Daniel: You’re much older than me.
Me: Yes I am, much.
Daniel: So you will die a long time before me.
Me: Yes.
Daniel (pensively): I’ll miss you when you die. But it won’t be for a long, long time. Unless you were shot. Then it would be soon.
Lord of Laundry
My saintly husband does all the laundry in our house. When he has to go to work early, he puts his clothes on the landing so that he will not wake me by looking for clothes in the dark. He is all virtue.
Recently, I had an early morning appointment at the dentist. I thought (for the first time, to my shame) I would take a leaf from Mr. Waffle’s book and leave my clothes on the landing. Unfortunately, after I had gone to bed, he saw them there and put them in the washing machine. In these circumstances, it is very hard to blame him. And then I had to go and get an injection in my gum. Alas.
Can I run?
Every day, we park around the corner from the school. The boys tumble out of the car and say, “Can I run?” and then hare off up the road. I remember vaguely, the joy of running quickly, of feeling your feet flying over the ground almost like bouncing on air. I wonder, when does that go away?
You Don’t Get That Much
A couple of weeks ago at mass, we had a priest who was home from the missions. He was very struck by the change in Irish society. My thoughts flew to the economy and immigration, infrastructure…but no, he was referring to sexual mores. In fairness, he had a lead in to address this as the second reading was about fornication. But considering it was a children’s mass, if it had been up to me, I would have gone for the first reading which came from the book of Samuel – you know the one, where the child is asleep and the Lord calls to him.
Nevertheless, despite my qualms about the audience, I did think he made some fair points. Children of 12 who finish primary school put on make-up and head out in high heels. There’s definitely something wrong there. My daughter who is a habitué of the €2 shop where she spends all her pocket money on cheap plastic tat has been surveying with alarming thoroughness the range of adult goods on offer and bringing her queries home to me. I am not sure I am entirely comfortable with a shop that sells plastic toys for children also selling plastic toys for adults. I see shoals ahead.
O Frabjous Day!
Michael can finally read properly. He and Daniel spent the evening reading and then swapping comics. Oh the blissful peace.
We’re Alive!
During dinner this evening, the carbon monoxide alarm went off for the first time ever. It’s very loud. My ears are still ringing. As Mr. Waffle wrestled with it, Michael kept posing questions through the ringing and things became a little tetchy. The alarm instructions (which, yes, we had to hand, OCD and its many uses) advised that we go outside and leave all the windows and doors open while we called the emergency services. We might well have done that had it been summer and not quite so rainy. Instead we stayed indoors, put the children to bed and later consulted the internet.
You will be relieved to hear that we’ve turned off all gas appliances (last serviced in October for heaven’s sake) and are sitting in the cold. Having re-checked with our original alarm and the spare (your point? it was sitting waiting in its packaging for this moment), all seems to be well now. However, a man will have to be summoned before we can put on the gas fired central heating, the cooker or the gas fire. Alas. I will be retiring to bed early with a hot water bottle.
Mr. Waffle (installer of the carbon monoxide alarms) is mildly triumphant. But he doesn’t feel the cold. Still, if you have gas appliances, I should, I suppose, take this opportunity to suggest that you invest in a carbon monoxide alarm.
