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Archives for July 2007

Middle Child

29 July, 2007
Posted in: Boys, Daniel

I often feel poor Daniel gets neglected between the histrionics of his drama queen sister and action man brother. He is the most placid child and very stoic. When he was vacinated, he didn’t flinch; Michael brought the house down. When he is sick, he is stoutly uncomplaining. He is happy to sit in the corner and flick through a book (often upside down) while the others demand attention.

20 April - Day off 014

 

He does, however, have a temper. When he is frustrated, most often by Michael whipping something from his hands and using his superior speed to carry it away, he will crawl into a corner and bellow or hit anyone who is to hand (usually not Michael who has nipped sharply out of the way). If Michael is foolish enough to stay within range he will generally get a bite on the hand from Daniel. This means that Daniel ends up in the coin colere or, at the very least, is spoken to sharply. Despite his macho appearance, Daniel is a sensitive soul and reprimands of any kind are a source of great distress and, once he fully understands that he, yes he, is being reprimanded, lead to copious tears (Michael, in similar circumstances, just glares balefully or laughs).

Spain 011

 

Daniel is always anxious to make amends and with his rolling walk (like a cowboy after a long day in the saddle) will go over to Michael and give him a big kiss. They tell us that in the creche, he often looks for Michael saying “calin, calin” (hug, hug) and gives him big hugs.  He has great fun with his brother and he loves it when they poke and push each other and try to close the door on each other’s fingers.  Oh yes, it’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye.

11 May - Europe 029

Daniel loves to talk and the Princess has taken his education into her hands. “One” she says. “Two” he replies. He will repeat almost anything she says to him and can make good efforts on most things. He still hasn’t strung many of his words together though.  He has a really lovely smile but he does not dole it out easily.  Mostly when I try to get him to engage with people he says “a shy” and buries his head on my shoulder.  For all that, he is often more courageous than the other pair, wading into water and patting strange dogs while they cower.

Cork and Kerry 103

One night when he would not sleep and I was desperate to get to bed, the two of us ended up watching a nature programme about barn owls on the BBC.  He loved it.  It was a gentle ten minute look at the owls and various other farm animals (quack, quack, baa).  I have one question for the BBC – why would you schedule this at 9 in the evening?  I digress.  Now he makes hopeful hoo hoo sounds at the television screen in Brussels in the hope that somehow the magic owls might come back but, so far, no joy.

Because Michael spends most of his time welded to my hip, Daniel gets much less time in my arms.  He is devoted to his Daddy.  Do you think I should worry that he occasionally says “Mummy, Mummy!” to my loving husband?  Poor neglected mite.

6 July Stage 005

 

 

Six years

28 July, 2007
Posted in: Family, Mr. Waffle, Travel

And we celebrated our wedding anniversary by flying to Dublin with our children.  As I type, Mr. Waffle is wrestling the children into bed.  Boy, did I marry the right man.

Action/Reaction

27 July, 2007
Posted in: Family, Siblings

“When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.” So said Mark Twain. My father is a charitable, kind-hearted, Irish, reactionary, pro-European Daily Telegraph reader. I am a wishy-washy, left leaning, hand wringing Observer reader. I have always tended to snort at my father’s views but the older I get the more I find myself in charity with them. The anti-smoking people are a curse (tick, though I like the smoke free pubs it’s the sanctimoniousness of it gets to me – you can’t smoke in the workplace so no, if you work outside cleaning the streets and have smoked all your life, you can’t have a cigarette on the job, really, we’re only thinking about you). French intellectuals are responsible for many of the worst atrocities of the 20th century (tick, Pol Pot). I was once friendly with a very strait laced lawyer who had grown up around the Haight-Ashbury and whose mother was an aging lesbian hippy. I can’t help wondering whether Dina is now into beads.

I’m getting to my point, bear with me.  My sister is leaving her job. Today is, in fact, her last day after nine and a half years of faithful service.  Yes, that’s right precisely a week and a half before we pitch up on her doorstep to get a feel for where she lives.  She’s going to move back to Ireland in the autumn; she’s decided that she’s been away long enough. I was astounded when she told me; this is a girl who was able to pay the deposit on her first flat with the profits on her wisely  invested first communion money. “With no job lined up?” “With no job lined up” she confirmed. Having grown up in Ireland in the 1980s and left before the boom got going in the 1990s, I cannot really view this prospect with anything other than horror despite the fact that it means that she will be much closer to us and I will see much more of her which will, of course, be wonderful. I was one of the first people she told. I rang her back a week later to see what everyone else thought. “They were all really pleased, they feel it’s a great move”.  “Even Mummy and Daddy?” “Especially Mummy and Daddy!” I think I have become more conservative than my parents.

You’ll be pleased to hear, though, that she’ll still be in Chicago when we arrive and, obviously, there’ll be no escape to the office for her.  She’ll be begging them to take her back.

Off to Ireland tomorrow before flying on to Chicago next week (we like to travel so much that we always make complex arrangements like this), wish us luck.

Knotty questions

25 July, 2007
Posted in: Princess

Me:  Look, all the people in the cafe are mothers and daughters.

Her: Well, everybody is somebody’s child.

Me: True.

Her: Except God, of course.

Me: Well, no, Mary was God’s mother.

Her: I didn’t realise that Jesus and God were brothers.

Me (anxiously though, you know, quite pleased as well that she’s getting the hang of family relationships – I have drawn family trees on the back of envelopes to show her how third cousins work, degrees of cousinship is such a useful thing to know and it’s a bit like public procurement or state aids, so few people know anything about it that even showing a little knowledge is enough to gain you much admiration): No, um, actually, you know, I might be wrong there, I think God is actually Jesus’s father, though of course the Trinity is one of those theological mysteries which are, um, mysterious.

Her: Can I have lemon tart?

Another holiday could kill us

23 July, 2007
Posted in: Family, Travel

We’re back. Did you miss me? No, well, we’re back all the same. Much as I love all my relatives, it is fabulous to be back in our own house. Also, Belgium is not damp. It is, I hasten to add, raining, but my clothes are not all damp in the way that they tend to be in Ireland where damp is endemic and the hot press a way of life.

So, we spent a week in Cork. As always, we went to Fota where Mr. Waffle and I were entranced by the llamas, kangaroos, monkeys and (I think) prairie dogs lolloping about and the children fell in love with the ducks all over again. Just because it’s a cliché, doesn’t mean it isn’t true. The weather was pretty good all in all, we had a paddling pool in the garden which the children loved and on the most rain sodden day we went to the Glucksman gallery which they also loved. Video installations are the way of the future.



For a couple of days they had their Uncle Dan in Cork as well which they loved because they are as feckless as he is and they recognised a kindred spirit. I was touched to see how sweet and patient my brother was with them: tossing them in the air, reading to them, playing football with them, outlining to a restive audience the rudiments of rugby, waving at them gamely when they went in to his room at 6.00 in the morning to tell him that daylight had broken and it was time to rise and shine. Not actually rising though. However, the star of the show was their Nana who spent hours playing with them, cooking for them and chatting to them. Their Granddad also contributed his mite by waving at them from behind his paper from time to time as appropriate and announcing when they seemed likely to do anything particularly dangerous. My parents house is great for this and Michael, in particular, got great entertainment from the hacksaw on the landing.

On Sunday we set off from Cork to Kerry with tearful farewells on our part (Nana, Nana, NANA) to the loving Cork grandparents and, I suspect, mild sighs of relief from them, though they looked suitably downcast. I imagine that the minute we left, they rushed in to have a quiet cup of tea and savour the silence. We left on a high as we had all gone to mass that morning and the children were as good as gold. Especially welcome since my aunt had done a reading and I wouldn’t have liked her to be shouted down. My aunt lives next door to my parents and is the least materialistic person I have ever met as well as an early riser. This was a phenomenal combination for a mother of three small children and most mornings saw us going through the back garden and tapping anxiously on her window so that we could go in, play her piano, test the durability of her china and wooden ornaments and demand that we too get porridge for breakfast.

The journey to Kerry was distressingly eventful. We were diverted from Macroom to Millstreet due to roadworks. We were stopped for about half an hour by an accident just before Sneem (isn’t that the most delightful name for a town?) and once we got to the other side, we promptly rolled over a stone and got a puncture. Subsequently we discovered that Sneem was the subject of much bad feeling among the holiday group as one of their number, a Canadian too, a visitor to this country, had been kicked out of a café there for breastfeeding her 5 month old daughter. I must say I have never ever had such an experience and nor has anyone I know. I suppose it must happen but not surely with a very discreet mother and a small baby and in modern Ireland to boot? Well, apparently, yes, poor J who was on her own with baby A was tossed on to a street with the words “this is Ireland, you can’t do that kind of thing here”. You will be happy to know that, even as I type, a number of irate letters are winging their way to the Irish Times headed “smirched in Sneem”. But honestly, who’d have thought?

I digress. We got to Caherdaniel in the end where we were greeted by another set of loving and excited grandparents, fresh to the fray. The parents-in-law described life in Caherdaniel as resembling a Feydeau farce with a vast rotating cast (though, to my knowledge, no infidelity). They had rented a large house as had their friends, the Canadians and the cousins. The previous week, the cast had featured, the Canadians’ son-in-law the theatre director and his daughter from an earlier relationship who had left for Las Vegas (fancy) to talk about a show, the Canadians’ daughter’s school friend from Ireland (I should perhaps mention that Mr. Canada is a diplomat who has spent time everywhere and is now finishing off his career as ambassador in a glamorous posting which comes with a house with eight bathrooms which we have been invited to sample and we may yet) and her husband (who was the year behind Mr. Waffle in college and remembered him but of whom Mr. Waffle does not have even the faintest recollection, and yet he can describe to you in detail the flags of 189 different countries, mysterious) and three children. More or less simultaneously with us arrived the Princess’s only first cousin and attendant parents, Mr. Waffle’s cousin J’s new girlfriend and Mr. Waffle’s cousin S who is working in Australia for a year and who is quite possibly a saint having travelled for 24 hours and after a brief respite in Dublin, driven to Kerry and spent many more hours entertaining a crowd of adoring four year olds. In situ for the duration were Mr. Waffle’s parents, the Canadians (friends of the parents from their Dublin posting), their daughter, her four year old and 5 month old daughters, Mr. Waffle’s uncle and aunt, their three children and their daughter’s 4 year old son. Are you still with me?

The Princess had great fun with the other children. In particular the Canadian four year old who was a quite extraordinarily entertaining and charming child (not obviously as extraordinarily entertaining etc. as my child but close and, on the plus side, she seemed to be quite happy to keep her clothes on much of the time unlike my hardy nudist daughter). I did think as I watched them gathering shells on the beach together with enormous concentration, how lovely it must be for the parents-in-law to have their granddaughter and their old friends’ granddaughter playing together. I am a sucker for this kind of thing. Her second cousin is a boy and he was better for jumping on beds but not as good at the shell gathering which he scorned in favour of shrimping with his mother and nana.

And the sun shone. This was nothing short of miraculous as there were floods everywhere else in the country. Obviously, the sun didn’t shine all day every day but we went swimming a number of times and, given half a chance, the boys would have launched themselves across the bay to Cork. How they loved the water. The Princess and her father went down to the pub one night with various cousins and aunts and uncles and while he sat and talked in a manly way she had crisps and bonded with her cousins which is a quintessentially Irish holiday experience and one that reminded me nostalgically of my own youth spent in similar hostelries in West Cork. On the Wednesday night, the ambassador brought his guitar round and there was a big dinner which necessarily involved cross-questioning the misfortunate new girlfriend (please see dramatis personae above) and her boyfriend, Mr. Waffle’s cousin. As I extracted much information from both by my use of the direct question (I am the only Irish person alive capable of asking a direct question and I find it hugely effective in getting information from my shocked compatriots), my mother-in-law kept saying “please forgive her, she’s from Cork”, she once tried this on a wheel clamper in Dublin and it didn’t cut the mustard there either. Nevertheless, the wider clan was captivated and the girlfriend bore up spectacularly well though I did think she quailed slightly when Mrs. Canada senior asked what they got up to after dinner on their first date.

The Ambassador is a really good guitar player. Normally when I see a guitar in the hall, my heart sinks, but “The Boxer” was not played once. There were some lovely Canadian folk songs including one which the Princess wants me to find about a boy who sinks another ship for the captain of his ship in exchange for gold silver and the captain’s daughter but, alas, drowns before he can claim his bounty. Unfortunately, I can’t remember the tune or the words which is a little problematic but I do think that it shows how attracted she is to cheerful tales. Incidentally, have I mentioned that my daughter can recognise sarcasm at 20 paces; I feel that this is one useful skill for life with which I have equipped her.

On Saturday we went to Limerick where we stayed in the grandly named Clarion Suites but I have to give it a plug because it was so nifty and I found it. Two bedrooms, a kitchenette and a sitting room. I am a genius. Having tried and failed to arrange to meet our only friends in Limerick we ran into them on the street and went out to dinner with their one very well behaved child and our three hyper ones. We exchanged fragments of conversation over dinner – Oh I see, you were in Washington when we called, five in the morning eh, fancy that? – No, no bugs except, of course, Daniel was sick in the car, I think I’ve got most of the large pieces of sausage he regurgitated out of the car seat – not sleeping through the night, no, oh you neither, great, um, no, sorry about that – your family have moved back to CAVAN? And so on. Slightly more satisfactory than it sounds but tiring. Limerick was as depressing as I remembered and not at all celtic tigery unlike Cork which is absolutely booming and looks fantastic but not overcrowded and overdeveloped like Dublin. Apparently the celtic tiger never crossed the Shannon; Limerick sits squarely on the Shannon and, frankly, it looks like it’s doing a good job barring the entrance. Maybe if I hadn’t seen it in driving rain, I would have felt more warmly towards it.

On Sunday we began the marathon journey home stopping at Bunratty Castle, no, stop your sniggering, we did not go to the medieval banquet, we had lunch. We got to the airport, unloaded our two bags, three car seats, buggy, assorted miscellaneous junk and three children from the car in driving rain and went to stand in the enormous queue for an hour to check in our luggage, then queued for security (fold up the buggy, take off all shoes, taste the milk in the bottles), then queued to get on the plane, in due course queued to get into Belgium, queued for our luggage, carried into arrivals two bags, three car seats etc. etc. as Charleroi airport continues to be trolley free by choice. Discovered we had just missed the bus for Brussels and would have to wait an hour. Spent the time stopping our hyper boys from pushing each other under a bus. Queued to get on the bus, got to Brussels, waited for two taxis, got home at 8.45. Will never travel from Charleroi again.

We’re flying to Dublin on Saturday and then on to Chicago a couple of days later. Reassure me. Please.

R&R

10 July, 2007
Posted in: Family, Travel

All morning: Michael has attacks of vomitting and diarrohea.

15.15 Two taxis arrive to carry us to the bus stop.

15.30 We finish packing in our equipment and children.

15.40 We arrive at the bus stop. Load our stuff. Get on board. Mr. Waffle and the Princess go to get her a bottle of water. The boys howl and wriggle trying to go with them. The bus driver starts his engine.

16.10 The bus driver tells us that, as the bus is full, we will have to carry all our children on our laps. No one is very happy about this arrangement infringing as it does on safety, sanity and dignity. He relents.

17.00 We arrive at Charleroi airport in bucketing rain. Uniquely, in my experience, Charleroi airport does not have trolleys. I wait with the children in the heaving terminal building while Mr. Waffle ferries across the luggage and the three car seats. Miraculously, car seats do not count towards your luggage allowance on Ryanair which seems extraordinary. This means that, hurrah, we are within our allowance unlike the young man from Limerick in front of us who is resignedly putting on as many clothes as he can from his overweight bag.

18.00 We board using our exciting priority boarding cards because Ryanair will no longer call people with children first and we were worried that we might not get to sit together. Not only do we sit together but the only seat left empty on the plane is beside me. Double hurrah. Journey is uneventful but tiring because my children only love me at the moment and none of them wants to be with their lucky, lucky Daddy.

19.00 (Irish Time – 20.00 Belgian Time) : We land and go to seek dinner in Shannon airport. Everything is closed which we discover after an extensive search. We get some sandwiches in the Londis shop.

20.00 We get into our hired car and drive to Cork.

21.00 The boys finally fall asleep.

21.10 I fall asleep.

22.00 We arrive in Cork. The Princess who had been flagging is all perked up and rushes in to the attentions of her loving granparents. We unpack and put the boys to bed.

22.30 Kind nana puts the Princess to bed and we sit down to a well-deserved cup of tea.

22.35 Michael gets sick all over his bed. We clean up and lull him back to sleep.

23.00 We go to bed ourselves and aside from administering some bottles, the night is peaceful.
05.45 The Princess wakes us up and our holiday begins.

Did I mention that it’s been raining since we arrived and the forecast is for more.  On the plus side, Michael appears to be well again.  On the minus side, Daniel got sick at lunch time.  Oh well, at least we have an army of loyal babysitters on call.
I am so looking forward to travelling to the US in August.

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