Hippo birdy

It hasn't been the most eventful of birthdays, I have to admit. Mostly, we've hidden indoors lest the sun shrivel us to a crisp, venturing out only to make the one good use of this weather - hanging some laundry on the line or bringing it back in again.

I say "we" because the children have been with me all day, of course, but they weren't the ones doing the laundry. They were the ones climbing the clothesline, pulling towels off, trying to set up a tightrope, and generally hindering my progress in trying to pack for our week at the beach.

I should probably be thinking deep introspective thoughts about what I've done in the past year, how I'll improve in the one to come, and how awful it is that I'm one year closer to forty. Mostly what occurs to me is to wonder whether, as next year my birthday will fall on a Saturday, I'll be contractually obliged to throw myself a Fortieth party. I'd really rather throw one for B in March, but his birthday falls midweek. Not that one has to have the party on the exact day, but it does lend itself to parties, and only happens once in seven (if that often).

We did get a babysitter last night - who managed to get Mabel to sleep, wonder of wonders - while we went to the movies and then for a very quick drink. And tonight an Indian takeout is winging its way homeward as I speak. (You might think I would rather have a nice salad when it's 102 degrees outside, but I will leverage my air conditioning and eat the food I like.)

Hippo birdy to me, as Sandra Boynton would say.

Country of origin

I just downloaded the forms to apply for citizenship of the United States.

I think we can safely say I have mixed feelings about this. It's not something I ever intended, or wanted, to do. I'm Irish, and Irish I'll stay. (Though in fact, even saying that sounds uncomfortably jingoistic to me. I was never much of a one for waving the tricolour and dancing the Walls of Limerick; but Irish patriotism can be a different sort of thing. I'm fervently proud of my little country on the edge of the Atlantic, and would defend it like a sibling - that is, to be roundly criticized until an outsider agrees, at which point I would leap to its defense and point out all the wonderful ways in which it's a million miles better than your country, so there.)

I currently have a green card - I'm a legal alien, a permanent resident; I can stay forever if I so wish. I can't vote, and I can't hold office, and I don't get called for jury duty, but I'm okay with that. My children were born here - they have two passports and dual citizenship. But my husband came here first on a student visa, to get his doctorate. Since graduating, his visa has been dependent on his job. He could apply for a green card, but the waiting list is unbelieveably long.

On the other hand, I've been here for over five years, so I can apply for citizenship any time I like. And once I had that, his green card application would be processed in short order. Nothing has changed with his job, but he's a contractor with a year-to-year contract. Nothing is certain in this life, especially for those of us who aren't civil servants. Much as I might carp about how we never meant to stay forever, there's a difference between deciding to go home when the time is right and being thrown out on your ear because somebody decides not to renew your visa.

I have cousins in this country who grew up in Ireland. They're all settled here for good, much more mentally permanent than I am, but their view on citizenship was a pragmatic one when we discussed it. "Just get it," they told me. "Cross your fingers behind your back if you like, but just get it to be on the safe side."

They're probably right. I probably will.

Transatlantic subtleties: Holiday v. Vacation

This is an easy one, right? Americans say vacation where UK/Irish people say holiday.

Almost. But then.

In Ireland you go on holidays (or on your holidays), when you go away from home and stay somewhere else for a while. You are on holidays when you don't have to go to school or work for a while. That much translates directly to "vacation", except for the plural.

Holiday, in the singular, is where one might get confused, because Americans use that too.

A holiday in the US is a public day off, such as July 4th or Labor Day. A holiday weekend is the weekend one of these days is attached to. A typical conversation at work when I first moved to America might go like this:

- How was your holiday?
- What holiday? I didn't go anywhere.
- Monday. Was a holiday. Remember?
- Oh, you mean my bank holiday.
- What's a bank holiday?

In the UK/Ireland, a bank holiday is what we generally call a public holiday, and that weekend (when it falls on a Friday or a Monday), is a bank-holiday weekend. Confusingly, there is actually a distinction between bank holidays and public holidays, and sometimes the bank is closed when everyone else has to go to work, but mostly they're all just called bank holidays. Because if the bank is closed, it's time to party. Apparently. (I bet it's Angela Merkel's fault.)

"The holidays", in America, means the Christmas season, which you aren't allowed call Christmas for fear of offending people who celebrate Kwanzaa or Hannukah or Solstice or whatever else it might be. Hence "Happy holidays", which to an Irish person would evoke images of sun-drenched beaches, and fruity libations, possibly in Spain. To an American it means snowflakes and ice-skating and gingerbread cookies and other secular wintery goodnesses.

If in doubt, just call it a break.

Summer numbers

Things I left the supermarket with this morning that I would not have expected to buy:

• One pink piggy spatula
• Two miniature American flags

Things I left the supermarket with this morning that I would have rather left behind, or not brought with me in the first place:

• Two children 

People who have been bitten by their sister twice in the past two days:

• Dash

People who have been driven to the last resort by their brother who just will not listen to any other sort of dissuasion:

• Mabel

People who have to decide whom to be more annoyed with first:

• Maud

Number of bites of baby carrot Dash has had since yesterday:

• 2 (actual honest-to-god bites that were swallowed; this is huge)

Temperature, in degrees farenheit, that it is outside my house just now:

• 95

Expected high:

• 100

Heat index; that is, what it will feel like when you factor in the humidity:

• 107

Amount I hope we will go to the pool this afternoon:

• A lot.

Fed and clothed

It's 92 degrees outside and I'm having a nice cup of tea. Proper tea, the Irish sort. Hot tea, if you really need me to specify. I'm sorry, (for you, and for myself too) but cold drinks just don't cut it. There's a point I arrive at after lunch, or mid-afternoon, or at some stage in the day, when only a cup of tea will suffice. I probably just need to get with the program and assimilate, but it was hard enough for me to leave the "--me" off "program", never mind anything else.

When I've been solo-parenting for a few days, I sometimes self-deprecatingly remark that I've kept the kids fed and clothed, and anything else is a bonus. But you know, even that much can be pretty hard. (Wearing a spider-man costume counts as clothed, right? Because that's how Mabel went to the playground yesterday. If her brother had tried to do that at a similar age, I would have put my foot down, unless it was within two days of Halloween. But that's second children for you - you've been beaten down and your personal goalposts shift a bit. Besides, I thought she looked cute.)

But I have the utmost respect for anyone who actually feeds children - especially their own - on a daily basis. I mean, people who do it properly, not the "throw some things out of the fridge and see who can catch them" technique I tend towards myself. Because tossing off "fed" as if it's a simple thing implies that children are like normal human beings in ways that mine - and yours? tell me it's not just mine - are not. Normal humans, mostly

1. eat more than three different things.
2. acknowledge when they're hungry rather than losing their mind in the loudest and most inconvenient way possible.
3. are prepared to eat at mealtimes because that's when people eat, so that they won't be hungry later. Because later it will be not mealtime and you will be nowhere near food that is in any way nutritious or inexpensive, and you will then ruin whatever the next proper meal was supposed to be.

But Maud, I hear your fingers clackety-clacking, Ellyn Satter! But Maud, nutritious snacks at proper intervals! But Maud, don't pander, don't short-order cook; don't offer, don't refuse. (No wait, that's weaning. Wrong rule.) It's your job to put the food on the table, and the rest is up to them.

YES, I KNOW. Save your fingers. Put down the spacebar. If you do all that and it works, I'm so happy for you, and I'm sure if I did it right it would work for me too. (Except I'm not, but that's what you need to hear. Maybe it's just not in my nature to do it right.) It's okay. I'm not looking for advice today. I just want to whine, in a perhaps-slightly-amusing way. If you find it as hard as I do to keep your kids just damn well "fed," by all means leave me a comment commiserating, so we can all whine together.

My kids are growing. They're healthy and the doctor is not worried about them. I try not to feed them too much sugar, to keep them away from high-fructose corn syrup, to limit the juice. I try not to give them a complex about eating too much, or too little, but to educate them about foods and what's good and bad for their body.

It will all come out in the wash.

(That's a metaphor. I'll talk about my broken washing machine tomorrow.)

Missed ewe

The grass needs mowing, the washing machine won't spin, and I still haven't tried out the new vacuum cleaner on the stairs, but the kitchen is mostly clean and we are fully stocked with bananas, beer, homemade bread, cookies, and even orange juice. (Really, what more could a man want? Steak, you say? Pshaw!)

Mabel sat up this morning and asked, with a huge sigh, "When will Daddy get back?" Dash packed up a Father's Day package of his own making yesterday and put it waiting on the sideboard where B will see it as soon as he comes in the door.

I think we missed him, for six days and five nights. We're a reasonably well-oiled machine without him - I even caught the trash collection this morning - and there might be a bit less friction regarding certain people getting dressed in a timely fashion, but there's less laughter too.

And I have to admit I'm looking forward to staying in bed a bit longer of a morning. I'm just not sure if I get to start that tomorrow, or if I have to give the traveller a day's grace.

Summer love

I was watching Dash twirling his light-saber like a pro earlier, admiring his deft wristwork and wondering what sport, or profession, or professional sport, we could get him into to make use of this. I felt like I'd definitely seen the movements before somewhere.

Actually, I think it's Tom Cruise in Cockail. He has a great future ahead of him as a celebrity bartender.

-----------------

Mabel's boyfriend across the road is going to Maine for the summer on Thursday. They will both be heartbroken. She ran over to his house to play this morning, which I thought was a good thing because she and Dash had been up since six, it was raining, I was baking bread, and despite too much TV, the bickering was reaching epic proportions. I saw her over the road and into the house, where she immediately jumped into bed with her BFF.  

Five minutes later, they were back here, where they played happily together until the friend wanted to get something from his house. She went with him, and I watched them toil up the wet grass to his front door in their bare feet (urchins! where are their mothers?) to make sure they were safely at their destination.

Another little while passed, until I heard voices outside. Mabel was parading down the street wearing her friend's little brother's lion costume from last Halloween, doing her best roars for the mailman. Her swain was hot on her tail, of course.

Later on, his mum came to retreive him, and he had to be pried bodily from the house. "Take my hand!" he wailed pitifully at Mabel, who of course was happy to comply.

After naptime (for somebody somewhere, perhaps; not for anyone in this story except the little brother who'd had his lion costume purloined - Mabel is like the opposite of a very thoughtful houseguest; she never leaves without taking something with her) and a trip to Target, the star-crossed lovers were playing together once more. They snuck into our house, but his mum came to get him, again. His granny is visiting, and would probably like to see her grandson from a closer angle now and then.

He went home. Mabel followed. I followed Mabel. They crawled under the table and held on for dear life. If they'd had a pair of handcuffs they would have chained themselves together. "See you tomorrow," I said cheerfully as I extracted her, shrieking, and closed the heavy front door decisively behind me. Ten seconds later he was out again. Mabel jumped on her bike. He took the big plastic car. (Not the best getaway vehicle, perhaps.) Eventually his mother left the house with everything except her elder son, put him into the stroller, and they went on their way, a small head looking back, one arm still extended. "Take my hand!"

It's all very Last of the Mohicans. "I will find youuuuuuuu." Daniel Day Lewis eat your heart out, I'd say.

Going solo

I sat here yesterday - okay, not exactly here, because right now I'm forming a pinchproof barrier between the children as they watch TV - starting to type some annoyingly smug blog post about how well things go when I'm solo-parenting because they're older and because when it's just me, I have to commit to doing things for the kids rather than trying to get my own stuff done.

And then we spent the rest of the day sniping at one another and not doing anything fun at all, until a very belated trip to the pool redeemed things a bit.

A lot of that was down to my sleepless night the night before, which was mostly not due to Mabel, for a change, but because the night went something like this:

10.30: I go to bed.
10.30 - 12.00 or so: Today's youth park outside my house to attend a house party down the street.*
2.30: I finally acknowledge the period pain I've been trying to ignore, so I get up to take some ibuprofen.
2.30 - 3.00: Today's youth return to their cars, chatting and sometimes singing opera.
3.30: Mabel wakes up. She'd been asleep since 7pm, so that was a great night, for her. But she was hungry and I had to get her a frozen waffle.** She went back to sleep pretty quickly once she'd eaten it.
5.00: I go back to my own bed.
6.00: I hear Dash wake up. I go to forestall him before he barges into Mabel's room looking for me and wakes her too. I tell him that he has to entertain himself until 7.00. He's not happy about that. I don't care much, so long as he's quiet.
6.35: Mabel wakes up. She joins me in the big bed and after a while everyone's up and the day has begun, against my better judgement.

So many things to discuss further here, but first let me dwell for a moment on the way my children constantly seem to demand food and water. Why aren't they self-sufficient yet? My fridge doesn't have one of those automatic water dispensers, and mostly I'm glad, because if it did we'd be swimming around the kitchen or skidding on ice all day, but on the other hand then they'd be able to get their own damn drinks. I've put the glasses where they can reach them, but they can't lift down the heavy filter jug and pour it themselves, so that's no help. And they won't drink unfiltered water from the tap - which they can't reach either anyway - because they're demanding little so-and-so's.

* Someone down the street is away, and the college kid they have house- and pet-sitting is Taking Advantage. We can't hear the actual partying from here, but because our street is usually so quiet, and because my bedroom is at the front of the house and the windows were open, I could hear every word as if they were standing beside my bed. They weren't yelling or raucous, they weren't even audibly drunk going home - except for the guy belting out arias, probably, though for all I know he does that sober too - but the whole thing just felt like such an affront to civilized society. Because I'm sure I never attended any house parties as a student. Nope. Didn't, for instance, first kiss my husband-to-be at one.

** Urgh. Feeding children in the middle of the night. It's against my principles, but it's also the quickest way to get her back to sleep, so I do it because the alternative is having her nursing all night. I really don't want to wake at 3am because her body expects a waffle, but she just won't go back to sleep hungry. I try to be sure she eats a good dinner to avoid this, but there's no way to make her eat if she's not interested, and she has the appetite of a gnat most of the time. Telling her "I won't get you a waffle at 3am if you wake up hungry" has no effect. And not just because she knows it's not true.

Back to wherever I was. Grumpy yesterday, that's where. But before the grumps, we did some watercolour painting and some knitting. (Long story. Dash wants to learn to knit. There, that was quick.) I felt like the crafting-est (rather than craftiest, you understand) mother this side of Martha Stewart.

Such concentration. This was at the start, before Mabel began to suck water out of her paintbrush.

I think my point, now that I look back and see if I can winkle one out of this diatribe, is that I've run the gamut of parenting in the past 24 hours or so, from sleeplessness to indulgence to home-schooling. Today we went back to our regularly scheduled light-saber fights and running around the street with friends, and everything was better again.

I also got a lot more sleep last night - so maybe the whole watercolours and knitting thing was just a product of my fevered imaginings.

A cooking sort of day

I was just congratulating myself on finally having children old enough to play nicely together while I whipped up a batch of olive-oil and lime muffins (this recipe, but we were too impatient to wait for a whole cake to bake, hence muffins; mini, even), when things in the next room degenerated into shrieks and I looked in to find the three-year-old naked and the six-year-old throwing small pieces of toys across the floor. Maybe another couple of years, then.

But still. Underpants may come and go, all the pieces will be picked up eventually, and now there's a bag of tangy muffins in the freezer. It was worth it.

Later on, while the children were eating their rudimentary offerings (don't judge me; my husband's away), I accidentally made myself a delicious dinner instead of just heating up the leftovers I'd intended to have. I got carried away and turned the plain broccoli I had been planning into these amazing broccoli fritters (from my favourite food blogger, of course). Mabel had some trees pre-battering, and I was the only person who profited from the fritters - but profit I did, because they were totally worth the extra washing up. I dipped them in Greek yogurt left over from making the muffins, thus making the day's baking and cooking mesh into one delightfully symbiotic relationship. Or whatever you're having yourself, as they say.

So now I am redolent of garlic, because I think a speck flew off when I splatted it in the garlic press, and I hope it's on my t-shirt, which I can take off, rather than my hair, which I was not planning to wash tomorrow. Does garlic brush out?

Speaking of brushing, Mabel let me put her hair in pigtails today for the first time in about two years. Maybe we have a summer of extra cuteness ahead. It might make up for the wanton nakedness and the post-four-pm general awfulness.

Beachbound

In a few weeks I have to pack for a week at the beach. We've never taken the kids to the beach, beyond a couple of chilly afternoons in Dublin and one at a sort of oily man-made sand-depository on the banks of the Chesapeake. I'm really looking forward to letting them just sit in the sand for hours on end and find out what happens when the water moves into the holes you dug.

Dash and Granny on a typical late-June day at the beach in Dublin

I'm optimistically thinking that Mabel is old enough not to have to be watched like a hawk every single second. By which I mean not that we'll be ignoring her and getting stuck into some riveting beach fiction and our mojitos, but more that at least we won't have to physically steer her away from running joyously straight into the waves the entire time. Or maybe we will, who knows.

Dash can swim, after a fashion, but is very leery of getting his face wet. I hope the extra buoyancy of the salt water will be a pleasant surprise, and that the odd splashlet from a wave won't be a huge tragedy. They both have "floatie" jackets that they wear at the pool part of the time, which gives me a greater sense of security. On the other hand, I wouldn't want anyone floatie-ing away from us - the no-boundaries ocean will be a bit of a shock on that front.

So I wanted to ask you, what should we bring? We're renting a condo for the week, in the Outer Banks, North Carolina, which I've wanted to visit ever since I saw it on a map.  Beyond some very basic sandbox buckets and spades, all we have are swimsuits and a few towels. Do I need to beg/borrow/steal a shade tent or canopy-thingy, and if so what sort is best? Should we bring the kids' bikes or scooters along? What sort of toys are good for the beach, that I might not think of?

A less-typical Dublin beach day; don't be deceived - the water was freezing

Branching out

Please excuse the radio silence of late, but I'm still figuring out how to navigate this two-children-all-day thing. I can check my Facebook and fire off a quick desperate e-mail or two in search of a playdate, but getting several minutes together at a time and having my mind in a suitably composed frame to put together a blog post is another thing entirely.

My plan was to blog in the evenings now that Mabel will be going to bed early instead of napping, but last night I was too tired to even pick up the detritus of a day's play from the floor and make my own post-prandial cup of coffee (mine's a decaf, thanks), let alone figure out how to entertain people all over my very small corner of the Internet.

Speaking of which, though, my little corner is getting a tiny bit bigger as of today, because I'm now also writing at The DC Moms, and I'm proud and delighted to be there. You'll discover, if you follow that link, that I'm not Maud, or even (not) Maud, over there - I'm Christine. But I'll stay in that amount of semi-seclusion for now, as while I don't want to pass up the opportunity to send a few more people this way, I'm not ready to go full on public. I like to retain at least the illusion of anonymity.

I hope I won't be blogging less here as a result of blogging there - I think the two should be complementary. The tone over there is less intimate and more journalistic, I suppose, so while my voice should be the same, and the subjects won't be very new, I'm hoping you won't find any repetition if you read them both. Should you be so inclined.

Right now the children are playing so nicely, so quietly and collaboratively - at least, they're close to each other and not fighting - that I almost don't mind the new mess they've created. I'm sure I just told them we were going to clean up so that we could test the new vacuum cleaner, but I suppose that will keep for a few more minutes, until they start jumping off the coffee table and hitting each other over the head again. Maybe I can even find us a playdate for tomorrow before that happens.

Simultaneous chaos and tranquility

Skywalker

Dash was standing in the middle of the room, moving his hands somewhere near a beam of sunlight streaming through the window. After a while he came back to where I was, a little downcast:

"So far I can only use the Force on dust."

--------

Today he was desperately in need of some directed activity, passing the time by lifting up one side of the big armchair and even the sofa a few inches off the floor, until we were tired of telling him to put them down before they fell on him or his sister. 

"Come on," I said. "We're going to the pool. You need to use some of that energy."
"I don't want to go to the pool. I don't have energy, I'm just getting strong by lifting things."
"What? We're members now, we have to go all summer. Why don't you want to go?"
"I just don't."
"Well you can't stay here and lift things all afternoon. [Lightbulb moment...] Did you know that swimming makes you strong? It's very good for your muscles."
"Really?"

Then I Googled some pictures of Johnny Weismuller and Michael Phelps. He was sold.

"Okay, let's go to the pool."

--------

Lately he has taken to drawing in bed before he falls asleep. This leaves him with ink stains in odd places, but is otherwise very nice and means our stock of love notes has been replenished. I just got this one:

[Dear Mom, thank you for getting me the markers.]

Last night B went upstairs and pulled this from under a sleeping boy.

That looks to me very much like a Venn diagram, don't you think? Showing afternoon at the conjunction of morning and ni(gh)t(e)? I was very impressed, even if the concept is a tad flawed.

I asked him what the two lower ovals were.

"That's a butt."
"A butt?"
"Yes, you know, the way--"
"Yes, yes, that's fine. I've seen plenty. Lovely."

Transatlantic subtleties: The Jumper

We all know that Americans become figures of fun across the Atlantic when they start innocently mentioning pants, vests, and suspenders; but the opportunites for sartorial confusion don't stop there.

Just in case, though, here's a quick run down of the basics:

US pants = UK trousers
US vest = UK waistcoat
US suspenders = UK braces

If you want to talk about your underpinnings in the US, you can say underpants, underwear, or possibly "skivvies" for slang. Knickers, confusingly, are a knee-length trouser-type item more like knickerbockers. Panties are panties, but nobody wants to have to say that.

A (UK) vest in the US is an undershirt, and suspenders are a suspender belt.

In the UK/Ireland, a shirt is only a long- or short-sleeved article of clothing that has buttons all the way down the front - made of material which generally calls for you to bust out the iron. A t-shirt is a short-sleeved, collarless top of softer jersey material. Anything else (in womenswear, at least) that is a first-layer item (not counting a camisole, or a thermal vest, depending on the season) falls under the general heading of "top", with qualifiers like "long-sleeved top" or "going-out top" or "sleeveless top".

In the US, the word "shirt" can be applied to almost anything you wear on your top half, short of a sweater. And sweater covers everything else, whether it's a giant, slouchy thing with a sporting logo on it or a cosy cashmere turtleneck, or even a cardigan. (Though those other words are applicable too.)

Which brings us to jumper.

I was bemused, one day in Ireland while watching The Simpsons, to hear Bart being teased by his sister, who said something about his needing to wear a jumper. This didn't sound like such an awful fate, because as far as I was concerned, a jumper is a knitted sweater - but with a leap of great mental acuity, I surmised that there was more to it in the USA. Many moons later (this was before the advent of the Internet to my house, or anywhere handy, I suppose) I figured it out: a jumper in the US is what I would call a pinafore - a dress that goes over a shirt (or top), the sort of thing that's often part of a girl's school uniform.

Have I forgotten anything?

I leave you with this gem of Irish pop. If you don't know a boy who left his jumper in some dark corner of the disco and now can't find it, well, you probably haven't been to an Irish disco yet.

Pig leg

 

Step one: Take one IKEA "Mammut" plastic chair. Remove the legs, usually by sitting on them while the chair lies on its back or side. Remove the plastic base of each leg, usually by whacking it on the floor a few times.

 Step two: Place as many limbs as possible at one time into the chair legs.

 

Ta-da! You have pig legs.

Step three: Your mother tells you that the phrase is actually "peg leg", and pirates only have one at a time, otherwise they can't stand up.

Step four: Ignore your mother. She has no idea anyway.

A brief note to my children re the (distant) future

Right now, you two have grand plans to invent an immortality machine when you're grown up. I'm not sure whether it will be kept for only immediate family members or whether you'll be generous enough to go public with it, but the idea of it has been very helpful in allowing you to accept the difficult truth that one day we will all die.

I'd like it, too, if you could invent an anti-aging machine, because frankly I'm much happier with the notion that one day I'll be entirely gone than that before that happens I might be short of breath and aching of joints and perhaps even completely gaga in the mental faculty department.

But it's possible that you won't, and I'll have to take my lumps like the rest of the human race, and probably, for the most part, getting older is, as advertised, preferable to the alternative.

Eggs over easy

Today, 9.30am:

I am hit by the incredibly obvious revelation for the day. If we're really stopping at two kids, then we're done with having babies. That phase of our lives, which was so all-consuming, so entirely absorbing, so eternally life-changing, that required special furniture, special adaptation of everything, right down to where I keep things in in the kitchen (nothing dangerous, spillable, or breakable low down), is behind us.

You put the high chair in the basement and you think, "Hooray, more space in the kitchen." But you don't think "That's it. Those years are over, and everyone was right, they were so short. And who am I now?" until later. Like, until today.

Today, 11.45am:

Looking around the cafe in IKEA, I start to say to myself that I really want another baby. Then I catch myself in time. "I really ... must be ovulating." Yup.