Newton Mearns, 09:34 20/03/2015

Partial (95%) solar eclipse.

Nineteen

It has come round astoundingly quickly. Yesterday, I had this tiny little blond boy who was starting primary school and today, thirteen years on, I realized to my shock that he has just nineteen days left of school before he leaves to go to university. I remember school felt like it took a lifetime when I was the pupil, but once you are the pupil's mum, you almost miss it if you let life distract you for a moment or two.

The 'guard rhino'

When dad died, we took over his car loan. The car came complete with two extras that we left in place. The first was a Buchanan tartan ribbon he'd tied to his gearstick, the second was the little rhino. Dad collected rhinos. The rhino has been guarding the car so long, it is a little sad and faded but it didn't seen right to evict it, so the kids christened it 'the guard rhino' and sure enough every day the car is still there and intact, therefore, it is doing its job well!

My people carrier never needed anything to guard it. It was huge and intimidating and had seven real seats and we'd had it since before the black Peugeot so no one thought to buy it a guard rhino...

Now, we have a tiny little four-seater car. It is about the size of a biscuit tin on wheels and about as rattly. Instantly, Amaia suggested something that vulnerable needed a guard rhino. Onto ebay we popped and Thomas found a rather feminine and fluffy pink guard rhino in Australia and sent for it. It is a major hit. The kids all pass it around on every school run, cuddling and petting it. I'm not sure it looks overly fierce but Amaia is convinced it'll, sorry, she'll do her job well. Of course, being fluffy and cute, she needed a name and Amaia decided without consultation that she should be called 'Daisy the guard rhino'.

I found it strange that the black car's guard rhino had lived with us for nearly three years, nameless, but this one had a name after one trip out. Every morning I get 'Pass me Daisy' from behind me as I drive.

Last week I took Amaia out in the black car for the first time in ages. She sat behind me eyeing the original rhino for a minute and then said ' Pass me Dougie, mum... He needed a name too so I've decided to call him Dougie'. 

Still attached to her Pumpa...

Through five-year-old eyes

I never really thought before about how it feels at five to have a brother who is 17. Marcel will leave school a few months before Amaia starts, so to her he must seem like an adult. 

On Friday, apparently, her nursery teacher mentioned that when she was growing up her parents had owned a sweetie shop. Amaia proudly piped up (given Marcel works in our local newsagent's and has done for as long as she can remember) 'My big brother owns a sweetie shop too!' 

Awwwh.

Coconut marble cake

We were shopping in See Woo the other day doing an exotic stock-up. The kids were more than impressed with the dragons left over from New Year.

At the check-out Thomas noticed a tiny bottle marked 'Coconut Pandan Emulco'. At about a quid, he was intrigued so asked the check-out operator what you use it for. She had very little English so simply replied 'cake'.

So we brought it home and asked for ideas on Facebook. This recipe was suggested. Not seeing Malaysian as a hindrance, Thomas rustled up something Lots could work with and a few hours later, Granny had a very coconut, glow-in-the-dark birthday cake that tasted wonderful! I definitely think we'll be stocking up on more pandan emulco next time round!

A shoe solution

Amaia has grown out of her black indoor shoes for nursery, so I have replaced them with the next size up. Nursery has two rooms, each with fifty morning kids and fifty afternoon kids, every day. That's a hell of a lot of identical black shoes, so they name the shoes in each child's group colour. Amaia, as you can see, is in the yellow group.

Occasionally, when Amaia grows out of something before it looks worn, I pass it on to one of her two younger cousins: Catriona who is two, or Elisabeth who is one. Today she tossed me her old black shoes, that look as good as new, and announced: Just give these to Amanda the next time you see her and then as an afterthought, Oh, and remember to tell her she'll just need to change Catriona's name!

Cute definition

Cute conversation overheard by Thomas on passing the bathroom...

Anna: ... and he fainted.

Amaia: What does fainted mean?

Anna: It's when you fall asleep from shock.

Amaia: Oh, right!

That certainly conjures up some strange images in my mind!

Anna's granny

Once a month the primary sends home the kids' classwork for parents to see how they are getting on.

While checking through (7 year old) Anna's, this weekend I came across this piece about my mum...

French, through Scandinavian eyes

Léon has a very Scandinavian outlook on language (funnily enough!) Completely out of the blue today he remarked: The Danish alphabet is quite like the French one, but they pronounce 'h' really differently.
Me: How good are you at both?
Léon: Well, I know the Danish one perfectly but I'm not as good at the French one.
Me (trying to be helpful): Tell me which letters you're unsure of and I'll teach you them.
Léon: Well, I only know A-Z.
Me: Huh?
Léon: I just don't know which order they add in à ç é and the other ones in at the end!

Isn't that sweet? Because I learned Swedish and Danish much later than French and German, I spent countless hours trawling through the A or O section of dictionaries never finding words like: år or øllebrød. I simply couldn't conceive of them as being different letters elsewhere in the alphabet, but Léon, as a native Dane, can't conceive of the French mixing écureuil, être and the likes in with espèce!

More 5-year-old ponderings

Another cute little observation from Amaia as she tries to understand the world:
Amaia: What country was daddy born in again?
Me: Denmark
Amaia: That's amazing! Daddy's from Denmark and so are my cousins, what are the chances of that, huh?!

A strange conversation about Denmark

It's sometimes hard to imagine how young kids make sense of their world. This morning I had a rather odd conversation with Amaia.

Amaia: What does a Northern Irish accent sound like, mummy?

Me (pondering how she even had the concept of a Northern Irish accent at the ripe old age of 5 and 3 weeks!): Do you know Beth's mummy? She's from Northern Ireland. That's what a Northern Irish accent sounds like.

Amaia: Beth's mummy is Irish? What's she doing living here then?

Me: Well Beth's daddy is Scottish, Amaia. People often live in different places. That's why daddy lives here even though he is Danish.

Amaia (in complete shock): My daddy is Danish? From Denmark?

Me: Yes, of course.

Amaia: I know he only speaks Danish to me but I didn't realize he was from Denmark! I thought he was Scottish and he just wanted to teach us Danish!

This seemed quite mind-boggling to me at first but on second thoughts, why really should she understand the set-up? Because her grandparents only ever see her here at our house or at their summer house in Italy, as they retired before she was born, she hadn't put two and two together. She has been to Denmark just twice - once at the age of three months for her grandfather's 70th birthday dinner when we spent the holiday in a rented flat in Copenhagen rather than at a relative's house and once for four or five days when she was three, and she spent the holiday in bed with a chest infection, so why would she realize her family is from Denmark? Of course, she has cousins and an extended family of second cousins and more in Copenhagen too but she has not been her cousin's house since she was 3 months old. In fact, they have moved since then, so she has never been in their house. Much as we would love to see them more often and miss them dearly, seven tickets to Copenhagen have been financially beyond us since the recession took hold and we can't exactly nip over and see them while we are visiting Thomas's parents as we only visit them in Italy. (They tend only to be in Denmark when our kids are not on holiday, and even if they did stay one summer, which they never have, their Danish base is a tiny flat, whereas their Italian one is a fairly big house. Seven people really can't inflict themselves on people in a two bedroom flat, that just wouldn't be very polite, or livable!) 

Because Thomas rarely has the opportunity to go home, now he has no real base in Denmark and when he does it is often on business so he goes alone, Amaia has lost all notion that she is half Danish. It is such a shame Thomas and I only had kids as his parents retired, because much as Italy is lovely and warm, by having our daughters as their grandparents retired to the sun, they lost their cultural heritage and any way of really learning about their roots. They do have the language thanks to Thomas's mammoth efforts and a great number of DVDs. He even tries his best to give them some of the cultural bases - by celebrating Xmas the Danish way and things like fastelavn but the kids don't actually know much about the little things about Denmark - they can't tell you what Danes eat for breakfast, they can't name a common supermarket chain, or even a brand of drinks. They have no foods or drinks that evoke childhood memories because they have no childhood memories. They can't tell you what Danish houses or towns generally look like, they wouldn't know Danes like flagpoles much more than Scottish people. They can't tell you whether the buses or trains are a specific colour or any of the things my older kids could easily tell you about their (half)-native France. It must be heartbreaking to Thomas to spend so much time putting so much effort into evoking Denmark for them, when he really is fighting a losing battle. It is hard to make someone yearn to go back home, when they have no notion of home. 

Had we had them ten years earlier (which of course wasn't possible, as we hadn't met!), they'd have grown up flying over to the beautiful Jutland manse twice or more a year, hearing children speaking

Danish around them, getting to know the foods, the traditions and so on, but now, their abroad is a rather strange mix of Danish and German spoken in the mountains of Tuscany surrounded by children and adults they can't understand, shops and TV that are equally meaningless and no cousins to drop in on while they visit their grandparents, as we don't all fit in the house at the same time. I, too, feel I know Denmark so much less well than I knew France, where I also had a family.

I get frustrated sometimes that my Danish, though passively so good, is actively so poor. I can't write it correctly and when I try to pronounce it, what comes out my mouth in no way resembles what I am saying in my head but it is good enough that I work as a Danish-English translator for two of the country's top universities! I beat myself up about it endlessly until occasionally it occurs to me that I have only been to Denmark twice for a week and three times for 2 weeks, and as I haven't set foot in the country in five years, most of my visits to Denmark were before I really had a basic understanding of the language. But, mostly I get upset for Thomas, more than for myself, because I know how much he would love a base there, to visit his friends, to see his sister, who he loves and misses whose kids are a perfect age for playing with ours and to proudly show his kids the country he has worked day and night to bring to life, all their life, despite the odds. And I'm sure he'd even quite like to show me around it properly too!

When we were first together Thomas and I did occasionally manage to nip over and visit Denmark when my ex-husband took my older kids to France to visit their grandmother but since three summers ago, he has been completely AWOL. We have heard nothing from him, we do not even know which country he is living in and that has meant that I have had full responsibility for all of my kids, both from a time and money perspective, not to mention an emotional one. When you suddenly find yourself unable to travel in a group of fewer than seven people (four of whom count as adults from a travel perspective), you cannot begin to afford a hotel room on top of seven airline tickets. You also feel, rightly or wrongly, that you cannot ask anyone to put you up for much more than a long weekend. But if you are paying seven airline tickets, it has to be your main holiday, not a long weekend or the tickets themselves are unaffordable. But if it is your main holiday, you want to take in all your friends and family as you know a repeat trip won't be on the near horizon, so travelling between Jutland and Copenhagen on public transport or hiring cars adds further hundreds onto the total and once you tot it all up and you eventually conclude with a heavy heart that over and above visiting Thomas's parents in Italy, Denmark, once again has to remain on the back burner.

Academic Proofreading

Although my preferred areas to work in are lexicography, followed by translating, I do occasionally do proofreading and copy editing to make ends meet. While hunting for some extra work earlier today I came across the following ad.

Academic Proofreaders/Editors - Freelance/Experienced
PSUK - Cambridge

- EXPERIENCE AND/OR A PHD ESSENTIAL - Fully flexible, remote-working. We're looking for experienced freelance (independent contractor) proofreaders/editors. If you are experienced in academic editing and/or hold a PhD, please send us an email with the title 'FREELANCE PROOFREADING & EDITING - INDEPENDENT CONTRACTORS' and the following details in the main body: Education: e.g. BA (Hons) Management, University of Warwick, 1989 PhD Management Studies, UCL, 2004 Other relevant qualifications: e.g. Advanced Member, SfEP, 2013 Experience: e.g. Editor, Editing LTD, USA, 2008-13 Strongest academic areas: e.g. Business, Management, etc. - Rates of pay are around £12 per hour (based on 2k words edited in 1 hour). - Fully flexible: as a freelance contractor, you dictate when you work and when you don't. No explanations are needed when you accept/reject a job. You are in complete control of the construct and outcome of your work. - You will only be offered jobs in your chosen academic disciplines which keeps the work interesting. Please feel free to attach your CV to the email also. Unfortunately, we are we are unable to answer all emails due to the volume we receive. It puzzled me, to be honest. It seems to be implying that a PhD (which here in Scotland means a minimum of 8 years at university), while not completely necessary, would be highly desirable, if you want to be considered. It also seems to prefer you to be an advanced member of SfEP; a society which charges for annual membership and which requires you to undertake training etc to reach an advanced level. Some experience would also go down well if you even want them to give you a reply to your CV given the number of emails they get. And once you've fulfilled all the above, it'll consider paying you £12/hr (which by the way is about half the minimum pay recommended to the members of the SfEP).  So the message we are sending is that if you take 8 years out to reach PhD level, you can read other people's PhDs for £12 an hour, so they too can qualify and earn £12/hr. What exactly is the incentive, particularly south of the border to run up debts to the tune of £9K+ a year, so you can earn a whopping great £18900 annually before tax, with no pension, no sick pay, no paid holidays? Working in your local supermarket for minimum wage (£6-50/hr) but with holidays (and no 8 year earnings break) etc and no lulls between jobs, would potentially end up earning you the same amount, in a much less stressful manner.

Exciting life!

Two and half hours sorting hama beads on a Saturday afternoon. It's amazing what forms of entertainment you can come up with to occupy the little people when you can't all get out together!  I need to get a life one of these days.

Beautiful Amaia

Sometimes in photos Amaia looks like a beautiful porcelain doll. The light in the igloo yesterday was just perfect!

Thanks for reminding me!

You can always rely on little kids for a dose of reality...

Overnight it hadn't snowed but it did feel cold and Léon was dressed first and ready to shoot out the door by 8-20am (he has a school trip to Bannockburn today, hence the enthusiasm so late in the week).

Me: Can you nip out quickly Léon, while I'm doing Amaia's hair and see if my car needs scraped?

Léon (enthusiastically): Sure, mum!

Anna (ever so helpfully): No, mum, remember, you don't actually have a car any more. Daddy's just letting you borrow his to take us to school!

Well, thanks for that Anna. I had, of course, completely forgotten that my car had dropped dead on the M77 three weeks ago losing me the thousands of pounds I had been offered for it a couple of weeks earlier and that I no longer own one.

Maybe I'll rename Léon Mr Sweet and Anna Miss Pedantic. Or maybe I'll just google where I can sign Anna up for a course of kiddie tact lessons. Grrrr!

Still learning

It has been nearly five years since Léon was first diagnosed as long-sighted and I am surprised to find I am actually still learning how to be the parent of a child who needs glasses. I didn't get reading glasses myself till after 40 and I only wear them for reading so there are aspects of glasses that still surprise me. I have learned that small children need their glasses cleaned much more often than adults, that goes without saying. They are more than happy to walk about with lenses smeared in yogurt, grease and beans without a thought of wiping anything off. I often wonder at what point it would occur to them to clean them themselves. On a more positive note, I have learned that, unlike me, my kids never misplace their glasses because they never take them off. That is a relief! 

Yesterday I took the two of them for their annual eyesight test. Their prescriptions haven't really changed and their glasses look ok to me, if a little scratched, so I feared we wouldn't be given another NHS-funded pair, as this scenario has not happened before. The optician looked appalled when I asked if that was the case and explained that although my child did have a working pair of glasses that are the correct prescription, his face had grown so much over the last 12 months that his pupils were now in completely the wrong place for the frames he was wearing and she was surprised he hadn't started complaining of headaches, or pressure on his temples. How could I have overlooked the fact that as he shoots up in height, his face and head are also growing? It seems a complete no-brainer now that I think about it, but as I haven't grown since I got my glasses five years ago, it just completely escaped my radar. I feel like a rather useless parent now! At least I'll know to look out for that issue in the future, especially as they shoot up around puberty.

Anyway, both got to choose brand new specs, one or two sizes bigger, so they are more than thrilled! And they will no doubt want a photo session next Monday when they go to pick them up.

"I was just..."

I know it's just a stage because I remember it well from when Marcel was this age, but it still drives me quite mad. It is when your child is doing something annoying, say humming at the table when you are trying to eat, tapping their fork on their plate incessantly or dancing backwards and forwards across the living room between you and the person you are trying to have a conversation with. You turn to him and gently say 'Léon, gonna not do that' and he replies instantly in a very sweet voice 'I was just humming/tapping/dancing' etc. Arg! 'I know what you were doing! That's why I asked you to stop doing it! I don't need you to explain what you are doing to me because I can see/hear what you are doing! That is why it is driving me mad!' And when you explain this, he looks at you wide-eyed, with a confused expression and launches once again into a more intricate version of 'I was just...'  

Maybe I could have an 'I was just...' box, the way some people have swear boxes. Every time he says 'I was just...', he could put in 50p and by Saturday night every week, we could all go out for a meal in a restaurant!

Whitelee Wind Farm

We decided to resume our windmill walking yesterday. We try to do that every week for an hour but things had slipped over Christmas with all the flu going round. The snow is still deep up there on the moor and the early morning sun was just stunning. Even the wee loch was frozen. I was absolutely thrilled I took my camera with me.

After such a beautiful hour up there, we decided to bring the kids back up after school so they could get an experience of real snow, in case we don't get a significant amount down here in civilization.

The first photos were taken around 11:30am and the second set at 3:30pm on the same day. The crisp, beautiful morning had turned into the beginning of an afternoon snow storm, but the kids still had a whale of a time, even if the views were less spectacular four hours on.

 

  

  

Farewell big blue bus

And off it has gone. For the first time in 25 years I am no longer a car owner. And to rub salt in the wound, I was even charged £50 to cancel my insurance, as I'd paid for an annual policy! I now have a limited window to hold on to my 25 years of no claims bonus too - stress!

It seems a bit odd that it can't be fixed at a reasonable price, given how good it looks externally. Maybe I should have studied to be a mechanic instead of a translator/lexicographer. I could have fixed my own cars and even done homers! No one ever wants a lexicography homer, for some reason!

Anyway, it does make me a bit sad. Even if I do manage to save up enough to buy a new car some time, I will never have a big, powerful seven seater again. That would only make sense for the next couple of years, and it would take me longer than that to get one of those so I'm saying goodbye to the most expensive, biggest and most powerful car I'll ever own. Mind you, I never could scrape the ice off the front windscreen. At 161cm, it was always a bit big compared to me! So maybe it just wasn't meant to be.

Tact - kiddie-style

My little niece, Catriona (left) has a dimple on one of her cheeks. Anna is quite fascinated by it, given none of my kids have dimples. So up she comes the other night and sits on my knee, looking soulfully into my eyes. She takes her right hand and puts it on my face. And then she comes out with it... 'Mum, you know how Catriona has that little hole on her cheek?'

Me: 'Yes Anna'

Anna: 'It's very pretty', then stroking my cheek, she muses 'Your face is quite like that too, only it isn't a little hole on yours, it's more like stripes. You have all these little stripes at the edges of your eyes and more stripes running down your cheek. They are kind of beautiful on you!'

I suspect that last sentence may just have saved her skin, well almost, at least!