Archives for 5 September, 2007

Monday, August 20

We went to the Shelburne Museum – these Webbs, they were big people locally. I love the Shelburne Museum and this was my third visit. According to our guide book, it’s about to be overtaken in popularity as Vermont’s biggest tourist attraction by the Ben & Jerry’s factory. If this happens it will be a shame and a sin. The Shelburne Museum is fabulous and fabulously odd. It consists of a range of houses from all over America and from different periods reconstructed on a large leafy site. They contain all sorts of odd things from people dressed up in 19^th century gear to an excellent collection of impressionist paintings. My favourite building is the lighthouse which was transferred from the lake to the grounds with, I would imagine, quite considerable effort. When it was sold off by the government or Commissioners for Lights or whatever, someone bought it for 5 dollars and very shortly thereafter, sold it on to Ms. Webb for a whopping profit; she forked out 1,300 dollars. The most spectacular thing must be the large steamboat sitting proudly on a large grassy expanse. However, by far the most popular thing with the children was the carousel on which they could have as many turns as they wished. The Princess also suffers slightly from what Mr. Waffle refers to wrongly and unfairly as my “weakness for chintz” meaning that she likes looking around other people’s houses but Mr. Waffle and the boys tired of this activity far too quickly for our liking. Even I find it a bit difficult to work up wild enthusiasm for somewhere just because it’s been around since 1804. Lots of places have been around since 1804. I was quite impressed that it had been moved from New York though (the Princess looked around anxiously and asked whether I thought it was about to move again). Everyone, however, was fascinated by the blacksmith as he worked on making a wrought iron letter for the Princess. Surprisingly, the children were also fascinated by the “settler” who talked about how people managed in the 1700s. Let me tell you one thing, making shirts out of flax is no picnic.

That afternoon we went to the big cheap supermarket out of town and the children had trolleys like little cars; I thought that the boys might expire from happiness. Why can’t we have that here?

Monday was the first day we fully appreciated just how hard our hosts have to work. They put in long days. Their childminder comes to the house at 7. They leave about 7.30. The childminder takes the children to the creche and then brings them home again in the evening just after our friends get in from work. She stays and gives the children dinner which is marvellous. They are blessed with their childminder who is a pleasant, kind, patient woman whom the children adore and whom our Princess wanted to move in with. It’s just as well they have her because each of them is on call one night a month and on back up call another night and they both work one weekend a month. It’s a lot, particularly for demanding jobs where you spend a lot of time on your feet – I suspect hospital doctors are the professionals who use computers least. At one point P asked me, if I would be able to find the on button on their laptop and Mr. Waffle was able to say confidently “she’s worked in offices all her life, I’d say she’ll be alright”. I digress. As well as long hours they have two small children. Their little boy is two and a half and their little girl just over one. I think it’s pretty hard to have it all. And they are so good with those children. P, in particular, maybe just because he’s an American, seems to have endless energy and goodwill (high five again and again and again, no problem). I think J, Mr. Waffle and I are similar in that we, obviously, love our own kids and are prepared to be interested in those of our friends but we’re not natural children people. P is. The children adored him, particularly the boys and Michael went flying out to meet him when he came home from work somewhat to the chagrin of P’s own unfortunate little boy who was exhausted from sharing with all these visitors.

I was struck too by how hard J&P work on politeness with their children. It’s not that I don’t want my children to be polite, of course I do, but they were insisting that when their little boy said sorry, please or thank you, he made eye contact and that he answered all questions clearly and politely. I think that they were setting standards that the Princess even now, alas, fails to meet. I was struck by their success. Maybe this is why the Americans are such polite grown ups. I am tackling the Princess with new vigour.

Tuesday, August 21

We went back to the Shelburne Museum. Our ticket was for two days and I needed more chintz. It was as well that I had a successful morning to sustain me because that afternoon we had a disastrous walk into town. The Princess was tired and crabby and for quite a while she lay down while we discussed strategies to get her moving.

Her father carried her for much of the journey and relations reached a low when in protest at some indignity, she bit him on the shoulder. She’s never done that before and I don’t think she’ll be doing it again either. I gave him a little break from the children and sent him to the supermarket while the Princess, the boys and I went for a walk on Church Street. Inevitably, the Princess had to go to the toilet. Furthermore she would only walk, if I used a form of words known only to her and since I was pushing the boys in the buggy, it was pretty essential that she walked. “Please, please, pretty please walk”.
“NO!”
“I’m begging you here.”
“NO, say what you said before!”
“What? What?”
“YOU KNOW”
“I DON’T”
“OK, say ‘it’s a miracle, she’s walking’”.

By the time we got back to the house, I was exhausted and refused to budge so I was able to enjoy the wholly suburban experience of cooking dinner while trying to stop the dog attacking the man who came to mow the grass. Dinner itself passed off peacefully though there was some excitement beforehand when my sous-chef (Mr. Waffle) was flummoxed by the complexity of American equipment and using only his skill and judgement managed to wedge the plug in the sink where it stayed until the heart surgeon later extracted it with a pliers. She doesn’t call her work plumbing for nothing.

Throwing ourselves into the American experience we spent an hour watching the Red Sox with P. Baseball may be like rounders but there seems to be a lot more science involved. I was pleased to note that he was wearing his People’s Republic of Cork t-shirt, the obligatory fashion item for all foreign men who marry women from Cork. But that does remind me of our other American holiday theme song – “Take me out to the ball game”. Does anyone know what Cracker Jack is?

Wednesday, August 22

We went out to hire bicycles. All three of our children threw themselves on the ground and screamed when they realised that nobody was allowed to rent the little pink bicycle with trainer wheels, it wasn’t for rent. It was almost funny. It was certainly very loud. We set ourselves up with two bicycles and little trailers and cycled out around the lake. It was pleasant but a bit chilly. When we stopped for our picnic, Michael snuggled up to me and said pathetically “coat, coat” as we ate ham sandwiches dolefully in a gale force wind. We wrapped the children up in the towels we had brought in case we felt like a dip in the lake (ha!) and put them in their trailers and cycled back, the only mild excitement being when Mr. Waffle’s trailer went adrift leaving poor Daniel sitting gloomily in his trailer on the cycle path. Not maybe an outrageous success.

However, that evening we went out to dinner in the Shelburne Inn with J&P and that was great. J and I went a bit early and had drinks in the library, a chat, a roaring fire and a view over the lake while the men wrestled with the children and joined us later. Dinner was delicious and it was just really nice to have a chance to go out all together. One of the best things about Vermont was the four grown-ups sitting down together every night for dinner and eating and talking all evening. J said that she felt that with all of the pressures of work and children, her social life had been squeezed and I know what she means. It was nice not to have anything to do other than sit and chat, no thinking, I’d better pay some bills or sort out some paperwork or anything.

Thursday, August 23

We went to Ben & Jerry’s ice cream factory. What can I say? They do their best but it’s boring, it’s a factory. I have to say that the fact that our daughter tripped on the concrete path (not their fault, I fully concede) and got the most enormous egg shaped bruise on her forehead when she bounced audibly, did not make me warm to the experience either.

In the afternoon my daughter and I went to town and as well as extra luggage (ouch, the credit card bill), I got a chance to gloat yet again over the purchases I had made in Hatley’s for the children (cute pyjamas, lovely coat) and Danforth pewter (measuring spoons, a Christmas tree ornament, if you laugh at me, I will never love you again, J has already) earlier.

The Princess and I had a heart to heart about life and how no one can ever really have everything he or she wants. I asked “can grown-ups do everything they want?” She thought about this for a while and then said “No, because you want to read your dull books but you can’t because the kiddies are jumping and shouting in your ear and want your attention.” She may be cranky, but she has insight.

That night J was on call. We overheard her talking on the phone. “He is scheduled for emergency open heart surgery at 8.30 in the morning, WHY did he think it would be a good idea to have a shower now?” Much dark muttering followed.

Friday, August 24

We went to the ECHO centre. I see that Senator Leahy has his name in the title. He may not perhaps have Mayor Daley’s presence but you can see that he’s working hard on it. I didn’t have high hopes for the ECHO centre which was a small enough premises describing itself as a “lake aquarium and science centre”. I was completely wrong. Though, mostly, the exhibits were neither high tech nor expensive, it was another example of how something simple done well can work marvellously. The staff made a big difference. There was someone feeding turtles and talking about them, there was a man with a projector in a room with a couple of paper dinosaurs making shapes on a wall, there was a woman encouraging children to touch star fish and sea urchins. All hugely enthusiastic and engaging for the children and grown-ups. There was a water feature pretty like what we had seen in the Children’s Museum in Chicago but this time there were little stools so that I didn’t have to lift the boys up to play with the boats on the ‘river’. There was a fairly high tech dinosaur moving about downstairs but my children got just as much fun out of finding plastic dinosaur bones in a pretend dig site. They got to pretend to be on television. There was a room for small children to wander about in with a miniature boat and a fish tank with a glass circle in the middle that a child shaped head could fit through. Clever. And they stayed there for ages while we chatted able to keep an eye on them in the enclosure. Excellent.

And then, at lunch time, Mr. Waffle minded the children to allow me to have a long lunch with J. After lunch we went back to the pool for one last afternoon before preparing for our long trip back.

I was sad to say goodbye to J and P and their children but I have determined that we will come back in 4 or 5 years to go on a skiing holiday and wouldn’t that be lovely?

I loved America and we had a fantastic holiday. I feel oh so smug for deciding to go. It’s our first holiday with all three children without any parents to help out and it was fine. Even better we had a great time. Even the poor Princess whom jet lag hit hardest. Where will we strike next? Over the Summer I heard that my oldest friend has just been appointed ambassador to an exotic Asian country. Mr. Waffle’s first words on hearing the news were “We’re NOT going to visit” but yet..

Yes, I know this is ridiculously long, look it’s for me and my mother, not for you, you can skip over it.

Thursday, August 16

On Thursday, we bade a tearful farewell to Chicago (well, I was tearful, the others seemed to bear up fine) and had a relatively pain free journey to New York and a dull wait in JFK before catching our 50 minute flight to Burlington, Vermont. We went to Vermont to see my school friend J and her American (exotic!) husband P and their two children. P was waiting to meet us at the airport and this announced the beginning of the Rolls Royce service that they put on for the duration of our stay.

I have been in Burlington three times now which makes it the place in America I have visited most. I love it. A friend of mine has a theory that when people go on holidays they like places to be like home. Certainly Burlington is a lot like Cork only smaller and American. After Chicago, Vermont seemed very rural and pleasantly so. Our friends live in a lovely big house (very big when you consider that nine of us fitted there comfortably) within easy walking distance of the town centre. I fell in love with their house and I covet it. It was built in the 1920s and it has colonial ambitions including a sweeping staircase over three floors (even the staircase to the basement was mildly sweeping). They have more space than they really know what to do with. As well as our bedroom, we had a guest sitting room; a lovely sunny room overlooking the garden. And there is a huge attic bedroom upstairs that they haven’t bothered to do anything with as they don’t need it. Their four sofas are almost unnoticeable in this enormous house and they need lots more furniture. They have beautiful wooden floors everywhere and the bathrooms all have the gorgeous original tiling. It is a wonderful place to live and it was pretty good to visit too.

On arrival, we gave J the full page article about her first cousin the Pulitzer prize winner which we had carefully saved from the Irish Times earlier in the month. “You think I haven’t been sent this already?” she asked in astonishment. J comes from an extraordinarily talented family. Her mother is one of six, five sisters and a brother and they all were very clever and sporty and have very clever and interesting children. Frankly, I think the Pulitzer prize winner should abandon the journalism and write a bit about her own family. I always felt that J becoming a consultant heart surgeon in her early 30s was an amazing achievement but with the maths geniuses and the millionaire businesswoman and so on among the crop of cousins, it’s hard work to come out on top. Though if the Pulitzer prize winner becomes secretary of state eventually she will definitely win the cousin one upmanship game. J was driving down to NY at the end of the month to watch the tennis with her mother and various aunts arriving from Ireland and they were all going to stay with her aunt (the prize winner’s mother) and J was determinedly reading herself up on all relevant issues to keep her end up over dinner conversations.

Friday August 17

Once our children had finished torturing our hosts’ young children and tossing their toys around the house (it’s hard to mess up a big house we discovered) we walked into town a 15 minute journey unless you are accompanied by a grumpy four year old who can make it last 50 minutes. The weather was lovely, unseasonably cool but not overcast. I love the clapboard houses in Burlington and the views over the lake as you walk in. We passed the house where Calvin Coolidge married his wife (is Calvin Coolidge Vermont’s only president? No Dorothy Parker type quips please). When we finally got into town we sat in the first café we came to and the Princess demanded snails. How we laughed; you can’t get snails in America! Which just shows what we know because there were snails on the menu there and in another local establishment as well. The Princess chewed smugly through six.

Then, on the pedestrian main street, we picked up an Obama 08 bumper sticker from a crowded table. I told the faithful I would put it on our car but now Mr. Waffle says I can only put it on with blu-tack as they reduce cars’ resale value. Still, he gave them 5 dollars which will doubtless see Obama elected. A sole Republican sat alone and unloved trying to get signatures for Mr. Giuliani. It was obviously not the day that all the rural Republican Vermonters hit town and the tattooed, hippie townsfolk didn’t seem to think much of Mr. Republican. We went on to the local supermarket which was very right on and had loads of lovely local produce and where I was made to feel very guilty of taking a plastic bag instead of a paper one. Shades of home. It was great. Mind you, J&P do a lot of their shopping there and I can see why they may be the only people on the planet who have a larger weekly shopping bill than we do. All that delicious, local, organic food isn’t cheap.

We spent the afternoon back at the house playing with the family dog. I had been a little worried about Drexel who has been J’s dog for years and years. He is a large black mongrel who used to be very jumpy. My children are scared of dogs. I needn’t have worried, age has calmed him and the children loved him and he is now used to the kind of abuse that small children like to inflict on dogs. It makes me more determined than ever that we must get a pet. It was wonderful to see the Princess overcoming her fear of dogs and throwing balls and rolling in the grass with this dog who was somewhat larger than she was. The boys were somewhat less brave, Daniel working himself up to patting Drexel occasionally but Michael always losing his nerve at the last moment. But the great thing was that they were transfixed by him. They would stand on the porch looking at him in awe, too fascinated to walk away but too scared to go any closer. Meanwhile, I lay in the hammock. Every morning their first words were Drex, Drex, doggy. Fantastic.

Saturday, August 18

Alas, J was on call for the weekend but P was not so we were all able to go to Shelburne Farms with the children. This was an excellent expedition. I was struck by how successfully elements which I have come across many, many times before were combined. Mind you, the farm buildings are quite spectacular. As we all drove out there in the hay wagon, the Princess thought it was a fairy castle. It was “created in 1886 by William Seward and Lila Vanderbilt Webb as a model agricultural estate” and guess where the money for that venture came from. It was essentially a petting farm but it was really well done. There were beautiful, friendly American teenagers everywhere to introduce you to the animals and show you how and where to pat them and tell you about them and their habits. There were little tractors to ride around in for the youngest children. The animals were all clearly well cared for and seemed happy with the attention. The children could look for eggs in the hen coop. The Princess with her new found courage around animals milked a very patient cow. And then we all had a picnic lunch at the little tables outside. It was perfect in every way for small children and pretty good fun for the adults too.

In the afternoon, the Princess and I skipped into town on our own and the Princess climbed every rock on Church Street (these are put there to torture the parents of small children). We were working our way up to the Ben and Jerry’s outlet at the top of Church Street where we were encouraged to support Ben & Jerry’s and buy local. Not a slogan that they can use in Singapore, I suspect. However, the Princess was distracted by a crepe seller and would not be persuaded away from her chocolate crepe; still that was buying local too, I suppose and we did meet some other locals. One of them was an all-American man with his wife and three daughters. We got chatting and it turned out that he was French but his family had moved to Tennessee when he was 12. Very odd. He attempted to speak to the Princess in French but she was having none of it; she turned against French in America, see, the problems of la francophonie are, in fact, all caused by American imperialism.

We went home by taxi because I couldn’t quite face carrying the Princess all the way back. The taxi driver picked up another fare as well, a couple of Quebecois down for a bit of shopping. I was surprised how poor their English was and how readily they lapsed into French with us. As the Princess maintained a mutinous murmur of “no French”, “no French” for the duration of the trip home, they must have felt that all their linguistic issues had been brought South of the border. The taxi driver was somewhat confused by the linguistic regime and the Princess’s imperious instruction that he bring her to North State Street between Ohio and Grand.

That night, Mr. Waffle and I went out to dinner and our kind hosts babysat and town was full of Quebecois. We went to a bistro. What with the Belgian style cooking and décor and everyone speaking French, it was like a home from home. Our waitress explained that there were a lot of Canadians because the Canadian dollar is strong. Nope, the American dollar is weak, admit it. Though, mind you, my credit card bill is still hefty. Alas.

Sunday, August 19

The next day we actually made it to Ben & Jerry’s and then let all five children disport themselves in the fountain at the top of Church Street. After this excitement, the afternoon spent by the side of the country club pool could only be a disappointment. Our friends are members of two (!) country clubs, one for tennis and one for golf. If only they weren’t both doctors working weekends and 12 hour days, they might get to use them. We decided that we would make it our mission to help them get value for their membership – though J was able to join us for the afternoon as, very considerately, no one had a heart attack. There was a great kiddie pool and all of the children loved it. I did have some concerns about the lifeguard who was watching out for our well being. She was one of the seemingly inexhaustible supply of pretty American teenagers available. Unfortunately, she did have a broken foot which made me feel that she might not be able to limp down from her post in time to save any of us from drowning.

Since J&P were going to give us their enormous car for the week – apparently, they don’t use it much because it’s environmentally unfriendly and they like to walk to work (I think it might be a bad buy) – it was decided that I would test drive it home. That was alarming. It was huge and automatic. For the first time in our entire acquaintance J manifested a twinge of irritation. “You’re going too fast and you’re too close to the cars on this side”. That was after I had forgotten that automatic cars only need one foot to stop and the screeching to a halt and tossing around all the children in the back was probably unnecessary. Certainly 7 people looked at me balefully from their various seats in the car and 5 of them started to whimper. But, you’ll be pleased to hear, I mastered it – well, we’re all still alive, aren’t we?