Today's lessons

1. Maybe Mabel actually is ready to potty train.
2. The hardest part of potty training might be just staying at home all morning. Especially because staying at home means she wants to nurse the whole time. 
3. Bringing the big green potty down to the kitchen from the upstairs bathroom might prove to be enough of a novelty to entice her to use it, even though the downstairs toilet is just a few feet away.
4. Just because she stays dry from 9.00 to 12.30 and goes twice in the potty on command, you should not assume that it's done and dusted. (I didn't. But it would have been nice.)
5. When you take off the (dry!) naptime pull-up, she will have a big wee to do. 
6. Even if she doesn't want to waste good playtime doing it on the potty.
7. And so she will wet the next pair of pants.
8. And the next.
9. Training child #2 is different from training child #1, because even inside the house there are now distractions. You must enlist the help of child #1 to listen to stories in the bathroom so that child #2 will stay still.
10. If you have a coupon for 20% off any full-price item at REI (big outdoor/sports store near us), you will discover there's something else you need to buy there the day after the coupon expires and the sale ends.
11. Any amount of money coming in, no matter how tiny, can be mentally allocated in total to more than one expense going out. For instance, if you are so proactive as to sell Monkey's last-year's sandals for $15, nominally towards his new sandals which were bought on Saturday, you cannot then also spend the money on a new sunhat for Mabel at REI. Except that you can, because you just did.
12. Children are amazingly adaptable. For instance, when Mabel accidentally ducks Monkey totally underwater by stepping on him as she climbs out of the pool, he might actually, after the initial shock, claim to have quite enjoyed it.
13. When making ratatouille, or anything resembling it, you always need the bigger pot. Starting out with anything less is just a waste of good olive oil.
14. If, by fiddling with the air vents, you somehow manage to make Mabel's room a little less like a sauna, your own bedroom will take up the slack and jump 10 degrees or so.
15. Swimming increases pre-bedtime craziness and resultant parental shouting by 50%; decreases time taken to actually get Mabel to sleep by at least 80%. Overall win.

Hot

Listen, it's been great. Really. This past week, some of it anyway, has been really quite fun and educational. I mean, I've totally sorted out Mabel's summer wardrobe now, and her shelves are all tidy and the things that don't fit are in boxes marked for next winter and next summer and giving away (/keeping for a long time), and I even sorted out some of my own wardrobe and I have a pile of things here over the back of a chair to be ironed (or to sit here until I get tired of looking at them, and I bring them back upstairs and just wear them wrinkled, one by one), and Monkey's wardrobe is totally up next for overhauling. And my fruit consumption has gone up and my muffin and cookie consumption has gone down dramatically, because when it's too hot for tea or coffee, I don't have any reason to eat them. And we went to the pool on Saturday and we saw friends who cooked burgers for us on their grill yesterday, and that was all nice.

But look, Weather. This isn't it. It's not time for it. This is just a trial run, right? A little teaser trailer for summer, before you go back to where you were and ramp us up gently. We're not doing the whole thing right now for real. We're just not.

Because if you are, well I just refuse to, that's all. The heat was beating back up at me off the asphalt this morning as I left the supermarket with two unruly children in tow. I have yet to figure out how I'm going to do the shopping with both of them all summer long once Monkey's out of school, because his ability to be useful by, say, retrieving Mabel's discarded shoes or running after an escapee sister, is directly mitigated by the extra helping of craziness they both have just by being in the same place at the same time. And the air conditioning in the house, let's just say its most flattering angle is downstairs. Downstairs is quite lovely. But upstairs in the bedrooms, not so much. Especially in Mabel's south-facing bedroom. At the moment I can open the windows when the kids go to bed and by the middle of the night, at least, their rooms are much more pleasant. But as summer progresses, that's not going to remain the case. I think we might need some fans, lest our children simply melt away into small puddles of sweat that soak through their sheets and pool on the waterproof mattress protectors on each of their beds.

And then, since I spend so much of the night with young Miss Sweaty McHotterson, I can't sleep because I'm too damn hot and the small furnace who insists on being attached to me won't desist. Which leads to a very grumpy and tired mother, and doesn't bode well for the coming months, as I can't be a fun entertainments director if I haven't had any sleep, and the children will be watching entirely too much TV if I can't muster the energy to make the dash from air-conditioned house to instant-melt car and take them somewhere else air-conditioned, or the pool.

So, Weather. Go away. Come back in July. Give me time. Please, just a little more time...

Reaction parenting

On Thursday, I finally did something I've been itching to do for quite some time. It didn't really improve matters, though.

I slapped Monkey.

Yes, you can come and revoke my attachment parenting card now, I hit my child. I'm sorry.

No, really, I am. I mean, if I could do it over, I wouldn't. But I can't deny that it felt satisfying, just for a split second.

It had been a long, hot day - the temperature hit 93, by far the hottest so far this year. My body is not yet inured to such things, and I'd had a headache most of the day, partly from the heat and partly from the incipient cold I was nursing. I had given the kids a bath and spirits were high. I left them tussling in towels on the sofa while I went to put the kettle on to make the rice for dinner. In the three seconds I was gone - of course - there was a thud and a wail and the beginnings of some hard crying, and I ran back, afraid that Mabel had done a Monkey and got herself a concussion.

She had indeed fallen - been pushed - backwards off the seat of the sofa, towards the table, and Monkey was standing on the sofa, clearly guilty, saying "I'd forgotten about the head-hitting thing" in far too good-humoured a way. As I picked her up and held her close, asking where she'd bumped and wondering if it was bad or really bad, the sight of her brother all unapologetic and - frankly, tantalizingly naked under his blue dragon towel - led me to some quick and rash thinking. I ran over it in my head for a second - would I? yes, I damn well would, because I had to hold Mabel and there seemed no other way to quickly get across the gravity of the situation - and reached out and gave him a smart slap on his thigh.

It was just hard enough to hurt, and it felt good. To me, for a second. Then he collapsed down into his towel and started to cry, and words like betrayal flicked into my mind. Mabel had stopped crying - it appeared she'd hit her leg off the table rather than her head on the floor - but now I had another fire to put out, and it was one of my own making. I put my arm around Monkey and apologised. I told him how I'd promised I would never hurt him, and now I had, because I was angry and he had seemed not to care, but I shouldn't have done it and I wished I hadn't.

Partly, I still thought maybe he'd learn something from the experience. Something about how if you push me too far, bad things happen. Something about taking things seriously. Something about doing what I say when I say it, instead of when he feels like it. I really hope he didn't learn that you can't trust anyone, not even those who love you the most, or that it's okay to hurt someone so long as you say sorry afterwards, or that the reasonable response to anger is to lash out physically. I hope he doesn't analyse it that much.

He came closer, still crying, and hugged me. We all three sat on the sofa, me and my crying child and my no-longer crying child and my consciousness that now I'd have to own up to the Internet about it.

A few minutes later he was jumping around and flagrantly disregarding me again, just like always. So much for lasting lessons, I thought. Hopefully the learning will be mostly on my part - that it didn't solve anything, it didn't teach anything good, and I don't want to do it again.

I was going to call this "Summer mugging, happened so fast" but that seems sort of tasteless

Why does my child have such a hot head? I mean, literally. I just kissed her hair as she sat on my lap for a bedtime story, and her (not feverish) head was radiating with heat. Poor girl: hers is the warmest room in the house, and the A/C just doesn't really reach all the way up there. Maybe her hair is actually pure cashmere, or perhaps it's just all the brain cells buzzing furiously in there that generate it all. She wakes up sweaty headed from naps and in the morning all summer long.

Which brings me to the fact that it was 94 F out there today, and it's not even June yet. It's amusing that in Ireland we consider summer to begin in May, when in reality of course it never begins at all, or might take place for a week in late April or a few glorious days in September, whereas in America the official start of summer isn't till June 21st. The fact that this date is also called "Midsummer's Day" doesn't seem to confuse anyone over here. Maybe it's only called that at home.

Anyway, we are technically still in Spring, but the weather is all gung-ho for getting as close to the magic 100 as it possibly can, with thunderstorms to boot. It was a while after moving here before I could get my head around the idea that "hot and sunny" could sometimes be a negative comment. In Ireland, there is no such thing as "too hot" in weather terms: now I am all too familiar with it, along with "frickin' hot", "bloody hot", and "too damn hot". Also, "disgustingly humid".

********

A friend's husband was the victim of a mugging last week. His iPhone was taken as he walked to work in broad daylight, and he was hit in the face for good measure. He's pretty shaken, and my friend wakes up in the middle of the night panicking about what might have happened.

They live close to us, in what might be called a slightly less "nice" part of town, which is still "nicer" than the area a little further down the road where we lived for four years. We never had any trouble there, or saw any (though my upstairs neighbour did say I was terribly naive and that there were drug deals going on on people's front stoops every day).

It does give one the heebie-jeebies, when someone blatantly disregards the social contract like that. I mean, we all exist here in some sort of harmony because we mostly agree to be nice to each other. If that's taken away, then it's just a free-for-all. Statistically, my friend's husband was just horribly unlucky; but emotionally, when something like that happens close to home, it makes you start thinking that every day you make through unscathed is amazingly lucky. It shouldn't have to be that way.

Anyway, Mabel heard about the incident and it's moved to the top of her list of things to perseverate about, along with why that boy fell off the slide, and the time Monkey had his face painted, and why Grandad hurt his leg (in 1971). The conversation goes something like this:

- Why did someone take his phone?
- Because they wanted it.
- They should have asked him for it.
- Well, he probably didn't want to give it to them.
- But he has to share it.
- Well, I don't think they were going to give it back.
- But why did they take his phone?
- They were just bad people, Mabel.
- I don't know why they took his phone. Maybe the bad guys should have just played checkers.

Yes, that's the solution to the world's problems. If only the bad guys would just work out their differences with a nice game of checkers, and we could all feel safe.

The lost boys

Poor Monkey had a five-minute trauma yesterday.

We had gone into Marshall's looking for socks for him, and were trundling around the shop/store picking up a dead cute pair of red-pink Converse low-tops for Mabel (not yet - next size up, but she might get to wear them to school next year and drop paint on them) and looking at this and that, since Mabel was sitting fairly contentedly in the trolley/cart so I didn't have to hot-foot it out. This may have had something to do with the baby in a box she had picked up in the toy department; I told her she wasn't buying it, but she could hold it till we finished up.

(See how I'm helpfully giving you the Irish and US vocabulary here? I don't want to alienate my Irish readers by making them think I've gone over to the dark side of sidewalks and vacations altogether, but I don't want to confuse and puzzle my poor American readers with peculiar terms they use for other things. If you're from somewhere else, I'm afraid you'll just have to muddle through.)

Anyway, Monkey was being a super-secret spy or something, following on behind me, but hiding around a corner or in a clothes rack any time I looked around. He probably had a theme tune going in his head. (This is a reference to The Emperor's New Groove, but we're probably the only family who has watched it enough to get it. An under-appreciated Disney: I highly recommend it.) I'd watch for long enough to make sure he'd seen where I was, and then continue without him, apparently unconcerned.

Sadly, it bit him in the ass, so to speak. The cash registers had been hidden behind a high display of summer tchotchkes, and I waited for him to appear before turning Mabel around the corner into them. Of course, this being Marshall's, I had to wait a few minutes to get to pay. (Marshall's, if you're not familiar with it, is a discount retailer ike T.K. Maxx in Ireland, though this particular branch is fairly small - a big square space too full of rails and rails of clothes.) As Mabel prattled on about the baby and its accoutrements, and I made sure she wasn't ripping the packaging of this item we were about to not buy, I craned my neck to watch for Monkey's face to peer around a corner at us. It didn't happen, but I couldn't lose my place in the ever-increasing queue to go and check on him, and I reasoned that all he had to do was listen for Mabel's crystal-clear babbling to pinpoint us.

Just as the customer in front left and the cashier beckoned me forward, a red-faced Monkey pushed through the display and ran over to me. He wasn't crying, but something wasn't right, and as he reached me he started to hyperventilate and burst into tears. I buried his head in my mid-section and tried to comfort him while explaining that no, we weren't taking the doll; yes, we were taking the socks and the shoes; and swiping the swipe and punching the numbers. Transaction completed, we headed towards some chairs by the door and Monkey said, between sobs, "Sorry, Mummy. I got some snot on your t-shirt."

I sat and held him for a while as he calmed down, but he was clearly very shaken and had been quite panicked. Someone had noticed and asked if he was lost just as he spotted me, so I don't know how he would have dealt with interacting with a stranger at that point. We talked about how I would never, ever leave a shop without him, and what he should do if he was lost in the future (we have covered this in the past, but not recently, and it's never been a real possibility to him before), and Mabel annouced that if he gets lost again, she'll go and find him and bring him back. That's all I would need, I imagine.

(When I was four, I got lost in Dun Laoghaire shopping centre with Simon from up the road, who was a lofty five. He panicked and blubbed. I clearly remember sitting in the little back room with the nice security people, telling them our names, as they announced over the intercom that two small children had been found. Our mums, shopping together, who had probably been frantic with worry, came to get us. I was sanguine and practical about the whole thing, and felt a certain scorn for Simon for a long time afterwards. Until now, maybe.)

Then Monkey and Mabel and I went next door to Target and christened the new Starbucks there by getting the victim of the incident a chocolate milk and a slice of lemon cake for us all to share. When he laughed about the giant dripping cardboard ice-pop suspended from the ceiling, it was with the pure sunshiny joy of one who'd been given a second chance at life.

Mus. App.

My children have a limited musical repertoire. Beyond the regular nursery rhymes and such fare, I mean. I blame myself for not playing music around them, but honestly, the noise around here is such on a daily basis that if I have anything else in the background, it just pushes me over the edge. I used to love to cook to music on the radio, but now my soundtrack to dinner is more often a loop of "She hit me!" and "He grabbed my horsie!" and "GET OUT OF THE KITCHEN BEFORE I DROP A HEAVY OBJECT ON YOUR HEAD ACCIDENTALLY ON PURPOSE." Adding Amy Winehouse to the mix just wouldn't help matters.

We will not discuss how far behind the times I am with current music. I have probably not heard of anyone popular, beyond Lady GaGa, who I mostly know for her bizarre clothing choices. If I heard one of her songs in the mall, I probably wouldn't recognise it. I understand now how people earn the scorn of their children for being so behind the times: I won't know a single hit of the late noughties when they're all golden oldies.

In the car I sometimes put on the classical station, and Mabel likes to ask for the violins (she's been watching some Little Einsteins, bless their cotton socks and conductor's baton and stacatto jumping over icebergs). Until recently, Monkey wouldn't countenance anything that wasn't the theme to the Spider-Man cartoon or Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, but there are a couple of other songs that have been in their orbit for so long that they never sounded new: namely, Don't Fence Me In (the slow one by Ella Fitzgerald, or the fast one by David Byrne) and what Mabel likes to call "Bum Bum Bum" - otherwise known as Mr Sandman. (Listen: you'll see why.)

I love to hear Mabel suddenly break into a few bars of "Mister Sandman, b'ing me a dweam..." as we go round the supermarket. Gives her such an air of sophistication, I think.

Recently, however, I was trying to broaden their horizons a tad and had put on some Beatles. Monkey suddenly professed to think Ticket to Ride was the best song ever, and has been asking for it since. Today in the otherwise deserted playground, as he slowly spun around belting out, "She's got a ticket to ra-ad. She's got a ticket to ra-a-ad..." and Mabel picked it up from the swings: "...She's got a ticket to ri-hide, and she don... doesn't care."

That's my gramatically correct two-year-old. My heart, it overflows with editorial pride.

Monkey sings along to Ella. Don't miss the big finale.

Field trip

This morning, Monkey's nursery school class visited the local elementary school to see what kindergarden looks like. Serendipitously, I was scheduled to co-op today, so I got to tag along for my own introduction to the next however many years of our lives.

For my non-American readers, kindergarden is the first year of elementary school. Children start when they're five. In Ireland - and the UK, correct me if I'm wrong, someone - we usually start at four and have two years before First Class/Form. First Grade here is roughly equivalent to First Class there, because it also happens when you're six. Perhaps they learn more in that extra year of schooling over the pond, but I'm pretty happy to have it this way for us right now: I think Monkey will be a whole lot more ready for the big transition at five and a half than he would have been a year earlier, and I don't feel there's any great advantage to teaching kids to read and write and do sums as soon as they pop out of the womb - they'll all get there in their own sweet time, given a conducive home atmosphere and interested parents. I'm more concerned that my son, at five or six or seven, gets time to play outside, than that he has an hour a week learning how to use a keyboard and a mouse.

But we've signed on for the public school and that's just how it is. And what I saw today, while terrifying because it seems to indicate that my children are going to keep getting bigger and bigger and older and more independent, was good. It's a big, bright school, with corridors full of artwork and geography projects and directions to the shad presentation (yes, shad, as in roe, I presume). It has things my primary school never dreamed of, like a counsellor and a lunch room and a library and a nurse. (In my school, the library was some books in a cardboard box at the back of the room. Or on a bookshelf, if you were lucky.)

But the kindergarden rooms we saw had comforting, familiar things too: cubbies for backpacks and lunch boxes, alphabet letters on the wall, scissors and gluesticks and pencils and easels, and nice friendly teachers. The children sat in groups at big tables, just like we did way back when, and it didn't seem like they had to stay there glued to the seats in total silence as they traced one giant cursive a after another - there was plenty of jumping up and down and moving around and talking when they shouldn't. Unless they were just putting it on to lull us into a false sense of security, and went back to a more Stepford-esque military precision as soon as we filed out the door.

And then we all had cut-up blueberry muffins and apple slices sitting on the grass outside the school, and wended our way back downhill - a train of green-scarved children caboosed by a sturdy wagon to trundle the snack materials, under the shade of tall trees, stopping at playgrounds as we went, along footpaths between the houses, leading to a tunnel, made so that the children of the town could walk safely to school without crossing any major roads. (That school, the original one, is the building that now houses the nursery school, among other things.)

Monkey took the visit in his stride, I think. He was interested, and didn't seem intimidated, and asked a question in the counsellor's office in a nice clear polite voice (I was proud), and I think he'll be fine when the time comes around. Me, I'm getting a little sniffly just thinking about it.

Una vida a medias

I'm living half a life, I thought last night, and built a blog post around it.

That's a bit melodramatic, I thought this morning. But let's see where it goes anyway.

I did spend quite a long time only living half a life. First I was in Dublin living one half of a long-distance relationship, not doing much, waiting to move. Then I was here, living a life that could be packed up and returned across the Atlantic as soon as the word was said. It took some commitment, to not acquire things, to pay no attention to local news, to maintain a presence at home and abroad.

A lot of people do it: the country not moved to, the job not taken, the man not married, the baby not born ... the road not travelled, whether by accident or design. We all have parallel lives where we did the other thing, to which our minds wander every now and then to wonder which way we'd be better off, how things would be different, how we're going to deal with the fact that they're not.

I spent a long time living lightly, noncommitedly, waiting for things to get going. I used to be yelled at by the hockey coach in school for keeping my distance from the ball: "Stop saving yourself, Maud!" she'd bawl, justifiably irritated by my habit of staying safely back, claiming that I was waiting to spring into action when the ball might come close enough to need to be repelled by me, but otherwise mostly retreating from the fray. (I was a terrible hockey player.) Things have now got going, and I'm in the thick of it, and yet there's still a small percentage of me that's lying low, waiting, watching what's going on on the other field, in my other life where I live in Ireland.

I still look idly at the property section of the Irish Times, marvelling at how prices have dropped, fantasy shopping for some gorgeous redbrick in D6 or a delightfully updated cottage in a secluded road just outside the heart of Dalkey. B reads the letters page. We still have our Irish bank accounts, our Irish drivers' licences, our wedding-present gift tokens for Irish department stores (dammit).

(You know, it has just now occurred to me that they probably ship to America. I think next time we're home I should just go up to the third floor of Brown Thomas, choose a nice piece of Le Creuset, and have them send it here.)

Of course, I also still have the co-sleeper, the baby stroller, the bouncy seat, and a big box marked "Maternity Clothes" downstairs in the basement. I'm no more - or less - likely to need those (aside from lending them to friends now and then) than we are to move home, but I'm not ready to let go of the possibility. Not quite yet.

When we moved into this house a year ago, the people doing the kitchen asked, "Well, how long are you going to be here? A few years, or forever?" "Yes," we said. "One of those." We still have no idea whether we'll end up here or there or somewhere else, and if so when.

For now, we're here, and a part of me is there. If we moved back, the opposite would be true - we've been in this country too long now for it not to leave a mark. Such is always the lot of the emigrant, or the returned emigrant, or the renewed emigrant. But you have to take the half of life that you have and run with it, because nobody gets to have both halves - the thing that happened and the thing that didn't - ... oh crap, I just wrote Sliding Doors, didn't I?



A prize (of my admiration) goes to the first commenter to tell me the source of the title quote. (It's not Sliding Doors.) (My husband is not eligible. Anyway, he already has my admiration.)

Saturday miscellany

Sunday Miscellany is a long-running "music and musings" (as they call it) programme on Irish radio. Every Sunday morning of my life, until I moved out (even, come to think of it, if I was hungoverly drinking a cup of tea at my boyfriend's house because I'd, ahem, missed the last train), it was the soundtrack to breakfast before going to mass. It features soothing or energising pieces of music interspersed with short memoir-style essays, usually read by their authors. Its theme tune is probably one of the most comforting sounds I could ever wish to hear.

It was many years before I connected the written word "miscellany" with the missal-eny (missal, obviously, because it was church day) I'd heard about for so long.

I don't have any soothing music, and right now it's still Saturday, but here are some snippets anyway. Imagine them being read by the author while you eat your rice krispies and wait for the toast to pop.

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

Hooray! A new person likes me! I've been stuck at 12 on my Facebook likes for ages, and suddenly tonight it's 13. It's been particularly trying, because the first day I set it up, I got 15 likes straight away, and I thought, "This is easy! I'll have 50 or 60 luvvies in no time," but then it wasn't working properly and I had to take it down and start from scratch the next day, and I'm still not back up to the original 15. So, you know, if you're on Facebook and you'd like to like me, please do. If you don't want the updates, you can always hide them, but otherwise it's an easy way to get a notification whenever I write a new post. And you get bonus super-secret only-for-FB-likers updates every now and then (but not annoyingly often) too.

I've just finished Operating Instructions; a book that I've seen recommended as new-parent reading ever since I was pregnant. It was good: somewhat surprisingly God-filled, but in a very diffident way. Americans (I generalize; forgive me) are so much more out there about their faith. Every time I click Next Blog on Blogger (which I have to do quite often because they've sneakily set it up so that to get to my dashboard I have to go forward and then back again; I won't object because presumably other people have to click to my blog for the same reason, and what goes around comes around), I'm amazed by how often God is invoked in the next blogger's About or Description or something. Irish people keep quiet about their beliefs even when they're strong - especially when they're strong, I'd say. The prosletysing life is not for us. Evangelical Irishmen are few and far between, except when drunk. (I generalise, but I'm allowed.)

It was quite similar to Anne Enright's Making Babies, I thought, which was given to me when I was pregnant. I started it and tailed off, but when Monkey was about six months old I picked it up again and every word resonated with me, hilariously or sentimentally. If you enjoyed the one, I recommend the other.

Mabel didn't nap yesterday, and in consequence went to sleep in a swift ten minutes at bedtime. She always falls asleep with me on her right, with her feet hanging off the side of the bed. Tonight we are not so lucky; I'm currently listening to her on the baby monitor, conning Daddy into singing songs and reading more stories.

My new glasses have been hurting the bridge of my nose, making me look - when I take them off - even more like my grandmother than I usually do. Her not-inconsequential nose was pinched at the top not by glasses but rather by old age, the rest of her flesh having dropped a little around the cartilage, leaving little indents on either side. (My nose is not the impressive Roman one of my maternal grandmother and some of my cousins, but it's a mini version of it.) I took them in to have the small, hard pads replaced by some more cushy silicone ones.

The nice (but not cute) Jason-Long-wannabe hipster nerd who had sold them to me was there again, spieling his spiel to some other poor sightless fool. He had been helpful, offering opinions and bringing along new selections, one of which was the pair I ended up with. At one point I tried on a pair, looked in the mirror, and remarked, "A little too Lisa Loeb, don't you think?" He laughed encouragingly, but even before I said it I thought that I probably had ten years on him and wondered if he'd know what I was talking about. Then I rationalised that she was more popular over here and probably had more hits than just the one I know, and that the glasses were a fairly constant part of her image, as far as I knew. So I said it anyway. It's amazing how many thoughts you can fit in the instant before you make even the most offhand of comments.

So none of us got raptured today. Did you? When we came home from Monkey's soccer game this morning (wherein the reds massacred the purples by about ten goals to nil, but none of them were scored by him; he's more into defence, which he pronounces in the American way with the accent on the "dee", to my chagrin) the Jehovah's Witnesses were making the rounds of our neighbours, and I wondered if it would be interesting, or politic, to bring up the whole notion of the world ending this afternoon with them. But they didn't call to our door, even though they must have seen us arrive. Maybe we looked beyond redemption, one way or the other.

Message in a bottle

These are the halcyon days, the days we were longing for back when it was cold and nasty; the days we'll be harking back to when it's hot and muggy; the days we'll be waxing lyrical about when the children are grown and gone, or even just grown and adolescent and all too present. It's glorious outside - t-shirt weather but not hot: just right for a five-year-old to ride his bike round and round and round while his sister and his mother prowl through the too-long grass looking for creepy crawlies.

And of course, instead of doing that, I'm inside at the computer, doing my best to ignore the children. More than one friend has remarked lately on the Groundhog-Day-ishness of life at the moment: every morning we're surprised not to hear I Got You Babe blasting from the radio, because everything else just seems to be happening over and over and over, every day the same as the day before or the week before.

I suppose the lesson here is that we humans are never bloody satisfied, and it's just as well we don't have pots of money and a little place in the Bahamas and designer shoes and a housekeeper, because we still wouldn't be happy all the time.

The other day a squirrel scampered through the damp playground, and Monkey shouted after it, "Hello, my friend the squirrel!" I realised that I hadn't heard him talk about his friend the spider, who used to show up in daily conversation, for a long time. It's the sort of tiny thing that you think will happen for ever, that you'll never need to remember because it'll never stop happening, and then it's gone and forgotten. That's why I write these things: photos only tell half the story of a childhood, if that. I want to recall the sounds and scents and essence of these fleeting days, in all their tedium, so that in the distant future when I don't even appreciate having a half-hour to myself again, I can open the bottle and take a sip of how it used to be.

Apples of my eyes

Posting has been sparse here this week because I've been donning my travel-agent hat and figuring out planes, trains and automobiles (ferries, actually) in and between England, Wales, and Ireland for our trip this summer. I think I have us sorted out now, so all I have to do work out exactly what mechanism we'll use to tote the smaller child without having the larger child hijack it all the time (I'm thinking Ergo, or maybe a tiny stroller he wouldn't fit into - the dolly stroller, perhaps), arrange some car seats to borrow in Dublin, and plan a party where we get to see everyone but we don't have to do any work. Potluck, anyone?

Right now, at 8.30pm, Monkey is the golden child. He's basically a miracle baby. This is because he's asleep. B says goodnight, Monkey lies down, closes his eyes, and goes to sleep. Then he stays asleep until tomorrow morning. (And then he wakes up B, not me.) He's everything I ever dreamed of in a child. (Back when I used to get to dream.)

Mabel, in contrast, is the demon child. She's still awake. She escaped and ran downstairs twice. She wanted books. She didn't want books. She wanted little Batman. She wanted mumeet. She wanted the big side. She wanted the other side. She wanted the other big side. She wanted to play with her doll's house. She wanted medicine because her tooth hurt. I'm hoping it kicks in soon and she lets me put her to sleep, because I'm tired and I have other things to do, like taking pictures of my new glasses and posting them on Facebook.

At her naptime this afternoon, Monkey disturbed my Very Special Quiet Time - during an ad break, because that's what he does during my quiet time - to insist that I send a message on my computer to the people who make plastic because he'd figured out, for once and for definite this time, how to fly. He just needs big plastic wings, five big, that I can ask the people to make to his exact specifications, which involve the very important detail that they need to be as sharp as the edge of a door.  I clicked a link to read about how Queen Liz on her historic visit to Dublin didn't drink her complementary pint of Guinness but Prince Philip nearly did - clearly the much-needed light relief; now I understand his role and why he makes famously silly comments - it's because One is so terribly terribly serious and solemn and queenly all the time - and Monkey, in great relief, announced: "That's it. Done." I don't think he understands how Internet commerce works at all.

Anyway. My glasses. When last we left this thrilling train of thought, I was hurtling towards maybe possibly finding out about getting laser surgery. Then the nice man from the laser surgery people rang me back to say that I couldn't even have the initial examination to see if I was a candidate until six months after I'd stopped breastfeeding. Well. Since that won't happen till the middle of the century or so, I went the more sensible route and booked a local eye exam with a view (har) to getting new glasses after all.

I dumped Mabel on a helpful friend (who let her spend the morning sitting on the front lawn watering a ceramic frog and most of her own clothing with the hose attachment, but heck, it was warm and she was happy, and the frog was very clean by the end of it) and went off unencumbered to look at red lights and green lights and points of light and wiggly lines in my peripheral vision as well as the traditional ever-decreasing A D F S thingies, and it turned out that rather than being a mere two years since my last pair of glasses, it was more like four. (Actually, he said, "Your last visit was in '07," and it took me several moments to figure out what that meant and where it was in relation to the present day.) So I felt totally vindicated in going the whole hog and ordering a pair of prescription sunglasses too, to replace the ones I use in the car that are probably ten years old and perhaps I'm guilty of missing things I should be seeing, like maybe other cars or short people or speed-limit signage.

And now I have, for perhaps the first time in my life, a pair of glasses that look pretty good. Cool, even. They're not trying to blend in and disappear: I decided it was time to embrace the sexy librarian within and be a Girl Who Wears Glasses without shame. They're purple, to boot. (I would take a photo but the daylight is gone. Maybe tomorrow.)

What's more, everything is sharper. I'm not sure how much I should be celebrating the fact that now I'll be able to see more clearly just exactly how badly my bathroom floors need to be cleaned.

Rescue squad: Mummy

Mabel and I went to Target this morning and had a pleasant time trying on various purple nail polishes, before not buying any of them. (Don't worry. I kept up my end of the consumer bargain by buying lots of other things.) It was quite sweetly mother-and-daughter, I thought. Though I fall short of being the mother of the only-just-two-year-old at a toddler class last week who was sporting a full, immaculate, pink pedicure under her tiny white open-toed sandals. I think that might be going a hair too far. But whatever floats your boat: in the big book of parenting sins, it's not exactly a mortaler.

We have been to the library several times since it reopened in all its tempting orange-topped-stool glory, and I pretty much have things down now. Before we go in, I go over the rules with them both: no sitting on the twirly stools, no playing on the computers, no running, no shouting. This afternoon we had to pick up a book for me, which meant a quick foray over to the sombre grown-up side of things, but we did that first and got it over with quickly. Then, a few books read, a few picked up, and I was queueing up to check out while they were swirling on the stools, Mabel blatantly playing with the computers.

(At this point I have to decide whether the correct course of action is to stick to my guns and go over there and remove them from the stools - which is pointless because Mabel gets straight back up, and I lose my place in the queue - or just grin and bear it and get through as quickly as I can, hoping that she's not actively breaking anything, and resolve to do better next time. I usually do a bit of the first, and a lot of the second.)

So we left the building, feeling all in all not too bad about how things went, and Mabel immediately went and got herself comprehensively wedged in a bush. There's a wide patch of conifer hedge outside the library windows, about three feet high and maybe the size of two or three ping-pong tables in area. It's dense needley leaf at the front and the top, but quite sparse underneath. As Mabel discovered, when Monkey ran between the hedge and the windows and Mabel followed him and then upped the ante by proceeding right into the middle of the whole thing.

Cue me circling the bush unfrantically, wondering vaguely what I should do now. I sent Monkey after her, much in the manner of Zaphod Beeblebrox sending a second pan-galactic gargle blaster down to check on the first, but I didn't really expect him to come out dragging her behind her by the ear, caveman-style. A young lad with a basketball arrived on the scene, eager to know if a dog was stuck in a tree, or maybe an injured squirrel, and seemed game enough when I tried to send him in after the first two, but then decided he couldn't fit. Mabel claimed to be unperturbed, deep in the foliage, so the first thing really was to get her to want to come out, or else to admit that she had a problem. I told her the boy might let her play with his basketball.

"I can't get out. I'm stuck," came a small voice. An opportunity for drama and pathos was noted and she moved to a quavery wail: "Mummy!"

So there was nothing for it but to swallow my dignity (again) and go in myself. Wondering if we'd have to call the fire brigade after all to cut my baby out of the hedge as if she were an accident victim trapped in a vehicle - only so much more embarrassingly - I ducked under, pushed through the dry sticks, broke off a couple, and pulled her out without undue drama after all.

Of course, then she was all pathetic and I completely forgot to scold her for going in in the first place. No doubt every time we pass the library in the future, she'll recount the day she got stuck in the bush and the boy with the basketball couldn't pull her out.

Discs and discretion

Mabel sat up in bed at five mumble-mumble this morning and whispered to me: "Why do squirrels run so fast?"

Who knows how the mind of a two-year-old works? She gets fixated on the tiniest details when she's tired, like why the red boy (boy in red t-shirt, that is) fell down the slide, or why Monkey wanted to have his face painted, or why she herself wouldn't share her popcorn with her brother that one time. (These are the current preocupations. The slide-falling incident happened before Easter, the face painting was two weekends ago, and the popcorn was about two months ago. Her memory is long and elephantine.)

She was so nice at music and art class this morning; the good twin of the girl who hit everyone last week. My hopes are raised. Maybe it really was the tooth, and maybe the tooth has made it all the way out. (It was halfway out when I last put my finger in the lion's gaping jaws to check. I don't do that too often.)

She seems to have intuited, somehow, though I don't think I've expressly said it and certainly I try never to make a big thing of it, that nursing is something we do in private, when other people don't see us. We had visitors in the house a few weeks ago and Mabel dragged at my hand, saying "Come over here, Mummy. Come into the front room with me." When I finally went with her, she said "...so I can have mumeet here." She was so discreet that she didn't even want to mention it in public. Such diplomacy.

On the other hand, then we went to pick Monkey up from school last Friday. Mabel pointed at Miss P's breasts and said, "Oh, you have those too. Mummy has those. She gives me mumeet." So that was perhaps a tad less discreet. If we were ever in any doubt as to whether small children differentiate men and women by noticing longer hair or how they dress or any cultural significators, I think we can lay those thoughts to rest: Mabel looks straight for the bazongas.

We will not speak of the time she asked me to show her my nipple as we crossed the road. At least nobody was in earshot, becuase it's not as if she has some cutesy code word for nipple. Oh no.

No logo

I had another Ikea-related epiphany the other day. This one had nothing to do with yogurt, or sofas, or even utensil holders: it was more of an editorial epiphany, really. As I typed "IKEA" in an e-mail, it suddenly occurred to me to wonder why I wasn't saying "Ikea" instead.

Thinking that a company name should be capitalized (or otherwise accessorized) a certain way just because that's how the company's graphic designers decided its logo should look is a particular bugbear of mine, and yet here I have been doing exactly that for as long as I've been writing the name of a particular Swedish furniture superstore and all-round place of wonder. I don't write Macy*s or GAP when I refer to those fine establishments, so why on earth have I been writing IKEA in all caps?

If you want a better say-so than mine to reference for how to treat logos like real words, look here. This man knows what he's talking about. (And yes, I stole my Macy's example from his piece.) 

In my defence, if there is such a thing, perhaps its foreign provenance lulled my subconscious into thinking that it was an abbreviation: Ideal Kitchens Ever After, or maybe something more Scandinavian, like Inbyn Knappa Ekarp Aspelund*, perhaps. Maybe it thought it was the initials of the nice man who started the shop: Ingmar Knut Edgar Allenpoe**. Or maybe it's just that after looking at the damn website and everything in the place and driving by the enormous sign so often that my two-year-old thinks anything written in yellow on blue says "Ikea," the logo had worked its insidious magic and subjugated my sensible inner editor. For shame!

******

So then, in the interests of completeness, I went to Wikipedia and looked up Ikea. And lo! and behold! It feckin' well is an abbreviation*** after all: the I and K are for the bloke who started it, and the E and A are for his farm and its parish. Thus meaning
(a) I was right all along
(b) I can go back to writing IKEA now
(c) I don't have to worry about whether I should go back and correct all the instances of IKEA heretofore appearing in the blog
(d) but this entire post is somewhat pointless

Ah well. You live, you learn, you buy some nice reconditioned Danish teak mid-century modern instead.


*Yes, those are actual Ikea product names.
**No, that is not the actual name of the Ikea founder.
***There is a completely different editorial issue at stake here which I really don't wish to get into, about whether it's an abbreviation or an acronym. And if it is an acronym, as I think it should be since it's pronounced as a word rather than individual letters, then I might have to return to my original stance, blame the graphic designers who are taking over the world, and start a single-handed campaign to have it spelled Ikea.

I knew I didn't want to get into that. You wouldn't believe how many times I changed my mind in that last paragraph.

I'll have what she's having

Having a baby is quite a lot like having sex.

No, I'm not one of those crazy women who find that labour is just one long wonderful orgasm, who I wouldn't believe exist in real life except that I know Davina McCall is one (go and look her up on Wikipedia, Americans) and I believe anything she says. But my sister-in-law said to me in some surprise after she had her baby, "It's very earthy, isn't it?" (or something like that; apologies if I'm misquoting anyone who might be reading). And that's the thing. It doesn't get much more gritty and realistic than having an actual human baby come out of you.

We modern people are so enamoured of our clean, sanitary, technology-enhanced lives that sometimes it's a bit of a shock to discover that some things just can't be made to be shiny and simple no matter how many European design specialists* you might employ. When you discover that about sex, it's pretty exciting - this elemental thing that connects you and your chosen one with the rest of humanity in a down and dirty sort of way. It's sweaty and you contort your face in funny expressions and things happen that you're not necessarily expecting and sometimes it goes on way too long and finally you lie there, panting and fulfilled. Just like childbirth. (See?)

Of course, with sex, you understand that this is a secret thing, to be shared only with your loved one (by which I mean the one you're with), probably in the dark and under the covers (in Ireland, hot sweaty over-the-covers sex is something that only happens about once a year; the rest of the time you only take all your clothes off because you don't want to look like a prude, but honestly you'd much rather keep all parts not vitally involved nicely insulated from draughts). The shock comes when you have a baby - the same sort of primitive, animal process, but in a brightly lit room, exposed to the four winds (or at least the air conditioning), with a whole bunch of people you only met once before parading through and peering and poking at your most delicate and intimate parts, and then asking you to do things like pee on the table.

As a girl, I was once a bit horrified by a TV depiction of birth - all that screaming and writhing and calling for hot water - and my mother, to save all hope of the lineage continuing, told me comfortingly that it wasn't like that any more: it didn't hurt these days, thanks to the miracles of modern medicine. Of course, then I went and turned my back on modern medicine and decided to have my babies as close to the old-fashioned way as I could manage, but I'm willing to bet that even with an epidural or a c-section, giving birth turns out to be a lot more like having sex on a spotlit stage (but less titillating, if that sort of thing turns you on) than you ever imagined it would. And you can't even get drunk first.

I'm just warning you.


*When I moved here I was often amused to see things touted as being of "European design", as if that would make them better. Becuase at home, we tend to think that all the newest, shiniest, coolest stuff comes from America. (It should really be Japan, but never mind that.) I didn't think that something having been designed in, maybe, Ireland, would really be all that great. But after I while I came to understand that Americans like objects that come from places like Italy (strollers) or Denmark (furniture) and will pay much higher prices for something that says it was designed by Europeans. They don't mean Dubliners, unless it's Guinness.

Unasked-for advice

If some poor soul asked me, not realising how much and how long I can go on about such things, what wisdom I had to impart about having a baby (a first baby, I mean), I would tell them, first, and then in great detail, how it is utterly impossible to underestimate the amount that this will change everything, totally and for ever.

Which isn't surprising, really, considering you're talking about being in charge of a new person, from scratch, just you and (if you're lucky) your partner. But we humans, we get the baby urge and we go all gurgly around small ones, and we tend to play down this aspect of procreation. It's Darwinian - if we thought about it too hard, nobody would ever reproduce. I'm (belatedly) reading Anne Lamott's Operating Instructions, and at one point she confesses that she thought having a baby would be a little more like having a cat. I think we all did, probably.

But then I would tell the person who had asked and was now probably already regretting it, especially if I was telling them in e-mail form because they'd get several chapters' worth in reply, probably replete with ennumerated, or at least bulleted, lists; on the other hand, I'd never know if they just closed the window and went on their merry way - at least until the pop quiz arrived the next week - I'd tell the person that they should do as I say and not as I do about this next bit.

Try to keep some things that don't change, I'd say. Whether it's some semblance of an exercise routine, or going shopping with your best friend, or having a date night, or even all three and something else as well, you should do your utmost to continue with some regular activity that was part of your life before the baby, albeit a bit less often. But not as un-often as I've managed to do this: to wit, taking two years to go back to my one puny weekly exercise class ("not that there's anything puny about advanced pilates, thank you," says my core; also "ow"), we've averaged about two date nights a year so far, and my shopping-companion best friend is still in Dublin, so we have an annual shopping trip, if lucky.

It's the guilt, you see. The maternal guilt. On the rare occassions when I'm out of the house and away from the children, even with them in the very capable hands of their father, I constantly feel like an escapee from the asylum, liable to be caught and returned at any moment, and that if I tarry one minute longer than the shortest time possible, something terrible will happen. The only time the guilt subsides is when they're asleep, and my entire body relaxes and and a Pavlovian desire for a cup of tea and something very chocolate rushes over me. Even then, there are so many things I should be doing in this "down time", from blogging to laundry to relaxing and reading a book (Books. I remember them.) that it's not long before the nagging feeling comes back. Oh for the days when I had one thing to be doing at one time (work, or drinking, or lying on my bed listening to my new CD) and even extra time in there when I had to invent things to do, like trying on all my clothes (not at once) or playing with eyeshadow or reorganizing the bookshelf according to publisher/edition.

These are not those days, is what I'm trying to say. Some day, no doubt, I'll be bored again. Until then, my books will remain in haphazard order and I'll just be happy if they're not chewed on. Too much.

Mind games

I brought Mabel to bed tonight at 6.30, since she wasn't fit for human consumption. Or else she was all too fit for human consumption, and bed was the only way to avoid her ending up in neat joints in the freezer. B had taken Monkey to soccer, so there was nothing else going on, and she was pretty happy to just alternate nursing with chatting to me for 40 minutes or so. Every now and then I'd come down and make some vague gesture towards cleaning up the toys or boiling water for pasta, but mostly we just hung out.

By the time the boys were home, she was feeling better enough to be allowed back into general circulation, and I actually got to eat my dinner in relative peace, reading a book, molested only slightly by the complicated game of Superman versus Lex Luthor with a butterfly in there somewhere going on around me. (Monkey got a late birthday present today of a Superman costume, and there were a pair of butterfly wings for Mabel. Monkey was quite interested in the wings too, since they're a flying mechanism - the pink and sparkles and fluffy stuff didn't seem to put him off at all.)

But really. This here above-pictured be-yoo-ti-ful butterfly. Yesterday she was tired after a congested night, and she took it out on her friends - and distant acquaintances - at music class by bopping them on the head at will. They didn't even have to be looking at her funny - she'd seek them out just to do it. This evening she hit Monkey hard with a glockenspiel beater, for no good reason, as he always tells me (but this time it was true) - those things are hard, and boingy - and then scratched him for good measure. Then she dumped the water out and tried to dump the towels in - the two things guaranteed to enrage me at bathtime.

It occurred to me that if she had a new sibling about now, as so many 2.5-year-olds do, and her brother did before her, we'd be worrying that we'd ruined our erstwhile darling girl by bringing an alien being into the family. But no! Take comfort, parents of newly embiggened brothers and sisters: your darling children were going to go to the dogs anyway. At least for a while.

Monkey let slip earlier today that when he coaxes Mabel to hit him, it's because he wants me to be cross with her. I'm surprised (perhaps impressed) by how calculating this is. I'm definitely impressed by the self-awareness he shows in recognising that this is what he's doing. On the other hand, considering he told me without the least guile, he's not exactly going to get an A in parental manipulation just yet. I'm also glad I decided not to make too big a deal of it when she hurts him if he's literally asking for it, if this is his motivation.

And ... back to the grindstone. She'll be asleep in no time, I'm sure.

<...Crickets...>

Plain sailing, briefly

Sometimes it feels like all my blog posts are about Mabel, because she's the cutest, and she says all the funniest things, and maybe Monkey's just running out of material for me because he's so old and jaded. And then weeks like this happen and the pendulum swings back and you think I should probably just shut up about my amazing five-year-old.

But I won't, just yet.

I just looked out the window. He and his dad are riding their bikes around in our nice quiet dead-end, and he looks as if he's been doing it for years. It's one of those moments that just makes you go all glowy and poetic inside. If he can ride a bike, he'll go far in life. It's like watching the beginning of his whole childhood - the bit I don't really get to be part of, but that he'll remember for his whole life.

A friend said that when her daughter turned five it hit her that her daughter's early childhood was over - and it's true: already we're at a point where I have to say that I just hope all that loving and holding and nursing and loving and general groundwork I put into his babyhood has paid off,  because now we're off on a new adventure where I have to do much harder stuff, like being mean and probably making him hate me sometimes, and being firm and laying down rules and boundaries. I like to think we'll work it all out together, we two and our firstborn. Mabel will sail along in his wake, creating her own ripples and probably more than a few typhoons, but we'll have weathered most things first, and worst, with Monkey.

Yesterday he was crying because of a sequence of unfortunate events (let's say), and I went and found him wrapped up in his duvet on his bedroom floor, and I held him and told him how much his dad and I both love him, always, every day, and are so proud of all the things he does and how hard he tries on his bike and all the great ideas he has and the clever things he thinks and the wonderful person he's becoming.

I spend so much of every day requesting and repeating and entreating and - let's face it - nagging and shouting, that I really have to remember to tell him the good things from time to time. The worst possible thing would be if he didn't know about them because I spent all my time blogging about what a great kid I have, and forgot to tell him in person.

Next stop, Tour de France

Monkey has been outside pedalling up and down for all he's worth every afternoon this week. Around Wednesday, I raised his training wheels again, and I think we're taking them off this afternoon. He sings to himself as he goes along, totally intoxicated by this new power and speed.

(In related news, I think I need to find a tiny walking bike on Craigslist for Mabel. Something tells me she'd love it. Yesterday when we met a new neighbour, of course Monkey had to show off his prowess, but Mabel kept interjecting: "I can run weeally fast.")

This week Monkey asked to try some apple, and said it was yummy. The next day he didn't want it, but he ate some dry-roasted edamame and liked those too. If you'd ever seen him refuse to even look at a new food, or have it on the table near him, never mind innocuously on his plate, you'd know what a great thing this is. 

Mabel and I went up to the elementary school on Thursday morning to (belatedly) pick up Monkey's application forms. Apparently they've been taking applications since the beginning of April, but the website remained singularly information-free and it's taken me this long to make a phone call to ask about it. As we parked I was thinking about how this is a whole new chapter and a place that's totally new to us (albeit only up the road and around the corner from our house) - and then we promptly met two people we knew. So that augured well. The building is pretty new, and it felt airy and clean and welcoming, and the staff were friendly and helpful.

Among the basic information and the medical forms and whatnot was a get-to-know-your-child form with some fairly silly questions, like whether your child can recognise some upper and lowercase letters or whether they can put things in order. How do they expect parents to answer "Does your child have an advanced vocabulary?" For one thing, it's ridiculously subjective, and for another, who's really going to answer no to that? If it had said "...an advanced vocabulary in English" that would have made a little more sense, as many of the pupils might have a different first language. Anyway, I ticked boxes, got Monkey to perform a few hastily contrived tests with crayons and shapes, and ticked a few more. He recognised the numbers up to 8, but by August he could well be up to 999. And he counted to 49 without missing a beat, before resetting to an optimistic "... thirty?"

And this afternoon, we did this:

Gracious in defeat

The experiment has been called off. You could call it Mabel winning, but I prefer to think of it as me coming to my senses.

Last night I only lasted till 9.00, despite my best intentions of duking it out with her till ten. She was more tired than the previous day, and the night before had taken its toll, so that by 8.30 she was into some concentrated crying; abject misery ahoy. Her body so badly wanted to sleep, but she had no idea how to go about it without the mumeet. I wasn't just depriving her of a crutch she no longer really needed; I was taking away her life support.

Winning pathetic quote from the first night: "Why is it raining in my bedroom?" "It's not raining, Baby, you're crying."

So yes, no more of that. Which leaves me feeling (a) sorry that I put her through it, but (b) at least I know and will stop thinking about this as a possibility for a while, but also (c) like a wuss who is totally pushed around by her baby. Sleep training just isn't for me.

Hah. I bought the Marc Weissbluth book, Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child, when I was delightfully innocent about babies, and pregnant with Monkey. I had all these great intentions of getting it right from the start, so that I would lose as little sleep as possible, because sleep was important to me. If you had told me then that five years later I'd be resignedly getting up several times a night, I might have shelved the entire idea of having children. It's amazing how adaptable the human body is.

Weissbluth had some useful things to say, especially the fact that most newborns can't/shouldn't stay awake for more than two hours before needing to nap again, and the 2-3-4 pattern for babies who take two naps (if that's even where I read about that); but he is basically a proponent of crying it out, though on a less cruel scale than Ezzo, whom I've never even read. We tried his methods (Weissbuth's, not Ezzo's) a little when Monkey was young, but they had no effect and I wasn't willing to keep trying. After that I read every sleep book on the block (or in the library, as well as the ones I leafed through standing up in Barnes & Noble) with equally little success.

The Sleep Lady's technique, of moving your chair a little nearer the door every three days until you'd left the room, was particularly laughable. I remember reading large chunks of Harry Potter in what I hoped was a soporific drone to Monkey as he yelled from his crib - from the moment I put him in, there was never a point when he wasn't crying to be taken out again, so the notion of softening the blow by moving gradually a little further away was totally pointless. Eventually I just left the room and shouted to him every now and then so he knew I was still around. He would fall asleep, but it was pathetic and never got better. One day he finally conked out kneeling up hanging onto the bars of the crib, with his face all smushed up against them. It was the saddest thing I'd ever seen, but kind of hilarious too. We stopped after a while.

Mabel is even more disinclined to sleep than Monkey ever was. If I remove myself from her orbit too soon, even though she's 98% out, she'll rear up like a zombie, eylids fluttering heavily open, and demand the other side. She's always been a light sleeper, so my creeping back to my own bed in the middle of the night is enough to rouse her a little, so that five or ten minutes later, just when I've got comfy, she'll wake again. This is really the first time I've tried to go against her will with sleeping, as after our experiences with Monkey I was happy enough to take the easy (quiet, angst-free) road for a long time with Mabel. I'm pretty sure if I'd tried to do it sooner the result would have been just the same, albeit with less conversation. We'll try again in a few months, or maybe - hey, I'm an optimist - she'll just grow out of it.

The truth is that nobody who wrote a sleep book had my babies. And even if I wrote a book, nobody who read it would have my babies either. Some things work for some babies, but mostly you just have to grope your way in the dark (often literally) towards the best solution for your family - for now, or for the future. Good luck.

 

Probably one of the few times he slept in his crib. Which is why I took a picture. 

And I can guarantee you that he did not go in there awake.

Negotiations, justifications, ramifications

So this is what happened for the rest of the night: Mabel woke up twice, I think, whereupon I nursed her back to sleep and went back to my bed, and I was actually there, in my own bed, from 2.30 till 5am. This may not sound like much - heck, it's not much - but it's fairly unheard of around here.

I could ascribe this to the fact that she was almost two hours late falling asleep, so all her subsequent wakes were just on a delayed schedule; but since I'm an optimist, I'm going to say it's a good sign. A better sign is the fact that I'm sure I heard her starting to wake in the middle of that period (because of course, I wasn't asleep) and then settle herself back without me. Maybe that happens every night too, but don't take this chink of light away from me, okay?

So I'll stick with it for a couple more nights. I want to clarify that we're not night-weaning (as is obvious from what I just said) - I'm just trying to help her learn to get to sleep initially without the boob. Because I'm hoping this will give her the tools she needs to resettle herself in the night-time wakeups without my help. (She doesn't know what falling asleep is. As far as she's concerned, she just nurses, and feels better. So last night when she was exhaustedly wailing "I want mumeet," what she really meant was "I want to fall asleep," she just didn't know it.)

I don't want to deny her the breast in the middle of the night because I know I would never have the gumption for that. This way, maybe I won't have to because she'll work it out herself. I think this is what happened with Monkey, but I didn't realise it at the time and was under the impression that his night wakes just stopped on their own. Mabel is not growing out of it, and her night waking is much more frequent than his ever was: she wakes first after two hours or less, and every couple of hours after that - more often if I'm not in bed with her. This is what I'm hoping to change. (B and I are a bit tired of nookie babyruptus, for one thing.)

We are still nursing to nap, because if I spent naptime trying to convince her to go to sleep any other way, she'd just stay awake for the two hours and I'd never get a break. I've read that it's okay to use different methods to get kids to sleep at naptime and bedtime, so I'm not too worried about this - ideally, I'd prefer to break her association with sleep and the boob entirely, but that's not an option right now. And giving up naps is not an option either.

And to address the question of why now, I'll admit it's more because I'm ready than because she is. But she's recovered from her cold of the weekend, she's not specifically teething, and yes, she's two and a half, but that's just something we all have to live with. I don't think she's in any particular sleep regression right now. On my part, I feel like I can do it now. We're not travelling anywhere till July, by which time I would really like to have effected a change in how she sleeps.

I sent B up when she asked for him, but he got increasingly shorter shrift: I think having me there, she had to take me seriously when I denied her. (Of course, this was undermined when I finally did give in, but let's not think about that just now.)

I'm trying to address the things that were brought up in the comments, but I don't want to sound all defensive. I am defensive, of course, but I don't want to bore you by explaining every tiny justification running through my mind. Any more than I have. Already.

This morning in the car, Mabel announced that now she's two and a half she can go to sleep by herself. We talked about how it was a hard thing to learn, and how it was hard for Monkey to get used to too, when I did it with him. He graciously offered to let Mabel have a sleepover in his room so he could help her go to sleep. Maybe I should just shut them both up together and let them have at it.

From the trenches

Ugh. I really hate this part.

Right now is the middle (middle? who knows) of the first night of trying to get Mabel to go to sleep without nursing. So far it's been about 45 minutes since books down, and she's had me, and Daddy, and me again, and Daddy again, and a change of venue to our bed and back again, and a visit to the bathroom, and medicine in case she's teething, and now she's playing on her own but will soon call me back for round whatever this is. There's been a lot of crying and pathetic tears and screeching in genuine misery and wailing, "But I don't want to be two and a half". And that's just on her part.

On my part there's lots of second-guessing and wondering and soul searching and grimacing and furrowing of brow and coming close to tears. I'm not sure how long I will hold out, and I'm not sure how long I should hold out. Isn't it meant to be easier, if they're ready? But what if I'm ready, and they're not, and I do it anyway? Would it be better to just leave her alone altogether? But I'm not willing to make her feel abandoned as well as denied. (The abandonment phase comes later.) (That was a joke.) (Sort of.)

If somebody could just pop back from the future to tell me that in a week's time she'll be going off to sleep by herself (or even with one of us lying beside her) with minimal fuss, I'd know that it's right to continue. But if it comes to a multiple-night battle of wills, with no progress in sight, I know which of us will cave first. (Hint: it's me.) Basically, it's crying it out, even if she's old enough to explain it to and to explain her feelings back to me, and even if I'm right there holding her. And even if that means that "technically" it's not CIO at all. All this crying isn't technical, and it's not crocodile tears - she's truly distressed and miserable, because she can't imagine going to sleep any other way, and into the bargain she's not willing to just lie down and try.

... So now she's sitting up in bed (her own bed) talking to a teddy about his day (which bears a striking resemblance to her day) and wrapping him up repeatedly in a baby blanket. It would be nice to think that she'll just continue to do this till she drops off gently by herself, but I'm sceptical. ... More as it unfolds...

And me again. And Daddy again. It's breaking my heart, but the longer it goes on, and the more I hear myself say, "But I can't give you mumeet," the worse I feel it would be to give in now.

But but but but but

And me again.

...

And I'm here to tell you that I caved. At 9.45 after an hour and a half of crying and talking and a very small amount of lying still while I forgot the words to a song, she was finally so pathetically exhausted but still utterly, stubbornly woeful, that I gave in. So now I feel like I tortured her (or she me, as B points out) for nothing. I thought she'd be asleep in a flash, but it still took 15 minutes - and both sides, even - to nurse her down enough to let me go.

The only thing that keeps me going is the memory - vague as it is - that it was hard with Monkey too. He was younger and less vocal (maybe a better thing, in hindsight, because at least he couldn't break off crying to ask detailed questions about characters' motivation in the book we just read, or to reminisce about a playdate two months ago or the time they had their faces painted in September) but just as miserable, and now he's a champion sleeper. (Which is just as well considering the racket she's been making tonight.) But thanks to the blow-softening power of memory, I can't remember how long it took, or even whether I gave in on the first night and felt as crappy as I do now.

I'll give it a go for three nights. I'll try to go longer before caving next time. But that's all I'm saying, because listening to my baby cry for the one thing I can give her and won't, for the sake of some big-picture fuzzy plan that might or might not work at this juncture, is more heart-breaking than I can do for any longer than that.

Anger management

I know I've said that I'll throw a party when Mabel's last tooth* comes through, but in a way I'm a bit apprehensive about it. Because once that happens, I won't have anything left to blame her shocking behaviour on, and I might just have to accept that she's a terrible, horrible, no-good child.

This morning, for example, in between my taking the old pull-up off her and putting on the new one, she ran off (par for the course) and I found her standing almost on the shaggy rug in the front room, peeing on the floor. I went to pull the chair out of the way so I could yank her all the way off the rug, but it appeared that Monkey had just tied the chair to the coffee table with some IKEA string, so I couldn't even manage that. They conspire against me, you know. (B too. I'm sure he was the one who procured the string.)

To be fair to her, while she can certainly poo in the toilet if she feels like it (key point there), I don't think she can really control the wee yet. But she could have done a better job of looking sorry about it: instead she laughed uproariously and thought the whole thing was hilarious. And it's not as if I was putting on my crossness about this and trying to hide a laugh myself - I was genuinely annoyed, and she hadn't even the common decency to look remorseful.

This evening I had her in a special-event unscheduled bath while Monkey was at soccer practice, thanks to a lot of ice-cream** drips and climbing a tree, and I was just taking the opportunity to clean the bathroom a bit when she dumped a jugful of water over the side. I was so annoyed that I grabbed the jug and retaliated by giving her hair a quick dousing before taking her out of the bath. My (possibly after-the-fact) justification was that she needed a hair-washing, or at least wetting, and I needed to get her out as quickly as possible as punishment for the water over the side. But really, I was just angry and knew she'd hate it. Which she did, loudly.

It is perhaps the case that my daughter and I will have a clash of tempers once or twice or daily in our relationship, as she gets older. I maybe need to get hold of myself and remember that I'm the adult in this situation.

What do you think? Was it a contravention of gentle parenting? Did I act vengefully out of temper? Did she deserve what she got? Or is it, in the scheme of things, a mere blip? All of the above?

Or maybe, once the last tooth comes through, this will all be in the past and we'll metaphorically frolic through the daisies together ever after. You think?

* I should clarify that I'm never sure whether she's teething or not, but sometimes she just darn acts like it. I don't want to dose her up when she says plainly "No, my teeth don't hurt," but I do wonder if she's just not recognising the pain for what it is.

**We got the ice-cream at IKEA, where, as suggested, I asked to see the ingredients. The nice guy behind the counter happily gave me a folder with the information, which told me that it has "corn syrup" but not "high fructose corn syrup". So that's okay. Maybe. Am not really any wiser, to be honest. But it's still better than the Trix with all its additives and colourings as well as the HFCS. And he only charged me for one because I asked him for two really small ones, so that's got to be good.

Nemesis

Remember last week, when I told you that one of the things cluttering up my kitchen counter was the eye drops from when Monkey last had pinkeye?

I'm sure you can see where this is going. (See. Heh.) After blogging about it, I did a modicum of tidying on the counter contents, including bringing the eye drops upstairs and stashing them in my medicine cabinet. That probably happened on Thursday. On Thursday night, Mabel slept until 11.00 instead of the usual 10.00 for her first post-bedtime wake. I jokingly wondered if she was coming down with something. On Friday afternoon, Mabel seemed somewhat moist around the eyes, and she sneezed a few more times than I liked.

On Saturday morning, Mabel's nose was streaming liberally, and her left eye was bright pink. Damn you, blog, I thought, if only I hadn't taken that stuff upstairs, I clearly wouldn't have had to bring it down again. Since I had it to hand, I decided to dispense with such formalities as doctors and diagnoses and cut straight to the chase. (I'm something of an expert in pink eye at this stage.) Mabel was not impressed with eye drops. In fact, eye drops are right at the top of the list of things Mabel hates with the passion of a thousand firey suns. It took two of us holding her down, and I still barely managed to pry her eye open enough to drip a drop in. Mostly over the past couple of days I've been dripping on to a tightly shut eyelid and hoping some goes in when she finally opens up to see if I've gone away. They need to invent some better mechanism for this stuff.

So Saturday evening was supposed to be a Moms' Night Out. She had a good nap and seemed in happy enough form that night - we'd even gone out to eat, at somewhere kid-friendly but still with real wait-staff and menus that are not on the wall behind a counter, and it had gone much much better than the last time - so I thought I'd risk it. She was asleep at 8.20, and I told B that if she woke before 9.30, he could call me. Otherwise, I'd leave at ten. (The venue was five minutes' drive from home.)

The local local, if I can call it that, is a clattery cafe by day, albeit with some impressive Middle-Eastern cuisine on the menu, and a hopping joint by weekend night. I was sent from the brightly-lit safety of the outer counter, where falafel and baklava reside beside apple pie and coffee, back to the bar to order my drink, and the dimmed lights and loud live music (live! music!) were an enormous shock to my system. For a moment, I couldn't really remember how to function in this night-time environment. I felt there was probably a huge flashing sign over my head saying "Out of Practice" - or maybe I just wanted there to be, so that if I suddenly lost all control and started wibbling manically, everyone would understand. Fortunately, I didn't have to fight my way through hordes of drunken rugby supporters or defend myself from the advances of smitten gigolos, and it was a fairly simple process to order a drink, pay for a drink, and remember to leave a tip on the bar.

I returned to our outside table victorious, and relieved to be back in the fading daylight, and we all discussed how we felt like saying, "But I have a baaay-beeee" to excuse ourselves in such situations. (I don't know. Maybe they were just claiming they felt that way too to make me feel better.)

Halfway through my beer, the phone rang. Of course. As I'd predicted, Mabel had slept for exactly 40 minutes before coughing herself miserably awake. I bequeathed the rest of my amber liquid to the table (they said they'd see it didn't go to waste) and vroomed home to find a teary, snotty child, momentarily lulled into calm by the soothing tones of Curious George as read by Daddy.

When the story was over, I took her up to bed. 

[Amusing tanget regarding Mabel being up when she shouldn't be: One day last week she woke soon after going to sleep and seemed to have had a bad dream. She was unhappy in bed and wanted to leave her room altogether. So, since we had been watching The King's Speech, which (a) I was very much enjoying and (b) I thought would be nice and low-key for her to watch as well, I brought her down without much ado. She sat nursing and watching with us for about forty minutes, and I was just congratulating myself on the choice of such a baby-friendly movie when Bertie, at the urging of his speech therapist, let rip a long and mellifluous stream of cursing, ending up with a rousing, "... fuck, fuck, fuck, shit. Tits!" Mabel, who had been listening despite my hopes that she might be drifting off, let out a shout of laughter: "Mummy! That man just neighed like a horse! That's funny!"

We agreed that it was indeed funny, and decided it was probably time she went back to bed.]

She's much better now, thank you. And so far, no swearing.

May the road rise up to meet you

Monkey got a bike for his birthday last year. A two-wheeler, that we did a fair amount of looking-round for and bought from an actual bike shop rather than plumping for the would-have-been-much-preferred Spider-Man bike from Target. This is a refurbished one (that still cost more than the Target one, but I suppose that was the point) that should be good for a long time to come - and they made the point that we can sell it back to them when we're done with it, which in theory is true. I only belately noticed that the "unisex" purple was sort of sparkly, but so far Monkey hasn't complained that it's in any way girly. I just liked the fact that it would do for Mabel too, in due course. Here he is on its maiden voyage, a year ago.

Anyway. He did fine with the training wheels at first, and why wouldn't he, when they were right down on the ground beside the other ones. It was basically a quad-bike. Then, in a fit of optimism, I raised them a couple of notches so that he'd need to start balancing to avoid leaning all the way over one way and then the other. He leaned. One way, and then the other. He didn't seem to mind. It looked horribly uncomfortable.

All year, he hasn't really done much bike-riding. He would go out now and then to power up and down the path in our little cul-de-sac, but it was awkward for one parent to observe him and simultaneously negotiate with Mabel on her inherited trike-with-push-handle as she decided to go, or get off, or want to push herself, or whatever she was intent on doing while her brother was half a road ahead and all I could do was hope he'd have the sense to stop at the Stop sign. Once or twice we tried taking the bikes to the playground, but that was a disaster, with Monkey falling off as soon as the road inclined at all, and deciding to push his bike all the way there, and me trying to pick him up and help him push and keep Mabel on hers and get us all out of the path of the oncoming bus before we were mown down. (We weren't mown.)

So what I'm saying is that the bike hasn't really been much of a success, and I blamed us for not getting him enough opportunities to practice. A few weeks ago the weather was beautiful and we took him with his bike, and Mabel with the chunky scooter, to a local lake that has a nice smooth path around it where people like to walk, skate, rollerblade, and bike. Monkey biked up the path from the parking lot towards the lake. Mabel scooted about ten yards, and then demanded that I carry the scooter, or her, or both. So we sent B back to the car to stow the scooter again, while I nearly lost Mabel in the lake as I disentangled Monkey from some thorns in the grass.

Then we tried to convince Monkey to ride around the lake.
"It's too bumpy."
"It's fine. Look, it's flat."
"No, there's a hill."
"There's a tiny slope and then it's competely level."
"No. I don't want to. It's all uppy and downy."

Et cetera. We turned around and went home, since the alternative was watching Monkey push his bike along the path for a mile, bumping his feet into the training wheels at every step, and carrying Mabel who didn't want to walk.

In an effort to revitalise interest in the bike, we were thinking that it might be a good idea to take the pedals off (and the training wheels) so that he could use it as a walking bike, which they say is the best way to teach children to balance on a two-wheeler. B got as far as removing the training wheels and one pedal on Tuesday evening, and was stuck on the second pedal, which wouldn't budge, when we heard that Thursday would be bike day at school. So the wheels and the pedal went back on, and Monkey happily took his bike and his helmet to school.

Last year, bike day happened just a week after he got his new bike, and he was thrilled to show it off. This year, I feared he hadn't progressed in the slightest, though his training wheels were now a little further off the ground. As I went in the door to collect him from school, a mum said to me, "I hear Monkey had a big adventure on his bike." Uh oh, I thought. An accident? But no - he was all excited because, as far as I can figure out from his somewhat garbled version of events, the training wheels came off the ground for a moment and he balanced on just the two wheels. It was a revelation to him.

So, armed with this newfound impetus, we went back to the lake yesterday, this time with a stroller for Mabel. Monkey took off down the path beside the lake, and basically never looked back.

 

You probably can't tell from the photo, but he was balancing on just the two wheels for long periods, and he rode enthusiastically all the way round the lake and wanted more. B had to run after him all the way. (Mabel and I slowly brought up the rear, where she hopped in and out of the stroller and then decided she was too hot and divested herself of her t-shirt,

which kept the passersby amused.)

Next time we go, we'll bring a grown-up's bike too, and someone can accompany Monkey on a wheeled vehicle. By the looks of him, in a month or two we'll be able to take off the training wheels altogether. I think it was just one of those things that had to click, and no matter how much practice he got, it wasn't ready to happen until now.

Five is good.