Daniel: My home economics teacher said today that her parents live in the country and they have an Aga but you should never buy an Aga because it’s really bad and energy inefficient.
Me: Is it too much to hope that you didn’t tell her about our kitchen plans?
Him: Yes it is, I put up my hand and said, “Miss, my mother’s getting an Aga”.
Thank you Daniel.
In other kitchen related news, the builders have put us off until January so Christmas is on after all.
So the first reading at Mass this morning was a source of mild amusement for Michael and Daniel. Well, definitely for Michael.
A reading from the Prophet Daniel
At that time Michael will stand up, the great prince who mounts guard over your people…
And the second reading was of interest to all, that St. Paul, it’s how he tells them:
Christ on the other hand, has offered one single sacrifice for sins, and then taken his place forever, at the right hand of God, where he is now waiting until his enemies are made into a footstool for him.
A footstool indeed. I hope your own Sunday morning offered up similar nuggets of interest.
Our French childminder who came to us on Fridays to give the children French lessons had a fascinating range of relations. He was related to famous actors, philosophers, a concentration camp survivor and all round heroine and he has a distant ancestor who as a baby had all her relatives killed in a slave uprising and was only saved by her black nanny hiding her and keeping her safe. All verified on the internet so it must be true. So it wasn’t a complete surprise when we discovered that he was a descendant of the Dukes of Leinster – a long line of younger sons marrying poorly leaving him and his family in relatively modest circumstances but with a really spectacular array of connections. The children were entirely underwhelmed when I pointed out that a direct(ish) relation of Edward Fitzgerald, the hero of 1798 had been turning up in our house once a week.
The boys miss him now though as they have to go out to French classes on Friday evenings: a source of endless bitterness.
Daniel was 13 on 27 September. This blog post is perhaps a little late. Better late than never, I hear you say.
He is a musical child. He loves to listen to music. He has a sense of rhythm and he can hear when he is off key. He is a great dancer – as he says to us while dancing to the intro music on TV shows, “Look at my gyrating hips”. To be honest, we are a bit baffled as to where his dancing ability came from. Not me anyhow, that’s for sure.
He is taller than me now – a matter for great rejoicing. He likes being bigger and taller and can’t wait to be grown-up. He lost another baby tooth recently so not as old as all that. Still, he now has a deep, deep voice and a square jaw. When we went to Cork recently, all the relatives marvelled at how big he had got, even some who had seen him quite recently.
He is very conscientious which I think is a trial to him. He is often disconsolate after team events as the other members of the team just did not try hard enough. Nobody tries as hard as him which might be part of it. He has finally given up hurling and is now doing tennis on Saturdays when he doesn’t have a football match. He seems to like it much better than hurling. He is a dogged and determined player of all sports: coaches love him because he never gives up.
He cycles in and out to school every day. I have to say that I am a bit afraid as I see him off every day but he is getting more and more confident and, I suppose, after 18 months of cycling in and out on his own, he’s pretty competent even though he doesn’t do wheelies like some of his school mates. At least, I hope he doesn’t.
He has newish glasses which are very cool. He doesn’t care much but he would like to wear contact lenses so that he can play more and different sports. He has sports goggles but that is only the beginning. The optician says he needs to wait another little while to get lenses. During the year, the ophthalmologist said, basically, that he never needed to see us again, patching had worked for Dan’s astigmatism and as he was longsighted his underlying condition would only improve from now on. He also said to Daniel’s great delight, that it was one of the few eye conditions that was actually improved by watching the TV and playing on the iPad. I mean really.
He loves playing board games – long elaborate Dungeons and Dragons type things. He gets very caught up in the lives of the characters. He used to love to read all the time but now, it’s much harder to find things he likes. He still re-reads books he read when he was younger but it is hard to find new books that he gets really absorbed in. He absolutely loved “Ender’s Game” but since that success, quite a while ago, we seem to have had more misses than hits. Suggested books for a very sporty 13 year old welcome.
He loves his x-box. He is only allowed to play on Saturday and Sunday mornings, an unfairness to which he is largely resigned. He is fascinated by American Youtube videos which he finds hilarious – College Humour, I’m looking at you (I know, unsuitable, true of so much material on the internet). I find to my horror that I have turned into my father who, when I was young, used to constantly interrupt me to tell me to stop using Americanisms. I now visit the same torture on Daniel as he recounts things from the internet to me. In my defence, I didn’t have the same ear for accents that he has and my Americanisms were, at least, delivered in a Cork accent.
At school, he seems popular with the teachers – he’s quite academic and a bit of a perfectionist so I imagine that helps. There are aspects of school that he finds tedious – they are going through Romeo and Juliet at a rate of two pages per lesson and I think he may kill someone before the process concludes – but he does enjoy a number of other classes so it is not all bad.
I’d like to see him arranging to meet friends outside school more often but I think that I overestimate his organisational skills (and those of his friends) a bit sometimes and things just don’t come off for him due to a lack of appreciation that time is finite and if you’re doing a, b and c on Saturday then d may not be possible. I sometimes wonder whether this is because he is as much as a year younger than some of the other children in his year in school. On the other hand, it is not as though I am struck by the organisational skills of his friends.
He gets on like a house on fire with his brother. They still bicker a bit but it seems to me, less and less. They have loads in common. He and his sister have a more challenging relationship; it reminds me a bit of my own relationship with my brother. They can drive each other up the wall. He finds his parents and his family generally a bit of a trial – you never know when they might burst into song on the street startling other pedestrians like in an American musical. At least, this seems to be how he feels many family interactions in public look. I may have hummed as I walked is how I would characterise the same event. Still, all this is normal, your family are mortifying when you’re a teenager.
He is still a very picky eater but, in fairness to him, he is willing to try more things but the almost invariable response to a new savoury food sensation is, “No thank you, not for me.” Obviously, a big improvement of the “yuck” of younger years but still not exactly heartening. He has expanded his range of approved foods but not massively, sadly.
He quite likes getting dressed up in a shirt and trousers for an occasion but most of the time his wardrobe consists of nylon sports gear. I do not love this but he is not alone in this obsession.
He does not like my outings but he is often more inclined than his siblings to give things a go, even though he strongly suspects that any outings are doomed to disappointment. Not exactly an outing, but he and Michael attend a much loathed French class on Friday evenings and he is really reasonable about giving it a chance and not giving up and I think he even quite likes it now. Well, that may be a little optimistic but I think I can say he doesn’t hate it.
Enjoying an outing:
He and I share a liking for fantasy and science fiction so sometimes we go to the cinema together to watch things that the others can’t face which I quite enjoy.
He is polite and obliging. If asked to do work around the house he’ll do it, if not happily, then at least readily and, crucially, efficiently. When he gets annoyed he can find it hard to stop being annoyed but I’ve noticed that over the past year, he has got much, much better at getting over it when he gets annoyed. So I face into the teenage years with a certain amount of optimism.
Overall, he is, as our American friends say, “a great kid.” He’s kind and generous, hardworking and obliging and interested in all kinds of things, even, on occasion, dull outings.
Of late, I have taken to trying to put my phone down at 6.30 when I come in from work and not picking it up again until I go out to work in the morning. I have imposed my draconian regime on Mr. Waffle and the boys also. From when I come home, no one looks at the phone. I’m not saying it works perfectly all the time and sometimes things ping in or there is a phone call but basically we are phone free for most of the evening most of the time. I have a slight tendency to check the phone as I’m going to bed but I am trying to stop. Overall, it’s great for me. Now Mr. Waffle is saying we watch too much telly but, frankly, that’s a bridge too far for me. I’ll keep you posted on our progress towards Victorian evenings.
The coda to our logistics last week was getting Herself back to France. She was due to fly out at 9.50 on Wednesday morning. Alas, I did not see some form online which was supposed to be filled in for under 16s [Air France didn’t need one but Aer Lingus did – I know, I know, when you’re explaining you’re losing] and she was thrown off on the steps of the plane. Mr. Waffle had to zoom back to the airport and re-book her for a later flight and then we needed to re-book her train from Charles de Gaulle to the west of France. It was all a bit stressful. She is Miss Super Competent in fairness to her. She got on the plane in Dublin and from there, unaccompanied, navigated her way to the train station in CDG and on to the express train back to her host family in the west of France.
Poor Mr. Waffle meanwhile spent the morning in the airport (unexpectedly, obviously) and then came home to find that the wretched cat had captured a blackbird and brought it into the kitchen. Mr. Waffle arrived home to a storm of feathers and the bird standing dazedly on the work surface between attempts to hurl itself out the closed window. The cat was pacing the floor frantically some dimly understood precept (or possibly her vast bulk) preventing her from hopping up on to the work surface. Mr. Waffle threw her into the utility room and ushered the bird into the garden. The cat got out the cat flap in the utility room and was waiting anxiously for them at the back door so that escape plan was not entirely successful. The bird got out eventually and we are still finding feathers in surprising places. Joy.
Meanwhile it was Halloween in Dublin and for the first time since moving in, our decorations beat next door’s. It could be that now that their children are 19 and 17 they are not trying so hard but I like to think that we really tried. The boys looked very impressive in their costumes but were too sophisticated to go door to door and just wore them for school.
We had planned to go to Cork for a couple of days over mid-term before Mr. Waffle’s father died and I wondered whether we should cancel but after some humming and hawing we went in the end. In a new development, the boys stayed in my parents’ house and Mr. Waffle and I stayed with my sister. This was a very satisfactory development for everyone except, possibly, our host.
We drove down on Thursday night which was a bit of an epic trek but it did mean that we woke up in Cork on Friday morning ready for a day of Cork related fun. In what can only be called the high water mark of family cultural engagement, the boys said that they wanted to go to Charles Fort in Kinsale on Friday, so we did. It was a bit damp but we missed the worst of the rain. On the strength of this, I bought a new family heritage card for €90 which means that we have to go to at least six heritage sites over the next year to break even. I fear the worst. So do the children.
We went for lunch in the Bulman and Daniel took the obligatory before and after pictures of the ketchup bottle to send to his uncle who does not love ketchup. The waitress assured me that ketchup is part vegetable but I am not entirely convinced.
We took the traditional picture at the caution children sign.
On Saturday, my brother and sister minded the boys for much of the day (including a trip to Milano’s for pizza, let joy be unconfined) leaving myself and Mr. Waffle to our own devices. We were a bit blinded by the unexpected freedom. We went for breakfast and, after a trip to the Crawford gallery and a mild wander around the town in the rain including a look at food fair in the City Hall, we waddled on to lunch. In slight desperation, wondering what to do next, I asked Mr. Waffle to check a list of 17 hidden exciting things to do in Cork he found on the internet. One of them was feed the ducks in the Lough. I mean, I’ve no objection to feeding the ducks but I wouldn’t exactly call it exciting. We had about an hour and a half until Mr. Waffle was meeting a friend for coffee and I almost suggested going home (to be fair, it was lashing) but then I had a mild stroke of inspiration and we went to see Elizabeth Fort and the Protestant cathedral.
Elizabeth Fort boasted mildly exciting views and an air raid shelter which I don’t remember seeing before. It was extremely damp and had a random collection of cold damp objects for viewing including this slightly alarming map.
I quite like the cathedral although I am not generally a fan of neo-gothic. Mr. Waffle wondered about the candles and the IHS on the altar. “Maybe they are very high church?” I offered. “Not in Ireland,” he said firmly. He said it was the least Protestant looking Protestant church he had ever been in. I wonder was he misled because Ireland is basically full of 19th century neo-gothic churches that are Catholic and there are inevitable stylistic similarities. It’s a mystery.
That evening, the boys played board games with my sister and her partner and had a fantastic time.
We drove back on Sunday morning. It was actually a really good idea to go in the end. We all had a lovely time. It turns out that despite the cynical words of my son Michael on another occasion, there is such a thing as fun for all the family.
