Last month the Princess cooked for us all when her grandparents came to lunch to inspect the new house. She made mini pizzas to start, toad in the hole for the main course and chocolate cake for dessert. Is she not a competent little genius all the same?
Princess
Poor Timing
For the Princess’s birthday, I took her and two friends to Milano’s in Temple Bar for pizza. I might digress here and say that I quite like Temple Bar, it’s always full of tourists being cheerful and it feels a bit like being on holidays as there are never any Irish people there. Mr. Waffle and most Dubliners avoid it like the plague. Mr. Waffle always refers to it as “Dublin’s cultural quarter” in sardonic tones. And though, I concede that it is a bit pub heavy for a cultural quarter, I quite like it. So, if you are ever in Temple Bar and meet a real live Irish person it will be me because I am the only one who ever ventures in there.
That was a digression. I just wanted to record my unluckiness in choosing to go there on the day when all of Europe’s finance ministers were meeting in Dublin castle (just adjacent), when an anniversary performance of Handel’s Messiah was taking place around the corner on the site of the original performance (Messiah, first performed in Dublin, you know) and concerned citizens were marching against the new property tax (protest unavailing, it seems to be here to stay). It was bedlam. Alas.
Lord of Laundry, King of Cotton and Prince of Persil
Mr. Waffle does the laundry. He says if it were up to me, we would never have a clean stitch. I vigorously deny this. I was wearing clean clothes when I met him, wasn’t I?
Four weeks after we moved into the new house, I went to put on the washing machine and remarked, slightly shamefacedly, to herself that this was the first time I’d used it and I wasn’t quite sure how it worked. “Think of it as a small victory for feminism,” she said.
A Decade
Tonight I kissed a nine year old girl goodnight and tomorrow I will have a ten year old sit at breakfast with me. Yes, indeed, herself will be 10 tomorrow.
She has been reading “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother” Amy Chua [who knows why?] and reporting to me on my parenting failures. Has she performed in Carnegie Hall? I fear not. But if reading were a competition she would star. On Sunday she had a prayer of the faithful to read out in front of the congregation: “For those who think that that the Christian faith is incompatible with compassion and kindness”. I thought that incompatible might give her pause but not a bit of it.
She is very happy in school. Her teacher this year doesn’t seem to be as good as those she has had in previous years (alas) but the Princess is doing well (except for her continuing atrocious handwriting). She is in fact breezing through school and she is lucky because she happens to enjoy the things that are valued in schools. I do worry that when she is actually required to do work to keep up – which is coming – she may be in for a salutary shock.
The school has a considerable social mix and her classmates’ parents come from all walks of life which is one of the things that really appeals to me about the school. It’s also small and most of the children know each other and all of the staff know each and every child in the school. Herself has become pally with some of the older children and looks out for some of the younger ones.
She likes to climb mountains and she likes to swim but physical activities outside of these two are anathema to her. She is utterly brilliant at inventing games for her brothers to play and stories to tell them. They regard their parents’ efforts as paltry by comparison. Unfortunately, she is capricious and sometimes her favours are withdrawn. Oh woe.
She loves to eat meat which is great but I wish she would expand her vegetable repertoire beyond raw carrot. She has a sweet tooth. She is brilliant at arguing the toss and she never lets go. She did not get this from her mother. She is obliging and kind and has a reasonably developed sense of duty. She is lovely and loveable and she has made me a better person (though definitely also a tireder one).
I just looked at last year’s birthday post and I said most of the same things. I suppose she hasn’t changed so much or maybe I’m not paying proper attention. I do have a slight feeling that it is all going a bit faster than it was and I want it to slow down a bit. I want to know her better as she is now and I feel that I never have enough time (though I have just this instant refused to go upstairs and chat and chased her back to bed so I am not entirely consistent in this). I think the biggest difference between us and our children is how quickly time goes for us and how glacially slowly for them.
As attentive readers will know, we moved house last Friday and, although the new house is great, she misses the old house. One evening she said, “I want to go home.” I know what she means. It feels a bit like we are in a holiday house or adrift from our moorings. We spent nearly 5 years in the old house which is half her life to date. It feels like the end of an era. But, I suppose, the start of a new one.
Happy birthday, my beautiful girl.
I Used to Write All My Own Material
When an idea pops into my head, I stick a note on the phone and then, in due course, I elaborate it into morsels such as you are now reading.
Just the other day, I wrote “How will I get the children to write thank you letters for Easter eggs I’ve eaten?” as a prompt to myself to share this difficult dilemma with you. When I came to the computer, I checked my phone for my reminder, and there it sat. Underneath, someone had typed in “Buy more eggs and let us eat them and it’ll be our secret.”
Happy Easter
Another Milestone
We recently taught our 9 year old daughter to tie shoelaces. Velcro has a lot to answer for.
