The opposite of nemesis

Dash only has six more days of school (not that anyone's counting), and Mabel has two. So, I have two more days (next Monday and Tuesday, to be exact, not that I'm obsessing about this or anything) to do things without children; after which I'll be permanently overrun, harried, and either too apathetic to stop the fighting, or else barking orders like a sergeant major and getting increasingly frazzled while they completely ignore me.

We will also be living in increasing squalour and subsisting on cold pasta and wild strawberries foraged from the unmown back yard, because I don't see myself getting any housework or shopping done while they're both home. And remember, this year Mabel won't be napping. So by the time we go to the pool in the afternoons, she'll be overtired and the stress of getting her to leave at the end will be hardly worth the strain of getting them both there in the first place. (I would love to go to the pool in the morning, but it doesn't open to the public till 11, and going at lunchtime is asking for sunstroke/meltdowns/disaster.)

Don't worry, I'm sure I'm exaggerating. Dash has a week of camp, we're going to the beach for a week, we will have playdates and see friends and enjoy our freedom from the tyranny of school timetables and homework. I might even get the groceries delivered, or something.

I only mention it because this morning Mabel and I had a nice time, just the two of us. We tried to do this last week when I took her to Target on Friday morning and it all unravelled into a disaster because it turned out she was tired and hungry and in no mood to be helpful or even just neutral about the trip. I had to grab the essentials (milk and Gatorade) and retreat while I still had a shred of dignity. Then I came home and complained to Facebook, who told me in no uncertain terms that my mistake was trying to put "reasonable" and "three-year-old" in the same sentence.

But today, it worked out well.

First of all, I snatched victory from the jaws of disorientation, when I took the wrong exit and still navigated sure-footedly to the right place. (Mabel: Why do you always say that? Me: Say what? That I took the wrong exit? Surely I don't.) That seemed like a good omen.

Then we picked a toy for her right off the bat, and one for her absent brother too. I know, I know, bribery is of the devil, but I'm grateful to Target for providing the banks of one-dollar crap at the front doors, because they understand my life. Much as I hate to bring home extraneous junk, and spend money on things we didn't need, and make the kids think they're entitled to something new every damn time, and be a bad parent - today the payoff was worth it. Mabel found a lavender-coloured squishy rubber porcupine that entertained her for the next half hour, and I got Dash a couple of torpedos to throw around in the pool, because I learned my lesson last week at school pickup, my lesson being:

1) Just because he wasn't there doesn't make it fair that Mabel got a new thing and he didn't.
2) Mabel can in no way be relied on not to tell him that she got a new thing.

In fact, no. 2 went more like this:

Me, on the way to school: Mabel, don't tell Dash you got a new thing. Or at least, don't gloat.
Mabel: Okay, I won't gloat. I'll taunt him.
[Five minutes later, Dash runs out the door from school]
Mabel: Look, I got a new toy and you didn't.
Dash, to me, his theory that he is the unloved child finally proven: Waaahhh. Why didn't I get something?
Me, to the amassed other parents: Parenting fail.

And then we had a lovely time (back to today, I mean) wherein I got to wander around, try things on, even swimwear (Mabel, at the top of her voice, in the changing rooms: "Are those new underpants, Mommy?"), find the right moisturizer instead of just bunging the nearest thing in the cart and running, and check out at our leisure. Then we had a snack at Starbucks and I congratulated myself on my lovely, cooperative daughter. See, Facebook? Perfectly reasonable. Sometimes.

Transatlantic subtleties: garden vs. yard

First in what I think will be an occasional series, to help those having translation problems they don't even know are problems.

What I mean is, when I worked in Ireland editing content written for the US market, I felt like I had a decent understanding of American English - a working knowledge, perhaps. Everyone in the British isles has enough familiarity with American TV and movies to know that sidewalk means footpath and vacation means holiday - but there are subtleties that you don't learn for years (like not to tell an American to walk on the pavement), and misconceptions that go uncorrected, and little things that it takes time to pick up on. I thought I'd help a nation - or two - out with a few notes on such things. (And if I've got it wrong, I'm sure someone will help me out in the comments.)

Today: Garden and Yard.

In the UK and Ireland, the space of your property around your house that's not in your house is called your garden. Even if it's paved or covered in gravel, it's pretty much still your garden, but definitely if it's got anything green in it. Not everyone can aspire to a perfectly manicured lawn, but most people have a garden of some sort, unless they live in an apartment. When you do things in this area - cutting the grass, trimming the hedges, picking up dog poo - it's called gardening.

In the US, this space is your yard. If you're doing things there, you're doing yard work. You can have a front yard and a back yard, and maybe a deck, which would be a patio in Ireland because mostly people don't have decks. I don't know why they have raised decks in the US but only paved patios at home. (Anyone?)

If you call your yard your garden in the US, you're liable to make people think you're getting ideas above your station. A garden, over here, is something carefully tended and maintained - a vegetable garden or a rose garden, perhaps. Any Tom, Dick, or Harry can't just think they have a garden by opening the front door and stepping onto the grass.

Conversely, if you described your garden as a yard in Ireland, people would envisage a dusty, perhaps slightly industrial, space devoid of any vegetation at all. "Yardwork" does not bring to mind pruning the roses or evicting dandelions, but something more burly and somehow metallic.

One scrubby rhodedendron does not qualify our yard to be called a garden.

So how was your Memorial Day?

Things I would have done differently yesterday if I had an ounce of sense:

• Looked at the forecast, noticed the number 93 beside the letter F, stayed home.
• On exiting the metro in downtown DC, set off towards the Capitol, where there was allegedly some free music happening, rather than in the opposite direction, because after one and a half monuments, and not even the one I wanted to see (the new Martin Luther King memorial) we were drooping from the heat and the kids were demanding lunch.
• Brought a packed lunch instead of a snack which was devoured in five minutes as soon as we stepped off the train, because all the food in Washington DC is on the other side of the Mall and even if you know where the cheap food court is so you don't have to pay museum-cafe prices, (we do; it's in the Old Post Office) Dash still won't eat anything except bare nachos, otherwise known as tortilla chips, and then whine for the next twenty minutes because he didn't get an ice cream for "dessert". 
• Explained up front that tortilla chips don't count as lunch, so dessert is not merited. It's not like anyone else had ice cream either.
• Made a bigger effort to get Mabel to use the bathroom at the last place we were, so that she wouldn't spend the  entire metro journey home spinning around a pole and almost firing herself off - head exactly level with chair arms - because she couldn't sit still because she desperately needed to pee.

Things at least I did do:

• Wear sunscreen, put it on the kids. 
• Wear a hat.
• Bring water.
• Bring a stroller.
• Not have to watch helplessly as my child peed her pants on the train, because she held it all the way home.

Then we got home, collapsed in a heap, and made the kids watch Star Wars so they would shut up and leave us in peace. That was a good move too, but in all I can't help thinking the day would have been better spent at the pool.

Poopy

Poopy is the word, it's the time, it's the motion. Poopy's the way she is feeling.

No, that's a bit misleading, now that I look at my oh-so-clever quote manipulation there. I mean, I wouldn't want you to think I was speaking literally, using "motion" in this context. It's just that with Mabel at the moment, everything is poopy. Poopy this, poopy that, I'm poopy, you're poopy, Dash in particular is very often poopy, we're all poopy. Except now and then one of us might be mutton-head. (That's a WildKratts reference. I'm told you had to be there, and I keep missing it. But she claims she means it as a compliment.)

She is three and a half, after all, so there had to be something. I think we're getting off pretty lightly if this is the sum total of her half-year behaviour-regression thingy. She's into calling people poopy and sometimes pinching them too, but mostly only if they're her brother. Poor Dash is trying hard not to take it personally, but if I hear "Waaaahhhh! Mabel pinched me and called me poopy," one more time in the next five minutes - well, it'll be just like all the previous five minuteses.

Poopy was not a word ever bandied around in this house before Mabel heard it last summer and had a brief fling with it, but now it has returned with a vengeance. While helping at nursery school recently I heard a teacher scold one of Mabel's classmates for saying it. His father, who happened to be there too, was shocked and wondered where he could have heard such a thing. I had to fess up that it was probably from my delightful daughter, and have a wee chat with Mabel about words we are not to use at school, to protect the delicate ears of those more innocent.

Personally, I don't really take much issue with poopy. As bad words go, it's pretty hilarious really, and I'd quite like to use it all the time too. Considering she has a six-year-old brother whose classmates, I know from my field-trip experience last week - know some much more serious bad words, I'm quite happy with it. But from the perspective of the other parent, I understand that I would have liked my only/eldest child to go as long as possible before hearing any of the less savoury elements of vocabulary, or even getting an inkling that words could be used like that, and I too would have been displeased if some moppet in Dash's class when he was three was wandering around firing off such epithets at random peers.

So I think she knows that she shouldn't say it at school, but at home it's a bit of a free-for-all, because I really don't have the energy to get all riled up every time the p-word is dropped; and since she's doing it for effect anyway, the best tack is clearly firm parental apathy. I suggested to Dash, who finds it hard to ignore, that he pretend she said something nice and respond with a cheery "Thank you!"

He's not sure this tactic is working yet, but at least it's more fun for all of us than hearing him whine about it.

One of the few times when she's not calling something poopy

Invisible memories

I was taking in the washing on Tuesday when the lady next door called me over to the fence to introduce her visiting friend.

"This is June," she said. "She's the original owner of your house."

Our house was built in 1967, and we're the third owners. The people we bought it from lived here for about ten years, but we'd never met the people before that. Our next-door neighbours are some of the few original residents left on the court, having bought their house from the plans before it was even built - and chosen the only completely level yard on the street, I think (all the others have a dramatic slope either at the front or the back of the house).

So I invited June in to see what we'd done with the place, of course.

She lived here for thirty-four years. She had her four children here and watched them grow. She put in the now-horrible green carpet that we routinely abuse, and the matching wallpaper that we ripped off. She and her husband were the ones who extended the family room, and had the washer and dryer brought up there from the basement - two things I wanted to hug her for because they make my life better on a daily basis. They put in the bay window I'm sitting beside right now, that we won't put shades on because they would hide the lovely gentle curve, even if they would also enable people to sit at the other end of the table unblinded of an evening.

She graciously admired the completely changed kitchen, the bench we put in, the new floor in the hall, but her mind was obviously on the years she and her family spent here, the times they had, the things I couldn't see. As we parted, she wished me well and told me they were the happiest years.

I hope I have them too, those years; a couple behind me already and many more ahead, in her happy house. It's nice to get an inkling of the history we're barging through, as we do all the same things again with a new batch of children to grow up feeding baby dolls and scattering lego all over June's carefully selected green carpet.

Ashes

Yesterday, I was on fire, domestically speaking. I had felt the urge to do some housework creeping up on me, and yesterday it burst forth in a glorious bevy of industry. While Mabel was at school, I did two loads of laundry, hung one on the line and put one in the dryer, swept the downstairs floors, cleaned the bathrooms (oh so horribly overdue), cleaned the mirrors, and started on some yeast bread. By pre-dinnertime, I was juggling the two loaves of bread, a batch of chocolate chip cookies, and some quite delicious from-scratch pseudo-Indian stuff that would do two nights' worth of grown-up dinners, as well as a corn on the cob in the microwave for Mabel.

So today, I'd probably have been all tapped out anyway, but the fact that then it turned out one ear of corn (is it an ear? a cob?) and a cookie do not a sufficient dinner make for my daughter, so that she was awake half the night gnawing on me, meant that this morning I was pretty much toast. Fried toast. Toast that is also fried, and burnt, and has had the burnt bits scraped off. The sort of toast you should probably just toss and make anew.

Then, in spite of a morning spent jumping on trampolines and playing with other people's toys, followed by a total needle-stuck-on-record meltdown on the way home ("I don't want to take the short cut, I don't waaaant to taaaake the short cut, I don't... I didn't waaaant to taaaake the short cut," etc), Mabel did not nap. So we got up again and made banana pancakes, she ate five, and the afternoon progressed. She had to be shepherded gently through the hazardous waters of four to six pm, and probably didn't eat enough dinner again, but the upside was that she was fast asleep at five minutes past seven.

I'm going to bed early.

Museum

I went on my first honest-to-God field trip yesterday, and it was a good one. Apart from the zoo, I suppose, you can't get much more classic for a school outing than the Natural History Museum - and when your kid's local natural history museum just happens to be the Smithsonian in Washington DC, you count yourself pretty lucky.

Because when the kids you're chaperoning are all museumed out, after live butterflies and beetles and caterpillars, and (dead) dinosaurs and whales and mummies (yes, really), and the Hope diamond to boot, you can take them outside and let them run around on the National Mall, with the Capitol to your left and the Washington Monument to your right, until it's time to go back in and see a few more dead mammals before the bus leaves. And they can take it all for granted, because this is just where they live, but some of us know it's pretty damn cool.

When I arrived in the classroom in the morning, the first thing everyone did was crowd around to show me who had wobbly teeth and who had lost teeth and who had new teeth coming in. Teeth, then, are big news with the six-year-old set. I suppose this shouldn't be a surprise to me, but since wobbly teeth are still a thing of aspiration in our house, it was interesting to see the higgledy-piggledy reality up close.

I had wistfully thought how nice it was to go on a field trip while my son is still innocent enough to hold my hand in public and want to sit beside me on the bus. Not so. My hand was disengaged as soon as we got to school, and he sat up front with his friend to play finger-lightsaber battles while I sat a few rows back with the girls and discussed why other kids were sometimes mean, what the best thing to do about it was, and where babies really do come out of.

Still, I think he was glad to have me along, if only to see him hold the big green caterpillar.

Dash holds a fat caterpillar.

A post called Weaning

Welcome to the Carnival of Weaning: Weaning - Your Stories

This post was written for inclusion in the Carnival of Weaning hosted by Code Name: Mama and Aha! Parenting. Our participants have shared stories, tips, and struggles about the end of the breastfeeding relationship.

Before I had my first child, the word weaning was not one I was familiar with. Actually, my confusion about its meaning, if I had considered it enough to be confused, was natural - on my native side of the Atlantic, they use "weaning" to mean the process of starting solids. In the US, it means the process of stopping breastfeeding.

Of course, my pre-child self would say, because those two things are the same. The baby starts eating food, so it stops breastfeeding. A simple, gradual process that will come about of its own accord.

This totally fails to take into account all the other things that breastfeeding provides for a baby, a toddler, a pre-schooler, even, that they may be unwilling to give up even when they're happily chowing down on three-course dinners. Comfort, familiarity, a sure route to sleep, relief from bumps and scrapes and imminent tantrums.

I had my baby, and I hoped to breastfeed him for at least, I said, the first three months; hopefully six. My midwife said something about a year, but I thought she was getting way ahead of herself. I couldn't imagine lending my breasts to someone else for a whole year. I need them back, I thought. At some point in the foreseeable future.

Well, after a painful start we were off and running, and by the time we got to three months everything was just starting to go really well. Why would I stop and mess around with formula now? Clearly, the six month marker was ahead.

At six months, he was starting solids, sure, but that didn't make any difference to our nursing. Solids were for playing with, for finding out about textures and gravity and motor skills. Anything that made it into his stomach was merely collateral damage. On we went.

Coming up to twelve months I began to wonder how the stopping would work. I couldn't really imagine not nursing him, because he still wasn't very much of an eater - I met a friend who told me her nine-month-old ate three meals a day now; I looked at him in wonder to hear of such a thing - and he still woke and needed to nurse back to sleep several times a night. After some thought, I gave up on the 12-month notion.

At 21 months I decided that something had to be done, as I wanted to get pregnant again. I cut back the on-demand feeding and got us down to three times a day, then just morning and evening. He started sleeping through the night so I no longer had to nurse him back to sleep at 3am. But this kid is a breast man - he didn't take any of these changes lightly, and as my pregnancy progressed - yes, it worked! - I'd give in to his pestering for some "side," just so I could have a little more lazing-on-the-sofa time.

When his sister was born, we were in tandem nursing territory - another thing I'd always said I'd never do - for a while. Every time the baby latched on, her brother wanted to get in on the action, and afraid of making him resent her, I'd give in, though the sensation of two at once gave me the heebie-jeebies, to be honest. After a few weeks, I suppose, I started cutting back again for the big kid - he was two-and-a-half by now, after all. On the other hand, I was nursing one, so what was the issue with nursing the other now and then to keep him quiet too? We went back to mornings and evenings.

And there we stayed, for quite a while. When he turned four we cut out the evenings. When he turned four-and-a-half, we cut out the mornings. That was it; he was weaned. Only four years from start to finish. A simple, gradual process. Just as I had imagined. Just a tiny bit longer.

It took about a year for him to stop trying to cop a feel every time I fed his sister. I think that's about standard.

And now he's six. Here he's reaching for the camera, not my boob.

 

Thank you for visiting the Carnival of Weaning hosted by Dionna at Code Name: Mama and Dr. Laura at Aha! Parenting.
Please take time to read the submissions by the other carnival participants (and many thanks to Joni Rae of Tales of a Kitchen Witch for designing our lovely button):

• On Breastfeeding, Weaning, and One Mother’s Identity — Jessica at Natural Parents Network has been nursing one or more of her children since 1993 - breastfeeding is wrapped up in her concept of mothering and herself. She shares her thoughts on weaning.
• two tales of weaning — Aspen at Aspen Mama writes about their countdown to wean.
• Wean Me Gently — Tam at Please Send Parenting Books shares a beautiful weaning ceremony.
• You say potato, I say bleeeuuuuch... — Anelie at Mindcradle had read the books and knew just how to introduce her baby son to solids—unfortunately, he had other ideas.
• A Post Called Weaning — (Not) Maud at Awfully Chipper writes about how weaning her son took longer than she expected.
• On Weaning, Pregnancy and Emotion — Shannon at The Artful Mama talks about her mixed emotions as she allows her son, Little Man, to guide her through his weaning process.
• half of her life — Staci at Springpatch Jam looks back on her nursing relationship with her first born.
• Is it just this After Forty Mom or is it harder to wean when its your last? — Amanda of After Forty Mom shares her emotional journey towards the impending self-weaning of her toddler daughter.
• Nursing Limits — Jorje of Momma Jorje shares how she has weaned her toddler down to minimal nursing and her guilt about the decision to do so.
• Weaning Video Series #1: Preparation for the Weaning Process — Why is weaning such a taboo topic? Dionna at Code Name: Mama got mamas from across the blogosphere to start talking about weaning - on video. Come check out the first video in a series of five that she'll be posting this week.
• Weaning due to anxiety — Shannon at Pineapples & Artichokes talks about how she had to wean to preserve her mental health.
• When Will I Wean? A Guest Post — Jennifer at Hybrid Rasta Mama hosts a guest post from a mama who contemplates when her breastfeeding relationship will end.
• On His Own Terms — Momeeezen shares her heartbreak from when her son weaned much earlier than she anticipated.
• Our Weaning Story - Sudden, Surprised, and Embracing a New Season — Weaning doesn't always go how we imagine. That Mama Gretchen shares the story of her daughter's sudden weaning and how she has embraced this new season of motherhood.
• A Tale of Two Weanings — Valerie at Momma in Progress shares the similarities and differences of how her nursing relationships with her now six-year-old and four-year-old daughters came to a close.
• She Doesn't Remember — Alicia at Lactation Narration finds that her 6 year old no longer remembers nursing, only one year after weaning.
• It's The End of the World As We Know It — A story about the end of a tandem nursing relationship on Never Mind The Rain: A toddler moves on to a new phase in her life before mom is fully ready.
• A Natural End To Our Breastfeeding Relationship — With two self-weaning children, Jennifer at Our Muddy Boots does not know when the end will come, but that it will be natural and without regrets.
• Child-Led weaning: It's Not Extreme; It's Biological — Mandy at Living Peacefully with Children explains why child-led weaning is based on biology rather than social constraints.
• 6 Years of Natural Weaning in 5 Steps — Jess at miniMum shares how and why she let her first child stop when he was good and ready.
• Is This Weaning?: A Tandem Nursing Update — Sheila at A Living Family bares all her tandem nursing hopes and fears during what feels like the beginning of the end for her toddler nursing relationship.
• Memories of Weaning: Unique and Gentle — Cynthia at The Hippie Housewife shares her weaning experiences with her two sons, each one unique in how it happened and yet equally gentle in its approach.
• Weaning Aversion' — Gentle Mama Moon shares her experience of nursing and unplanned weaning due to pregnancy-induced 'feeding aversion'.
• Three Months Post-Mup: An Evolution of Thoughts On Weaning — cd at FidgetFace describes a brief look at her planned (but accelerated) weaning, as well as one mamma's evolution on weaning (and extended nursing)
• Weaning my Tandem Nursed Toddler — After tandem nursing for a year, Melissa at Permission to Live felt like weaning her older child would be impossible, but now she shares how gentle weaning worked for her 2 1/2 year old.
• Every Journey Begins with One Step — As Hannabert begins the weaning process, Hannah at Hannah and Horn's super power is diminishing.
• Reflections on Weaning - Love Changes Form — Amy from Presence Parenting (guest posting at Dulce de Leche) shares her experience and approach of embracing weaning as a continual process in parenting, not just breastfeeding.
• Weaning Gently: Three Special Ideas for Success — MudpieMama shares three ideas that help make weaning a gentle and special journey.
• Guest Post: Carnival of Weaning — Emily shares her first weaning experience and her hopes for her second nursling in a guest post on Farmer's Daughter.
• 12 Tips for Gentle Weaning — Dr. Laura at Aha! Parenting describes the process of gentle weaning and gives specific tips to make weaning an organic, joyful ripening.
• Quiz: Should You Wean for Fertility Treatments? — Paige at Baby Dust Diaries talks about the key issues in the difficult decision to wean for infertility treatments.
• I thought about weaning... — Kym at Our Crazy Corner of the World shares her story of how she thought about weaning several times, yet it still happened on its own timeline.
• Celebrating Weaning — Amy at Anktangle reflects on her thoughts and feelings about weaning, and she shares a quick tutorial for one of the ways she celebrated this transition with her son: through a story book with photographs!
• Naturally Weaning Twins — Kristin at Intrepid Murmurings discusses the gradual path to weaning she has taken with her preschool-aged twins.
• Gentle Weaning Means Knowing When to Stop — Claire at The Adventures of Lactating Girl writes about knowing when your child is not ready to wean and taking their feelings into account in the process.
• Weaning, UnWeaning, and ReWeaning — Jennifer at True Confessions of a Real Mommy discovers non-mutal weaning doesn't have to be the end. You can have a do-over.
• Prelude to weaning — Lauren at Hobo Mama talks about a tough tandem nursing period and what path she would like to encourage her older nursling to take.
• Demands of a Nursing Kind — Amy Willa at Me, Mothering, and Making it All Work shares her conflicted feelings about nursing limits and explores different ways to achieve comfort, peace, and bodily integrity as a nursing mother.
• Breastfeeding: If there's one thing I know for sure... — Wendy at ABCs and Garden Peas explores the question: How do you know when it's time to wean?
• Five, Four, Three, Two, One, Two, Three? — Zoie at TouchstoneZ discusses going from 3 nurslings down to 1 and what might happen when her twins arrive.

A quick run down

• Time Mabel went to sleep last night: 9.30 pm
• Time Mabel woke up last night: 2.30 am (that's actually quite good, you know)
• Time it felt like it took to get her back to sleep: 2 hours, give or take (that's not good)
• Time somebody decided to ring our phone before changing their mind: 5.15 am
• Time I actually got up: 6.45 am
• Amount I felt like running a race: Not even a little bit
• Time I left the house: 7.10 am
• Time spent loitering around once I'd attached my number to my t-shirt with safety pins and my chip to my shoe: 30 minutes
• Time the race started: 8 am
• Number of runners who streaked ahead of me very quickly: Most of them
• Number of walkers still behind me: A few, I hope
• Number of runners who passed me clearly already on their second lap while I was still completing my first: About 6
• Number of times we went around the lake: 2
• Number of fluffy ducklings I saw: 6
• Number of chipmunks who dashed across my path: 1
• Number of toddlers who mistakenly thought I might be their mama: 1
• Number of times I did not stop running: Any
• That is, because the former seems ambiguous, amount I walked: 0 cm, inches, meters, rods, poles or perches
• Number of family members I was delighted to see as I rounded the final bend: All 3 lovelies
• Amount I was surprised to find I could speed up to make a big finish: Quite a bit
• Number of kilometers I ran: 5, Baby

This is me approaching my waiting supporters
(I don't know what the guy in the grey is doing, but he's going the wrong way.)

Where are my bonbons?

I have been thinking it's Friday since Tuesday, and it's still only Thursday.

It's not even as if we've had a particularly arduous week, or that last weekend was in any way weekday-like, but this particular five-day set seems to be dragging its heels, at least in my head.

My house is a mess, because I can do (partially) clean or somewhat tidy, but not both at the same time. I can keep the kitchen clean, the fridge somewhat stocked, and the laundry up to date, but not the bathrooms scrubbed too.

(When we arrived in the first of our three hotels on our recent California trip and looked in the bathroom, Mabel marvelled at how shiny and white everything was. A girl could get used to that sort of thing, if she never had to keep it shiny and white herself. When I got back into our own car at the airport, I have to admit it looked awfully dusty compared to the enormous rental vehicle we'd been driving for the previous few days. And then the added exertion of having to lift one's foot to the clutch and actually change gear... sigh. But I digress.)

Mabel was amusing herself nicely this morning, and at one point I found her lying on her tummy on the hardwood floor.

"I'm just blowing a dead bug across the floor," she told me.

Time to sweep downstairs too, maybe.

How that's going

You might remember that for Christmas, I got running shoes. And then I surprised nobody more than myself by using them, not just once, but on a fairly regular basis. I decided to sign up for the nursery-school fundraiser 5k race in May, thinking that surely almost five months was enough time for anyone to get themselves from zero to five.

The race is next Saturday. Just in case things don't go well for me on the day, I went for a run last Saturday and beat my previous personal best by a whole mile, bringing me nicely up to 3.25 miles altogether. Which just happens to be a shade over 5k, so whatever happens on the day will be a mere technicality.

My aim has been three times a week, or two runs and one something else, like that dance exercise class I was doing. I certainly haven't been faithful to that aim ever since January, between travel and illness and (even) injury (I twisted my ankle quite painfully in the playground two weeks ago; not exactly a training injury, more an occupational hazard); but I've kept it up, and for some reason I haven't wanted to stop.

It's been encouraging, too, to find that when I do stop for a week - or three - my body bounces back to where it was before much more quickly than it took to get there in the first place. So I might go out the first day and run less than a mile before limping home, disconsolate;  but I can add back the distance half a mile or more at a time. Muscle memory is a wonderful thing.

I'm not a shadow of my former self or anything. I don't think I've lost so much as a pound after all this, but then it's not as if I've been laying off the muffins either. Perhaps the reason I keep going this time is because for once it's not about weight-loss, though of course that would be nice; it's really about being healthy. I want to show my children that everyone exercises, not just Daddy the marathon man, and I need to find a new normal for myself that includes regular movement further than from kitchen table to couch, or around the aisles of Target. And it would be nice to go (ever closer) towards my 40s as a woman who could, perhaps, outrun the zombie uprising, so long as the zombies can't run any further than three miles at a nice leisurely 12- or 13-minute-mile pace.

(To put my wussiness in perspective, my husband got up at 3 a.m. the other week, with a headcold, went out in the dark, and took a bus with a bunch of strangers to run 26.2 miles up the California coast, just for fun, in under four hours. And here I am worried that if Mabel has a less-than-stellar night I might not be able to go a whole 3.2 without having to stop and walk.

(Not that there's anything wrong with stopping and walking. It's just that once I stop it's immeasurably harder to start again, so I prefer to keep going.)

) <- end of digression. And other digression. Though if you can call it a digression when it comes at the end I'm not sure. Maybe it's just a tangent. Like this one.

Labels, schmabels

When Dash was born, before we left the hospital they brought us one last paper to sign. It went something like this:

DECLARATION OF INTENT: PARENTING STYLE

Please accept or decline the following.

We hereby declare that we will raise this child entirely according to the principles of Attachment Parenting, never deviating from the laws set out by Dr Bill Sears in his canonical volumes, including but not limited to the following basic tenets:

• always wearing the baby and/or child, never pushing them in any type of wheeled conveyance 
• breastfeeding on demand, at every peep, day and night, for the entirety of the first two years and thereafter as long as you possibly can
• sleeping like a big happy pile of puppies in a family bed until the day the child decides they want to sleep alone
• never, ever, allowing the baby to cry. At all.

On receipt of this signed declaration, you will be issued with an Attachment Parenting card. The Attachment Parenting Police may stop by your house unannounced at any point and your card may be revoked if such things as a stroller, a crib, or an open tin of formula are found in your possession.

Sign here: ____________________

Then there was a note:

Alternatively, you may wish to join the Evil Parenting movement. In this case, you will need form 666B, wherein you will avow to eschew slings, wraps, and carriers of all types; to wean the day your baby turns six months old or starts solids, whichever happens first - or to use formula from the get-go; to leave your baby in a crib in a dark room down the hall from your bedroom from day one and never ever nurse him/her to sleep; and to generally follow faithfully the principles laid out by either Ezzo or Gina Ford to the letter.

In big letters along the bottom, it said: THERE IS NO MIDDLE WAY.

Oh, wait. No, they didn't.

We left the hospital with a new baby and a few ideas about how we wanted to look after him. When one thing didn't work, we tried another. We ended up doing what worked, until it stopped, and then we looked at our options, read a variety of books, and tried again. After a while, the baby got bigger and those things were easier and different things were important. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Parenting is a journey, not a label.

Now can everyone please just go back to whatever they were doing last week?

Mabel rides

Two years ago, for his fourth birthday, Dash got a two-wheeler, with training wheels. One year ago, when he was just five, we took off the training wheels and he was off like a shot, more or less. Yesterday, his three-and-a-half-year-old overacheiver sister caught up with him.

This astounding precociousness is down to two things: personality and a balance bike.

Thing the first is that Mabel is a much less cautious child than her brother. He tests the waters gingerly; she dives in. He takes it slowly, wary of pitfalls; she forges ahead. Sometimes it's because she has him to show her how it's done, because he's done all the hard work of worrying; but often it's just because she's not so much a worrier as a doer. She climbed all the way round the climbing-frame dome before he ever did, when she was two and he was four point five.

She also happens to have an innately good sense of balance, I think, because for all her rushing in and scaling unsuitable objects, she rarely comes a cropper. (Skiing is probably next on her list.) I have to admit that though "sporty" is probably the last adjective anyone would ever come up with to describe me, I was a bit of a tomboy, mountain-goat, wannabe-gymnast as a child, and I did have a bike just as tiny as hers which I insisted on learning to ride without training wheels. I remember a lot of scabby knees, but I think I was four when I was riding alone.

But the other thing that led directly to this development was the balance bike. Last year when Dash was zooming all over our cul-de-sac with his newfound skills, Mabel was desperate for a bike of her own, with two wheels, not three. I finally found a balance bike (no pedals, just for gliding along with one's feet) small enough for a petite two-and-three-quarter-year-old on Craigslist, and brought it home triumphantly. The nice lady threw in a little pink scooter for another $20, and it turned out to be the scooter rather than the bike that Mabel fell in love with and has been using to get her speedy thrills ever since.

Until about a month ago, when she nonchalantly picked up the little pink balance bike and started whizzing around on it. She knew what to do all along, but it just seemed to fall into place and she was sitting on the saddle and pushing along with her feet and balancing, just like that. When her little boyfriend across the road got a pedal bike (that's too big for her, because although only two months older he's quite a few inches taller), it turned out she could actually ride it pretty well, with an adult to start and stop her.

So Facebook came to the rescue, as I sent out a quick APB for a 12-inch-wheeled bike for Mabel, and a friend responded within the hour that she had one her daughter had never used, taking up space in the shed, needing a good home. We brought it home yesterday, pumped up the tyres, lowered the saddle all the way, Mabel jumped on, and that was the last we saw of her.

Well, sort of. She still needs help starting off, but thanks to the balance bike she's very good at putting a foot down when she stops. (Dash, in contrast, used to the training wheels holding up the bike in repose, would forget to take his feet off the pedals and just sit there and promptly fall over sideways.)

It seems to be a tiny generational gap between her brother and her. In just two and a half years, balance bikes have gone from being European wooden models that only Germanic types had (because this is how kids learn to ride on the Continent) to much more easily found metal ones. I saw two of her classmates whooshing around on Strider bikes last year before I went looking for Mabel's one, and since then I know of at least five other local children her age who now have pedals on two-wheelers, and several others who are proficient with their balance bikes but don't feel like taking the next step just yet.

It is odd, though, watching your baby pedal off, unsupported, seeing wings sprout from under her shoulderblades and take her away from you, as fast as her little legs can carry her.

Being weird

A friend sent me a link to this Irish Times article about extended breastfeeding in Ireland. (I would probably have happened across it myself anyway, but she has far-reaching connections in the breastfeeding world and knew my interest in both the country and the subject.) It led me to a great Irish blog called andmybaby, and from there it was as if I could suddenly survey a whole country - mine - where people actually do the same sort of things I ended up doing.

I mean, I know in theory that many Irish mothers must breastfeed, co-sleep, baby-wear, and even continue nursing past the first year, but none I knew had done all that. Or none who talked about it, at least. Which is not surprising in a country like Ireland where things are swept under rugs all the time - and we are way more prudish than the stereotypical No Sex Please, We're British.

It makes perfect sense that blogland is the place to find all this hidden information, because the Irish do love to talk, and love to write, and love their kids, and just need an acceptable outlet for all this stuff so that it doesn't turn out you mortally offended your next-door-neighbour's mother who told her cousin who told your mother who was mortified to hear that you're telling all and sundry your private business.

Being an ex-pat was perhaps the best thing that could have happened to me from a parenting point of view. It gave me the freedom to work things out for myself. I lacked an on-the-spot support system, but I had friends inside the computer and I could let instinct, informed by what I read, tell me how I should parent. Peer pressure was not an issue. I knew what I'd heard about friends and friends of friends who had babies back home - they were almost always stories of past-dates, inductions, emergency c-sections, then bleeding nipples, failed breastfeeding, thriving on formula. All these things happen, of course, but the fact that I didn't seem to know anyone at home they hadn't happened to (from my admittedly small sample circle) was a bit disturbing. I was sure that wasn't how it was meant to go.

When it came to breastfeeding, and once things were going well, I saw no reason to stop. Around twelve months I assumed the baby would helpfully "wean himself," but that didn't seem to be what the baby intended. So we went on. If I was weird to the Americans I encountered, they could comfort themselves that I was, after all, European. If the folks at home wondered where I got my strange notions, they could of course blame those crazy hippie Americans for influencing me.

In truth, I learned to trust my own judgement and followed my heart. I decided that what had worked for the cavewoman - co-sleeping, babywearing, extended nursing - would probably be pretty good for my babies too.

Favouritism

I came home from a meeting at ten past nine last night and - surprise! - not! - Mabel was still awake. Wide awake, downstairs, with Daddy. She had drawn me a picture of a machine that would say I love you. Or churn out teddy bears. Or something. I picked her up and she snuggled happily into my arms, head on my shoulder, clearly more than ready for bed.

"Say night night to Daddy."
"..."
"Say I love you to Daddy."
"I love you."

Daddy wasn't too offended. Because we all know it's not really me she loves.

"Do you know why I love you?"
"I can hazard a guess, yes."
"Because of your booboos!"

If Daddy had the booboos, he'd be the one in favour, no mistake about it.

Last night she only (yes, insert eyeroll here) woke three times, and for two of those she went back to sleep without nursing. Instead, whoever goes to her - it's me, unless she wakes when B is still up, in which case he gives it a go and sometimes it works for him - tells her a story. When it's 2am my stories are not very interesting and tend to tail off after a few sentences. I have a sort of a formula at this point. It goes something like this:

Once upon a time, there was a little girl called [Mabel/Violet/Bonnie/whatever name is in favour with her just now, or some totally random name that pops into my head, maybe Ermingarde or Apple]

and she had [no friends at all/a puppy/a pet alligator/a dragon called Billy/you get the picture]

and every afternoon, [girl] and [pet/friend/all by herself] used to walk [down by the river/into the deep dark forest/along the beach] [throwing stones into the water/talking about their day/discussing quadratic equations] until it was time to go home for dinner.

One day while they were [doing whatever], they came upon [an amazing thing] and they said [blah blah by now I'm mostly asleep and I start ... speaking more slowly... and realising that I just had a very short dream there instead of continuing... and maybe I can get out of bed now...   ...    ....     ]

And if I'm very lucky, then I get to go back to my own bed for another couple of hours till I'm called on for the next installment and I have to take up where I left off.

If I'm not lucky, she's far more awake than I, and she announces, "That's the end of the story" and claims the booboos for her own. I'm too sleepy to stop her.

More than meets

They needed a new photo to update the nursery school brochure. I was proofreading it, and the designer had put in as a placeholder one she already had, of her own daughter and three friends sitting on a rock by the lake on one of the previous year's field trips. It was a beautiful picture of four lovely children.

But it needed to be replaced, because it wasn't diverse enough.

Our school is diverse. We have kids from many countries, cultures, and backgrounds. But at first glance, this photo was of two boys and two girls, two blond, two brunette, all Caucasian. If only we could have told the whole story.

In fact, between those four children, there were two European parents, two black parents, one Armenian-Canadian parent, and a lesbian-parent couple, as well as a smattering of native-to-this-city genes, because people who grow up here often love it so much that they stay right where they were planted.

So the lovely picture had to be replaced with something more conventionally diverse - a white kid, a black kid, an Asian kid, and perhaps an Indian one; we have all those to hand, easily. Of course, it was not so easy to get the appropriately-melanined kids to sit, look at the camera, smile, be photogenic, all at once, on command, but it was managed.

I suppose all I want to say here is that diversity is more than what you see in front of you. Don't go making assumptions.

Deceptemuffin

Today I was helping at a bake sale in aid of Mabel's nursery school.

Someone came up with the idea of a bake sale last autumn, and when the donations started coming in, we wondered why we had never done this before. Clearly, the parents of the nursery school are in need of some sort of baking intervention, I said in October, as I put my double batch of lemon scones down on a table already groaning under a surfeit of cakes, cookies, muffins, and pies.

So for today's event, I didn't go quite so overboard, and confined myself to just a single batch of banana-butterscotch muffins. Banana seemed to be the theme of the day, as there were also banana-oat-bran, banana-nut, and gluten-free banana muffins on the table, in addition to an impressive selection of chocolate-chip cookies, brownies, chocolate-brownie cookies, chocolate fudge squares, and a few delicious outliers in the form of snickerdoodles, coconut macaroons, and even soft pretzels.

Thing was, as the banana-nut muffins were arrayed on the table in their individual zippy bags, with hand-written labels listing the ingredients, we all remarked on their impressive size and uniformity. In fact, they looked very much like the sort of banana-nut muffins you might buy at the supermarket. Very, very much. In addition to which, the ingredients listed both milk and soy; as a parent of a child with allergies pointed out, nobody bakes with both of those at once. You use soy to replace dairy, unless you're a supermarket who uses soy because everything has soy in it.  We were pretty much, say 99.8%, sure that someone had just bought a batch of supermarket muffins and repackaged them for the sale.

Now, there's nothing wrong with that. Nowhere is it written that donations for the bake sale have to be homemade. If you want to help with the fundraising effort, it's perfectly kind of you to buy something - something you know many people like - and give it to the school to sell on. They were priced at $2 each, so we probably even turned a profit on the original outlay. And the customers didn't seem to mind - I was astounded at how many people's eyes lit up as they scanned the table, spotted the giant, "Texas-sized" muffins, and decided one of those was exactly what they needed. It's bigger, it must be better. I need bigger. Everyone needs bigger.

I didn't point out to any of these people that the muffins were clearly not home-made. Maybe they knew that. Maybe they haven't eaten as many store-bought banana-nut muffins as I have in my time, and don't recognise them. Maybe they don't care, they just like things that are big. But I did feel that we were duping our generous customers somehow by providing these at a stand otherwise full of honest-to-goodness home-baked goodies.

(I reserve judgement on the samoas that had been put two-by-two into small sandwich bags and marked at 50c apiece. I've seen recipes for samoas (reknowned as girl-scout cookies) online, and they were donated by a student's grandmother. Grandmothers have time for meticulous baking, right?)

What do you think? Would you donate store-bought goods to a bake sale? Does it matter, so long as it raises funds for a good cause?

Freeloading

Sometimes I wonder if some day a call will come to tell me that no, I don't get to have all this, and I have to go home to Dublin and do it the hard way, the real way, instead.

Because I'm sitting outside my house on a glorious May afternoon, on my Ikea bench with its stripy Ikea cushions, watching my children puttering around on various miniature vehicles, with or without light sabers, and it's leafy and blue-skied and the grass needs mowing. Every now and then a car comes up or down the street and the children scatter to the margins, but mostly it's quiet because we're on a cul-de-sac.

I'm pretty sure I didn't do anything to deserve this. I really hope nobody notices.

Backpedal

I have to go back and tell you about the party.

What happened was this. I wrote a blog post, in which I talked myself into hosting some kind of Star-Wars party. Then I thought I'd better get my act together quickly before the madness wore off, so I sent some e-vites. I even came up with a witty title: Dash's Sith (I mean 6th) Birthday Party. Then I came back to look at my blog and found that a very lovely, clever, crafty, friend had offered some help with games and such.

So she sent me a page full of ideas, and I said thank you very much and followed her instructions to the letter. It worked out great, and I can take no credit for any of it.

In case you too want to have a low-effort Star Wars party, here are some of the things we did.

We made light sabers for everyone out of halved pool noodles with grey duct tape and blue electrical tape on the ends. (Here are some very detailed instructions.) I made sure they were all blue or green so everyone could be a Jedi.

Then we constructed a very simple obstacle course where the kids had to limbo under a pole (broom handle on top of stacked boxes), walk along a line of tape on the floor, crawl through a tunnel, grab a light saber, and finally give Darth Vader a good whack. (I picked up a 99c Vader mask at the party store and we put it on a balloon on top of a black raincoat and my long black skirt. Nobody doubted its authenticity.)

Next, they had to free Han Solo. I printed a picture of the lovely Han, laminated him with clear packing tape, and froze him in ice in a baking pan. (Don't forget to start this one a couple of days before the party. Freeze a layer of water first, then put in your laminated picture, then one or two more layers on top.) We could see him, but not too clearly, which I thought was just right.

Because it was raining, we started with spoons and little bowls of warm water, but it wasn't much fun. So we went outside anyway and propped Han up in the back of a handy kiddie car under the eaves of our front door. Then we raided our stash of water pistols and the real fun began.

 Sucess at last!

Then we stopped for cake and Yoda Soda. The Yoda Soda was an ice-cream float made of lime sherbet sorbet and Sprite. They also had cheese and crackers and strawberries and melon and chocolate cornflake buns and ice-cream cones.

Afterwards, it was time for fighting stormtroopers - everyone took turns to throw balled-up socks at these menacing little guys, and some lightsaber practice where you try to keep a balloon up in the air with your lightsaber. Mostly there was just bashing each other over the head with pool noodles, but that was okay too.

And then it was time to go home, with a certificate (you can get one here) and a pool noodle and a dollar-store Star Wars jigsaw for everyone; and Mabel, for one, slept until 3am before waking up. Apparently we need to have a Star Wars party every day.

I took the BART in San Francisco (but not this time)

I left part of my heart in San Francisco in the summer of 1994, and since then I've been lucky enough to go back a few times and check that it's still there. I have cousins who grew up in Dublin but now live near San Jose, and a while ago I realised I could marry my husband's penchant for running long distances in new places to my desire to see cities other than our hometown. So on Sunday he ran the Big Sur marathon, and we made it a long weekend in California. 

Mabel balancing on a log and flagrantly disregarding the amazing view

Last time we were there was only two and a half years ago, but in the life of a child that makes a pretty big difference. We decided there wasn't much point going into the city that time, as at the ages of three and almost one, there was nothing they'd really remember, and B and I had both been before. But this past Friday, we drove up from our hotel right beside the crashing Pacific and swooped down to and across the Golden Gate Bridge, immortalised in Monsters V Aliens. The kids, of course, were mostly unimpressed and much more interested in climbing on dangerous objects than posing for photos, but I did my best to inhale the vista of the beautiful bay.  

Dash ditto

(Being on East-Coast time was also a great advantage, once we'd got through the two hours everyone was awake before it was even daylight. We had breakfast promptly at six, and were in the city before 9am, with plenty of parking spaces right beside tourist attractions.)  

The amazing view

Then we turned around, went back over the bridge, and headed to Lombard St, the twistiest street in the world. I had never been there, despite a summer working directly opposite it, so it was fun for all of us to wend our way down in our enormous rental SUV. (The smell of rental cars is the smell of California to me, even though I have rented cars in other states too.)  

Twisty turny

After that, it was up the other side to Coit Tower for some more views, and then a stop in North Beach for coffee in Caffe Trieste, where Francis Ford Coppola and his buddies used to hang out in the Beat days.  The summer I spent in the city, I worked in a cafe just up the street, at Grant and Green, but it's long since been turned into a club of some sort, because - ridiculously - that was 18 years ago and I was already an adult back then. So whenever I go to San Francisco, I have to go to North Beach and Columbus Avenue, because that's my part of town. 

That's an iced coffee, not a beer. I promise.

After coffee we went to City Lights and bought a couple of books for the kids, and looked briefly into Vesuvios to be told that the bartender was not only married to a man from County Cavan but went to school within five miles of where we live in Maryland - we said we'd say hi to her mom for her.

Beat poet central

At this point, Mabel was well overdue for a nap by either time zone, so we bought the kids a bread roll each to gnaw on and went back to the car to drive south to my cousins' house.  We even saw a cable car go by as we drove up the hill.  

San Francisco is one of my favourite cities (not that I'm as seasoned a global traveller as many of my friends) and the opportunity to show some of it to my offspring - well, I think that's one of the reasons we have children, isn't it?