he'll come out okay at the other end, and that some day in the distant future, he and I will appreciate a Thai curry or a rhubarb crumble together. With a nice glass of wine or a good beer, perhaps.

I can't think of a good title because I've been in the constant company of my two-year-old for three days and two nights now.

Saturday 1 pm: Mabel fails to take a nap, thanks to her brother's ill-timed wail of anguish as I come in the door with her almost asleep.

6 pm: Mabel finally succumbs to eye-closing. I put her to bed and high-five myself on a night "off" from bedtime.

7-10 pm: Mabel wakes up and requires re-settling every hour on the hour. So much for my night off.

10.30 pm: I go to bed. I stretch out on the freshly laundered sheets. I sigh.

10.31 pm: Mabel wakes up. I give up and go to sleep in her bed.

10.32 pm-1.29 am: Mabel seems to wake up a lot, intermittently. She nurses a lot, intermittently. It's starting to hurt a bit. I wish she'd stop.

1.30 am: Mabel wakes up, suddenly congested. She sneezes twice, and I decide that it's unlikely a couple of dust motes spontaneously inserted themeslves in her nose and that probably she picked up some horrible plague at the birthday party place we went to that morning. I spend the next twenty minutes internally bemoaning another sickness that will pervade the family for weeks on end.

2.00 am: Mabel stops nursing and demands to get up. I tell her it's the middle of the night. She hops out of bed, picks up Yertle the Turtle, and proceeds to "read" it to me. I have to respond to questions about the baby turtles and the daddy turtle and whether they're falling or flying. I wish she'd stop talking and go back to hurting me.

2.30 am: She goes back to hurting me. After a while I think she's dropping off.

2.55 am: She sits up and crows: "He's a llama. He's supposed to be DEAD!" and laughs hysterically. (This is not as random as it sounds. It's a quote from The Emperor's New Groove, which we've been watching non-stop since Christmas, when Santa deposited it in a stocking. (It's very funny, and tends to get overlooked in the Disney canon.))

3.30 am: Still nursing, still hurting, still not asleep.

3.ZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

6.something am: Mabel wakes up for the day. I roll over. Shoot me now.

************************

Sunday 1.00 pm: Nap fail again. No, shoot me now. I mean it.

Delurkuary

Apparently yesterday was national (let's say international, okay?) de-lurking day. That means you are contractually obliged to leave a comment on my blog now you've read this.

Oh go on, please? Just say hi. Tell me who you are, if you like, or where you came here from, or your favourite knock-knock joke.

Faraway hills

Irish things the USA should definitely look into:

When you ask for tea in a cafe in Ireland, you don't get a paper cup of hot water with a teabag on the side, for your (alleged) infusing pleasure. You get a little teapot of tea made with real boiling water, and it's enough to refill your real teacup (with a saucer) about two and a half times. It's so nice to pour yourself some more tea. You also get real milk, probably in a little tiny personal-sized jug. There is no such thing as creamer. And that's good.

The genius of potato waffles. I may have mentioned this before, but every time we're home the humble Bird's Eye Potato Waffle becomes a staple of the kids' meals (well, Mabel's, anyway; Monkey ate one once, I believe, when he was about a year and a half old). I find it hard to believe that the freezer sections of the USA, replete with tater tots and french fries and hash browns, have yet to discover and embrace this simple article, because - here's the brilliance - you can cook it in the toaster. No other shape of potato item functions that way. But apparently North Americans are too attached to their regular waffle waffles to contemplate any other sort of waffle-shaped item. (These are not the same as waffle fries. They're potatoes in a regular waffle shape, not vaguely grid-shaped fries. Yes, there's a difference. Try making waffle fries in the toaster. Well, don't, because that would probably be a bad thing.)

Sausages. In the US, sausages come in many guises - big fat brats, cooked salamis, chorizo from Mexico (not the good stuff from Spain, I hasten to add, which is much harder to find), breakfast links and (urgh) patties. In Ireland, a saussie is a saussie, unless it's a cocktail sausage which is just the same thing only smaller. It's a breakfast sausage, but not remotely like the wizened wrinkly sticks of salt and gristle that we get over here. An Irish sausage is plump and juicy, burnished and conker-brown, glistening and savoury and delicious. Mabel, my little carnivore, thought so too.

American things Ireland could profit from encountering:

The snow shovel. It's not rocket science, lads. Sturdy wooden handle; wide, flat, light, strong plastic shovelling surface, enabling you to move lots of snow quickly, while it's still new and not packed hard. Looks like this, more or less. If they were readily available, perhaps you wouldn't have to mobilise the army to chip the layers of ice off Dublin footpaths quite so often this winter.

Retrospective

When I was about eleven years old, a nice family moved in across the road. They had a girl of 5 and a boy of 2 (and later a new baby), and very soon they began grooming me as a potential babysitter. Or perhaps I began grooming them as potential employers. One or the other.

Either way, I had little in the way of social life or friends right there on our road, and enjoyed hanging out with the little kids. I basically functioned as an unpaid "mother's helper" for a while, without even realising it - but I kept them occupied, kept an eye on them, played with them in the back garden, and generally could be relied on to keep things ticking over safely while their mum got on with making dinner or whatever it was she was doing. They used to take me swimming sometimes, and while I thought they were doing me a big favour by paying my entrance fee to the local swimming pool, in fact my presence meant that their dad could take both kids swimming and leave the mum at home with the new baby only because I was there to lend a hand. It was pretty much a win/win situation.

When I was fourteen I started babysitting them officially, with payment and everything. The kids were very good, went to bed easily, and then I'd watch shows I never saw at home (because they clashed with the holy of holies, the Nine O'Clock News) like Twin Peaks or Thirtysomething, make myself a cup of tea and steal an extra biscuit, and possibly sneak The Joy of Sex off the bookshelf for a surreptitious ten-minute gawp, before putting it back as silently as possible. Sometimes I played Tetris on the Gameboy. Sometimes I even brought my homework. The older kids never woke up, and if the baby did I was instructed to just pat her on the back until she went back to sleep.

They were an interesting family - Dutch mother, Irish father, first two kids born in the Bahamas before they moved back to our neck of the woods. I remember seeing her breastfeed the baby once, and being surprised because the baby was walking by then, perhaps - I really don't know if she was one or two or some other age, but it was one of only two times I ever saw a mother nursing a baby in my growing up years, so perhaps it was surprising by virtue of happening at all.

Back then, babies went down to sleep on their tummies, and the nifty new baby carrier was secured by the seatbelt in the front passenger seat (well, there were probably no airbags), and of course I never questioned my directions to just pat her back to sleep. (I honestly don't remember whether I ached to pick her up or not. I suspect not. I do remember droning over and over "Go back to sleep; Mama be back soon," and wishing for her to calm down; she always did eventually, but I think I downplayed the events to the returning parents.) I never gave her a bottle, but I never changed her nappy either.

Last year, when we were re-doing the kitchen in our new house, I had a brief but intense flirtation with the notion of cork flooring. It would be warm and cushiony underfoot and pleasingly retro to the eye, but was pretty pricey compared to other options. Finally, I realised that the reason I really wanted it, the reason it seemed like the ideal family kitchen flooring to me, was that the family across the road had cork floors. The memory brought back the comforting feeling of sitting on the bench in the sunlight from their big back window, helping the kids eat their fish fingers and peas, or tasting lentil soup for the first time, not one of the littles and not a grownup, but somewhere in the middle, finding my own space.

Little Miss Justify and Young Master Strike-a-Deal

Have you met my children? Let me introduce you.

Little Miss Justify has perfected the art of the injured-sounding response:

- Mabel, don't shout. You're hurting my ears.
- I not shouting, Mukkey. I was just walking.

- Don't touch that, Mabel; you might break it.
- I'm just wooking at it, Mummy.

- Stop kicking the maps, Mabel. (The map books that live in the pocket on the back of the car seat in front of Mabel's place.)
- I not kicking them. I was just bobbling them with my foot. [That should be "bobbewing", I suppose, for verisimilitude.]

While her brother, young Master Strike-a-Deal, will bargain you for anything, even when it's something he wants to do and you have no interest in whatsoever.

- Eat your sandwich, Monkey.
- I know, Mummy, I'll make a deal with you.
- Uh huh?
- I'll eat one of my vitamins and then you can give me a digestive biscuit.
- And your sandwich?
- Well, I don't really want my sandwich. It's not really very cool, Mummy.
- Uh huh. Sandwich.
- Or, listen, Mummy, here's my new idea. I'll eat a digestive biscuit and then - and THEN - I can have a black-bean brownie. Because they're good for me.
- Sandwich.

Hard of heart, piggish of head

I don't know what was up with Miss Mabel last night, but at 2am she awoke, wailed loudly, and declared that she wanted to get up. After a lot of what I shall call distraction by boob ("You want the other side?" "You want the big side?" Lasciviously.) she finally agreed that she'd like some medicine - those last damn molars are definitely coming, but oh so sloooowly - so I took her to the bathroom and poured a dram of Motrin (where a dram is one teaspoon measured in the tiny plastic cup), whereupon she lapped at it half-heartedly with her tongue and refused to drink it. So we went back to bed and recommenced the side-to-side motion (that is, first this side, then the other; repeat ad nauseum). Eventually she fell back to sleep and we both stayed that way until past 7.30 this morning.

I'm a bit sick of coming up with good intentions here and then progressing no further with them, so I'm not going to frame this as a plan; but I might be coming to the point where I will be hard-hearted enough to stop nursing her to sleep. It has occurred to me that by the time Monkey finally slept through the night at 26 months, he had been going to sleep without the boob for 3 or 4 of those, and it's just possible that the two things are not entirely unrelated. I had cut down nursing to three times a day, and then just two, when he was 21 months and I wanted to get pregnant again, and when I was pregnant (and he didn't just give up on his own, as I'd been hoping; but nor was it quite excruciating enough for me to just deny him altogether, as I'd been fearing) I cut out the midday session and started walking him to sleep for nap, and brought forward the evening session to "side on the sofa" before bed. Then first I and later his Dad would lie down with him until he fell asleep.

I know that took some (many? how many? I can't remember; oh cruel head full of holes) long and painful bedtimes before he got the message and would just settle down beside one of us and eventually drop off; I vividly remember holding him on my lap while he refused to lie down but instead thrashed around, sobbing pitifully (him, not me), and thinking how quick and easy it would be to just end this right now by nursing him. Then, later, he would finally drop off lying right on top of me, for maximum entrapment, his head heavily on my head, preferably cutting off all respiration, matricide due to cruel and unusual denial of boob.

But at the time, I had a bigger picture to consider that helped me - and Pushover is my middle name (except when it's Pigheaded) - stick to my guns: I knew we needed to have a new bedtime routine in place well before the new baby arrived. This time, without the spectre (and I mean that in the nicest possible way) of a succeeding infant to maul my boobs in its turn, I haven't had the same pressure to deal with Mabel's bedtime, and have been content to let the daytime nursing wax and wane depending on her mood and our engagements. I still nurse her in public - partly as a lactivist statement, or maybe just because it's fun to be shocking - but now that our travelling is over and we're getting back into our regular busy term-time routine, she'll probably nurse less and I'll try to keep it mostly at home. I really don't want to stop altogether, but I'd feel pretty silly if all this lovely nursing is what's keeping her from learning to stay asleep for more than a couple of hours at a time.

So maybe, soon, it will be time to find out. Of course, last time we didn't have the sleeping pre-schooler to consider when Monkey was making a row and taking hours to conk out. Maybe we need to soundproof Mabel's bedroom first.

Five-second reviews

Harry Potter and The Whatever it is These Days: Harry, Hermione and Ron go camping and get very cold. Other stuff happens. I didn't care, I was just high on the fact that I was watching a movie in the cinema with my husband and no children. It was good, mindless fun. I suspect it would be totally incomprehensible if you hadn't read the book.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society: My optimistic aeroplane book, finished thanks to the total lack of Internet and tiny number of functioning TV channels at my parents' house. It was excellent, just the way I like my books - stealthily educational, tackling a serious subject (the German occupation of Guernsey during WWII) with a light touch and a lovely story. Go and read it, if you haven't already.

Going the Distance: Aeroplane movie #2, all of which I saw, with sound, while Mabel slept on me. The Apple guy and Drew Barrymore fall in love and pursue a long-distance relationship in the current economic climate (i.e. neither of them can just move and expect to find a decent job once they get there). With my extensive experience of LDRs (well, just the one, but a lot of it), this resonated with me, but the ending was annoying. [Spoiler coming up, so look away if you care that much...] When you've wished and hoped to be with your loved one full-time, moving to a city six-hours' drive away is a step in the right direction, but by no means a resolution. In fact, it's almost more annoying to be tantalizingly closer. When I moved to the US, I didn't move to a different city, or my own apartment on the other side of the same city - I moved into my boyfriend's bed, in my boyfriend's bedroom, in my boyfriend's apartment. Anything else would not have sufficed.

Salt: Aeroplane movie #3, mostly without sound, because Mabel woke up. Angelina Jolie is a double, triple, quadruple backward-triple-salka agent. Or is she? All I know is she looks funny as a dusty blonde.

Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow: The weather made me want to re-read this one, when I was within easy reach of my own bookshelf. Funnily enough, I remembered a lot about the first part, in the city; not a lot about the second, on the ship; and nothing at all about the denouement; which made it a satisfying finish, but I still think it meanders too much in the middle.

Fuzzy math

Age I was when I first went out with B, whom I would (much) later marry: 19
Age his niece was then: 2

Age that niece is now: 20
Age our daughter is now: 2

There's some sort of wierd and slightly scary symmetry in there. I don't want to delve too closely into it because I think all it would tell me is that I'm old.

Good things about Monkey's Christmas trip to Ireland when he was four and a half

It wasn't all doom and gloom on the Monkey front. Some things were pretty good, from both our points of view.

My highlights

Walking: For the first trip we've made since the time Monkey was 8 months old, we didn't take the stroller with us. It was a bit of a sacrifice for the airports, where we're used to being able to load it up with all our hand-luggage bits and pieces instead of having to lug them (eponymously, even), but to be honest, hucking them all out again for security and boarding, and taking the wheels off so the Bob would fit through the x-ray machine almost made it not worth it anyway. And, more to the point, these days Mabel will scream blue murder rather than ride in it, while the instant it's around Monkey accesses his lazy gene and hops in for the easy option. So we left it at home (and brought the Ergo for Mabel, of course). And he walked everywhere, with very little complaint. He walked up and down to the train station, up and down to the village, around town (a bit), two-thirds of the way down Dun Laoghaire pier and back, and through endless airport corridors, even when he'd just been woken up, and was generally a superstar about it. I had feared sit-downs and demands for piggy-backs and whining, and there was none of that.

Sleeping: Last year, Monkey's bedtimes in Ireland were a long-drawn-out affair with a lot of calling back, and staying with, and wanting Mummy, and it went on and on half the night. In retrospect, this is because he was coming to the end of needing a nap, but was still napping solidly every day, so that combined with the 5-hour time difference, he just had no need to fall asleep until 10pm, even if we wanted him out of our collective hairs at 8. This year, with naps a thing of the past, he was put to bed and left alone and was out like a light in a while; no muss, no fuss. (Well, some fuss, but a few nights he just wanted to be near me, so he came and slept in the room I was in and his Dad slept in his room.) Huge improvement.

Pooing: When he needed to go, he went. He still wanted to be accompanied, but he went and it was fine. Hooray for poo.

His highlights

Interacting: About half of the time, when not tired and paranoid, Monkey actually did have a really good time playing with his cousins. He ran around happily making cushion forts and jumping on beds with the five-and-a-half-, seven-and-a-half-, and eleven- year-olds, and even shared a lot of giggles on Christmas Day with the 17-year-old (who is fabulous with babies and children, I have to say). It was great to see.

Playing: He went to a fabulous play place called Zoom with dad, his aunt and his 2-year-old cousin one morning while Mabel and I stayed at home sick, and had a wonderful time running, jumping, climbing, and shooting air guns. He even talked to his aunt.

Receiving: Opening presents was declared a good time. He got a telescope with a cool case, a pair of walkie talkies, a voice-changing loud-hailer, Toy Story Lego, books, a pre-loved PowerRanger (red), a motion-sensitive spider robot, and a chocolate santa. And probably more things I'm forgetting.

Pooing: But the absolute number one best thing about Monkey's visit to Ireland, he will tell you, was when he used the automated public toilet that he and his father encountered on a saunter down to James Joyce's Martello tower in Sandycove while Mabel and I visited the doctor (we missed all the best stuff). From the door that opens without a touch, to the soap and water that come out all on their own, to the way you didn't need to flush, it was up and down the most exciting thing about Ireland this year.

To each his own, I suppose.

With the aforementioned 17-year-old cousin.
Does this look like a kid who's having a thoroughly miserable time? I think not.

Appreciating the simple things

The other morning, as Monkey skulked in my parents' sitting room, far from marauding grandparents, and Mabel vociferously demanded something or other, reasonable or otherwise, my father ventured that perhaps it wasn't the best thing for the kids to drag them around the world for short periods of time quite so often. This may have been a hint about moving home permanently - my parents don't quite understand, no matter how much we explain, that we're not staying away because we don't want to come back, we're staying away because there are no jobs for B at home - but I took it more as a criticism of my parenting. (Of course I did. I'm fourteen, remember. Flounce.)

It has crossed my mind, especially this trip, to wonder whether it's fair to the children to pluck them from their everyday routines and subject them to such chaos for a few weeks every year. But mostly, I come down on the side of yes. Maybe fair isn't the right word, but I do think it's good for them to see that the entire world isn't calibrated around their personal whims and desires, even if it looks that way at home because it's easier for us to live that way.

And I really want them to understand that, even though America seems like the centre of the universe - as home always does, wherever it is, when you're a child - it's not the only place in the world. There are other countries, with other ways of doing things, and other people, and they're all quite normal. It's not as if going from the US to Ireland is a huge cultural leap, where people speak the same language (more or less) and the cartoons on TV are often the same - but hey, they don't have all-kids, all-day channels, so sometimes you have to go and do something else. That's a shock right there.

So if there are some missed naps, some late nights, some days when all Monkey eats are chocolate biscuits purloined from first one granny and then the other, well, that's Christmas. We're all that much happier to get back to our normal lives. A change really is as good as a rest. Kind of.

24 hours later

On Monday, I packed with, well, something approaching military precision. The suitcases were a feat of engineering. My hand luggage contained nothing but more nappies than we could possibly need and changes of clothing for each child; and possibly a book for me, in case of miracles. The kids' backpacks had new presents to thrill and delight on the journey. We had left no plug adaptor unaccounted for, no toothbrush adrift, no sock under the bed.

On Tuesday morning the alarm went off at the ungodly hour of 4.30am. We slipped into clothes, roused sleeping children, put the last bags in the car, and pulled out of my parents' driveway in the cold - but thankfully snow-free - darkness (as my Dad stood at the top in his dressing gown and socks to wave us off). We picked up my mother-in-law as arranged (it was her car, so she was driving us to the airport and taking possession again) and thanks to the wonders of the East-Link bridge and the new Dublin Port Tunnel, arrived at our destination on the other side of the city at 5.30.

We joined the throngs that habitually flock to Dublin Airport between 5 and 6 every morning (or maybe just every morning soon after new year's) and found our queue, which wasn't too long. The security check girl asked for our passports and swiped the chips.
"Hm. You're not in the system. Do you have your confirmation printout?"
I sighed the sigh of the jaded traveller who knows the system will cough us up any second. We had misplaced the printout at some point and hadn't bothered to make it again, as you don't really need it these days. It's not like the dark ages when if you forgot your ticket you couldn't fly. But she seemed to want it, so B took out the laptop, scooped up some free wi-fi, and I found the approprate e-mail.
"There, see?"
"Scroll down...yeah, there you are. That's yesterday's flight."

I blinked. I swore. All the breath left my body. The children danced around me shrieking about the new presents they'd just found in their backpacks. Life goes on, even when you've just made an unbelievably stupid mistake. The people behind us in the queue looked on in sympathy, or possibly just amazement. I didn't really see them. The girl told us to go over to the ground service desk and ask them what we should do.

I have never missed a flight. (Well, there was that time I was stuck in Spain because my passport was in Dublin getting a visa for the US and it turned out Europe wasn't quite as borderless as my travel agent had assured me it was, but that was a long time ago...) I'm the one who books the flights, and writes the dates on the calendar, and puts them in my diary, and makes sure we get up in time, and and and. And I had no excuse. Somehow the 4th had got into my head as the day we were flying back, even though when I looked at my diary - finally, too late - there it was, on the 3rd. I almost wished I was pregnant so I'd have something to blame it on.

Well, God bless the Serviceair groundstaff in Dublin, because they are wonderful. And God bless the family of six who didn't make the flight, and I sincerely hope it wasn't for any terrible reason. The nice ladies told us to go and eat breakfast and come back at 7.15, because they wouldn't know how many standby seats were available until check-in closed. B massaged my forehead, where the stress lines were digging in and setting up for a good long session, and was totally wonderful about not saying a word. He didn't even look as if he was refraining from saying a word. The kids opened their new presents and were delighted, and got chocolate muffin all over themselves, and already needed to dig into the spare clothes in my hand luggage.

When we went back to the desk they told us it was looking good, but they couldn't say for sure yet. They had us "profiled" by security - which is just the bit where they ask you if you packed it all yourself and put a tiny sticker on your passport - and we kept our fingers crossed. The lady behind the check-in desk asked me if we'd consider splitting up if they had fewer than four seats. We were just beginning the Solomon-like process of dividing up the children and the suitcases, and pondering who would go ahead and who would slink back to the other side of the city, tail between their legs, admitting what an idiot I'd been, to await the next day's no-shows, when we were called forward and given the all-clear to put our bags on the scales and leg it through security, down the corridors, past duty-free, come to a screeching halt at immigration (you go through immigration in Dublin - saves time and intimidation at the other end) and finally, thanking our lucky stars and anything else we could think of, onto the plane.

The rest of the trip was a cakewalk. Long, tedious, filled with ever more hyped-up-on-sugar and past-their-bedtime children, but so much more lacking in stress.

In 1985 we were on holidays in Brittany (that's northern France) when one lunchtime I happened to peruse the brochure and find that our ferry was leaving on Friday night, not Saturday night as my Dad was thinking. We left that afternoon and drove up quickly instead of taking a nice slow two days for the trip as had been planned. My parents were delighted with their bookworm daughter who would read the label on a can of peas if there was nothing else around.

So in a way, maybe I've had this coming for 25 years. I promise to check my diary next time.

Giant milkshakes and over-tiredness in Atlanta airport. (Yes, we were flying through Atlanta. Which is probably the only reason we managed to get on standby at all, as the New York flight would have been much more oversubscribed.)

Notes from the other side (of the ocean) (or this side, depending on where you are)

This from when there was snow:

I was right: they don't have snow shovels in Ireland. You can't buy them. Everyone who has shovelled snow has done it with a heavy garden spade. If they're lucky, it's one with a square base; otherwise it's a wedge-shaped one that just makes life even more tedious. I saw a man with a rake earlier today, trying to clear behind his car. (A small, flat gardening one, not a big wide leaf-raking one.) There seem to be a lot of brooms employed too.

That said, not many people shovel, unless they have to. (And why would you, if you had to use a big metal yoke that wasn't even a useful shape for shifting stuff any distance?) They look at the footpaths outside their houses and tut-tut about how the county council isn't clearing anything up, but they only dig the bare minimum it takes to get the car out the gate and onto the sandy, mushy, slushy road. Otherwise they just sit at home and wait for it to melt away. Which it will do eventually, but perhaps only to be replaced by more in another few days.

-----------------------------

This from a bit later:

First we were snowed in; then we all got sick. As the plane landed in Dublin, Mabel began to sniffle, and so began the cold that we passed around between us for the entire time away, with a loving personalized touch for each of us: throat for B, sinuses for me, his signature cough for Monkey, and a quick virus for Mabel that gave her two nights of high temperatures and a fun trip to the nice Irish doctor to make sure she didn't have an infection of one sort or another.

In between, there were Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, various encounters with large and small people, family or otherwise, to terrify or mildly intimidate Monkey depending on how he was feeling and how much sleep he'd had, and whether or not he had decided that his shoes were going to be ridiculed by everyone in the greater Dublin area. Mabel, on the other had, lapped up the attention and flounced around the room giving kisses and hugs in a pink dress and a most delightful manner, just about redeeming us as parents who can produce displayable offspring.

Most people were very understanding about her brother and left him alone to warm up, or not, depending on the day. But he did expend an awful lot of energy just hating it and wishing very hard (and very vainly) to be invisible, and I did feel bad for him, to a point. When said point was reached, I'd go away and converse with an adult, and possibly charitably send his father to spell me in the cold room with the plate of congealing cocktail sausages where Monkey skulked in the narrow gap between the sofa and the radiator, hiding his shoes, for the entire duration of the party, as his cousins happily shrieked and played chasing all over somebody else's house. At least his father was able to locate the problem with the DVD player (needed to be plugged in) and start the Disney movie that had been acquired for the purpose.

--------------------

This from today:

I hope my children are nicer to me when I'm old than I am to my parents. I know it's a failing, but there's not much I can do about it. B does sterling work running interference, and having conversations where I'd just sit there grumpily like the teenager to which I have regressed (and I'm sick, okay, so don't bug me...), and politely turning down offers of food and explaining again where we're going and that we won't need lunch. I think we might need to work out something different next time, though. It's not getting any better, and while they've loved having Mabel in the house - and vice versa - Monkey has spent the entire two and a half weeks being "shy" and refusing to talk to his grandparents. Which was okay at first, but at this stage it's just plain rude, but there's nothing I can do but field their bemused questions about whether all boys go through this phase or if it's just American children (arrrgh), and remarking once again that I was never like that.

---------------------

I will be back with fun anecdotes and nice pictures when my sinuses feel better, I promise. I hope all your holiday times were lovely and just snowy enough. We had our first white Christmas this year, and we're quite over it, thank you. Mr Crosby has a lot to answer for.