Her: In my Jacqueline Wilson book, it says there is no Santa, it’s just your parents. It’s true, isn’t it?
Me: Pathetic strangled noise followed by equivocal reply.
On consultation with my loving husband, I discovered that she had put the same question to him and he had replied that Jacqueline Wilson writes fiction and everything in her books is fictional. Which was very clever but too late for me.
Tomorrow my daughter will be eight. It seems extraordinary.
She is a great reader and a great talker. She has a terrific vocabulary. She doesn’t like ball sports but she likes walking and running. She still speaks French and her Irish is ok. Her handwriting is appalling. Her teacher describes it as like an extinct animal. However, she is a creative child and the house is full of diaries (usually abandoned after a frank description of the particular offence her parents have committed) and stories and art projects. She knows a lot of stuff – she loves National Geographic, Kids. We are training her up for University Challenge.
She often gets hysterical at bedtime which is tiresome but really, the only time when she acts like a little girl so, faintly appealing also. Her brothers worship the ground she walks on and will do anything she asks. She mostly treats them with cruel indifference.
Socially, she still struggles a little bit, but she is getting better at staying friends. She is always quite good at hitting it off initially but when friends come to our house, she is quite liable to disappear to her room to read which is, obviously, not terrific. We had her birthday party on Sunday and she really enjoyed it. This is the first time I can say this unequivocally. My husband found it excruciating, not just because birthday parties are, but also because it was the weekend of the neighbourhood clean up. He sits on the residents’ committee (you are not surprised, I expect) and saw his fellow members, who are elderly, picking up carefully on our street. 80 year old T waved to him while holding a black plastic bag. However, stern duty in the form of supervising 13 little girls called, and I wouldn’t let him out.
The Princess is a great cook. I am really quite proud of how she has mastered cooking. The fact that the page of Nigella Lawson’s “How to Eat” that covers cake now looks like this is a small price to pay.
Her baking skills are impressive. I close the kitchen door, she gets out the recipe book, she weighs and measures and mixes, calls me when it is time to put the cake in the oven and that is my only role. I hope eight will be the year she gets the hang of savoury food. Somewhat dismally, when I asked her what she would like for dinner as a special birthday treat, she instantly replied, “Domino’s Pizza”.
She loves the cat. She also loves dogs and small animals; though not dead mice which the cat occasionally presents to her. In fact, she is pretty dubious about blood and gore generally and becoming dubious about spiders and worms. I love spiders – they’re cute little things and very light. Ideal pets for small children. I digress.
She increasingly offers me hope that she will be a delightful adult. Happy birthday to the best girl in the world.
The school had a singing and recitation competition on Saturday. The boys were both very brave but failed to scoop any medals. Michael took this very hard. “I try and I try, but still I don’t win,” he sobbed as the kindly adjudicator mouthed “sorry” at me over his heaving shoulders. The same adjudicator proceeded to award his sister second place in her category which she regarded as no more than her due. If I were giving out medals, I would have given one to Daniel, I think, who did his impression of a child from the Connemara Gaeltacht.
In completely unrelated news, herself walked a neighbour’s child home this afternoon and came back carrying a bag full of swag. Apparently, every day when coming home she, the childminder and the boys, meet a nice lady who lives on the street. The Princess had informed the lady that her birthday was coming, as indeed she has informed everybody. The lady acted on this information and as the Princess was passing her house this afternoon, she came out with various offerings. Unfortunately, the Princess has inherited my sense of direction so she has no idea in which house exactly her benefactress lives nor is she aware of other useful identifiers like the lady’s name. She has composed a thank you letter to hand over next time she meets the lady in the street and that is the best we can do for the moment. Who says the big city is an unfriendly place?
As ever, delivered at 8.45 as we are walking out the door, “Mummy, I need a photograph of you for school.”
The Princess made her first confession. It was a surprisingly nice ceremony. When I made my first confession, we were taken out of school during the day and filed into the church and into the confession box in turn. No parents were involved.
This was quite different. It was in the evening and families came in droves. The children did a little play and went up to the altar to tell the priests their sins (although as I may have mentioned before, there are no sins any more, only occasions when they don’t “show loveâ€). The sixth class choir came as did all the teachers from the school.
Mr. Waffle and I didn’t quite know what to wear so we were somewhat overdressed for the occasion. My poor daughter was horribly nervous, mostly because she had one small line in the play which she had to deliver in front of an entirely sympathetic audience. As her moment came, she turned pink. Then she scrunched up the end of her skirt in her fist and delivered her line at great speed. Not, in fact, entirely unlike my interventions when forced to speak at large conferences.
After this, the actual confession was painless.
The church where the ceremony was held is very pretty. It’s a beautifully proportioned Victorian gothic structure with lovely stained glass. It is, however, in a very deprived part of the inner city surrounded by run down council flats, some of which are boarded up. After the ceremony we were told by the school to do something celebratory, so although it was late, we decided to take herself to a slightly old-fashioned but still smart hotel nearby for a drink. As we walked past the flats (or the flahs, as they are known locally), I was astonished to hear someone calling the Princess’s name and to see her waving merrily up at a depressing balcony. “Who was that?†I asked. “That’s X [let us call him Bronte] from my class, he lives in the flats.†Truly all human life is here. “Oh, I think he lives with his granny,†I said to Mr. Waffle, “I’m not sure I’ve ever seen his mother.†“Who then is the young woman with Bronte tattooed on her lower back?†replied Mr. Waffle.
The Princess got orange juice and marshmallows from the nice waiter in the hotel. She got a sparkly bracelet from Veritas (religious goods store in Ireland, haberdashers in Belgium – I give you this information free) which was the best of an, ahem, interesting range of items. She loved it which was delightful. The whole thing was very pleasant and, I suspect, may be more successful than the First Communion day given the weight of expectation which is riding on it. Of course, she is not really prepared at all for her second confession when she’ll have to go into the box in the church, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.
To renew the children’s passports, we have to bring them to a police station and let a Garda look at them. This may or may not be because Mr. Waffle was not born in Ireland but in a country well known to harbour dangerous subversives (Canada, since you ask). So on Sunday we trooped into the station where the Gardaà duly looked the children over and pronounced that they matched the photos. During that time, I fielded the following questions from the Princess based on a series of posters on the wall:
What is rape? [Having looked at these excellent but disturbing posters]
What’s human trafficking?
What’s a drug dealer?
While doing this, I had also to break up a fist fight between the boys on the subject of Daniel’s wellingtons.
Unrelated: Praxis, please advise on the capitalisation of the title.