Michael: Christmas is Jesus’s birthday.
Me: Yes, that’s right.
Michael begins to cry.
Me: What’s wrong?
Michael: That means Jesus gets all the presents.
Me: No, no, the baby Jesus loves us all so much that he wants all the children to have presents.
Princess: And Santa delivers the presents with help from his brother Saint Nicolas and his sister the Befana.
Princess
Call the tabloids
Me: Does anybody know who Barack Obama is?
Her: Yes, let me think, yes, he is the President of the United States.
Me: Very good.
Daniel: I’ve seen him.
Me: Really?
Daniel: Yes.
Me: Where?
Daniel: Outside my window.
Me: Oh yes?
Daniel: Oh yes, and he was naked.
And here’s a nice link for those who love Dr. Seuss.
And for the cat owners with children, keep the children away from the hole punch or your cat may end up like this.
Christmas Cheer
We went up to Farmleigh this afternoon. It was restored for the nation by the office of public works and is open to the public when very important guests are not staying there. It was bought from the Guinnesses for €29.2 million (ah, that property boom again) and it is a, not very attractive, piece of high Victoriana, in my view. I can’t help feeling that there are many other buildings the nation might have been better off spending its money on.
Nevertheless, as our politicians are fond of saying at the moment “we are where we are”. There are markets in the courtyard and events all year round. I have been consistently disappointed in the Farmleigh offering but the fact that so many other people regularly have a great time there keeps drawing me back. Today, wasn’t too bad. The courtyard was chilly and cheerless and the Santa unconvincing but the house was warm and manned by people in 19th century gear (I am a sucker for costume – I nearly died of happiness in Upper Canada Village). In the ballroom, there was a big Christmas tree and a choir were singing beautifully. All around were people like us with small children, spellbound. Children were sitting on their parents knees, rocking back and forth – their little faces all aglow from the cold weather outside. When the choir stopped singing, you could have heard a pin drop. Two childish voices piped up into the silence:
Childish voice 1: This is boring.
Childish voice 2: Yeah, this is boring, I want to go somewhere I can spend my money.
No prizes for guessing whose children these might be.
Parenting Thrill
My daughter loves to read. I am delighted. A lifetime of happiness opens up. When I see her reading at breakfast, reading in the car, coming out from school with her coat and bag under one arm and a book held open as she walks, I am thrilled. She will read anything. I used to try to keep up with her but I’ve given up. I cannot face “Milly Molly Mandy” or “The Naughtiest Girl in the School”. The other night, I found her reading “A Christmas Carol”. Not an abbreviated version for children but the original. She cannot have understood more than one word in ten but dogged determination kept her going to the bitter end. I suspect that this is much the same spirit that moved me to finish Winwood Reade’s “The Martyrdom of Man” aged 11 to the shock and awe of my parents who, I think, were both defeated by it – needless to say, I retain almost no memory of this seminal text.
She has started to use words that she has only found in books. So she talks of the “wilder ness” and is indignant to be told that it is not so pronounced; “but it’s spelt “wilder ness”” she protests. I have already told her about epitome so she won’t be caught out by that one.
Wildlife in the Classroom
There was a mouse in the Princess’s classroom yesterday. The teacher stood on her chair and yelled. They all had to decamp to another room while the principal (God love him) caught it to “send to the pet shop”. He tells me he has had to fork out €800 to Rentokil to make sure that all the mice in the building make it safely to the pet shop.
And today’s links:
We get to find out what Mike has been up to. And very interesting it is too. Particularly, if you are interested in furniture and design.
My sister-in-law is losing the will to blog. Go on, give her a comment. Yes, I know, not only am I nagging for comments here but there too. It’s all too much. Thank you for commenting here, by the way. You might like to know that, on foot of that last post, my mother has offered to buy us a dryer for Christmas. Mr. Waffle won’t let her because of the environment.
My brother drew my attention to this interview by a cranky Cork footballer. Cranky, but I suppose he has a point.
Ireland has been underwater for a couple of weeks. Except Dublin. Dublin has been pretty dry. For days, the Irish Times had to put pictures of places outside Dublin on its front page. The pain. Obviously, there was a flood (ha, ha) of complaints as the Dublin Intelligencer (as my father calls it) ignored the needs of its nearest and dearest. On Monday, they could stand it no more and, with most of the rest of the country under several feet of water the Irish Times ran with “Debris is washed ashore as southwesterly winds lash the South Wall pier at high water in Dublin yesterday” and a nice picture of the local debris risk.
Blessed are the merciful, for they shall be mortified. Oh dear.
Eeek!
My children do not enjoy as diverse a diet as I did when I was their age. In part this is because I am not at all as good a cook as my mother and in part because they are the pickiest eaters in Ireland.
I am spending a couple of days with my parents (photos of flooding may follow, hold your breath) and this evening my mother cooked prawns for the offspring. It was then that I realised that they had never even had a frozen prawn before, let alone one still encased in its shell. They gazed in horrified fascination at the little bodies laid out for their delectation. They winced as I screwed off the thorax and pulled out the edible part. The Princess then began to create new bodies using the heads and pincers. The boys were too afraid to even touch them. So, your best guess, did they eat any dinner tonight?
