The village it takes

I spent the morning at the open house for our nursery school, partly chatting to prospective new parents (I mean, parents of prospective new pupils), partly watching Mabel flit from one favourite play area to another - now the playdough, now the babies, now the watercolours - and mostly snaffling cookies and other nibbles to keep up my blood sugar. I'd brought lemon scones along, and I had to check out the competition.

I love our school. Because Monkey is still there, Mabel gets automatic entry for next year, so I didn't have to worry about beating the crowd in some undefined way to get a hotly contested place. They don't interview the kids, or test them or anything, so it's not competitive in the manner of NYC preschools, for instance, but I know several people who turned in applications last year and yet didn't get in. As far as I know, they're offered on the basis of age and having a gender balance in the class, and it's a great thing for the school to be oversubscribed, but I have several friends who will be biting their nails down to the cuticles for another month or so as they contemplate one more year at home with their darling two-year-olds.

To be honest, we didn't even look at any other nursery schools when Monkey was two. I had heard good things about this one, it was local and didn't require the kids to be potty trained. That basically accounted for all my criteria. We went to the open house and it just felt the way I expected a nursery school to be: not all that different from when I was three. There were easels to paint on and playdough to squish and lots of toys and dolls and a play kitchen and little tables and chairs, and coathooks down low along the walls. Each kid had a tub with their name and photo on it under their hook, and the walls were covered in daubed, crumpled, or glittery artwork. I'm not really sure what more you could look for.

Today I watched lots of new parents come in the door for the first time, many of whom I already knew from the classes and playgroups we participate in locally. If all our friends are lucky, Mabel will probably be on first-name, hair-pulling basis with more than half her class before they even begin the year. And I'll be lucky to have another great group of mums (and dads) to co-op with on the days when it's our turn to help out at school.

The other parents really are my co-workers, whether we're at school or in the playground. They're the people I see more days than not, who form my social circle and are my real-life peers in this game of parenting. (As opposed to my online peers, whom I cannot discount as an important influence and vital other support system, both those I know personally and those who have never been more than names - and sometimes photos - on a screen.) We let our kids bogart each other's snacks, we pull the agressor off the agressee, we grab a passing runaway and return them gently but unceremoniously to their owner, we provide a push or an observing eye or a help down on the playground, we eat lunch together on Wednesdays, and once or twice we might even get to shed our workaday persona and have a night out, where we go crazy with a beer or a margarita and some nachos, and converse without juvenile interruption for the first time ever.

Puzzling

Monkey is finally getting the hang of jigsaws. We took out a 24-piece one today that he got for his last birthday (if not the one before that; it's marked age 3-7) and with a little help made it three times.

The trick, I realised, or problem if you look at it another way, is that he can't understand what I mean by "straight edges," so telling him to separate out the edge pieces first (as Special Agent Oso taught us to do back when we had the Disney Channel) is useless and frustrating to him. He looks at a piece and sees straight edges all over it, wherever it's not a definite curve.

So I stopped talking about edges and saw that he had already put together two sets of two pieces that were obvious matches. I asked him to find all the pieces of hand next (it's a rescue guy dangling from a helicopter reaching out a hand, drawn from the perspective of the rescuee, so the hand is huge and the rest of the man much smaller; such an odd picture to expect a child to figure out), as they're all the same colour. Then we did the helicopter, fitting larger pieces together as we we went along, and then we could easily fill in the last bits. He still tries to fit a corner piece right into the center, but I keep my mouth shut (mostly). Presumably at some point, just like with everything else, it will click and he'll understand what I was on about all along.

I think observing someone do a jigsaw must say a lot about how their mind works. I could probably work some finely crafted metaphor around it too. But I think I'll just mention that it's very nice to watch your almost-five-year-old work out a jigsaw for himself. (Especially while the toddler is napping and you have a cup of tea in hand.)

Forward motion

Monkey's parent-teacher conference was this morning. I abandoned the kids at a handily situated playgroup (in the charge of all the moms in general and one in particular) and ran up the path to the school. Then I lurked selfconsciously in the corridor peering through the window at intervals and trying to think charitable thoughts while the mother ahead of me ran over time by five minutes. Maybe they were running late, or maybe her kid just has lots of Issues.

Anyway, his teachers are perfectly happy with him. He needs to work on putting up his hand and waiting to be asked before volunteering information. (Yes. I can see that. Even before I leave in the mornings, when they go to sit down for circle time, he's bouncing up in the teacher's face informing her of something or other. He likes to sit right up at the front. The idea of shaming someone for "licking up" to the teacher clearly hasn't got to the four-year-old set yet, for which I am grateful.) He needs to work on resolving conflicts by himself. (Aha. I wonder whether they noted that any member of his class was particularly good at solving conflicts without help.) He needs to work on fine motor skills like writing his name and using scissors - but he's no further behind with those things than any of the other boys. (I'm the one who said "boys" when I asked about that. The teachers admitted that probably the girls are better at that stuff.) And it would be nice if he said "No, thank you" instead of "I don't like that," when refusing food. Everything else is fine.

I asked the teachers if they'd ever thought that perhaps his food issues were part of a bigger whole; mentioned the words "sensitivities" and "autism spectrum" and his cousin who has Aspergers. They said they'd never considered that at all. He interacts perfectly normally with adults and his classmates, and there were no red flags raised by anything. They admitted that yes, he is probably the most picky child they've ever had; but hey, it's nice to be remembered for something.

So I'm pretty happy about that. I had been increasingly thinking that he's coming out of this phase, and that - food issues excepted - that's really all it was. We were in two unfamiliar situations this week - one party with lots of strangers and one playgroup at a new house - and he was only normally shy at the party, and not at all at the playgroup. The word "cripplingly" did not cross my mind.

He even took a bite of a strawberry the other day. An honest-to-God bite. I know it sounds absurd, but this child has never ever done that before. The most I could get him to do was stick out his tongue and touch it to a strawberry. He hasn't even had a strawberry-inclusive smoothie for a long long time. But he came to me and said he'd like to try one, and he did, and chewed it and swallowed it and said he'd do it again the next day. The next day he had a smaller bite, but still a bite. Today he didn't have any and now his sister has eaten all the strawberries, but it's a start.

Balls of meat

I have been hanging around smitten kitchen a bit too much lately, mouth watering at the delicious photography and the beautiful recipes, and as a result I have decided to blog tonight's dinner.

Usually I disagree with the idea of stealth vegetables, a la Jessica Seinfeld, because I think kids (or adults) should (a) know what they're eating and (b) not get the idea that a wide selection of cakes forms a balanced diet, even if it does. I also think it's too much work. I do make black-bean brownies for Monkey's school lunch "dessert", but he knows there are beans in them and is proud of the fact. (He also knows there's a little instant coffee powder in the recipe, and enjoys scandalising adults by telling them that there's coffee in it. In his mind, I may as well have made them on straight gin. If he knew what gin was.)

Pre-pureed sauce

Anyway, I had a head of cauliflower, and I didn't have any red pepper, which I would often use to veg-up a tomato sauce. So I sauteed the cauliflower with the onion and then pureed the whole lot with my handheld whizzer device after I'd added two cans of tomatoes. It sort of worked, in that you couldn't taste the cauliflower, and it wasn't yucky. On the other hand, it had a bit of an unusual consistency going on, and the colour wasn't quite the rich red one expects from a straight tomato sauce. I still prefer my cauliflower roasted with lemon, parm and garlic, but that would have been extra work. This made it a one-pot meal.

Meatballs going in - I like little ones

I hadn't made baked meatballs before, always afraid they'd be dried out and crumbly, but they turned out to be just as tasty as the fried ones, and so much less work. I will probably never fry a meatball again.

I mostly made up the recipe, but it was a pound of (organic) minced (ground) beef mixed with an egg, some breadcrumbs (I used panko because that's what I had to hand), a couple of teaspoons of pesto, a tablespoon or so of grated parmesan, and some finely diced and sauteed onion. (I did the onion before starting the sauce, which also started with chopped sauteed onion, so it was hardly any extra work, just a little more careful chopping and some extra standing around.) I think it's a variation on a recipe from the first Avoca cookbook.

Then I baked them at 400 F for about 15 minutes, until they looked done, and transferred them to the sauce where they simmered for another 15 minutes or so.

Meatballs, meet saucy goodness

I like my meatballs with rice, as Nigella suggests, rather than spagetti. And my rice is almost always basmati, because it cooks in ten minutes. I use twice as much water as rice, put a glass lid on, turn the heat up till it boils, turn the heat all the way down and set the timer for ten minutes, and at the beep it's perfect. Five or ten minutes sitting waiting does it no harm at all and lets any excess water steam off.

I don't know who put that measuring jug at the other end of the table

Dinner is served. There's enough for tomorrow, and one serving for the freezer.

Girl, interrupting

Car rides with my children can be challenging. (Car rides with my children plus one more, all three in pinching/scratching distance across the back seat, qualify as instant birth control. I finally figured out why minivans are so popular: it's not that you can't fit three in the back of a regular car, it's that you need to allow for buffer zones.)

But on a normal day, Monkey is in his booster seat on one side, and Mabel is in her carseat on the other, and they get along quite nicely, comparitively speaking, and oh dear, all the orange chocolate chips seem to have ended up at the bottom of this bag of cookies and I just keep pulling them out somewhat in the manner of Little Jack Horner...

Sorry, where was I? Yes, all is hunky dory in the back seat except for one tiny problem. Monkey is at a lovely stage where he's interested in how things work and what things do (no change there) and also old enough to understand more complicated explanations. I love nothing more than the chance to explain things to people, and he loves nothing more than having me or his Dad take the time to explain something to him that he's genuinely interested in. But. Mabel does not appreciate this. As soon as we pick Monkey up from school, or set off for the supermarket or whatever, and Monkey asks some interesting question like why we get dizzy when we turn around, or where we get food from, Mabel yells. To drown us out. Because I'm talking to him and she's not involved.

Like this:

Monkey: Mummy, are houses stronger than metal?
Me: Well, it depends on the metal. And on the part of the house you're talking about. Some metals are stronger than others, you know?
Monkey: Ohhhh. What's a really ----
Mabel: "Mummmmmmmmaaaaaaaaay!"
Monkey: What's a ---
Mabel: Aaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!
Me: Iron, for instance ---
Mabel: Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
Me: Iron is a strong ---
Mabel: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
Monkey: What's a strong ---
Mabel: Mummmmaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyy!
Me: Yes, Mabel. Monkey and I were just having a conversation, you know. You could listen too.
Mabel: Mummmmmaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyy!!!!!
Me: Yes, Mabel. Is there something you want to say to me?
Mabel: Ummmm... [has to come up with some spurious subject quickly; falls back on old faithful] Why did the chicken cross the road?


On Saturday we were all in the car, and Monkey was telling us his idea about why we might get dizzy: "Because the air is pressing down on us, from the Earth turning around, and that makes us dizzy."
I responded, "That's a very interesting hypothesis, but I'm not sure it's quite right. I have another idea..."
Mabel, tired of this science, interjected: "Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah."
"Mabel, Monkey was just telling us his hypothesis about why we get dizzy. Do you have something you want to tell us?"
"Waaaaaaahhhhhh. [Sobs] I have a hi-pop-epis.... "

Naked ambition

Mabel sat up in bed at 6.55 this morning and addressed me as follows:

"Daddy and Monkey have penises."

I assented without opening my eyes. She continued, reassuringly:

"When you and me have penises, we'll be able to pee standing up."

Tell me a story

This blog is anonymous, right? And those of you who know me won't out me, right? Because there's something that just tends to bring out the snark in me on a weekly basis, and I realise that if I really hated it all that much, I could just not go, but sometimes half the fun is in the complaining, you know?

It's Storytime at our local library.

I used to go along with Monkey, way back in the day - in fact, it's where I met my American Best Friend. At that point it was run by a sweet, well-meaning older lady who asked us to keep our babies on our laps and got a bit snippy if we tried to bring out snacks to distract them with. I know that there's meant to be no food or drink in the library, but how else are you supposed to keep a wriggly toddler on your lap while they're patently not interested in the story being told? Some other days there was a nice younger librarian with the fatal flaw of having a first language that was not English. Her mispronounciations of nursery rhymes had us gritting our teeth and wincing. One day I was asked once again to keep my baby on my lap - and this was my Active Baby Mark I, remember, who as a toddler was even less likely to sit still than his sister is now - and I just upped and left. In high dudgeon, no less. We camped out on the grass outside the library and ate snacks to our hearts' content, and were soon joined by two other rebels (and their mothers; or was it the other way round?) and together we vowed never again to darken Storytime's doorstep.

But time moves on, people have second children, librarians come and go, libraries close for refurbishment, and when they reopen some naive parents might think that maybe it's time to give Storytime another shot. Well, yesterday was our third week there, and I think it's safe to say that things have not improved on Walton Mountain. The current storytelling librarian, well-meaning as always, is totally tone deaf and sings the introductory song as if he'd heard tell of this thing called music but didn't quite know how it worked. Next he proceeds to suck all the joy out of a couple of well-loved, amusing, and probably award-winning children's books: yesterday we had Where The Wild Things Are, and I had to sit on my hands and sing One Dozen Monkeys* in my head to stop myself from groaning aloud as I listened to him stumble over the words and inject no emotion at all into one of my very favourite read-aloud books.

Meanwhile, Mabel had six friends (and two strangers) in the room, with their mothers, and all the two-year-olds milled around like a mathematical diagram for chaos theory; now congregating around the tiny baby to sneeze some germs on him, now leaping on one random mum who apparently had covered herself in baby-nip for the occassion, now wailing for mumeet (mine), now watching in amazement as one of their peers nurses (the others)...

So why don't you go somewhere else, you ask? Because all our friends are there (also carping at the horror of our ritual Thursday morning torture session), because it's handily situated right between the nursery school and the playground, because it's local, because we're gluttons for punishment and can't believe it'll be that bad again next week. Also because the kids seem to enjoy something about it - maybe dancing around to the two interactive songs-on-tape that are the same Every Single Week, or maybe just being shut in a room with a bunch of friends and some adults who can't escape.

Or maybe just because then we can all go to the playground and bitch about how terrible Storytime is. It brings a community together.




*One Dozen Monkeys by They Might Be Giants. A friend posted it to Facebook the other day, and my children made me play it approximately 147 times and I went to bed that night with it going round and round and round in my head. Luckily, it's very good. So you should have a listen. (Just beware before you play it near your kids.)

Top gear

Monkey wants to body-paint himself red. Except his eyes, because he's very sensible. I'm not exactly sure why, but apparently it will provide camouflage (when he's on the red chair, I'm assuming) and help him to defeat baddies. He promises to take a bath as soon as the baddies have been defeated. I think we should teach him the word "vanquish" next.

I hope this desire wears off soon, before he goes looking for a paintbrush.

The weather was beautiful today. We went out on the back deck and I fished the easel (warped from being left out in the rain one - or seven - too many times last summer) out of the shed. It was soon abandoned in favour of making trails with the sidewalk chalk all over the deck itself, and then on the driveway out the front. Monkey was drawing long wiggly lines and then having me make a movie on my camera of him walking thrillingly along them. (I know you'd love me to post one of these engrossing pieces of cinematographic genius, but I think I'll keep them to myself.) Mabel was having an involved conversation with her doll, and her horse, who were sharing the dolly stroller.

I made the mistake of leaning against the front of the car. And then raising my feet so I was perched on the bonnet (hood). Big mistake. Huge mistake. Mabel looked up, decided sitting on the car was the most fun thing ever, and scrambled up to join me. I abruptly removed her, stated that nobody would be sitting on any cars, and she went back to the chalk, or her baby, or whatever it was.

The battery light on my camera started flashing and I took Monkey in to show him how I had to put it into its little holder and plug it into the wall. When we came back out we found in front of us something approximating this (excuse my lack of Photoshop, so I have to do it in text):

BABY
CAR

I would have taken a photo, but I was too busy grabbing her before the neighbours called CPS. Also, the camera was plugged into the wall in the house. But take it from me, you don't want to find your two-year-old perched like a grinning maniac in between the bars of the roof rack of your pale green Subaru Outback. It's just not a Good Thing, you know.

VD

God be with the days, as you might say, when Valentine's Day was all about your secret crush, and wondering whether somehow they might send you a totally anonymous card, even though they didn't know you existed or where you lived or really anything about you. And about dangerously fantasizing about the notion of sending a card to them, and how close you could go to letting them know who it was from without signing it in any way - because as far as we were concerned a Valentine wasn't a Valentine if it was signed with an actual name. They were supposed to be from secret admirers. (If you got one from your dad, that was just sad.) I remember one girl in our class did actually send her not-quite-boyfriend-yet an unsigned card when we were about 15, and I'm pretty sure we all got to admire the card before it was sent off. (Either that or we were shown her mystery card from him; one or the other but either way it sticks in my memory because that girl was never ever me.)

And God also be with the days when V-day was about shaving your legs really carefully and sourcing a lacy little black number and trying to get a table for 8pm in a nice restaurant, when all the restaurants in Dublin had grown wise to the 8pm-ers and realised that they could herd the idiot masses in for two sittings at 7 and 10 and get twice as many covers for their buck. I always hated going out for dinner on Valentine's Day anyway - or the associated Saturday - to be surrounded by other couples all dutifully doing their duty as couples and having dinner out and trying their damndest to think of meaningful nothings to say to their sweetheart without just resorting to making observations on all the other couples in the room.

Yesterday's celebrated day was marked mostly by me trying to get Monkey to sign his name seventeen times in the previous days: once for each member of his class, each of whom was required to be brought a card. This probably sounds totally normal to my USA-ian readers, and bizarre to my Irish readers. How it sounds to my reader in Moldova I have no idea, but I'd love to know, if you'd care to comment. (Please? Oh please?) The cards didn't have to be fancy, or even homemade, so I embraced the first part of that sentence and wrote the recipient's name at the top of 17 pieces of card, let Monkey stick stickers or draw elaborate curves denoting electricity (he said) on them, and just asked him to sign his name at the bottom.

(Okay, I admit I helped out a little more by writing "Happy Valentine's Day" in purple sparkly biro in the middle, and may have put a couple of pink sparkly hearts on some of the girls' ones, but mostly I decided that when you have a 4-year-old boy, it's okay to let the cards look like a 4-year-old boy (who has not, as yet, shown any inclination to follow in his architect/watercolourist grandfather's footprints, more's the pity) made them.)

The thing is, I see his teachers' point. Not only does this avoid any of the "she likes him more than me" traumas, because everyone gets a card from everyone, but Monkey's signature improved drastically from the first card - where his wobbly letters, went around the corner and I had to append a translation in parentheses below just in case - to the last several, where the letters were the perfect size to fit across the bottom and were all more or less the right shape. (His lowercase e's are a little more spiral-like than they should be, but that just makes them cute: they're the right way round, but he starts at the loose end instead of in the middle.)

So that was my Valentine's Day this year. Oh, and someone apparently hid a bottle of Rosemont Shiraz behind the fire extinguisher on the kitchen counter. No idea how that happened.

Coda

Mabel likes words. She likes long words, and compound words, and synonyms, and sometimes she just likes to use words even when she's not quite sure what they mean.

In the playground opposite the library there's a metal bouncy turtle thingy. You can sit on it and bounce. More interestingly to most of the children, it has a hole at the front and a hole at the back, enabling you to feed it sticks, and make it poop them out at the other end.

This afternoon we took advantage of the milder weather and stopped by the playground on our way home from the supermarket. After some climbing and some swinging and some sliding, Monkey was feeding the turtle while Mabel crouched at his other end like a consciencious proctologist and poked around his nether regions with a twig.

"I'm just making the poo come out," she told me. "With my epilogue."

Lactivist-in-action

So this morning we went to the nurse-in at the Hirshhorn, which really does have two h's in its name. (Wait, three.)

There was a woman outside handing out little laminated cards with the right-to-breastfeeding law printed on it - the federal law and the state laws for DC, Maryland and Virginia. Handy to have on your person if you think you might have to defend what you're doing to antsy security guards, for instance.

We were shuffled upstairs to the third floor, which at first I felt was a little like sending the crazy ladies away where they wouldn't inconvenience anyone, but actually half the exhibition is up there (the other half being down in the basement - the entrance level is just the shop). We came up the escalator to a lovely plethora of mothers and babies, sitting on the benches and against the walls nursing, nursing while walking around, nursing in carriers, and just chatting and laughing. There were plenty of dads too, and siblings. I sat down in a nice leather chair and offered Mabel some mumeet. For the first time in living memory, she refused and asked for snacks instead. "No," I replied, "it's time to have some mumeet." She ran away laughing. So much for my lactivism.

We wandered (that is, chased the two-year-old) around the exhibits (hey, I can do modern art - big canvas, blue paint, Bob's your uncle), bumped into a friend and her daughter, smiled at all the babies and the commotion, noted the presence of the news cameras, and finally Mabel deigned to get down to business and have a wee dram of the good stuff. Three minutes and we were done. Oh, for a newborn who would have let me sit there all morning. Still, Monkey was militating to go downstairs and eat his snacks - I assumed that food and drink on the other floors would be verboten - so we couldn't really tarry.

The Hirshhorn knew what it was doing when it welcomed the nurse-in: it was great PR and they probably had five times more visitors than on an average Saturday morning in February. We'd never been there before, and while it's not particularly my cup of tea (and they don't even have a cafe, so there were no cups of tea at all), it's a lovely space. In fact, I can imagine that, on a regular emptier day, it would be just the sort of area I'd have been delighted with as a newly nursing mum - lots of nice comfy chairs and handy benches where I would assume I could just sit down for a few minutes and quietly nurse the baby without bothering anyone.

I hope that's what it will be from now on.

Organic (which is another word for random)

Last night I couldn't sleep because I'd been looking up flights and ferries and prices and timetables for our summer trip before I went to bed, so of course then I had to mentally pack for everyone and make the stroller/no-stroller decision and work out what new clothes the kids would need and so on, in between swallowing to see if my throat was getting more or less sore as the night went on, and being roused by Mabel here and there and now and then.

At some point I had written a great blog post in my head. Sadly, I can't remember a word of it now, except that there was something very amusing/clever about putting the weather in time-out, or possibly sending it to sit on the naughty step. I have a nasty suspicion that none of it actually made a jot of sense. That's always a risk of sleep-blogging, I suppose.

So now me and my big fat slime-filled nose, and my sinuses that are once again making their presence felt, and my throat which has actually backed down for the time being, have nothing to tell you. I'm out of my favourite white tea with mint, which I only drink when I'm sick: in fact, the way I can tell that I'm sick is that I start to pull the regular tea and the instant coffee and the honey bear out of their cupboard and look behind them for the fancy Stash box that sit mostly unmolested from one end of the year to the other.

Monkey wants me to make muffins out of chocolate chips, a big pile of sugar, and some peanut butter. I don't have the energy to get into the whole chemistry of baking with him just now (as if I actually know), but he won't believe me when I say that will just make a big mess, not muffins. Oh, and sprinkles on top. I forgot the sprinkles. Well, I suppose that changes everything.

I keep finding liquid soap smeared on the wall or the mirror in the bathroom. In a similar experimental vein, he's putting it there to see what will happen the next day, in case it turns into metal, or stone, or the much-sought-after secret formula for Spider-Man's webs (so far he's suggested water, snot, and peanut butter, all of which notions I have cruelly and unreasonably shot down). What usually happens, in actuality, is that I find it, mutter imprecations, wipe it off, and come back out to explain once again that soap will just turn into dried-up soap.

I am happy that I will not be his science teacher. I predict explosions.

For the record, the gorilla feet are on my husband's side of the family

- I have a great idea, Mummy.
- Oh yes? Can you get dressed?
- I can have wings! We can make me wings! Big wings that I can fly with.
- Like Icarus? Remember what happened to him?
- No, from paper! So they'll be really light and able to fly.
- M-hmm?
- I can have wings and then I'll be able to fly like a superhero. And we'll cover me with white, to make me light. [I wonder if he was conflating light=not heavy with light=not dark.]
- Yes. Get dressed.
- Can we make me wings? Now? Or you can make me wings while I'm at school, and then when I come home at lunchtime I'll be able to fly. Okay, Mummy?
- No. No, I'm not making you wings. Get dressed. And blow your nose.
- But I have to be able to fly. Because I'm a superhero. I really am.
- No, you're not. It's a game. You would like to be a superhero. We pretend you're a superhero.
- No, I really am a superhero. Because who else could be as fast as this? What boy could be as fast as this? No other boy that is four and three-quarters [he's very pleased with his new designation] can be this fast. Except K___. He's a superhero too.
- Okay, fine, you're a superhero. But you still can't paint your underpants white.
- But, Mummy. We're a superhero family, remember? Your superpower is to have gorilla feet. And so is mine, but mine is to be really really fast as well. I have lots of superpowers and you just have one.
- Oh good, thank you. Clothes. Now.
- But Mummy.

By the numbers

Time of event: 5.20am

Number of wails that shattered the slumber of the household: Just 1, but that was enough.

Number of parents who went to see what was up: 1

Number of parents who wisely stayed out of it: The other 1

Number of toddlers who insisted on being brought along: 1

Weight of said toddler when carried by zombie-like parent at 5.20am: Approx 150lbs

Number of nostrils that were not working, according to upset preschooler: 1

Number of nostrils that were, therefore, working just fine: 1

Degree to which the whole thing annoyed me: The nth

Hours of remaining sleep I was afraid I had been done out of: 2

Chances of getting the also-congested toddler back to sleep: Slim

Chances of preschooler going back to sleep: None

Likelihood of my being the parent who got up with the preschooler: Big fat zero

Hours of sleep I in fact did subsequently get: About 1

Net gain: Vicks Baby Vapo-Rub, in which I should have bought shares

Decent exposure

Next Saturday, I might be going downtown again, this time to flash some security guards.

There's a nurse-in planned at the Hirshhorn Museum, where a mother a few weeks ago was told by more than one security guard to feed her baby in the restroom. There was no chair or otherwise designated breastfeeding area in the restroom. The law states that a mother may nurse her baby anywhere she and her baby are allowed to be, even if part of her breast is exposed during feeding. If we can't even get people to respect that, here in the fairly left-leaning nation's capital, what hope do women in more far-flung, more conservative areas have?

I'm trying not to nurse Mabel much in public these days. I am, at least, making an effort to have snacks with me and offer them first, or try to distract her. It's not because I'm embarrassed to nurse my two-year-old in front of other people: it's just that I'd like us to start winding down and that's a good way to begin.

However, if I have to briefly take a retrograde step and sit down in a public building with the express purpose of breastfeeding my toddler, I will do that to ensure that everyone else has the right to do it too. It's not about exhibitionism. It's not about thumbing my nose at other people's sensibilities. It's not about being contrary. It's about basic rights for mothers and babies, and helping normalise the act of breastfeeding for everyone.

No, I don't have to whip out a boob to feed my toddler. She can eat big-girl food. But if she was under six months old, that would be all the food she'd be getting. Why should a mother feel she has to hide a wriggly baby under a "modesty" cover - which, as far as I can see, just enrages babies and calls attention to what you're doing in a way that simply lifting your shirt and hiding everything with a baby on your lap rarely does? Or that she'd better pump at home, decant to a bottle, bring the bottle along, and feed the baby that way to avoid embarrasing others while out and about?

Some babies don't take to bottles and refuse to drink from them. Some mothers can't pump more than an ounce or two. (Me, last time I tried, for instance, though my supply is far from paltry.) Some mothers can't afford a pump anyway. Most mothers have other things to do, and really don't want another thing to have to remember before heading out for the day. One of the wonderful things about breastfeeding is the ability to just go, with the bare minimum of stuff attached. You always have the food, it's always the right temperature, it's always sterilised, and there's always enough.

But even if you do see a mother breastfeeding a baby who can walk, or - horrors! - talk? What of it? Would you rather listen to a screaming toddler meltdown? All the way home on the train? Wouldn't it be so much nicer all round if the mother held her baby close and comforted him or her, quietly, making everyone happy? You probably wouldn't even have noticed them. That's what nursing can do - even on the DC Metro System where if you stick to the letter of the law you may not feed your poor tired grumpy child so much as a goldfish cracker without transgressing Metro rules. (Here I am compelled to note that I do not stick to the letter of this law. My children have eaten more than one goldfish in Metro stations and on Metro trains. Am I alone?)

The bottom line for me is that if nobody ever nurses in public, then nobody will ever nurse in public. Breastfeeding whenever, wherever, should be normal, unexceptional, not-head-turning. If some of us have to turn a few heads in order to help make it that way, I'm up for that too.

Air, space, boots, shortbread

This morning we took advantage of where we live, and the fact that we were up relatively early, and went into DC to the Air and Space Museum. It has all sorts of mind-boggling things like nuclear rockets and moon modules and astronaut suits, and, as with the Natural History Museum, every time we go Monkey understands a little more and learns something new. (Mabel, not so much just yet.)

The trip started inauspiciously with a bad-parenting attack from me: Monkey has been wearing his rain boots for weeks, basically ever since he started putting on his socks instead of making me do it. Until today I didn't care too much, but this morning I decided that I was sick of seeing his jeans tucked into his socks and, since it's sunny and lovely out, there was no reason for the boots.

I put my foot down and put the boots up, out of reach. Monkey pitched a fit. I realised I had backed myself into a corner, and he was never going to acquiesce to his perfectly reasonable shoes (either pair). B appeared on the horizon and I thought, oh good, a good cop to my bad, who can make the peace, probably by giving in and retrieving the damn boots. Unfortunately, B didn't realise that he had to be good cop for a change, and went the worse-cop route instead, first trying to force the shoes on and then stuffing socked Monkey into the car along with the unattached shoes.

I felt bad, because the boots were only hurting my aesthetic sensibilities and possibly Monkey's arches, and weren't really worth fighting over. Monkey felt bad because he was powerless and we'd just rubbed his nose in it. Mabel stepped in to lighten the mood with a rendition of Old Mac Donald, and soon we were all discussing just which animals mooed and ribbitted and quacked. When we found a parking space (go downtown early on a Sunday morning and you can practically park on the Mall, for free, it's wonderful) Monkey was bribed to put on his shoes with the lure of a simulator ride at the museum, and peace reigned. It was nice to see his ankles again, but I'm not sure if the price was too high. We'll see what happens next time we go out.

By the time we had exhausted the rockets and the simulators and a snack, it was almost naptime, and we headed back to the car. Mabel had wrapped up in her napkin the last bite of the shortbread square we had shared, and she caressed the gradually disintegrating confection as we drove:

You're a tiny wittle baby. You're all cwumbuwy [crumbly].
I have a onesie for you. You have to put on your onesie or you'll be cold. [Pulls the napkin more tightly around the shortbread.]
Now you're all cosy.
Here's my tiny wittle baby [...repeat to fade]

When we got home, all that was left of the tiny little baby and its onesie was a fine coating of crumbs in Mabel's lap and a small pile of shredded paper.

Enlisted

I have a list in my mind. The first item on it is "Make a list."

I am a list-maker. I like writing things down, and crossing them off. I don't like doing the things in the middle there, but sometimes that happens too. Sometimes the stars align wonderfully and I get to cross things off without ever having done them. When I was pregnant my list-making reached epic proportions, of course. I have been known to have lists of the lists I need to make.

But for some reason, lately, my list-making seems to have fallen off. I have an ongoing shopping list, which is as close to meal planning as I get most weeks before I set off for the supermarket and let fate have its way with my debit card, and I have a few virtual sticky notes on my computer desktop, most of which have been being ignored for several months now, but that's about it.

And when I said "some reason", up there, I can tell you that it's not because now that I'm no longer pregnant or in the fuzzy land of post-partum, my mind is sharp and steel-trap-like and I have no need to write things down to remember them. No, a large part of "some reason" is Mabel, and her affinity for pens. And notebooks. And "writing" all over everything she can get her hands on. Added to that is her new desire to help me with cooking by dragging a chair over to the counter and standing up where she can see me, which happens to be just where I keep my big and little notebooks and all the pens. So then I move the pens out of her reach, and she can get the knives instead. So I give back the pens and let her scribble all over my shopping list, so that I can just make Monkey's sandwich or chop an onion, or whatever it was I was trying to do, in peace.

She has her own notebooks, of course. But mine are so much better. And pens work much better on skin than crayons do, you know, because naturally at some point the paper runs out and she becomes her own canvas, until I see what she's doing and she jumps guiltily and runs away in delight, and that's exactly when I've started chopping the garlic or taking out the raw chicken or breaking an egg so I have to wash my hands before I can follow to wrest the implement from her manic, good-sofa-seeking hands.

At the moment, I'm just about staying on the right side of this (go and look, it's hilarious). But I think I need to start writing lists again, or I'll forget to do something quite important, like booking our summer holidays or getting Monkey enrolled in elementary school. The big question is where will I keep my pens?

Disjointed

See, now I feel like I was being overly dramatic yesterday and today I just have a perfectly regular four-year-old boy who's a picky eater. And in case anyone [wind whistles, crickets chirp, tumbleweeds tumble] was wondering what was up with the extra-cryptic post title, that was because I had a paragraph where I was talking about "the spectrum", but then I deleted it. And forgot that it was the only thing even vaguely tying in the title. Spectrum = rainbow = through a prism: gettit? Ah well.

On to more amusing items.

Mabel has decided that when she's bigger she'll be a boy. She announced this to the man in the supermarket the other day: "When I'm grown up I'll have a penis." This sort of thing is so old-hat to me now that I hardly even blushed. I pretty much stood there to see what she'd say next. Which turned out to be: "My daddy has a penis." The poor supermarket man wisely decided to not quite understand her (though it was clear enough from where I was standing) and before she could repeat herself I hustled her out of the bread aisle back to the cleaning products.

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

There's a style of management called Managing By Walking Around. (No, really, there is. It has its own acronym and everything. I didn't spend a year getting a Diploma in Business Studies for nothing, you know. Well, mostly nothing, yes.) On Sunday morning I implemented an innovative parenting technique known as Parenting By Lying Around. (I shall acronym it thus: PBLA.)

Monkey wanted some toast. I wanted to languish on the sofa. Thus, by employing the much-vaunted (now) PBLA method, I taught him to open the freezer, remove a loaf, open the package, take out a slice, move a chair, stand on it, put the bread in the toaster, push down the lever, and wait for it to pop up - all without leaving my supine and cushioned position.

Unfortunately, he still insists on having the crusts cut off, and there I drew the line, so I had to get up. Later, I came downstairs from my shower to find his father had embraced PBLA and had Monkey enthusiastically using a paring knife to cut the crusts off for himself.

Soon we will have a fully self-sufficient son. Or a slightly perforated one.

Through a prism

I am a little scattered today, so bear with me.

Item the first: The heretofore wonderfully efficient energy-audit people haven't yet followed up with us, so we haven't yet filled our attic spaces with fluffy yellow insulating material. Luckily, the weather is a bit warmer now and somehow the Gigantic Arctic Front covering most of the country missed us completely yesterday. We had a high of 51 (10 C) and even some sunshine. The snow has receded somewhat, though Mabel is still trying to eat what's left of it.

Item the first, addendum: The chimney sweep came yesterday. I thought it would be well worth spending a hundred bucks or so to make sure we could use our wood-burning stove in the event of another power outage, even if we decided not to use it every day (now that our heating system would be working so much more efficiently thanks to all the yellow stuff). Unfortunately, the chimney sweep declared that it would take $1500 worth or so of work to upgrade our fireplace from fire-hazard to functional. (Ooh, alliteration.) I'm not sure I believe him, as the previous owners left two log-chopper thingies in the shed and a pile of firewood at the side door. Unless they were using the choppers for something else. I saw Fargo. (I know, that was a wood chipper. Just work with me.)

Item the second, unrelated to item the first: Monkey decided to try some peanut butter again yesterday, in case it was just the bread he no longer liked. He had peanut butter with crackers, and that was fine. He also had two slices of toast (dry). Today he took a peanut-butter sandwich to school for lunch, and is right now (after lunch) eating another one. So I think we're over that hump. I never thought I'd be so happy to see him eating nothing but peanut-butter sandwiches. (He's still adamantly anti-breakfast-cereal. How a child of mine could resist that entire food group is beyond me.)

Still, I am considering whether it might be worth looking into the notion that this is part of a bigger whole. Or talking to his doctor about, or something. As a friend said, worst-case scenario they tell us nothing's wrong, he's just a stubborn little turd with control issues (she didn't say that last part, because she's very polite).

Item the third, vaguely related to item the second: A friend of mine - the funny and clever Damien Owens, who not only has a blog but has also written several novels and a comedy-drama series that is debuting on Irish TV this very night - said, when telling me (and the rest of Twitter) of his wife's second pregnancy, "Henceforth, first daughter will be known as Practice Baby." Or, as Philip Larkin put it, "They fu** you up, your mum and dad."

I was wondering if first children are always destined to be "harder" babies, more trying preschoolers, more challenging teens, because they're imbued with so many hopes and dreams and thwarted ideals and - these days - just generally overparented more than their siblings, for whom they have smoothed the ways and beaten down the egos of the surrounding adults. I mean, B and I are both fairly detail-oriented people (let's say) who like things the way we like them, and from the day we started to try to make a baby, parenting has been an exercise in learning that we're not always in control. If Monkey has control issues, I'm betting they didn't come out of the ether, though I can't tell from here whether it's a case of nature or nurture.

Rope, end of

I suppose I always knew this day would come. But it still upsets me. Monkey has tired of peanut-butter sandwiches. He is filled with ennui for the sandwich as a meal form. The peanut butter tastes funny, even though it tastes just the same as it always did.

He has also announced that he no longer likes Life cereal, frosted mini wheats, or cheerios. We lost Oatmeal Squares a little while ago when they changed the recipe. (There was no indication of a difference on the box, but I could taste it too. It's not bad, just different. A bit of a stronger honey flavour, I think.) And he's gone off honey milk too.

The fact that he told us he wanted to try carrots (because they make you see in the dark), strawberries and pears does not really make up for all this. I know it should, but he's already tried the carrots and given them the thumbs down. (I got good ones from the organic supermarket, and cut them in various different ways because I know that matchsticks taste nicer than coins to me, and he did actually bite down on two with his molars, which was a great step forward in trying. I was impressed he got that far.) I bought pears but they're not ready to eat yet. I didn't buy strawberries because they were 7.99 a punnet, but they had them for snack at school this morning. He licked the outside of one, and smelled it when I bit into it, but that was as far as he would go.

So I am somewhat at the end of my tether, foodwise.

Monkey has lunch at school three days a week. Ever since he started having lunch at school, he's taken a peanut-butter sandwich, an apple juice box, and a small home-baked good from the freezer (pumpkin bread at the moment). Today he had crackers and cashews instead of the sandwich.

I know that there isn't much difference between straight cashews and peanut butter. I worry that missing the wheat bread will do damage at the other end (if you know what I mean), and I don't think wholegrain crackers are a long-term substitute. I know eating sandwiches for lunch and dinner day in, day out wasn't a long-term solution either, but I had reconciled myself to that. I'm not ready to throw it all out and reconcile myself to nothing but breadsticks and cashews.

Yesterday I was desultorily googling sensory perception disorders, having almost convinced myself that when added to his four-year-old quirks and phases, this eating thing might add up to more than the sum of its parts. But this morning, and having observed the other boys in his class today while I did my co-opping duty, I'm pretty sure that he's mostly normal, apart from this one thing. (Every time I co-op, though, I'm struck afresh by the world of difference between boys and girls at this age. The girls swarmed over the craft table, wrote letters to each other, cut out hearts and pestered me to draw rainbows for them. They skipped hand-in-hand to the dance studio for playtime (it's too snowy to go outside). They had a princess convention at reading time, discussing in earnest the contents of the Little Mermaid book they were huddled over. The boys played with the large wooden blocks and the wild animals for most of the morning.)

So I don't quite know where that leaves us. He's not sick, though he does have a bit of a cold that might make tastes seem different. I suppose I'll give it a few days and see if this really is the new new order, or just a blip. Maybe he'll like the pears, once they're ready to eat.