The natural

I am generally unwilling to read new books, but will happily take an old beloved off the shelf and re-read it again. I'll have forgotten either the whole thing or the details, or else I love it so much that I know every word that's coming before my eyes get there. Why spend time on the unknown and possibly disappointing, when I can pick a winner every time by going back to the ones I love?

In hindsight, I'm glad I pretentiously spent much of my 20s reading books one "should" read just so I could say I'd read them, because I don't have the patience, or the time, or the peristence for such things nowadays. The Sound and the Fury is sitting on my bookshelf with a bookmark holding fast at page 20 or so, because I know I should read it, and I'd like to read it, but every time I open it, it just looks a little too much like hard work.

So I'm in a bit of a Dick Francis phase, again, just now. Mock me if you will, but his stuff is exciting, well-written, engaging, and even if I remember whodunnit once I'm a third of the way through, I usually still need to find out exactly how once more. I seem to have an affinity for twentieth-century males - Neville Shute is another old favourite (if you've never heard of him, you may have heard of A Town Like Alice; he was British but wrote a lot about Australia, and, like Francis, always had an interesting subject to describe in detail as background for his adventures). (My husband is also a twentieth-century male, come to think of it. I quite like him too.)

I have a high tolerance, is what I'm saying, for the type of writers often described as misogynistic. It's an unfair description: it's not that they hate women; they're just products of their time. Hemingway, now, was a total bastard, but I love his writing - partly because he gets me swearing at just what a bastard he is as well as how he manages to evoke a scene or a mood with three well-chosen single-syllable words and no adjectives at all. JK Rowling he was not.

So now and then Dick Francis comes out with a humdinger like this:

She glowed with happiness, the peach bloom cheeks as fresh as a child's. It was extraordinary, I thought, how quickly and clearly the mental state of a woman showed in her skin.

Idiot. (And not just because he missed a hyphen there.) Still, maybe it makes me a bad feminist, but I'm willing to register such nonsense and keep reading because I want to know how it turns out. His heroes are highly intelligent men of honour who often find themselves in enormous amounts of physical pain - here, have a pitchfork to the back and a dislocated shoulder while you get kicked in the head by a crazed stallion - before emerging victorious against the forces of evil, and if the love interests are often treated in an uncomfortably patronising manner, well that's just Mr Francis being what he thinks of as a gentleman. It's all good clean steeplechasing fun, and a breath of fresh Cheltenham air compared to things like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

What inspired all this musing, however, was a line I came across yesterday. The narrator was talking about how if he refused a drink, people sometimes thought he was a recovering alcoholic. "One had to drink to prove one wasn't, like natural bachelors making an effort with girls." This is a 1974 publication, and natural bachelors must be a reference to gay men.

Which, I think, answers my mother's question. The lesbians, who were there all the time, were natural spinsters.

Spice of

The existence of lesbians is giving my mother a crisis of faith. Apparently.

She said that the news at lunchtime today was all about lesbian weddings in Ireland.
"Where were all the lesbians when I was growing up?" she asked me. "None of the girls at school were, or in the bank [where she worked before she got married], or on the road where I lived. Where did they all come from?"
"Well, they weren't invented in the last five years, Mother. They've always been around. People just didn't talk about it in those days."
"But I don't understand what God was thinking about. Why did he make them?"
I decided not to tell her that I can't answer that because I tripped and fell into a vat of atheism.
"Maybe he just likes variety."

Grrrls

Mabel was hell on wheels this morning at playgroup, for no apparent reason. When I asked her why, in the car on the way home (I mean, I asked her in the car, she didn't do it in the car; and yes, for your information, it is much easier for me to just keep typing than to back up with the delete button to clarify things), she had felt the need to fight with her friend and push over her friend's little brother, repeatedly, she told me it was because she hasn't had a nap. Which is fine, except that this was at 9.30am. I need to stop excusing bad behaviour with lack of naps, it would seem.

Now she's napping, and I feel like I need one too. I didn't think last night was particularly bad, but perhaps we were both sleepwalking up and down the corridor for hours and neither one of us remembers.

I think she was just very excited to be there this morning, and wanted to show off to everyone that these are her particular friends whom she sees outside school/ organized playtime events, and she felt the best way to do that was with overenthusiastic belligerent physical contact. Interspersed with taking toys away from smaller children just for the heck of it and/or because they weren't doing it right.

I don't know if this is a girl thing, but it's exactly what Dash's friend (known here as Helen) used to do every time we had a playdate, and here's Mabel being her second incarnation all over again; and it's not as if her first incarnation isn't still out there wreaking havoc - I mean, being sweetness and light and growing up at twice the speed of Dash, it seems whenever we see her - so I'm not sure population of greater Washington DC can deal with the sheer force of another one. Or that I have the fortitude to cope with it.

So is it girls in general, or those two in particular?

Wordation

I would love to record Mabel playing by herself and play back it for you (or, you know, for someone who would hear it and declare her a genius), because it's very entertaining. She not only does the voices, she also narrates the whole story. So she might be holding a Strawberry Shortcake doll and a dinosaur, or a small pony and a squishy frog, who will be each other's sisters, or mother and daughter, or some such relationship, and I'll hear:

...[Squeaky voice] No, you can't do that. You're not allowed to. Becuase it's naw-dy [American accent coming out there] and dangewous.
- [Other squeaky voice] But mother, I want to do it. I'll be vewy careful.
- [Normal voice, a bit sing-song] And then she went upstairs and climbed on the shelves and she fell off and hit her head. And she said [Squeaky II] Ow, my head.
- [Narrator] And her mother came upstairs to see what was going on and said [Squeaky I] Oh, sweetheart, are you all right?...

And on and on and on, only much funnier than that. If I listen carefully I hear her go over things we've been talking about, or things she wants to do, or things that are on her mind - going to sleep on your own, the ever-present little sister role, working out the concept of death, even. It's also a little unnerving to hear your own words coming out of someone else's mouth, and makes me very happy that I've managed to excise swearwords from my vocabulary, because I know she'd be using them right now if she'd heard them.

Speaking of which. Dash has taken to saying "Aw, nuts," when something frustrates him. After listening to this for a while I decided it was probably not the most gentlemanly of expressions, and I asked him to say something else instead. More importantly, I thought he should know what it was he was saying, so I told him what it was a slang expression for, so that he didn't think he was just talking innocently about squirrel dinner. He said he'd say "Oh, brother" instead, which I can't find any objection to. So now Mabel is saying "Aw, nuts," and I'm a little afraid to stop her for fear she'll decide to say it all the more.

As I may have mentioned before, I grew up convinced that rude words had been invented in the 1980s and my parents had never heard any of them. My father's worst expletives were Damn and Blast, and I got into a fair amount of trouble with my mother the day I tried to say either of those. When I was about 13, the word of choice at school seemed to be "crappy," and one day I used it at the dinner table. To immediate and shocking effect. I had no idea it meant anything other than, well, you know, crappy. Bad. Not nice.

Which is why I would rather Dash knew what he was saying. Then it can be his own decision, though of course I can let him know that some words are not for use around his elders and betters, or his youngers and more impressionables either.

Mabel has also taken to exclaiming "Good Lawd!" if she needs to express dismay. I suppose I need to start saying Good Gravy instead. Maybe with a side of Heavens to Betsy or Holy Mackeral. It would, after all, be amusing to hear her come out with those while sorting out the members of the dollhouse at school some day.

And then it occurred to me that perhaps fudge and fiddlesticks and sugar are things people say not because they're granny-types who never said anything stronger in their lives, but from many years of not-in-front-of-the-children last-second adjustments.

Running into trouble

I'm sorry if you're only here for the pictures of children in boxes, but I have to gab on about running again for a minute. I'll bring it back to the children, I promise.

This morning I went out and I ran a whole mile without stopping. When I came back I told B that it had taken me 15 minutes to run it, and by the way he looked at me I could see that he was wondering how that was physically possible. "I lay down between each step," I added, to reassure him. But after my shower he told me that I'd read the watch wrong (he lets me use his fancy GPS running watch) and my pace had in fact been a much more respectable 12 minutes.

Just to put that in perspsective, his "slow" pace is about a 9-minute mile, and in marathons he's aiming for 7.5 or so. For all 26.2 miles. I will never be running marathons, is what I'm saying, but on the other hand, apparently I didn't lie down between each stride either.

It turns out that my limiting factor is mostly getting a stitch: if that doesn't happen, I can keep going till my legs get tired, which is about a mile as of this morning. I have yet to figure out how to not get a stitch: is it random, has it something to do with fitness, or is it about how much coffee I drank how soon before I left the house?

And I have to get all soap-boxy about it for a second and say that if you can walk, you can run, so you may as well give it a go. It's over sooner, it gets your heart rate going faster, and it makes you think you're the bee's knees. (Bees' knees? How many bees are we talking about here?) But, three words: Buy A Bra. (Unless you're one of my two male readers. Probably, you don't need to. But hey, whatever floats your boat.) Don't think that the one you wear for yoga will do; don't pick up a cheapie in Target or Dunnes Stores; choose a heavy-duty one in the right size, take it into the changing room, and jump up and down a few times. If you bounce, move on until you find the right one, and don't begrudge the money. The difference between running while bouncing and running while being properly reined in is astounding.

So there I was, pootling around the lake this morning - I've decided I need a better word for what I do, because it doesn't yet aspire to running, and a good quantity of it is still walking, but it's walking in a good bra, you know - and thinking why it is that I eschew those app-y things like Couch to 5K that tell you when to run and when to walk and are roundly praised by people like me who start from negative levels of fitness and want to go a bit faster and a bit further without falling down. Basically, it's because I don't like to do what people tell me to. In fact, I am positively motivated to not do what they tell me to.

Ooh, look, once again running (pootling) helps me understand how my children's minds work.

But, historical revisionism, ahoy. My mother says I was never any trouble. How can this be, if I am so programmed for rebellion? Did I develop this characteristic late in life? Or else, 

(a) I was Trouble, but my mother has forgotten
(b) I was Trouble, but my mother didn't find out
or (c) I wasn't any trouble, because my desires meshed with my parents' desires

This last may have been true once I was older and decided it was fun to get good grades - because if there's one thing I hate more than doing what people tell me, it's getting answers wrong. And since I didn't know where the boys lived or how to find them, I had nothing else to do but my homework.

I suspect I was Trouble, but both (a) and (b). Also, it's possible that my mother was more canny than she gives herself credit for, and manouvered me into doing what she wanted me to do while making me think it was my idea.

Or perhaps my parents just left me alone and I turned out okay. Free-range parenting in the eighties? What a concept.

Goings-on ongoing

Once again, this morning, I didn't go for a run.

One way or another, the fates have conspired against me for the past week, and between weather, and days off school, and weather, and my period, I haven't had a chance to go out for ages. I hate this - not because I'm a runner, all champing at the bit for activity and pacing up and down like a caged tiger; but because it makes me afraid that I'll never get back out there and my tiny bit of motivation will desert me and I'll be back to being a blob who wasted money on good shoes for nothing.

On the other hand, it's novel, if irritating, for me to actually want to exercise and be prevented by outside influences. I'm almost completely certain I'm not just using them as excuses. And B has been very good about not bugging me, because he knows that the one thing certain to make me not go is someone telling me that I should. (Mabel? My daughter? What? I see no correlation here.)

I have gone to the not-aerobics class for the past two Saturdays, even last week when there was fresh snow on the ground (all of half an inch) and only the die-hards were there (and me), so all isn't entirely lost. I can do a sexy march with the best of them. (No. No, I can't. But I'm learning.)

****

The wearing of the underwear was going really well until I bragged about it to a friend, whereupon Mabel immediately went through two pairs of trousers, peed on the aforementioned ice, and is now wearing a pullup. I suppose we'll get back on the horse soon, but I'm not talking about it. If you see me start to talk about it, put your fingers in your ears and sing la la laaa at the top of your voice.

****

Yesterday, in a fit of something or other, I bought a bag of mini croissants. (This is what happens when I go to a different supermarket. All sorts of odd things seem perfectly reasonable purchases.) Dash was excited but wished they were chocolate croissants, and I said we could probably do something about that. So when we got home I cunningly sliced along the top of one, put in a few chocolate chips, and heated it for five seconds in the microwave. He was quite pleased.

Today, somehow, there are two...one...oh, look at that, the mini croissants are all gone. Mabel just asked for the last one, let me put three chocolate chips carefully in it, and said she didn't need it heated up. Then she fished the chips out again, sucked each one into happy oblivion, and told me I could eat the croissant.

****

Dash came home today with a big picture of a penguin captioned in his writing with "My penguin and I like to fly." His teacher had stuck on a post-it in response to my e-mail of this morning, saying that the children had used their IMAGINATIONS to think of something they would like to do with their penguins. (Hmm. That sounds dodgy. She didn't put it quite like that.) Dash has recanted his earlier statement about there definitely being a flying species of penguin and now says the movie they watched was a cartoon. I'm still a bit confused, but I think we can be confident that his teacher was not using BBC April fools jokes as source material, and that you can't always take what a five-year-old says at face value.

No news there, then.

Up and Down

Dash has been telling us that there's one species of penguin that can fly. He watched a movie about it at school. (Sigh. Nobody watches videos at school any more.  I suspect nobody listens to tapes in French class either. Remember when your teacher had to bring in a giant boombox and balance it on a stool beside the wall where the outlet was so that they could press play to let you listen to the fuzzy-voiced announcer telling you something impenetrable about le train que départ à quai numéro trois? Now I suppose they just send an mp3 to the kids' iPhones or something.)

But all the knowledge that Dr. Google (that's Dr. Google, PhD in acquatic avians, not Dr. Google, MD) has put at our fingertips tells us that there is definitely no such species. I really hope Dash's teacher didn't inadvertently show them this BBC clip from 2008, which turned out to be an April Fool's Day hoax.

If he comes home talking about the spaghetti harvest next week, I suppose we'll know something's up.

(The title is this adorable book by Oliver Jeffers, which confirmed our suspicions that penguins don't fly unless shot out of a cannon. Then again, it would lead one to believe that they're quite partial to playing backgammon, so I'm not sure this is the ideal resource for those of you looking to find out more.)

Note to self

For future reference, when your recently-bribed-into-toilet-training three-year-old clutches her crotch while you put on her ice-skates, don't just let her refuse to let you take her to the bathroom. Because the quickly spreading yellow puddle on the ice is a bit of a giveaway when things go wrong.

In fact, backing up a bit, when you know that she really should have taken a nap, even though you're trying to phase out the naps because they lead to neverending bedtimes, don't take her ice-skating in the first place. Because while it may seem cruel to deny her the outing if her brother and her daddy are going, having her fall so solidly asleep on the way home that she takes an unwakeable hour-long nap at 4.30 is probably going to have a worse effect. On your mood when she's still wide awake at 9pm. (Not that we're there yet. Maybe the gods will be kind.)

Fingerwalking

Sometimes you just have to click the button with the big pencil graphic on it and see what your fingers do.

Sometimes I don't think I have anything to say, but something comes out anyway. Sometimes I start out saying one thing and end up telling a totally different story. Sometimes I just put it away and don't publish anything that day, and sometimes I fall back on something funny somebody said, or what we had for dinner.

Sometimes I self-censor a blog post out of existence because it's too personal, or too uninteresting, or about money, or religion, or things maybe I don't want all those people I know in real life to read and be thinking the next time they see me at nursery school or a family gathering. Whereas in reality, they probably didn't read it anyway, and certainly won't remember it if they did. They have too many other things in their lives. But sometimes the post I'm not writing drowns out the post I might write, so that I'm left with nothing to show for it.

Sometimes one word borrows another and suddenly I'm knee-deep in reminiscences about schooldays or misspent youth, whether you wanted to know it or not. Sometimes I read another blog, one so piercingly written or side-splittingly funny, that I wonder what the point is at all. Sometimes I think my stats are all just a big lie told by Russian searchbots and nobody's reading at all except my two friends down the road and my ever-constant husband.

Sometimes it turns out that you really just didn't have anything to say today. Try again tomorrow.

Daughters

I sat opposite Mabel in the food court of the mall last week, watching her chow down happily on a slice of pizza and hoping for many more pleasant outings like this as she gets older.

She's three. It's easy for her to delight me. All she has to do is eat the food I just bought her, not throw a tantrum, sit on her chair without knocking over her drink, grin her big grin, and I'm suckered, hook, line, and sinker. As she gets older, I suppose I'll expect a little more from her, and there'll be disagreements over jeans, or shoes, or Bieber, or whatever it is the young people will be wanting when she's a tweeny bopper; but I can't help thinking that I'll always be delighted if my daughter - my beautiful, hilarious, vivacious daughter - is happy to be out in public with her mum.

And then I thought of the gulf between mothers and daughters and saw it from a new angle; this gulf that can be miles wide and unbroachable, or small enough to step across with a shared joke and a smile.

Perhaps I see what I expect to see, but I feel as if her relationship with me, mine with her, is already more complex than the other one, the mother-son bond of simple mutual affection. (And frustration, infuriation, impatience, all those other things.) But because I've been there, because I know Girl from the inside, the weight of all the things I want to teach her - tell her, advise her, show her, avoid for her - is mighty.

Did my mother think these things when she looked at me? Did I barge ahead, embarassed, tolerant, amused, or superior, according to my age or mood at the time? As she sat there, smiling calmly and knowing that some day I'd get my comeuppance? Or was she thinking that my hair was too long and my shoes were too clumpy and my table manners were lacking? It's not a gulf, then; it's a finely balanced scale that is tipped in one direction and then the other by the merest glance or a throwaway comment.

Do Mabel and I still have plenty of time for just enjoying each other's company before all that hits?  

Rules for co-sleeping*

*if you are under six and want me to continue sleeping with you, at least some of the time; rules for Daddy are somewhat different.**

1. Do not kick off the covers. I am cold. I need that duvet. Especially, do not lie on half the duvet and kick off the rest, so there's nothing at all left for me.  
2. Do not stick your foot down my pyjama bottoms.
3. Do not have sharp, pointy toenails.
4. Do not demand a waffle at 3am.
5. Do not barf. Ever.
6. Do not touch the other nipple. At all.
7. Do not hog the bed so that the smaller person takes up 80% of the space, leaving me to wake up perched on one shoulder, wedged against the wall, with my head on your unicorn pillow pet.

Thank you,
the Management

**Actually, come to think of it, rules for Daddy are mostly the same, except perhaps for number six. Ahem.

Food for thought

Dash seems to be having a growth spurt. Which is very annoying. Because even though he's always hungry for more, the only more he's hungry for is the same more as always. Somehow, I've made peace with him having a sandwich for lunch and another for dinner, but when he then demands a third sandwich mid-afternoon or for his after-dinner snack, I see a missed opportunity as it skids by me and lands in the peanut-butter, and get all enraged about it.

He's been dutifully tasting things, and getting stars on his chart, though when he got to a dollar he said in a relieved manner "Phew! I've finished!" and was not so happy to hear that I expected this to go on ad infinitum. Money isn't really very meaningful to him yet, so perhaps it's not a great incentive. We need to go to Target and pick something he wants to work towards, I suppose.

But I'm getting frustrated. I know it takes up to 15 tastes before a kid might like something, and that licks and spitting things out still count towards getting familiar with a food, but when he licks a carrot, again, and wants it to count as his "taste" for the day, or gingerly touches his tongue to a cut piece of sausage and annouces "yuck", or spits out a mouthful of applesauce, for heaven's sake, and says it feels dry in his mouth, well, it's a little wearing on the spirits, you know. He's starting to act as if it's our duty to come up with new and desirable things for him to taste every day, as if we should say "Hey, I know, why don't you try this caramel-flavoured ice-cream for today's thing" and then give him a big round of applause for his great effort.

And then I read something like this and get all discouraged because we are so far from having either child eat what the adults eat that it's not funny. Unless the adults are eating sausages and plain pasta, or pizza, in which case Mabel will happily play along.

But then. If I list the things Dash has tasted (/licked, spat out, whatever, sigh) in the past two weeks, compared to all the nothing new ever he would even consider looking at before then, I should be impressed, and keep on plugging away. So I will. Carrot (raw, steamed, roasted), cheese, applesauce, baby spinach leaf, sausage, banana, tinned peach, a new type of cracker, cauliflower, pasta.

See? That's pretty impressive. Except that he has yet to meet anything he likes. Even tinned peach. Come on, who doesn't like tinned peaches? And he thinks that having tasted something once should give him the benefits of its nutrients for life. I try to explain that he has to keep eating them, and more than just a micro-bite, and that the food you eat doesn't have to be your favourite thing all the time, it just has to be okay, and you eat it because you're hungry. Damn, that sounds depressing. No wonder he sticks to what he likes best.

And he's started making his own sandwiches, so really, what am I complaining about? Gah.

All Mabel, all the time

Last night Mabel woke up crying and writhing with a pain in her tummy. This morning she said she had just been hungry. Not peritonitis, then. Could have told me that in the middle of the night when I was doing my Pieta impression. (Wherupon she fell back asleep and I heaved a huge sigh of relief.)

The white noise made no difference last night, except to leave me convinced that it was about to rain in her room at any moment because the humidifier had been running so long. She still woke up after less than two hours of sleeping. The new and exciting development, however, was that I had taken Dash to his karate class and B put Mabel to sleep. Admittedly, she was exhausted, but she has never (since newborn days, when a baby will fall asleep on anything with a pulse) gone to sleep for him before. And without a peep, too.

So that was good.

Today, we had nothing on the agenda and were on the move relatively early, so after bringing Dash to school she and I headed for the mall and had a nice-until-inevitable-meltdown mother-and-daughter morning of snacking, playing, and browsing. We took a look in the Lego store and she immediately started taking the minifig keyrings off their display and deciding which was whose mummy/sister/grandad.
"Look, Mummy! It's R2!"
"R2D2? So it is!"
We finally got Dash to watch Star Wars over the Christmas break, and of course Mabel saw it too. I desperately hoped the lovely nerds who work in the Lego store would hear and appreciate my pint-sized prodigy, but I think they missed the moment.

She's been well stuffed with sausage and oven fries this evening (there was carrot, she declined - but she did have ketchup and that's a vegetable); I'm having another glass of wine and hoping for no more hunger pangs/appendicitis tonight. Never a dull moment, yaknow.

News at eleven

Stop the presses. Mabel slept from 9pm to 12.30am without waking up last night. And then I even spent another two hours in my own bed from 2.30 to 4.30 or so.

Recent nights have been so bad that this seems like a fabulous advance. As her ever-logical father pointed out, it must be due to one of the following factors:
    (a) the humidifier I put in her room to stop her waking early from congestion
    (b) the white noise from the humidifier
or (c) chance.

As it was raining last night, I don't think the humidifier did much to change the quality of air, so maybe it was the noise; which I admit I've never tried before because I hate even the tiniest hum or buzz when I'm trying to sleep. Tonight I might try tuning the clock radio in her room to nothing, and seeing how that works for her.

But because I am Never Satisfied, as I luxuriated in my own bed at 11pm, unencumbered and unsummoned by small person, a tiny part of me felt rejected. It's just a glimpse into the future when the children will scorn any notion of sleeping with a parent, and my own bed will be my only bed. And for all the complaining I do about sleepless nights, it's so much simpler, if not always easy, to give love and cuddles to a small warm body that readily accepts them, than to fulfill all the other requirements of parenting.

The anchovy thing

Yesterday I made fabulous oatmeal cookies. I even pandered to my husband's desires a bit with them, by putting in raisins instead of chocolate chips. But then I added pecans as well, because I had some to use up, and I like nuts in cookies. This was perhaps cruel of me, because B does not, mostly, like nuts in cookies, but I thought it might be given a pass. (Apparently I feel I can't be too nice to the man, because that's giving in to The Man.)

My friend, who had brought over some fresh soda bread and dill butter to snack on with our tea, as well as the cookies, during the playdate that was really a thiny veiled baking-exchange eating-excuse, asked, "Why don't you just not tell him about the nuts and see if he notices?"

"Ah," I replied. "I can't do that. Because of the anchovy thing."

And then I had to explain the anchovy thing.

When we first met, B was not a fan of fish. He had once eaten a piece of salmon that was quite nice, but saw little reason to repeat the experiment. Since those far-off days, I have gently introduced some seafood into his diet, with simple mild tilapia, salmon in peach-habanero marinade, mussels with lots of garlic, things like that. But when we first moved in together, I still had much to learn about the ways of man, The Man, and this man.

I had just moved across the Atlantic and was looking for a job, watching lots of Food Network, and doing the shopping and the cooking, since he was an overworked grad student who had to adjust to being home for dinner and not getting to go to Wal Mart at 3am any more, and who had very patiently let me reorganise all his bookshelves when I arrived, because evidently my psyche needed to lay claim to the place. Rachael Ray, my new girl-crush, told me that if you sizzled some anchovies out of a jar with some garlic at the start of making a tomato sauce, it would taste fabulously savoury but not at all fishy. I couldn't wait to try it.

So I made the sauce, and didn't tell him what the mystery ingredient was. He liked dinner well enough. Then came the big reveal. He was appalled. Horrified. Betrayed. Not happy. As far as he was concerned, I had deceived him. What was next? If a girl starts by sneaking anchovies into a man's dinner, no doubt arsenic and belladonna will soon follow.

I was contrite, learned that I couldn't always anticipate his reactions, and haven't snuck in ingredients again. (Though, you know, he might be happy to find I'd been gradually building up his immunity to arsenic, or iocane powder, when a random Sicilian tries to poison him. Oh well. His loss.)

Last night we were reminiscing about the incident, now that we're so much older and wiser.

"I realise now," I said, "that it was as if I'd fed meat to a vegetarian and told them afterwards."
"Yes, it was. Well, vegetarians might have an ethical reason for not eating meat."
"Exactly. So that would be a reasonable reaction."
"Wait a minute. You mean, my reaction was like that? Not that what you did was like that?"
"Yes. No. Your reaction."
"Oh. Oh. I thought you were being a bit generous there for a minute."
"No, no. As if."


******

And of course, I did check with him this morning that he didn't mind my writing about it. I know now not to spring things, even delicious things, on him without full disclosure in advance. (And don't worry about the cookies. He liked them.)

Things to do

Things I am not doing right now though I'd really like to:

Buying these boots (black) online or in person, even though they're reduced and I waaant them like zombies waaaant braaains, but I tried them on and they're too narrow for me and I'm not sure I want to gamble that much on the possibility that they might stretch to fit my freaky feet.

Buying these other boots (brown) which are clearly too expensive as they're the same price the first ones were before they were reduced, but these are also beautiful and I don't know yet that they don't fit me.

Rushing off to the mall where I saw it two weeks ago and buying a down jacket that was more reduced in real life than it is online, because it's too far to go and it wouldn't still be there and I'm not sure about the colour and I don't really need a down jacket except it would be nice to have something warm that was light and had a hood.

Booking tickets to go to a family wedding in Italy this summer, because the prices are just insanely crazy, and we're already going to Ireland in March because we didn't go at Christmas. But this is good, because we might finally get to have a beach holiday at the Outer Banks, which is something I've wanted to do ever since I saw the Outer Banks on a map. I imagine us looking like one of those beautiful families in one of those beachside houses in a Land's End catalogue. The truth may be sandier and more sunburned, but I'm willing to risk it.

Making oatmeal raisin cookies.

Things I am not doing right now even though I should, because I have no desire to:

Cleaning any part of my filthy house.

Sorting and filing all the papers that are ranged on the shelf where I keep my computer.

Finding the hole punch so I can file the notes from last night's committee meeting.



Most of these things are beyond my control, or my budget, but I suppose I could get cracking on the cookies.

Snow

It's snowing and I suddenly have a burning desire to look up cookie recipes. To be fair, I'm always happy to look up cookie recipes, but it's nice to have an excuse.

But I can't decide. What do you think is the right cookie for a snowy day?

Rhythm: gonna getcha

I went to an aerobics class once.

It was 1991 and I was in my first year of university. All the girls were doing it - at least, some of all the girls - so a friend and I said we'd have a go. I lasted about ten minutes, I think, between the vast gym full of people who knew the steps gyrating away in time with the crazy-fit lycra-ed instructor, and the balcony full of male students whose lunchtime entertainment was to go and watch the scantily-clad girls bounce up and down. "I'm not going to be a piece of meat in your between-lectures porn fantasy," I said, as a good feminist; "and also, I don't like getting sweaty and I don't want to have to bring extra clothes to college every day, and I certainly don't want to shower in the sports centre, and it's too long a walk from the Arts block, and it looks haaaard."

So that was that. Until this morning, when I participated in an Ultimate Groove Workout - which turned out to be, as far as I'm concerned, thinly disguised aerobics to music. (Didn't aerobics always have music? But somehow this is different. Maybe the music is more intrinsic to the movement here.)

I had thought that my two or three years of ballroom and Latin dance would help me out, but it seemed not. Apparently, I'm incapable of moving my arms and my legs at the same time. You'd think I'd have noticed that before now, but it seems that over the years my body has become skilled at hiding this tiny handicap. Dancing with a partner, my arms were almost always engaged in leaning against the other person; it turns out that when you take this person away and ask me to make prescribed motions with my arms while stepping steps apace with my legs, my brain goes into its math zone: that fuzzy place where all of me decides to go on hiatus until someone asks an easier question. Or in this case, until the music slows and something relatively simple happens, like standing still or maybe lying down and closing my eyes.

Even when everyone was clapping their hands nonchalantly above their heads while skipping lightly from one step to the next, I was the one clapping out of time. Decades of my life dedicated to weekly choir practices, years of recorder and piano and clarinet lessons, many many nights spent shaking my booty on the dancefloor, and I couldn't even clap in the right place. Sigh.

The good news is that I can only get better. Surely.

Or petrel blue, as my mother always called it

My school uniform was a dark teal skirt with a grey knitted sweater, light grey shirt and bottle-green-and-silver striped tie. Our secret shame was that the skirt wasn't a skirt, it was a pinafore. (Before I go any further let me clarify for Americans. A pinafore is what you would call a jumper. The sweater was what we would call a jumper. All clear? Good.) We only ever exposed its top half when mandated for school concerts or when sunbathing under the Home Economics room windows.

The pinafore was such a bone of contention that I remember it being a topic for our Irish Debates class in second year. I have no idea why we felt so put-upon by that extra swathe of mostly-invisible material, but it was seen as a vast injustice to us, when other schools, such as Loreto Foxrock and Mt Anville had real honest-to-goodness skirts. In fact, I think the teacher was hard-pressed to find anyone to argue the opposing side in the "That we should have a skirt instead of a tunic" dialogue. I remember her putting up some sort of feeble nonsense that girls of our age were developing (cue hand movement in the vague bustular region) at different paces and it was for our own modesty that this area was more hidden by the pinafore. Perhaps the girls at Mt Anville all lived in daily embarassment as their breasts grew overnight and the buttons on their shirts gaped and then popped undefended, but we were unmoved by their potential plight.

I know at least one girl who had taken to wearing her gym skirt instead of her tunic in protest - which rebellious behaviour went unnoticed until the end-of-term concert when she was found to be (gasp!) tunic-topless and relegated to the very back row. As she was not anywhere near the five-foot-eight or more of everyone else in the back row, this rendered her basically invisible for the whole performance. That showed her, I'm sure.

This morning I wore a teal top that I bought on sale somewhere or other last week, thinking that finally I should be able to wear teal without feeling like I was back in my uniform.

So yes, I can. But then it goes and dredges up stuff like this...

Crazy fool mother

Sometimes I pretend I'm a stranger and have a conversation with myself that goes something like this:

"You what?"
"My daughter wakes up multiple times a night and I have to nurse her back to sleep and nobody else can do it and she has never slept through the night in her life."
"And she's ...?"
"Three."
"And you think this is perfectly reasonable."
"Well, it's not ideal, no. I'm sort of hoping she'll grow out of it."
"What sort of crazy fool woman are you?"
"Um. Yes."

And then I feel pretty stupid.

The night before last, after a prolonged putting back to sleep that saw me finally get to brush my teeth at midnight, Mabel slept on her own from 12.30 to 4.30. Four hours. I was so excited I spent the rest of the night planning to make a Facebook page called "Mabel slept for four hours on her own" just so I could Like it.

She's not even at the point technically known as sleeping through the night - the five-hours-at-a-time thing that you might reach with a baby who's a few months old, when after giving thanks to the deities and scattering burnt offerings over the ceremonial altar, you get greedy and think, well that's nice, but I'd like it to be five hours when I'm asleep, not just from 7pm to midnight, thank you very much, "technically". I'd LOVE her to sleep from 7 to 12, because then I could go out without rushing back to either a screaming child or a wide awake one, either of which will take a further hour to get to sleep now that I'm here because she's so disgruntled that I had the temerity to leave her.

Her sleeping is more in flux now than ever because we've scrapped the nap, mostly. Tomorrow night we're going to the cinema and a friend is babysitting, and so I'm going to give Mabel a nap so that she can stay up till we get home at ten. (If I put her to bed before we leave, she'll scream when she inevitably wakes up to find me missing. If I let her stay up, she'll be perfectly happy hanging out with one of her favourite grown-ups until we get back.) She definitely needs a nap now, after four napless days, but we're toughing it out, and she'll be fine so long as we don't try to go anywhere she needs to be civilized.

And as soon as I had written that she came to me and said "I know what we can do! We can go and have a nap!" so I took her upstairs and she was out like a light. I'll wake her after 40 minutes and I don't think it'll do too much damage to the master plan. It's one thing not napping a child who could do with one but won't admit it, but I'm not going to deny a nap to a child who actively seeks one out. I may be a crazy fool woman, but I'm not a monster.

Cryogenic

Yesterday, one of the teachers at Mabel's school asked, "Did I see you run past my house the other morning?"
"Mumble," I replied, busying myself with the important task of posting some information about housekeeping duties to the noticeboard in her classroom.
"Sorry?"
"Yesnomubby. I mean, yes, I suppose it was. But I can't do it yet, so don't ask me about it."

I did learn some useful related facts this morning, though, which I will ennumerate for you here in handy list format.

Bad things about going for a short run in 21 F (that's -6 C) weather: My fingers don't thaw out until I get home again.

Good things about going for a short run in 21 F (that's -6 C) weather: At least my glasses don't slip down my nose from the sweat.

Most important thing about going for a short run in 21 F (that's -6 C) weather: Whatever you do, don't check to see what temperature it is before you leave, or you'll abandon the whole endeavour.

Chilly

Mabel is eating a piece of frozen bread and complaining that it's cold. She won't let me defrost it or toast it though, so I can't really help her.

(We keep our bread in the freezer, mostly for space reasons. As we generally make toast, it doesn't matter to us, and we never have to worry about it going off. But it means that our children are slow to associate the word bread with the sliced stuff, and when Mabel asks for a piece of toast, I have to make sure to find out whether she wants it toasted or frozen. Pointing out that it's not toast if it's frozen does nothing to convince her.)

Geese are flying overhead, big flocks of them up from the lake spreading themselves across the sky. They've finally packed their little feathered suitcases and are heading for Florida. The temperature today is hitting a high of 32 F (or 0 C, which is freezing in both languages) for pretty much the first time this winter, and my fingers don't like it. If my fingernails weren't silver, you'd be able to see that my fingertips are a delicate shade of palest purple. A tiny flurry of snowflakes is whirling outside, and we will be driving the half-mile to pick Dash up from school.

It's all well and good to be cosy and warm inside while the winter wind howls, but when the winter wind makes the drainpipe outside your bedroom window vibrate in some unidentifiable way that sounds unpleasantly like a pneumatic drill at random intervals all night, things are less like snug as a bug and more like Night of the Living Dead. This is what was happening two nights ago outside Mabel's room, which just happens to be on the windward corner of the house and as inaccessible as possible by ladder or leaning out a window. I decamped to my bedroom leaving a soundly sleeping Mabel behind. She woke up three minutes later. I went back and got her, but she spent the next hour and a half flipping from one side to the other as she didn't nurse back to sleep, before she finally did.

Must be time for a cuppa. Should be warmer tomorrow. Maybe the geese will turn around.

Repeat to fade

Conversations with a five-year-old go like this:

- Do you like this picture?
- Yes, it's great.
- Is it the best picture you've ever seen?
- Well, there was once this man called Dali who did some pretty good stuff...
- Is it the best picture of me and [the boy across the road] you've ever seen?
- Yes, yes, it probably is.
- Which picture do you like best? My picture or Mabel's picture?
- I love you both the same so I love your pictures both the same too.
- But which one is better? Is mine better?
- Yours is excellent for a five-year-old and hers is perfect for a three-year-old.
- Do you like this picture better than the picture I gave you for Christmas?
- I like them both. Can you stop asking now?
- Why?
- Because.

Conversations with a three-year-old go like this:

- I spy with my little eye, something that is black.
- Is it inside the car or outside the car?
- It's outside the car. And we saw it when we were leaving the house.
- Can we still see it now?
- No, it's in the red car next door to our house.
- This is not really the way you're supposed to play this game. Is it the dog that was in the car?
- Yes! It's the dog!

- I spy with my little eye, something that is brown.
- Is it inside the car or outside the car?
- It's outside the car and we ate it on Christmas morning and it's made of chocolate.
- Is it M&Ms?
- Yes! It's M&Ms!

- I spy with my little eye, something beginning with M.
- [Suspicious, because she usually does colours.] Is it Mabel?
- Yes! It's Mabel! Good guess, Mummy!

Wish

I have no deep thoughts today. My children failed to provide me with material, parenting epiphanies were sorely lacking, and I didn't bake anything pretty. (Well, I made some muffins, but they were hardly original.) The fact that the clock ticked past midnight once again and a number turned over is not inspiring me to fill this page with insightful banalities.

So I'll just wish you a happy year, again, replete with simple - or exotic - pleasures, and thank you for reading.

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