belgianwaffle

Archives for October 2006

Home alone


Posted in: Boys, Princess

Last week while Mr. Waffle was away, I had to mind all three children overnight. Our babysitter came and helped me to bath them all and put the boys to bed. When she left, I fed the Princess and put her to bed. And she got up again and again and again. As it got later and later I realised that the interval between her finally going to bed and the boys starting to wake up was likely to disappear. I got desperate and called her father in Luxembourg to talk to her. He threatened not to bring a present unless she was good. She treated him with laughing disdain. Finally at 10.30, I said to her that I was going to bed. She was absolutely exhausted and lying on the bean bag playing in a desultory way with the boys’ toys but she gamely said to me “you go off to bed Mummy, I’ll sit here and play quietly on my own”. So I conceded defeat and asked whether she would like to sleep in my bed thereby, as my mother and sister both pointed out to me, rewarding poor behaviour. As she climbed into bed beside me, she said “ring Daddy in Luxembourg and tell him I’m a good girl”. “I will not ring Daddy in Luxembourg, he’ll be asleep”. “No, he won’t, he’s working in Luxembourg”. She should meet my former boss, they have such similar ideas on working hours. In any event, on his return from foreign parts, Mr. Waffle brought no present. The Princess expressed neither surprise nor indignation.

As ill-luck would have it, my esteemed husband is away this week also. Tonight, not only are we all home alone but the babysitter couldn’t come at the last moment. I got home about 6.30 and put them all into the bath which I had let run a little deep which they all enjoyed very much. Hysterically so, in fact. Nobody got hurt but I got very wet. Then I got out the two boys who instantly began crawling around the bathroom dragging their little towels behind them (making for the bin and the potty respectively). I got out a somewhat reluctant Princess also. I corralled all three of them down towards the boys’ bedroom where the Princess jumped up and down on the large bed, somewhat taking from the soothing end of the day quiet I was aiming for. I wrestled the boys into nappies as speedily as I could and nobody weed on the floor. Result, as I understand the young people say. At a somewhat more leisurely pace I got them into their pyjamas and sleeping bags allowing Daniel time to try once again his trick of trying to catch his finger in the drawer while Michael invested his not inconsiderable energies in pulling himself upright and falling back on his bottom. He performed this trick for the first time on Saturday but, so far, it shows absolutely no sign of palling. They were both in bed sucking on bottles by 7.10. Did I hear a peep out of them thereafter? No, I did not. Let us hope and pray that Daniel will equal the feat of sleeping 12 hours which he managed on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday night but most certainly did not last night. Since Michael has yet to wake up fewer than three times in any given night, I suppose it would be futile to hope that he might sleep through. Let us pray also that the Princess does not wet the bed. In the past week she has taken to wetting the bed half an hour after going to bed. This is some feat since she always goes to the toilet before going to bed. We think she does it on purpose because a) she has confessed to her father that she finds it funny and b) she wails when we put her back in her own bed “but before when I wet the bed, you let me sleep in your bed”. Just once. Never again. Mind you, friends of ours who came to the boys’ bash at the weekend pointed out that things could be a lot worse. Their little girl has only just been toilet trained and she tends to poo in ther underpants (which the Princess never did, mercifully) and then poke around in there (ditto, especially mercifully). Her father says that the other day it was like a dirty protest in their bathroom. Lovely.

I do feel a little bad that this evening I spent exactly 40 minutes with my sons, time which they had to divide with their older and somewhat demanding sister. Oh well, I daresay they will have plenty of time with me during the night. On the plus side though, the Princess was phenomenally well behaved. While I made dinner for us, she tidied away all the boys’ toys (by tossing them into the playpen which has become a vast untidy toybox rather than somewhere to put the boys) and we sat down and ate together and she said to me “Now Mummy, isn’t this pleasant?” Yes, indeed. And then she went to bed. No problems and she asked me “can I get up, if I want to do a wee?” ” Absolutely sweetheart”. And, finally, just before I turned out the light she said anxiously “Daddy will bring me a present, won’t he?” That’s my girl.

Kerry


Posted in: Princess

Her: Mummy, I want to live in Kerry.

Me: I know sweetheart we had a lovely time with the beach and the garden and your grandparents and your cousin and your aunties and uncle. Tell me, what did you like the best?

Her: The biscuits.

The Grammar Diet


Posted in: Mr. Waffle

Mr. Waffle: It must be time for dinner.

Me: I think it must be; I’m starving, myself.

Him: Am I married to Posh Spice?

Me: No, I’m starving, comma, myself.

The Belgian Plumber


Posted in: Family

I am visiting my parents for the weekend.  Mr. Waffle is minding the children alone.  My heart bleeds for him. 

My father seems to be recovering apace.  Alas, on the day he emerged from hospital (last Sunday), the downstairs toilet broke.  Obviously, getting a plumber in to fix the toilet is out of the question in boom time Ireland, so for the past week my father has been traipsing up and down to the bathroom, despite the fact that he has strict instructions to only climb the stairs once a day.

Today, I sourced a thingy to attach the handle to the flushing device. Perhaps I do not have a long term future in the plumbing industry as I now have no recollection of what it was called. I removed the lid from the toilet cistern and spent half an hour kneeling on the toilet lid wrestling under water (clean water, I like to think, it goes into the cistern before it goes into the toilet) with a pliers and a singularly unyielding piece of metal while fielding helpful comments from my mother.  I fixed it.  I am very proud.  Let us hope it remains fixed, at the very least, until I leave tomorrow.

Embracing middle age


Posted in: Family

When we were in Kerry during the summer, my mother-in-law asked me whether I was particularly fond of 1960s songs as I seemed to know a lot of them.  I found myself mulling on this and reflected that I knew far more songs from the 1960s than from the last 10 years.  I asked Mr. Waffle to hum one hit song from the last year and he couldn’t do it.  I knew precisely one song, something about God by pink and I couldn’t hum it either.  We are without it.

Furthermore, I am getting quite testy about this business of complete strangers addressing each other and, more particularly, me by their or my first names.  In a hotel I stayed in for work, the 60 year old man on reception had a label with “John” on his chest.  Not “John Bloggs” just “John”.  Am I really supposed to call this older gentleman “John”?

I have had some exposure to hospitals recently through my parents whom the doctors and nurses treating my father felt completely free to address by their first names whether they knew them or not.  In a context when you or your spouse is ill, poked, pulled and cut open, I can’t help feeling that it would be nice to have some vestiges of dignity retained.  Neither of my parents complained, but my mother did mention it and I wondered who decreed that all patients should be addressed by their first names.  In Belgium, I was “Madame Gaufre” to everyone when I was in hospital.  Maybe it’s because they have “tu” and “vous” in French and this encourages formality.  Whatever the reason, I like it.  You can always tell people to be a little less formal but it’s much harder to ask people to be more formal.  I remember when a friend of my parents’ was very ill (possibly dying) in hospital, he was addressed by his first name.  As it happened, he was always known by his middle name, so that wasn’t even his name, really, if you see what I mean, and I, who had known him all my life, only every addressed him as Professor C.  A little courtesy might be welcome.

I was pleasantly surprised the other day when I got an email from an academic beginning “Dear Anne (if I may)”.  Yes, you may, how nice to be asked.  When I started my working life, which is not that long ago, 1990, in fact (if this was before you were born, please don’t comment), it was quite standard to address the senior partners in the office as Mr. (there were no senior women, so the question of Ms, Mrs or Miss did not arise – ah, progress, not all bad then), though my own boss did get his secretary to tell me to stop calling him Mr. because it made him feel very old. 

As a child, I addressed grown-ups as Mr. or Mrs. or, good friends of my parents as aunty or uncle.  This latter, I concede, carried its own difficulties. As a sullen adolescent, I wasn’t going to call unrelated people “uncle” or “aunty”, so I ended up having to address them as “you” or point.  I don’t, however, like to see the Princess imperiously addressing my friends by their first names and telling them to do things.  Imperious is her usual mode of interaction and, it might, I suppose be softened, if she were using some form of title.  I am not entirely sure how to deal with this, but perhaps inspiration will come.

Oh, and also, the policemen appear to be getting younger.

Sunday Morning


Posted in: Reading etc.

My mother and I emerged from the parents’ house on Sunday morning to go to mass.  It was pouring rain which made the fact that some yobs had walked on the roof of my parents’ car and put a dent in it which created a large gap between the roof and the sun roof that little bit more annoying.  Somewhat to my surprise, the guards came when we called them and said that they had arrested a mob which was rampaging around the area.  This is the second time that I have seen the guards on a trip home.  I am beginning to think that my parents live in a more dangerous part of town than I had realised.

 

At mass, the priest gave a sermon about divorce.  Divorce was only introduced in Ireland in 1995 and we’re all still getting used to it.  Some of us more quickly than others, it appears.  The divorce rate is 33% the priest told us.  He said that in his 20 years as a priest he had only seen unhappiness and misery when people split up.  So far, so catholic.  And a marriage is for life.  Continuing catholic.  Even though this is the case and he knows that there will be people who disagree with him, he believes that people should be allowed to have their second union blessed by a priest in a church.  I nearly fell out of my pew.  Doubtless his defrocking papers are in the post.  We also prayed for people who had died during the week including a man who would have had his birthday next week.  I think we were all expecting the priest to say his 100th birthday but he said “his 21st birthday”.  He died in a traffic accident last week and he was lying in the side chapel. 

 

After mass, we repaired to the scout hall where they were having a book sale.  It was a great book sale.  Lots of old Nevil Shutes and Dorothy L. Sayers and theology primers (“An Introduction to the new Mass”).   We ran into my favourite aunt who told us that she had brought four boxes to the sale and was busy buying more back.  I bought some myself.  My father once said to me “books are the ruination of this house”.  I was appalled but I am beginning to see what he means.  My parents’ house is falling down with books – I am reminded of the C.S. Lewis quote where he describes himself as follows: I am the product … of endless books.  There were books in the study, books in the drawing-room, books in the cloakroom, books (two deep) in the great bookcase on the landing, books in a bedroom, books piled as high as my shoulder in the cistern attic, books of all kinds reflecting every transient stage of my parents’ interests, books readable and unreadable, books suitable for a child and books most emphatically not”.  When I was a teenager, my father was always tying up piles of books with string to go to the Oxfam shop and I would unpick the knots and take out any I considered worthy of saving.  Now I see that he was right.  Our own flat in Brussels is chock full of books.  I am reluctant to get rid of most of them.  There are the ones I will read again.  There are the ones that I may read again.  There are the ones that I read with great difficulty over many weeks or possibly even months which I am reluctant to remove from the shelves because, if people are to judge me by my books, I would, hypocritically, rather that they judged me by these rather than my set of Georgette Heyers (which definitely fall into the first category along with Terry Pratchett, the Narnia books and Cold Comfort Farm).    And then there are the ones I am going to read.  Yes, really, when I get a moment.

 

Book sale notwithstanding, probably my best moment all weekend came when I bought cake at the French cake shop with my mother.  We’ll have a mille feuille, I said and the French woman behind the counter said “you pronounce that really well”.  My heart swelled with pride, it nearly made up for the time my husband and a French waiter fell about the place laughing at my pronounciation of this most difficult collection of French vowels.  Mind you, every one in Cork says milly filly so the competition isn’t exactly fierce.