Family

Before Mr. Waffle and I had children, we used to holiday in Spain a lot.  These holidays were very luxurious as befitted a dual income couple with no children: paradores, Michelin starred restaurants, all sorts of good things.   We even went to Spain for our honeymoon and we stayed here and it was very wonderful indeed.  We had never visited anywhere further south than Seville and it had all been perfect in every way.

Since we have had children, almost all of our holidays have been with our families.  Their matchless babysitting skills have made our holidays possible.  So, this trip to Spain alone with three children, two of whom were sick you will recall, was a bit of an adventure for us.

 

The plane trip was 2 hours and 35 minutes which was an unbearable length of time and made us both think glumly about our proposed summer odyssey to America.  The boys were sick and listless and, actually, that was quite good because it meant that they were calm.  They needed every morsel of calm to put up with their sister moaning, kicking, patting and pinching.  She was a pain but, all good things come to an end and we arrived.

 

We stayed here for the first two nights.  We would have stayed longer but it was fully booked.  It was very nice and reminded me of our glorious Spanish holidays of the past.  There were, however, a number of difficulties.  I have never been to the Costa del Sol before and, frankly, it is kind of rotten.  It is a prime example of what can go wrong without the application of proper planning laws.  Yes, the scenery is beautiful and the weather was very pleasant (not too hot, not too cold, just right) but the buildings are mostly horrible.  Big apartment blocks stretching forever and turning the coast into a huge ugly conurbation.  Mostly, it appears these were owned by Irish people of whom there are very many in the South of Spain.  There was also the odd British soul but they were overwhelmed by the volume of celtic tigers.

 

Nevertheless, I heartily recommend the parador in Nerja.  I could only salivate enviously at the retired Scottish woman (who clearly goes there every year – I could tell by the way she was embracing the cleaning staff and chatting genially in Spanish) who told me that they were having a nice long stay this year – 4 weeks.  She looked at harassed me with my three children and said kindly that she had five herself including a set of twins and that I would look back on these as the best years of my life because, at least, I knew where they were.  Ominous.

 

We had a ground floor bedroom with a little terrace in front.  It led across a lawn to the swimming pool and then on to the lift to the beach.  All lovely really.  But the boys were sick and miserable.  The Princess made friends with two charming English children next door and we shamelessly outsourced her care to their grandmother and parents.  When I asked her afterwards what the best part of the holiday was, she said “climbing trees with Ben and Annie”.  We have a Costa del Sol bunny called Annie in honour of their friendship. The Princess loved the pool and so did the boys, especially Michael.  In retrospect it may not have helped their illness to let them go swimming every day but it was hard to resist their demands when the swimming pool was visible shimmering invitingly every time we went out the door of our bedroom.  The boys were alright during the day and we kept thinking that they were better but at night they were unhappy.   As were the rest of us as we were all sleeping in the same room and trying to persuade the Princess to be silent and not wake her sick brothers was impossible.  Thursday night was a low point.  We had hoped to put the children to bed and sample some of the delicious food available in the parador on our terrace.  Fat chance.  We finally got them to go to sleep at 10.30 by which time we were far too tired to do anything ourselves other than go to bed, ready for the boys to wake up at midnight and half hourly intervals thereafter. On Friday morning, after our miserable night, we called a doctor.  While the Princess was minded by her new friends, the doctor came and said that the boys had tonsillitis.  Unglamourous.  He was very pleasant about being called out for a minor infection (but really temperatures of 40 plus for three days, how could we guess) and prescribed some amoxycillin because that is what doctors seem to do to be on the safe side.  They’d already had some when I was pregnant and they seemed to enjoy the nasty chalky taste.  They are supposed to get it every eight hours for a week and we are doing our best to comply but I fear that we are busy creating an antibiotic resistant strain of tonsillitis.

 

On from Nerja to La Herradura where our friends have an apartment and where the great birthday dinner was to be celebrated.  The hotel in La Herradura was much less glamourous than in Nerja but it did have a much larger room.  We were also somewhat comforted by the doctor’s diagnosis so, though the boys were not happier, we were.  We went to visit our friends in their flat and it was all very pleasant and the boys were reasonably well behaved though Michael was slightly howly and with his conjunctivitis and sickly pallor, he looked a bit alarming.  Daniel was actually sicker, but he doesn’t complain as much.  As our friends M&R have no children, it occurs to me that they may not have regarded our children’s behaviour in quite as kindly a light as we did but there you go, someone has to pay their pensions.

 

The following day, I decided that we should use the pool in M and R’s apartment complex because I am shameless.  I turned up with the Princess and Michael (Daniel was too sick and Mr. Waffle stayed back at the hotel with him) and disturbed our friends sending them scurrying about to do our bidding (hold Michael; find the Princess a float..).  Once our extensive needs were met they retired from the lists in exhaustion. As they are childless, it hadn’t occurred to them that a pool where the water, at its shallowest point, was above my waist, probably wasn’t ideal for the under 5s.  I was tempted to turn tail but the Princess and Michael were very keen to get in so I hopped in with them, putting the Princess on a long tube like float found by R and keeping Michael in my arms.   No sooner were we in, of course, than the Princess announced that she wanted to do a poo.  So we all climbed out again and went to the toilet.  I had to put Michael down to wipe her bottom and, of course, he slipped and fell on the wet floor leading to profound unhappiness.  Have you ever tried to wipe a four year old’s bottom while holding on to a squealing one year old?  It is marvellous.  Back to the water. The Princess got on very well with the float but Michael squirmed in my arms trying to get further in.  I put him sitting on the edge of the pool for a moment and seizing his advantage he began running around the edge as he had seen the big children doing.  There wasn’t time to get the Princess out so I ran after him, wading about in the pool.  It was terrifying.  Fortunately, he decided to jump in while I was there to catch him (something he also picked up from the big children).  He is, however, too little to know how to jump so he just threw himself in on his tummy.  Oh how he enjoyed it, oh how disappointed he was that Mummy wasn’t going to let him do it again.  And how vocal his disappointment.  His loving sister was really very sweet to him trying to cheer him up.  “Here” she said “have my float”.  And promptly sank.  I yanked her from the bottom of the pool, spluttering and horrified (all three of us) while hanging on to Michael on my hip.  I don’t think she really believed that she couldn’t swim.  With a child in each arm, I hauled us out of the pool.   The Princess sat wrapped in her towel in deep shock.  “I could have drownded” she said to me reproachfully.  She sat in silence a little longer, pondering this limitation of her powers.  “But I wouldn’t have drownded” she said.  “No, of course not, because Mummy was there” I said.  “No” she said, “because I was holding my nose like this [untrue] and kicking my legs [possibly true but unlikely]”.  She smiled and leapt up, reassured of her powers.  She didn’t show much appetite to go back in the pool though.

 

One thing we have learnt from this holiday is that hotels with small children are a disaster.  We have had very positive experiences in Italy in the past but that was different as the local hotel owner was, like everyone else in the small Sicilian town where he’s from, a good friend of my sister-in-law’s father (the piccolo cugino’s grandfather, try to keep up) and cooked odd things for us at all kinds of times and did laundry and generally exerted himself above and beyond the call of duty.  Though the staff, in the parador in particular, were very helpful, it wasn’t quite the same.

 

Meals presented us with fundamental problems.  Lunch in Andalusia is served from 2 and dinner from 9, at the earliest.  The boys eat at 12 and 6 and it was impossible to persuade them that the new times might suit.  We picnicked a lot in the hotel room, stocking the minibar with tortilla and ham.  While Spanish ham is second to none, if I never see a ham and cheese sandwich again, I won’t care.  Michael, I have to say, illness or no, ate ham for every meal with a very good grace. “Jamon, jamon!” said his sister.  “Am” said Michael appreciatively.  He nearly keeled over from excitement when we went into a bar with hams hanging from the ceiling “am, am” he cried pointing as far as the eye could see.  This is the first Spanish holiday from which I will return home quite a bit lighter than when I started.

 

Then there was socialising which went much better.  Mr. Waffle’s mother was an au pair in Paris in her teens (stay with me here) and she made friends with a Spanish au pair.  Over the years they stayed in touch and when the Spanish woman’s daughter needed to learn English, she came to Dublin and met her mother’s old friend and then she met an Irish man, married him and carried him back to Andalusia.  We see them and their two children every Christmas and they are delightful, which would explain why they drove for an hour and a half to meet us for lunch in La Herradura.  I think it all went swimmingly or so the photos appear to indicate.  Alas, I had to retire to the hotel with two howling and unhappy boys – more ham and tortilla.  The hiberno-hispanic family came equipped with presents for our girl and boys.  Of course, we hadn’t thought to bring anything.  Alas.  And their presents were such a hit.  The Princess loves this book. Their two little girls are 8 and 5 and they are extraordinarily pretty children.  The older girl has also got the sweetest disposition and spent ages trying to cheer up the boys, in vain.  The younger girl may well be very sweet also but I have to say in her robust attitude she reminded me much more of my own daughter who is many things but only sweet when it suits her.

 

The Spaniards were very kind to us.  “Guapa” they said to the Princess.  “Guapa” she agreed.  As always, our daughter was a stickler for accuracy.  In Andalusia, the final Spanish s leads a fugitive existence.  “Adio” would say the Spaniards.  “Adios” she would correct. “Gracia” they would say.  “Gracias” she would snap.

There were good things about the trip.  The Princess had a wonderful time.  When we split forces and one of us went with her, we had fun on the beach, in the pool, occasionally even eating.  But the boys were deeply miserable.  Even on Sunday, when they were nearly better, Michael howled for a good hour as we tried to find somewhere to give us a ham sandwich in Almunecar at 12.  Saintly Daniel fell asleep in despair.

By far the best bit of our time away was Sunday evening.  There were nearly 80 people over for M and R’s joint 50^th, almost all of whom, incidentally, appear to have invested in high quality apartments in Spain.  Miraculously, the children were sufficiently recovered to leave them with a babysitter and to mind them marvellous M dug out a cousin’s teenage daughter from La Herradura who spoke perfect Spanish and perfect English (what it is to have relatives everywhere, he’s like Charlie Haughey).

M and R will never get married because even if Ireland allows some kind of civil partnership in the future, R, who is profoundly conservative in some ways, would deeply disapprove.  So this was like their wedding, in a way.  There were toasts.  There was a very elaborate Spanish menu (food! no ham for me, thanks), there was flamenco dancing, there were speeches, there were table plans.  Need I say more?

I thought I would know no one but I have known M and R for nearly 20 years and I discovered that over this time, I’ve got to know a lot of their friends and relations, they like to mix people.  I first met M when I was a lowly apprentice solicitor and he was a partner.  He made me get him a lunchtime sandwich once which was a low in our friendship and something he has been paying for ever since.  I was only comforted by the brightest solicitor in the practice telling me that when he was an apprentice he spent his time collecting his master’s dry cleaning.  Still M had to pay and, I think I can say he has done so.  Over the past 17 years, he has bought me lunch innumerable times when I was poor and needy and even when I was not (they had got into the habit), he and R have had me to stay many, many times.  They allowed me and Mr. Waffle to live in their lovely house in Dublin while they went to work in exotic locations [once I asked R for a reference, because not only are they charming, they are important too and he said “Dear Anne, I would give you a reference for anything except gardening”, so we were bad tenants to boot].  We got married while we were living there.  M sang at our wedding.   A lot of people still think that their house is our house because of all the parties we threw there.  Even when M and R returned to their house, they still encourage us to hold a joint Christmas party there every year when we came home from exotic Belgium.  For years, on Christmas Eve, M would drive me from Dublin where we both worked to our families in Cork.  We had such fun.  Gallingly, he always stopped in Mitchelstown to see an old friend from college and his wife: three hours into the drive and only an hour to Cork (I was glad though when I saw his Mitchelstown friends at the party – see there is a point to these things sent to try us). When I go back to Dublin without the children now, I always stay with them and not just because their house is convenient and still feels like home.  They are the easiest people to be with, entertaining, undemanding, kind, exceptionally generous and interesting.

And they had a great party full of interesting people: the French man working in Gaza whose parents run a B&B in their chateau; the former UN worker from Bosnia who stands a good chance of being elected to Parliament in Australia later this year; loads of lawyers of varying degrees of eminence and on and on and on.  I was delighted to meet M’s nephew and niece who are half Spanish, from nearby Grenada, and whom I had met 10 years previously on a Christmas Eve trip to Cork.  Then they were 3 and 6 but now they were 13 and 16.  I did that very annoying thing exclaiming and exclaiming how big they’d got and they were patient with me.  I was very nearly tongue tied on seeing his niece who was a pretty child but is the most beautiful 16 year old I’ve ever seen in my life.  Quite extraordinary.  M’s 92 year old father was also there.  He made a great speech and later when I was chatting to him confided to me that he was, however, getting on, he had given up shooting when he missed a pheasant earlier this year.  Impressive but a little unnerving, my parents live in Cork too, you know.

The following day, Monday, our trip home was mercifully without incident.  The boys were surprised and delighted to see their home again and ran around checking that all the furniture was still there.  Even the Princess was pleased to be back.  I wouldn’t have missed the party for the world but it was very nice to be home.  This made it even more galling that today, Wednesday, I had to travel for work.  It has perhaps not been a spectacularly good day.  My flight was delayed by 4 hours and I missed my meeting.  On the plus side, since Michael gave me his conjunctivitis, I looked to my colleagues as though I had been weeping all day at the pain of arriving late.  I also think I feel the onset of tonsillitis.  Alas.

If you are still reading, you are a hero.  Thank you.

When I was a small girl, Ireland converted to metric. From imperial not from catholicism, clearly. This presented no difficulties for me as my parents are both from the science side of the great divide and, from earliest youth, my father, in particular, had banned the use of feet, inches, yards, miles, pints and other such measures and insisted that we use the far more useful and comprehensible centimetres, metres, litres and so on. Mind you, our milk was still delivered in pints which presented some problems “would somebody get an approximately half litre of milk from the fridge” does not trip off the tongue. The other day, the Princess asked me what an inch was and I explained that it was the measure that they use in the UK and the US. “And what all your relatives in Ireland use” added Mr. Waffle. “Not my relatives” I said startled and told him about the strict ban on imperial measures in my parents’ house (also on hopefully in its non-adverbial form). “I see” he said thoughtfully “I had noticed that you were much more metric than me”. “Isn’t everyone in Ireland metric?” “No”. “Oh”.

Getting there

We went to visit friends in the Hague for Easter. The Princess grasped immediately the nature of the Netherlands which is essentially a vast conurbation. As we crossed over the border, she said “we are in the Otherlands we must be in the Hague”. Unfortunately, there was a good forty minutes drive after that and neither her father nor I could convince her that constantly asking “are we in the Hague?” as we tried to negotiate the tricky final miles wasn’t going to help anyone. As we drove along with our three ratty children, Mr. Waffle said wistfully “I don’t suppose you’re ever going to let me go to Baarle-Hertog”. “Why would I want to go to Baarle-Hertog?”. “It’s a part of Belgium entirely surrounded by the Netherlands.”. “Fascinating, you’re absolutely right”.

Settling In

We arrived safely at our hosts’ house and disgorged ourselves and the enormous quantities of luggage we had brought with us for three nights away from home. We settled in to eat them out of house and home and work creatively on making a mess. Fortunately they have two children of their own, so they were somewhat prepared for the onslaught. In fact, the trip was a great success. The children got on really well together and it was lovely to see them playing together when they weren’t hitting each other. In particular, the Princess got on with C who is the elder of our friends’ two children. C, is a very gentle, charming and sweet little boy who is nearly 5. The Princess loved him. Despite her exterior toughness, I feel the Princess is quite timid and I have never seen her warm to someone, the way she did to C. They spent hours playing together. I heard her diligently trying to teach him some French: “We say ‘Winnie l’Ourson’ for Winnie the Pooh; I know the French for poo is ‘caca’ but we don’t say ‘Winnie le caca’” which is just as well for the marketing people, I suppose. C’s sister E is only just 3 and the Princess enjoyed a more combatitive relationship with her. E is much more forceful and I don’t think that the Princess liked that half so well though they did play together a bit because whatever the Princess considered E’s faults might be, she was, at least, far superior to the Princess’s little brothers. What the Princess particularly enjoyed was teaming up with C and excluding the others, particularly her brothers, if at all possible.

The Linguistic Regime

The Dutch Mama is, despite her name, from Cork as well. As the weekend went on, I could hear both of us reinforcing each other and speaking with more amd more pronounced Cork accents. The Dutch Papa is Dutch. Very Dutch, he’s 2 metres and 3 centimetres tall (nearly 7 feet) and one of my favourite things was seeing him bending all the way down to talk to Michael who was staring up at him with considerable interest (I suppose everyone is tall to Michael, though). The Dutch Papa used to live in Japan; he must have been a sensation there. The Dutch Mama speaks English to her children and I speak English to mine. Both the Princess and C were able to chat away happily to each other in English. They were not at all thrown when one or other of them spoke French or Dutch to another parent. However, E didn’t speak much English to us at the start and she didn’t get very far with Dutch; though the grown-ups and the boys were prepared to give it a go, the Princess certainly wasn’t. It was amazing by the end of the weekend how much more willing she was to chat away in English (to clarify, she had always been able to chat in English but just choose not to, I mean why would you bother, everyone speaks Dutch – you have to see her point, she’s only 3). At one point she said something to me and I didn’t understand “you know, I don’t understand a lot of Dutch, sweetheart”. She looked at me coldly “that wasn’t Dutch, it was Polish”. And, it was true, she’s minded by a Polish woman and speaks quite good Polish as well, clever girl.

Outings

Our friends do not, in fact, live in the Hague, they live in the Roman town of Voorburg which is, essentially, a nice leafy suburb of the Hague. Great was the Princess’s delight when she found that I had made a mistake. All weekend long we heard about foolish Mama’s ineptitude. We took a stroll around the suburbs and into the lovely old town, taking in the market. It almost reminded me of holidays before children (what, oh what did we find to worry about on those holidays?) except for the insistent demands for sweet purchases.

We went on a rural walk to look at windmills. Well, as the Dutch Mama pointed out, it was rural, if you could close your ears to the sounds of the motorway and look away from the tower blocks. My God, there are a lot of people there. It’s just as well 90% of them cycle everywhere because otherwise the country would be one big car park. Michael has become entranced by ducks. While the windmills left him cold, he very much enjoyed chasing ducks. “Ack, ack” he said pointing his little finger and trotting off in their direction. The Netherlands is full of open water. The Dutch Papa explained that it would cost too much to fence in all the open water in the Netherlands, so they taught people to swim; the whole law of tort seems to not have taken off there. They’re very pragmatic, the Dutch. Nevertheless, since Michael can’t actually swim, unlike the ducks he had set his heart on, this did present some problems. I was rather taken with the windmills which are inhabited and one of which had a duvet stuck out the middle window to air but I couldn’t really focus on them as I was trying to haul Michael away from water hazards.

We went to the beach; you’re never too far from the beach in the Netherlands. The children loved it, though Michael was scared of the sea. Daniel loved the sea and got his trousers wet chasing waves. The Princess focussed on denuding the Dutch coast of shells. The beach was busy. I couldn’t help comparing it to an Irish beach at this time of year where you would have a half dozen walkers. This beach was full of Dutch people disporting themselves with their dogs. “You asked me what I disliked about the Dutch” said the Dutch Mama “16 million people and they have 16 million dogs”. It really felt like it. The beach was very developed with lots of cafes and stalls. Nice, fine but so different. Obviously, it also had lots of bicycle racks. We went for tea and a bun. Michael took the Princess’s bucket of shells and turned it upside down. The Princess was furious. To my really intense mortification she said “Michael, you bastard, I’m going to pour tea all over you”. All the polite Dutch people looked at their feet. I wanted desperately to explain that really, this was not the kind of language she uses all the time and not me either but, of course, the problem is, she does travel in the car with me. In the past couple of weeks, she has taken to getting out of the bath and wrapping herself in a towel crouching on the floor and pretending to be a green cushion. The cushion says “shag it, shag it, shag it, you bastard”. I have tried ignoring and reprimanding “it’s the feathers in the cushion, Mama, not me” but she knows I don’t like it and she can use it against me. Must try harder either that or we walk everywhere in future.

On Easter Sunday, we all went to mass. I was a bit surprised that the Dutch contingent were coming. “We’re cultural catholics” explained the Dutch Mama. This is a far superior term to “lapsed”, I like it. Outside the church, there were, of course, hundreds of bicycles, all the more impressive when you consider that the average age of the congregation was 65. This was probably why we ended up sloping off early as our children’s were the only raised voices. In fact, C and E were very good and kept quiet by the promise of a further jelly from the supply that their mother had brought. The Princess also enjoyed the Dutch jelllies. She, however, approached matters differently by turning what was intended as a bribe into an opportunity for blackmail “I won’t be quiet, unless I get another jelly”. “My children never thought of that” muttered the Dutch Mama. I am so proud.

Activities

The children painted Easter eggs; the Princess discovered that she does not like hard boiled egss, however nicely they may be painted. They all hunted for chocolate eggs in the garden which was much more successful though Michael appears not to like chocolate. Can this be normal? They spent hours playing baffling games together. I fell down the steep stairs which are a feature of Dutch houses but no one else did. As I went bump, bump, bump down a flight of stairs, people came running from all sides. I sustained minor injuries other than to my dignity. The Princess was very thrown. As I sat in a heap on the floor she called “Mummy, mummy”. I thought she wanted something but no, she came wanted to check that I was alright and came running out to give me a kiss. Last night when I put her to bed, she was still exploring matters “You fell down the stairs Mummy”. “Yup”. “But normally, grown-ups don’t fall”. The whole thing was particularly embittering as I had just started to get my stairs legs and the pains in my thighs from climbing three flights were beginning to abate. Three stories over basement brings its own difficulties, I suppose.

The Princess rejected her own bed in favour of sleeping top to tail with C in his and E’s room and the three big children got to bath together which they enjoyed very much and gave us an opportunity to snap photos in our ongoing mission to ensure that no second of our children’s lives will remain unrecorded. After the bath, the Princess announced to C that she would have breasts when she grew up but he would not. She would also be able to have children but he would not. “I can be the Daddy” he countered but they both seemed to believe that she had the better deal. You would think that an inspection of the Dutch Mama who is currently seven months pregnant and not able to walk very far (though she still cycles to work – they’re Dutch) would convince them otherwise but no.

The Dutch

I was chatting to the Dutch Mama about the Dutch and what they are like and in many ways, we think they are like they see themselves. She says that living in the Netherlands has almost turned her into a monarchist. The Dutch queen is so nice. She described watching her going to some god forsaken part of the Netherlands where the locals appeared to have made a sculpture from sewage pipes to greet her. It was bucketing rain. One of the little girls from the band out to play for the queen had started to cry. She arrived and, said the Dutch Mama, you would genuinely think to look at her that there was absolutely nowhere she would rather be, she set everything to rights and also gave the crying little girl a hug. They’re tall, they’re pragmatic, they’re frugal, they’re hospitable, they believe in community. The Dutch Mama says that she reckons marrying a Dutch man has added ten years to her life. Before she met him she took less exercise, she smoked, she weighed more. And she reckons that her kids watch less TV than their Irish counterparts and that they are better served in creches and schools. I looked at her and asked “what quintessentially Dutch emotion are you experiencing at this moment?”. “Smugness” she replied instantly. Having the perfect society does have its downsides.

The return

Prised a howling Princess away from Voorburg and bundled everyone back to Brussels. The Princess and Daniel slept but Michael burbled quite cheerfully to us all the way back. The boys were surprised and delighted to see their home again but the Princess continues to pine for the delights of the Otherlands. Indeed, this very night the last thing she asked me before I turned out the light was when we would be going back to C and E’s house.