Genetics

It's definitely colder here since Sandy blew through. I encountered a friend at nursery-school pickup.

She said, "Aren't you wearing gloves? I can see you're holding your hands as if they're cold."
"I know," I explained. "I do have gloves. They're at home."
"Well they're not doing any good there."
"I know. I'll keep them in my pockets now it's cold. But then I won't put them on because that's too much hassle."
She laughed at my illogicality.
"I also hate using an umbrella," I continued, "because then it gets wet and I don't have anywhere to put it."
She left me to my particular brand of crazy.

Not five minutes later I found myself having the following conversation with Mabel.
- Mummy, my hands are cold.
- See, we should have brought your gloves. For tomorrow we'll put your gloves in your jacket pocket and they'll be there when you need them.
- But I don't want to have to take them out of my pocket.

Blood will out, I suppose.

The long long weekend

It was cosy in the basement, and we couldn't even hear the winds that were lightly battering the house (like tempura) and not actually, in the event, felling any of the surrounding trees or even tossing the neighbour's un-put-away deck furniture at our windows. What's more, and against all expectations, the stairs light shone all night and the alarm clock I'd optimistically plugged in beside our mattresses on the floor glowed the time redly all the way to 6:23, when Mabel could be restrained by boobies no longer and demanded that Daddy play magnetic dress-up with her.

I'd imagined that opening the door at the top of the stairs this morning would be like entering a post-apocalyptic world, with the possibility (if not the actuality) of strewn possessions, shards of window-glass and broken ornaments, maybe a huge bough coming through the ceiling, scattering wet leaves on our bed and letting the cold wind blow through the house. Maybe no house at all, just grey open sky and the leaves of a sodden paperback whipping back and forth in the cold breeze.

(Maybe zombies. Having an American house with a basement of the sort that is always spooky in movies used to disconcert me a bit. But last night, the basement was homely and comforting. Also, I'm pretty sure all the crickets down there are dead by now.)

Instead of devastation, of course, there was just the usual debris of a day spent at home with no energy left to clean up at the end. Lego people, cushions, pieces of paper with scribbled notes that must be kept forever, half crayons. A couple of dirty coffee cups, some glasses of half-drunk water, cookie crumbs on countertops. Lovely electric light emanating from the microwave and the stove and the inside of the fridge.

Nothing new, nothing dramatic. Home the way it should be, the way it always is. Lucky us.

It was pretty wild outside last night as Hurricane Sandy made landfall up the coast from us, but we didn't flood, we didn't lose power, and no trees fell on our house - or anywhere nearby that I can see. We've had two extra days of weekend in which to bake and clean and play family games and obsessively refresh Twitter. We'll move ahead into the rest of the week - trick-or-treating tomorrow, Mabel's birthday party on Sunday - refreshed and reinvigorated, if somewhat weighed down with too many cups of tea and oatmeal cookies.

Not everyone gets to be so lucky, and we're thankful.

God Save Our Socks

Times were hard in Dublin in 1979. I wore hand-me-downs from my cousins most of the time. I didn't really care, as I was a bit of a tomboy and not interested in clothes, but it was a far cry from today's "If it's not pink I'm not wearing it" tutu-splosion in my own daughter's closet. (Though a large proportion of her stuff is also pre-loved.)

Anyway. I remember a particular pair of knee socks that came from my cousins in England. They had Union Jacks all over them. My mother, aware that this might not be the most politically correct statement to be making, made me wear them inside-out.

I'm really not sure how much of an effect that had. These weren't little Union Jacks randomly arrayed over white socks, that might be taken for purple dots from a distance. No, these socks were overwhelmingly red-white-and-blue, with a repeating unbroken pattern of inch by inch-and-a-half flags, one after another with no spaces in between. Add some sequins and Ginger Spice would have loved them. Even inside-out, any casual viewer over the age of seven would probably have known what it was.

I was five. So that was fine.

You'd think, in hindsight though, that perhaps we could have done without that one pair of socks. I mean, from my point of view, the murders and kneecappings and car bombs I heard about every morning on the radio might as well have been taking place in another country, as they never involved places I'd been to or people I knew; but Dublin had been bombed by the IRA the year after I was born, and murders and bombings continued in the UK and the North of Ireland until as late as 1996 (and beyond, from various factions). The late seventies were the height of The Troubles, as they were known. While nobody I knew in Dublin was a rabid Republican, almost everyone I knew was Catholic. In general, it would not have been the done thing to fly the British flag (metaphorically; literally would be totally inconceivable), even if my father happened to have been born there. (Which he was.)

(I'm trying to think how to explain this to Americans. It might be a bit like wearing the Confederate flag to school in New York. You know the way over here people fly the flag of the country of their forebears with pride, and paint themselves those colours and enthusiastically support the teams in the world cup? Well, you don't do that in Ireland if you're English. You certainly didn't do it then, and I'm really not sure how loudly you would want to do it even now.)

But, in my family in 1979 at least, a perfectly good pair of socks was not to be turned down on the grounds of political correctness - not when you could just pull them the other way out and pretend nobody could tell. I suppose I should be glad it wasn't a Union Jack woolly jumper.

That which is not happening

Yesterday I thought for a while that I might have to fly home to Ireland for a few days as soon as this weekend, to sort out some family stuff.

This morning, I found that wouldn't be necessary, and took myself off high alert. So that's all right then.

A lot flew through my mind in a very short space of time, though. I've never left the children overnight, not even for one night, not even when giving birth to the second one - we were only at the birthing center for five hours or so before we came back again with a brand new baby. I've flown with my children plenty of times, but I've never flown without them. That would be a totally new experience.

My initial reaction, of course, when the possibility was raised, was "Noooo! I can't! It's impossible!" Because I am a planner who fears change, especially change that comes quickly. I don't much like surprises, either. All the reasons why I couldn't crowded down on me: Mabel can't get to sleep without me; everyone has a cough and might be getting sick; Halloween; Mabel's birthday; B can't cook; B doesn't know that they have to go to the bathroom before dance class and I might forget to tell him; I'm tired...

In the brief periods last night in between Mabel-waking no.1 (quick and easy), Dash needing to be shepherded to the bathroom because he'd had three last drinks of water, and Mabel-waking no. 2 (prolonged and terrible), I couldn't fall asleep because my brain was busy outlining all the things that would need to be done, all the things that would make it impossible, and all the things I would need to remember; as well as all the things I wasn't looking forward to or didn't know about once I would get there.

But I cannot tell a lie: some of my thoughts drifted in other directions. What would it be like to catch a plane on my own? Could I just bring a carry-on? Should I invest in a decent pair of black trousers to look respectable and not like a harried mother of two caterwaulers? Should I bring my black boots? Might I, perhaps, pick up a neat little backpack with a padded section that would hold my laptop in REI before I left?

Would I be able to steal wi-fi from my parents' neighbours if I asked them very nicely, assuming there was some signal I could pick up from the house, if I was staying there? Should I actually put some books on my under-employed Kindle, because I'd have a lot of time on my hands in airports? How would I cope with all that free time compounding the guilt of leaving B to cope with everyone for four whole days? And four whole bedtimes and four whole (long, long) nights?

Of course, B would be fine. He's known these children just as long as I have, and loves them just as much, and if his culinary skills are lacking it's only due to my own orneryness in not wanting to share my kitchen, and he's perfectly capable of making pasta and opening a tin of baked beans, and he scrambles a mean egg to boot.

What's more, when I floated the idea to the children yesterday afternoon, Dash was fine with it straight away. Mabel was resistant at first, but after an hour or so mulling it over she was already telling me how she'd draw me a picture to take with me and how she'd go to bed nicely for Daddy. It would probably be a huge turning point in her sleeping/weaning.

So this morning when it turned out I didn't need to go at all, my feelings were just a tiny bit mixed.

Mostly I was relieved, of course. Relieved that the emergency was not really an emergency after all, that the sky hasn't fallen just yet. Happy that I didn't have to run round like a headless chicken booking a ridiculously expensive last-minute flight and trying to stock up the fridge with easily prepared food and writing excessive lists of information. Very pleased not to be trying to predict when exactly this incoming hurricane of ours would be making transAtlantic flights at best unpleasant or else totally unviable.

Suddenly, my life looked laughably easy. I could think about Halloween costumes! I could continue to plan Mabel's birthday party! I could clean the toilets! (Yes, really, for one fleeting moment I almost thought that.)

But then, I would quite like a cute little backpack with a padded space for my laptop. Maybe for Christmas.

It gets better: Swamped parent edition

I posted an impromptu photo of myself with Mabel on Facebook the other day, and was amused to see someone comment that I looked "groomed". From where I was sitting, I just had clothes on. And maybe my hair was on one of its good days. (When it's newly washed, it's fluffy. When it needs to be washed, it's flat. There's about half an hour in the middle there when it looks quite nice, if you ignore the grey bits.)

Oh, fine, here's the picture. Judge for yourself.

But the commenter has two tiddlers. I mean, toddlers. I mean, two under four, or so. She's probably lucky if she can find some clothes, never mind brush her hair of a morning.

So today I'm here to tell you that you do get out of the trenches eventually. You get to take someone to school and leave them behind, at least for a couple of hours. And then one day you get to take both of them to school and go off on your own and do the shopping and think about what you're going to cook for dinner right there while you push the trolley around the supermarket. That's a great day, so 'tis.

The day will come when you can have a shower even though you're the only adult in the house and both children are in residence. And not only will nobody be crying when you come out, but there won't even be someone sitting on the toilet seat eyeing you balefully through the wobbly glass, or squeezing your toothpaste all over the basin or brushing their hair with your toothbrush. (Okay, this only works with the TV on some thrilling show, and I probably wouldn't risk shaving my legs as well as washing myself, but it's a start.)

In fact, some glorious day, in the dim and distant future, the baby swings will be a thing of the past and your children will be able to pump for themselves on the big-kid swing, and beyond an initial push you'll be rendered pretty much superfluous in the playground.

And then you'll smell someone's new baby's head and you'll think, wow, that was a long time ago.

Baby Mabel, going on for four years ago

Sinking

Sometimes I feel like I'm functioning just a knife-edge away from mutiny, and that all I can do is to keep the crew (inmates, whatever) happy, whatever the cost, because if they lose it, then we're all down the tubes.

This is not a good long-term parenting strategy.

As captain/first-mate of the ship, I should wield some authority. But that assumes my crew is formed of rational adults who chose the job. In fact, the inmates almost in charge of the asylum are immature, irrational, and incapable of the simplest actions of self-preservation (eating food so that you don't go ballistic, for instance; sleeping during the night so that you can function reasonably during the day; using the bathroom when your bladder's full, for pete's sake). Not to mention the fact that they didn't ask to be born, not that anyone has thrown that one up at me yet, but it's only a matter of time.

So empathetic parenting is only part of the battle. There's also the part about teaching them to be reasonable human beings, doing things that are judged to be civilized and acceptable to the rest of society.

Sometimes I'm hanging on by my fingertips, wondering how I'm going to get myself out of this one, wondering who would win if it came down to just sitting it out, wondering why, with all my years of education and experience more than they have, it's not easier.

Maybe tomorrow will be better.

Oncoming four

The sell-by date on the milk I bought this morning is November 6th.

That's a long way off, I thought. By then, I'll have a four-year-old.

I really love three, for all its intransigence, it's got to be the cutest age (apart from 18 months, and 2, and all the other cute ages); but then, I love four too. It's so grown-up. Maybe it's because I remember being four, or because in Ireland four is when you start school, but to me, it seems like the real start of childhood. I remember being thrilled when Dash turned four, to have such a big kid.

But then. Mabel isn't Dash. Maybe I don't want a big kid just yet. She certainly doesn't want to be a big kid - not if it means giving up booboo (not altogether, just at bedtime, just maybe), or getting injections at her checkup, or having to walk instead of being carried. Even the thrill of a new carseat and a princess (and prince) party at which she can wear her party shoes and the prospect of lots of presents doesn't quite offset all that. Next thing you know I'll be getting her to wipe her own backside, and that will be entirely unsupportable.

I can see her point, to be honest. Dash is all about doing things himself (things he wants to do, that is; come to think of it, putting on his own socks or wiping his bum didn't really apply), but Mabel likes to be waited on hand and foot. "I need a tissue," is a common refrain in these germ-infested days of October, as she sits and waits for some disembodied hand to wipe her nose, and god forbid she should go to the trouble of blowing, no matter how often I explain that it will mean less wiping in the future.

I am bad at delegating. I'm bad at letting someone else make a hash of something when I know I can do a better job myself. Parenting is one long lesson in letting go, and I'm not good at learning it. I should probably leave her alone until the snot runs down her face and she comes and gets her own tissue and uses it by herself, but then, she might just decide to lick the delicious snot away, or wipe it on the cushions, or use it as glue. And then - she's right - I'm the one who'll be sorry.

Two more weeks, and I'll have a four-year-old. And everything - and nothing - will have changed.

Transatlantic subtleties: pavement, dirt, and those pesky islands

A couple of quick ones to add to this occasional series of disambiguators (that's a word):

Everybody knows that Americans say sidewalk. What UK/Irishers say is either footpath or pavement. The former is simple, and that's what we say to the kids because it's pretty unambiguous on either side of the Atlantic. The word "footpath" in this country might make people think of a trail through the woods rather than a paved area beside the road for walking on, but it'll do. Because pavement is tricky.

In the UK you walk on the pavement, but in the US you definitely don't - it's the road surface, for driving on. If you see a sign warning that the pavement is under repair, you'll want to be careful in the car, not on your feet. Don't mix them up.

As an addendum, the black stuff they put on the road is called tarmac (short for tarmacadam) in the Isles*, but asphalt (or blacktop) in the US.

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

And then, there's dirt. To me, dirt is dirty stuff, anything that makes you unclean. But to an American, dirt is the stuff plants grow in. They say soil as well, but that's the fancy word for it. Earth, here, is only the planet, not so much the stuff the planet is made of. 

So when Americans tell their children not to play in the dirt, they don't mean to stop cavorting in the rubbish tip, they just mean not to get mucky.

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

*And, for people from elsewhere, it occurs to me that this quick run-down might be handy:

The British Isles consist of the two islands of Great Britain and Ireland. (Geographical)
The UK consists of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. (Political)
(Great) Britain consists of England, Scotland, and Wales.
The island of Ireland (geographical) is composed of the six counties of Northern Ireland (or simply the North) and the 26 counties of the Republic of Ireland (the South) - (political).

Does that clear everything up? Wikipedia can tell you more, of course.

Backsliding

There has been some backsliding on the night-weaning issue.

I'm embarrassed to admit it, becuase it was going so well. She hadn't had a boob in the middle of the night for so long that I was sure she'd forgotten it was even a possibility. But hey, I was wrong. How 'bout that?

When we were in Chicago, Dash was just getting over his almost-croup, and I was convinced Mabel was about to come down with it. One night she seemed warm, to the kiss test, and I suspected she was running a low-grade fever. She definitely had a cold. She woke up in the night, and I decided to hell with my principles (such as they were, the no-boob principle is always fighting against the why-shouldn't-I principle) and gave her the boob. It sent her back to sleep quickly, it gave her antibodies, it kept her hydrated, it was just the ticket. In the morning her fever was gone and she only coughed a few times.

So I said, "It's only because we're away, and you're sick." "Once we go home, there will be no booboo at night, you know?" I said. "Only in Chicago," I said.

Yeah, right. She'd broken the streak, and she knew it. Also, she's still sick with a very runny nose and a crackly cough that doesn't worry me because it sounds productive, as the pharmacist would say. I have not had a lot of luck denying the midnight boob since we've been back. And I can't tell whether it's because she's found my weakness (you know, liking sleep) or because she really does need it because she's sick. But I'm teetering on the edge of sick myself, with a runny nose and an incipient sore throat that never gets quite bad enough to bother about, and telling the long version of Cinderella at 3am is really not something that appeals to me when I know there's another option.

I do try, though. Last night. Ugh. Last night she woke at some horrible hour and I recounted all of Cinderella (slightly abridged, with breaks whenever I dropped out of consciousness). Then she wailed at me for 20 minutes until I gave her one boob. Repeat for other side, even though she'd promised she'd go to sleep after just the one. (She's like an alcoholic. I wonder has she an addictive personality, perhaps.) Then the other side, or a Mabel story, or I don't remember what. Finally, two hours later, she said she was hungry.

One waffle and one more bloody Mabel story later, she was asleep. For, I dunno, an hour, until it was morning.

I'm a bit tired today. I'll night-wean her again when I have the energy. Don't hassle me, man.

Pop quiz

Dash wanted to give Mabel a little quiz this morning. He wrote

1 + 1 = 

on a piece of paper and gave it to her.

"I'm not sure she wants to do a quiz right now," I said, not wanting him to be disappointed, but trying to protect her from the unreasonable demands of academic life at the same time.

"Mabel, Mabel, what's one plus one?" he asked, undaunted.

Mabel picked up her pencil and scrawled a careful squiggle after the equals sign.

"Mabel, is that a two?" he asked.

"Yes, it's a two."

"You're right!"

Hooray for acing tests. And for brothers who know how to set you up for success.

A Few Good Minutes

Mabel went to a friend's house this afternoon while I took Dash to his dance class. I dropped him off and wandered over to the shops to buy some toothpaste and some cheese. I'm used to being child-free in the mornings, of course, but in the afternoon it's different. I kept thinking I'd forgotten something, someone. I didn't know what to do with my hands, with nobody to hold on to. I greeted passing squirrels, forgetting that lone adults don't usually do that. I felt strange without my small-child armour, distractor, attractor and detractor of attention (to herself and away from me, that is).

We want the peace, but the truth is, we can't handle the peace.

I went into the library and tried to browse the adult side of the room, the side I never usually get to go into, because it's not quite so forgiving of small children chasing each other up and down the bookshelves, twirling on the shiny high stools. But I couldn't concentrate, lacking direction, focus, motivation. The pressure to Make Every Moment Count isn't quite so strong nowadays, since I do spend a couple of hours alone each morning, but idle wandering still feels like wanton frittering.

If only I could take those quiet moments and dole them out to myself when I really need them - this morning at 7am when Mabel was dancing on my head and insisting that I come downstairs, for instance, would have been the perfect moment to really indulge in twenty minutes of alone time. 

What to do when you don't know what to do

Where is the hilarity, you might ask? Where have all the funny conversations gone? Where's the real stuff of life? (Wait, it was just Jimmy Durante asking that one.) I dunno, really.

Mabel has calmed down, a bit, but Dash has ramped up the anger management issues, and it's not so funny when he goes all hulk smash on me, because I can't just hold him at arm's length and let his not-so-little legs windmill around without connecting. They get my kneecaps every time.

This boy has never been physically violent in his life before. Even as a two-year-old, he'd throw things and rip up books but not hit people. So I'm hopeful that this is a phase; I just hope it burns out soon, before somebody gets hurt. And the rage is always directed at us, the parents: at school he's doing wonderfully; everyone else thinks he's the "easy" child - but right now, not so much.

However. As threatened, I took How to Talk so Kids will Listen out of the library, and I think it might just be saving my bacon. I even got B to read the first few chapters, though he's still not as convinced as I am by it - he feels they're presenting a one-sided argument, while I've been totally brainwashed and have decided this is the One True Way. It certainly offers a parenting technique that fits my style and personality, and even now that the initial Come-To-Jesus-ness of it has worn off for me, I'm trying my best to use it, and it's working often enough for me to remain convinced.

If you don't know the book, its basic message is empathetic parenting. That sounds all wishy-washy and lovey-dovey, but they give some examples of how you would feel when things aren't going your way, and people in authority talk down to you, try to coerce you, or ignore you, and I found they really rung true. If I want to teach my children to respect other people and think of their feelings, then I have to start by parenting them that way. The book helps. It gives me tools that I can pass on to them. It tells me what to do when I don't know what to do. I don't know about you, but I really like that in a parenting book.

For instance. At least three times lately I've been faced with a boy who is determined not to give in. Whatever the original issue was, it has come down each time to a refusal to get ready for bed. There is no way to force this with him, and it's very hard to get a graceful exit. Or any exit, come to think of it.

One of the problem-solving techniques in the book is to make a list of options. Even with a non-reader, you say "I'm going to make a list of the things we could do to work this out" and you sit down with a piece of paper and start writing. You list what the child wants, and what you want, and any number of options in between and around about and totally unrelated. Somehow, the act of doing this, giving his plight the weight that a written list denotes, and appearing to (yes, you're allowed pretend) seriously consider what he wants to do, helps ground the crazed beast and draw him into the process. With a little luck, you'll even think of some totally ridiculous options to inject a little levity into the situation.

Then you go through the options together and cross out the ones that aren't acceptable to you, and the ones he doesn't agree with. And eventually, magically, something appears that is not remotely related to the matter at hand, and you write it down and draw a big circle around it and he does it and then the whole thing goes away.

I know. It sounds as if it couldn't possibly work every time. I'm not saying it will. But I am saying that several times now this has got me out of a totally boxed-in corner with Dash. Today I spent an hour asking him to sit down and do his homework. He never did. I told him that he could do double on Thursday (the week's homework is due on Friday; we don't have time for more than one day's worth on Wednesdays), or he could find out what happens when you don't hand in any homework. But either way, he wasn't getting to watch his favourite TV show today, because he didn't do it. He went outside to play after dinner, and when he came in he was under the impression that he could still do his homework and watch his show (on the Internet).

Dash tends to think that time is elastic and that the evening will stretch to fit all the things he wants to do, but bedtime is not so forgiving. When I told him the window on homework, and therefore TV shows, had closed, he had a total meltdown. It wasn't pretty, but he still thought that his will would prevail. Now, I'm a pushover, but not that much of a pushover, and his way was not an option tonight. We were utterly stuck.

I got out my trusty notebook and a pen, and wrote:

How to get Dash to bed

Then I listed some options, like "Watch his show," "Watch a 2-minute snippet of his show," "Go straight to toothbrushing and bedtime stories." I asked for more suggestions: "Watch ten episodes," he said. "Watch 16 episodes." I wrote it all down. "We sit on him until he falls asleep," I added, for good measure. And "Run naked around the house five times," since he was refusing to put on his pyjamas.

We started crossing things out. I had no idea where this was going, because we hadn't yet hit on anything both of us liked. He grabbed my notebook and ran away. I sighed.

Then, out of nowhere, he came up with a new one. "I put on a puppet show of my TV program, and you make a movie out of it [with my camera] and I watch the movie."

"Oookay," I said, "but it has to be all done in five minutes, because we're right up to bedtime now."

"Okay," he agreed. We got the camera. His father set the timer for five minutes. Dash picked up two random objects to be the puppets and started making them talk before I'd even found the movie setting. I filmed until (luckily) the camera memory was full. He watched it play back. And then he put on his pyjamas, brushed his teeth, had two very short bedtime stories, and was done.

It took time and dedication, but we resolved the stalemate without violence, without shouting, without tears. I don't know exactly why it works, but it works. It might just save our sanity.

Charting success

As soon as Mabel started school this year, the immediate challenges that came to light revolved around the bathroom. At school, not unreasonably, they try to get the children to use the bathroom after snacktime. Mabel did not like being told when to go. She, further, did not like the fact that when she went, the teachers wanted her to - most unreasonably - keep her underpants round her ankles and her shoes on her feet. She was used to kicking everything off so she could straddle the seat comfortably, and though I'd tried to instigate some keeping on of stuff before the school year began, because I wasn't exactly blind to the fact that this was going to be an issue, it hadn't really gone down well.

I don't know how this had resolved itself last year, but somehow it wasn't a problem then. She was toilet trained by about March, so she'd clearly spent about three months using the bathroom, or being allowed refuse to use it, in her old classroom without incident. In September, though, - new classroom, new teachers, new people to inculcate in the ways of Mabel; or vice versa.

Mabel and I spent a fraught few mornings before she'd agree to darken the door of the classroom working out some sort of compromise whereby I would tell the teachers that she would go if she needed to, and they wouldn't make her. They agreed, but tried to make her anyway. She refused. Stalemate was reached, but they gradually realised that, like her brother before her, she has a bladder of steel and doesn't need to go all morning.

Meanwhile, though, I thought we should tackle the pants-round-ankles business as soon as possible, and the most direct method seemed to be some form of bribery. A star chart might do the trick, I thought. So I drew a few lines on a piece of paper. While I was at it, I thought I'd add a column for cleaning up, and of course there'd have to be a complementary chart for Dash too, because heaven forefend she have even the prospect of some new thing if he didn't too. Casting about for something to fill the other side of Dash's chart with, I decided maybe he could do some reading practice.

And so, the new chart was affixed to the fridge. Mabel's prize, if she ever tidies up anything again in her life, will be - surprise! - a new baby. Dash filled in his prize suggestions himself, so they might be a little hard to read, but it says "Litsaber" [light saber], "woch" [watch], "new shoes!"

As you can see, the toilet practice was a total success. In fact, after about three days she was happily keeping her knees together (such a lady) and her shoes on, which I'm very pleased about even if she never actually uses these new abilities in school. With winter approaching, it's a good thing in general.

Dash's reading practice also went really well - I told him ten minutes' reading was enough to get a star, and he was totally motivated to pick up a book any time I could sit down with him. Sadly, once those stars were filled in the habit didn't persist, but maybe I can start another one for something else. When he'd finished with the reading stars he started trying to earn clean-up stars as fast as he could, only just stopping short of making a mess in order to be rewarded for cleaning it up. (No need for that. There's always a mess around thanks to his sister's habit of playing with a small subsection of every different thing at once. Though I did have to stop him from cleaning up when she was still in the middle of playing.)

So, on Sunday, the chart reached the dizzying heights you see in the picture, with all of Dash's stars filled in. (Please excuse the crumple marks. Mabel was making her displeasure known one day.) I knew we were in for trouble. Dash spent all morning mooning around asking when we'd be going to Target to buy his new thing. Mabel spent all morning telling me earnestly how it wasn't fair if Dash got a new thing and she didn't. Pointing out that when (when? if ever?) she fills in her side of the chart, she'll get a new thing and he won't, did nothing for me. We did not go en famille to Target for the purchasing of the object; I sent Dash with his father and instructed them to pick up a small item from the $1 section to appease The Unappeasable One.

Dash came home with not a light saber, not a watch, and not shoes, but a new Nerf gun (oh joy); and they brought Mabel a tube of glow bracelets, which kept her happily entranced all afternoon.

So that worked out better than expected. Next chart: back to eating vegetables, perhaps.

Harvest bounty

When I was cooking for myself, all those years ago when I shared a flat in Dublin, I had a basic repertoire of vegetables. Fresh broccoli, red pepper, onions, and mushrooms were about the size of it, with a few tins of tomatoes or beans, and frozen peas, to augment. Along with a protein and a starch, dinner was made, day in, day out, rain or shine, summer and winter. Those were my basics.

Which is fine, but takes no account for the seasons.

I suppose you can argue that in Ireland nothing local is ever in season anyway, except potatoes and turnips and carrots (and parsnips and spinach and kale and cabbages and rhubarb and gooseberries, perhaps), so perhaps that's why it never even occurred to me to try to eat with the seasons. I'm pretty sure my mother bought the same things regardless of the time of year, too - apart from, say strawberries, which were clearly a summer treat, and new potatoes, likewise. (You always got to make a wish when you ate your first strawberries of the year, or the first anything else, it seemed like. It made it special, even if it was gooseberries.)

Anyone American is probably wondering what on earth a gooseberry is right about now. I'm not sure you get them over here, but they're little hard, smooth, light-green berries with stubble on them, and faint stripes running from pole to pole. You stew them with lots of sugar and stick them under a sweet crumble topping and they still make your mouth pucker with the sourness, but somebody somewhere decided they were a fruit and therefore worthy of dessert. They flourish in the Irish climate in the late summer.

It probably wasn't until we were living in Texas that I noticed certain vegetables were cheaper at particular times of year. The asparagus, for instance, was $3.99 a pound until suddenly, in June, I could get it for $1.99 instead. My inner skinflint rejoiced, a friend mentioned that asparagus was delicous when roasted, and suddenly I had a new favourite veg. I began to pay attention. Watermelons and avocadoes were plentiful all year round because we were so far south, but other produce clearly had its moment in the sun (so to speak).

Nowadays I try to get as much of our greenstuff (and red, yellow, pink, orange, and purple stuff) as I can at the local farmers' market, which runs from late May to late November. This year, with extra inspiration from my new best friend Smitten Kitchen, I've been making an effort to cook seasonally. There was the asparagus and the strawberries, the rhubarb (oh happy day) and the corn, the blueberries (we picked our own) and peaches and zucchini (that's courgette) and summer squash.

Picking blueberries in July

This morning's market was bursting with all my favourite things: red peppers, big sweet onions, broccoli and cauliflower, curly kale, heirloom tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, grape tomatoes, roma tomatoes, green, yellow, orange tomatoes; eggplant (that's aubergine) in purple and white, butternut squash, acorn squash, sweet potatoes, and big iconic pumpkins. I didn't buy one of everything, but I bought a bundle.

The last time I was at a farmers' market in Ireland (which was probably also the first time, as they're a bit of a newfangled invention over there), I was delighted - until I discovered that they were selling vegetables grown in Peru and Mexico, to name a couple of venues. It seemed to be more of an outdoor novelty supermarket than what I'd expected - an opportunity for local vendors to sell freshly harvested local produce straight to the customer, cutting out the middleman and passing on both quality and savings. Maybe that's just impossible in Dublin, unless you want a market full of little beyond carrots and spuds. (And great meat, excellent cheese, freshly caught fish... so many opportunities missed.)

So I'm appreciating what we've got here, and enjoying the colours, the flavours, the textures, and the chance to cook with the freshest food I can find. I'll leave the Peruvian asparagus in the supermarket for now.

Diorama drama

Never mind the politics, what happened with the diorama, you want to know. Or maybe you never even heard about the diorama, but here I am to tell you all about it. A few weeks ago Dash struck terror into my parental heart by bringing home his first project assignment - for that most iconic of American elementary-school items: a diorama. 

Now, I had only heard of dioramas in The Simpsons and the like, and never really knew what they were, other than something schoolchildren were required to make. Luckily, Facebook and Google came to my rescue when presented with a requirement for one of our very own, and I soon discovered that for these purposes a diorama is a 3-D scene presented in a small space, for example a shoebox.

As luck would have it, Dash's project was to be just that, and we even had a shoebox in the house already. (Several of my friends suggested that I might have to go out and buy a new pair of shoes in order to get it, and wouldn't that have been just terrible, but no, we were all set. Ah well. Maybe next time.) It was to portray a habitat, and should use recycled materials as much as possible.

I was afraid this marked the beginning of a long career in doing my children's science projects, something I really didn't want to ever get roped into. But Dash, to my delight, seemed to know exactly what he had to do, had a clear vision for his art, and would barely even stop to listen while I read the instructions and gave a little advice. I didn't press him to look at the photos I'd found online, since he obviously knew what he wanted. Apparently all those years of pestering us to "help him" make masks, robot suits, jet packs, Thor's hammers, wings, swords, shields, and rockets out of cardboard boxes were not for naught.

A couple of days later notification of an extended deadline came home, along with a "rubric" for the marking of the diorama. (I can only assume that some of the parents felt they needed more information for their masterpiece.) We were told that two points would be awarded for having the correct plants and animals in the habitat, two each for labelling at least one plant and one animal, two for labelling the whole thing with the name and location of the habitat, and two for neat presentation. Right, then.

So without more ado, and with great pride, I present Dash's first diorama, made entirely by himself, aged almost six-and-a-half, with no help from adults.

The only input I had was suggesting a way to make the butterfly on the top stand up, and remarking that he could write the labels for the plant and animal on white paper and stick them in, to make them easier to read.

Close-up for detail. I didn't say anything about the missing 'n'. I thought it added a nice touch of authenticity. He was so enthusiastic, so certain about exactly what he wanted to do, I was just standing back and staying out of the way, lest I accidentally say anything to break the spell.

I suspect it should say "Rainforest", but what's the diff, really? I may also have helped him spell "South", when asked. Because that's a tricky one.

I happened to be in the classroom yesterday, so I saw all the dioramas on display. I'm pretty sure there was more parental input than just spelling advice on the ones that had printed labels, for example. Sheesh.

Dash's may not have been the neatest, the one with the best writing, the most realistically drawn, the one with everything spelled correctly, or the most beautiful; but by heck it's the best first-grade diorama I've ever seen.

I hope his teacher can see that too.

Blog marching

If you scrutinize this page minutely every time you upload it, as I'm sure you do, you might have noticed a couple of new things recently. For one thing, I changed my ocean waves header to a dappled sky one, which is only a little more autumnal, but until I get a good photo of orange leaves or something, it'll have to do.

For another thing, I joined Twitter. This may or may not turn out to be a good idea. I don't have a fancy phone, so I'm only updating it from my computer, which I'm sure is Not The Point, but oh well. If you'd like to follow me, as I'm told people do over there, I'm @AwfullyChipper. I'll tweet a link to new blog posts, so it's another handy way to keep up to date. (Ooh, note to self: remember to do that.) Also, if you follow me, I'll follow you. Not in a stalkery way, of course.

But most importantly, there's a new logo over there --> proclaiming that I'm a proud member of the Irish Parenting Bloggers group. And so I am. If you're interested in reading some great Irish blogs, click Subscribe and we'll bring all the updates straight to you.

Right now, some of the group have come together to bloggily protest the proposed cuts to the Child Benefit allowance - so let me tell you what's going on with that. Currently, all Irish parents (/guardians/caregivers), regardless of income, are entitled to a certain amount monthly per child - in the same way that parents in the US receive tax relief for their children. The government of Ireland, as you might have heard, is somewhat strapped for cash right now, however, and they're proposing to take some of this benefit away to use it for something else.

At first glance, this seems pretty reasonable. From the US perspective, being paid for your children sounds somewhat - gasp! - socialist. Definitely liberal. Practically - excuse my French - French. Reducing the amount a bit, not taking it all away or anything like that, seems fair enough. Some people are saying it could be means-tested so only the people who really need it will get it.

Well. Lemme explain further. A lot of the election rhetoric in the US at the moment concerns the "squeezed" middle-income segment. The middle-income segment in Ireland is so squeezed right now that you could put it in a glass and call it lemonade. Very bitter lemonade with no sugar.

Now I've never been a parent in Ireland, so I don't really have a dog in this race. I left the country when times were still good, during the boom, before the bust had really got going. I didn't buy a house there, or even think about buying one, when the house prices were insanely high. I got laid off from my cushy IT-sector job, true, but I was planning to emigrate anyway and I got a nice little redundancy package, so that all worked out well. My memories of the children's allowance are of my mother buying me a pair of shoes, or maybe buying herself a pair of shoes, with it. I always thought of it as a nice extra, not something we needed.

But times have changed. Well-educated, fully employed, fiscally responsible adults with children in Ireland nowadays are often counting on that part of their income for more than just an extra pair of shoes. Maybe they're budgeting it for their children's only pair of shoes for the (cold, muddy, Irish) winter, along with their school uniforms and the exorbitantly priced schoolbooks. Maybe it's a vital component of their artificially inflated mortgage for the modest house they own in a regular neighbourhood. It might be the difference between a trip to the doctor and some antibiotics for a five-year-old with strep throat and just waiting it out with honey and lemon. It might just mean they can get dinner on the table every night and pay the electricity bill as well.

Here's the part of the blog post at The Clothesline that really shocked me:

My eldest daughter is on a waiting list for Occupational Therapy. Current waiting times 16 months. A private assessment costs €550. That is 4 months of child benefit I get for her. A private session of occupational therapy costs €80. Two a month and its over the amount of child benefit I receive per month. Our Health Insurance does not cover it.

My son was waiting 17 months for an out patients appointment to see an ENT. His appointment was in August. He was not examined. We queued and queued and saw a doctor who said he would bring my son in for a sleep clinic in the next few weeks. That was two months ago not a word from them since. He is also on a waiting list to see a Optomalogist. Current Waiting time 22 months.  The cost to see a consultant privately – €180. We have seen two at the cost of two months of his Child Benefit payment.

My youngest daughter had a problem with her teeth. She was just shy of two. The HSE dentist said there was nothing they could do. Full stop. Nothing. I asked could we go privately. She said the cost would be in excess of €10,000 as we would need a surgical team. No cover from our Health Insurance. We managed to get her sorted through a different route. The doctors we saw kept telling us how lucky we were that they were seeing her. I don’t think we were lucky at all. I do not think you should have to fight and fight and fight to get a medical appointment for a child under two. A baby.

I always said we'd go home if we could. I always said we're not in the US for ever. But reading the stories I'm reading makes me wonder if we'd be crazy to consider it, even if we had the opportunity. It's slowly dawning on me that maybe this is still the land of opportunity, in many ways. Here in the US, with health insurance, I can take the kids to the doctor for $15 a go, so I take them whenever I'm feeling iffy about something. If I had to pay 50 or 60 euros a time (because Irish health insurance doesn't cover GP visits), that would be a different story.

My son is in public school here, but he has music, PE, and art two to three times a week, with dedicated teachers. He woudn't get those extras in an Irish national (public) school, I suspect. Here, his books are paid for and there's no uniform and no "voluntary contribution", though we do buy school supplies and volunteer for the PTA and contribute to fundraisers. Irish "free" schooling costs a whole lot more. (Though I should add that Irish private schooling doesn't reach the giddy heights of expense it does here either, at primary, secondary, or even university levels.)

If my children needed to be evaluated for speech or developmental delays, or to recieve early intervention therapy, it would happen quickly, and at least some of the services would be freely provided by the county. Not so in Ireland.

The cost of living in Ireland is high, due to its geographical isolation, the climate, the small size of the country, the government taxes on everything... Cars are expensive, gas/petrol costs a lot, you have to heat your house ten months of the year, and the weather's often crap. It's beautiful, the people are lovely, and it's home. When you live there, you just battle on, because you've no choice.

I've never been a parent in Ireland for longer than our annual trips home, which is why I'm not making an official contribution to the "blog march" against cutting the child benefit. But if you're one of my Irish readers, or you're interested, I encourage you to take a look at the posts linked there from the parents this is hitting. What I'm seeing from these bloggers is that the whole system in Ireland - health, education, finance - is broken, and the child benefit allowance is an easy target. The ordinary people of Ireland are pissed off, because the bankers made a mess of the whole economy and every year in the budget, they're made to pay for the fat cats' mistakes.

I have no solution to propose. If I was trying to balance a budget out of nothing at all, maybe this would look like the least bad place to get a few shillings - shillings to put back into something that needs it even more, like the healthcare system, that is.

But my heart hurts for my country and its people - its nice, ordinary, good people - who didn't do anything wrong but will have to pay, one way or another, again.

Postcards from Chicago

 

First, to show you what angelic travellers our children are, here's Mabel on the metro to the airport, listening to some music.

Here she is doing some colouring in her new colouring book (five crayons at a time) while we wait at our gate.

Here are Dash and his father making some paper aeroplanes to pass the time. (Who thought a book of paper aeroplanes were a good idea? More to the point, why do I keep typing "airplanes"? How long have I been in this country anyway?)

Chicago! This gorgeous thing is called Cloud Gate, but known locally as The Bean. For obvious reasons.

 

I took a lot of photos of it. This was close to the middle, underneath, looking up.

At this point Mabel had shed her shoes and socks, of course. That day saw the end of the warm weather, but she spent the rest of the trip refusing to wear a coat and trying to take her shoes off again anyway.

Dash admiring the view from the 96th floor of the John Hancock building. That's Lakeshore Drive, looking north.

On a bus to the Museum of Science and Industry. This photo is much more representative of our trip than any of the others, but you need to add a soundtrack of exasperated parents telling them to leave each other alone and sit quietly and fine do you want to watch another episode of Word Girl on the iPod?

 Dash down a coalmine, because the museum is just that cool.

On the L (the El?), plotting our route to support the runner on the morning of the marathon. Well, no, actually I just gave them the maps to entertain themselves and they were mostly just figuring out how to fold them back up again. (Then I had to tell them how being able to fold a map up properly is a very important disappearing art, like reading a map, for that matter.)

Also, please note that Mabel is sporting tights-as-leggings here, because she refused to put on anything further. I hid her under a blanket in the stroller and when she finally got out, I managed to coax a pair of trousers onto her.

But by then, she was barefoot again. Sigh.

In short, Chicago

I could just sit down for two hours - if I had two hours - and spew out a spool of words about our long weekend in Chicago, but I think I need to use my editorial function a bit more wisely than that. Here, then, are the posts you might or might not be seeing in the future, in no particular order:

The one about how small children don't like going from mild to cold weather in the space of a 40-minute train trip, and will continue to refuse to wear a coat, even when they already have a cough that sounds like one hound of Hell, for days afterwards because if they do not bow to outside influences like parents, what chance does Weather have?

The one with all the photos.

The one about six-and-a-half and whether that's a thing or not, the way three-and-a-half and four-and-a-half are recognised Horrible Stages, because I hope to God this here thing with the 6.5-year-old is a Thing because it's Horrible and it's as if I've just been handed an entirely new child whose ways I have to figure out double-quick before he kills us all or vice versa, which I was not expecting, frankly.

The one about how we nearly didn't go at all because Dash nearly had croup, and then on Saturday night I was convinced that instead of supporting the marathon runner the next morning we'd probably be busy taking Mabel to the emergency room because she coughed twice and that was enough, but it all turned out okay in the end except for that one other little coughing fit that made the nice airline lady come and tell me about her granddaughter who had a cough that sounded exactly like that and it turned out to be pneumonia, and then I felt like I was the one getting pneumonia for the next hour, but then she didn't cough again and now they're both back at school praise be to the holy deities.

The one about how getting a suite instead of just a room with two beds really didn't make any difference because Dash refused to sleep with Mabel so it was still one adult and one child to a bed and the door in between was quite pointless though I suppose maybe I was spared some sounds of snoring, perhaps.

The one about how your priorities have to change from getting decent food into them to getting any sort of food into them because when you're away from home and held hostage to the hotel restaurant and the crappy little hotel gift shop full of cookies and dollar-fifty apples you just need the children to eat and suddenly a plate of french fries sounds like a perfectly good dinner option if he would only damn well eat it when it's there rather than refusing it and getting hungry half an hour later.

The one about how parenthood changes you because when the small child asks you if there's a bathroom on this train, instead of holding her out at arm's length, you hold her closer on your lap and wonder how bad your jeans will look if they get soaked with pee; but how happy I was - I cannot express just how happy - that she managed to hold it in every time and make it to the bathroom so my jeans were unscathed and so was Chicago's public transport system.

The one about how all American cities look the same at first until you look a little closer and get to know them, but all airports really do occupy the same unchanging point in time and space and it makes no difference where you are because it's like being in a vortex of expensive food choices and pleasingly sanitary bathrooms until you finally get to leave. But Mabel won't keep her shoes on there either.

----

I think I'll just do the photos.

Bring out your boobs

It's National Breastfeeding Week in Ireland, and once again I'm shocked by the statistics. Reading this article in the Irish Times, the basic takeaway is this part:

Just over half of mothers currently initiate breastfeeding in Ireland compared with 81 per cent in the UK and in the region of 98 per cent in Nordic states such as Sweden, Norway and Denmark.

What's going on?  Are Irish maternity practices that different from those of the UK? (Yes, I think they are.) But according to the finding cited later, that after a month, "women who gave birth in hospitals where there is a particular breastfeeding culture are no more likely to breastfeed than other women,"  that's not really where the problem lies.*

I think it's entirely about peer pressure. You do what your friends do. You don't want to be the weird one. You assume that what's "normal" is the most "right". The Irish psyche is also deeply suspicious of things that authority figures tell us to do. We're a lot more likely to listen to our friends than the experts or the media, at least when it comes to deciding how we're going to behave. We have a healthy scorn for experts.

In the comments on that article, several people mentioned that Irish mothers want to get back to the pub. They don't want to be tied to an infant, and they don't want to have to moderate their alcohol intake for an indefinite length of time. The idea of six more months without a pint or a (good) few glasses of red, after a whole nine months of self-denial already, is horrendous to your average Irish mother. Is that really true? Is it because the Irish doctors take the more USA-ian approach of no alcohol at all while pregnant or nursing rather than a Continental attitude of a little is fine? Or do Irish doctors know that "a little" is not an option once an Irishwoman goes out drinking?

On balance, I'd like to think this isn't true. The Scandinavian nations where breastfeeding rates are highest are not exactly known for their abstinence from hard liquor. The Swedes party hard, I'm told. But they are probably able to exercise a modicum of self-control too, and I imagine if the breastfeeding culture in Ireland was more like that in Sweden, Irish mothers would find that they could, let's see

• have one drink and stop
• have a few drinks once in a while and offer formula that evening instead
• pump enough to have a backup stash in the fridge for the babysitter to offer while you're out on the batter, and for you to give while you're still a little worse for wear once you get home

or even

• discover that it's no fun trying to care for an infant when you have a hangover, and realise that moderation might be a good thing

Lots of options there. Not having a drink is not enough of a reason not to breastfeed; but from the point of view of a first-time pregnant woman who's dying to get her life back and doesn't understand that her life is about to be irrevocably changed anyway, it might look like one. By the time the baby's out she's already told everyone that she's not going to do it, and bought the bottles and the formula, and made a date for her first girls' night out, there's no going back, so she goes forward, and there's one more baby who didn't even get a chance at the colostrum, one more set of potential siblings who probably won't either, one more bottle-feeding mother out there not changing the public perspective on what's "normal".

Yes, yes, there are many people who really really wanted to breastfeed, and it didn't work out. I'm not talking about them. I'm talking about the almost 50% who decided beforehand that they weren't even going to think about it, because it's weird. Or because it's not what anyone they know does.

If nobody ever does, then nobody ever will. Simple as that. Are we all sheep, Irishwomen? I'd like to think not. Don't just do what your friends are doing. Find out for yourself. Remember, in the immortal words of L'Oreal, you're worth it. And so is your baby.

Mind the Baby has some words to say about the week here. Coincidentally, since she talks about the PR campaign, my own post linked at the top of the page described my imaginary advertising campaign aimed at the Irish market. Perhaps we should add one that just says, "Why breastfeed? So your friends will too." Maybe it's just that simple.

*Although higher rates of intervention are statistically linked with lower rates of initiating breastfeeding, so it does have something to do with it.

Dessert diaries

Apparently I didn't get the memo. My own memo. The one about laying off the muffins. Or else I did, but perhaps I'm working to rule, since while I haven't baked any muffins recently, the house is certainly suffering from a surfeit of baked goods. I didn't mean to, honest guv, but somehow it was incumbent upon me and here they all are.

First there was a brownish banana that had to be used up, just when a friend had serendipitously posted a recipe for banana cookies. (They turned out very cakey, which made them oddly like individual blobs of banana bread, but today I put them in a warm oven for a while and they've crisped up quite nicely. Mabel likes them, anyway. Dash is anti-banana, even in cookies.)

Then on Friday Dash was off school so I took him to IKEA where he had chocolate milk and I bought things, enjoying the ability to look at stuff without fearing Mabel would be sending a display crashing to the ground. As we left, though, he was lobbying for a cinnamon bun, and I rashly said, "Let's go home and bake cookies instead." So then he got to choose what sort, and - a boy of excellent discernment - he picked chocolate chocolate chip.

It's nice to bake with just one, because if they're both home everyone fights over who got how many turns stirring and then one grabs a pen and scribbles on my shopping list and the other wants to spill sugar so he can "clean it up" and in no time at all I'm yelling at them both to just go away and watch tv and leave me alone. This was better, and we even did some math when scooping the cookie dough, to find that four rows of four make sixteen. Plus another four meant that he knew exactly how many cookies had been made, minus one each when they'd cooled down, and by the time Daddy came home the number was carefully recorded and yet mysteriously the next day there were fewer than 16 left in the tin, so SOMEBODY must have had more than one that evening.

Yesterday was Sunday, and since I was making a nice dinner (or at least, a dinner) I got carried away and bought some rhubarb, took some strawberries out of the freezer, and put together a crumble. We didn't have any cream, or ice cream, which would have been ideal with it, but we managed somehow. Half of it is still in the fridge.

And then today I had promised to bring a baked good of some kind to the "Meet your committee" night at the nursery school, so I made blueberry boy-bait. Except all my blueberries turned out to be blackberries. Nobody seemed to mind, and they all made appreciative noises, through the crumbs.

Of course, the mere fact that I baked these things doesn't mean I had to eat copious quantities of any or all of them.  On the other hand, I'm not made of stone, people. And quality control is important. And I did go for a run on Sunday morning, where I probably ran as much as an entire mile. And fruit is good for you.

Today I picked up some vanilla ice cream. The kids are in bed and I just folded a huge pile of laundry.

Draw your own conclusions.