Old-hat reviews: The Hunger Games Trilogy

In June, it was my turn to pick the book for August's book club meeting. My first two suggestions were shot down as, inexplicably, they'd already read them (bad Maud, forgot to check the list). And despite their five-star reviews on the book site I'd taken their titles from, nobody present had liked them much. This left me feeling insecure: people don't have to love the book you choose, but it helps. And I wanted an easy read, because I knew I'd probably be reading most of it on a plane, my eyes propped open with matchsticks but unable to sleep. I cast about for a third option and came up with something other people kept telling me to read: The Hunger Games. I was afraid it might be gory or gruesome, because I'd heard something - erroneously, as it turned out - about cannibalism, but it was the best I could come up with on short notice. I was pleased when the others seemed happy to take it on.

I bought it in the airport, read the first 20 pages or so, and promptly left it in the pocket on the back of the seat in front of me. I didn't manage to find another copy until about a week later, but it's not as if I'd had much time for reading anyway, what with navigating myself and two children past the transatlantic jetlag and around the local parks of Cardiff while my husband attended a conference. I bought it again in Dubray Books in the Blackrock Shopping Center in south county Dublin, along with a Oliver Jeffers for Monkey and a tiny box-set of Charlie and Lola books for Mabel. And then I read it rather quickly. Indeed, it was a page turner. My husband, having finished his own reading matter, picked it up and was immediately engrossed. It's that sort of book. It pulls you in from the instant you start, and tosses and turns you over and over until you're dizzy, but you keep going.

Yesterday I finished the third and final book of the series, Mockingjay. (The middle one is Catching Fire.) My husband finished it the night before that. So now I think I can discuss them here - and they've been out long enough to qualify as "old-hat" in my review series, right?

If you haven't yet read them, there will be some spoilers ahead, but nothing too vital.

The biggest question I had was why I wasn't more traumatised by the horrible images of violence and suffering in the books. Terrible, horrific things happen, the sort of things you don't want to dwell on lest you wake in the middle of the night, and yet, I was able to gloss over them and keep reading without them entering my brain and scarring me.

It might be because I know they're YA books, and I scorn anything that's "popular fiction" rather than "literary fiction". Except that I love YA, especially YA fantasy - ever since I was pulled into the wardrobe with Lucy and Edward, since I entered the hole in the ground where a hobbit lived, ever since I read Alan Garner's Elidor, I've loved this sort of thing and happily suspended my disbelief along with my sense of time passing and my need for a snack or a bathroom break or to go to sleep until I found out how it ended.

It might be because I'm grown up now, and the books that I read and re-read as a teen just don't stay with me and become part of me the way books did then. Except that I read Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials series, and the Susan Cooper books, and Earthsea, not to mention all of Harry Potter, as an adult, and consumed them eagerly and without criticism. (Because at heart I'm a terrible literary critic - I could never get the hang of it and its pretentious vocabulary, despite my BA in English.)

I came to the conclusion that it's because the Hunger Games books are plot-driven, not character-driven. Maybe this was a conscious decision on the part of Suzanne Collins, because honestly, it would be impossible to write it more deeply and (a) cover all the material she covered and (b) leave your audience actually wanting to keep reading. I think you keep going, and you see these horrific images on the surface of your brain, but they don't penetrate because there are more words and you're just moving right along here and not thinking about any of it too hard. I didn't really identify deeply with the heroine, didn't feel a part of her despite the first-person narration. Maybe the present tense narrative made it easier to rush on ahead and not dwell on what had just happened.

I can't help wondering how they'll portray these horrible events - people being mauled to death by wild animals, consumed by acid, or having their flesh melted off by a beam of light, to pick a few at random - in the movies, without creating a horror to rival the Saw movies (which I have no intention of ever seeing) and getting an R rating. They'll have to dumb down a lot of the horror, and will presumably up the love-triangle aspect instead, but I wonder will it lose its punch as a result and become just another alternate-universe love story.

I can't even figure out what you would do to fix this sense of being slightly removed from the action, if you wanted to, which in this case I don't think anyone really should. But as an aspiring writer, it interests me. When a Dick Francis character is kicked in the ribs, breaks a bone, falls from a galloping horse (as they frequently do; Francis's heroes have amazing pain tolerance and live dangerously), I gasp and wince in sympathetic pain. But when Katniss is hurt, I just gloss over it. Is it overload, because she gets hurt so much? Is Francis so much a better writer than Collins? Or is there something obvious I'm missing about how this works?

If you have an opinion, I'd love to hear it.

A day late and a dollar short

I'm going to post a What's for Lunch Wednesday post, except that I didn't get the photos out of the camera till today, so it's not Wednesday any more.

(Mabel loves Thursday, because it's named after Thor, her favourite of the Avengers. Except when her favourite is Wasp, or Ant-Man, or Captain America. Last night she was very excited to hear that today would be Thor's Day.)

Other people who shall remain nameless always get their post up in time, so if you go there you can read more about yesterday's food and follow the links to everyone else's lunches.

I packed the big lunchbox for me and Mabel yesterday, full of good stuff that of course came back mostly uneaten. This is why I don't feed my children: they don't eat food. In our lovely green Goodbyn (that always gets admiring glances) I have apple slices, grapes - quartered because they were big fat ones with choking hazard written all over them - some watered-down red juice (V8 V-fusion), a mini yogurt, and quesadillas. Mine had black beans from a tin (well rinsed) mixed with a spoonful of chipotle salsa and some grated red cheddar. Mabel's had ham and cheese, because she doesn't like purple beans. All she ate was the yogurt.

Those mini yogurts, by the way, are called Danonino and are unappealingly labelled "Dairy Snack". But if you look at the ingredients, they have no HFCS and are mostly just milk, and have 19% of someone's required protein (I don't know if that's a toddler's or an adult's) as well as calcium and some other good things. In Europe we have tasty little pots of stuff called Petits Filous, or Petits Suisse, or simply fromage frais, but all those words are French and therefore would be frowned upon by Les Etats Unis. From the taste, these little guys are almost the same, a little milder perhaps, but clearly the Danone company is stumped to find a decent name for them.

So that was lunch. Mabel hasn't been eating much lately, but between the fact that she's been on antibiotics for almost three weeks now to make sure she doesn't develop Lyme disease - and it seems to be working, because the mystery rashies have gone away and the target-shaped one is fading nicely - and that she came down with the snurfles at bedtime last night and is currently streaming snot, I'm not too surprised. It's not like she's slowed down any with the nursing, I can promise you that.

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In other news, I'm painfully - painfully, I tells ya - aware that the banner graphic is horribly out of date, and I have a nice autumnal photo all ready to go for up there to replace the swimming pool we haven't been to since August. But Blogger tells me it's too big, so I'll have to wait for my IT advisor to come home and do clever things with Gimp to make it fit. I hate iPhoto. For an iThing, it's really annoying. [... Update: Done!]

While I'm talking shop, I have to say I'm very tempted to change Monkey's name to Dash. What do you think? He's just not a Monkey any more, and it also turns out that Monkey is a very obvious and boring thing to name your blog son. Mabel has been playing The Incredibles a lot - she likes to be Violet and look after her baby brother Jack Jack - and has taken to addressing Monkey as Dash. It's a good name for him, since he likes to show us how fast he is at every available opportunity. (It also fits the Halloween costume I picked up for him at the thrift store last week to a T.) Do you think I should? Would it be too confusing? Do you care? Etc.

Acclimatization

So it appears that Mabel will be okay at school after all.

Yesterday when I confessed that it was, in fact, a school day, she registered the requisite protests. "I don't want to go to schooooool," came the pitiful wails. "Don't bring me to schooooool." Unmoved, I plopped her in the car beside her brother, as for the first time I was required to get them both to their separate places of learning at 9am. (Okay, she can be a little late. They don't count tardies for the two-year-olds.)

"You'll be fine," said her brother, with the assurance of one who knows. "Your school is even nicer than mine. You get to play all the time. I have to do work." His work mostly consists of colouring, but I suppose it's a little more arduous than all the playing with large wooden blocks he spent the three years of nursery school mostly doing.
"Waaaahhh," she answered.
We stood in line with Monkey as the rest of his classmates arrived, and wished him a happy day at school as he headed on inside when the doors opened. And off he went.
 
Perhaps Mabel remembers the first few mornings of kindergarten, when Monkey yelled and wailed and clung and cried and demanded that we not take him to school. I think she was at least a little impressed to see how he seemed to be taking it now.

When we got to her school, I brought her over to the table where several of her friends were helping to make playdough. As she gripped her wooden spoon and began to stir, I brightly told her I had to go now, and kissed her goodbye. She didn't flinch. Nor did she cry, or cling, or ask me not to. She looked a little damp of eye, and I could see that she was making a huge effort to hold it together, so I stayed not upon the order of my going but went at once.

She didn't cry all morning. She was totally fine when I picked her up from the playground two and a half hours later, sitting by a tree trunk with a big red plastic shovel, doing something with mulch.

This morning was much the same: she complained about the concept of school, I ignored her. I took her to school and said goodbye. She wasn't quite so stressed. When I arrived at the playground, she wouldn't look at me and said she didn't want to talk to me, but after a couple of minutes she deigned to come down off the slide and demand that I take her home.

I think she's confused by her emotions: she's probably worried that she's not missing me so much any more, and maybe even feels a little guilty for forgetting about me and having something akin to a good time. So when I come back, she can't even tell what she's feeling any more.

Her teacher told me that every sentence that comes out of her mouth (and there are plenty) is no longer a reference to Mummy and things Mummy failed to do - yesterday she told them that I hadn't made dinner on Sunday night and she was very hungry; blatant slander - I fed her several slices of pizza from those nice Domino's people, and fed myself several more.

All in all, I think she's settling in nicely.

Bloggity

See, as soon as I take my eye off the (blog) ball for a few minutes and try to write something else instead, in the shape of this crazy short story I'm playing around with that I think jumped the shark the moment I mentioned zombies, but I just ran with it and now I'm really quite enjoying the whole nutbally thing - as soon as that happens, then I have nothing to blog about and it just sits here all day and I realise that while it was extra super-duper nice of me to post on Sunday afternoon so that all those people who are bored at work on Monday morning will have something to read - wasn't it? because I used to be one of those people, so I do feel for you - that it doesn't really count as a Monday post, and what about all those other people who came along looking for something new on Monday and still haven't found it? Well, there's an extra long sentence just for you, that's what.

My most regular source of visitors, according to my stats, is a discussion board I happen to frequent that also has a portal where members can advertise their latest blog posts. Before the advent of things like Facebook, this was totally fabulous, because even people who hadn't bothered to bookmark your blog could go there and find the most recent post. Even now, with things like FB, it still sends me by far the biggest chunk of readers. But right now the portal is broken, so I'd like to extend a big thank-you to anyone who's still coming along to read even though they have to do it by a more convoluted route than usual. I'm really surprised my numbers didn't drop further, so I think some people are actually making an effort. And I do appreciate that.

Ugh. I just accidentally Febreezed my hand. You don't really want to know why.

You know, I'm very happy that the Internet came along in my lifetime, and that someone invented blogging and that it became a thing that people do. Because it's exactly the perfect thing for a person like me: a closet exhibitionist (I do cartwheels in the streets, but only when they're deserted) who used to subject her friends to ten-page letters and, later, e-mails that took way too much scrolling. This way (a) only people who actually feel like seeing me exhibit need to do so, (b) I don't have to write the same news over and over to different friends, and (c) I have an outlet for the constant stream of drivel that apparently comes direct to my fingers, bypassing my brain.

It's also good that I learned to type, disregarding the advice of my uncle who told me that if I did, men would only see me as a secretary. (I've been a secretary, and I was glad of the job and the fingerspeed that got it for me.) Times have changed.

In fact, now my uncle has a blog. I bet he has to hunt and peck to find the right keys.

a.m.

Thud.  Monkey gets out of his mini-loft bed.
Click. Bang. Click. Monkey carefully opens his door and closes it again behind him. He has not yet figured out how to do it quietly.
Muffled tromp tromp tromp. He goes into the bathroom.
Whsssshhhhhhhhh. Water hitting water.
Clunk. He bounces the lid of the toilet off the cistern, or the seat off the lid.
Clunk. Clunk-clunk.
Long period of silence while he stares into space, probably having a super-hero battle in his head. Possibly using his fingers to illustrate it.
Chhhhhhh. Water into basin.
Long period of silence while he washes his hands ritualistically and with many stops to stare into space. Click. Bang. Click. He opens the bathroom door, closes it behind him.
Excited tromp tromp. Moving towards me, not away from me. Bad sign.

"Mummy!"
"Yes."
"Mummy, I just have to tell you something really amazing!"
"Really."
"I just heard a train whistle!"
"Amazing."

What's amazing is that this doesn't rouse Mabel enough to make her decide it's time to get up. Also that he goes away again.

Tromp tromp decrescendo.
Click bang click. Opens his bedroom door and closes it carefully, but not quietly, behind him.
Rrrrrr. Rumble of top drawer opening smoothly but not silently. Selection of underwear and socks.
Rrrrr. Bump. Rumble of top drawer rolling to a close.
Repeat for t-shirt drawer and trouser drawer.
Long period of silence while he gets dressed, stares into space.
Click, bang, click.

"Boo, Daddy! Can I watch Avengers now?"

Mabel decides it's time to get up too. She scrambles across me, all elbows and knees in my soft parts, eager to see her brother and start the day.
"Wait for me!"

I roll over and go back to sleep until the decibels rise again.

Note to self: Do not mess with a good thing

For a minute there I was about to be the next great culinary genius. Alas*, fate threw a spanner in my works and I'm just another failed chef. For now. Let me take a moment out of what I'm supposed to be doing, which is trying to work out how my spreadsheet of all the housekeeping jobs at the nursery school just fails to tally with the list of all the families at the nursery school, to tell you about it.

*This reminds me that I have to mention that Monkey has started saying "Behold!" in his games of superhero-before-bedtime. I heard it for the first time last night, but B says it's a regular utterance now. Maybe Thor says it in The Avengers; he talks a bit funny sometimes. (Also also, and clearly I'm procrastinating on the spreadsheet even more than I thought, given all these tangents, I do love that Mabel can tell me that Odin is Thor's daddy and Loki is his brother who is not nice. I don't care that she's getting it all from a cartoon series that also includes Iron Man and The Hulk. It will win her a pub quiz in later life, I'm sure of it.)

Where was I? Oh yes, culinary. Genius. Me. Yup.

Last week I made sweet potato pancakes for lunch one day, and nobody ate them but me, because my children are heathen ingrates with cardboard where they should have palates (and don't tell me that heathen is irrelevant there, because I'm sure it's not; and they are, because we're raising them to be). B didn't eat them either, because I ate my share and quickly froze the rest for safekeeping. Then I had two a day for the next week, with syrup, instead of toast for my breakfast. They were yummy. I suspected they could be made even better for one by using half wholemeal flour the next time instead of all white flour. I promise to try that next time.

Today, I looked at the half-can of pumpkin puree and the buttermilk that needs using up in the fridge, and decided that I was perfectly well able to make up my own delicious Wholewheat-Buttermilk-Pumpkin Pancake mixture, riffing off the sweet-potato one and the Alton Brown recipe that's my basic standard. As I threw together a cup of this and a pinch of that, I mused on my future as the latest big food blogger, who could whip up delicious baked goods using no more than her intellect and her innate baker's soul.

However. There's a reason I am happy to throw food in a pot and call it dinner without consulting a book, but tend to stick to the letter of the recipe when baking. It works better that way. My batter was was a bit stiff. No matter - just stir in another quarter cup of pumpkin. Plop it in the pan and wait for the bubbles to let me know it's time to flip. No bubbles. Flip it anyway. Golden brown with a hint of orange: the perfect autumnal pancake. They'd be soft and yielding, slightly spicy, crisp on the outside, just waiting for communion with maple syrup to acheive pancake nirvana...

No. Not really. Mabel was not interested. The finished articles, while edible, were a bit too heavy, a bit too doughy, a bit too bland, a bit too not much good. They reminded me of the sort of thing sailors used to pack on long trips to the end of the world. Dense. Stodgy. Full of nutrients.

I will channel my father and eat them up rather than waste them, but I'll do it with the help of a lot of syrup, and if they're really not hitting any spots at all, I give myself permission to chuck them out. Next time, I'll just make pumpkin bread again. Maybe I can turn it into muffins. I think I could safely manage that. Probably.

On the loss of the career so cruelly denied to me

Last night my pilates teacher told me - and the room at large, for that matter - that I have amazing, prehensile feet. Luckily, I've been watching Animal Exploration on Qubo lately, because until about two weeks ago I would have thought she meant they were better suited to cavemen and should have gone out with the ark.

When my children were born, the first thing my mother asked on being informed that she had a new grandchild was whether they had my feet. (Okay, practically the first. After whether they had curly hair.) The funny thing is that even on a newborn, it was easy to see that they didn't. This is because my husband's toes look like fingers, and my toes look like toes. Or tiny nubby things, depending on your perspective.

My feet are basically pyramid-shaped. They're short and wide with a very high arch. I try not to bore people with the litany of all the shoes I have bought that didn't fit me, and all the shoes I can't even try to wear because they would fall off immediately or not even go on. They are my father's feet, except his are even worse, mostly due to the accident he had 40 years ago, resulting in a smashed patella, a broken femur, a broken tibia/fibula, and something wonky happening on down at foot level. He was lucky to keep the leg and is on his second artificial knee. Which, I suppose, should put my finding it hard to find nice shoes into perspective. But hey, I'm shallow.

I never thought much about my feet as a child, until one day my so-called friends from high school saw me barefoot and did the point-and-laugh thing about how intensely weird they were. After that, I knew for certain that my feet were not just difficult to sandal, shoe or boot, but also freakish and probably malformed. Even reading that a high arch was considered a sign of good breeding in years gone by wasn't really enough to take out the sting.

Then, a few years ago, I started taking pilates classes. My teacher is an amazing woman - a librarian who used to be a ballet dancer. She's 70 years old, and an inspiration to everyone to keep at it. In class, she doesn't take things too seriously, and knows that we probably don't managed to put spine to mat in between classes. One evening she was exhorting us all to practice more regularly: "Just imagine how you'd feel if you did even ten minutes a day!" she told us enthusiastically. "It would be amazing."
"Well, yes, it would be amazing," we all replied dryly.

When she saw my feet, she asked if I was a dancer.
"No," I replied.
"Ah, those that have it never use it," she said enigmatically.

One thing partaking in an exercise class like this does that no DVD can do is to show you how many variations the human body comes in. I always assumed that everyone could bend their limbs about the same amount, that everyone's head could touch their knees if they tried hard enough, that everyone's toes pointed all the way down. But looking around my class, it's amazing to see how far, or how little, we can all twist or bend or gyrate when doing the same silly exercises. For instance, when I sit on the ground with my legs out in front of me and my toes pointing up to the ceiling, it's very hard for me to stop them from doubling over and pointing towards my head instead. They don't want to go straight up from my feet. If I sit the same way and point my toes as hard as I can towards the wall, they almost touch the ground. I suspect this is peculiar.

Clearly, I have the feet of a great ballerina. (I stashed the rest of her in the freezer.)

But this amazing genetic trait went unrecognised by my parents. I even read the books - Ballet Shoes, and A Dream of Sadler's Wells and its companions are still on my bookshelf in Dublin. The kicker is that I did take ballet from the age of four until the time for the class for my age group moved too close to dinnertime for comfort, and then my Mum took me out and put me in drama instead. A great career stymied by something as prosaic as dinner. And, probably, lack of innate talent and too much of a taste for the easy life, but that's just splitting hairs.

Sadly for their dance careers - though happily for their shoe-buying futures - neither of my children have inherited my feet which are both amazing and prehensile. But I will be paying attention when presented with my first grandchild, and if they have short, fat toes, I will not depress everyone by discussing how much they'll have to spend at the orthopedist's, but rather celebrate the newest proto-ballerina in the family.

Winner/victim

Brought to you by the random number generator at www.random.org, the winner of the mani/pedi/fish-y cure from Yvonne's spa is JeCaThRe (whose lovely mostly-food blog is going sadly neglected these days, just because she's busy helping people have better birth experiences, of all crazy things).

You and a friend can go and pay a reduced amount of only $50 for the privilege of having your feet nibbled by pirahnas. Or some other fish, maybe; can you tell the difference? Just don't put any more in than your feet, okay? (You can thank my husband for that lovely story.)

And if you don't use it, I won't even know.

Sink or swim

First of all, if you're wondering (yes, you and you) about the fishy spa giveaway, the mere thought of which seems to have driven my readers away in hordes, I'm still waiting to be sent the vouchers for the "save". Once I have them, I will put your anxious minds at rest by having the computer (or my two-year-old) choose a number at random. A number between one and three, where number two did not wish to be considered. And if I go and do it myself, I will certainly be telling you all about how it was to be paddling with the fishies at a later date. I just wish I hadn't been so freaked out by Pirahna when I caught a few minutes of it on a friend's TV at the age of seven.

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My much-anticipated free time has mostly yet to actualize. To help Mabel with the transition to school, I went back at 10.15 yesterday and stayed the rest of the morning with her. She wasn't hicupping and on the verge of tears, as she had been last Wednesday (she only has school Mondays to Wednesdays, which makes for a very long weekend in which to get de-accustommed again), so today I left her till 11.00, which is the start of outdoor playtime before the regular pickup time of 11.30. Tomorrow I would quite confidently leave her for the whole morning, except that I'm co-opping - that is, helping in the classroom as part of our co-operative membership duties - so she'll be happy, but we may be back to almost square one next Monday. Baby steps, always baby steps.

I don't mind taking the time to ease her in gently. (If you can call it "gently" when I put a protesting child in the car, drive her to school, and leave her sobbing in my wake. But she calms down and cheers up quickly now.) I don't really have anything else pressing to do, anywhere else to be other than the very exciting supermarket or here in front of my computer blathering to you, or anyone else to be rushing home to attend to.

Yesterday morning, when I left her crying and didn't know if she'd cheer up in five minutes or be sobbing and heaving for the next hour, I felt all the requisite pangs of uncertainty. "We're not supposed to do this," I thought to myself. "She's too little. We should all homeschool forever. Why on earth do we feel compelled to send our offspring away from us and think, 'Well, if not now, she'll have to get used to it later and it'll be that much worse if she's been with me all day every day until she's three-and-a-half instead of two-and-a-half...' How is this any more civilized than sending a five-year-old into service, or up the chimneys, or to boarding school for months on end...? You can't make an omlette without breaking eggs? I don't even like omlettes! I don't want to break her!" All adding up to a pitiful internal wail of "Mah Baybeee!!", as Amalah would say.

Don't get me wrong: I have the greatest of admiration for those who choose to homeschool. I am in awe of their dedication and patience, and I have no doubt that they - assuming they are doing it with the right motives - will turn out exceptional and highly educated young people who can function excellently in society.  I'm just not one of those parents. I'm not a teacher. (I don't delude myself that a love of pontificating on the Internet means I can teach children anything.) And when I'm not all caught up in the emotion of the first few days, I can work out why it is that I do this to myself and my beloveds.

At school my children get the opportunity to do things they don't do at home. They play with water to their hearts' content instead of until my patience gives out and I demand that they stop washing up and give me back my kitchen sink before the floor is completely submerged. They paint with paint, using big fat brushes, or their fingers, or sponges or wonderful implements like toy car wheels and spatulas and potato mashers. They get to make their own play-dough and turn it into sausages and spaghetti and spirals without being yelled at to stop walking it all into the carpet. They learn to sit at the table and help themselves to a snack served family-style, and see and maybe taste new foods because their friends are eating them too. They learn to be quiet and considerate so that others can hear the story, instead of being the only one ruling the roost.

These are all things I could do at home, but the one thing I couldn't do is be an adult who is not Mummy. Mabel is learning that she's not the planet around whom we all orbit - not all the time. She's learning that sometimes there are fourteen of you, all thinking that maybe you're the planet, and all finding out slowly that to make things work smoothly, you often have to wait your turn and stand in line and sit when sitting is called for - and also that when you need something, you have to speak up and ask nicely, and then you'll be helped.

And yes, you could say that my darlings are learning to be good little cogs in the machine, to do what The Man tells them, to never think for themselves but just follow along with the crowd, to submit to peer pressure. But I don't think that's how it is. I think they're learning to rely on themselves a little more and me a little less, to discover what they can do as individuals; and if a tiny bit of that involves throwing them into a very shallow deep end to help them see that they can paddle after all, then I'm just going to nut up and do it.

Pictures of us

I was writing something else, but it bored even me, so instead I'll post some pictures. Everyone likes pictures, right? You don't even have to read them.

Almost a year ago, I was thinking of getting some professional photos taken. It nearly happened at Christmas, but then it didn't. We finally did that in July, and I'm delighted to present some photographs of our newly adorned walls for your admiration.

We were given the option to buy the digital copies of all the shots from the session, so I did some investigation to find out how much printing them ourselves (decently, not from CVS) would be and decided that it was the best value. So now we can get as many prints as we want and put our faces (and our children's faces, more to the point) all over our walls if we so choose. And I can make a calendar and everything.

While we own the digital files, we don't, of course, own the copyright to the photos, so I'm not uploading the pictures themselves. Hence, you only get to see photos of photos. If you want to come over for tea and a muffin some day, you can see the originals.

I ordered the framed ones above from MPix.com. I think they came out really nicely, though Monkey is a bit miffed that Mabel is bigger. Hers was square, I couldn't help it. If I make his 8x10, then she'll be feeling miffed.

I had these silver frames in the basement. I think they were wedding presents, so I'm happy to finally have a good use for them. Because you know, it's one of the facts of life that no matter how much you say "it's just a placeholder until I get a better one" about whatever photo you put into a frame, it will never, ever come out again.

Then, for our bedroom, I got all fancy and had a canvas printed. I ordered this from canvasondemand.com. Please do not comment on how it looks like Mabel just tied Monkey up. It was the best one of both of them, and I like the hilarious face she's making, which you can't really see here.

 In the family room, I started a wall-o-photos. The middle one and the top right are from the photo shoot - the others are ones I had sitting around in Ikea frames. I'm going to add to this with various shots of the kids at different ages.

But I had to give you a close-up of this. Butter would not melt in his mouth, right?

Snowflakes

I know that my children are special snowflakes. (You probably know that too, because you're so nice and here you are reading about them.) I know that it's because they're highly intelligent and extremely sensitive and also because they have a very healthy attachment to me that they scream and cry when first introduced to a new setting like, say, school. But I can't help feeling that their teachers probably have only a finite amount of patience with these very special darlings, of whom there must be a few in every class, and yet somehow this year it seems like mine are the very most specialest of all.

(I also know that the teachers have a ton more patience with the children than we parents do. Because your child knows how to push your buttons, innately and by their very being which contains your exact DNA and therefore is often just a tiny bit too much like you, yourself, for your comfort. When faced with the scenario of the small child who's been hitting the other small child and goes back to do it again, I suspect it's much easier to remain calm when neither of these children are your own. Also, when you're a consummate professional who's been doing this, dealing with this, for twenty years now, like Mabel's teacher, who I saw gently and kindly remove a troublemaker from the scene of the crime and help him sit and wait beside her for his mother yesterday morning. I was impressed.)

But then, there's Monkey having been the one child who needed to be peeled off his parent for the first week, walked to his classroom for the second, and walked into the school (but not all the way down the hall) by his dad for the third, while everyone else just got with the program and nutted up and did what all the other kids were doing by day three or so. I wonder, does his teacher think "Ah, Monkey. Such a happy, well-adjusted child, with caring parents," or does she think "When will this child and his mollycoddling parents stop disrupting my class?"

And now Mabel, being That Kid, the one who cries all morning at nursery school. We've all seen them. At least, all of us who have had the pleasure of helping out in the two-year-olds' class. There's always one. Maybe two. They stop after a few weeks, but for those weeks, while you're sorry for the child, thoughts like "How can her mother do this?" and "It's upsetting the other kids, you know" and "Gosh, it's awfully stressful being cried at all morning," do tend to make their way into your head.

That's the sort of way I felt yesterday about both of them. That this year, I was That Parent, with Those Kids.

On the other hand. (As Mabel would say. I can't wait for her to say it to her teacher.) Monkey told me yesterday that one of the boys in his class still cries some mornings. His other friend is terrified when there's a thunderstorm. Monkey, in contrast, seems to be loving school already and has recently been seen carrying around a notebook and asking me how to spell things. I'd seen other people's kids doing that, but never believed mine would. I love it.

Mabel, too, may be upset in these early days, but I'm confident (don't hold this against me, please karma) that she won't be one of those children I used to see crying their eyes out when saying goodbye in the morning even in their second and third year of nursery school. We'll work through it, gradually stretching out the time of exposure to People Who Are Not Mummy Without Mummy Present, and she'll be fine in a few weeks. Somebody's always the last, or the saddest, or the naughty one in the class, and if it's not yours today, it might be tomorrow.

I read something recently, somewhere on the Internet, about how if everyone  could drop their problems into a pile and choose new ones, you'd take back your own pretty happily as soon as you saw everyone else's. I think it's like that with kids too. No matter what their idiosyncrasies (let's say), no matter how bad they are at sleeping or eating or being denied the boob even when everyone else is long weaned (say), or being separated from you, their beloved; they're your kids, and thus better, by definition, than anyone else's. That's how it works. That's why we keep 'em.

Second-hand memories

I'm at that point where I'm starting to feel like I can get rid of some of the stuff in the basement. You know the stuff I'm talking about. The baby stuff. The booster seats and the baby bjorn and the fleecy carseat covers and the ginormous body pillow I treated myself to for my second pregnancy - because I remembered all too well the feeling in my hips that my mattress had been replaced by bare planks of wood - and then somehow I hardly ever used it. I've advertised them all, and little by little I'm replacing them with nice slim green strips of paper that go into my wallet and don't take up any space in the basement at all. (Soon they won't take up space in my wallet either. Oh well. Them's the breaks.)

I'm keeping the pack'n'play (travel cot) and the simple high chair in case of visitors, and a couple of other things are earmarked for friends. I still have a box or three of tiny baby clothes, and a box of maternity gear, but as the children get older it's becoming easier and easier - not to mention a lot more practical - to give things away as soon as they're grown out of. I keep a few things of Monkey's that might be gender-neutral enough for Mabel in a year or two's time, but otherwise, every time I have a grown-out-of pile, I run through my mental list of people whose children are a year or two younger and don't have an older same-sex sibling, and I ask them if they'd like some stuff.

I don't know if it's an American thing, or something more peculiar to the area I live in, or just a parenting thing, but I'm growing to love hand-me-downs. I love putting a sweater on my daughter that belonged to her brother before her, and maybe even her two cousins in Ireland before that. I love that her favourite blue raincoat came from her cousins in California but somehow originated in Dunnes Stores (the Irish version of Target, sort of). I love bringing a bag of clothes to our neighborhood clothing swap and seeing friends pull out some of my favourite things to fit their own children, and picking up some finds of my own. Thrift stores are great resources, clothing co-ops have wonderful bargains, yard sales are fab, but nothing beats free kids' clothes.

Here's Monkey, aged almost three, wearing a hand-me-down from his Irish cousins. (Who is that brown-haired, grey-eyed baby with him? Surely not his blonde, green-eyed little sister?)

And lookit, there's Mabel, this July in Cardiff, wearing the same thing. Isn't that nice? (I know that looks like a sausage on a stick that she's eating, but it's actually a Mini-Moo icecream, which is basically chocolate milk in frozen pop form, and the ideal size for small children. Wish they had them here.

I may have said this before, but as a child I was clothed almost entirely in hand-me-downs, as I had the (mis)fortune to have five older girl cousins all geographically close to us. I was a bit of a tomboy, and didn't care much until I was about 13, when I finally demanded some clothes of my own. Before that, my memory of new clothes is limited to Christmas-present pyjamas, duffle coats that would be the envy of Paddington Bear, and bargain-basement jeans.

One day I went shopping with my dad, under orders to get new jeans. We went to Cornelscourt, site of the largest Dunnes in the country (it still is; back then it wasn't nearly so fancy, and was very reminiscent of a school building, with grey floor tiles and strip lighting). My father had no idea what size I was - what, did they not put ages on the sizes then? Maybe I was at that awkward in-betweeny stage of 12 or so - and I remember him producing his architect's tape measure from his anorak pocket and professionally stretching it down the length of my leg as if I was a piece of plywood in Chadwick's. I was probably mortified, but it's a nice memory now.

Every so often a bag of clothes would arrive from the cousins, and I'd eagerly riffle through it. On one occassion a lovely soft green wool turtleneck appeared that looked familiar to my mother. Yes, she had donated it to the cousins, five girls or so ago, and here it was, perfectly good, now back in our house for another round. It was my favourite jumper that year.

By cost-per-wear calculations, it probably should have been paying me by then.

Doing it all. Well, doing some of it and faking the rest.

Okay. So. I was asked, presumably as a result of my five seconds of fame on the BlogHer site last week, to participate in a Blog Carnival hosted at Mom Generations, and sponsored by Eversave. And in return for letting them link to the words of wisdom that I will set out here below for you in one moment, I get to give away a Special Deal from Eversave, which is $50 for a a Mani/Pedi/Fish-y Cure at Yvonne’s Day Spa. 

In fact, the winner gets a package of two, so that they and a friend can go and enjoy being nibbled by fish while their nails are painted for a bargain price. I don't know if you even want to win this, but here we are, and I have to let you know that just by leaving a simple comment, you too can be entered. Yvonne's has three locations in Washington DC, so if you're further afield this might not be much good to you. But hey, comment anyway. Tell me what sort of fish you'd most like to be nibbled by.

And now, without further ado, let me tell you - because apparently Sarah Jessica Parker can do it all in her new movie, to which this whole thing is somehow linked, (and lookee, Pierce Brosnan's in it too; did you know he's Irish? and handsome?) - exactly how I, myself, personally, manage to Do It All.

Well, obviously, I don't. Nobody does. If you think they do, they're just very clever with the sleight of hand and the misdirection and the prioritising. Something is always falling off the end, but that's okay, because so long as you keep your wits about you to some extent, the something is not a small child and the end is not the end of the high-diving board. Doing it all, to me, just means Staying Sane While Staying At Home.

However, I have a couple of tips, if you'd like to hear them:

1. Never do anything at naptime that you could do when the baby's awake. Unloading the dishwasher is out, because that might wake her. Same goes for vacuuming, or cleaning the upstairs bathroom. If this means all you do at naptime is sit down and read a book, that's a really good thing.

2. Invite people over now and then, so that sometimes you have to tidy up a bit.

3. Don't invite people you feel you have to clean the whole house for. People with kids are always a good bet.

4. When having people without kids over, remember to clean the bathroom, if nothing else. It's the only place they're alone and will pay attention. (I read that one in a magazine. It's a Genuine Tip.)

5. Put a drop of vanilla essence in a low oven to make the house smell good.

6. Sorry, wrong list.

7. Believe in karma. What goes around comes around. Especially if it involves snot.

8. Get a good haircut. There's nothing more depressing than going weeks convinced that your hair looks horrible.

9. Don't draw attention to your weak points. Nobody will notice them if you can just manage to keep your big mouth shut. I learned this yesterday, here, and it's a great lesson.

But really, this is the most important one:

10. Have a great team. I couldn't get out of bed in the morning, let alone Do It All, without my husband. I also have a team of co-parents at the playground who watch my kid when I'm too busy gossiping, and a team of cheerleaders inside the computer on whom I can rely for good suggestions, moral support, and space to whinge when necessary.

Now: comments. Go win that fishy spa deal! I'll pick a winner at random on Friday.

Taking flight

It's hard navigating these uncharted waters of letting-go. Yesterday, Monkey walked to his classroom alone for the first time, while his father stood at the top of the corridor. Okay, so it took us two weeks to get to the point other kids were happy with in three days, but that's just the way he rolls. He's so proud of himself, he practically glows.

But, you know, it's difficult on this side too. You have a baby: you suddenly have to immerse most of the fibres of your being into keeping him alive, buoyant, content. Then five minutes/years go by, and now he's spending most of the day, for most of the week, somewhere else, with other people whose names you recieve only garbled versions of for months, making hard-to-describe art projects, and you're sort of sidelined.

At some point after total dependance, we'll all end up being chauffeur and ATM for our teenagers, and that's the way it should be. (And mentor, and guide, and stuff, but mostly the taxi service and the bottomless pit of money.) It's this no-man's-land of getting from one to the other that's a tough path to tread. When to hang on, when to push out, when to talk, when to keep quiet.

I remember primary school, and have no memory of missing my parents or being upset or not wanting to use the bathroom or feeling abandoned if nobody was there to get me in the first five seconds after the bell rang. I walked to school and back with neighbours, until my Dad let me ride my bike there. But then I realise that my day-to-day memories are probably from when I was nine or ten or eleven, not four or five or six. And thinking about when I had certain freedoms or didn't is almost completely irrelevant anyway: I was a different child in a different country in a different era.

Monkey doesn't want his freedoms too early. He likes to wait until he's completely confident of the weather and the flight plan and the machinery before taking flight. But once he does, he'll be off. And here I'll be, wondering what he's up to, wondering if my mother wondered too.

Not lupus

Mabel has decided she's not taking a nap, and my feeble attempts to leave her in her room for quiet time worked about as well as you might predict, so now she's doing something with Duplo and monologuing about Thor. (She and Monkey have been watching The Avengers cartoon series, which is only partly completely unsuitable television for an almost-three-year-old, and she knows all her superheroes better than I do. Anyway, I like that she knows about Thor because I can pretend it's mythology rather than superhero-ology.)

She didn't really go to school today because I decided to take her to the doctor instead, and between the traffic and the waiting room, we finally squeaked into the playground with 15 minutes of the morning left. We went to the doctor because she'd had an odd red rash on her hands last week that was itchy at night, and which Dr Google told me might be eczema. I got some cream and it seemed to be improving, but other, different, rashy bits were popping up on her torso. So, just to be on the safe side, we went.

I'm glad we did, because, just to be on the safe side, she's now on half a teaspoon of amoxycillin three times a day for the next 21 days, to make sure she doesn't have Lyme disease. One of the rashy patches (these are tiny patches, just blips really) is suspiciously circular in shape, and when I said that I'd pulled a tick out of her leg several weeks ago - not where the rash is at all - the doctor said it's much easier to just treat than wait and see. I don't think she's showing any other symptoms, though I suppose if she's extra tired that might explain her reaction to school last week, but I'd much rather be on the safe side with this one.

The doctor said the rash on Mabel's hands is something else, possibly hives, and told me to give her Benadryl for that.

I've also decided I have arthritis in my thumb. Getting old is terrible. Monkey needs to hurry up and make his anti-ageing machine.

The mother of invention

As you may remember, Monkey likes machines. He likes dismantling machines to see how they work, and he likes inventing machines that accomplish marvellous things, mostly to do with his long-held ambition of flying. (Not aeroplanes, mind you. Much too pedestrian, if I may mix my adjectives. More along the lines of jet boots and rocket packs.) He's taken to telling us that he's about to make something "magnificent." He just needs a moustache to twirl.

I long for the day when his machines are made of intricate Lego Technix and do not involve a parent until they get to the admiration part: for now, they are either tedious verbal explanations that never end, or things that his father is required to construct out of cardboard.

 Jet pack, by Daddy, last November

So "When I'm a grown-up, I'm going to invent..." is a common refrain around here, and of course Mabel has picked up on it. She too will be inventing all sorts of things any day now.

Me: Mabel, when are you going to start using the potty?
Mabel: When I'm a grown-up, I'm going to invent a machine that goes to the toilet so I don't have to.
Me: [Deep sigh.]

Yesterday she told me she's going to invent a new bottom. Presumably one that doesn't need to pee.

At school last week, one of Monkey's friends was very scared by a thunderstorm overhead. Monkey related this to us in the car on the way to IKEA (it appears, by the way, if I may digress here for a moment, to be so long since I've been to IKEA that I totally forgot my usual route and ended up going a different way, finding the road blocked by flooding, having to go another different way, and vaguely wondering why it seemed to be taking much longer than usual; the clear lesson here is that I need to go more often) and my children proceded to have an argument over who would invent the better machine to comfort the boy in question.

Monkey: When I'm a grown-up I'm going to invent a machine that puts a force field around him to protect him from the thunder.
Mabel: No, I'm going to invent a machine with arms and legs to give him a hug.
M1: No, my machine.
M2: No, my machine.
etc.

I was touched by their concern, and managed to defuse the row by pointing out that they could put Mabel's machine inside the force field and thus use both at once. Co-operation.

Miss Behaviour

At Monkey's school they have a traffic-light system for discipline. Everyone starts on green each morning. A small infraction moves you to yellow, and "something awful" (his words) gets you a red light. You can work your way back up the light to green during the day with good behaviour. The children colour smiley faces on a chart in the appropriate shade to bring home and show us how they did, and presumably after a certain number of greens they get a reward, like tickets to buy something in the school "shop".

Yesterday, Monkey brought home his first yellow. This was because, as he explained to me with excitement, he and his friend across the desk came up with a great new game: pencil jousting.

Yes, I can imagine that would get you a yellow, all right. Unlike his friend's mom, who seems to take these things very much to heart (with the result that her son was afraid to tell her about it), I'm sort of, almost, pleased by this development. I think it's a sign that Monkey is really, truly, settling in happily.

Of course, if he comes home with a month's worth of yellows, I might have something to say about it, but for now I'm not worried about him being a Bad Seed. I just said I hoped he'd be back to green today, and he agreed that he hoped so too.

The episode got me thinking about times I remember getting in trouble at school. I was a horrible little goody-two-shoes for the most part, and when something did happen (note my use of the past exculpative) I always got the disappointed look and the pointed, "I thought you were more mature than that," speech from the teacher.

In sixth class, roughly analogous to sixth grade, at 11 going-on 12, and the last year of primary school, a certain level of decorum was expected of us young ladies. (There were no young men at our school, of course. Perish the thought.) Standing at the window en masse, yelling in a clearly derogatory way, as your teacher comes up the path from the staff car park, does not count as decorous behaviour.

Let me back up a bit. Our teacher that year, Miss M__, while a very good teacher, was somewhat arty and farty, airy and fairy, and not blessed with America's-Next-Top-Model-like beauty or svelteness. She was large, bumpy, and anemic looking, with very pale blonde hair and very pale blue eyes. In Ireland in the 80s, it was probably hard to dress what I imagine was a plus-size figure - and I'm talking probably closer to a 20 than a 12 (either UK or US sizing). So Miss M__ favoured knitted skirt suits - she had invested in a selection of them and pretty much rotated them all year. (The Irish climate allows you to do this, with addition or subtraction of warm undergarments as appropriate.) There was the blue one with a wide white stripe, the dark green with red trim, the fireman red, the red and white, and the bright pink with a flouncy skirt. They are seared into the second tier of my memory and it took a few minutes pondering to dredge them back up, but here they are, in their stretchy, elastic-waisted, unforgiving glory.

On the morning in question, around 8.55 am, someone looked out the window of our upper-floor classroom to see that Miss M__ had left her car and was approaching the building. It was a pink flouncy day, evidently. Something possessed us, and within seconds almost all the girls in the room had gathered to observe her progress.

We were children, and children are cruel, and do not stop to think that even adults can have their feelings hurt. Here was a large, unattractive woman with blonde flowing locks in a big pink dress, and it occurred to us all simultaneously that she looked like nothing so much as Miss Piggy. In a moment, we were shouting (something, I don't know what, probably nothing witty), and quite possibly belting out the theme tune to The Muppets. We assumed she couldn't hear us through all that thick glass, but, you know, she quite possibly could. Either way, it must have been pretty obvious that we weren't just mentioning in polite undertones that the teacher was approaching and we should probably sit down and read a nice book of poetry.

We all got into trouble for that one, and a lecture on peer pressure to boot. I remember being asked if I, too, had been with the group of girls at the window, and shamefacedly admitting that I had. There may have been a note sent home; there was probably some sort of general punishment. I don't remember that, I just remember feeling that for once, I was one of the ones in trouble instead of one of the ones looking on. In a way, it wasn't so bad.

But don't tell that one to Monkey.

A good dressing down

I'm reasonably good, though I says it as shouldn't, at dressing my children. What I'm terrible at, especially now, is dressing myself.

Monkey and Mabel are usually pretty nicely turned out. Monkey has recently started dressing himself as soon as he gets up, which is a Miraculous and Wonderful Turn Of Events (remember the boy who wouldn't put on his own socks?), and though he's usually fairly willing to go up and change something if I point out that it's seasonally inappropriate or clashes horribly, for the most part I try to keep out of it and just make sure I like all the stuff in his drawers.

Mabel usually lets me choose her clothes, and while she's basically a shorts and t-shirt kind of girl (make that jeans and sweater in the winter), she does have some dresses too, and she's coming from a good starting point of Cute As All Heck. Her shoes are adorable. I don't buy high-end stuff for her and Monkey, but I trawl the sales racks and the outlet mall and pick up some nice hand-me-downs, and the finished article is put together without being an "outfit" (I don't like matchy-matchy; I prefer mixy-matchy, I suppose) and doesn't have to be taken too much care of.

But I am pretty much a sartorial disaster. I suppose the change of seasons is always when it strikes me, as I delve into my off-season receptacles of boxes, under-bed storage, and the giant suitcase, and once again reject but don't actually get rid of things that were from my semi-formal working wardrobe six years ago, things that are too big but I might need again some day when Mabel weans and I keep eating all these muffins, things that are too small but I might fit again some day when I start exercising, and things that are too nightclubby/sparkly/non-casual but I will suddenly need for a wedding or some other occasion as soon as I donate them to the thrift store. Leaving me with, once again, Nothing To Wear except all these clothes that I can't wear right now. No wonder my husband doesn't understand.

Every year I vow to spend more money on fewer items in better shops; every year finds me excitedly pulling things off the sale rail at Target (because I can't pay full price, even at Target) or out of the clearance bins in Marshalls, and seeing how much cheap crap I can grab that doesn't look actively horrible in the changing room. (If you're in Ireland, Target is like Dunnes, and Marshall's is like TK Maxx.) This is not a good way to Build A Wardrobe.

When I first moved to the US, I was bamboozled by the choice of places to shop. It took a long time to sort the wheat from the chaff and find some stores that had the sort of clothes that fit me and my "look". Where "look" means something simple and non-flashy that doesn't make me look four feet tall with droopy boobs. Additionally, people in Ireland, generally, tend to dress up more than people in America, and I was living in a small college town and associating exclusively with grad students, so I was pretty much always overdressed. Better over than under, I suppose, but now I fear I've gone too far in the opposite direction to compensate, and would have a great deal of trouble mustering anything even remotely semi-casual. Our annual trip home is a time of great stress and deliberation for me and my wardrobe.

And then fashions changed, and stores changed, and I got older, and had exponentially less time available to shilly-shally in the changing room and visit every store in the mall twice before making a decision, and suddenly it's eight years later and I can now understand exactly why the mother-of-three who was also VP of the company I worked for in the late 90s was still wearing suits with shoulder pads up to her ears that she obviously purchased in 1988. (The suits, not the ears.)

I think it's part of the Curse of the SAHM - you don't bring in an income, so you feel guilty spending any more than the bare minimum on clothes for yourself. You're covered, you're respectable, you don't have anywhere to go or anyone to impress, and it's so much easer to buy cute clothes that you know will fit your kids than go into a changing room and try to squeeze your depressingly expanded thighs into something that's the wrong colour and the wrong length but might look okay if you can get a distracting top and a necklace and some better shoes to go with it.

And when I say "you", I mean "I". You are probably much better dressed than I am.

(Don't get me started on shoes. Men can make do with one formal lace-up (lasts forever), one informal lace-up, one running shoe, and a pair of sandals. Anything else is gravy. They cannot possibly be expected to understand how far the gamut of women's shoes runs, and how many different pairs of footwear I might need just to cover the basics. Sigh.)

Aversion therapy

This is, once again, as I knew it would be, crunch time. The time when I find myself with unscheduled (but over-subscribed) free time. The time when I drop my two children at school and feel wavery, limbless, missing something. The time when, in an unguarded moment, I might rush out - I mean, upstairs with my husband - and get pregnant again.

Yesterday during my sojourn in Target I happened down the sanitary products aisle and glanced at the pregnancy tests positioned so thoughtfully at the end there, right beside the condoms. It's like a graphical representation of Our Bodies, Ourselves: you need these every month, or else you might need to pee on one of these, so if you're planning on getting up to anything, you'd better buy a pack of these just to ensure that you keep coming back every month to buy those. Anyway, I almost - almost - had a pang of nostalgia for that moment when you really want the pregnancy test to be positive, and you're pretty sure it will be, and all that monumental excitement and no-backing-out-now and a tiny bit of dread is just escalating inside waiting for you to, well, to pee on a stick. I wish I could do it again, I thought. No, no, I didn't. I experimented with the notion of thinking it.

Then I made myself remember how it's all very well and exciting being pregnant, but then you have to get fat and spend months wearing yet again all those clothes you grew to hate, or else feel guilty for buying new ones; and then there's childbirth, and home births still aren't strictly legal here in MD so we'd have the middle-of-the-night drive home from the birthing center again (because babies are never born in the afternoon); and then there's the way my children don't like to sleep when they're new, or when they're three for that matter; and the fact that no matter how much Mabel professes to like babies, one that was horning in on her precious mumeet might not be tolerated in the house; and then, at the end of all that you still don't have a cute little adorable totable baby any more - you have a monster bent on self-injury and destruction, that won't give you a moment's peace until you can ship them off to nursery school and the whole cycle starts again.

I love babies; don't get me wrong. (They're delicious. But I couldn't eat a whole one.) But we've done it. Twice. And that's probably enough. The question of no. 3 came up at a party we were at on Saturday, and I explained that the possibility was still on the table, not off the table completely, but definitely moving further down the list of things that were most likely to happen.

Ask me again tomorrow.

Hello!

If you came here because of the BlogHer spotlight thing, welcome! It's lovely to see you and I hope you'll stay a while. Make yourself at home, take a look around, check out a tag or two in my pretty tag cloud over there ( -> , down a bit), and click the Facebook "Like" button, if you dare.

If you're looking for my more attatchment-parented-oriented posts, try the tags for childbirth, tandem nursing, extended nursing, lactivism and weaning. If you're looking for something amusing, I recommend the "Kids are icky," "Hilarity," and "Death and sex" tags. You can also read my birth stories, if you like that sort of thing, or find out more about who the flip I am anyway.

If you've no idea what I'm talking about but were going to be here anyway, thank you, faithful reader! You are most appreciated. I was thrilled yesterday to hear that I was going to be a featured blog on the BlogHer Family page, and indeed it came to pass and my stats count went up. Call me ridiculous, but that sort of thing makes me happy.

Also, they gave me a pretty piece of bling to put on my blog. That's the official term, you know.

Our very own Sally Albright

Monkey set off for school this morning with his dad, sporting a smile as wide as the Liffey. (Fine, the Thames, the Mississippi, whatever wide river you like. I always thought the Liffey was a perfectly respectable river to bisect a capital city, and then I went to London and was admittedly a little awed. The Mississippi is just ridiculous.) He was happy, is my point. No post-holiday relapse here.

He told Mabel that she'd have more fun at school than he would. She was looking forward to it, and agreed that she would. As soon as we got there, she made a beeline for the dollhouse, and then the animals, and was quite happy to kiss me goodbye - after I'd made a quick run to the car for a spare pullup, because I suddenly didn't trust her in underpants after all.

Me: She's wearing underpants today.
Other mom: Oh, has she been doing well with that lately?
Me, breezily: No. No. ... Hmm.
Other mom, a little confused: So you just decided today was the day?
Me: Yep. Well, she said she'd wear underpants. I think she'll be okay.
... At least, she should be. Well, if...
... You know what, maybe I'll put a diaper on her.

Anyway. Two and a half hours later, after a pleasant trip to the post office (and how often in recent memory have I been able to put those words together?) and a quiet wander around Marshalls and Target, where I picked up a couple of things and tried on a few others, I returned to school. Mabel was crying, and practically levitated, buzzing, off Miss S in her anxiety to be in my arms. School, while nice, had not been exactly like home, and Mabel had had some difficulty getting the teachers to behave in exactly the right manner. The bread at snacktime was a little too toasty. The strawberries were not to her liking, though I'm told she ate quite a few anyway. The teachers couldn't hug her just like her mummy could. She apparently demanded at one point that they put her in the car and drive her to me.

It's not that our Miss Mabel is high maintenance. She just wants things the way she wants them, that's all. I'm sure she'll love it in a few days' time, once she's got everyone else operating according to plan.

Safekeeping

You know, don't you, that when you curl away down to the ground to hide your crying, you hold my heart in your hands? I might be too busy picking you up and dusting you down, running over damage-limitation and mollification strategies, being exasperated or impatient or downright annoyed; too busy right then to stop and let myself feel my heart being squeezed, to let the tears prickle behind my own eyes;  but understand, please, that it happens.

You were surprised, last week, to hear that when I leave you at school crying in the mornings, it makes me sad too. That I don't like to do it, that I want you to be happy. How could you not know?

You, and your sister, and your father; the three of you whom I have made my family: I chose you, and grew you, and you chose me and teach me every day, and you are the repository of my heart.

Things I will do with my seven-and-a-half hours of free time every week starting next Tuesday, not that I'm counting down or anything.

Mabel starts school next week. From 9 to 11.30 on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays, she will be entertained by and entertaining the teachers, co-opping parents, and her classmates; slicing play-doh pizza, painting masterpieces, splashing at the water table, and of course minding the babies. From time to time, I muse on what I will do with the few minutes of extra time I'll have to myself with both children out of the house. And by muse, I mean plan ferociously and count the minutes.

Of course, what I'll actually do is run around like a headless chicken because I can't light on just one thing, and I don't have time to really do anything much. But there are plenty of things I'd like to do.

1. Go to Target. Trawl the aisles slowly, at leisure, without having to recapture an escape artist every five seconds, without having to bribe anyone with chocolate milk at Starbucks afterwards, without buying anyone a pair of conciliatory Hello Kitty sunglasses because it's really hard to visit the toy aisles and choose a birthday present for a friend when you're not getting anything yourself. Try not to spend too much.

2. Go to the outlet mall. Actually try things on. Buy clothes for me, not for the kids. Try not to spend too much.

3. Go to Old Navy, Marshalls, or Ross, and spend ages perusing the sale racks. Hardly spend anything at all, because it's all cheap crap anyway.

4. Clean the house. Hah. Right.

5. Do the ironing. The downside to line-drying like a nice environmentally friendly tree-hugger is that some days I really do need to bust out the iron if I don't want to look like I slept in my clothes. And I actually like ironing - it's soothing, and satisfying, and I can listen to the radio at the same time. Oooh.

6. Listen to the radio. Any time I have tried to listen to music for the past five years, it's been instantly drowned out by the cacophony of my children demanding something else, or not that, or the tv, or attempting fratricide.

7. Read a good book.

8. Write a good book. That would be nice. In my dreams.

9. But more realistically, blog, so that I don't have to do it in the evening.

10. And maybe, just maybe, write a short story. Or finish that one I started.

11. On a more practical note, go to the supermarket without having to take a TV cart and pass out bagels as soon as we get to the bakery section and defuse arguments about who sits on the side with the steering wheel and who put whose shoes on the TV screen. I could even come home with all the ingredients for more than two meals, rather than just half the ingredients for one and a half meals.

12. Or I could just plan the meals at home, and do the shopping later with a properly organised list. But I like to be inspired by what I see in the store, not sit at home waiting for inspiration to strike.

13. Bake a ton of muffins. Eat them in peace with a nice cup of tea.

14. You know, I'm going to do that right now. If naptime lasts long enough. What are the chances? Tell you what, I'll save vital time by not proofing this.

15. Oh, there was meant to be something about getting some freelance editing work and earning a crust of my own. I'm sure I'll get round to that at some point. But if I'm busy working, when would I get to go shopping?

Listen

This  morning Monkey announced that he wasn't going to cry today. He went off to school with his Dad and wished me goodbye with aplomb. Reports from school were good: he still wanted to be walked to his classroom, which we're not supposed to be doing at this stage, but he sat down and permitted a hug with nary a wail. I'm so pleased. There may, of course, be a relapse on Tuesday after the long weekend, and others to come, but I think it's a good sign.

But that's not what I wanted to talk about. Instead, let's talk about extended breastfeeding. Here, let me drag out my soapbox. Comfy down there? Need a seat? Don't strain your neck, okay? I promise it won't take long.

I didn't really even register that Mabel counted as "extended" for quite a while. When you're still nursing the big one too, you have to assume that the little one is legit, and the big one is just along for the ride. And technically, I'm not even sure when extended starts - after one year? After two? Okay, well, we're coming up on three in a few months (and the big one has stopped, you'll be glad to know, if you weren't sure about that), so we're definitely there now. She hardly ever nurses in public, so though we don't have set times, I think it's all ramping down gradually and I'm fine with that. There are days when she drags me to the sofa every five minutes, and I kvetch about how she needs to eat real food and stop bugging me, but then it turns out that she was starting a cold, or had been awake half the night, and she just really needs it.

Thing is, if I wasn't nursing her, I don't know when I would take that time to just sit down and have a cuddle with my two-year-old. She's a big girl - I keep telling her that every time I try to entice the underpants back on. She's starting nursery school next week. She'll talk to you till the cows come home and she knows that cheetahs are the fastest animal and that Iron Man has repulsor blasts. (Good lord, but there's a lot of information about Iron Man on Wikipedia, where I just went to check that fact. I suppose I should have expected that, really.) She can climb anything, run anywhere, reach every damn thing she shouldn't. But she's still two, and even when she's three, there will be times when she needs to decompress by being close to her mama for a while.

If I wasn't still nursing Mabel, if she didn't hold on to me every now and then in the most vital (and painful) way possible, I'd get up and walk away far too much. I'd say "Just a minute" and "Hold on a sec" and "I'll be there in a moment" and "I have to get this done" even more than I already do, and I'd expect her to be fully self-sufficient all the time. She's canny, this one, and she knows how to get her own way. Cuteness works, asking nicely works, whining works sometimes even though it shouldn't; but when push comes to shove and she needs what she needs, she knows how to get me and keep me.

Because she's right. The babies know. They always know. Listen to your baby.

Because one day they'll walk off to big school with aplomb, and they won't let you kiss them any more.