belgianwaffle

Middle Child

A-r-t-i-c-u-l-a-t-e


Posted in: Dublin, Ireland, Middle Child, Twins

Daniel speaks exceptionally clearly and quite loudly. Grown-ups always understand him. This has its drawbacks.

The other day Mr. Waffle met a little old lady who chucked Daniel under the chin. To his father’s mortification, he said to her clearly and reproachfully, “You hurted me.”

Shortly afterwards I was cycling with Daniel in our edgy/urban/ rough (delete as appropriate) neighbourhood and saw two small children (maybe 3 and 18 months) playing on the main road. A quiet main road but certainly a main road. As I toiled up the hill , they fell over together and lay spread out and bawling. I stopped the bike, took Daniel off, went over, took them off the road, dusted them down, made comforting noises and asked, “Where are your Mummy and Daddy?” No very coherent answer was made but shortly a large man came around the corner and grabbed them roughly. I made bleating “no harm done they seem to be fine” type noises. He was joined by his partner. Both of them seemed slightly out of it and they yelled at the children (who ignored them – a constant across socio-economic groups, apparently). At no point did either of them address me. I mounted my trusty steed and peddled slowly off (it was hilly). Daniel, speaking loudly and, of course, clearly said from his perch behind “Mummy those people were very rude, they didn’t answer you when you spoke to them.” I pedalled more quickly.

School


Posted in: Middle Child, Mr. Waffle, Twins, Youngest Child

Michael and Daniel are starting school in September. They will be four on September 27. I hope they are not too young; although children can start school at 4 in Ireland, increasingly the trend seems to be to hold them back until they are 5. A parent I met recently thought that she had sent her son to school too early and he had been 4 the previous March. At the GAA, I was tortured by a man who said that his son had only just turned 4 and he was far, far too young to start school in September and he was putting in another year at pre-school. However, we got their uniforms the other day and they tried them on in complete delight, so I think that we are committed now. Also, I feel Michael is looking forward to having a little less one on one attention from his teacher.

Last week, Mr. Waffle went to a parents’ evening for children who were to start in September and met a college acquaintance from the cumann gaelach. Together they made painstaking conversation as Gaeilge. As the acquaintance went into computers, I’m not sure how that went (our Gaelic ancestors not having had a word for computers).

Mr. Waffle learnt some mildly useful things from the meeting even though our daughter has been in the school for a year. A copy of the disciplinary code was handed around. The principal explained that it was a little out of date but it would give parents an idea of what was expected. One woman asked why her daughter couldn’t have a pony tail. “Ah yes,” explained the principal, “it was drafted when it was a boys only school.”

We also got a photocopy of an Australians study from 1990 on how twins do in school. It reminded me of how remiss I have been in my own research. According to this twins are particularly at risk of language and reading delay if they are identical, if they are boys and if they have a sibling 2-3 years older. Well, at least they are not identical. In light of this I have been considering their speech. Daniel speaks very well and articulates clearly; Michael far less so. [Don’t compare says the study reprovingly.] It is not clear to me whether this is just relative to Daniel or in absolute terms. Ho hum, always something to worry about. On the plus side, the study recommends letting them see their parents enjoying reading – I think that we could probably do that alright.

The study also emphasises that they need to be seen as individuals. I do regard them as two different individuals but the following things are true: they have never spent a night (or more than a small part of any day) apart; when you ask either how old he is, he will reply “we are three”, even when the other is not in the room; if one starts doing something, then the other invariably wants to do it too (although, I’m not sure that this proves anything, it is also true for their sister).

Eeek


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

Michael is constantly injuring himself. He is our daredevil. He had to be rescued from an oncoming tram with inches to spare. At least, this is the story he and the Princess tell, I have yet to verify it independently with our childminder, F, – sometimes, it’s better not to know. The Princess insists that Daniel pushed Michael and that Daniel was not properly reprimanded by F something which the Princess is keen that I should remedy – presumably poor F was too traumatised to do anything other than hang on to Michael for dear life.

Last week, Michael managed to rip a piece of skin off his foot climbing in his bedroom. I have inspected the locus of the accident and can find nothing that might remotely be suspected of causing such a nasty cut. He hobbled for the week.

Then, their father took them to the zoo where “the dreadful fate/Befell him, which I now relate.”* Michael managed to take a square of skin off his arm climbing a fence. He got dirt ingrained in the cut and under his skin. I prodded at it unavailingly for a bit to his anguished screams of protest and then, on the advice of my father (who first verified that Michael’s tetanus shots were up to date – of course Michael’s tetanus shots are up to date), stuck on some disinfectant and a plaster and sent him to bed. “Why am I always getting hurt?” he asked mournfully. Being the mother of a daredevil is very challenging.

*This came into my head. Look, it’s my blog. Small prize (you know, having your charming comment acknowledged for a change, that kind of thing), if you can identify the source without recourse to the internet.

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.

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.