belgianwaffle

Twins

Travelling back


Posted in: Middle Child, Princess, Reading etc.

We came back from Dublin yesterday. I am still a shadow of my former self. On the plane back, the Princess sat by the window, Mr. Waffle sat in front of her with Michael on his lap and I sat beside her with Daniel on my lap. As we were sitting on the runway taxiing about, the Princess and I had the following conversation:

Her: I want to do a poo.
Me: You can do a poo when the fasten seatbelts sign goes off.
Her: But I want to do a poo NOW!
Me: I’m afraid you’ll have to wait.
Her: But the poo wants to come out.
Me: Well it will just have to wait. What is that awful smell? And those funny damp brown marks on Daniel’s back?
Her (giggling): I think he did a big poo Mummy.

Once airborne we retire to the toilet where the Princess sits on the toilet while I try to stop Daniel eating anything dangerous. When she is finished, I change Daniel’s nappy and all his clothes. He wriggles. The toilets on planes are small. That’s probably all the detail you need. When we got back to our seating, the long-suffering man on the outside stood up to let us troop in.

Him: Three children – a lot of work, eh?
Me: Hmm. I suppose. Princess, sweetheart, can you get up off the floor please.
Him: I have two sons 27 and 29.
Me: That’s nice. Are you from Belgium?
Him: Yes from Mechelen.
Me: I like Mechelen.
Him: It’s handy for my work. I travel a lot. I was in Ireland for work. It’s very expensive.
Me: Yes, isn’t it? Sweetheart, what are you doing down there?
Princess (muffled but indignant): I’m picking up papers to put them in the bin.
Him: Are you working in Brussels?
Me: Yes, what do you do yourself?
Him: I’m a businessman. I sponsor the IMPAC literary prize.
Me (vaguely aware that this is the largest literary prize in the world): Goodness, that’s very impressive.
Him (pleased): You’ve heard of it?
Me: Absolutely. Daniel will you please stop pulling your sister’s hair? You must be very interested in literature.
Him: No, it’s really for the publicity. My passion is art collecting. When I’m in my New York office, I like to go to the art galleries.
Me: What kind of art do you like to collect? Are you biting him?
Princess: NO, I’m kissing my little brother.
Him: I like Cobra and I have a lot of these works.
Me (faintly): A lot?
Him: Yes. I also collect….[inaudible]
Daniel: Waah, a bottle, waah, I need a bottle, also she did bite me.
Him:…and a small Picasso that I keep in the kitchen.
Me: Good for you. Here, sweetheart, have a bottle.
Daniel: Glug.
Princess: I WANT a bottle.
Me: Well, I haven’t got a bottle for you.
Princess: Can I have some crisps then when the “any drinks or snacks” lady comes?
Me: OK, then.
Him: I’m also really interested in the symbolists.
Me: Oh yeah, did you see that whatshisname, Belgian symbolist, um..
Him: Khnopff?
Me: Yes. Horsey, horsey don’t you stop, just let your feet go clippety clop…
Daniel: Big grin.
Princess: When will it be MY turn to sit on your lap?
Him: Did you see that picture of his sister in the dress with all the buttons?
Me (warily, considering that almost all the pictures were of his sister – Khnopff appears to have a number of issues here): Yeees.
Him: Do you collect at all?
Me: No, not really, no.
Him: I had my house repainted in the colour scheme on that painting. Why not, eh?
Me: Why not indeed, um, do you have a very large house for your large collection?
Him: Art nouveau house, 600 square metres.
Me (swooning from envy): Lovely. Sweetheart, look out over England, see all those things sparkling, they’re fireworks (it was November 5 and the English like their fireworks for Guy Fawkes – it was an extraordinary sight).
Daniel: UH OH.
Me: Princess, could you pick up your brother’s bottle?
Her: No, I’m looking at the fireworks.
Him:Have you been to see the Spilliaert exhibition?
Me (holding Daniel on the chair with one hand while rooting round on my knees on the floor for the missing bottle): No, not yet, though I do like Spilliaert. He’s interesting in a weird Belgian kind of way.
Him: You think Belgians are weird?
Daniel: The bottle woman.
Me (inserting bottle in indignant mouth): The home of surrealism, I think so, yes.
Her: Can I see Aunty Publishing Exec’s house?
Me: No, sweetheart, we’re too high up and anyway, we’re over Belgium now.
Him (pensively): Having children, it’s a lot of work; I’m not so sure about having another baby. I think I will offer a million to the first of my sons to have a grandchild.

I’m not sure whether he was serious or not but I bet he wished that aer lingus hadn’t dispensed with business class for the weekend flights.

More blogs for NaBlPoMo 

Peggy (in French)

Peggy is a working mother of two little boys. She works on European stuff but is Belgian. I know this sounds odd, but it is hard to meet Belgians in Brussels. Please trust me on this. Peggy is like a Belgian friend. Through her blog, I get an insight into what it must be like being a Belgian in Brussels. I won’t say anything further because I don’t want to unnerve her by behaving like a weird foreign stalker but I do like her blog.

A Little Pregnant

Julie, mother of one after (trust me here), not inconsiderable difficulties.  Polemical, opinionated, funny – what’s not to like?

I’m the gin in the gin-soaked boy


Posted in: Family, Twins, Work

I had an excellent day at work the other day. As I drove home, destroying the planet, I listened to this catchy song on the stereo. As far as I was aware, all three of my children were healthy and cheerful (I’m the ghost in the machine). We had a babysitter booked for that evening (I’m the sunset in the east). All was right in the world (I’m the trojan horse in Troy). This, I thought to myself, ecstatically, is having it all (tum, tum, tum, tum te tum, tum). Is it though, enough to make up for the other 364 days of the year (I’m the half-truth in the lie)?

And, I know, I’m one of the lucky ones. I enjoy my job. My colleagues are lovely, my boss is a pleasure to work with and the work is interesting. But in the mornings, Michael is particularly clingy and he clutches on to my clothing howling desperately when I leave (mercifully, Daniel is very phlegmatic). Even to go to the kitchen. My mother used to say, when the Princess was small “she was fine until you came in” and it’s the same with Michael. He’s fine and then he sees me and he starts to cry. It will pass I suppose.

But it’s hard. I hate to sound like Breda O’Brien, but I do think that the Irish government is wrong to try to force single mothers and every other type of mother out to work. It’s hard when you are going out to an interesting, reasonably well paid job; it must be bordering on the impossible, if you are going out to some horrible minimum wage job. Especially, if you have no partner with whom to share the childcare. And, let’s face it, what generally works best with childcare is part-time and, mostly, part-time jobs are neither the most interesting ones nor the ones with the best prospect of promotion. My cynical colleague says “worse, come the economic downturn, they’ll all be told to go home to tend their children, two part-time women is one full-time man”. I’m not sure I entirely share this view but I do believe that this whole dilemma will continue until everyone in society acknowledges that children have two parents, both of whom have responsibilities, and that to accommodate this, it is as normal for men to work part-time as for women. I guess I’ll be waiting a while, then.

The moment you’ve all been waiting for


Posted in: Princess, Twins

And then again, possibly not.  Please see the Princess on video admonishing her students in the language of Voltaire.

In other news, as of yesterday, I am no longer breastfeeding.  The boys have tired of beating dry gourds and even Michael has definitively moved to bottle.  No more business trips with the breast pump then.

And finally, I bought wild boar in the supermarket this morning.  Why?  Because it was there.  Do I regret this?  Deeply.  How long does it need to be marinated before it can be eaten?  Five days.  Sigh.

Double standards


Posted in: Princess, Twins

What I may not want to hear my children saying when I am old:

She loves it, really.

She’ll have stopped crying 5 minutes after we walk out the door.

It’s good for her socialisation skills; I’m sure it wouldn’t be good for her to be at home all the time.

I like to see her making friends with all those other people; it’s just a pity they all seem to catch each other’s bugs.

The staff are great; you can tell that they really like old people.

I’m glad to see that they haven’t got a television; it’s great that they’re devising games and songs for them instead.
Good God, am I paraphrasing a Cat Steven’s song here?

Home alone


Posted in: Princess, Twins

Last week while Mr. Waffle was away, I had to mind all three children overnight. Our babysitter came and helped me to bath them all and put the boys to bed. When she left, I fed the Princess and put her to bed. And she got up again and again and again. As it got later and later I realised that the interval between her finally going to bed and the boys starting to wake up was likely to disappear. I got desperate and called her father in Luxembourg to talk to her. He threatened not to bring a present unless she was good. She treated him with laughing disdain. Finally at 10.30, I said to her that I was going to bed. She was absolutely exhausted and lying on the bean bag playing in a desultory way with the boys’ toys but she gamely said to me “you go off to bed Mummy, I’ll sit here and play quietly on my own”. So I conceded defeat and asked whether she would like to sleep in my bed thereby, as my mother and sister both pointed out to me, rewarding poor behaviour. As she climbed into bed beside me, she said “ring Daddy in Luxembourg and tell him I’m a good girl”. “I will not ring Daddy in Luxembourg, he’ll be asleep”. “No, he won’t, he’s working in Luxembourg”. She should meet my former boss, they have such similar ideas on working hours. In any event, on his return from foreign parts, Mr. Waffle brought no present. The Princess expressed neither surprise nor indignation.

As ill-luck would have it, my esteemed husband is away this week also. Tonight, not only are we all home alone but the babysitter couldn’t come at the last moment. I got home about 6.30 and put them all into the bath which I had let run a little deep which they all enjoyed very much. Hysterically so, in fact. Nobody got hurt but I got very wet. Then I got out the two boys who instantly began crawling around the bathroom dragging their little towels behind them (making for the bin and the potty respectively). I got out a somewhat reluctant Princess also. I corralled all three of them down towards the boys’ bedroom where the Princess jumped up and down on the large bed, somewhat taking from the soothing end of the day quiet I was aiming for. I wrestled the boys into nappies as speedily as I could and nobody weed on the floor. Result, as I understand the young people say. At a somewhat more leisurely pace I got them into their pyjamas and sleeping bags allowing Daniel time to try once again his trick of trying to catch his finger in the drawer while Michael invested his not inconsiderable energies in pulling himself upright and falling back on his bottom. He performed this trick for the first time on Saturday but, so far, it shows absolutely no sign of palling. They were both in bed sucking on bottles by 7.10. Did I hear a peep out of them thereafter? No, I did not. Let us hope and pray that Daniel will equal the feat of sleeping 12 hours which he managed on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday night but most certainly did not last night. Since Michael has yet to wake up fewer than three times in any given night, I suppose it would be futile to hope that he might sleep through. Let us pray also that the Princess does not wet the bed. In the past week she has taken to wetting the bed half an hour after going to bed. This is some feat since she always goes to the toilet before going to bed. We think she does it on purpose because a) she has confessed to her father that she finds it funny and b) she wails when we put her back in her own bed “but before when I wet the bed, you let me sleep in your bed”. Just once. Never again. Mind you, friends of ours who came to the boys’ bash at the weekend pointed out that things could be a lot worse. Their little girl has only just been toilet trained and she tends to poo in ther underpants (which the Princess never did, mercifully) and then poke around in there (ditto, especially mercifully). Her father says that the other day it was like a dirty protest in their bathroom. Lovely.

I do feel a little bad that this evening I spent exactly 40 minutes with my sons, time which they had to divide with their older and somewhat demanding sister. Oh well, I daresay they will have plenty of time with me during the night. On the plus side though, the Princess was phenomenally well behaved. While I made dinner for us, she tidied away all the boys’ toys (by tossing them into the playpen which has become a vast untidy toybox rather than somewhere to put the boys) and we sat down and ate together and she said to me “Now Mummy, isn’t this pleasant?” Yes, indeed. And then she went to bed. No problems and she asked me “can I get up, if I want to do a wee?” ” Absolutely sweetheart”. And, finally, just before I turned out the light she said anxiously “Daddy will bring me a present, won’t he?” That’s my girl.

A big day all round


Posted in: Twins

Today, as well as being the the festival of the French community of Belgium, it is my parents’ 39th wedding anniversary and the boys’ first birthday.  I spent more time than you could possibly imagine would be necessary putting together a slideshow of their first year.  Time when, perhaps, they might have appreciated a little attention, it being their birthday and everything.  Oh well.

At the end of August, the boys started to crawl.  Can I tell you how glad I am that they waited 11 months to do this?  They are putting their new found skills to devastating effect.  As I can only be in one place at a time, when I am minding them, I tend to encourage the Princess to pitch in “Is Daniel putting his hand in the plughole again?” “No, Mummy, he’s pulling out the plug from the plughole.”  Only this morning while I was in the shower, I heard her admonishing Michael “What is that in your mouth?  Spit it out, give it to me.”  I emerged dripping from the shower to see her holding aloft a small piece of plastic.  That’s a good child, ensuring her brothers’ survival to see another day.  She’s almost as good as her father whom I found one morning mopping up a patch of vomit in the middle of which was the piece of sweet wrapper on which Michael had been choking moments earlier.  When we were at home in Cork, I myself found Michael meditatively sucking on a curtain hook which, somewhat to his chagrin, I removed from him.  My favourite great risk though was the time we found him snuggled up to an empty plastic nappy bag which he had managed to reach by stretching his hands to maximum extent from within his cot.  Meanwhile, Mr. Waffle tells me that one night he went in to comfort a howling Daniel, took him into the bed in their room and awoke some time later with a start to see Daniel sleeping peacefully on the floor.  The other day I heard a roar from the hall and went out to find that Daniel had pulled a chair on top of himself and was lying sprawled on the floor with a lump the size of a small egg over his right eye.  Danger Michael, as we think of him, has managed to move the stand holding in place the full length mirror in our bedroom and, in a delightfully dramatic moment, I was able to save him from being squashed by catching the mirror just before it flattened him.  I also see real potential for their favourite game of playing peekaboo together on either side of a door to end in disaster and bloody digits and foreheads.  As Mr. Waffle says, it will be a miracle, if they reach the age of reason.

They do so many things now and they are changing so fast, I feel I can’t keep up.   They both do lots of imitating.  Michael does an Indian whoop “awa, awa” and puts his hand in front of his mouth.  Daniel flicks his lips with his fingers.  They both do roly poly with their hands and clap when you say clap handies.  When you say “no” Daniel shakes his head vigourously and when you say “yes” he inclines his body forward from the waist. Michael waves when you say “salut” (the creche) and both of them do the movements to one of the Princess’s songs from school.  They adore the telephone and I have only to say the word for both of them to zoom towards the delightful object.  Michael picks up the receiver, hands it to me and when I say “it’s for you” and hand it back, he makes a sound along the lines of “ang” which,  I believe, is his version of hello.  Daniel gets more of a kick from pressing the little buttons.  They both say “Mama” and I’m pretty sure that they know what it means, particularly Daniel who has a very imperious tone when demanding my attention.

What is wonderful is that they have started to play together.  I remember that when the Princess was this age, she had no interest in other babies but the boys really do seem to enjoy each other’s company and from the start of this month have played peekaboo together and laughed together.  Of course, the flip side of this is that they have also started to injure each other (as though their negligent parents and the fixtures and fittings didn’t present sufficient dangers) and that they have to compete for parental attention and toys.  Mr. Waffle calls Daniel “the gentle giant”* as he never takes anything from Michael.  Michael, however, is always swiping stuff from Daniel with an air of mild abstracted interest.  Daniel is never less than horrified by these thefts, turning an alarming shade of red and howling loudly (and he can howl very loudly) but he rarely tries to take back his object of desire; he just sits there protesting until an adult intervenes and returns it to him.  It is strange that they are so very different in this regard.  Generally, Daniel is much more self-sufficient whereas Michael sticks his arms in the air to be picked up the moment he sees me approaching.

In some ways, it has been a long year. They have been sick often, colds and coughs (though incidentally, Daniel’s perma conjunctivitis seems to have cleared up) and, particularly memorably, chicken pox.  They will not sleep which is grim.  Pathetically, over the summer Michael, took to howling himself to sleep sitting up, so we found him asleep bent over with his head on his knees.  We’ve moved on from that, but they still don’t sleep.  Please do not issue advice on this.  No, really, please.   Overall, though, things are getting easier and they are so funny, so affectionate and so lovely that I think that we are quite extraordinarily forunate.  Happy birthday, boys.

 

*Doubtless with the frantic crawling Daniel will soon stop being super chubby and I am a little sad about that.  His grandfather says that cuddling him is like cuddling “a sack of spuds”