A special gift

I sometimes think the most special gift I ever gave my biggest child was my smallest child. With 13 years between them, they are at opposite ends of childhood's spectrum but the sheer joy they get from each other is visible on a daily basis.

Danish boiled sweets

I don't know if you need to be genetically Danish, or if you need to be born in Denmark, or what to appreciate Danish confectionery, but despite a decade of trying, I must finally concede that Danish sweets are utterly vile. Maybe they are meant to be to encourage a healthier lifestyle? If you make sweets taste like that even kids will ask for apples instead, cunning...

The little transparent ones are passable but disconcerting. Despite being red they taste of creamy vanilla custard. They feel wrong, but can be eaten. The yellow lumps smell strongly of banana but once in your mouth emit a smelly-sockness that is barf-worthy. The black taste of that usual hideous mix of warmth, salt and liquorice. I imagine traditional liquorice might taste like this, had you buried it, wrapped in seaweed on a beach for the summer. But the blue take the biscuit. They are somewhere between salt liquorice and toe nail cheese once again, but with no banana disguise it this time. There's definitely a certain je ne sais quoi in there.

I don't think Lindt should be worried! ;-)

Unfazed

We've always been very open with the kids about what meat is made of. English likes its meat euphemisms like pork, and beef.

I remember Anna, before she could speak properly, used to differentiate using the animal noises - we had cluck-cluck meat, moo-meat and oink-oink meat.

Yesterday, completely seriously, after a meal out with his school friends, Léon asked me what breed of dog was used in hot dogs! He even looked a little deceived when I mentioned they were unlikely to contain dog (though there might be the odd chunk of horse in there, depending on where they were sourced ;-) ) I'm sure my doggy-loving mates will be horrified, but he'll never have any issues with intercontinental travel, that's for sure.

A fond farewell to my old school

In 1979 I went to high school. My local school was Eastwood High - an upper secondary grammar school that had just been converted the previous year to a normal six year high school. I had been bored rigid for seven years at primary, spending many hours staring out the window which resulted in report after report telling my parents I was working hard but was average in every way. The problem was I wasn't - working hard that is. In fact the only thing I was working hard at was staying awake! 

Tantalizingly close, I could see the high school across the road from my primary and longed to leave. On the induction day, my first impressions were very positive. It was big, I was suddenly small again. The building was tall - three whole floors, five or six different buildings. Each class was over too soon and I was swept along to corridors in a sea of big, noisy kids all chatting happily. It felt very much alive and I was determined to start anew. I went into the French class and was greeted a small woman with dark, elfin hair. She had a foreign accent! She told us she was going to teach us ten words in French and that she would test us on our first day in August to check if we'd been paying attention. She went round the class naming pieces of furniture and parts of the room - la table, les fenêtres etc But when she said 'le mur' something changed in me. I can pinpoint the exact moment, the exact word that shaped my entire future. It was May '79 (no, unlike everything else this week, this is not about Margaret Thatcher)  and a French woman said the word 'le mur' and I woke up. The quality of the vowel sound played with my ear. I had never heard a 'u' sound pronounced like that. In an instant I realized there were other languages out there and they sounded different. I was mentally transported beyond my small world. I was only 11 and I had never been abroad. I had never heard foreigners speak. I had no idea whether I was going to be good at language-learning but I was thrilled at the prospect.

By the end of my first year, my hard work in French resulted in my being streamed into the top second year class which came with the exciting prize of getting to learn a second foreign language, German. Second floor left - I lived along that corridor. I have special memories of every language teacher I had. Highlights included Miss Blair stopping in the middle of one of my oral exams with the surprising statement - This is pointless, we might as well stop here, your German is faultless! That fair boosted the moral of the little girl who'd heard she was average all those years. I loved walking into Mrs Callaghan's class at the age of 12, listening to her chanting German adjective endings and threatening to say them behind the curtain on This is your Life, should any of us become famous one day. The lovable and terribly camp Mr Sutherland's accounts of his year abroad in Paris's Latin Quarter made me float to a new realm. I suddenly realized I too could do that one day, and I did. A slight man, I still remember him asking one day if any of the large 18 year old boys in the class could lend him a pair of size 6 (39) rugby boots for a charity match! How we laughed. Mr Ogg taught us CSYS French. I loved us all sitting in a circle drinking coffee and discussing French literature, art, politics and history in a university-like fashion. He sent me on a study weekend in 1985 where I was placed in a group with a French native speaker helper - one André - much as our divorce twenty years later was acrimonious, I adore the kids that relationship gave me, so Mr Ogg truly changed my life. But there were two teachers who really influenced me way beyond the others. Mr McBirnie - one of most learned men I have ever met - should have taught at university, not school but I was lucky enough to be his only CSYS German pupil. We read Thomas Mann together, we studied the Holocaust, the birth of the East German State and its politics, we dabbled with Kurt Weill in our spare time. He made the worst coffee I have tasted in my life and I was so in awe of him, I never did dare to tell him! A traditional gentleman, he still wore his graduation robes every day to teach and the younger kids made his life a nightmare calling him batman and trying to spear the goldfish in the pond two floors below his classroom window, but I hope I made his last year of teaching bearable. He retired the day I left. And then there was Mrs Guy. She came back to teaching in my last year and I was given her for the other half of my German course. I felt a little apprehensive as I knew all the staff well and she was unknown to me. That could be awkward with only her and I together in a large cupboard discussing translation, and poetry in German. I walked in the first day and suggested coffee. We bought two mugs and a jar of instant coffee and started to chat about German, then kids, then life. She gave me tips and life advice as well as university-type tutorials. She shaped me more than any other teacher I ever had. We talked and talked and never stopped. She had two boys - a young one and a disabled older one. When I left to go to uni she asked if I wanted to be her babysitter so we stayed in touch for years. Eventually I moved a few times and we lost touch until a year ago when I came across her again. We agreed to meet for a coffee - would it be awkward and full of difficult pauses? I walked up to her in the café where we'd arranged to meet, neither of us had changed overly. We started to talk and couldn't stop - now retired, she's learning Italian and rings me for help and advice - the teacher has become the pupil, the pupil the teacher - funny how life works out! We're having coffee this week!

Anyway all this was because last night my old high school invited back its former pupils for one last look before the building is demolished in the summer, replaced by a new state of the art building. I nearly didn't go - why bother - but I'm glad I did. So many memories came back. I went into Mrs Findlay (with a 'd')'s class and remembered her little cupboard back-left where young girls were forced to remove their nail varnish as it wasn't ladylike! I went into the library and found two magazines I'd helped edit! In the Home Economics classes I remembered making apple crumble - where I'd stood and all. The little flat the used to use back then to teach us girls how to iron in and tidy up(!) was no longer, I am relieved to say! I'd forgotten how I felt about the staircases too... There were the Boys' stairs and the Girls' stairs! By middle school we were allowed on both as that concept was being phased out but I suddenly remembered how slippy they felt under foot, with a herd of big boys thundering down at my back I often feared I wouldn't make it through to sixth year with my front teeth intact!

I'm sad I was in such a rush I forgot my camera. Fortunately Lots brought her phone - hence the one shot above. But in summing up, that place made me who I am. The love of language I got there resulted in a degree, two husbands, five kids, many séjours abroad and friends for life. It gave me back the self esteem primary school had effaced. I won prizes for Modern Languages, Maths, History, Chemistry. Miss Average worked her way up into the top four or five girls in the school academically and for that I can never underestimate its worth. I loved my six years at Eastwood and am sad that that building will be gone by this summer, but in a way it will never be gone because it lives on in me.

Chicken Pox Day 6

And so we've reached day six now, with still no let up and very little crusting over :-( Amaia has definitely won second prize for pox-severity in this house, coming close behind Léon. What happened with Léon was that he caught chicken pox six months after starting nursery, and at the end of the winter. Amaia has followed exactly the same pattern. The difference, however, is that Léon started when he was one, spent six months ill, having caught every bug at nursery and got it when his immune system was least able to cope. Amaia didn't start nursery till her third birthday as I now work from home rather than an office, so was older and tougher when she started. That meant she didn't spend the first six months ill and seems to have come in to the battle fully equipped and still, look at the mess of her. She has swollen eyes with spots on her lids and all round the edge of eyes, spots in her ears, her fingers are covered. She even has them on the palms of her hands. She's so itchy, she can't sleep so Thomas and I are up all night comforting her which isn't great for our work output. I do still wish they offered the vaccine here, as they do in many other countries rather than leaving it in the private realm. Given how many other vaccines they get as babies, it seems a shame that she has to go through all of this just because I can't afford private health care.

I'm also not sure how it is meant to work in the modern work setting either. Had I still been working off-site I'd have needed to take off more than two weeks in the last four given I have no one who could care for a highly contagious child. That would have cost society much more than the vaccine... As it is, I just need to work when the sick kid is asleep which isn't great for my health but...

Musical memories

Chris Evans played this on the Breakfast Show this morning in full. It was very odd. I was driving my kids to school but suddenly I was eight years old and in my granny's front room listening to her play at a New Year party. Glued to the driver's seat, I couldn't speak to my kids, I just listened to it all the way through in a trance. Granny played this all the time - at parties, on weekends and always faultlessly. It's 29 years since she died, but for three minutes this morning, she was as alive as ever...

Sheep

Anna's many questions pertaining to nursery rhymes last night reminded me of an amusing rhyme Léon came out with at the age of about three. I presume he'd been learning at nursery but had misheard the odd word and added his own interpretation based on words he was familiar with:

Baa, baa, black sheep,
Have you any wool?
Yes, sir, yes, sir,
Three bags full;
One for the bastard,
And one for the Dane,
And one for the little boy
Who lives down the lane.

I wouldn't be surprised if he overheard the words 'bastard' and 'Dane' in close proximity occasionally back at that time, as he still visited his biological father then!

Slow-burning pox

 

I fear I may have spoken too soon, declaring Amaia's chicken pox to be mild...

Fortunately she is still not distressed, feverish or in any way perturbed, other than by the sight of herself in the mirror. She hasn't even needed calpol, though the piriton is a godsend. But the whole thing is on a much slower burner than Anna... Anna got her first spot around 2pm on 2 April, on 3 April she had more and by 4 April they plateaued. Amaia got her first spot on 12 April, on 13 April she still had only one on her neck, on 15 April in the afternoon she got three on her back and three on her front just below her neck. Yesterday she had a mild dose and today she looks like a walking pizza and her head is so lumpy with those on her scalp, I can no longer brush her hair. So what will tomorrow morning bring? Will it flatline overnight or am I getting up tomorrow to more spots than skin?

Tossing the what????

Thomas is, first and foremost a linguist. Moreover he has lived in the UK for 11 years so his English is usually faultless. I can listen for days without hearing even a preposition out of place. So the opportunities to ridicule him are few and far between, and therefore must be grasped head-on when they arise... 

Over lunch today...

Thomas: "Did you hear they are doing Highland Games down at Rouken Glen on Saturday? I think we should take the kids. They'd really enjoy it. There are Icelandic strongmen and everything. It'd be fun to watch them tossing the caper!"

Hahahahahaha! Immediately I saw the photo above in my mind's eye! (And let's face it, I can only get away with publicly humiliating him because my Danish is a piss-poor second to his English!)

Poxy pudding - day 3

Now that Amaia has developed the chicken pox too, I think we can safely say that she, like Marcel, Charlotte and Anna before her has gone down the ordinary, boring, chicken pox route. She was hot for an hour or two last Saturday and isn't even itchy, thanks to Piriton. She skipped a couple of meals, but hasn't shed a tear, and given she (like Marcel and Lots) hasn't developed any significant spots on her face, then a week or two down the line, we'll not even know she's had it. Seven years of worry after Léon's hospital escapades have been unfounded. I'm so glad to have it over with at last.

(And yes, she's reached that stage of illness when Heinz tomato soup has to be top of the menu!)

Post pox

Isn't Anna's face looking a bit better now the pox are starting to clear up? There's just that big one under her mouth left to go. It looks like we've escaped with a fairly light dose, though I guess in my book, not being hospitalized counts as a mild dose! Phew...

(Oh and I gave in to my inner sad nerd and sorted the t-shirt. Doesn't it look better now?)

Inside a 5 year old's head

Inside a 5 year old's head is a tiring place to be, I am concluding this evening.

Thomas was out so I had to take the kids to bed. In general Thomas likes to do this to read Danish stories to the kids, but once or twice a month I am on duty. Anna was restless and hyper and not ready to sleep. In the space of ten minutes in the darkness she asked me:

• Mummy, which bits does your brain control, is it only talking, or breathing and other stuff too?
• Mummy, what's your blood for?
• Mummy, if dragons had really existed would they have lived at the same time as the dinosaurs and would they have had to eat coal to keep their fire working?
• Mummy, why is there air floating about everywhere, could we survive without it?
• Mummy, if I was bigger than Charlotte when I was born but smaller than Amaia, could I still grow up to be the biggest?
• Mummy, I love school so much but I want to wear my blue summer dress, why is there no summer this year?
• Mummy, in Little Bo Peep, who is it who tells her to leave them alone? Is it her mummy, or maybe her older brother?
• Mummy, why did Jack have a crown on when he went for water?
• Mummy, why did they forget to put Jack and Jill in my nursery rhyme book?
• Mummy why is Incy Wincy called Peter in Danish? And do Scottish children know his real name is Peter or should I tell them?
• Mummy why do English people on the telly sound different to Scottish ones?

Finally I made my escape - god knows how many other questions she mulled over before I found her snoring ten minutes later!

Chicken Pock

Saturday at bedtime Charlotte noticed Amaia had one little spot behind her ear. It looked suspiciously watery so I assumed we were getting up to chicken pox on Sunday morning. Amaia was hot and grumpy, bad-tempered and wouldn't eat.

Sunday morning, however, saw her bounce into our room, full of the joys and still with one spot.

So of course on Monday she would have got it? Nope, on Monday morning, there was still only one spot. Had my daughter managed to get the mildest dose of chicken pox in history? Had she got chicken pock, singular???

But, of course, suddenly on Monday afternoon her wee body gave up the fight and a few more appeared. So it looks like she has got chicken pox after all, just not very many.

Watch this space for updates...

Indoctrination?

DSC_5206, a photo by derek1971 on Flickr.

Just flicking through my brother's most recent uploads... I barely recognize my poor wee niece! Is this known as indoctrination?

And while we're on the topic of illnesses...

Back in 2006 I was in New York with Léon. On my flight home he started to develop a seriously strange rash that looked like little circular targets on his whole body, at the same time he started to swell up, looking like he'd spent ten rounds in the ring with a heavy-weight boxer. By the time we touched down, he couldn't open his eyes, he was so swollen. I went straight from the airport to Yorkhill where they analysed him, tested his urine, and scanned his liver and kidneys. They kept him in and eventually after a day sent him home, still scratching their heads. He was recalled several times for scans over a six month period and eventually they threw in the towel and told me they had no idea what it was.

A few years later, I was discussing it with a friend and her husband asked to see the photos. He was a hospital doctor but again wouldn't commit to a diagnosis, not even a hypothetical one.

It's always been in the back of my mind but I gave up analysing it years ago. Then on Sunday one of my best friends in the whole world, Karen (who is from Glasgow but is currently working as a director in the Medical faculty of Lancaster uni) dropped by for a coffee. Out of the blue she mentioned having come across pictures of people with the same symptoms as Léon all those years ago. As soon as I googled images, I felt like I was looking at a photo of Léon. Finally, and from an unexpected source, I know what my poor baby had on that flight six years ago. It seems to have been Erythema multiforme. Just look at these images. I wonder why no one worked that out at the time...

Anna's chicken pox

Well we're on day 5 now of Anna and the pox and so far things aren't too bad. Now that I look back at the photos taken on Tuesday at lunchtime, she had one spot then, I just hadn't realised what it was going to develop into, until dinnertime when the whole of her hairline went spotty. So on a scale, she is a little worse than Marcel and Charlotte, but so much better than Léon when he caught it.

Tuesday and Wednesday we used calpol and piriton. Everywhere is sold out of calamine as there's a major chicken pox outbreak at the moment in the area. She ate normally and didn't seem up or down. Thursday floored her. She slept with us overnight, she slept all day and only drank Heinz tomato soup, refusing all other food. Friday found her sitting at her seat at the breakfast table, hungry and back more or less to normal, though she flagged around four and fell asleep. Today she's back to normal, has been out playing with the neighbours' kids (well the ones who've had the pox!) and everything is drying up and scabbing over. Tomorrow I expect they'll start to disappear and then we'll need to start the countdown to Amaia's outbreak, crossing everything in the hope of an equally light dose.

It is nice to reminded why it had seemed such a minor disease when Marcel and Lots got it. I have been so hung up on it since 2007, living in fear of the inevitable because it hospitalised Léon that I lost all sight of the fact that usually it is merely a minor inconvenience that affects them less than the common cold. And the Easter holiday timing is perfect, she's not even missing a day of school. Anyway, let's hope Amaia is just as lucky and not another Léon...

Chickenpox

We had a nice family Easter afternoon yesterday. The kids played happily with their Scottish cousins and then came home, had a nice meal and went to bed excited after a weekend of Easter eggs, filled with the prospect of their grandparents flying in this morning from Denmark.

This morning went well too. A glorious day, they touched down in Edinburgh twenty minutes early and we were back in time for lunch. At dinner Anna was a little moany. I took her through to the bathroom to get a closer look at one tiny lump she was complaining about on her forehead. Under the bathroom light I thought it looked suspicious so lifted her hair to find three spots on the back of her neck. I've had five kids. I have been through this four times already. Marcel once, Charlotte twice, mildly (both times confirmed by my doctor before you tell me you can't get chickenpox twice) and once from to hell and back (via Yorkhill) with Léon who suffered in a way I have never seen a child suffer with chickenpox. I didn't need to lift her t-shirt but I did anyway. There were three or four more under her vest.

She's gone to bed none the worse, so far and I am hoping that we are revisiting a Marcel or Charlotte dose, and not one that puts us in Yorkhill. And the next three weeks are going to be long as we watch both Amaia and baby Catriona for signs of the dreaded lumps.

I'll update in a day or two once the extent of the dose becomes more obvious...

Fiat 500L (again)

People who know me might have noticed me going on and on and on in the past about wanting a Fiat 500. You probably know I like pink and purple ones, you probably heard I hired an automatic one on holiday last year and raved about it too.

I didn't think any feature could be added to it to make it more attractive to me... until my in-laws decided to buy one and happened to drop into conversation that the 2013 model comes with a built-in espresso machine!!! I have died and gone to heaven!



(Apologies, I can't find it in English but it is pretty self-explanatory anyway)...

Pink table

I noticed almost all garden furniture colours are shades of brown with the odd green thrown in for good measure. I think now I am middle-aged (shock-horror) I am comfortable with myself to think life's too short for boring, so I think my garden furniture is about to go through a pink phase! Let the neighbours talk! ;-)

Light at the end of the tunnel!

My Bopster is starting to grow hair at last! For the first time this month we have managed to (just about) pleat her hair, or twiddle it, as she calls it. She has so much less than any of the first three had at this age, and a little less even than Anna who I had considered bald, but I can definitely see a little light at the end of the tunnel!

Twitch, twitch, twitch

I know I am being pedantic, and I know I shouldn't proof-read everything but after more than 20 years in publishing I can't help it!

Someone bought Anna a pack of T-shirts a few months ago, probably for Xmas, I don't actually remember where they came from... It was cold at the time and she wasn't wanting short sleeves, so they were put away unopened in her drawer. Today she found them and bounced downstairs wearing this one and it has been upsetting me all day.

The question is (and I want yes or no answers before I decide whether or not I should...) would it be ok to use a permanent marker to add in the missing apostrophe or would that be too sad?

Calendar time again!

I was skimming it to see what this month's funniest faux pas would be. Would it be French this month or German? The language was poor as usual, but nothing caused my jaw to drop open initially. I thought it was going to be too boring to mention, but I should have had faith! Of course they had made a major mistake! There it was at the end of the German... The English tells me to cut my pasta dough into disks and fill them with the mixture. The French tells me (badly) to do the same. The German however has looked up the word disk in a dictionary where the first translation on offer was for the computing sense of disk, so the poor German cook has to fill his or her dough after having cut it into some kind of data storage disks. ROFL! (The rest is, of course, worth a head shake too, if you have the time!)

Big kids/little kids

I noticed the other day when I happened to see Léon and Marcel having a conversation standing in the doorway that there is a huge difference in height between them. There are eight years and eight weeks between them. But when I think about it, Marcel has been this height for a couple of years now. In fact Marcel overtook me in the summer after he left primary school, just before he turned 12. It is hard to believe my little Léon has the potential to be chatting eye to eye with his big brother in just five or six years time.

The difference between three and thirteen is also enormous. But again Charlotte slowed down a couple of years ago so in no time at all her favourite baby could be looking down on her. It will be strange to watch who reaches what height.

I guess if I had to predict based on who was biggest as a baby and who grew out of which clothes sizes first, I would plump for my kids ending up tallest to smallest as Marcel, Léon, Amaia, Anna, Charlotte, but only time will tell. I'll be back with an update around 2022 to see if I am correct!

Language

My children's linguistic awareness blows me away at times. Maybe Thomas and I talk shop too often over dinner and it is turning them into mini-freaks!

Anna is five, part way through p1. She just just bounced up to me and said "I like Easter and rabbits and chocolates and pretty spring flowers..." She took two steps away, then turned and added "I know there were too many ands in that sentence. If I'd been writing it, I would have used commas instead but you can't see commas when you speak so I changed them into ands to make it clearer!" Do five year olds really analyse language in that way before speaking, or is it influenced by the bilingual dimension?

Perugia, Umbria

I see Perugia is back in the news this week, once again for the same reason as usual. It is sad that in most English-speaking people's minds it is synonymous with just one thing: that truly horrible, and infinitely fascinating murder which took place in 2007.

This saddens me. It saddens me because Perugia is a wholly different place in reality. Perugia is the place I grew up overnight from a child to a young adult. It is the first place I lived alone, or at least in a shared student flat, or even two - the first with two Austrian boys, the second with three Koreans and a Scottish girl.

I was 18 years old and I sat an Italian exam prepared by the Italian government. We were told one person would win a scholarship to spend the summer studying in Perugia uni, all (basic) expenses paid. I didn't dare dream but somehow I won it. It was pre-Ryanair of course so I went by train. Forty-eight hours straight from a cold, damp Glasgow to a stiflingly hot Perugia station. Anyone who knows the town, knows that you walk out the station at the foot of the hill into a boring 60s suburban-looking town. It's dirty and noisy and frankly nothing special. For a moment you wonder where this old town you've read about is but outside the station is a bus marked 'centro storico'. It drives up a hill you can't really see from the station for about 15 minutes and drops you at the top. The air is cleaner, burning hot. You turn the first corner and come across this truly magical sight. White buildings everywhere, students everywhere chatting, laughing, eating. I was 18 years old and had never left home and suddenly I was standing in this square with the keys to my own little flat in this wonderfully exotic location to a Glaswegian girl. I loved every second of it. I loved the smells, the food, the architecture, I loved speaking Italian and I loved becoming independent - going home when I wanted, to the beach when I wanted. I loved the uni canteen that fed you more for lunch than I expected to eat in a week for about 50p. I loved watching my blue skin turn brown and my mousy hair turn bright blonde in the sun. Everything was magical. I took countless photos of beat-up old Fiat 500s. I drank Orvieto on my balcony eating fresh figs from the tree that was overhanging it. I visited the region, I marvelled at the architecture. I even sunbathed nude in a monastery... accidentally! I travelled to Assisi and Florence, to Milan and Como.

Given Perugia has a wonderful international uni, I imagine thousands upon thousands of students have my memory of the place. I just think it sad that when Marcel's generation come home and tell their parents they are thinking about studying for the summer in Perugia, their thoughts will be dark ones rather than realizing their child is most likely in for an experience they'll still be raving about nearly thirty years on.

A great start to the day

6:00 am Léon arrives at the foot of my bed and announces 'Mum I'm sick'. He'd been complaining about a sore throat last night so I offer him a strepsil. 'No I mean vomit sick'. Great! 'Is it all over your bed?' I ask, assuming the worst. 'No I made it to the bathroom', he assures me so I tell him to go lie on the couch and roll over and go back to sleep quietly smiling to myself that child number three has finally reached the age of getting to the loo when he's sick so I now only have two to go. I have to say dealing with piles of puke before it seeps through to the mattress is one of my least favourite parenting jobs, and reaching that level of vomit-awareness is one of my milestones of relief. In particular, given Léon sleeps in the top bunk, Léon reaching it is worth celebrating...

So I lie there two hours in blissful ignorance till 8:05am. I'm just getting ready when a totally appalled Charlotte bursts in to my room on her way out to the bus and shouts 'Mum - the bathroom at the top of the stairs is like... covered in puke!'

Joy - so he's worked out to get up, just not to aim - ho hum. Back to the drawing board.

Léon and Lots

There are some conversations that are so (subtly) sweet you have to grab them for posterity.

So last night's conversation went like this:
Charlotte came in from school and announced she'd come top in her Maths exam. Léon piped up 'Do you still do adding at high school?'
Charlotte came out with 'Yes but it's harder adding at high school, we add letters as well as numbers'
Léon immediately came back with ' So do you add not just 12+15 but also t-w-e-l-v-e-p-l-u-s-f-i-f-t-e-e-n?' spelling it out carefully!

Cute!

Oh to be 3 again!

Does anyone else remember when jumping on the bed was this much fun? Amaia had a whale of a time on my bed this afternoon. Three is such a happy, carefree age!

Climate change

Here are two photos taken exactly 362 days apart in the same place. I think they speak for themselves!

                            27-3-2012

       23-3-2013

I can hardly wait to see what next March is like!

Anna and the Peugeot

Kiddie priorities can be mind-boggling at times. I drove Léon to Beavers tonight and then on to Sunbeams with Anna which starts ten minutes later. We were sitting in the car park waiting for the hall to open when she spied the diagram telling you not to put babies in rear-facing seats in front of the passenger airbag.
"What's an airbag?" she asked. I explained it was a big pillow that popped out if you were in a crash. "Oooh," she replied, "let's crash daddy's car so we can see what the airbag looks like!" Emmm, no! I don't think so. "Oh but muuuum, I've always wanted to see what an airbag looks like!" (Wait a minute, two minutes ago you didn't know what an airbag was and now you've always wanted to see one! Drama queen!) I explain how often we use the car and how we need it and she looks totally disinterested and points out I have a people carrier so it is superfluous anyway! (She doesn't pay the petrol costs obviously, given the whole point of Thomas's Peugeot is so we don't need to use the people carrier on a daily basis with its 80l diesel-guzzling tank!) Anyway we agreed to disagree on experimenting with crashing daddy's car, for now anyway.

Gok, she's not...

Amaia's decided she's a big enough girl to choose her own clothes now :-/

So what else would you go for on a day when it's snowing other than lime green socks, pink leggings, a blue t-shirt and a pink and orange summer dress, one size too big... I hope this self-dressing phase is short-lived... either that or I need to hope she grows some dress sense fairly quickly. I certainly don't want the other shoppers in Tesco to think I had a hand in choosing what she's wearing!

Hereditary numptiness

Well what do you know - it's hereditary! What? The spacial geometry gene :-(

Anna started school in August. I had been a wee bit concerned knowing she missed the cut-off point for the following year by twelve days. I worried about my wee young Anna struggling. It needn't have. She's in the top group for everything, reading fluently, calculating additions and subtractions up to thirty in her head without using fingers, starting to pick up on times tables from Léon's homework - I needn't go on. But then today she was given a drawing of half a crown and asked to draw it other half symmetrically. Marcel, Charlotte and Léon could have done this in their sleep at this age. Anna stared at it for twenty minutes as if confronted with some Arabic to translate without having studied it. She the carefully drew the same half again, not its mirror image. So the question is - did she get it from Thomas's floor-laying skills or from Pumpa's cornicing extravaganza?

Daunting?

It's interesting. I was on Borgen's facebook page the other day when I came across some English native speakers discussing this particular exchange from Borgen series one. Interestingly Thomas and I (always being latecomers to anything vaguely TV-related) had only discovered Borgen two weeks earlier (Marcel had got the DVD for Xmas) so we were watching an episode a night, enthralled. We happened to have watched that very episode the night before I came upon the discussion. Those taking part in it were obviously in awe of the speed at which Katrine is speaking. English natives aren't great at foreign languages in general and many have never heard anything other than a little French or Spanish, spoken at schoolchild/tourist speed. It's funny, I live in a house where Danish is spoken every day. I hear it all day long. Rather than learning it from a book as I did with French, German, Italian and Swedish, I've picked Danish up through the spoken medium so it was fun to see how strange my fellow English natives found it to listen to. I take it for granted I suppose. When we'd watched it the night before it hadn't even occurred to me that Danish is spoken quickly and I had no trouble understanding what she was saying in this exchange (yes the English subtitles were off before you think I was cheating!) - I tend to think of French and Italian as much faster languages to parse in their spoken form. It was only when I came across the discussion that I realized how far living this bizarre bilingual existence has taken me from my roots. Maybe that is part of the issue with language teaching in the UK. We don't expose people to foreign languages very much and when we do, we slow them down artificially so as not to frighten the English speakers, but of course when we then come face to face with two natives having a conversation, we can't follow it at all. By making it easier, we are actually making it harder.

Anti-D

Anti-D is meaningless to 83% of the UK population. In fact given half of the rhesus negative people are probably men and another 20% are kids or childless then anti-D is possibly something that concerns only 5%. But when you have rhesus negative blood and my family history, you can't help but be appalled by this. Let's start with my granny, Phyllis. She had negative blood, my granda didn't. Therefore dad was born positive. A few years later granny decided to add to her family. Her second baby lived only a few hours, killed by rhesus disease, her third died at birth, of rhesus disease. Dad never got over being an only child, because he wasn't meant to be. Medical ignorance meant his blood killed his siblings. He grew up with his O+ blood and married mum. She had a negative blood group. She was given counselling and told her babies may require blood transfusions on arrival, and was advised to limit her family. Fortunately I was born with negative blood so didn't affect my brother and he was her last child so no damage was done to that generation. I grew up with my negative blood and married not one but two men with positive blood groups. Anti-D had come on the scene and with every bleed, miscarriage, or even amnio I was given anti-D injections. Each of my babies was tested at birth. One, two and three turned out to be negative themselves so all was well there. Anna was my first positive baby. She was the equivalent of dad. She was the positive baby born to me, a negative mother. I was injected immediately on birth with anti-D. That meant that two years later Amaia, positive baby number two was born healthy, not needing a blood transfusion and not dying like my aunt and uncle who never grew up to be that. It is criminal that we are allowing this to happen in a day and age when it doesn't need to. I can't imagine what my granny went through trying more than once to have other kids, not knowing the implications of dad's blood type. And when I look at the photo above, taken five minutes after Amaia's birth, I can't contemplate the possible outcome a lack of anti-D might have had on that happy photo.

Yes Scotland

I think my dad would have liked Yes Scotland's new poster. (Recognize anyone?)

Standing to eat

When Léon grew out of his high chair he went onto a booster seat. When Anna grew out of her high chair she too went onto a booster. We made the mistake of taking Anna and Léon's boosters away just as Amaia grew out of her high chair. When offered the booster, she of course, took it as a personal insult and refused pointblank to sit on it as she was a 'big girl'! This means that since she was about 18 months, Amaia has been on an adult dining chair. The problem with that is that she originally struggled to see her plate so she took to eating standing. As she's got bigger we have had to remind her over and over to sit to eat. Last week when Thomas was away she was eating standing once more. In an attempt to show her how standing to eat can't really continue indefinitely I had the others stand to show her how ridiculous it will become in time. I'm not sure she saw any issue with it to be honest, but the rest of us had a good laugh, especially at watching Marcel try to reach his plate!

Unionist media

The Unionist bias in the Scottish press is really starting to irk me. Let's take this morning's little gem of a message at face value. Imagine you are a parent of a bright fifteen year old boy. I suggest that because I am. We are at that point in Marcel's life where we have to recommend which subjects he should study for Higher and what uni he might go to. Going on the Herald's logic this morning I should obviously be saying to him: " Please keep your job as a paper boy when you grow up rather than going to uni to study to become a doctor because if you earn as much as a doctor later in life, you'll have to pay the state much more in tax, because you will be so much better off". How many parents would recommend that to their straight-A student?

So we're too poor to be independent because it would make us the third richest EU country above Scandinavia etc. It's time they cut the crap.

Fun food

And just to redress the balance on tonight's posts I thought I'd share this kiddie cooking idea we've been discussing tonight on Facebook. It all started when Thomas shared this photo.

Complete with some quotes from the rather amusing discussion that ensued!

I had a German friend Wilma shaking her head telling it just wasn't right and that the sausage must be cooked to a pulp, followed by an admission that she was intending to try it with her daughters as soon as possible, then a French friend Gaëlle butted in appalled with 'I'm not German and I don't have strong views on not destroying sausages (regardless of their horse-meat content), but I just think it looks utterly revolting. Don't do it Wilma. Put the spaghetti down... We've still got your life ahead of you!' She was unconvinceable, despite having two small children too. But given Thomas started it and my American friend Paul joined in towards the end debating whether these even were sausages in US terms, I think it was a highly successful and truly international sausage and spaghetti conference.

I think I can see a theme developing for the next child in the family's birthday party... half an hour of sausage threading followed by dinner of... sausage!

Outraged!!!!

I know I'm not much of a ranter ;-) in general but tonight I am outraged! As always the primary kids were given all their homework on Monday for tomorrow. We did a little on Monday and Tuesday but skipped yesterday as Thomas was out and it is always easier to do it on nights you aren't playing mum and dad to five. So I sit down with Anna tonight to see what is left on her list. She's read and learned two sets of spelling words, she's read her reading book and answered the comprehension questions, she completed her topic work on Scotland and then I notice she has two websites she's meant to go on to play Maths games. I sit her on my knee in front of my laptop and we go onto the first - it consists of approximately a dozen subtraction questions. She happily completes those. I key in the second address, on the same Maths site but entitled Naming 3D shapes. It brings up the first question with a banner across the middle declaring 'You have exceeded your daily allowance of free questions, sign up and pay £7-99 monthly to continue!' Excuse me??? Well, as you can imagine, I have sent Anna's homework back with a letter of complaint. Homework cannot be prescribed on pay-as-you-go sites, not during a recession, not ever. I resolved to google some free 3D shapes for her to name but even if I had all the money in the world I would not be paying for my child's homework. I am appalled and outraged.

Working parents and medical appointments

And while I'm on a rant anyway... I don't get how this country is meant to work. First of all I read yesterday that an average nursery place costs £11K a year - you pay that out of your net earnings so if you are on the country's average salary, having a second kid (never mind a fifth!) is a no-goer. Apparently 25% of us are relying on grandparents for full time caring. I never have but know many who do. What happens when our generation has to work to 68? Who is going to care for our grandchildren? And now what happens when they get too old or infirm? Do those parents suddenly find themselves choosing between childcare and their mortgage?

 Then there are orthodontists, hospitals etc. Take Marcel. He's had braces on his teeth for about three years. He needs driven from Mearns Castle High to Giffnock every four weeks and back to have them adjusted. All appointments are during school hours. Back in second year I guess letting him taking the bus, which might have necessitated him missing two hours of school would just about have been feasible but as he comes up to starting fifth year it is bad enough me taking him out for half an hour, let alone sending him on public transport. I don't want him missing school. So, there is no other option than me taking him. There are no weekend appointments, no one else available to drive him but if I still worked in Bishopbriggs rather than from home, who would do it? Society relies on me doing it. I can't imagine mothers in Denmark being expected to take an afternoon off work twelve times a year (per child) for such things but our social model relies on it. Marcel's dental work wasn't cosmetic, his mouth was too small for his teeth, so what was my alternative? No wonder more an more highly qualified women are giving up on stable jobs to work freelance because there is no backup in this country. We have overpriced nurseries, outrageously priced out of school care and holiday clubs that for my kids would cost half my annual earnings for just the summer holidays. It doesn't work. We base mortgages on two incomes and then we take more than one whole income away for childcare. I don't get it. We have no official policies on what you are meant to do with your kids on the mornings they waken up with say chicken pox. You aren't allowed to stay off work, but no one will take them either. I was fortunate enough to work somewhere who let me work from home when Marcel and Charlotte got chicken pox, but these days, if I still worked in house, it would be a no-goer. Mine got it in October on year two weeks apart. I'd already used up my annual leave. The stress involved in parenting in a country that doesn't allow for it is hard to deal with. I am lucky enough to have skills that allow me to run a business from home but many parents aren't so lucky. Why aren't we looking at other countries even for ideas of how to make things work better?

And as for the delivery guys who give you a 12 hour window of when you are likely to receive your new washing machine and then invariably don't turn up once you take the day off - I won't even go there. But I'm sure we've all done it over and again! That doesn't work either.

US wealth stats

If you have six spare minutes, I defy you not to be shocked by this video.

Borgen withdrawal symptoms

I'm feeling a wee bit devastated tonight. After over a year of having everyone we know assume we'd be watching Borgen because it is in Danish, we suddenly realized Marcel had the first series lying on his desk, having received it for Xmas. We sneaked in two weeks ago and stole it and have been watching it every night 11-12. It's been great for practising my Danish I'm sure, as I have deliberately left off the English subtitles. (Any excuse!) But last night it finished and now we have no idea what to do with ourselves! How long will we last before one of us comes up with a reason to buy series 2?!

Painted play house

Finally finished last week's play house project.

Monster hands

Charlotte was helping Léon with his Egyptian homework task and somehow 'accidentally' ended up with green hands. It reminded me of one of my kids' favourite books 'When Mum turned into a monster'. If you don't have it and you want to scare your kids into behaving well, I can thoroughly recommend it! ;-)

Just a thought...

While we are on the topic of things I can't relate to at all... I have to say I see a gulf developing between Scottish and English politics. The things that, according to the press, and recent elections down south, are preoccupying the Southern Englanders are unimaginably alien to me. They seem to be voting UKIP because the Tories with their obsession with referenda on exiting the European Union, with their student fees, their pseudo-privatization of the NHS and their failure to notice the recession because it is outside London, are too far to the left for their liking. When I look to our European neighbours I see thoughts much more similar to mine and those of my fellow Scots. How can a country so diverse ever be successfully governed by one parliament? In a way it feels as stale as my first marriage did when I walked out. We pull in opposite directions, and have nothing left in common other than the fear of the unknown. Having had the balls to walk out on my marriage, I have found a new life that is much richer and more harmonious. I am in a partnership that is mutually beneficial. We pull in the same direction with similar goals and interests. If I had stayed, my old life would have suffocated me.

If you let them walk, they'll learn to fly.

This isn't the most exciting article ever published but it is something I find myself thinking about often, especially when I compare my kids to many of their contemporaries. I meet daily examples of things that puzzle me. Sometimes I wonder if I am in a parallel universe. I'll come back to other examples I'm sure over time but for now let's just take the concept of letting your child out of your sight.

Let's take last week for starters. I drove past school to where I could park and let Léon and Anna out the car. It was about 35m from the path that leads down to the school gate. Between where I parked and the path there were no roads to cross. You need to walk past two houses following the pavement and then past two trees. Here's the google map (though of course they were on the other side of the road at A.) A is where I dropped them, B is the path into school.
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There were many children on the path. I kissed them goodbye and asked Léon to walk Anna in holding her hand and I stood and watched them till they rounded the corner. During this time not one but three of my friends asked if they wanted me to take them in if I was in that great a rush. They were appalled not only at me letting my five year old walk those thirty steps alone but even at me letting my seven year old do so. Yes, I am in a hurry in the mornings, but I also strongly believe freedom and empowerment have to start somewhere and if I can let them walk 35m this year, next year it could become 50m and by two or three years down the line they will be walking unaided to the park, to Waitrose or whatever. I remember both Marcel and Lots suddenly deciding they wanted to walk home occasionally at the age of 11 or 12 so if I don't train them now, when should I start? Home is 3.5 km - see below.

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Interestingly here is the google map of my own primary one journey from 1972-3. It was sometimes done with mum or gran, sometimes with a neighbour who was seven or eight, just like Léon, and occasionally done alone.


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All I know is one day Marcel and Charlotte started walking home, then they started taking public transport to school, then Marcel started going into Glasgow alone. I know if I asked Marcel to go to visit relatives in Copenhagen flying through Stansted alone, he could do it. He has the life skills. If we never let go, we are not preparing them for life itself and we are therefore failing in the main task of parenting. Teaching them how to live without us is a far greater lesson than anything they learn at school.

Love

I caught this on radio 4 the other day... It speaks for itself. I don't think the presenter was alone in his loss for words.

(And if you're lucky enough to understand French, here's the original - the quality isn't great but it's worth watching.)

Fiat 500L

How can this have passed Thomas by? Everyone was sharing it on Facebook months ago! Give me strength. How can I, of all people, have a husband who hasn't noticed Fiat have brought out a new Chuggy?!

Anyway, given it's been in my blog drafts for months, I'd better blog it now so he can catch up! His parents have apparently been asking his opinion of Fiat's new 500L and he didn't know it!!!! How can I have educated him so badly?

This, my dear, is the Fiat 500L. And you can tell your parents that if they buy one, I'll pop over and be their permanent chauffeur, because it is sooooo cool and cute!

Léon by Léon

When Charlotte was in p4 she came home having written a poem about herself using her name. I think acrostic poetry has always been a great time-filler in primary schools. Anyway, today I was in school for the open morning when I spied out of the corner of my eye a poem Léon had written to describe himself on the wall. Anyone who knows my wee man will definitely look at this a read aloud in astonishment the same one of the four words he's chosen. Let's see if you can pass the test?

Wedding positives

Last year on our anniversary I had a mini-moan about the fact that our anniversary should really have been some other date many years earlier. Outside forces - that is to say my ex-husband and his obsession with hampering my divorce for three years, and Thomas's then employer choosing redundancies as their  way out of the start of the recession - meant we were stuck with some strange date in the wrong month and the wrong year.

Much as I still feel like grumping a little about that, I have learned from living with a positive and dynamic man whose glass is almost always half full, so I will endeavour to pick a positive point about our wedding anniversary to blog each year instead of moaning. Sometimes it might be something that made me happy, something that made me laugh, or simply the fact that I got my man in the end, even if the road was a bit twistier than I'd have liked.

So what will I choose to be my first positive point? It has to be the cake top, doesn't it? Thomas decided he could sculpt us out of marzipan. The day before the wedding he asked me the colour of my dress. I had no idea why he needed to know - but it all became clear when the cake was unveiled! The kilt is cute as hell and we're very cuddly looking, if a tad shorter and more overweight than in real life. But mostly I loved it because it was so imperfect. It was handmade by him for us and no shop-bought wonder would have been half as cute and lovable!

The observant child

Today Thomas and I were celebrating our fourth wedding anniversary. Well, we had a pudding after our dinner and some fizzy wine. That got us onto the subject of our wedding so we dragged out the old photos. Both Marcel and Lots were more than gobsmacked to see how they had looked just four years ago... two almost unrecognizable little kids.
Lots then surprised me with the comment: 'It was amazing that both our dresses had the same pattern despite us buying them in two different shops'. (Mine was from M&S, hers Next). You know I hadn't noticed! I didn't notice on the day and in four years of looking at the photos it never once jumped out at me. I guess nine year old girls are sometimes more observant than 41 year old ones!