belgianwaffle

Princess

Learning by Example


Posted in: Cork, Family, Ireland, Princess

I do not like to keep things in the attic. My parents’ attic is full of stuff. Mr. Waffle’s parents’ attic is full of stuff. He said that when he was growing up, broken things were put in the attic to “self-heal”. I know what he means. I have never been in the attic of my house and, as far as I know, it is entirely empty. And I’d like it to stay that way.

I love things to be tidy. Colleagues have been known to recoil when entering my office. It’s tidy. My family are not tidy. If you don’t give things away, you cannot be tidy. I am like a changeling. I have been trying, with absolutely no success, to make the Princess tidy. She suffers from the twin issues of loving stuff and believing that it is not a problem, if you let stuff lie where it falls. She and I fundamentally differ in this regard.

For some time she has been waging a campaign to get into my parents’ attic. I have been a regular visitor as I have been looking for the leg of a table, the top of which is at the back of my parents’ wardrobe and the whole of which I am hoping to get to my house in due course. You would think that a large Victorian table leg would be easy to find, but you would be utterly wrong. I looked – several times; my sister looked; even my brother looked. To no avail.

On this last adventure, the Princess finally got her heart’s desire and came up to the attic with me. Her objective was to retrieve my Great Uncle Dan’s gas mask [given out during the war and definitely in the attic – but where?]. I didn’t hold out high hopes as, if a whole table leg could disappear, then finding a gas mask was a practically insuperable problem. We did not find the gas mask. We did, however, find the table leg under the eaves on the left. Rejoice. Here’s a picture of the table leg [currently residing in the utility room until the top can be brought up from Cork].

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I stood there in the attic looking at the mountains of stuff and I said to my daughter, severely “Look around you; this is what happens, if you never throw anything out.” Then, I realised that her eyes were shining and the attic was possibly the most magical place she had ever been. She brought back to Dublin: an old dial phone, a mug with a rose, two boxes and a china bowl with a hole in the bottom. She is desperate to get back up. I may not quite have conveyed to her the message I was hoping to get across.

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An Irish Education


Posted in: Princess

Herself: I need an uillinntomhas.
Me: A what?
Herself: You know for measuring angles.
Me: A protractor?
Her: What?
Me: It’s the English for uillinntomhas, I think. Uillinn is an angle isn’t it?
Her: Yes.
Me: What’s tomhas.
Her: Guess.
Me: I can’t.
Her: No, guess.
Me: Really, I haven’t a clue.
Her: No, tomhas means guess.

Bonus information: Uillinn also means elbow, now you know why uilleann pipes are so called. Would you prefer if I stopped now?

They Also Serve Who Only Stand and Wait


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

So we ran mass today. The woman from the parish council who normally does it was off in Siena on holidays. We had the intro (me), the prayers of the faithful (all the children) and the second reading (Herself).

She read beautifully. As she was reading, “There must be no competition among you, no conceit; but everybody is to be self effacing. Always consider the other person to be better than yourself..”, I was whispering to her father, “She’s so good at this, she really is superb at reading aloud much better than anyone else.” So very much taking the message of the reading to heart, then.

They all did fine for their prayers of the faithful but after delivering his, Michael went to the back of the altar where he appeared to believe he was invisible and began rotating in circles.

But what, you ask of my couple of lines of introduction, well, I went into the sacristy and told the parish priest that I would be doing the introduction. “Fine, fine,” said he. When mass actually started, I was surprised to see that someone else entirely was saying mass but I assumed that the parish priest had passed on the message. I went up to the altar and stood at the lectern opposite the priest. The elderly priest opened mass with a welcome. Then he pressed on completely ignoring me. I stood there opening my mouth like a landed fish and failing to get a word in edgeways. Eventually I slunk off the altar without saying anything still completely unnoticed by the priest who was well into his stride at this point. Why do these things always happen to me? Predictably, the children thought it was hilarious

Consequences


Posted in: Princess

Herself: If Scotland votes yes to independence can I get a Scottish passport?
Me: No, why would you be entitled to a Scottish passport; you weren’t born there, you haven’t ever even visited Scotland and you have no Scottish relatives.
Her: I thought maybe because we were all rebels against England together.

Soft


Posted in: Family, Princess

My father often used to say to us when we were children “you are brought up too soft”. You might imagine that on this basis he himself was brought up in conditions of penury and hardship and went barefoot to school but in fact, he grew up in a large house at the bottom of the road where my parents’ house is now. As far as I know, he had access to shoes at all times. So, given my father’s relative affluence, I felt his tendency to assert that we were too soft was inappropriate.

The other day, herself wanted to squeeze some lemon juice. The electric juicer was in the dishwasher so I hauled out the manual juicer from the back of the press. She looked at it a bit dubiously. I went back to reading the paper. After a while she said plaintively, “How does this work?” I looked and she was holding the lemon daintily on top of the squeezer waiting for the squeezer to work its magic. “You have to twist it down.” “What?!” Brought up too soft.