Her: I brought Doggy downstairs.
Me: I don’t like you bringing him out of the house, you know that.
Her: Why?
Me: Because we might lose him.
Her: And what would happen?
Me: I would cry.
Her: Your cheeks would be profaned by a tear?
Me: Yes.
Princess
Poxy – continued
Her: I have as many spots as there are stars in the sky.
Me: That’s a lot of spots.
Him: Though it’s daytime now and there aren’t any stars in the sky.
Me: Yes there are, you just can’t see them.
Him: That’s what YOU say, Columbus.
Happy Belgian National Day
Me: So Daddy and I will be home all day today to mind you.
Her: No work?
Me: In fact, today is a holiday, it’s July 21, Belgian National Day. Nobody has to go to work.
Her: Not you, not Daddy, not Aunty Pub Exec…
Me: Actually, Aunty Pub Exec probably does have to go to work, it’s only a holiday in Belgium not in England.
Her: And Aunty Pub Exec is English.
Me: No she’s Irish.
Her: But she speaks English.
Me: But we speak English and we’re Irish.
Her: Except Daddy, he’s French, he speaks French.
Me: Well, he speaks English to me.
Her: Really? I didn’t notice that.
Poxy
The poor Princess is and the rest of the world isn’t great either. Unless you count
Moldova.
The Middle East is awful. I remember hearing an Irish guy who was with the UN peace keeping force in the Lebannon many years ago blasting the Israelis and their agression and, you know, I read Pity the Nation as a student at the instigation of my then boyfriend (I feel I’ve mentioned this here before, but it was a hard read, alright).
On the other hand, an acquaintance whose sister lives in Israel described to me how driving round in their hired car all the young soldiers kept waving at them from their outposts (apparently you can tell hired cars from their plates – I imagine that this keeps you safer, if you’re a tourist) and I suppose that just makes me see the Israeli soldiers as vulnerable young fellas (and girls, though, I presume, they weren’t doing the waving). I suspect the inhabitants of Beirut have a different view.
The sound of elastic snapping
It’s 38 degrees today. No air conditioning in our sunny flat. No air conditioning in my sunny office. And I am busy, busy, busy. Mr. Waffle isn’t exactly idle at work either but he’s been picking up a lot of the slack at home, while I hunch over a hot computer post 9.30 when our children finally go to bed. Need I say that both of us are up regularly during the night?
Yesterday the creche rang me to say that they would replace the cover of our car seat which got dirtied in their building works.
Me: Sorry, I didn’t see it, my husband collected the boys.
Them: But later when you saw it at home, how was it?
Me: My husband had put it in the wash. And he hung it out to dry and he dropped the boys to the creche this morning because I left the house at 7.30 for an 8.00 am meeting, so I have no idea what the damage is, but I’d say it washed out alright or he would have mentioned it.
Them: Silence.
Me: See, in our household, my husband looks after that kind of thing.
I feel that I am a cliché, running all day at work and running at home and only just managing to catch some of the balls that are in the air. At work, if I don’t write something down, I have no chance of remembering it and even then, some of my notes from the previous day can be baffling (is that somebody’s name, a new policy initiative, what?). As well as having a lot of the kind of competing deadlines that interviewers love to ask about we have a new trainee who is keen as mustard and entirely ignorant about what we do. This combination is proving a little difficult in the short term.
Yesterday, the boys were the last kiddies in the creche and the Princess was the last one waiting to be picked up from her course, the second last little soul having been picked up by her mother 50 minutes previously. The Princess was sitting on her own in a big room at a little table colouring conscientiously under the, slightly dour, supervision of a middle aged man (I suppose, it was hot and he wanted to go home). It was depressing.
Last night Michael woke up with a temperature and was up for a couple of hours. Being Michael, he was cheerful but he was hot. Since it was 30 degrees in the boys’ room anyway, I suspect that didn’t help. The Princess woke up with a temperature. Mr. Waffle took the morning off to tend to her but poor old Michael recovered so well that he was escorted to the creche along with our only healthy child and a message to them to call me, if he seemed unhappy (I called them, he was described as being as happy as someone could be with a temperature of 39 when it’s 39 degrees outside – I will have to rescue him when the Princess wakes from her nap). During the morning Mr. Waffle called to say that the Princess was very cheerful but he had taken her to the pharmacy to get something for her heat rash and they said “that’s no heat rash, that’s chicken poxâ€. What do you think might be wrong with Michael, people?
Context is everything.
In the film “Cinderella”, the stepmother’s cat is called Lucifer. I wish that I could have explained that to the people who heard my daughter hissing at me, pretending to stick out claws and then say “Look, I’m Lucifer, Mummy”.
In other news, I’ve bought another teapot. Can somebody out there help me?
