Me: Doggy’s cousins have arrived.
Her: You said Ian was Doggy’s brother.
Me: OK. Doggy’s brothers.
She treated them with utter indifference. The boys, on the other hand, were delighted to see them both and exclaimed “Doggy’s back”. Obviously, Doggy was a big figure in all of our lives.
The computer died. It went pop and smoke came out from behind as I was sitting playing with it at 2.30 am when I should have been in bed. I feel quite nostalgic. We bought it in 2003 cheaply, second-hand from the people downstairs. I had wanted a cool apple computer but my husband reined me in. I am quite pleased that he did. It was not beautiful but it was functional. And now it has died at a very opportune moment because we have been thinking of getting a new one for some time but felt we couldn’t justify it while the old one worked fine. We have a new one, twice as fast, half the size and half the price and amazingly silent.
We discovered that in the privacy of her bedroom, the Princess has been working on some alternative models:
Do this child’s parents spend too much time playing with the computer?
The Princess invited twins to her birthday party in April and each brought her a fiver inscribed “Happy Birthday love from..”. It struck me as an odd kind of present and I wasn’t sure whether it wasn’t some kind of offence to deface notes of the realm, but who am I to knock other mothers of twins. The Princess preserved her treasures carefully regularly asking about their purchasing power (she’s holding out until the economy hits bottom and she can get a house). Last night she decided unbeknowst to me that her treasures should sleep under the stars; under the brambles in the back garden to be specific. This morning she learnt a valuable lesson about minding her money. I suppose that kind of knowledge is worth a tenner.
Princess: Mummy is very nice to us today.
Michael: Yes, she is.
Princess: Normally she doesn’t give us this many meals.
The other morning, Michael asked could he bring a bag into Montessori school. He and his sister had been whispering about this earlier in some excitement. In a moment of weakness, I said that he could and in he trotted with a pink poodle bag strapped to his back.
When he got in, he could contain his excitement no longer; he opened up the bag and, to my intense astonishment, began distributing envelopes. “We’re having a party,” he announced to his classmates. I managed to get one of the invitations from one of the other children. It said, in his sister’s handwriting “We are having a ‘Thomas the Tank Engine’ party”. It gave a date (aha her request for a calendar explained), time and address and included a drawing of Thomas.
I was impressed by her organisational powers. She had said that she wanted to hold a party for the boys and I had fobbed her off saying that we would have something for their birthday in September and we couldn’t afford to throw parties at the drop of a hat. She was undaunted and said that she only wanted a party for playing games not for food which might, she could see, be expensive. I resorted to the grown-ups’ favourite phrase and help in ages past “We’ll see.” Clearly, she felt that she needed to take matters into her own hands. The teacher rescued all the invitations from the boys’ classmates and the Princess and I had a discussion about the power of the written word.
Herself went for a sleepover with her saintly aunt. It was a bit traumatic for both of them. The Princess burnt her lip by applying a scalding sausage roll to it and crushed her fingers in a heavy fire door. She still has a scab on her lip but, at least she can write again. My poor sister is exhausted from it all, her niece, however, is undaunted and keen for a rematch with the door.
Perhaps in part due to her various injuries and the fact that she had stayed up until 1 the previous night on her sleepover, the Princess was an unmerciful pain when we went to the Leinster House open day. I was mildly keen to be guided round our legislature by one of the ushers who won the lottery (a syndicate won the lottery, though I understand from one of the ushers in question, it worked at 18,200 each and his share has already gone on internal plastering work at home) but the royal mood was such that we felt that it would be unwise.
I was a bit disappointed overall, I thought that there would be more in the way of family fun and less in the way of re-enactments of the debates on the Treaty. Also, I was a little surprised to see lots of vans selling random wares on Leinster Lawn (or the car park as it now is). I suppose I hadn’t really psychologically prepared myself to beat off requests for popcorn and ice cream and I am not sure about whether the marriage of politics and commerce sends out quite the right signal. We were met on arrival by a man on stilts who assured the children that there was free candy floss. Though I assured them he was joking, it was not until we had carried out an extensive search and double checked with the apologetic stilt walker that we were able to abandon the candy floss hunt. We got the children’s faces painted and called it a day.
To my intense chagrin, the event was reported in detail on the radio as I drove to do the shopping later that day (one hour in the car, the hunt for a decent supermarket nearby that is not Tesco continues unabated and entirely unsuccessfully) and everyone other than us seems to have had a spiffing time. I like other people to share my misery.