Body of work

Monkey knows all the letters and their sounds, though he mixes up lowercase b and d (I always did that too), and n and h, and has trouble recognising g in print. He can count to 39, or sometimes higher, and tell you that three twos are six.

He knows his full name and his birthday and his address, but not his phone number. He knows that he lives in America and that his grandparents live in Ireland, and he might even be able to point out tiny teddybear Ireland on a globe, if you ask nicely.

He knows about the planets and gravity and inertia and evolution and the big bang, and the difference between monkeys and apes, and that Curious George is actually a chimpanzee. He knows many, many A- and B-list superheroes and their associated villians, and some Greek mythology. He knows that many people believe in God, who is kind of like a super-duper-hero, and that his parents aren't sure whether God exists or not, and that he's free to make up his own mind on that one and change it as often as he likes.

I'm not sure what he knows about Santa. I think he knows to keep quiet about it.

He knows that it takes a mother and a father to make a baby (which is more than I knew for a long time) and that people die when they get old or when they get sick and the doctors can't make them better. He plans to make a machine to stop us all dying, when he's grown up. I hope we last that long.

He knows that protein makes him grow and sugar gives him energy but is bad for his teeth and makes him crazy, and that vitamins keep him healthy and that he needs iron in his blood, but he's not too concerned about eating a wide variety of different foods in order to make all that happen.

He knows how to ride a bike and swim (sort of) and kick a ball and climb a tree. He knows how to run after his little sister and stop her with a flying tackle. He knows how to throw a frisbee and fly a kite and how to do up his own seatbelt.

On Wednesday, he spontaneously broke his cookie in half and gave the rest to me.

38 Candles

I woke up this morning to discover to my delight that Mabel had stayed dry all night. It was her first night without a pullup - she had gone to the bathroom with me at her 10pm waking, and now, at 7am, she was still dry. (And don't think she hadn't had a drop to drink in the meantime. I can personally guarantee that she had.) Even more happily, I was awake enough to hustle her to the bathroom straight away - we can thank the 8pm power cut that ensured early nights all round for that one - and the miracle was complete.

"Mabel," I declared as she put the stuff where it was supposed to go, "You are officially out of nappies."
"No, I'm not," she said, laughing uproariously at silly Mummy.
"No? Why?"
"I'm not a fish! You said I was a fish."

All this was so wonderful and amusing that I had honestly forgotten as I came downstairs why Monkey would be waiting impatiently for me at the bottom and handing me a homemade card depicting his newest superhero creation ("Flystomp").

So, just like Sally Albright, I'm going to be 40. But it's still "someday". That's okay for now.

 And I got a lovely present.

What more could anyone ask for?

Electric avenue

Boom, boom, boom, Mister Brown is a wonder. Boom, boom, boom, Mister Brown makes thunder.

Right now it's lashing rain and crashing thunder and if Mabel wakes up from this unaccustomed early night - acquired only at great personal expense due to a total lack of napping - I will be most upset with Thor, or whoever it is that's in charge up there.

Monkey has been hearing about Greek myths again lately - he was talking about how people believe in God the other day, except he kept saying "gods" instead. I didn't think it necessary to correct him. There's not much point saying, "Well, it's God that we don't know exists. There definitely aren't gods, that's just wrong."

Oh. There goes the electricity. That was predictable. Time to locate the torches (flashlights, I mean; don't be visualising us going around brandishing giant flaming branches or anything) just in case. How am I going to get my coffee now, I ask you? I shouldn't even open the fridge to have milk with my cookie.

Freewheelin'

We had a really nice, low-key day today - played with friends, played outside, went to the co-op without too much trauma - but Mabel's teeny-tiny naptime coupled with Monkey's reduced TV time leaves me with, ooh, about five minutes to myself on the computer (not to be confused with all the time I spend refreshing my Facebook page in between breaking up fights, putting food on the table, and denying my firstborn all the recycled-cardboard creations his heart desires (today's invention: a gas-mask-type voice amplifier held on by an elastic band that would enable him to break glass, coupled with a laser holder and a mirror so that he can direct the laser onto the rope that the enemy has bound him with and escape out the broken window - I think: it was not made, but he did draw a picture which I helpfully labelled for future reference)) so my blogging-at-naptime habit has been severely curtailed.

Yes, that was all one sentence. No, I'm not going to go back and break it up. Just concentrate really hard.

So now I'm snatching moments between dinner and bath, as B has taken them outside on the bikes again, but I can't for the life of me remember what, if anything, I was going to say.

We do seem to be falling into some sort of a rhythm for the summer, and I'm less frantic than I was about the fact that I have both my children! at once! all day! to cope with. Eh, they're not that bad, you know. They've actually spent quite a while today playing nicely together with the action figures and the cars and whatnot, and if I don't try to get anything else much done, we can all muddle through pretty well. The pool is always there for when it's too hot to ride bikes, and somehow the laundry gets done and somebody picks up more milk and something is figured out for dinner.

The weather is slightly less hot than a few weeks ago, when I was afraid we were doomed to unabated hundred-degree days for the next three months, so there has been more bike riding. Monkey has progressed to bumping up and down the driveways around our road, and was angling to go further afield, so on Sunday B took him to Lake Artemesia, scene of former bike-related disaster and triumph. They went around the whole thing, plus a couple of detours, and it was one happy five-year-old who came home an hour later, proud of his accomplishment.

Mabel has taken to saying, "I weeally weeeally want a bike," and is somewhat disgusted with the hand-me-down tricycle that's her mode of transport at the moment. She got the hang of the pedals quite recently, but can't get up any speed and gets terribly frustrated whenever I take the handle to help her up over a bump or stop her from careening brakeless down a hill. (Yesterday she was particularly overwrought after a late night and early morning, and she stomped and wailed and declared, "You have to give it away to some other girl. No more bike for Mabel." Poor bunny.  She weeeally weeeally needed her nap.)

So I'd been looking on Craigslist and e-Bay for a no-pedals bike for her (walking bike, balance bike, whatever you want to call it), to no avail, and the adorable one I saw in REI yesterday was a whopping $130, which is probably more than my own bike cost, but then I found one on sale on Amazon (with decent reviews and free shipping to boot) and ordered it quick smart, so Mabel will be getting her my-birthday present in a few days, and I hope she'll love it and also not perish, seeing as how it doesn't have any brakes either. We have some elbow and knee pads that might need to be employed, and she already has a helmet.

The toilet training is trundling along, becoming more and more just how life is, with a diminuitive change of bottom-half clothes in my handbag these days instead of a spare pull-up; and nobody should ever have to do this in winter - or in Ireland for that matter - because you'd need a much bigger handbag. Mabel's sleeping is just as erratic as ever, but with only a couple of weeks to go till we change time zones for three more, there's no point trying to make any changes in that arena right now.

I have a lead on a mother's helper who I'm thinking I might employ a couple of hours a week, to keep me sane, and who could become our regular babysitter as time goes on, if the children like her. Monkey already seems a lot more open to the notion of a babysitter than he did last time the concept was mooted. It might not pan out, but just the idea of it is helping. Much as the idea of paying someone to clean my house, once Mabel starts school and I do an infinitesimally small amount of freelancing, is helping me not care much about cleaning it right now.

Summer, season of happy procrastination.

Light reading

Our cardboard supplies were dwindling dangerously. Nary a superhero mask had been made in recent times, and the days of the robot costume were well nigh forgotten. We almost thought we might have to go and buy some large item of furniture in IKEA, just so that there would be box fodder for young Monkey to demand we make things out of.

B fished a copy-paper/moving box out of the basement, to forestall such drastic measures. He started to make the lid into a shield, as requested, one morning before work, but it was left half finished and then was somewhat dismantled by Mabel, who enjoys dismantling things. Luckily, my friend Anonymous came to the rescue. (That's her name. It always says so right there in the comments.) Let's call her Ano for short. She came over for a playdate on Monday - except that her daughter was in summer camp, so it was a very calm and quiet playdate compared to the normal sort. And while I was upstairs putting Mabel down for her nap, Ano fashioned for Monkey the most wonderful shield, and sword - of his design, he'll have you know - ever.

Monkey spent the rest of the day exclaiming over Ano's brilliance, and telling us how much better at making cardboard shields she was than Daddy, who was even more in the ha'penny place, as my mother would say, than usual, after this event. (Daddy is regularly judged to be "medium" in the greatness stakes. Mabel and I are the best Mabel and Mummy (respectively) he's ever had, but Daddy is just about medium. Poor Daddy. Of course, the joke here is that then I have to respond "I'm the only Mummy you've ever had", and then everyone falls about laughing. He's lucky he has a two-year-old to appreciate his jokes. She's the perfect audience, really.)

Anyway, the next morning, Daddy was found useful enough, begrudgingly, to be employed writing "KNIGHT" in various places, as directed, on the back of the shield. In case the user should be in any doubt about his occupation, I suppose, so he could just take a quick look from whatever angle he happened to be at in his vigorous slaying of foes, and read his job description right there.

Later that day I heard Monkey trying to sound out the letters - though of course, he knew it was supposed to say knight, but he was making an effort to read it. Knight is probably the worst possible word he could have chosen to start reading with - unless he'd tried "psychic" or "slough" or "onomatopaeia", perhaps.

So I sat down and wrote a list of words he would know that rhymed with "knight" and had the same -ight ending: fight, might, right, night, light, sight, and flight. And showed him how you couldn't sound out each letter, but you could learn to recognise that all these words went together, and then you just needed to figure out the initial sound to read them. He started to get the hang of it.

We went on to do some simpler lists: cat and other -at words; dog and other -og words. Mabel wanted in on it too, of course, but Monkey was the one really taking things in. Today at lunchtime I heard him pick up the page (which I had left nonchalantly on the coffee table) and start reading through, working mostly from memory and partly from sounding out. After every word, he'd pop his head around the door and tell me, excitedly, "I just read 'fight' all by myself!"

He's not an early reader, and I suspect Mabel will pick this all up much faster than he does, but it's so nice to see him start to put it all together, one painful letter at a time.

Adventures in meal-planning

Remember the dinner that wasn't good enough to blog? Well, I'm blogging it now, because it turned into a new and entirely original dinner the next night.

It began as a interesting-sounding Turkish Lamb Pizza from Darina Allen's Easy Entertaining. (Yes, I do have cookbooks that are not by Nigella.) Darina Allen, if you're not familiar with her, is Ireland's answer to Martha Stewart, except just for cooking, not for home decor; and without the dodgy book-keeping. She's pretty much the grand-dame of the Irish culinary revival, or her mother-in-law Myrtle was before her, and she's passing the torch on to her daughter-in-law Rachel, who is also a successful TV chef and author.)

I had seen this recipe in leafing through the book over breakfast, so when I saw ground lamb at the supermarket, it all came together nicely. At least, then I had to check the recipe again and procure a lemon and some tomatoes and I left out the parsley, which maybe would have made all the difference, but that was all I needed. The base, made from just flour and yogurt, intrigued me.

Darina gives quantities for 8-10 portions, and there were only the two of us, so of course I had a lot of topping mixture left over. More about that later. But this is how mine went:

Topping:
1lb minced lamb (ground lamb, if you're American)
1 large onion
4 large tomatoes
2 tablespoons flat parsley, chopped
salt and pepper

Base:
2 cups white flour, plus more for dusting
About 1 cup plain yogurt

Lemon wedges to serve

You start these off in a heavy frying pan on the stovetop, then finish them under the grill/broiler. I'm sure you could cook them on the outdoor grill, but you might have to experiment with the method.

For the topping, chop the onion finely. Sautee it in olive oil or butter over a low heat until soft but not coloured.

 

Let it cool completely (or as much as you have time for - you could do this step way in advance, if you wanted). Dice the tomatoes. Then, using a fork, mix together the meat, onion, tomatoes, parsley, salt and pepper.

Next mix the flour and yogurt to make a soft dough. I only made enough for the two of us, so I had to eyeball the quantities, but I think I used about a cup of flour and half a cup or a bit more of yogurt to make each of the small pizza bases. (Sorry about the picture. I shouldn't have used a white bowl.)

With lots of flour on your surface, roll (or press) it out as thinly as you can. Mine were each about 8 inches across, and a few millimeters thick, and they probably should have been thinner, but I was afraid they'd stick to the surface.

When it's thin, spread a few spoonfuls of your meat mixture onto the round (ahem) of dough.

 

Turn on the grill/broiler to preheat, and put a baking sheet under it to get hot.

Have the heavy frying pan on the heat at this point. Fold the dough over in half and then into a quarter and transfer it to the pan, where you can open it out again.

(I thought all the topping would fall off, but it stuck quite well to the base. I don't see why you shouldn't put it in "naked" and then add the topping, but maybe the dough would stick to itself if you did it this way.)

After about 2 minutes, it should be golden on the bottom. Slide it carefully onto a hot baking tray and put it under the grill/broiler for another 2-3 minutes until the topping is done.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that the meat really did cook in this short space of time. We ate them with lots of lemon squeezed over the top (this is really necessary to cut the fattiness of the meat) and they would probably have benefitted from the parsley I left out.

They were interesting, but not amazing. The dough was a little stodgy - I think it should have been thinner, or maybe I should have cooked them in the pan for longer.

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

But there I was, with all that leftover mince mixture. The next night, I decided to turn it into Turkish meatballs.

To the mixture, I added an egg, some grated mozzarella, and a squeeze of cilantro (coriander leaf) from the squeezy coriander I had in the freezer. Fresh cilantro would of course have been even better. I used my small cookie portioner thingy (looks like a baby ice-cream scoop) to make evenly sized meatballs, and discovered that I needed to squeeze them out before rolling in flour, as the mixture was very wet. I put this down to the tomatoes - if making the meatballs from scratch, I would definitely squeeze the seeds and liquid out of the tomatoes before dicing them.

I baked the meatballs at 400 F for about 20 minutes, and we ate them with rice and broccoli, and they were quite delicious.

The next night, I said to hell with competing flavours and reheated them in half a jar of tomato-and-basil pasta sauce. They were still delicious (though you couldn't really tell it was lamb any more).

So: three different meals from one recipe. This is why I don't really bother to plan ahead. Sometimes it pays off nicely.

For their viewing pleasure

Yesterday I made the mistake of letting myself add up just how much TV is being watched these days. And came to the conclusion that it was Way Too Much. I decided that the least I could do, maybe, is try to cut us down to two hours a day, beyond which children become obese and their brains turn into little puddles of mush. Allegedly. It might be too late already, but I suppose better than never.

I told Monkey this morning that he'd have to pick the four programs he wanted to watch because that was all he could have, and I encouraged him to turn it off at breakfast time so we'd have more viewing time later, when we really need it. Surprisingly and impressively, he was able to do that, and we came to an amicable arrangement without bloodshed. (Mabel whined, but I ignored her; Monkey is by far the worse perpetrator of TV viewing around here.) So now - during Mabel's naptime - he's going to watch one 15-minute Gofrette, one 15-minute, My Friend Rabbit, and all of Rupert. Later on, before dinner when I will desperately need them to sit down and chill out, they can watch Pearlie and Zula Patrol before bed.

That sounds like an awful lot, doesn't it? (Though Zula Patrol is downright edumacational, with all the planet and outer-space stuff.) I won't tell you how much it was on before. The problem now is that he's going to be bugging me much more often during naptime, and I won't get so much blogging done. Right now I was supposed to be documenting last night's dinner, and instead here I am drivelling on about television.

I have given him an egg whisk and he has gone away. For 30 seconds. I fear I'll be offering up a lot of kitchen implements to the gods of no-TV this summer. Monkey is, and always has been, incapable of just playing with his toys. Even when he sits down with some action figures or a couple of toy cars, he's usually trying to dismantle them or use them to pry something else open. When Mabel was a baby I was amazed to discover that she would actually play with baby toys as advertised, just like the babies in the photos on the box, whom I had always assumed were drugged or stuffed or something.

And now I'm having Cheerios for lunch. Still haven't really got this summer thing down.

Weekend edition

Two days without blogging and I've completely lost my train of thought. Herewith the things I will not be telling you about:

1. I tried a new recipe for dinner and was going to blog it, but it turned out not quite delicious enough. I don't want to waste your bandwidth with undelicious dinners.

2. I'm certainly not going to tell you about how potty training is going, because each time I think things are looking up, like the day before yesterday when she was dry all day, and yesterday when she stayed dry during a Father's Day trip into DC on the metro and only fell at the final hurdle, in the car on the way home from the train station, then I get complacent and things like this morning happen, when she peed on the chair she was standing on while I was dusting the front room - "What are you doing, Mummy?" "Dusting." "What's dusting?" - and half an hour later proceded to triumphantly put her underpants in the potty while I wasn't looking and pee on them. So she was back to a pull-up for the rest of the day, because I decided I wasn't going to deal with it. Tomorrow is another day.

3. Similarly, I'm definitely not going to talk about sleeping, because that would immediately jinx the fact that she stayed asleep for a further 30 minutes after I came home from the moms' night out on Saturday, and that for the past two nights I have actually come back to my own bed for a couple of hours after 2am. This morning she slept on her own from 3am to 6am, which is totally unprecedented. (Of course, I was wide awake at 5am, wondering what was up with her. When she did wake, I was groggy and disorientated and mid-dream.) Because I am me, I am calling this a pattern, and will be sad tomorrow when it has turned out to be a mere blip. But then, because I am me, I will call that a blip and hope that the new-found pattern re-emerges the following night.

So instead I'll just leave you with a photo of B demonstrating the use of his Father's Day present to the intrigued children. We don't usually do presents for Hallmark holidays, but considering I skipped out for my pre-birthday massage yesterday morning (just in case the rest of the weekends got away from me and I ended up not celebrating my end-of-June birthday till September or something), I thought he deserved it. Also for all the being great he does. Not to mention the stealth hoovering.

Schooling

I am about the last person who would consider homeschooling. And this is not going to be one of those posts that ends up with the revelation that Hey! I'm going to homeschool! because no, I'm not. But I do enjoy reading homeschooler blogs like Bethany's and Jessica's and how it makes me think about what I want out of my children's educations.

Last week, in this great post about her son starting his own business, Jessica said they were coming closer to unschooling. Coincidentally, I heard part of a report on NPR about that very thing. The unschooled 12-year-old boy on NPR said he was bored a lot and wished he had a new TV series to watch or comic book to read. Somehow, I don't think Jessica's kids are ever bored - even if being bored is a central tenet of some people's unschooling experience.

Last Christmas we were discussing schools with some friends at home - in Ireland you have to put your kid's name down for the local (free, probably Catholic) school as soon as they're born, and even then they might not get in. If you want them to have a non-denominational education, you need to live in the right part of town (or be willing to spend a lot of time in the car), and put their names down as soon as you start dating a guy you think you might have kids with in ten years' time. A mention of homeschooling was met with uproarious laughter, because it just hardly ever  happens in the British Isles; as far as I know, you have to be a fully qualified teacher to be allowed do it, and even then most people just don't. Here in the US, on the other hand, it's reasonably normal - I can think of four or five acquaintances or people I've met in the neighbourhood who homeschool. The rules vary from state to state, but in Maryland you have to show that you're following an appropriate curriculum - and there's enough market for such things that it's easy to buy homeschooling curriculums and materials  - or you can put together your own.

I was a good student, in the end, but I took my time getting there. I had good report cards in primary school because I was well behaved and the teachers liked me - I may or may not have exhibited abilities in anything other than reading, but mostly, as far as I could see, it was just about being a good girl. When I started secondary school (at 12, so that's 7th grade in the US) it took a while for me to figure out how it worked, with a different teacher for each subject, and homework not always due the next day but sometimes not for a week, and projects due in two months. (Our first project, set for Religion on an evangelist of our choice, was a resounding group disaster. The teacher may have mentioned it, but she never told us what to do, and we all conveniently ignored it until a note went home in all our homework notebooks about the missing project. My mother was sympathetic, and I think the teacher learned that you can't just set a project for a bunch of kids who have no idea what you're talking about, announce a due date, and expect them to hand it in.)

Anyway, I didn't bring home A's in every subject throughout my school years, even though by the end I did pretty well and was considered some sort of "academic" type. Same thing in college: my first-year results were resoundingly average, but I ended up with a first and a 2.1, which is not too shabby. (I have no idea what that converts to in USA-ian, but a first always sounds impressive, doesn't it?)

And now we have my first-born child, offspring of me and his rather brainy and also academically-inclined father (rather more than I, I have to say, what with the black holes and stuff), heading off to start his life of formal education. What do I want him to do? Do I want him to bring home A's across the board from kindergarden on? Do I want him to finish up valedictorian and go to an Ivy League school (and condemn us all to decades of debt) and end up working his ass off as a med student or a lawyer or some other member of the professions?

I am not a tiger mother, and I don't want that. I don't want my son to learn the value of hard slog and poring over the books and learning by rote and repeating his times tables and study planning and spending hours on his homework every night. I am much more concerned that he gets exercise and fresh air every day, that he makes friends and learns how to get on with people, and that he reads (not right now; by the time he's 8 or so, say). So long as he's reading books, everything else will come.

So I think about the homeschoolers and the unschoolers, and about the things I like about their systems. Children follow their interests and thus they learn. I realised early on that the subjects I liked were the ones I was good at, and I followed my interests despite the naysayers who claimed I should do Science to keep my options open, or that I should study law because I had enough points to get into a law degree.

I'm not saying "Look at me now with my multi-million business," or my great law practice, or whatever, but I am saying that I'm happy and I'm still finding my way. As a SAHM, I'm lucky enough to get a chance to do that. A few years at home with the kids seems to provide a change of perspective for a lot of people, and they come out of it less willing to go back to the corporate grindstone and more eager to stick their necks out creatively and make money on their own terms.

What do children learn from school that they miss in homeschooling? How to sit in a classroom and take notes? How to raise their hand if they have a question? How to function as a member of a team? Or as a member of the proletariat - as a Hand, to hark back to Dickens? How to study subjects they're not interested in? How to work to a deadline? (That one's important.) Or do they get a basic grounding in everything so that they can find their interests?

Do homeschooled kids go on to University and have trouble functioning in a classroom setting there? Or are the homeschoolers the go-getters of the future, the entrepreneurs, the leaders, never the followers, the ones who rise to the top despite no formal education? (But someone has to be a follower. If we raise a nation of leaders, what happens then?) I muse. I don't have answers.

I hope I can learn to navigate the public school system for and with my son without compromising my principles too much. I hope I can help him find a middle path, with friends and fun but also learning and logic and development in directions that interest him.

I hope he's not just another brick in the wall.

I get all proactive on grey days

This morning it was grey and not even 70 degrees out when I got up, with a forecast high of only 80. I decided to leap on opportunity and take the kids to the zoo. (I must have slept extra well last night or something, to be imbued with enough energy to even consider such an undertaking.)

Major animals we saw at the zoo:

• Two tigers, reclining
• Five lions, roaming (one Daddy and four overgrown cubs; Mommy must have been having her nails done or something)
• Four orangutans, climbing, swinging, lounging, and playing a computer game, respectively
• Five gorillas, sitting around with their backs to us
• One panda, sleeping
• One elephant, wandering

 

Minor animals we saw at the zoo:

• Prairie dogs
• Macaque apes

Things that were not animals but had to be examined anyway, despite the fact that I had paid $15 to park at the zoo and we only had till naptime to see as much as possible in the way of real animals, and the traffic was bad, as it always is when you decide to drive to the zoo, but anyone who thinks I'm taking my children to the zoo on public transport has a much higher opinion of me than is warranted by actuality:

• Bamboo: "Is that bamboo? Is this real bamboo? Let me just check that bamboo to see if it's real. It is bamboo!" ... etc. Monkey is obsessed with bamboo.
• Pathways to nowhere: "I just want to go up there." "There's nothing up there. Let's go and see the elephants." "But I reeeeeally want to see what's there." "There's nothing there. Fine. Go. I'll wait here."
• Statues of animals: "I think those apes are dead, Mummy." "They're not dead, they're statues. They're made of metal." "But I think they have real apes underneath, like in that other place." "You mean the natural history museum? No, these ones are just statues, I promise. Let's go inside the ape house and see the real ones." "But I want to climb on these ones."
• Toilets: This one was my fault, but as a result Mabel stayed dry all morning. Then she peed in her jeans when she got up from her nap because she refused to sit on the potty. Have to work on that one.

(Bonus quote of the day (overheard from a school group): "There's the ape store!" "The ape house, Johnny.")

Monkey and an (undead) ape

Slim pickings

This morning Mabel was fishing around inside the hardly-ever-used diaper bag - having been denied access to my handbag; yesterday she waltzed through the kitchen saying "I'm just going to Target." "Was that my wallet she had?" I asked. "Well, how else do you expect her to buy anything in Target?" B responded reasonably.  Mabel likes to sit at the dining table emptying the coins out of my purse to buy things with at Imaginary Target - which in itself is amusing since I never use cash at Real Target...

Anyway. This morning she rooted several panty liners out of the recesses of the diaper bag and produced them joyously. "These things!" Yes, yes, I agreed. Those things. You can bring them with you in the car if you really want to.

For some reason, "those things" are a constant source of intrigue to my children. Nattily packaged, begging to be pulled open with an easy tug on the little white tab, and look - inside, it's a giant sticker! What's not to love? And an aura of mystery and vague forbidden-ness to boot. I usually try to keep them out of reach, but if the kids get their mitts on them, I suppose one or two can be sacrificed for the cause of keeping them amused.

So we got into the car and headed off for the supermarket, a trip I could finally put off no longer, as pickings for dinner have been slim since last Friday or so. The pair of them were squabbling over things in the back seat, and giggling happily. At the lights, I glanced around. Mabel had a panty liner neatly wrapped around each shin, and Monkey was wearing one over his mouth. No, his eyes. No, his neck...

I just hope the people in the car beside us weren't looking too closely.

Control issues

A school friend who's coming to town in a few weeks suggested we arrange to meet up for an early dinner somewhere, with our cumulative four children.

Well, I don't know about her children, who are probably models of decorum and eat what's put on their plates and are seen but not heard except when saying please and thank-you with adorable lisps, but the mere idea of trying to do that with my children set my head spinning in Exorcist manner (strangely prescient of the demon-possessed way they'd behave, I think) and I nearly ran away from the Facebook on the spot.

You know how my children do in restaurants. Even when not being truly awful, they're still a handful and I'd spend my entire time shushing and re-sitting and placating and not getting to eat my own, never mind actually chatting to someone I probably haven't seen since we were on the 6th-year debating team together.

Then I remembered that you don't control your children: you get smart and you control their environment. That way, they're happy, you're happy, and nobody has to think that you're totally incompetent as a parent, whatever about your erstwhile public speaking abilities. (To be honest, she was better at that too.) So I suggested that we meet in the National Building Museum of an afternoon (or morning, even).

The National Building Museum in Washington DC, if you've never been, is one of my favourite places. I rarely look at the exhibits, but it's an oasis of air-conditioning in summer or of dry space on a rainy day, with plenty of space to run around, building blocks and an arch to put together, a Red Hook bakery shop with coffee, and the best museum shop in the city, full of clever and beautiful toys, kitchen doo-dads, paper goods and books. On top of that it has a separate play area for small children, with giant lego and a little house and books to read and everything to keep them occupied with one parent at a time while the other goes and browses in the shop.

See what I mean?

The only possible quibble I could have is the two fountains in the middle of the floor, which might entice an 18-month-old to get rather wetter than you intended.

This is somewhere I could imagine meeting up with two toddlers, a four-year-old and a five-year-old and actually getting to chat in a somewhat adult manner.  Without using a large amout of duct tape and velcro, that is.

 

B and a much younger Monkey, with a bunch of strangers, having successfully erected the arch together

Where do you go if you want to keep the kids happy and talk to grown-ups at the same time?

Coffee

Last night went something like this.

7.30 or so: Mabel's bedtime. And Monkey's, but he's not involved in this particular saga.
8.30 or so: Mabel's sleep time. To be honest, I don't really remember.
9.30: Mabel's first wake-up. I got her back to sleep, put on my pyjamas, brushed my teeth, and went back to the movie we were watching.
10.15: Mabel's second wake-up. After getting her back to sleep, I gave up on seeing the last 20 minutes of the movie and just went to bed.
12.00: Mabel's next wake-up. To be honest, I'm making up the times now, because I don't retain it all from one night to the next, lest I go stark raving mad. But this is more or less how it goes.
3.00: Mabel's next wake-up. At this point I'm in her bed, so it doesn't bother me much.
Then the fun part happened.
4.40: Mabel sits up and announces that her teeth hurt and she needs medicine. She makes for the door. I reluctantly look at the clock, calculate that just maybe her teeth really do hurt that much, lever myself off the bed, and give her a dose of Motrin. We go back to bed.
4.50: Mabel sits up and says she has a wee. Which has to be done on the toilet even though she's wearing a pullup. Of course it does. Because it's the middle of the night. We go to the bathroom. She wees. We go back to bed.
5.00: Mabel sits up again and says she has a poo. I seriously doubt it, but it's late and I'm powerless. If I have to be up at 3am, I'm perfectly alert, but between 4 and 6 is pretty much the lowest ebb of the soul. I sit on the floor in front of her as she sits chirpily doing nothing at all on the toilet, and feel a little like crying.
5.10: We finally go back to bed. Mabel asks: "Are only grown-ups awake now?" I say, "Nobody's awake now, Mabel." This time the Motrin has kicked in and after a little while she's able to sleep.
7.00: Mabel's awake for the day. She happily gets out of bed and wanders downstairs to find Daddy. I roll over and embrace unconsciousness for another blessed hour, just happy that I have a husband with flexible working hours.

This is not what I was going to say

Naturally, because I wrote about it, Mabel decided it was time to let me know in no uncertain terms that the only change I have effected is one of creating more laundry for myself. Still. We're in it for the long haul, and it has begun. That's all I have to say about that.

Monkey just jumped off a too-high bay windowsill one too many times and bit his tongue pretty badly. I know he really wanted an ice-pop, but there are less painful ways to get one. He's lying beside me on the sofa, still sniffing pathetically at intervals, but the bleeding has stopped and he'll be fine. I offered to put on a DVD, as some sort of special treat, but he said, "No. I love Qubo." What a testimonial for public TV.

Yesterday he told me he thought I should make another baby sister, a smaller one. And that it said in his book about the human body that I could make one every month. When I reminded him that Daddy would have to be involved as well, he said "Oh yes, you have to do that special hug. Well, you can do it in there, in the family room."

Which led to a bit more of a conversation about s-e-x (he was unimpressed and mostly uninterested), and how grown-ups like to do it even if they're not making a baby, and how sometimes they do things to make sure that they don't make a baby, and that if we wanted to make one we'd stop doing those things. But that we probably aren't going to because we're probably good with just two.

And yet, part of me wanted to say, "Oh well, since you asked so nicely and you clearly mean it, then I suppose you can have a new baby sibling. Just wait a minute till I've finished my lunch." Because that's a good reason.

I probably shouldn't tell you this next part, but it's too good to keep to myself. It was probably inevitable, given all the, um, region-specific acrobatics Monkey was doing, that something interesting would happen. He discovered that he could make his penis go all straight and standing-uppy. I happened to find him doing this when trying to hurry him up in the bathroom one afternoon, and I thought I should let him know that it's perfectly normal and something that happens to all boys, in case he was worried in any way. Far from it: I think he was a little disappointed to find out it wasn't just him. He probably thought it was a fabulous new superpower.

Now, from what he said to me yesterday, he apparently has a whole scenario in which his penis is a monster chasing things... I was trying not to listen, really, but as his father said when I regaled him with this latest, he'd want to refine his notions a bit before he starts trying to interest the girls.

I begin to see where all this male idolatry of the penis stems (ahem) from - as far as a five-year-old is concerned at least, it's a magical animal all of his own. But then, some men, as we've seen all too clearly in recent days, never really progress from the five-year-old stage, do they?

Some sort of success

What's that you say? You want to know how the potty training is going? You're dying to hear all about it in eensy weensy detail? Oh, okay then.

When last I mentioned this, we were on Day 1. We're now at Day 10 and still going strong. By which I don't mean that we've already freecycled the last pack of Pampers, but just that we really are doing this, and Mabel is happy that she's mostly a big girl who wears underpants now.

She still hasn't really got the hang of telling me when she needs to go, which is why one of the cushion covers for the good sofa is currently drying in the sun on the deck (machine washable FTW), but I'm hoping it will come. (Or else she'll settle into a predictable pattern of just going and doing it, as Monkey has finally done. (Seriously. I'm not sure he ever listens to his body or stops to hear what it's screaming at him, but so long as he visits the bathroom three times a day  - never more! - and sits down to see what he can produce at least one of those times, it all works out. He's always surprised, though, to find that he did have a poo after all.))

After the first two days, the novelty of sitting on the relocated-to-the-kitchen potty wore off and I had to invoke the power of bribery. If she sits down and produces the goods, she gets a chocolate chip. It's amazing how this turns a squirming, refusing child into a model of enthusiasm. I think it's a mark of second-child-parenting that the notion of bribery doesn't really sting the way it used to - oh, the ethical dilemmas I used to produce for myself wondering if it was allowable to offer Monkey a chocolate milk in return for being good at Target - even though he had my number from the start and always insisted on stopping at the in-store Starbucks franchise first, not last.  But we all know that bribery for potty training is totally kosher, so long as you're not giving them a whole chocolate muffin at a time. (Why did chocolate muffins come to mind? Certainly not because I just ate two of them with my cup of tea. Absolutely not. But if I had, they'd have been home-made ones, which would make them practically health food.)

So now she wears a pull-up at night, and if I manage to remind her often enough, she can stay dry, or mostly dry, all day. At naptime I put a waterproof crib pad under her just in case, and so far she's been dry on waking every time. I think we can probably abandon the nighttime pull-ups pretty soon, once I have the energy to get her to sit on the potty as soon as she gets up instead of an hour later when it's getting-dressed time.

Whatever about their sleeping habits (abysmal), their eating habits (shocking), and other facets of potty training (Monkey), I will say this for my kids: they're both lucky enough to be dry sleepers from a reasonably early point. It's not something you can train - nobody has control over their bladder while asleep - and some kids wear something absorbent to bed till they're seven. It just seems that for my two, that particular switch was tripped early on, and they don't wet the bed. And since they never just sit around in bed awake - once they're up, at least one parent is up too - I don't have to worry on that end. Small mercies.

I know we're a long way from out of the woods yet with Mabel - there are regressions a-plenty to come yet, I'm sure - but it's a good start. When Monkey was three and one month and I finally decided that since he wasn't showing any "signs" of readiness we would just go cold turkey, I said to myself, "We have a month before we go away for the summer; surely he'll be trained by then." That was not the case. Not by a long shot. But here I am saying the same thing with Mabel: "She'll be all done by the time we go away in July," and while I'm perfectly prepared to eat my words with a nice chianti and some fava beans if necessary, I think it might just work this time.

And you know, it does afford a certain sense of accomplishment. It's not that I've really done anything - she's the one who has to decide what she's doing where, after all - but I have effected a change. The way things go with this girl, I think that's something to celebrate.

Life's a picnic

I have discovered something very much like a Jaffa Cake in our local supermarket, and I think I might just be about to eat half a packet in one sitting. This is good, but also bad.

This morning, while Monkey cavorted in shaving foam and frolicked under lawn sprinklers with his classmates, I had wanted to do something special with Mabel. Or at least something we wouldn't get the chance to do again all summer, now that we'll have Monkey with us all morning every morning (playdates, as yet unarranged, excepted). In the end, I spent a while taking photos of the kids' water day, and then we had to go home because we'd forgotten Mabel's shoes. (Yes, I know. But sometimes I put her in the car and chuck the shoes in separately, because she so often kicks them off on the way anyway. So rather than put them on twice, I just put them on when we get to wherever we're going. This morning, busy remembering hats and sunscreen and a towel, I forgot the vital second step.) So instead of sharing a mother/daughter cupcake in Starbucks or trawling the racks in Marshalls for something I can wear in the lovely 100 F temperatures we're having now (something that's only just possible with one and pretty much impossible with both), we went to the Teddy Bears' Picnic.

The picnic is an annual event held by the local library to kick off their summer reading program. Somehow we'd never gone before, even though I'd heard about it every year. It turned out to be a supersize story time, with snacks at the end to entice listeners. All the kids brought a teddy - or a baby (Mabel), or a stoat (her friend), or whatever - and at the end we paraded around the room three times to the strains of the eponymous song.

I've mentioned before how our local library's storytime isn't my favourite. This was much the same, only On Crack. Let's just say that the five librarians, enthusiastically clad in their orange t-shirts, were a bit more reminiscent of the Munsters than Jackanory. Still. We saw some friends, ate some snacks (amazing how not one of the little packages of crackers and cookies was devoid of HFCS, but at least the juice was real), and pointed to our heads, shoulders, knees, and toes as required.

And then we went and got Monkey from school, and now the long, long summer stretches out in front of us, and every time I consider doing anything tomorrow (laundry, shopping, sitting down) it's tempered by the realization that I probably won't be able to without breaking up a fight or calming down craziness every five seconds.

I'm really going to have to up my game a bit, aren't I?

Monkey, shaving foam, you get the idea

Crossing over

This morning Monkey graduated from nursery school. They had a little ceremony called "crossing over", and each child received a scroll, walked across the symbolic bridge, and shook their teachers' hands. It was adorable.

Monkey gets his certificate

Before, I thought such things were totally ridiculous. Leaving aside the unfortunate name his school gives it, which always makes me think of a classful of unfortunate terminally ill children, or at least those who are leaving us temporarily to visit a higher spiritual plane, the very idea of dressing four- and five-year-olds up in caps and gowns (some do; our school didn't) and making a big deal the fact that they're going from one class to another seemed like overdoing it. In the words of Mr Incredible, isn't it just "finding new ways to celebrate mediocrity"?

On the other hand, my hairdresser this weekend, as we chatted about such things, said that the British (I didn't quibble, it seemed rude) always take things so seriously. It's just for fun. I was trying to remember if we had had any sort of graduation ceremony when we left secondary school (high school), and eventually decided that our official celebration was probably the sixth-year mass. (I had to repeat and clarify to get "mass" across: it's one of those unfortunate words that doesn't travel well in my accent, like ham and tomato and oregano. The number of times I've had to re-order a sandwich or a pizza, and eventually sigh and go all nasal and say "hee-am" (and o-reg-ano instead of ore-ga-no), you wouldn't believe.)

So I don't think they're preparing the little ones for a lifetime of walking across stages, shaking hands, accepting scrolls, and smiling for the cameras, but they are having a little fun and making a big deal out of something that is, in fact, a big deal. Most of these kids have been at the nursery school for three years, and the prospect of going to elementary school in September is a little bit scary and a little bit exciting, and definitely the mark of becoming a big kid. There's no harm in celebrating that.

In with the in-crowd

This morning I came down to find two children hiding behind the arm of the sofa.
"Boo!" shouted Monkey, as he jumped out.
"Boob!" shouted Mabel, belatedly. It must have reminded her of something. "I want your boobies!"

This is exactly why I never taught Monkey the proper word for some things. But Mabel picks up on words more quickly, and has more access to synonyms. (She loves synonyms. When B comes home and Monkey yells "Daddy's home!", Mabel counters with a joyous "My father!")

I just attended my first committee meeting for the nursery school. There was food. I was still hastily dabbing at the drip of spring-roll filling on my t-shirt moments before I had to introduce myself as the new housekeeping chair. Luckily, the position has more to do with delegation of cleaning tasks than actually performing them. Just as well.

Later, when I had to stand up before all the new and returning members and explain a little about the sub-committee positions, I felt I did fairly well and, you know, projected and stuff. It was only after I sat down that I remembered I'd said "hoovering" instead of "vacuuming." I hope they understood me.

Mabel had not napped today, and by the time I came home after two-and-a-half hours of meetings, she was still wide awake, watching cat videos on u-Tube with her father. (Monkey was sleeping peacefully.) I had been thinking that maybe it will be easier to get Mabel to sleep in a timely and non-boobular fashion once she gives up her naps, but perhaps not. Even after 13 hours straight awake, she took her sweet time to drop off, insisting on a totally fraudulent trip to the bathroom to string things out.

Well, I'll have a meeting once a month, so she'll have one extra reason to see me leaving the house without her, apart from pilates (weekly, maybe) and book club (monthly, maybe). It's almost as if I'm having a life of my own. Just a little.

Salon

You enter, lank and harried, searching for refreshment that goes beyond mere water; in need of revitalization.

First, the ritual laying-on of hands. You close your eyes as your head is massaged by strong, trustworthy fingers. The dirt is washed away.

Then the examination of conscience: how long has it been since your last haircut? You think back, you estimate, you fudge some dates, you come up with something that might sound reasonable.

The readings: will it be Cosmo, InStyle, or Us Weekly this time?

Now the sermon: you should really think about trying a Brazilian kerawhatsit treatment, because your hair tends to be a bit fuzzy. And don't even think about going swimming without some deep conditioner.

The crux of the matter: the cut. Reverent silence as the sacred duty is performed.

Then a little penance for good measure. A blast of hot air scorches; rough bristles pull. Your armpits quickly prickle with sweat and adrenalin. The urge to fight or flight is roused, but you sit and endure and offer it up, head bowed.

Finally, the collection. A tithe? You hardly begrudge it; your very soul feels relieved. As is your wallet.

And you leave: energized, relaxed, light of heart and head.

Giant steps

Mabel did not sleep this afternoon. At least, after 20 minutes of blessed peace, the monitor chirped "Mummy?" and that was that. This, added to her bad night last night, meant that at the nursery-school picnic this evening, her dark shadows were such that people were asking me if Mabel had done something to her eyes. Just kept them open too long, that's all.

We effected a departure ASAP, once Monkey had eaten his sandwich (brought from home) and some cake and a brownie and drunk a lot of pink lemonade, and Mabel had ostentatiously rolled down the hill several times, pausing ever longer at the bottom both for dramatic effect and because she was far too tired to get up. (I also had time to queue up twice for food, because by the time the first lot is eaten another batch of people have arrived bearing culinary goodies that must be investigated. And I believe B ate something too.)

Now they are both asleep and I have a nice glass of pinot grigio in front of me, to bolster me for who knows what sort of night ahead. I'd like to say that she's bound to sleep long and hard and deep, but that's what I said at naptime and look what happened.

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

In my youth, lo these many years ago, there was one public swimming pool in the vicinity of my house. And not particularly the close vicinity: about a 15-minute drive, sort of three suburbs over, if you like. It was romantically known as Blue Pool. Which was nicer than greenish-from-pee-and-dead-skin-cells-and-floating-band-aids-mitigated-by-large-quantities-of-chlorine-pool. But to be honest, I imagine that's how most public pools were then, and probably still are. Especially if other kids were as clueless as I was: having grown up mostly swimming (that is, wading for a long time and eventually ducking down to shoulder level just before I got out) in the Irish Sea, where if you needed to go, you just went, it was a while before it dawned on me that this wasn't actually appropriate in an enclosed swimming pool. (I blame my parents. They should have mentioned it.)

In fact, a quick Google shows that the pool is still locally known as Blue Pool, though its official name has long changed. I'm sure it's lovely now. And as far as I was concerned, it was lovely then. Swimming in an indoor pool was always a huge treat - for one thing, it was warm, far warmer than the sea - and ... well, maybe that was it, but because I hardly ever went, I loved it when I did. Even the mortification of changing in front of other people (that is, huddling under a towel trying to pull up twisted knickers while I assumed everyone was watching me, critical of my every move) wasn't enough to put me off.

So I didn't get much swimming practice as a kid, is what I'm trying to say. It was lovely growing up so near the sea, and I miss being able to go down to the rocks and breathe deeply to drink in the ever-changing, ever-same blue-green expanse, and I would love nothing better than to be able to take my kids paddling and poking in rock pools and collecting seaweed and periwinkles and tiny white crabs;  but it's not the sort of sea you really spend much time swimming in, especially if you can't actually swim yet but could do with some time in water to get confident.

When I was seven, we took one of our rare trips abroad for holidays. Usually we went to a farmhouse B&B down the country somewhere, but every five years or so (it turned out, though I don't think it was planned that way) we went properly abroad (not just to England, which doesn't count). When I was almost two, we went to Menorca, a tiny island in the middle of the Mediterranean. Sadly, I don't really remember any of that. When I was seven, we went to Corfu, a Greek island off the coast of Albania. It was wonderful. It was my first experience with proper hot weather and warm blue translucent seas (not to mention mosquitoes and lizards and Greek dancing and scampi), and I've pretty much wanted to go back ever since.

So one day in Corfu in the warm water, I took myself over to the shallows and started swimming. And that was that. I had no form to speak of, and have never learned to do the crawl, but I think I have a passable breast stroke, which is what I use if I swim laps, like an old lady.

Anyway. Our hot weather has broken now, but we went to the pool every afternoon for most of the week. Last summer, Monkey went from clinging limpet-like to a parent to happily swimming about alone wearing his flotation vest - a huge step. This year, in three days, he abandoned the floatie and I looked down on Wednesday to see his arms and legs gyrating wildly and not touching the bottom at all. In essence, he's swimming. Just not actually forwards.

As with the bike, there's some backwardsing before he'll progress again - for now, he won't cycle anywhere but on our road, because apparently all other surfaces have intimidating slopes or bumps - and he was back in a brand-new, better-fitting floatie yesterday. (Mabel has inherited the other one. Which, though I'd love to see her swimming like a dolphin, is probably safer because I can't be in all places at once. She does show a little more caution than last year, though, when she would have just kept on walking into the deep end if I hadn't scooped her up before the water covered her and her little pink hat floated away merrily.) He doesn't want to take lessons, so we just keep doing what we can, telling him to kick behind him and move his arms, and he'll get there, some day.

Superheroes: the root of, and solution to, all evil

As I left the supermarket with Mabel this morning, the man sitting in the car beside ours heard her babbling away from her vantage point among the shopping bags, and smiled. He asked me how old she was, told me I had a beautiful daughter, and remarked wistfully that his own daughter had just graduated yesterday, and yet it seemed only a few short years since she was two-and-a-half like Mabel.

I waved to him as we pulled out, and said to Mabel that he was a nice man.
"No, he's not."
"Really? Don't you think he's nice? He was very friendly."
"I don't like him."
"Why not?" I asked, hoping I didn't know what she was implying.
"Because he has a dark brown face."

Dun dun dunnnn. Where did that come from?

"Mabel, the colour of people's skin has nothing to do with how nice they are. Why do you think that he's not nice?"
"I just do."
Something occurred to me. She had been playing with the superhero action figures before we went out this morning.
"Is it because Bad Spider-Man is black?"
"Yes."
"But Batman is black too. And he's good."
"Oh." Thinks. "Then he was a nice man."

I named various people we know who have differing shades of brown skin. It transpired that, I think, though Mabel can recognise brown skin when she sees it, she doesn't retain people's colours in her memory. This is, perhaps, some small comfort. And I have no way of knowing if she would have the same reaction tomorrow - toddlers are fickle, after all.

But really. If this is how easily, and how early, and how literally, children interpret the lessons of colour symbolism - white=good, black=bad - we need to be very, very careful. Maybe I need to introduce some creepy albino bad-guy action figures* into our collection.


*Joking, joking. Calm down.