Me: Doggy’s cousins have arrived.
Her: You said Ian was Doggy’s brother.
Me: OK. Doggy’s brothers.
She treated them with utter indifference. The boys, on the other hand, were delighted to see them both and exclaimed “Doggy’s back”. Obviously, Doggy was a big figure in all of our lives.
Princess: Mummy is very nice to us today.
Michael: Yes, she is.
Princess: Normally she doesn’t give us this many meals.
Me: Worry, worry, school, boys, blah etc.
Husband: Don’t worry.
Me: But I do worry, school, big children etc.
Him: Look,they’ll be all right, Daniel is clever and Michael, Michael has street smarts.
Please note: 1. They are both clever (of course they are, my children etc. etc.), 2. Neither of them has street smarts (they’re three).
The other morning, Michael asked could he bring a bag into Montessori school. He and his sister had been whispering about this earlier in some excitement. In a moment of weakness, I said that he could and in he trotted with a pink poodle bag strapped to his back.
When he got in, he could contain his excitement no longer; he opened up the bag and, to my intense astonishment, began distributing envelopes. “We’re having a party,” he announced to his classmates. I managed to get one of the invitations from one of the other children. It said, in his sister’s handwriting “We are having a ‘Thomas the Tank Engine’ party”. It gave a date (aha her request for a calendar explained), time and address and included a drawing of Thomas.
I was impressed by her organisational powers. She had said that she wanted to hold a party for the boys and I had fobbed her off saying that we would have something for their birthday in September and we couldn’t afford to throw parties at the drop of a hat. She was undaunted and said that she only wanted a party for playing games not for food which might, she could see, be expensive. I resorted to the grown-ups’ favourite phrase and help in ages past “We’ll see.” Clearly, she felt that she needed to take matters into her own hands. The teacher rescued all the invitations from the boys’ classmates and the Princess and I had a discussion about the power of the written word.
A couple of weeks ago I had lunch with a friend in his 50s who has never married or had children. Over lunch he laughingly described a sum of money as being insufficient “to keep you in nappies.” “Of course,” he corrected himself “they must all be out of nappies by now.” “Actually, they’re not,” I said. As a single man with no children (therefore not possessed of the exquisite tact of fellow parents in relation to advice) and distinctly firm views on the rearing of same (in his 50s), he yelped in horror “Three and not out of nappies.”
This made me think and I determined that the time had come to attempt to move the boys out of nappies. For a couple of weeks I trailed the idea of only one bottle at bedtime. When that was successfully executed I moved on to trailing “no bottle, no nappy” which the boys greeted with great excitement. On Friday night we had no bottles and no nappies. On Saturday morning, they were dry. Hurrah. “Tús maith, leath na hoibre,” opined my husband. “What’s that ‘doucement’?” I enquired. “No, it’s Irish, a good start is half the work,” said he. And we had another dry night last night. Could it possibly be that easy?
Michael was recently forced by cruel circumstance to eat something sweet. He chose a rich tea biscuit.