belgianwaffle

Princess

My children’s very different personalities


Posted in: Middle Child, Princess, Twins, Youngest Child

The other evening they sat down to draw for me.

Daniel drew a soldier:


Michael drew a picture of me:


The Princess wrote out a passage from the bible:


Look, cut her some slack, she’s left handed, it reads “God says let my people go or I will make the rivers run with blood.” She’s very taken with the gore of the Old Testament. My mother gave her a bible for children for her birthday. It is quite sanatised and, in fact, says rather blandly of the first plague “God made the water undrinkable”. When the Princess read this out to me I was initially confused and then after a moment’s reflection said “Oh the rivers of blood.” This has taken a very strong hold on her imagination is all I can say.

Domestic Games


Posted in: Cork, Dublin, Ireland, Middle Child, Princess, Twins, Youngest Child

Recently, on Saturday mornings, we have been taking the children to football and hurling training. The boys love it. The Princess stays on the sidelines, solidly (and very annoyingly) refusing to take part. To their enormous delight we dress the boys up in their FC Barcelona and Lions 09 kit (a Christmas present from their uncle) to go to training. And very fetching they looked too.



I did have mild qualms about introducing kit from foreign games but all that is in the past now and I noted that the very patient man training the four year old boys in football was wearing an Irish rugby jersey. After limbering up and working on their ball skills, the four year olds started a match. I was a bit concerned about this as my children had never played a match before. “Never mind” reassured the trainer “wait until you see it, it’s like a flock of sheep milling around a ball.” So indeed, it proved.

The hurling, however, was a different matter. The trainer was from Cork and he took it all very seriously. Ah, well do I remember my primary school days when year after year the hurling team won the All-Irealnd. They would tour the schools, show us the McCarthy cup, and give us all a half day (they won three in a row between 76 and 78 – formative years, I was 7, 8 and 9 and very grateful for the half day). The trainer clearly remembered that too and he was taking no prisoners. Having equipped his 30 four year old with helmets and hurleys, he went down the line “clashing the ash” (essentially walloping their hurleys with his) and he made them all get in the ready position and roar (something that works well for the NZ rugby team). There was some confusion with his instructions. “Is the ready position holding the hurley on our heads?” roared the trainer. Some of the young men thought it was and held their hurleys over their heads. The match itself was more like a real match than I had at all anticipated following the football. Poor Daniel came trailing over to me saying that no one was giving him the ball and I explained to him that he had to go and get it. I then had to wade on to the pitch and separate him out from another little boy who had taken the ball from him. Aside from this minor off the ball incident and despite the fact that 30 little boys were given sticks and told to swing them, there were no injuries.

In encouraging the Princess to play (in vain), I picked up a hurley myself for the first time in my life. My previous experience had only been in hockey and a hurley has a much bigger head, so it is much easier to dribble the ball. I was delighted with myself as I zoomed around the little markers until I heard an English accented voice say “that looks like a back stick to me.” These migrants are clearly mingling well. After confirming that I was indeed playing a different game (with his hurley as it turned out), he encouraged me to go again. I was happily zooming round the obstacles (the Princess lolling disinterestedly by the fence) when a six year old came up and with a sweeping wallop of her hurley took the ball out from under me. This is indeed a very different game, maybe I should stick to what I know.

When relating all of this to my mother-in-law the next day, she told me that her father-in-law, my children’s great-grandfather, had played senior hurling for Tipperary. This is information which was hitherto unknown to me and very impressive indeed, trumping the information I already had that my father-in-law had played minor football for Dublin. I see a great future for my children, particularly, if I ever succeed in actually getting the Princess on the pitch.

Cultural Hegemony


Posted in: Cork, Dublin, Ireland, Princess

Recently, the Princess asked me what “ggu..nn.ess” meant? “Where did you see it?” I asked. “Everywhere,” she said. “Ah, I think you must mean Guinness”. “Oh, the black beer with white on top?” “Well, Guinness isn’t the only black beer with white on top, its called stout and in Cork they make two kinds of stout : Murphy’s and Beamish. In fact, your great, great uncle Tommy, your Cork Grandad’s uncle worked in the Murphy’s factory in Cork”. I’m doing my best here but I feel that I’m fighting an uphill battle.

Vote!


Posted in: Ireland, Princess

Last night the Princess asked her parents why there were pictures of the judge everywhere (she meant the Taoiseach – separation of powers is a mystery to the Princess, she regards the executive and judiciary as interchangeable). She spends a lot more time pounding the mean streets of the city and she likes to read everything and election posters are unavoidable. We explained that there were a number of elections looming. The local elections where we would vote for people to run Dublin and the European elections where we would vote for people to.. um…go to Brussels and Strasbourg. “And,” added Mr. Waffle, “don’t forget the by-election.” I consider myself very literate in these matters but I am having trouble working out whom they want me to vote for and for which position. It’s all very exciting though. The other night a young fella came knocking at our door urging us to vote Green in general and more specifically for him. Following a brief chat we established that he had been lectured by a former classmate of mine and our friend, the Dutch Mama when he was at college. Is it any wonder that there is a statistic that something like 90% of Irish people know their local T.D. personally?

The unkindest cut


Posted in: Princess

The Princess, in her infinite wisdom, cut her hair while I was away overnight last week. She was making playdough and got some in her hair and this seemed to her the most practical way to deal with the problem. Essentially, she cut out a large clump of hair on one side of her head. I nearly cried when I saw her. “Your beautiful hair,” I said in exact imitation of my mother. “My sister is a boy now,” said Michael gloomily. We went to the hairdresser to get it all chopped off. He tsked and gave her a mullet. Her hair grows so slowly that she could be a teenager before it looks respectable again.

I spoke to her on the phone while I was away and she told me a tale of woe about how school was awful. The others had told her that she was to look for them while they hid and while she was counting they went and told the principal that she had pushed someone and she was punished. The principal and even the school secretary (who is lovely) had been very cross with her. Then, the authorities had found out that the others were lying and she was pardoned. I was very saddened by this glum little story and, the following morning, took her into school myself to get to the bottom of it. After dropping her off, I went for a word with the principal. He was astounded. The whole tale was utter fantasy. “In fact,” he said, “she is a very good child and has never been in any trouble at all.” What, internet, are we to make of this?

Finally, I discovered that in the Princess’s school, they make their first communions in their school uniforms. While this is something of which I heartily approve in theory, in practice, I find myself a little disconsolate. In theory, obviously, it stops ludicrously over the top expenditure and helps to focus the children’s (and indeed their parents’) minds on what is a very important religious event rather than an opportunity for dressing small girls as brides to be. In practice, I find that I had been somewhat looking forward to dressing my small girl as a bride to be (don’t mock the afflicted). One of the other parents said that some parents get dresses for their daughters for after the event. Even I can see that that is daft and my husband thinks that its completely ridiculous but yet, I am tempted. It’s two years away (oh stop sniggering in the corner) and perhaps herself will, once she has a thorough grasp on transubstantiation, have views on the appropriate dress code.

Socialising


Posted in: Dublin, Ireland, Middle Child, Princess, Twins, Youngest Child

Last weekend, the Princess went to a birthday party in one of Dublin’s more exciting suburbs. It boasts horses in front gardens (this is not a good thing in Dublin, you’ll have to trust me here) and, if you type this suburb + shooting into Google, then you get 26,100 results. However, she emerged unscathed.

That evening her father and I went to dinner at the houses of friends who live in a rather different Dublin suburb. For the hell of it, I typed “much nicer suburb + shooting” into Google and it reproachfully asked me whether I meant “much nicer suburb + shopping”.

Meanwhile, Mr. Waffle got a call from the childminder asking whether she could take the children to a party at the house of a little (francophone, North African) boy they regularly played with in the park. He said yes and I probably would have too but I had some qualms subsequently. This is the problem with having two working parents. While I was perfectly happy to drop the Princess off to gangland shooting suburb as the birthday girl was a classmate whom I had met, I was uneasy about them all going to a strange house where I didn’t know the child or his mother even though their childminder stayed with them the entire time. Sigh.

We also got invited to lunch by friends – she is French and he is Irish and her parents (who do not speak a great deal of English) were staying for a week and I think that they felt that it might be useful to have some other French speakers and French speaking children about. All very pleasant – they are French farmers from deepest darkest Brittany and I was fascinated to hear that his parents were native Breton speakers and hers spoke a local dialect but, of course, they all learnt French French at school. While both our friend’s parents understand dialect and Breton respectively, our friend understands neither. It has to be said that the policy of the French state seems to be a little hostile to languages other than French within its borders. My husband, who knows everything, told me that as recently as the first world war only one in five Frenchmen spoke French. Well, they’ve fixed that then.