I came home from work yesterday and the Princess leapt up to meet me. “I won the class art competition! I got first place! I got a brilliant prize!” Her recital of her greatness was interrupted by prolonged wails from her brothers neither of whom won their class prize. Rejoicing in your siblings’ good fortune is a learned skill, I think.
Happy Anniversary
My blog was nine yesterday. Which is 205 in human years.
Back in pre-history, when I began blogging, it was very cutting edge, I’ll have you know. There was no facebook, no twitter, no tumblr and no youtube. It’s hard to know how we filled the long empty days.
In a nostalgia fueled search, I came across a post from February 2006 which reminded me of how much I enjoyed a blogging community when I started off on 20six (my first platform – now defunct – none of the links on that 2006 post work now). I was quite lonely and far from home with my first baby and 20six became a support community. I remember Mr. Waffle printing off all the comments when the boys were born and bringing them into the hospital. I still follow some of the people I used to read on 20six on other platforms; a lot of them turned up on twitter.
After 20six folded, I stuck with blogging. I did miss the community but I became fascinated with the idea of keeping a record of our lives. And I loved writing text that no one cleared except me. Did you see how I started a sentence with “and” there? Also, because of the whole blogging thing, I got interested in technology and, although I am pretty ignorant by most standards, compared to some other Irish 40 somethings I am quite the technological genius. This may say more about the digital divide than it does about my abilities but there it is. I was in a position to wow the residents’ association by setting up a wordpress.com blog for them. Mind you, they never used it but that is hardly my fault.
So, happy anniversary to me and thank you for reading.
All I Want for Christmas…Seasonal Round Up
Daniel is down a front tooth…
And in other news, did I tell you that Saint Nicolas came on December 6 – Dublin is somewhat outside his remit of the Low Countries but he came all the same.
We went to see Santa at the Botanic Gardens on Sunday. On the plus side it was free and the children got an African violet and a gummy snake each. On the minus side, it was freezing and the queue lasted for 90 minutes.
Mr. Waffle is in Helsinki all week. He was obsessively checking the weather before he left and packed his ski gear and a pair of long johns for the expected Arctic cold. It turns out that it’s not as cold as he expected (but, you know, snowy, dark and -3). I am home alone with the children and it is now gone 10 and Michael continues to trek down the stairs at regular intervals to inform me of activities upstairs. In fact, I think I hear him now. Sigh.
Do You Think Santa Does Dispute Resolution Work?
The Princess has brought to my attention in a marked manner the first draft of her letter to Santa. As, they say in letters of note, transcript follows below.
Headed on each page: Important
Dear Santa,
Over the years you have kept our family well supplied with treats. But do you realize [sic] that the sweets you graciously send are cruelly snatched away straight after mass? And used for the abominable treat-only-if-you-eat-dinner regime? I am not complaining too much about this regime for it has yielded excellent results for me. Except for one thing it is: I slave away for hours eating every single morsal [sic] on my plate whereas the boys take two bites of rice, make a tragic face and are told good boys well done for trying because of the fact that have been reaping more than they deserve. I demand that you send a quarter of their sweets into my stocking! No half! No half seems less the the fair amount for my suffering but I suppose it’s the season of goodwill. Please take into mind that if you do not want to transfer the goods I deserve into my stocking I will be perfectly happy for you to double my sweets and leave the boy’s [sic] sweets alone. This is an urgent matter!
I would also like for you to bear in mind that I shall try to bring some of your gifts onto an aeroplane so please try to make them below five kilo grams. I am sure this will not be a problem for someone of your prowess yet I feel it prudent to warn you. I have tried to make the items on my list light but sometimes you get the wrong end of the stick confused.
Holly Bough
Every year my father reads the Holly Bough from cover to cover on Christmas Day. It’s a Cork publication and the content is, perhaps, not at the cutting edge of journalism. On the cover it describes itself as “A Cork Institution since 1897”. Its articles are full of quirkiness (the girl who was called Tanora – apparently only Cork people know what Tanora is, imagine) and nostalgia. It has several pages of pictures of Cork people in foreign parts holding aloft copies of last year’s Holly Bough. Are you getting a picture here? Nevertheless, I was really very pleased to come home and see that my loving husband had picked me up a copy. My ambition is now to get a picture in it for next year.
Not a Complete Loss
We went for a walk in the Dublin mountains at the weekend. It was too cold and the children were cranky. Michael managed to give himself a heavy nosebleed by hitting himself hard on the head with a long stick (also ruining the photograph below).
On the way home, Mr. Waffle dropped me and the boys in town to pick up new shoes for them. By complete co-incidence on the way home we passed the lighting ceremony for a Christmas tree. Attractions included the count down to lighting the tree (mercifully brief), the Lord Mayor, a choir, free hot chocolate and a free merry-go-round. This was populated in part by bused in middle class children wearing mustard hats and pink tights and swaddled in red coats and their anxious parents and in part by entirely unaccompanied local children in track suits having a terrific time on the merry-go-round and milling through the hot chocolate like there was no tomorrow. All surprisingly pleasant though bitterly cold. I think that we may say that the Christmas season has begun.
