Live and let die

As we rounded the gentle curves of Dublin's M50 this afternoon, death was on the children's minds. In the abstract, probably because we visited an old graveyard in Waterford two days ago and pottered around reading the interesting headstones in the almost-rain.

(Personally, I liked this one, which went off in a big old name-dropping tangent about her brother who had sailed with Captain Cook, even though he wasn't buried there at all:

[This Stone was Erected in memory of M[iss] Mary Dinn of Passage E. a mark of her burial ground and in memory of her Father Nicholas, her Mother [indecipherable], her Brother Martin, her Sisters, particularly of her brother William Dinn (alias Doyle) who sailed round the globe with Capt. COOK  and was present at the death of that Great Circumnavigator at [illegible] and who died respected and regretted at Stoke near Devonport in England in June 1840 (?), having spent a long life as a warrant Officer in the Service of his Country.]

)

(Speaking of tangents. Ahem.)

This weekend I travelled the length and breadth of half the small country for bloggy meetups, wherein I was lucky enough to meet some of the Lovely Irish Bloggers (not their real name) and put names to faces and faces to blogs for Musings of a Hostage-Mother, Mind The Baby, Mama.ie, Proper Fud, and the currently-on-hiatus And My Baby.

As we drove back from today's assignation, during which my most accommodating spouse had taken the children to IKEA, because why not, it's like a little home from home with ice cream, we listened to the Bond theme tunes CD I had put on in the car as a tiny nod to his great service to the blogger good. So at the start of each track - or preferably just before the start, since they were playing in film order - he would announce to us all which song it would be and by what artist.

(You know the way some fathers wait impatiently for the day they can show their sons (or daughters) Star Wars? Well, Dash has seen all six Star Wars movies (in original airing order), but what his father is really waiting for is the day when they can both sit down and appreciate the full oevre of Connery through Craig, including Lazenby for completeness.)

In between these public service announcements, the children posed the following tricky questions:

Mabel: How do the dead people get into the coffins?

Dash: So, do people who go to church believe in ghosts except that they all exist in another universe?

The first was more easily answered than the second, which I think we are still working on.



(Edited after first posting to correct the date of death on the gravestone to a much more likely century. Sorry about that.)

Frequent rainbows

I always have Good Hair in Ireland. My skin feels softer, I wore my contact lenses two days running without my eyes shrivelling up and falling out, and when I made lemon scones for yesterday's brunch - even though the tablespoon measure I used turned out to be not-a-tablespoon and I had to chuck in a load more flour to soak up the extra milk - the dough was soft and dreamy to work with and the scones turned out perfectly.

No wonder people want to live here, is what I'm saying. Near-constant rain is a small price to pay for eternal youth and forgiving dough. And to be honest, today is the first day of actual soakage, precipitation-wise. A few drops fell when we were at a playground the other day and we started to head for the shops, but I noticed that all the local children didn't budge, and after a few minutes' dalliance by the park fountain, the drops had ceased and everyone was back on the swings.

Today, in contrast, is one of those days that just looks grey until you focus on the middle distance as you look out the window and the steady tiny drops resolve themselves like a magic-eye picture and you realise that it's lashing. It's the wetting-est rain, this stealth rain - not a torrential downpour as we might get in America, but a constant, fine mist just on the falling side of gravity, sometimes driven sideways by the wind. This qualifies as a filthy day, with no innuendo necessary.

Rain is forecast for the rest of the week, which is about right, since we're heading down the country (out of town, as you might say) for a little extended-family getaway for a couple of days. I had hoped for walks on the beach, but not in the rain.

And then I went upstairs to find something and got sidetracked by a leftover scone or two, and the rain stopped and a big wodge of blue appeared in the sky and Mabel called me into the bathroom to show me the beautiful rainbow. She's never seen a rainbow before, because they're a much rarer phenomenon in the US, and also because when you tell a four-year-old to look over there while you're driving and you see something interesting, they don't find the right direction for ten minutes and by then it's long gone.

I'm sure there's a metaphor in here somewhere.

Dispatches

I think we're finally on Irish time now, after five days in the country.

The night before last was terrible as both children apparently overcorrected and set themselves to some middle-eastern time zone (Afghanistan was my best guess) by getting up for the day at 4am. I spent half an hour or so trying to convince them both to go back to sleep and an uncomfortable hour as the ham in a Dash-and-Mabel-bread sandwich (so I suppose I should say peanut butter) trying to keep them both in bed, but at 5.30 I threw in the towel and sent them to wake their father. Then I went back to bed till nine.

[I decided lately, in some sleep-deprived haze or other, that exceptional people are always challenging as children. My children will clearly be very exceptional when they're done. If I don't do for them first.]

But anyway. This morning they waited till daylight to wake up (and that's some achievement when day doesn't break till after 8am), so I'm pronouncing us cured. I expect no more sleep problems for the rest of our trip. (I am also expecting a Rolls Royce and a fully staffed Greek island for Christmas. Yup.)

I have finished my shopping and wrapped all my presents, and they are reposing in the big suitcase they arrived in because I'm afraid to put anything too tempting-looking under the tree. We saw three sets of carol singers today, as well as the live crib (two donkeys, two sheep, and a goat - no actual humans), and have not yet been rained on, though we've narrowly avoided it a few times.

After three days, the British (and sometimes Irish) voices on the TV no longer jar to my ears, and now watching an American film (School of Rock at the moment) I can hear the American accents clearly. When we're in the US they just blend in to normal, because there's never any counterpoint. (No wonder you people think everyone else's accents are cute. You never hear them unless you're watching Love, Actually.)

Dash refuses to change his watch to Irish time. He informs us at regular intervals what time it is in America. Sometimes he then counts up the extra five hours to tell us what time it is here too. Possibly he's afraid America won't still be there to go back to if he insults it by ignoring its time.

Titles are for people who've had more sleep

Jetlag. Bullet points. Two things that go together like jaffa cakes and a cuppa.

• Irish dishwashers should be made with double the normal capacity on the top shelf, to accommodate all these cups of tea people keep drinking. Or making and forgetting to drink. Somebody get on that, and don't forget to cut me in on the royalties, 'kay?
• We'd hardly been in the country half an hour before Dash asked me "Why does everyone keep saying 'Thanks a million'? Why does Daddy keep saying it?" He also asked B why he kept calling him Ted. I think someone was returning to his native idioms a bit hastily.
• I'll have to explain the Ted thing for 95% of my audience, won't I? Maybe tomorrow.
• Travelling was a breeze, except for the A-1 idiot rookie mistake I made of checking the stroller through with our cases. Mabel had been walking the whole time, pulling her little blue butterflies-and-hearts case adorably, and I saw no reason why that should change. (Doh.) As soon as the case went away on the big black conveyer belt of PleaseGetThatBackToMeLater, of course, she turned around to me and said "Pick meeeee uuuuuuup."
• We always gate-check the stroller. It's why we have a stroller. I don't know what I was thinking. Blame the euphoria of getting to the airport on time in spite of catching our Metro (to the bus to the airport) with literally, I am not being hyperbolic here, seconds to spare. 

[Mabel is playing just out of my line of sight. Every now and then I hear her exclaim "Jesus!"(more like Cheezuz, but whatever), and then I remember that she's playing with the tiny figures in her aunt's crib/creche/nativity that's set up inside the front door. So that's entirely appropriate. At least, until I find out what she's done with the donkey, I suppose.] Ooh, risque Christmas humour. Do I dare?

• Somehow, I have lost an earring, which is very annoying because I only have the one pair. And now I only have the one. It's either on the plane, or in an airport, or in any of the three beds I was sleeping in at one point last night, or on the sofa where I was also "sleeping" while Mabel was wide awake at 1am. 
• The children took turns to be awake last night, which was lovely for them, I'm sure, but not so much for me. Sleep went like this (you probably don't need this much information, but I have to download it from my brain somewhere):
  - On the plane: 3 hours for Mabel, 2 hours for Dash, about 20 minutes for me, none for B. (He never sleeps on planes.)
  - After we arrived (at 5am local time): Big nap for Mabel, medium-sized nap for me, small nap for B, no nap for Dash, who refused to be tired but got progressively crazier and crazier. High on coke and speed, as his father said. At 3.30 we got into the car and Dash conked out in five minutes. We brought him home and put him to bed, where he stayed ...
  - At bedtime: Mabel went to bed at 8pm (very reasonable), I followed not to long afterwards, around 9.30, maybe.
  - In the middle of the night: Mabel woke at midnight, starving. I fed her two pieces of bread with butter and a potato waffle, and after two more trips downstairs, to the bathroom, etc, she finally went back to sleep around 1.30am. Maybe.
  - ... and then, what felt like a  moment later, Dash woke up. It was actually 4.30, so I suppose 13 hours of sleep was pretty reasonable, but I was sort of not enthused to see him just then. I fielded him till 5.15 and then handed over to his father and went back to bed until 9am.

• So things should improve from here, right?

Most people are good

I think it's a form of survivor's guilt that makes it so hard to turn off the coverage of tragedy. We think that perhaps if we steep ourselves in the information, in every tiny gleanable detail, we can take on some of the sorrow, maybe bear some of the brunt for the people who are hurting the most.

Or maybe we're looking for some detail that will make it turn out to be not so bad as we had thought. Some tiny panacea for our global pain.

Well, this time it was so bad, and no amount of detail is going to fix things. Knowing more about the tragedy is not going to help me deal with it, and trying to imagine how it must have been is not going to improve matters. There's no common quota of tears - by shedding my own I'm not helping someone else shed less. Everyone is crying.

I'm only looking at the news once or twice a day, and not clicking on a headline unless it really has new information. It was only last night that I saw the names and the ages and the fact that they were first-graders, and as soon as I did, I scrolled quickly on because I couldn't immerse myself in those details. They were all Dash. They were all my son the first-grader. People keep saying "They were babies," but because he's my eldest I know that they were big kids, with new teeth, and bright ideas, and responsibilities, and far more understanding of the world than we give them credit for.

And I'm not going to tell my first-grader about what happened, if I can possibly help it. He'll say "Could that happen in my school?" and then I'd have to lie and say "No, they have procedures and checks and sign-ins so that people can't come in if they're not supposed to." And then he'd say "Well, didn't they have those things at that school?"

What can we do? We can demand gun control, we can campaign for better mental health services. And we can turn off the news - not because we don't care and not because we're unfeeling, but because life has to go on, where life is there to do it.

Most people are good. Most people are healthy. Most people are sane. We have to keep believing that. It has to be true.

****

I'll be offline for a while because we're travelling tomorrow. Back soon with cheerful stories of flying with children and holiday hi-jinks.

Obligatory

On a day like this, I don't really want to blog about it. I don't have anything original to say. I don't want to pretend that my feelings are anything special, or that I have words that can help. I don't. I'm just one more parent scrolling through a Facebook feed that's filling up with advice on how to talk to your children about tragedy, wishing it would go back to being an ordinary Friday the way it was this morning. But I blog most days - to skip it today seems like shirking, and to talk about something else would be unfeeling. So I have to talk about it.
 
When something bad happens, my instinct is to distance myself from it as much as I can, so that I can believe it would never happen to me. It's in a different part of the world, a different country, a different area, at a place I would never be, happening to people who couldn't be me.

I'm pretty sure this is human nature, to convince ourselves that we're safe even if others aren't. They weren't just unlucky, they were in some more inherently risky environment. They live near a volcano, on a fault line, in the tropics, in a place where bad things happen. Not here.

Today's tragedy didn't happen here, but my list of reasons why it couldn't are dwindling. It happened in a nice town near a big city, on this side of the country, not a million miles away. It happened to children in an elementary school; just the sort of elementary school my son attends.

My intitial gut reaction was that we should go back to Ireland. My second was that homeschooling would be the safest option. (I have nothing against the school system. I don't blame the school, in any way. I just felt that if these things are happening in schools, then I don't want my kids to be there.)

I have no intention of homeschooling and we're probably not moving back to Ireland any time soon. Terrible things happen, no matter how much you try to protect your loved ones. I could homeschool my children on Achill Island, and they could fall off a cliff instead.

The people in my town went through a terrifying time ten years ago when the so-called "Beltway sniper" was shooting very close to here. I can't imagine the stress of bringing your children to school, putting gas in your car, getting off a bus - and knowing that someone doing exactly that had been picked off by a gunman lying in wait, just a few miles away. That went on for weeks. Anyone who lived here then can't even put up my feeble "It would never happen here" defense - they know better.

I don't know what an optimist is supposed to say today.

********

But you can go here and shed a few tears for a joyful reason, maybe, and think that the world isn't so bleak after all.

Chapters

A few weeks ago I volunteered at the elementary school's Scholastic book sale, to help the younger children note down which books they wanted their parents to shell out for and stop the older ones making off with the keychain minifigs attached to the front of a few most-sought-after volumes. In between deluges, I perused the small selection of books aimed at the parents and teachers: a slow-cooker cookbook, a multi-columned calendar that claimed to solve all my problems, and some books about how to raise readers.

Mostly, I shun parenting books these days, having had my fill when Dash was a baby and I was still convinced that somebody, somewhere, had had this model before and had helpfully published the manual. Once I figured out that this wasn't going to happen, I became bitter and cynical and decided to take all my advice from trusted figures and random strangers on the Internet instead, because that seemed much less stressful. But as the kids get older, we're moving into new territory, and since I really do want to raise readers - after all, I was one, and I thought it was great - I leafed through this particular tome with some amount of interest.

A heading caught my eye - something about why children should be reading (or have read to them) chapter books. Why should they, I wondered? Apparently it's ideal for helping train their memories to recall what's gone before and predict what might come after - all the skills they need for analytical reading later on. All righty, then. But I had tried starting Charlie and the Chocolate Factory with Dash a year or so ago, and he just hadn't had the attention span. I'd mostly forgotten about it since, and our library haul continued to be a stream of not-too-long, nicely illustrated picture books that would keep the attention of both 6- and 4-year-old, as well as one or two mind-bendingly tedious Dora or Diego books and maybe a Star Wars easy reader to entice Dash to practice.

But most nights now, Mabel goes straight to bed before Dash's storytime - I try to do some reading with her around lunchtime instead. So keeping the four-year-old's interest doesn't really need to be in the mix. And having seen the piece about chapter books, one night a couple of weeks ago when I was doing bedtime by myself, I asked Dash if he'd like us to start Charlotte's Web.

"Is that the one about the spider?" he asked.
"Yes. Do you know about it?"
"I know what happens. The spider dies at the end. Daddy told me."

Okay. I'm not sure how, but for some reason the denoument of the children's classic had slipped out on the way to school one morning. Dash didn't mind, and was willing to start the book anyway. (I think it's easier for him if the stress of the unknown is tempered a bit.) I opened the paperback copy that I had picked up second-hand some time in the dim and distant past when I was ten or eleven. (Or younger: I think I remember my Dad reading it to me and doing the voices. So maybe I was seven.) The pages are yellowed and a bit crispy, and the cover has been so creased that it's smoothly wrinkled all over, but it's perfectly functional. There are line drawings every few pages, which helps the novice chapter-book reader.

All the same, I was surprised when Dash was still listening at the end of the first chapter, which to my mind was not all that thrilling and contained some puzzling references. I remember being a little mystified by the school bus, since we didn't have those in Ireland - not that that's a problem for Dash - and finding the brother's name, Avery, very odd. The mid-century rural American setting was almost as unfamiliar to Dash's ears as it had been to my suburban Irish ones thirty years earlier, but he didn't seem to mind. I quizzed him gently at the end of each part to make sure he was following along, and with some prompting it seemed he had gleaned the main points. So we continued.

I read it for two nights and then his Dad took over. Dash started telling me what was going on in the farmyard every day. From my place beside Mabel, as she dropped off, I could hear B in Dash's room doing the voices just the way my Dad used to - the goose and the rat and Mister Zuckermann and everyone else.

They finished Charlotte a few nights ago and started straight into Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - the copy I'd had the foresight to bring, with its sequel, from my bedroom bookshelves in Dublin one or two trips ago. (My bedroom remains, for now, just as it always was, and functions as a handy library for my Dad, who picks up some obscure required literature from my English degree every now and then and milks it for every drop of Victorian wisdom. Nobody looks at all the books that are my real treasures: the small shelf of young-adult fiction right beside the bed. I'm keeping them all for Mabel.)

Charlie proved so exciting that B had to read six chapters on the first night. Dash didn't want to go to sleep that night, begging to find out what was going to happen next:

"Just tell me, Mummy, does he get to go to the chocolate factory?"
"Listen. It's a book called Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Do you think it's all about how a boy called Charlie didn't get to go to a chocolate factory?"
"Oh. Good point. .... But does he get to go?"

I put his mind at ease on that point and he finally went to bed.

Can you imagine what the suspense will be like when we start with Harry Potter? And how soon can we do that, do you think? I have the box set (UK editions, of course) at home, and I can bring it over any time...

Words per minute

More times than I should admit to, I sit down here and have no idea what I'm going to end up saying. Sometimes it works out, other times not so much. Sometimes just sitting and typing will trigger a thought that turns into a decent post, and then I go back and delete all the drivel at the top that got me to it, and ta-da! it looks as if I had a plan all along.

If you don't know what to blog about, but you're fairly good at typing, I recommend it. (I'm not sure how it would work if I had to hunt and peck for each letter - my brain-to-finger motion is pretty seamless at this point.)

Though really. My mother had 60 words per minute on an old-fashioned typewriter, not even an electric one at first; probably with a sheet of carbon paper underneath and working from shorthand dictation. If I didn't have a Delete key up there within easy reach of my right little finger, this would be a whole 'nother ballgame. She was a proper secretary, like the sort they had in Mad Men. (I wonder if she's ever seen Mad Men? Must ask her. I bet she'd love the clothes but she'd spend her whole time telling me how it wasn't like that in The Bank.) (There is more than one bank in the country, but apparently not when you worked there. Everyone, according to my mother - that is, all the unmarried ladies in Dublin - either worked in The Bank or Guinness's. That's just how it was in the 60s. They were also all in either the tennis club or the golf club.)

I've used one of those old typewriters - my mum still has one at home in its own lovely wooden case. You have to bash down each key with the force of a concert pianist going for broke on Beethoven's Ninth, and you have to sit up straight and hold up your wrists too. None of this slouching over the kitchen table with my elbows all noodly, like I'm doing now. And I imagine it would be pretty hard to take your typewriter to bed with you and type on your knees, cosily wrapped up in a dressing gown, as I have been known to do. The people who habitually blog while on the loo would have a bit of a problem too, even leaving aside the problem of how to connect your manual typewriter to the Internet and how you might insert a hotlink.

I suppose what I'm getting to is that blogging is so much a product of this time, and I imagine it will be superseded by something new and improved in a few years, so that our children will read about it in the footnote of a history book and say "Oh yes, my mother used to do that," and they'll wonder how we managed when life was so hard and laptops were so unwieldy and you had to use all the fingers of all your hands to put words on a screen. Maybe they'll all be vlogging, or they'll attach electrodes to their brains and mind meld, and the whole Internet will be In Your Mind all the time...

If I had lived in any other century - or other few decades, I suppose - I might have filled diaries with my blathering, but I'd more likely just not have bothered. Blogging gives me a tiny, supportive audience - just enough to keep me writing, not so much that they become critical and put me off. The fact that I'm just one of bazillions of bloggers means that if someone doesn't want to read what I'm saying, they can easily go elsewhere. No harm, no foul; no money or time wasted; no skin off my nose. I get the validation that keeps me writing, I get the creative outlet and outside connection I need in these years when former at-home mothers would be isolated and inward-looking (back to Mad Men, and I've only seen the first season so don't go spoiling me). I get to feel like a writer, without all that character-building, soul-destroying rejection that "real" writers have to go through.

Because if you write, you're a writer. If you write for an audience, you're a writer. If you write a blog, or a book, or on the back of a napkin, you're a writer. If you write because there are words inside and you want to get them out, on paper or on a screen, or somewhere in between, you're a writer.

I blog because I want to write, and this is where I get to do it.

Unshopping

Now is the time on Sprockets when we blog...

That is, the children are wending their way to sleep and I am off duty, so I'd better come up with the goods. Whatever they might be.

Earlier I tried to tempt Dash to do his homework, or at least think about his homework. I called out to him from the kitchen as I figured out something to make plain pasta and chicken a little more grown-up for me and B. "I'm not on the menu," he replied.

I had to laugh. I'm not sure I'm ready for such a smart-arse kid, but it beats yelling, I suppose.

****

I don't usually go in for reverse shopping, (as I believe Marian Keyes called it, though maybe she's not the only one), but this morning I got a great sense of satisfaction and freedom out of returning two items I'd bought and regretted.

The first were the red jeans I got at the start of the month. I tried and tried, I really did. I got things to go with them, which I still like and will wear with other things. I readjusted my sensibilities and recalibrated my whatsits and learned to love my hips even when they weren't balanced by big wedges of fabric flapping comfortingly round my ankles (and soaking up the rain from the ground at every wintery opportunity). I thought I could make them work. I was sure the answer lay in the footwear.

Last week I got a lead on a pair of boots. On Sunday, I bought them. They were on sale, and I had a coupon, and they looked exactly like the boots I needed to go with the jeans. They were even comfortable, which is quite a miracle where my feet are concerned. It was meant to be. I was delighted.

Then I came home and put on the jeans and the boots. (No, I hadn't worn the jeans to go shopping. What sort of sensible person do you take me for? For one thing, I couldn't because I didn't have the right boots to... oh, yeah.) And I was underwhelmed. In fact, I was pretty sure that this wasn't even just not a great look, this was a downright undesireable look. I looked kind of, well, I have to say, skanky. And not in a good way. Not in a sexy way. Just in a "She shouldn't have worn that" way.

So I came to the conclusion that if you have to try so hard to make something look right, it's not going to. The jeans were an unflattering fit to begin with, but just because they were less unflattering than some others I have tried, and because I loved the colour, and they were a good price, I made an impulse buy. Usually, my MO is to spot something I like, mull it over, decide I wanted it after all, go back and find it's left the shop, and spend the next three months searching in vain for something similar. When you find something that's right, you should buy it, but I obviously misinterpreted "right" in this case.

So this morning I brought back the jeans and the boots. (Amazingly, I was able to locate the receipt for the jeans.) The nice ladies gave me my money back and I continued on my way with a feeling of freedom and lightness heretofore known only in tampon ads.

The world is my oyster! I can start again! I have fifty-two dollars (woohoo!) back in my wallet and some other poor mug can buy those jeans, and those boots, and I wish them the best with them. They'll probably know better than to try to wear them together.

So I still don't know what I'm wearing for Christmas, but I think I'll be looking more like me in whatever it turns out to be.

Dental

This evening, as Dash was telling me something at close range, I found myself thinking that his teeth used to be a bit more even along the bottom row than they looked now.

"Do you have a wiggly tooth?" I asked him.
"No," he said.
I put my finger on the tooth and gently rocked it back and forth.
"Yes you do!"

He was thrilled. He spent the next twenty minutes wiggling it cautiously with his finger and telling me how he didn't want to wiggle it all the way out. Not yet.

"I'm really getting old," he told me at bedtime. "Now I'm almost six and three-quarters and I'm getting glasses and I have a wobbly tooth."

I'm fine with him being six and a half, but that's it for now. He's not six and three-quarters till the end of next month. I'm definitely not ready to have a seven-year-old.

I remember seven. I was in second class. Our teacher, Miss O'Sullivan, was twenty-one and fresh out of teacher-training college, and she was trendy and wore jeans and played the guitar. She taught us songs from Jesus Christ Superstar and she would eat an orange peel and all. I don't remember learning anything much apart from "... red and yellow and pink and orange and BLUE!" (that's Joseph's amazing technicolour dreamcoat), but those were the salient points. In a school where the principal was still an old-fashioned scary nun in a long, black habit (but not a wimple; I'm not that old), and where our previous teachers had been at least our own mothers' ages if not older, Miss O'Sullivan was something new and exciting.

I don't really remember losing my baby teeth, though. At least, bits and pieces, but not the first, not what it was like to be missing my two front teeth, not how sharp and big the new ones must have felt in my mouth when they came through. Not any of the things you'd think I'd remember.

I do remember how it felt to rock a tooth with your tongue, further and further, until it was holding on by a thread so that you could take it between your finger and thumb and twist it around, and then really the only decent thing to do was just give it a quick yank and put it out of its misery. I think I remember that. And I remember how it felt to gingerly probe the bloody, congealing hole with your tongue - but that memory might be due to all the teeth I had pulled before they put my braces on. That was a lot later, when I was 14.

I remember a note from the tooth fairy, who had forgotten to come, or didn't have any change and had to give me an IOU, or something. But this was later too, when I knew who the tooth fairy was, so I wasn't surprised that her handwriting and her little flower sketch looked so much like my dad's handiwork. (I think that was the same year Santa left me a note because I'd changed my list at the eleventh hour. Poor Santa couldn't keep up.) I don't remember the thrill of finding whatever the fairy had left for me earlier on, when I must have believed, when I lost the first few teeth. I don't know if I got 10p or 50p, but I think probably 10. Only very flaithúlach* tooth fairies would give out 50p pieces, and this was well before the introduction of the would-have-been-handy 20p coin.

We'll do the fairy, of course, when the time comes, even though Dash delights in telling me in a stage whisper that he knows it's really the parents. He's a stickler for tradition, as am I, and certain rituals must be followed.

And I imagine I'll end up keeping all the fairy spoils, and eventually find myself wondering what to do with them, as happened to a friend recently. If you look in the comments there, you'll see I provided her with a nice - and totally fabricated - alternative option. Maybe I should follow my own advice.


*Generous, to the point of rashness, perhaps. Pronounced "fla-hool-ock".

A slideshow and a cautionary tale

Mabel and I played with PhotoBooth yesterday. Then I spent all this evening wrestling with iPhoto and iMovie to turn the photos into a slideshow I could put here, and to turn off the damn Ken Burns effect. (If you have no idea what this is, you're lucky. I hope you don't have to find out.)

So you can think of this as a whole bunch of mummy mugshots, and it's not even Monday. It's true I'm reluctant to put myself on my blog; not from any sense of anonymity (seriously, if someone I knew in real life happened upon my blog without my sending them there, I'd be more chuffed than miffed; it's very unlikely to happen) but more because I think my kids are cuter than I am.

Still, it's always easier to smile for the camera when you have a prop, and Mabel and a miniature My Little Pony make good props.

********

In contrast to the past few days, the most exciting thing I did today was to park incredibly badly.

Three o'clock struck in the Chipper household, which meant it was time to swoop out the door with Mabel in the stroller and pick Dash up from school. But no! Mabel ran the wrong way, hopped on the loo, and demanded a game of Who Am I? Which meant she was there for the long haul.

"But Mabel," I pleaded, "we have to get Dash."
"I'm doing a poo."

Five minutes and one very misleading game of Who Am I? later, I realised we would be driving to school. It's only two minutes up the road in the car. Eventually, Mabel was done, hands were washed, shoes were on, baby cheetahs were wrapped up in blankies, and we were on our way. We weren't really late, but it's my only excuse for what was to follow.

Usually, you see, I pride myself on my parallel parking. It's not fabulous, really, because I don't get nearly the amount of practice I used to when I could shoehorn my wafer-thin mint of a car into a space the size of a postage stamp in the middle of Dublin city, and I was never anything like as good as my best friend, who would leave herself with about an inch leeway at both ends in double-quick time, but compared to most Americans, I'm pretty decent.

More importantly, I'm better at it than my husband, usually. I instinctively know which way to turn the steering wheel to maximize the infinitesimal movement of the car backwards and forwards into the spot until I'm right beside the curb. This knowledge is especially helpful when I sit beside him, shaking my head and making useful motions with my hands to show him which way he should be turning the wheel at any given moment in his parking efforts.

Except today, my parking karma deserted me. There was a perfectly good space between two other cars near the school entrance. I reversed in, taking it a mite too tight on the first go, as I am wont to do. I moved forward. I moved backwards. I thought "Isn't it nice the way the front of the car is never quite as far out as I'm afraid it might be from here?" I saw the car in front of me rock. "That's funny," I thought, moving back and twirling the wheel blithely, by instinct rather than design. The next time I moved forward, it rocked again. "Oh shit," I thought but did not say out loud. "I hope there's nobody sitting in that car," I did say out loud. "Why?" asked Mabel.

In some sort of insane stress-fuelled frenzy, I very gently bumped the car in front about twice more before I belatedly concluded that this wasn't going to work. I couldn't get out again forwards, so I gunned it in reverse and felt my back wheel mount the sidewalk, as I had intended. My front wheel came up against the curb. I realised I had lost all sense of which way to turn the wheel at any given moment. There were about ten feet between me and the car behind; ten milimeters the other way.

"Right," I said cheerfully to Mabel. "Let's just leave it like this."

First I checked that the car in front was indeed empty (it was an SUV, so I couldn't see from where I'd been sitting), and that its bumper was totally undamaged. Then I sheepishly remarked to the woman getting out of the next one up that I seemed to be having a bad parking day. Finally, I hustled Mabel out of the car and we moved away from the scene of the idiocy as quickly as I could, hoping that anyone who saw it would assume it was somebody else's pale green Subaru Outback, not mine.

Five minutes later when we returned with Dash, my car and the one in front were the only ones still there. I was afraid I'd angled my front wheel in such a way that it couldn't reverse at all, and that we'd embarrassingly have to sit there until the driver of the car in front returned to liberate us in a forward motion - which could be all afternoon if it happened not to be someone picking up from school at 3.15 - but - jubliation! - my karma returned and I turned the wheel the right way first time without even thinking about it, and we were reversing and then we were away, gliding smoothly as on wings of pure delight (except for that first bump when the back wheel came down off the footpath).

So here is my lesson for you: never parallel park while stressed. That should be easy, right?

Unfuzzy

I dropped Mabel with a friend on Tuesday, picked Dash up from school, and high-tailed it down the road to the eye-doctor's, where the nice man flicked lenses and spun letter charts expertly in front of Dash's eyes, while Dash described at length how it was when he tried to look at something but he coudn't see it properly and how it happens with the visualizer too and do you who invented this machine because it's really cool and I invent machines too I can make a phone, you know?

Clearly (hah) something was amiss with what he was seeing, but I couldn't really tell what it was from my vantage point on the chair in the corner. I could see the letters Dash was trying to read - they were pretty small, but not tiny. He'd read the first one and then hesitate. The doctor would swipe it away and put up a different one, click a new lens into place in the machine, cover one eye and reveal the other, asking quick decisive questions and letting Dash's unceasing monologue fall over him like gentle snow.

The verdict gave me a certain sense of vindication: he needs glasses! But not because he's long-sighted or short-sighted. No, I like to think that in fact, my boy's eyesight is an overachiever. His eyes are overcompensating when they focus together, and in consequence, things he tries to look at appear blurred. (Please forgive my layperson's understanding of it. I think that's the gist of what he said; I don't think there was any technical term mentioned.)

So Dash will have glasses to wear for the classroom and for reading, or any close-up work. In six weeks we'll go back and the doctor will be able to tell if they're helping. So they might prove merely corrective, or a more long-term thing - we don't know at this point.

And then we went back outside into the store and chose some groovy blue frames with arms that flex 180 degrees and Dash got marginally pleaseder about the notion of having glasses, so that by the time he found out that he'd get not only a free case to hold them in but also a free wiping cloth thingy he was pretty much very excited. He listened intently to the fact that they would take 5 to 7 days to arrive, and every day since he has been telling me how soon they will be here and asking if they might be here sooner than that.

I'm sort of delighted, I have to admit. I know the proof of the pudding will be in the reading; but I can't help assuming that if whenever you tried hard to look at something and read it, it went all fuzzy, you wouldn't really be able to imagine ever doing that for very long, and certainly not for fun. I think it answers a lot of my questions about why reading takes Dash so long, why he doesn't seem to recognise the same word when he sees it again in the next line, why he's great at spelling but hates writing, why he won't do his damn homework. (Okay, maybe not that last one. But let me dream, for now.)

Maybe it won't change anything, or anything much, but I'm really looking forward to finding out. Watch this space.

Official

The people in the waiting room had taken the American government's vague requirement to be "properly attired" in a fascinating variety of ways. There was a diminutive, aged Indian woman in a pale blue sari with silver embroidery. There were men in suits. There was a Rastafarian in his best dreadlock-covering hat, his best leisure wear and silver chain. There were women clearly dressed in their "good" dark-denim jeans with a plain sweater and clogs. There was Sunday-best and dressed-for-work. Some people kept their important documents in a plastic bag, some held manila envelopes. Mine were in a green cardstock file folder.

Mostly people came and went through the heavy door at the back of the room without expression, without incident. I read my book and tried to ignore the 24-hour news channel exploring an unimportant incident in far too much depth, from all the wrong angles. A young black woman bounced out of the room, smiling and making jubilant motions in the direction of her husband, who was minding the baby. She had obviously dressed with care: her tiny frame sported a shiny, teal, drainpipe-legged pantsuit, finished off with bright white bouncy sneakers. Her long cornrow braids shook with triumph as she kissed her little boy.

I had gone through at least three outfits the night before, rejecting the trousers that don't really fit any more because it was eight years and two babies ago when I used to wear them to work, and ended up in the exact outfit I wore for my mother-in-law's funeral last February: purple dress, teal slim cardigan, black boots. I was comfortable and felt like myself, not some other version of me that's not around any more or never was. And I looked as if I'd made an effort, which is all that "proper attire" turned out to mean.

My name was called. I followed the lady back to her room, where she shuffled and hole-punched and checkmarked pieces of paper as she asked me rote questions in a routine voice. First I had to stand up and promise to tell the truth, as if that would make any difference to an unscrupulous person. She wrote with her left hand at right angles to the pages, initialing and circling and numbering in red ink as she went, checking a whole row of boxes at once to catch up to what I'd already answered. I remained calm and collected and was a model student, getting all my civics questions right first time, even that elusively random number of Representatives in the House: 435. I wanted to say "Guam. Ask me the one about Guam. And that Benjamin Franklin was the first Postmaster General of the United States. Those are my favourites," but I didn't, and she didn't.

Then she asked me about my family, and whether I'd ever been in prison, and whether I'd ever conspired against the goverment, or been a Communist, and some other questions. And then told me that she'd be recommending that I be granted what I had come for. I could take the Oath at two this afternoon if I liked.

I didn't like. My town has a Naturalization ceremony once a month and I'd assumed I'd do it at that; I hadn't planned to be away all day. Beyond that, I wasn't ready to seal the deal just yet. One step at a time, without thinking too hard, is the way I'm doing this.

Midway through the questions, I had almost started thinking about what I was doing, as she leafed through my Irish passport looking for stamps and dates. I don't have to give my passport to them, I'm allowed to keep it. I'll never not be Irish. I just don't like that one line that goes "I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen..." That's a lot to take on. That's a lot to ask.

I'm just going to say it and not think about it, which I'm sure is exactly not what the people intended, but there you go. It makes sense to do this, it's the practical thing to do for our family, to make sure we can stay here, where we've made our home, as long as we want to rather than finding ourselves chucked out at some sudden date if things go wrong and funding goes away and the letter of the law must be adhered to. I'm a sensible person. In the end, it makes no difference to my day-to-day life. America needs me, I tell myself, to be a sensible liberal-leaning democrat-voting, atheist, lactivist supporter for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. 

I'll say it, and I'll do it.

But always and forever, if you cut me, I'll bleed green.

Now with extra autonomy

I'm pretty sure I'm hormonal today, because I don't think I usually would have to fight back tears while listening to an NPR report on how the theme to Reading Rainbow is very popular on YouTube. (Something about the magic of stories really got me, man.)

I suppose one is always hormonal, and that's a good thing, but extra hormonal, let's say. Also, I have a giant zit at the edge of my eye socket, of all places, which is a dead giveaway. Better than the tip of my nose, I suppose, as my glasses frames hide it a little. The two-inch-thick layer of concealer also hides it a little, but only a little.

I mailed KeAnne's cookies this morning, so now I'm just frittering away the rest of my time before I have to get Mabel from school. It's the first time for a while I've had nothing to do (housework, shmousework, I'm sure you'll agree), so I'm just doing nothing.

Maybe another cup of tea.

So, anyway. At the moment we are experimenting in giving the six-year-old more autonomy. I think that's what we're doing, while also, of course, providing firm boundaries and limits for him to continue to test with all his might and main. Our two main areas of battle lately have been i) homework and ii) bedtime.

So, as promised, yesterday I told him about his homework twice and left it at that. He didn't do it. This morning he got up and did it. It was not quite painless, as he was still finding it hard to focus, and breakfast time isn't the best time to work, but on the other hand he sat down and did it. Then he read for 20 minutes with me before he got dressed. Reading in the morning is definitely easier for him than reading at night, but, again, it cuts into the time when preparation for school should be happening, leaving us without any extra room for manoever.

On the plus side, yesterday afternoon was delightfully stress-free for all of us, and I enjoyed it much more that way. He probably did too.

Bedtime has been a bear lately. Last week B had extra choir rehearsals and then three concerts, so I did a lot of solo bedtimes, and they weren't good. They were pretty horrible, really, with an extra half hour of both children ignoring me, and then 40 minutes of insane manic yelling and running around (them), and a lot of shouting (me), and some locking myself in the bathroom before I did something I'd regret, and finally things would calm down, and Dash would have to use the toilet, and I'd take the opportunity to put Mabel to sleep, and once she was out of the picture he'd get to bed. Eventually.

The thing is that the lure of stories just hasn't been so lure-y of late. Telling him that "At 8pm I'm not reading any more, so you have to be ready before then," doesn't work. He still demands the stories, and by then it's 8:30 and you're so worn down that you think he'll probably leap out of bed and wake his sister and run rampage all over again, so you read them anyway. Not good for any of us. Not enforcing limits. Not setting boundaries. Not enjoying it.

Two nights ago, when B was back for our regular routine and I was trying to get Mabel to sleep while listening to their usual back-and-forth over "Do you WANT stories?" a thought occurred to me. Why not just read the stories first, and let Dash put himself to bed after that? It's all the waiting round through his interminable nighttime routine that infuriates the waiting adult; if we take that out of the equation, the pressure is off.

So for the past couple of nights B has read stories first, and then Dash has pottered around getting himself ready for bed and putting himself into it at his own daydreamy pace, without infuriating anyone because nobody was waiting for him any more. And because nobody's waiting and badgering him to do it, he just does it. He likes the independence, and it's not as if he needs us to supervise at this stage anyway.

It's such a simple change, but it seems to go against everything we expected: surely every child wants to get into bed and be read stories and be kissed goodnight and tucked in. It has probably been staring me in the face for ages, but it took this long to percolate through. I think it was only because I was once again an observer, listening to the same old futile arguments, that I could think clearly enough to come up with an improvement.

We'll see how it goes, anyway.

Ramblin'

Gah. I'm sitting here trying to remember the great idea I had for a blog post last night in bed, and I know it was about two things that were like each other but different and I could draw parallels and... uh...I don't even know if it was a real idea or one of those things that sounds perfectly practical when you're about to fall asleep but actually involves a minature elephant and twenty-five pints of purple rubber and won't work in real life because I don't live in Mongolia anyway.

I'm sure it would have been great. A literary gem. Instead, let us give thanks for bullet points:

• My new phone just arrived and I'm waiting impatiently for the battery to charge so I can play with it. It's sort of a smart phone - in that it has a touch screen and can use the internet and appy things - but I'm still pay-as-you-go so I'll only use the Internet at home and in places with free wi-fi. I know, this seems kinda stupid, but it made sense to me. I don't need a real smartphone because I'm mostly at home within five feet of my beloved laptop with an actual keyboard.
• The weather is ridiculously warm and I've hung the laundry outside again, which I only do when it's warm enough for my fingers not to go numb. Which usually means I use the dryer from October to March. 
• I spent this morning baking cookies for KeAnne, who bid for them in the Hurricane Sandy fundraiser. I hope she likes 'em crunchy, because they're crunchy. And sweet. And buttery. (We've sampled a few. Just to be sure.)
• I was delighted with myself for finally booking dental checkups for the kids and for myself. The reminder postcards had been floating around the sideboard for months. Then I found myself reading an old blog entry (what? it's like leafing through your own photo album, you know?) and discovered that they went to the dentist as recently as last August so they're not overdue at all. However, I suspect Dash has a cavity (on a brand-new adult molar! it must have come up that way) so I think we'll keep his appointment anyway.

Now I have to figure out how to package these cookies so that I can mail them tomorrow. (I'm told popcorn is the answer. I also have bubble wrap.) So if you'll excuse me, I'll be back tomorrow, maybe even with some purple rubber and an elephant.