Last night the Princess asked her parents why there were pictures of the judge everywhere (she meant the Taoiseach – separation of powers is a mystery to the Princess, she regards the executive and judiciary as interchangeable). She spends a lot more time pounding the mean streets of the city and she likes to read everything and election posters are unavoidable. We explained that there were a number of elections looming. The local elections where we would vote for people to run Dublin and the European elections where we would vote for people to.. um…go to Brussels and Strasbourg. “And,” added Mr. Waffle, “don’t forget the by-election.” I consider myself very literate in these matters but I am having trouble working out whom they want me to vote for and for which position. It’s all very exciting though. The other night a young fella came knocking at our door urging us to vote Green in general and more specifically for him. Following a brief chat we established that he had been lectured by a former classmate of mine and our friend, the Dutch Mama when he was at college. Is it any wonder that there is a statistic that something like 90% of Irish people know their local T.D. personally?
Princess
The unkindest cut
The Princess, in her infinite wisdom, cut her hair while I was away overnight last week. She was making playdough and got some in her hair and this seemed to her the most practical way to deal with the problem. Essentially, she cut out a large clump of hair on one side of her head. I nearly cried when I saw her. “Your beautiful hair,” I said in exact imitation of my mother. “My sister is a boy now,” said Michael gloomily. We went to the hairdresser to get it all chopped off. He tsked and gave her a mullet. Her hair grows so slowly that she could be a teenager before it looks respectable again.
I spoke to her on the phone while I was away and she told me a tale of woe about how school was awful. The others had told her that she was to look for them while they hid and while she was counting they went and told the principal that she had pushed someone and she was punished. The principal and even the school secretary (who is lovely) had been very cross with her. Then, the authorities had found out that the others were lying and she was pardoned. I was very saddened by this glum little story and, the following morning, took her into school myself to get to the bottom of it. After dropping her off, I went for a word with the principal. He was astounded. The whole tale was utter fantasy. “In fact,” he said, “she is a very good child and has never been in any trouble at all.” What, internet, are we to make of this?
Finally, I discovered that in the Princess’s school, they make their first communions in their school uniforms. While this is something of which I heartily approve in theory, in practice, I find myself a little disconsolate. In theory, obviously, it stops ludicrously over the top expenditure and helps to focus the children’s (and indeed their parents’) minds on what is a very important religious event rather than an opportunity for dressing small girls as brides to be. In practice, I find that I had been somewhat looking forward to dressing my small girl as a bride to be (don’t mock the afflicted). One of the other parents said that some parents get dresses for their daughters for after the event. Even I can see that that is daft and my husband thinks that its completely ridiculous but yet, I am tempted. It’s two years away (oh stop sniggering in the corner) and perhaps herself will, once she has a thorough grasp on transubstantiation, have views on the appropriate dress code.
Socialising
Last weekend, the Princess went to a birthday party in one of Dublin’s more exciting suburbs. It boasts horses in front gardens (this is not a good thing in Dublin, you’ll have to trust me here) and, if you type this suburb + shooting into Google, then you get 26,100 results. However, she emerged unscathed.
That evening her father and I went to dinner at the houses of friends who live in a rather different Dublin suburb. For the hell of it, I typed “much nicer suburb + shooting” into Google and it reproachfully asked me whether I meant “much nicer suburb + shopping”.
Meanwhile, Mr. Waffle got a call from the childminder asking whether she could take the children to a party at the house of a little (francophone, North African) boy they regularly played with in the park. He said yes and I probably would have too but I had some qualms subsequently. This is the problem with having two working parents. While I was perfectly happy to drop the Princess off to gangland shooting suburb as the birthday girl was a classmate whom I had met, I was uneasy about them all going to a strange house where I didn’t know the child or his mother even though their childminder stayed with them the entire time. Sigh.
We also got invited to lunch by friends – she is French and he is Irish and her parents (who do not speak a great deal of English) were staying for a week and I think that they felt that it might be useful to have some other French speakers and French speaking children about. All very pleasant – they are French farmers from deepest darkest Brittany and I was fascinated to hear that his parents were native Breton speakers and hers spoke a local dialect but, of course, they all learnt French French at school. While both our friend’s parents understand dialect and Breton respectively, our friend understands neither. It has to be said that the policy of the French state seems to be a little hostile to languages other than French within its borders. My husband, who knows everything, told me that as recently as the first world war only one in five Frenchmen spoke French. Well, they’ve fixed that then.
For the record
Princess: 18.7 kilos
Daniel: 18 kilos
Michael: 14.8
Me: Exactly what I weighed the day before Michael and Daniel were born. Let the record show that the day after they were born I reached my lowest adult weight ever: I spent my pregnancy vomitting and almost the only things I was allowed to eat were lentils. I regard pregnancy as akin to a diet plan. But still.
We were in my sister’s house. She has a weighing scales and we were curious. Curiousity killed the cat and, even more pertinently, information made him fat. Well indeed.
A shadow of my former self
We had the Princess’s sixth birthday party yesterday. I always find these occasions immensely stressful. Firstly, there is the actual organisation and trying to guess how much food might be appropriate, how many party games will be necessary and so on and then there is the concern that no one will come, your child will not be loved and that she has no friends.
The party started at 2.30 and by 2.45 I was seeing nasty flashing migraine shapes (overlapping triangles, since you ask). I took two paracetemol and soldiered on. If you had told me 7 years ago that I could get through a children’s party with a migraine, I would have been astonished. Then, I would retire from whatever activity I was engaged upon and lay my sore head gingerly on a pillow in a darkened room while mulling about when I would be sick. It is amazing how much the human body can withstand.
There were seven little girls at the party and all of them, bar one, were reasonably well behaved. They accepted that they could not win all the prizes and queued up in an orderly fashion for the various entertainments offered. One of them screamed and sulked and retired to her bedchamber in a huff. Our daughter was told that she had to let her guests go first and she did not like that. In future, I think we might just throw our hats at it and say “birthday girl goes first”; there are other occasions to polish up her manners. I had suspected that something of this nature might happen; she was so excited beforehand that there was bound to be a violent reaction. What I had not anticipated was that Daniel would also be atrociously behaved. I think that he must have been tired but he spent most of the afternoon howling in frustration which is unlike him. During pass the parcel, he signally failed to understand the nature of the game and clung to the parcel with impressive tenacity every time it came in his direction. A charming little classmate, who spent some time soothing him, confided to me that she was glad she did not have a little brother and, on the basis of the afternoon’s behaviour, I could not be surprised. She was a lovely little thing and I said to her, “you are a really good girl”. And she replied, “I know, everyone says that to me”. I was delighted that despite the apparent sophistication of the group (they knew all the words to “Mamma Mia” and were conversant with the plot of High School Musical), they were thrilled with their little prizes of 50 cent rubbers and teddy key rings.
I was particularly sad that the Princess missed the pinata bashing (sulking in her room) as she and her father had spent the previous two weeks carefully constructing it. All the children seemed to enjoy it very much and threw themselves on the floor to scoop up its contents with impressive speed when it finally collapsed.
Mr. Waffle and I had made significant efforts to prepare a number of party games but they seemed to take very little time, as follows:
basic face painting – 2 hours and 55 minutes to go;
pin the tail on the donkey- 2 hours and 50 minutes to go;
potato and spoon race – 2 hours and 40 minutes to go;
treasure hunt – 2 hours and 30 minutes to go;
bash the pinata – 2 hours and 25 minutes to go;
pass the parcel – 2 hours and 20 minutes to go;
musical chairs – 2 hours and 10 minutes to go;
absolutely all games exhausted and children tossed into back garden to play in the drizzle – 2 hours to go.
The birthday tea was reasonably successful. We had more or less accurately gauged their capacity though one little girl went through an astonishing quantity of food. I thought that when she saw the chocolate cake, she would regret going through a quite astounding number of cocktail sausages and carrot sticks during the first course but they did nothing to slow her down. It was slightly unfortunate that the main savoury elements of the feast consisted of cocktail sausages, sausage rolls and ham and cheese pizza. This meant that our next door neighbour’s vegetarian daughter had to survive on vegetables and a pizza crust which was sub-optimal. She was also the child at whom Mr. Waffle hissed, “are you at all familiar with the words please and thank you”? I thought that she might be upset but she is made of stern stuff, although the very polite little girl who was sitting beside her looked terrified, the neighbour’s child was unfazed and went on to point out when the sweet course came with Mars bar rice krispie buns (v. nice, ask me for the recipe, if you are interested) that Mars bars are very, very, very bad for you. My sister, knowing my culinary limitations, had baked the birthday cake which was a huge success with all of the participants. The Princess was delighted when the cake came out and everyone sang happy birthday and her face lit up. This was undoubtedly the highlight of what was otherwise, alas, a damp squib from her point of view.
By 5, the birthday tea was over, our stock of party games was exhausted, the drizzle had become solid rain and the visitors’ parents were not expected for at least another half an hour. I had seen the Examiner when I was in Cork (the Irish Examiner is to Cork as the Irish Times is to Dublin) at the weekend and it had, most fortuitously, recommended a series of party games for 5-7 year olds and one of them was paint a face on a paper plate. I did not think much of this at the time but I was despearate so distributed paper plates and gave them some crayons. This was extraordinarily successful. It kept them entertained for longer than any other single party game and it was a good “wind-down” activity. I offer you this information, in case you should ever need it.
Next year, we are going to bring in outside expertise regardless of the cost; we can always remortgage.
Unrealised potential
The other morning the Princess arrived into our room at 7.30 fully dressed asking whether there was anything she could do to help us. She got her brothers up and got them dressed. We were all ready to go out the door at 8.30. This exceptional behaviour has not been repeated. Sometimes, I think that she likes to taunt us.
