The birds, the bees, and the giraffes

Sorry about the radio silence yesterday: I was busy tagging all my old entries and fixing the paragraph breaks so that my new tag cloud - look! over there! - would be more representative of the blog as a whole, and to perhaps entice people to read entries that have never before seen the light of day.

So now it turns out that an awful lot of my entries are about pregnancy -  but that's just because it was seemed like an interesting thing to talk about at the time. Unsurprisingly, quite a number of others are about sleep. I'm still trying to refine the tags to make it a more useful tool, so it's still a work in progress, but at least every entry has some sort of tag now. Anyway, let me know if you have any opinions on the tag cloud - if you think it's useful/interesting/a waste of space, whatever.

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When I brought Monkey to school this morning his classroom was sorely depleted - almost half the class were out with a rampaging stomach bug, and I can hear the ominous strings of the Jaws music creeping up behind me as I type, sure that he'll come down with it sooner or later. We've had a good run of luck not getting puking things recently, and it's bound to end eventually. It's not so much the illness I dread, as the cleanup.

Usually when we arrive at Monkey's school, Mabel doffs her coat, I wash her hands, and she dives straight into the playdough or heads off to the kitchen area to whisk up a nice little something for the babies, before it's time to leave the big kids to their activities unmolested by two-year-olds. Today Miss B (who is her new favourite person, having looked after her on Saturday evening while we went to a fundraiser) headed her off at the pass with the lure of plastic animals rampaging among wood blocks, and Mabel was soon holding forth on what exactly was going on between the lion, the panda, and the wild boar. Then she looked underneath the giraffe, and commented: "He has a penis, like a boy baby."

Miss B looked startled, as she gamely agreed. In the universal signal of pride, I breathed rapidly on the kuckles of my right hand - hah - and polished them on my chest. That's my girl, letting no penis go uncommented upon.

Incidentally, if anyone knows where this gesture originated, I'd love to hear it.

Early days: a retrospective

Maybe it's the upcoming milestone birthday (five years!) or maybe it's because we visited friends with a newborn recently, or maybe it's reading Erin Shea's blog posts about her new baby, but I was thinking about the early days of life as parents, and all the things I never wrote down because when you're in the thick of it there's just too much everything and nothing going on to manage to parse it into paragraphs. (And I applaud Erin for doing just that. She's amazing.) So, on the better late than never principle, let me try to remember...

I remember sitting in the pediatrician's office looking down at my tiny pink-skinned baby in his blue blanket in his gender-neutral green carseat, thinking that he'd never be two days old again.

I remember going to another doctor's appointment with a slightly jaundiced baby who had a tiny, tiny hint of nappy rash. I was a little teary.
  "We've only had him three days, and he was so perfect, and I feel like we've broken him," I said to B; my rock, my compass.
  "He's not broken. He's just getting a little lived-in."
That made me feel better.

I remember taking him to show him off to my erstwhile office. My female co-workers oohed and aahed and dandled. "How's nursing going?" they asked. "It hurts," I said, unabashedly rubbing my nipples through my shirt. They laughed, but not in a mean way. More in an "I've been there" way. Funny, I had assumed that everyone in southmost Texas would think I was crazy to breastfeed - the numbers there are pretty bad, after all - but they didn't.

I remember sitting up in bed, nipples throbbing, seeing the days and weeks stretch out before me - days and weeks when I was going to have to keep doing this every two hours, no matter how much it hurt - and feeling hopeless.

Our apartment was tiny and filled with summer light. We sat on the floor a lot, because a changing table seemed like an extravagance, and I was paranoid about him rolling off the bed, even from day one. (In retrospect not a bad stance. He was a very active baby.) I gave him a sponge bath sitting on the floor in the living room, in the sunlight by the window where it was warmest. He screamed his head off and turned purple. After washing his top half, I had to stop and nurse him to calm him down, before proceeding with the bottom half. Later I realised that the UPS man had come to the door, and hoped I hadn't given him an eyeful as he passed the window.

I discovered daytime TV, watching all the birth stories and bringing-home-baby shows that I had never seen, nor wanted to see, while pregnant. I tutted at all the mothers labouring flat on their backs, and eating ice chips, and having the inevitable complications that turned into emergency c-sections, and I teared up and wept copiously at the birth every single time.

I remember lying on the bed trying to play sleep chicken with the baby: I'd close my eyes in the hopes that he would imitate me, and whoever fell asleep first was the loser. He won a lot. When I discovered that I could nurse him while talking on the phone, I felt like such a pro; when I found I could nurse him while standing up and swaying vigorously, to get him to sleep, I felt as if I'd invented electricity.

The days went slowly, because we had nothing to do. We were far from family members and didn't have friends with babies, but we muddled through and made it up as we went along, the three of us. It was a strange time, measured in three-hour chunks, full of resting but often not restful. Everything was new, but I was oddly comforted by the feeling that I was doing what women have done since time began: lying beside my baby and feeding him and marvelling at his very existence.

 

The witching hour

We have a lovely children's book called The Shrinking of Treehorn. B had enjoyed it in his youth, and we weren't long into our career as parents before he went out and procured a copy for Monkey. Or "for Monkey". It's written by Florence Parry Heide, of whom I had never heard, and illustrated by Edward Gorey, of whom even I had. (And according to Amazon, it has two sequels. This is wonderful. Must find immediately.) Maybe it's a children's classic, or maybe it's better known in the US, but I had never encountered it until I read it as an adult.

Anyway, it's a slim volume in bile-green paperback and that awkard wider-than-long shape that doesn't fit properly on bookshelves. The liny pen-and-ink drawings are delightfully 70's, from the principal's sideburns to the kitchen floor tiles; and the story of Treehorn, who gets smaller and smaller until he figures out why, is amusing to children - but the humour for the adult reader is all in the beautifully understated writing. It's not so much what she says, as the spaces between the words that convey the story of the jaded adults who so totally fail to notice what's happening to poor Treehorn, and it's deliciously awful.

[Tangent: I've just read the following line and had an epiphany: "He always liked to finish things, even if they were boring." Oh my God, I married Treehorn.]

Anyway, sometimes I feel like Treehorn's mother. Unlike Treehorn's mother, my cakes almost always do rise, but when I read this, I feel a certain sympathy for the poor woman:

His mother was cleaning the refrigerator. "You know how I hate to have you climb up on the chairs, dear," she said. She went into the living room to dust.

She's just so resigned to his going ahead and doing it anyway that her comment is no more than a formal protest lodged to have the paperwork in order in case some day she's audited. As Monkey leaps repeatedly from chair to coffee table to sofa around 5.30 every evening in yet another bid to concuss himself, and I ask him, wearily and pointlessly, to stop, I know exactly how she feels.

Of course, since I rarely dust and never clean the fridge, the similarity ends there.

Administrative issues

[Update: Okay, so it might take a couple of tries to get this to work the way I want it to. If you already clicked the button, but it looks as if you didn't, go ahead and click it again. If you like. Not that I want to pressure you into anything. But I had to reinstall it and it's gone back from 15 lovely people to 0 and I'm a bit sad about that...]

I am, I admit, a teensy bit addicted to Facebook. It began innocently enough, a couple of Novembers ago when we were trying to catch up with people we might see at home over Christmas, and a friend who is somewhat more on the cutting edge of technology than we are - I'm more trailing-after-the-bandwagon-still-considering-things than early-adopter - said thst B and I should get on Facebook to make it easier to keep up with friends. Before then I had assumed that FB was much like MySpace - something for the Young People and the Music People and People Who Were Not Me.

But then it turned out that Facebook was full of people who were me, or at least very like me in many respects. Since that time, of course, it's all gone to hell in a handbasket and people like my aged uncles and uncles-in-law are on it too, which I think might be going a bit too far when I remember who may have just read my thrilling update about an underwire having gone bendy in the dryer again. I try to maintain a respectful division of generations and I don't go round searching for nieces and nephews to befriend, but if one extends an invitation to me, I won't be rude and refuse. (Although I reserve the right to hide their updates, especially if they're overwhelmingly about Manchester United.)

Anyway, these days I spend far too much time obsessively refreshing to see if anyone has done anything interesting, or refining my bons mots and aphorisms (and petits fours and whatnot) in the hopes of igniting empathetic comment and witty discourse among my followers. I mean, friends. I mean, friends and "friends".

So, you might observe, if you're a particularly noticing sort of person, a new button over there on the right. I hope you're not offended by it. (If you are, look away again. Just pretend it's not there.) I just thought it might be nice to have a quick way for people to interact without having to comment, and a handy method of sending a link straight to anyone who might be interested in reading a new update. If you "like" the blog but don't want the updates, you can always hide them and I'll be none the wiser.

So go on, have a wee click there.

Post-pancakes

I am in no way suggesting that you should forbear from eating your Pancake Tuesday pancakes just so that you can make this delicious dinner, but if it should happen that you have heinous ingrates for children who scorn the pancakes you made, and you can't manage to eat them all yourself, this might turn out to be a good thing to do. At least, that's how it was for me.

 

First we have Mabel, helping me to make the pancakes way back a few Tuesdays ago. (If you didn't know, one is supposed to have pancakes the day before Lent begins, to use up all the eggs. Because eggs were verboten during Lent, don't you know. Same concept as Fat Tuesday, just no parade.)

Sieve one cup of flour and a pinch of salt into a large bowl. Beat an egg with 10 oz of milk and then mix all of that into the flour. Melt a tablespoon of butter, let cool a little, and mix that in too. That's it: no leavening agents, no sugar, nothing else. Let it stand, covered, in the fridge for at least 20 minutes, or even overnight. I mixed these up at breakfast time and cooked them for lunch. It made about 14, but my pan was quite small. (You could, of course, double the recipe.)

These are not puffy American pancakes, though I do like to make those at other times. These are thin pancakes, closer to crepes but not that thin because I am not a magic French person with magic crepe-making equipment. Just as thin as I could get by ladling enough onto the pan and swirling it around quickly to coat the bottom. If you use a good non-stick pan (or even a bad one; I'm sure mine was cheap), you'll know when it's ready to flip because it will come up easily when you try to slide a fish slice or other flat non-metal object underneath, or even move when you give the pan a vigorous (but not too vigorous lest it end up on the floor) shake. Whether to safely flip or devil-may-care toss I leave to the conscience of the individual.

 

The good specimens look like this. (The bad specimens are discarded, unless you have a dog.) You may gobble as many as you can with fresh lemon squeezed over and plenty of sugar. Unless you are my children, this is delicious. 

However, you might have some left over. In this case, freeze them with a layer of cling wrap (cling film) between each pancake. They freeze well and reheat very quickly in the microwave. Or you can make dinner with them, as I did the other night.

Take your pancakes out of the freezer. Look, they're still lovely.

Defrost a packet of frozen spinach in the microwave. Squeeze it out in a clean teatowel to get rid of the excess water. Chop a small onion (or half a large one) as finely as you have the patience for, and sautee it until it's very soft. Add a crushed clove (or two) of garlic for the final couple of minutes. Now break up the spinach in a bowl using a fork, add the onion and garlic, and mix in about a cup of ricotta cheese. (I think it was a cup. About the same amount as there is spinach, anyway.) Season with salt, pepper, and a good grating of fresh nutmeg.

Take your defrosted pancakes and roll them up around the spinach mixture in a lasagne dish. Thusly.

Then I took a jar of pasta sauce - look, there's mine, it was Classico Tomato and Basil - and pour about half of it over your plump and lovingly rolled babies. Five pancakes, in my case, gave us enough dinner to fill two people and still have leftovers for lunch.

Top with lots of parmesan - I should have used more than this, but we ran out. And bake at 350F for half an hour or until it's bubbling.

It was delicious, even if the parmesan did all disappear.

The pancakes worked perfectly here, but of course you don't have to go to all that trouble. You could use manicotti or giant pasta shells (but then you have to cook them before stuffing them, which is still a nuisance). You could make an inside-out lasagne. You could probably even use tortillas and call it Italian enchiladas. Or you could just make pancakes for breakfast and plan to have enough left over to make tomorrow's dinner.

Old-Hat Reviews: Fast Times at Ridgemont High

In our continuing quest to educate ourselves in popular culture and movies we may have missed, we found Fast Times at Ridgemont High appearing in our mailbox courtesy of Netflix last week. This 1982 oeuvre was the seminal high-school movie for a lot of people a few years older than me - Ferris Bueller's Day Off was probably the nearest equivalent American-high-school movie that I saw when I was actually the age of the protagonists.

Although this turns up on TV all the time, I'd only ever seen a small part of it. And the real thing is R-rated, so the TV version is pretty sanitized, which would make for a somewhat different experience.

It's notable for being the first big movie of a ton of famous-later actors: Sean Penn, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Phoebe Cates are the big names, but there are also small roles here for Anthony Edwards (that's Dr Greene from ER), Forest Whittaker, and Nicolas Cage, rolling pizza dough. I have decided that Sean Penn has spent the rest of his career choosing worthy, overwrought, thinky roles because this one, as the ultimate stoner surfer dude, was so embarrassing. But maybe that was just the hair.

When you didn't go to high-school in America, viewing these movies - and shows we watched like Beverly Hills 90210 or even Degrassi Junior High (I have to admit that I didn't really understand that Canada was a different country) - was somewhat confusing. Not having experienced the real thing, we had (and still have, to be honest) no understanding of where fact ended and fiction began. Those rows of tall lockers in the corridors, talk of hall passes, free periods, and study hall, boys and girls in all manner and means of clothes - these too were things of fiction as far as I was concerned: my school was filled with green-and-grey-clad girls, and lockers were small and square and mostly in our classrooms. As for sex, I have very little idea who was doing it and who wasn't (apart from me: I was very much on the wasn't side, and found it hard to believe that anyone really was). I tended to assume that teenagers in America were all straight out of Judy Blume novels, and was very relieved not to have to be one.

I had no idea, before watching this, that that its writer was Cameron Crowe - the guy portrayed in Almost Famous. He went back to high school masquerading as a pupil, and took notes. (Very Never Been Kissed, though if Almost Famous is to be believed, that wasn't a problem he had.) So I have to assume that it was quite true to life.

Which is damn scary, what with all the sex going on. And the complete disregard for STDs or pregnancy. Poor 15-year-old Stacy is pressured into Doing It because her friend Linda says that's what all the guys want: she ends up with an abortion - which is totally glossed over; makes it look like a visit to the dentist, with no more psychological impact than having a tooth out - and finally - duh! - discovers that the nice guy who actually likes her is happier to wait. Evidently condoms weren't invented till after the AIDS crisis.

I suppose I still don't know who represents the norm: Linda, who had all the sex - or at least said she did; or Stacy, who did, but didn't really want to? Then again, I could reassure myself that maybe this is what goes on in Californian high schools, but not in the rest of the country (lie!) or that this sort of thing may have been prevalent in the early 80s, but everyone's much better informed now and girls don't think they have to put out just to get a boyfriend (maybe?). What I can't tell myself any more is that this sort of thing only happens in America, and I'm safely in good old Catholic (ahem) Ireland, where the grass is green and the girls are virgins and the boys only want to hold hands and you have to keep a phone-directory's distance apart at all times until marriage, because whether I'm coming from the point-of-view of a shy teenager or the mother of a daughter, that's not true any more. It's probably not true in Ireland either.

Parental involvement

I keep trying to write amusingly about Mabel's latest sleep regression (let's call it; it involves a nighttime cough and at least one molar), but it just turns into a long-winded whine. I should probably take a different tack.

I attended a nursery school meeting last night and found myself volunteering for a board position for next year. It's a co-op school, which means it's run by the parents, and the ultra-sexy position of housekeeping chair has been vacant for all of this year. It's not so much that I decided the school could do with my firm hand and expert sweeping motion, but more that I have an idea what this entails, it's pretty simple, and I felt it was about time for me to step up and help out a bit more than we've done to date.

Every family has to take on a role every year, but some are more time-consuming than others. Last year I volunteered to be librarian, which I thought had a nice literary ring to it. I imagined myself cataloguing books during quiet evenings, perhaps taking home a few well-loved volumes to mend, carefully re-shelving and tidying. It sounded ideal. In the event, it was less so, as my small and increasingly mobile appendage (Mabel) made it very hard to spend even a few minutes every week re-shelving books without having them all pulled out again at the bottom of the stack. The catalogue belonged to a teacher who was reluctant to give it up, and nobody really explained things to me, with the result that I spent ten minutes blithely distributing school library books in the bins containing the public library books, and then a fraught half hour trying to fish them out again.

Before I set off for this September's member meeting, I asked B what he thought we should sign up for this year, since being librarian had turned out to be such a bust. He was disappointed - evidently he has literary aspirations too - and said that if I took on the same job again, he'd be responsible for the tasks. So I happily and pointedly put his name down against Librarian instead of mine, to the confusion of the director, and to date he's done more or less as much for the job as I did.

So I felt we were due. After three years as a member, I understand the basics of the housekeeping position - helping to organise the twice-yearly cleaning workshops, showing up for most or some of those days, and arranging and reminding parents of their commitments (everyone signs up for one housekeeping job during the year - you might be laundering dress-up clothes in March, or cleaning toys in October, or organizing the medical kit twice a year - it's pretty simple). And I'll get to - I mean, have to - attend monthly board meetings. I think I can manage that. So long as nobody wants to see the state of my house before giving me the job.

When Monkey started at the school three years ago, the August cleaning workshop was actually the first time I interacted as a member of the co-op. (There's a new-member meeting in June, but we'd been away.) I was seven months pregnant and really quite enjoyed a two-hour window of something totally different: being toddler-free and chatting to another incoming parent while we wrestled with sticky green paper and a bookshelf. This August, I'll be able to welcome new members and give them their introduction to the nitty gritty of some of the things that joining the school entails: messing around with duct tape, cleaning paintbrushes, and sorting out boxes of tiny foam shapes, to name a few.

Don't panic

It's still me. I'm just experimenting with a different template, that's all. It might stay like this for another year, or it might look subtly (or totally) different over the next few days. But nothing else has changed. I still love you.

So long as you know where your towel is, you'll be fine.

Welcome to the dollhouse

Monkey's pinkeye was noncontagious (and totally cured, for that matter) just in time to attend a classmate's birthday party on Saturday. On Friday afternoon it occurred to me that I should procure a present.

Me: What should we give A____ for her birthday, Monkey?
Him: Ummm. Something with princesses.
Me: Oh, is she into princesses?
Him: Or something pink. Because she's a girl. And girls like ... girly things.

I think it's possible he just formed that adjective off his own bat, because I try not to refer to particular things as girly (or boyly, which is of course the alternative). But he managed to insert exactly the expected amount of scorn for all things pink and princessy into it that you would expect from an almost-five-year-old boy.

So off I went to Target the next morning with a special dispensation to shop alone so long as I didn't take too long about it, to trawl the aisles for something suitable and pick up milk and bananas and maybe a couple of other things (tra la laa... I tripped and fell into this dressing room and I just happened to find a t-shirt in my hand) on the way. But seriously, it took a lot of thought just to get the darned present.

Because the choice of a birthday present for someone else's child is rife with potential hazards. Especially when you're shopping in Target instead of some adorable independent toystore full of overpriced German wooden toys and also plenty of cute stuff you'd actually like your children to receive (coughFranklinscough). You don't want to be That Parent who started the child on a year(s)-long obsession with something unsuitable - ever, or just at this early age - like, say, Bratz dolls, or Barbies, or even Disney princesses, unless you know that they already like and own some of it already (and you have the parent's blessing).

I stomped around the store getting all het up about how, as soon as you've passed the baby and toddler toys, everything is strictly segregated by gender: two aisles of unmitigated pink pink pink, followed by three aisles of cars, guns, and lego. Even outside the toy department, I was assailed by licenced characters on most of the kids' items: you'd be hard pressed to buy so much as a pair of underpants (not that I think Monkey should go round giving the girls in his class new underpants for their birthdays) or an insulated water bottle without encountering the damn princesses or some other my-little-pony-esqe design.

In the end, I was pleased to find an oversized pearl necklace and matching crown for dressing up, with no branding beyond that of the basic Target toys. Admittedly, it was pink and girly, but I'm pretty sure A___ enjoys dressing up (if my stints in the classroom are anything to go by), and I thought it would pass muster with her mum too. (And I managed to remember to get a gift receipt for once, despite the rookie employee on the register who had no idea what I was asking for, let alone how to make one come out of the machine.)

Anyway, the whole experience made me realise that for some reason, I have much more scorn for the princesses, and a great desire to keep Mabel away from them and all things Barbie for as long as possible, than I do for the boyly (see?) obsessions like Spider-Man and Batman that we have running rampant in the house already. But is this just because I've been worn down by two years of superheroes, or is there something innately worse about the girly stuff? For instance, I was very close to buying Mabel a pink Batman t-shirt the other day (but they didn't have her size), but I would never ever spontaneously buy her a princess t-shirt - at least not until that point in the future when I'm worn down by nagging and whining and I see a cute one.

Thinking back, this is how Spider-Man started with us. It crept in insidiously, a found action figure here, a pack of bribery underpants there, a comic-strip t-shirt on the sale rail. In each instance, I weighed the attractiveness of the item in question (I'm mostly talking about clothes here) against the delight I knew would follow its reception. (The underpants were unmitigatedly hideous, but they were hidden. And in a good cause. I just bought him Lego Batman ones to replace them with the other day. Also ugly, but I don't care so much any more. See? Beaten down.)

At a yard sale a few months ago, I paused for a moment at a box of old Barbies, and then decided that there's no rush: she loves her dolls for now, and at some point someone will give her a Barbie (or a Sindy: I had two Sindys and loved them hard for many years) and that will be okay. I'm not going to be all "nothing but anatomically correct dolls made of biodegradable materials dyed in earth tones and fashioned by authentic Nepalese peasants for my precious snowflake" about it, and I don't have moral and feminist objections to the princesses (as some people, perhaps very sensibly, do). Since we already own The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast, I'd be a bit late on this front, though Mabel hasn't seen either of them yet. (The reason we have them is a long story. Let me just say that where other people's husbands see their children as the perfect excuse to pick up on (or, let's be honest, continue with) their Star Wars obessions, my husband is not only a comic-book geek but is also rather fond of some Disney soundtracks. So certain movies get added to the "kids'" collection much as my father bought "me" a fishing rod for my tenth birthday. Anyhoo. Moving on. Not bitter at all.)

I think it's kind of cool that Mabel likes Batman and plays with the action figures just as much as she does with her dolls. (Wolverine and Aquaman can be babies too, you know.) We have one Tinkerbell book (at Monkey's request, actually, a year or two ago), but that's as much Disney fairy dust as has been sprinkled on our household so far, and I'm not eager to add more before I have to.

Today it was raining and Mabel pulled out Monkey's old, broken Scooby-Doo umbrella. They both fought over it all the way to school, and I ended up promising Mabel that we'd go and buy her an umbrella of her own soon. She was delighted to hear it. And then she asked, "Can it be pink?"


You can take the girl out of the pretty, but you can't take the pretty out of the girl, it seems.

In my head, it's 2004

Hang on. I think I blinked or something.

I'm okay with the idea that my firstborn is turning five in a month's time - in fact, I've already made the mental switch, and was quite offended yesterday when somebody mentioned that I had a four-year-old. But I'm still in my early thirties.

Aren't I? I was, just a minute ago, before I had all those babies. (All both of them. I wouldn't want you to think you'd missed one or anything.) And I don't feel any older, or wiser. I know a bit more about the contraptions and vocabulary of baby-wrangling, that's all. My basic child-rearing tenets haven't changed since I was 30: love your babies and teach them good manners. I still think that's pretty much what it comes down to, it's just that now it takes up more real estate in my head, along with phrases and names like babywearing, attachment parenting, CIO, Dr Sears (good), and Ezzo (bad). I can discuss induction methods and nipple confusion with the best of them, and I even have strong feelings about some of it and a soapbox I cart out and dust off every now and then.

Of course back then I was a career girl, or at least a woman with a full-time job outside the house that paid actual money, and I slept all night every night, and I went out for dinner sometimes and watched rental movies all the way through in one go. Now, I haven't slept all night for five years. Maybe that's what happened to my sense of time passing: it fell through the gaps in the nights and floated away. Nights like a folded circle of paper with holes snipped out with a child's scissors: some big, when I wandered around the quiet house on hyperalert, or sleepwalked a crying baby for eternity; some tiny, when all I had to do was roll over and produce the other side, over and over. Open up the paper and the strong American sunlight shines through the holes and leaves behind a hundred baby photos scattered on the wooden floor.

The older I get, the thicker my metaphorical skin is - I care less and less what other people think so long as I'm comfortable with what I'm doing. But when I get three minutes at a time to look in the mirror nowadays, for the first time in a long time, it seems my real skin has got thinner. In repose I look mostly the same as I always did, with one short vertical line dug out between my brows - coincidentally enough, just in the place where my boyfriend used to say I got a cute wrinkle when I frowned. But if I animate my face, smile or talk at the mirror, I am shocked by the way it crinkles - crinkles! - at the eyes and around my mouth, and I am unnerved to see my mother's face appear fleetingly under my hair. So I quite like to hide behind my glasses, with their defensive coating of tiny scratches that make the world a little blurrier. If I can't see it, neither can you, right?

I suppose this is all part of the ongoing process of clambering out of the pleasant marshmallow of baby brain I've been enveloped in for the past several years. I need to re-embrace the world beyond, or something. And get a better haircut.

House matters

Yes, Hugh Laurie, aka Dr House, does matter. We still watch him religiously (if you can download your weekly worship from the IMDB at a time that suits you), though we have a slight suspicion that maybe he jumped the shark a while ago. Yesterday, out of the blue (actually, because Kai Penn turned up on an old episode of Buffy) I got all riled up all over again about how annoying and unnecessary the whole Kutner suicide storyline was, because everyone knew they'd just shoved it in there because he'd left the show to be Obama's advisor on lupus (or something), and it was ridiculous to see Taub and the others feeling all terrible and guilty about not having hadn't noticed his depression when we all knew that was because IT WAS TOTALLY FABRICATED AFTER THE FACT. Bah.

But that's not even remotely what I was going to talk about. I was just going to show you some photos of our new carpet, and stuff. Sorry if I got off on the wrong foot there.

Here's a photo of the disreputable Dr House, to make up for any disappointment. But make sure you come right back.

I finally got around to ordering the runner I wanted for upstairs. The wood floor is lovely, but had some big obvious stains on it that wouldn't come out (probably dog pee, our floor guy said; delightful), also it's a bit chilly underfoot and noisy. This is exactly what I wanted, and after I'd sent back the extra tiles I mistakenly ordered, quite good value. It's from FLOR, as you'll have guessed if you see as many online ads for them as I do. But I invented the pattern all by myself.


Also, in a moment of pure inspiration, I picked up a sideboard at the thrift store a couple of weeks ago for $25. It's exactly the style I wanted - just right in our 1967 house beside our inherited dining table - and if I ever actually manage to refinish it, I'll then put things in it and it will be useful. At the moment I'm still basking in my great bargain.

Here it is under some lovely flowers that just arrived from my brother-in-law because he was here for dinner on Tuesday. If people sent me flowers every time I cooked them dinner ... well, I'd have no vases left, that's what. Luckily, these ones came already in a vase with water, which I particularly liked about them. The painting is an original of B's (high) school, a wedding present from our best man.


Remember our new sofa (photo at the bottom there)? This is the deconstructed version.


And finally, if you're even still here, I ordered some great alphabet cards from Secret Agent Josephine and put them on the wall in the family room (inspired by her photo of her daughter with the cards similarly stuck above her desk); but since Mabel still thinks things should be on the floor more often than a table, and Monkey is prone to pulling up anything that might be trying to remain stuck down, I had to put them at least a bit out of reach. I hope they're low enough to read. Mabel was delighted with them as she saw them go up, and I love the way the colour of the wall makes them look almost as if they're painted right there.


Sorry about the light coming through the window there. If you go to Brenda's post here or her Etsy page, you can see them properly, and maybe even buy some for your own monkeys. I was really happy to order something from her, because she's a great artist with a lovely blog, and I actually met her last year when she visited Bethany near here.

Finally, here's Mabel, bouncing.

Cultural exchange of information

Some facts about St Patrick's Day in Ireland that American readers might not know:

- St Patrick's Day may be called Paddy's Day, but never, ever Patty's Day. Ever.

- St Patrick's Day is the national holiday, so it's a day off school and work for everyone. But it's also a holy day, because of the Saint bit, so you have to go to Mass. Before Mass you get a little bunch of shamrock, preferably with a clod of earth still attached, and you affix it to your lapel, like a very agricultural corsage. (I don't know where you get it. From your mother, usually. She gets it from her dealer, over a cup of extra-milky tea and some contraband custard creams. I suppose.)

- If you don't go to Mass, you miss your chance to sing the hymn of the day, Hail Glorious Saint Patrick, which is wheeled out just once a year, and which you've been practising in school all week.

- On Saint Patrick's Day you have a special dispensation from on high to break Lent. This means that if you've given up sweets for the 40 days prior to Easter - within which March 17 always falls - you are allowed to buy a large bar of Cadbury's Dairy Milk and eat it while watching the parade. If you've given up the holy trinity of sweets, crisps, and chocolate, you can have a pack of Tayto as well. And maybe a bag of Milky Moos, but only if you go to the cinema.

- Depending on the weather, you may choose to go home and watch the parade on telly. This is allowed. If you decide to brave the rain/hail/sleet anyway, you will be rewarded with the sight of all the poor Texan majorettes in their short skirts and flesh-coloured tights failing to mask the goosebumps wondering why they came. But, to be honest, you can see that on telly too, so I'm not sure what the point is, except to feel like you earned your Dairy Milk. If your fingers aren't too numb to break off the squares.

- There are no leprechauns. If there are leprechauns on St Patrick's Day, they are deeply, deeply ironic ones. The Irish are a cynical, sardonic, hard-bitten race, and we know that the only thing at the end of the rainbow is rain, and banks lining their pockets with tax-payers' money.



Some facts about St Patrick's Day in America that Irish people might be interested to hear:

- Americans think we eat corned beef and cabbage all the time. I've explained numerous times this week that it's meant to be bacon and cabbage, if we ate it at all, which most of us don't. Corned beef is the Irish-American substitute because you can't get the right sort of bacon here.

- If you don't wear some item of green clothing on the 17th of March, people are allowed to pinch you.

- Americans have shamrocks and four-leafed clovers inextricably mixed up. Because four-leafed clovers are lucky, and shamrocks are Irish, and luck and Irish go together, so... that makes perfect sense.

- On the 16th of March children all over the USA are hard at work making leprechaun traps. The next morning they come downstairs, or go to school, to find that a mischeivous sprite has wreaked a little havoc with the toys or in the kitchen, maybe left a few green footprints, and possibly a peace offering of some green cookies or cupcakes.

I don't know why Americans find it necessary to give their children imaginary nighttime visitors so often: I've already carped about Santa Claus, and the tooth fairy will soon be breathing down our necks, but I didn't realise till last year that the Easter Bunny was also a real, live, fictional character whose cover I wasn't meant to blow while parents sowed the lawn with pastel plastic eggs - and now this. I'm a bit appalled. I may be That Parent if this sort of thing is perpetrated next year. (Monkey missed school today due to continuing pinkness of eye.) And I'm a big old curmudgeon, I know.

Happy Day of Greenness. I dressed the children in yellow and pink, and we had red lentil coconut curry for dinner.

Bunnies

I know I'm not the only mother who sometimes feels like she gave birth to the Duracell bunny. (That's the Engergizer bunny in America. For some reason, even though Duracell batteries exist here too, the bunny - still pink, still banging a drum - belongs to Energizer. I don't explain these things, I just tell you about them. Anyway.) There's Mabel tonight, after a mere 20-minute nap from which she coughed herself awake, to my dismay - dismay much more at my lost naptime than her coughing - lying in bed the very picture of giggly awakitude, all kick-a-little, talk-a-little, and when I say I have to leave, the howls of anguish and clutching hands and promises of eye-closing force me to stay a little longer, though I know that really she needs a bit of a cry to reset her system and let her relax. Eventually I leave the room, she wails, "Mummy's not here" piteously for 30 seconds, I go in and try again, and she was lying still in my arms, mostly asleep, within a minute. Of course, it took me another ten to extricate myself from that situation. Thus:

I sit up and start to move away.
Mabel's eyelids flutter open: "Where are you going?" Curious, not accusing.
"Nowhere. Just ... moving over." I adjust my trajectory and lie down on the other side of her.
Two minutes later I slide myself off the bed. She looks up, betrayed, but a little sleepier.
I lean on the bed and stroke her hair. "I'm here." Making no promises about staying, mind.
Two more minutes, and I can stand up and tiptoe away. Lucky I'm not wearing my creaky leather belt tonight, or I might still be there.

I had both children with me, at times directly on top of me, all day today, apart from those blessed 20 minutes wherin I started to make my lunch, started to bake some apple bread, started to put on the kettle for a cup of tea, and (all right) probably started to check Facebook again. Monkey had woken up with a suspicously goopy and pink eye, so I had to keep him home. Pinkeye, as I have mentioned before, is not the sort of illness you can hope to fly under the radar with. I did take them both to the supermarket for milk (vital) and applesauce (I suddenly got a hankering for the aforementioned bread), but he was under strict instructions not to touch anything.

What's more, he had woken up at 5am, but luckily that falls beyond my purview as I was sleeping with Mabel. I opened one eye when I heard his stage whisper to B down the hall, thought how strange it was that it was still pitch dark, and went back to sleep. When Mabel and I emerged in daylight, at 7.30, I was congratulating myself on finally getting up "on time" for the first time this post-time-change week. I looked at B and asked if Monkey had woken up in the middle of the night. "We've been up since five," he said, both weary and longsuffering.

So I'm tired now, because spending all day with two overtired children does that to you. We had a nice trip to the playground, where they mostly spurned the slides and swings in favour of a waterlogged hole in a tree stump that could be satisfyingly filled with soil and other goodies, and stirred around with sticks. They cooperated excellently on this project, though the end result was somewhat up for debate:

"It's a potion to stop the criminals from stealing Mummy's money. And Daddy's money. And yours and mine, if we had any," announced Monkey to Mabel.
"It's for the babies," replied Mabel, decisively, adding more fruits and vegetables.
"Not vegetables. Gregetables." She likes to subvert your expectations.

Then I took them home and dumped them in the bath. And thence, after some manner of dinner, to bed. Which brings you up to date. The end.

The Three R's

The three R's of parenting an active toddler in public: retrieve, restrain, reason with. And a fourth: repeat.

Mabel was feeling a bit fractious this morning: mostly my fault with a dash of blame awarded to the time change - I tried to fit too much into our activities by squeezing a trip to Gap and Target in between Monkey's school drop-off and Mabel's music class at 10.45, with a nonsensical notion that I might find some new jeans and pick up some pull-ups; as she ran away for the nth time, after promising earnestly in her sweetest, most obedient (if you didn't know her like I do) voice, "I will stay beside you", it dawned on me that maybe nobody had actually fed her any breakfast. So we went to Starbucks, stat, for a smoothie and a slice of banana bread, which I think did help the situation somewhat, but she was still seeming tired and out of sorts when we finally joined the semi-circle of mothers and toddlers paying rapt attention to the nice lady singing nursery rhymes at the top of the room.

Hah. Trick sentence. That can't possibly be true, of course, because given a room full of x toddlers, no more than y of them will ever be paying attention to the matter at hand, where y is some number probably greater than 0 and always less than x. So in fact, one was rolling on the floor, one was attempting to jump on his baby brother, two were running circuits around the room, one was sitting by the door, too shy to join the group, and one was edging closer to the tempting large American flag that sits in the corner of the room, just to torture mothers with its irresistible presence.

Happily, in today's case, Mabel was just tired enough to sit with me, and not so tired that she was one of the pair running laps (as she had been last week). My sympathy was all with my friend, who was trying to corral her rambunctious two-year-old son while not losing her grip on the four-month-old in her lap - or her mental faculties, for that matter. Monkey and I took this very same class, in this very same room with the same damned flag (sorry, is that illegal?), two and three years ago, and I used to look at mothers with good little girls who sat in their laps and hate them just a tiny bit, and pity them just an eensy bit, because my son was into everything, opening everything, testing everything to see how much pressure was required before it would break/fall over/cause me to whisk him away, and their uncurious girls obviously would never amount to much. It took so much energy, though, to be constantly pulling him off, distracting him, calculating the next move, the next bribe, the next thing to interest him in doing before we could go anywhere new; and deciding at what point I would just have to pick him up and force the issue.

And now, from my exalted position as a mother of a boy who is almost five, and therefore relatively so much more reasonable, and a girl who is two, and active, but when all's said and done still a girl, and until you've had one of each you don't realise how much difference that makes*, I have to stop and remember, before I sound too superior to my friends-with-little-boys, how bad it was sometimes. I remember dragging Monkey to his room and all but flinging him onto his bed in order to get the head start I needed to get out the door before him, and then holding the door closed with all my strength, listening to him scream and start to throw things.

He's not an agressive child, he was rarely violent with people even as a toddler, but I could never just put him in time out and expect him to benefit from the experience and emerge chastened and subdued: I would put him in his room to put a physical barrier between us and give myself some space. But I couldn't leave him there for long because I feared for his own safety and the structural integrity of everything in the room. Once, my Facebook status update noted that I wanted a padded room with a lock on the door, but whether it was for myself or the toddler I couldn't say. I had some sympathetic responses.

When I recall those days, I remember why I'm so lucky with Mabel, and what the tradeoff is for getting a scant ten minutes a night in my own bed: she's not like that. She's mischievous and contrary, she runs away from me in heart-stopping manner if she's tired and/or hungry, but she's not quite the level of wild-animal-cub that I had to deal with on a daily basis with Monkey. Who in turn, was a good communicator even before he was very verbal, not given to tantrums, and relatively willing to be reasoned with.

Hm. Maybe we all find excuses for our own kids, at whatever stage they're at, to save our own sanity. That's quite likely, really.


*I know I'm generalising there, but it seems generally true. Girls present their own challenges. I'm not saying anyone has it easier, in the long run.

Many muffins

As I remarked on Facebook at the weekend, I may need a muffin intervention. I baked two batches of muffins on Saturday alone. Not all for my consumption, of course (as if); the first - blueberry buttermilk - came with us to visit friends with a new house and a six-week-old baby, and the second were somewhat less virtuous orange-chocolate-chip, for the playdate.

The playdate was fine, of course. The other mother read a book for a while, while I did indeed make muffins, and then we started chatting, and then we ate some muffins, and then it turned out that she's a big Nigella Lawson fan too, and she was perfectly nice and very easy to talk to and not intimidating at all. And the boys had fun, and Mabel, as she was not falling asleep tonight (thanks, time change, for making bedtime even longer), asked me if the friend in question was coming over again, and when I said not right now, because he's at his house, she replied plaintively, "But I want him to be at our house." So I think she liked it too.

Aquaman and Batman being put to bed in Mabel's sleeves.
They were pretty tired after the playdate too.

Midnight paranoia

There's something going round the two-year-old set, and the older-kids set too, and it's not a happy propensity to say please and thank you. It's a mysterious on-again off-again fever, and/or an upset tummy. With vomiting. Lots and lots of vomiting.

Last night, all the day's talk of how many times x's child had thrown up on Monday night, and how many loads of laundry y had done, and just how many baths it took to get the puke out of z's hair finally got to me and I started to think I was feeling a bit queasy. As I lay in bed, my thoughts went something like this:

... I feel a bit funny.
Crap.
I'm obviously getting It. And if I'm getting it, the kids are bound to get it too. It's not like I can maintain a healthy distance from them.
How quickly can I leap out of bed and get to the bathroom, I wonder?
I wonder if Mabel will throw up in her sleep, or wake up and call for me first?
Maybe I should put a towel under her pre-emptively. I really don't want to have to wash her whole duvet. Why did I ever think duvets were a good idea? Stupid IKEA with their brainwashing and their meatballs.
Ooh, my brain feels sort of swoopy.
I wonder is that because I'm about to throw up, or because I'm really very tired now?
Maybe I should get a bowl or something.

[Gets out of bed. Finds red plastic bucket under bathroom sink. Pulls a few towels out of the linen cupboard. Looks at Mabel. Leaves towels on her bedroom floor, where they will be no use at all until after the deluge. Goes back to bed. Takes bucket with her.]

Okay. Now I don't have to make it to the bathroom. But I'll still have to wash all Mabel's sheets. What if Monkey's the one who succumbs first, while I'm all busy shoring up defences for the wrong child?
I don't have an actual pain in my stomach, just a funny feeling. Will it hurt more before I throw up? Is that how I'll know in time?
...
Oh. Now I'm awake. Maybe that's because I'm about to throw up.
No. Hmm.

[- Waah. Mummy?]
[Gets up. Goes to Mabel. Brings bucket. Gets into bed with Mabel.]

Okay, well now I'll be on the spot and can surely intervene before she throws up. And the bucket is here for both of us. And the towels.
Hmm. Now she's on top of me. So when she throws up we'll both be covered in it. Ok, there, I'll just move her off.

[Cough, cough.]

Now, is that a pre-vomit cough or a cold cough? You'd think I could tell. Is she sitting up? I think it's just a cold cough.
Now she's behind me. So it'll go in my hair. I'll have to wash all the puke out of my hair before I can go back to bed. I don't want to do that. But I'm too tired to move, and she'll wake up if I do. So I'll just lie here and think about whether I'll have to shampoo it or if I can just rinse it. It'll be really stinky, though.
Look, it's 2am. I should really be asleep by now.
...
Huh. I'd forgotten how many large statues there are in the sea along the coastline from Dalkey to Monkstown. You can see them all from this train I'm on. There's my school, look! What are those Indian people doing in those buildings? They'll be caught when the tide comes in...
...
There's Monkey getting up. Is he going to tell B that he's sick? But, hang on, is that daylight coming through the curtains? How is that possible? I only just fell asleep a minute ago.

[Squints hard at the clock, which is just near enough to make out very fuzzily with myopic eyes.]

I think that says 5:59. Maybe he's not sick.
I don't actually feel quite so funny any more. Maybe we'll all get through the night. Maybe I don't even have to call off the entire weekend's activities after all.

[Mabel sits up. Mabel does not throw up.
- I want to go downstairs.
- Okay, you go and see Daddy.
Rolls over. Groans. Returns to strangely watery train line.]

Road-trip weather

Sunny weather and blue skies make me feel like a road trip. America feels like it did when I was a visitor, full of giant roads and old-fashioned-looking highway signs and anonymous roads to nowhere and run-down diners with elderly waitresses who refill my cup and call me "hon", and trees, trees, trees.

No, this isn't quite the usual tourist impression of America: to Irish people, America comprises New York (with an addendum of Boston) and LA/San Francisco. Possibly Chicago and Florida. There isn't really anywhere in between the coasts, unless some remember JR Ewing and bring Texas to mind. And admittedly, my introductions to the US were via Boston, New York (briefly), and San Francisco, respectively.

But the road trips I'm thinking of mostly, the memories that make me inhale the clear bright air and feel like hitting the asphalt, were when I visited central Pennsylvania to see my on-again, off-again boyfriend; the one I married, eventually. They were charged with emotion - excitement, anticipation, sideways glances on the long road out from the airport; a vaguely sickening feeling of imminent depression (and a red-eye flight) while trying to squeeze every last drop out of being together on the road back again a week later. Maybe that's why I remember so piercingly clearly in the in-between seasons (when the air tickets were cheaper and the weather was nicer) how it felt to look around and see big-sky, big-tree America, at once movie-familiar and unexpectedly alien, before I lived here and it became no more than the place we are all the time.

So sometimes I look up from the local highway that's now as familiar to my hands on the steering wheel as the roads of suburban south Dublin once were, and try to recapture that feeling that maybe, just maybe, the rest of my life was waiting somewhere out there on the unknown roads. And other times, when the sun shines out of a cloudless blue sky and the trees are waiting for their leaves, that feeling ambushes me unbidden and makes me catch my breath with a swoop of ten-years-ago me. And I want to hit the road and teach the kids all the words to the Chicago soundtrack and all the good Billy Joel songs and the contents of all the other cassette tapes that are gathering dust in the basement.

Sticky wicket*

We are approaching a watershed in playdates, and it's a bit of a tricky one.

Until now, playdates for Monkey have been mostly an opportunity for me to hang out with moms who are my friends and happen to have a kid the right age to play with (or "play" with, or play "with") Monkey while we drink tea/sip mimosas (it could happen) and natter. But this weekend, Monkey is having a friend over to play.

Thing is, this is a friend with whom up to now we've had no outside-school contact. He's not quite as local as most of the other kids, and both his parents work, so he's not around in the afternoons to bump into or hang out with at a playground. (Hence the weekend playdate, even though I was wary of trampling on other people's sacrosanct family time.)

But I thought that as our children have reached the ripe old ages of five and almost-five, I could now venture to invite a kid to play without having to ask his mum along too. I e-mailed her our address and named times when, if it suited, he could be dropped off and picked up. Fine, fine, GPS yada yada - and then she said, in the nicest way possible, that she hoped I wouldn't mind if she stayed too - that I didn't need to entertain her, she'd just sit in the corner and read or work or something.

Argggghh! On the one hand, I can totally understand her concern. I wouldn't want to send Monkey off to the house of people I barely know for an afternoon, and Monkey perhaps wouldn't want to go without me. I was planning to invite her in for a cup of tea / [your beverage here] when she dropped him off, just so she could see that the house wasn't a basement full of chainsaws or a gallery of piercing art, and that we were fairly normal people. (I think we're fairly normal. I hope we are, or we'll never get a damn playdate.) But I hadn't mentioned that in the e-mail, because I thought it would amount to overthinking things. Probably I should have.

On the other hand, gaaahhhh. Awkward, you know? I'm sure she's a nice lady, and maybe we'll be best buds, but - well, right there is my problem: I called her a nice lady. Possibly because she's always dressed professionally when I see her doing drop-off at school, and possibly because I think she's a little older than me, she seems scary and grown-up and not really someone I see myself having a couple of hours' worth of chatting-over-coffee to do with. But I can't really leave the woman sitting in the corner with a book while I do... whatever it is I would be doing... probably surfing the Internet and ignoring the children as best as I can, free-range-kids style, until someone is in imminent and documented danger of losing an eye. Or sending B outside to play soccer with them all - if this rain ever lets up - while I bake muffins, or surf the Internet, or write blog posts to you, dear reader(s).

Now it's like I have to clean the house or something, lest she ding me for having grotty bathroom floors.

I know. I'm a grown-up too, and no doubt we will all resolve the situation with grace and good humour. So long as the boys have a reasonably good time and nobody gets a concussion, it will be fine. She doesn't even have to like me, so long as she likes my home and my attitude to children. But she'll be judging me - oh yes she will, from my housekeeping to my decor to my parenting skills - just as I would be in her situation, because you can't expect your five-year-old to choose his friends wisely and consider their parents' views on weekend tv watching or how often the kitchen floor should be mopped when electing which kid they're going to most often play superheroes with in the playground at school.

Have you been in this situation? In her shoes or mine? What did you do?


*All these (I mean, both these, so far, but I might manage another before the year's out) cricket references are because Ireland beat England in the Cricket World Cup last week. Post-colonial schadenfreude, don't you know.

Missing

Monkey thought it would be a great idea to play with the baby monitor as half a walkie-talkie this afternoon - after he'd wrested it from his sister's hands, since she was the one who originally asked me for her "mometer", I don't know quite why but probably something to do with the three babies she'd just gathered up and tenderly unclothed because they needed a change and probably a nap - anyway, now my children are both asleep and I have in the kitchen a wire plugged in at one end and dangling like a naughty participle at the other because I lost track of the vital part some time after I heard the whine of feedback emanating from Mabel's room whereupon time folded in on itself and everyone seemed to start yelling for dinner and sandwiches and apple juice and I was just hanging on by the cuticle of an unmanicured fingernail for B to come through the door and so that I could leave and go vacate my brain and stretch out my spine at my pilates class.

All of which means that we can't watch anything televisual right now because we wouldn't hear her inevitable waking if we did. And no matter how much some people might think it would do her good and she'd just go back to sleep on her own after a little while, I respectfully beg to differ. She would scream herself silly, quite possibly wake her brother, maybe come out looking for me and fall downt the stairs, and generally be totally paranoid by the time I did go and put her back to sleep such that she would fling all parts of her over my body in her sleep and never let me leave.

So I thought I'd just sit here and write some very long sentences for you to unravel. You're welcome.

Splashback

Playgrounds aren't much good when they're wet, but last weekend we ended up in a wet playground anyway. We had gone to a local park for some fresh air and because B wanted to locate a hard-to-find geocache near the baseball diamond. I decided that faced with the option of Mabel running around on wet metal bleachers above asphalt or playing on a wet playground with nice soft mulch under her, I'd go with the latter. She ended up with sopping wet trouser-bottoms and front-of-coat, but that was better than concussion. We were headed straight home anyway.

She stopped where the water had collected at the bottom of a slide and started to scoop wood chips off the ground and drop them in. It gave me a total flashback to her brother at the same age, who would happily spend twenty minutes - or as long as I could stand it - in just-above-freezing weather at our local slides plopping wood chunks (I think they bought the cheap stuff; heavy on the wood, not so much with the chip) into the puddle on the slide and then sloshing the water around with a stick. His sleeve and most of his front would be soaked with icy water, but he didn't care.

I happened upon a little video of him at 2 or so, singing Insy Winsy Spider and accompanying himself on his cooling-rack guitar (okay, I'm probably the only person who could have told you what the song was, and in hindsight I only knew because of the title of the clip). But where did that funny, happy, chubby, irrational toddler go? How can he be almost five - a proper kid with pointy elbows and knees and a whole complex life of his own just starting to open up and take him where I can't follow?

Mabel monologued as follows the other day: "Next year I'll be three and I'll go to school and you'll ask me what I did at school and I'll say I don't remember." (She knows, because that's what her big brother does.) One of these days Mabel won't be my funny happy sweet toddler either. I'll be sad when I look at the photos - but just imagine the amazing, complicated, challenging girl she's going to turn into.

It's a bit of a scary thought, actually, so I think I'll just stay here with the manic teething toddler for now, if you don't mind.

No muffins

I made two batches of muffins in two days: gingerbread muffins for a playdate on Friday, and banana-and-butterscotch muffins on Sunday because we needed to use up some icky bananas. However, I'm not going to blog them because I wouldn't want you to think that all I do is make muffins. And I didn't take any photos. And they're all gone.

My children are mostly delightfully robust. They don't get sick often, for which I am thankful. I can deal with snotty noses, but my patience for vomit is limited, and I was quite pleased last week when Monkey waited till we were actually in the ER to throw up, because then cleaning it up was somebody else's problem. However, this does mean that whenever they're struck by a fever (or a temperature, as we say at home, which is pretty meaningless when you think about it), I tend to get a little doom-and-gloom about it.

Yesterday afternoon we needed to get out of the house, but I knew that a trip to a mall would send adult stress levels through the roof before we even started the car, so I suggested putting them in wellies and raincoats and going for a walk in the wet. This worked pretty well, I thought: we all wandered down the road, the kids right in the rushing gutters, finding big sticks and pushing wet leaves around with them. After a while B and I were getting a bit too rained-on, so we all meandered back up the road and home. I put Mabel straight in the bath to warm her up, since she was wet up to her tummy, despite the boots. But it wasn't very cold, and we weren't out very long. I thought it was okay.

Later on, when she seemed warm and looked flushed, I wondered if our encounter with nature had been such a good idea. She conked out early, practically as soon as I put the book down, but her breathing was more rapid than usual. Such a thing causes a mother's thoughts to turn lightly to pneumonia, so I came downstairs and WebMD-ed it. I think, having broken the invisible barrier and gone to the ER once, I feel as if nothing is stopping us from going again, maybe on a weekly basis, now that we know how it works. Nothing except my fervent desire to stay at home and have healthy children, that is. I decided that Mabel would be okay till the morning, so long as I could keep an eye on her. And knowing that she'd wake up pretty soon looking for her bed-mate (hint: that's me), I felt I'd be in a good position to do that for most of the night. I don't know why I feel that nothing terrible can possibly happen if I'm right there beside her, since I'm asleep too, but I do.

An hour and a half later, right on schedule, she woke up. She'd been warm of forehead going to bed, but now she was downright feverish all over, looking miserable, and complaining of a pain in her tummy into the bargain. I thought of appendicitis, as you do. (My father nearly died of peritonitis when he was five. I know things have probably changed in medicine since 1934, but family lore weighs heavy.) I took her temperature and it was 101.5, so I gave her some Motrin, and half an hour later she was asleep, cooler and breathing easy.

The rest of the night was exactly as usual, and this morning Mabel was her regular chirpy self, with the added bonus of having discovered how to whistle. I just wish she'd discover how to blow her nose. And it would be nice if tonight brought no surprises, because I'm over surprises.

Saturday round-'em-up

Mabel missed her nap today, for no obvious reason except that she woke up ten minutes after she went to sleep, and that was that. As a result she was increasingly volatile as the afternoon wore on, and finally caved at 6.25 and is asleep. So I can actually enjoy my dinner and a glass of wine without rushing, except that I'm so used to rushing that I'm not sure I can do it any other way.

Mabel also had her first pony ride this morning, so I suppose we can only blame ourselves when she starts demanding a pony. It was impromptu: we happened to be at a local farm-in-a-park when there were rides going on, so we nabbed one each for the kids. Mabel didn't even want to be held on her shaggy Shetland - she grabbed the - what's it called? - the thing on the saddle to hold, not a possum, not a podium... - the thingy like a pro and nonchalantly rocked around the ring. Pommel, that's it. Here she is, quite unperturbed.


Monkey leaned over to me as I accompanied him with the camera and whispered, "When is the real ride going to be?" He's a pro: this was maybe his fourth ever pony ride, and he wanted to be let loose to gallop free across the hills, or something. I explained to him later that riding a horse isn't as easy as it looks, once you progress from being led on the most docile nags in the county.


But it's fun to think that some day, on some vacation, we'll all go on a pony trek and I can show off my amazing trotting skills. They're about on a par with my amazing cartwheeling skills, which I like to bring out on beaches and in secluded parklands, to delight the children and entertain the adults.


Ha. You thought I was joking, didn't you?

Strawberries and tuna

Sometimes, it would have been nice to have the second child first.

Mostly I'm very glad ours turned out this way round, but now and then Mabel does something to make me realise how very pointless it was worrying about something with Monkey.

I'm talking about food, mostly. Oh, the countless minutes - tens of them at a time, even - that I spent agonising over how I must be doing something wrong with the way I was offering Monkey food. It must be too late, too early, too near nap time, too soon after nursing, the wrong sort of food - clearly it was my fault that he wasn't eating anything.

At lunchtime today Mabel cleared my misconceptions up for me once and for all. We had spent the morning in doing nothing, as she had sprouted a cold yesterday evening, incubated it all night while not sleeping, and by now was producing a constant gentle drip of clear snot. I thought we should take it easy, though she didn't seem to see the need. Anyway, around 11.30 I was thinking of starting lunch and she wanted to nurse, so rather than push food on her when she probably had no appetite, I went ahead and nursed her. Then she saw a tiny tub of strawberry ice-cream as I opened the freezer, and demanded some. I said "Okay, if you have some strawberries with it" - reasoning that she might get some vitamin C that way - and put a tiny scoop in a bowl with a quartered giant strawberry. She polished off the ice-cream and ignored the fruit.

Then I sat down with my tuna melt (fancy name for a tuna-and-cheese toasted sandwich, dontcha know), and at the last minute cut off a largish portion for Mabel's plate - if she didn't want it, as I assumed would be the case, I could always take it back.

She ate it. And asked for more.

So there you are. She was too tired, she'd just nursed, she'd eaten dessert already, it was a new food, and she ate it anyway. Because that's what most kids do. Monkey's just odd, and if I'd stopped blaming myself for his vagaries sooner, I'd have been just that little bit happier.

Oh well. Such is parenthood.

Oscars, vegetarian lasagne, and IKEA pencils

I amused myself greatly on Sunday night by live-Facebooking the Oscars. It turned out I was not the only one among my friends to be sitting at home watching TV with a laptop on my knee, and we ended up with a spontaneous virtual Oscars party. I was so entertained by thinking up smart comments (smart in the Irish sense of cheeky, not the American sense of erudite) for my status updates and scanning my friends' comment threads to see what further nonsense I could add to the proceedings, that I ended up watching the whole thing. Though I may have missed a few nuances of the speeches.

On Monday I made vegetarian lasagne. I took some photos along the way and it turned out delicious enough to blog, I thought.

First, I chopped a large onion, a couple of cloves of garlic, one courgette (zucchini), one summer squash (the yellow ones), and sauteed them all with a tub of ready-sliced mushrooms. (You could slice your own, but I'm lazy.) I usually do half an aubergine (eggplant) too, but they were out of eggplants in the supermarket. And I never manage to use up the other half becuase I don't really like aubergine, so maybe it's just as well.

When the vegetables were soft, I added half a big jar of pasta sauce, a tin of fire-roasted tomatoes, and a small jar of roasted red peppers. You could, of course, just use a normal red pepper at the sauteeing stage, but I like the roasted ones. I tossed in half a carton of tomato soup that was sitting in the fridge too. Salt, pepper, dried oregano and a teaspoon of fresh pesto. Simmer for as long as you can bear it, or as long as it takes to make the white sauce.

Here's Mabel helping by balancing pencils on the empty mushroom container. After that she was a little less helpful and decided to empty out the pencil holder all over the floor. Twice.

Take a moment to appreciate how many little IKEA pencils we have. I think it may be time we mounted a pencil-returning mission.


Then I made the white sauce, of which process there are no photos because it's not very picturesque. Visualize, if you will, in your mind's eye, me melting some butter in a saucepan, then stirring in a tablespoon of flour, seasoning it, and stirring some more. Then adding milk, gradually, in between stirring a lot more.

Somewhere around this point Mabel started chomping on a magnet from the fridge.
"We don't eat fridge magnets, Mabel," I said.
"We don't eat fridge magnets?"
"No."
I continued stirring to the sounds of Mabel methodically removing each magnetic letter from the fridge, slurping it noisily, and dropping it to the floor.

When I'd added all my milk and the sauce was too thin, I turned off the heat and put in most of a bag of grated cheese (sorry, JeCaThRe) and some extra parmesan. Sauce thickened up nicely. I built my lasagne. This is layer two of tomato/veg sauce going on.

And the finished product, pre-oven, with the last of the cheese on top.

Out of the oven. 350 F for 30-40 minutes, or until it looks like this. Let it cool down a bit before you serve it up, or you'll burn your tongue.

On the plate. My lasagne always lacks cohesiveness on the first night, but it tastes divine. On the second and third nights it sticks together better, and tastes almost as good.

This was the third night. There is no more.

Breaking a duck

I had an Oscars-related post all planned, possibly with bonus vegetarian lasagne dinner-blogging and cute story about how hard it is to cook at exactly the witching hour with a two-year-old who had a short nap flitting around the kitchen trying to eat the fridge magnets and spilling pencils all over the floor, but then Something Else happened yesterday to (a) prevent me blogging at all and (b) push all that thrillingness on to tomorrow, probably.

What happened was, while I was upstairs about to brush Mabel's teeth preparatory to an early bedtime because she clearly needed it, and his dad was clearing up after dinner, Monkey somehow propelled himself off the back of the sofa headfirst into the carpet-over-solid-concrete floor. I heard the cry, knew it was a biggie, and was back downstairs with Mabel while he was still drawing breath for the next one, though his Dad, obviously, got there before me.

He cried and cried, but we couldn't see any blood or even a bump on his forehead, and I reckoned he was mostly still crying because it was so near bedtime and he'd had a busy day of school followed by running around with a playdate, so I finally told him I had to get Mabel to bed and asked if he wanted me to put him straight into his bed or if he wanted to play his usual pre-bedtime game of Batman with Daddy. He chose Batman, of course, though he sounded a bit shaky about it and was still intermittently crying.

I took Mabel back up, brushed her teeth, and read The Gruffalo's Child. Just before we settled down I heard Monkey and B come upstairs, but instead of the usual grousings over toothpaste and how long it had been since his last pee, I heard Monkey say, "I can't see."

Red flags started waving themselves all over my brain, obviously. I went in to clarify the situation for myself.
"Things look fuzzy, blurry? Is that it?"
"No, I can't see anything. It came and went before and now I can't see anything."
I ran downstairs and called the doctor's office, hardly even to see whether we should go, mostly just to check which hospital they recommended. I was talking to the doctor-on-call within five minutes: she sounded serious when I described the problem, and confirmed my thoughts that we should go to the further-than-just-local place, because they have a dedicated pediatric ER.

It's quite amazing, really, that I've been the mother of a son for almost five years and yet this was our first ever ER visit. We'd only been to the hospital once before in the four+ years we've lived here, and that was because Mabel needed an extra heel-prick when she was five days old and jaundiced.

We put shoes, socks, and coats over pyjamas on the kids, I silently thanked heavens that we'd had dinner already, B abandoned any notion of getting to his Monday-night choir practice, and we got on the Beltway. As we started driving I asked Monkey if he could see now, and though he sounded vague I could see his pupils alertly tracking the headlights of the passing cars, so I knew his eyes were working. Fifteen minutes later I was carrying a mostly asleep Monkey into the ER reception while B and Mabel parked the car. (I know you shouldn't let someone fall asleep if they might be concussed. I'd tried to keep him awake, but on the best of days this boy will fall asleep on a car-ride any time after 5pm, and this was not the best of days. He'd roused when we got there, so I knew he was conscious.)

Just as I was trying to spell his name for the lady at the desk, and wondering if I could get my insurance card out of my bag while still holding him (four-year-olds are longer and heavier than two-year-olds, whodathunk?), Monkey coughed a few times and then threw up his peanut-butter sandwich all over both of us. That got us a bit more attention, I think, and I mentally checked the "vomitting" box on my mental list of things that mean it's concussion.

Anyway, long story slightly shorter, the triage nurse assessed him, said it was probably not too bad - he'd perked up since the upchuck and was able to tell her how old he was and how many fingers she was holding up - once he understood that she really wanted to know the answer to such a stupid question - and sent us out to wait. Then he threw up the rest of the sandwich, and she brought us back to wait under observation where the doctors actually were. (She had thought the first vomit might have been unconnected, just because of all the crying and the car journey, but when it happened again she was more concerned that it might really be a symptom of head injury.)

Then we got into a room, where Monkey curled up on his trolley-bed and tried hard to fall asleep, while we tried to keep him awake until the doctor came. Mabel, meanwhile, was crazy-awake, providing a running commentary and asking intelligent questions about everything. (Where intelligent means asking why a lot.) The doctor asked similar questions about numbers of fingers, looked in eyes and ears, said he was probably okay and sent him for a CT scan anyway. She said it was okay to let him sleep, so the poor boy finally got to snuggle up, as best he could, and close his eyes. He was out like a light. He looked very small, curled like a comma under the thin hospital blanket. Mabel demanded nursery rhymes and walks and didn't let us dwell on things, which was probably just as well.

The CT tech took Monkey away on the trolley and B went with them while I tried to keep the relentlessly unlseepy Mabel occupied. Luckily, it didn't take too long. He slept through the whole thing - which is good because it meant they didn't need to sedate him to get him to keep his head still, but on the other hand I think if he'd been awake he would have been really interested to see the machine, and probably would have been quite good about keeping still.

We waited about twenty minutes more, and then the doctor came to tell us that the results were clear and we could go home.

Mabel finally cracked in the car, and cried all the way home. Monkey stirred a little in his booster seat but mostly just slept. We put him to bed in our bed - more for our peace of mind than his, though he does like company when sleeping - and as I lay beside him waiting for Mabel to call me away, I looked at the just-perceptible rising and falling of his shoulder and said a quiet thank-you to the God I don't believe in. Because it's polite to be grateful for what you get.

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

They said to keep him home from school today and let him take it easy. I'm trying, but it's hard because he's acting like his normal, infuriating, jumping-around self. The sofa has been pushed up against the wall, but I'm sure something else will present itself to fall off if the mood takes him. But it would be nice to wait another five years before our next ER trip, thank you very much.