"To have it all"

As I was getting dressed this morning I could hear my wee-est three discussing whether or not they 'had it all'. Having just returned from the kitchen, I had missed their definition of 'having it all' so I listened in from the next room to see what they meant.

Anna: Well, it's definitely not me or Amaia. We don't have it all.
Amaia: What about Charlotte. Oh no she's missing one.
Léon: Marcel then?
Anna: Hardly!
Amaia: It's Léon! Léon has it all. Oh no, he doesn't because of us two.

And so it went on... In then end I had to ask. It turns out that they believe the ultimate prize in life would have been to have both an older and a younger sibling of each gender! So Marcel is ruled out as they are all younger, Charlotte has no big sister, Léon is missing a little brother, as is Anna and Amaia is in the same boat as Marcel. So none of them 'has it all', after all.

It's a sweet measure of life's perfection, though!

May the fourth be with you!

So it's so-called Star Wars day, and even more than any other year Léon is fit to burst with excitement. He's refusing to do all homework and is wandering around humming the tune. Since the latest offering the girls are also getting in on the act, chatting excitedly about all things Star Wars... and although it is nice to hear such enthusiasm from these young and innocent souls, I find myself being short-tempered and snapping at them. But it's not Star Wars' fault. I want to snap at them to leave me in peace today, to think of my beautiful friend Sheina, who I still miss and whose birthday we'd have been celebrating had she not died four years ago at just 45. But the kids were just tiny then and they don't remember a lot about that time, so I'll stick on my smile, and watch Star Wars though my thoughts will be elsewhere.

I was worried there, for a moment

Conversation overheard between my wee girls: Anna: What's your dream job, Amaia? Amaia: emmm nun! (I panic that my atheistic tendencies aren't rubbing off and plan a full assault... when I hear the clarification.) Anna: You can't choose none, you have to choose something! Amaia: Ok then, I'll be a waitress! PHEW! wink emoticon

Bilingualism

One day last weekend Anna came out with this and it got me to thinking: I wonder what it must be like to have only Scottish relatives... everyone in your house would speak the same language all the time... weeeeeird! 

 All of my children have heard a minimum of two languages every day of their lives, the first few years it was English and French, latterly English and Danish: and with a succession of visitors adding German, Italian, Norwegian, Georgian, and Polish amongst others to the dinner table (and that's without even mentioning Scots). TV, of course has added Swedish, Icelandic and Spanish to that as well. I'm not sure I remember the last time I watched anything in English on the TV. 

 I guess the main point is that they fully understand two languages each and also understand many bits of others. You can't sit at the table for years without picking it up. So they have a feel for what multilingual normality is. They are completely unfazed if they don't fully understand everything being said around them because they know there are so many different languages in play at any time. 

 It reminded me of an eye-opener years ago. I was sitting in my garden with a French friend and her kids. We were speaking French, our kids were speaking a mixture. A neighbour's child (a ten year old) who had been doing French at school asked to play so I invited her in. My friend shouted some instructions over to her kids and the neighbour looked really puzzled. "Why is she speaking like that?" she asked. I explained that she was French so although her kids were bilingual as they lived in Scotland, she spoke to them in French, even if they usually replied in English (a bog-standard bilingual child's way of communicating with their foreign parent). The child replied "But she's speaking it really fast!" I relayed that French is spoken much faster in reality than what they learn at school but still she couldn't understand how the kids all understood it without a second thought. Eventually she explained to me that although she had learned some French at school: Il fait beau, je vais bien, la pomme est rouge, etc, she hadn't understood that it was in fact a full language that people used to communicate! She had been brought up in such a monolingual atmosphere that she thought English was the only language people used to communicate and that the little phrases she'd learnt in French were of no more everyday use than memorised poems or mathematical formulae. She had never heard people actually communicating in another language. I think I was as gobsmacked by her lack of linguistic experience as she was by our nonchalant mixed communication. 

 I find people are often taken aback by the real way bilingual households communicate - that is to say, the foreign parent speaking their language and the kids who've grown up somewhere else replying in that language. Of course, when in the other country the kids can switch to that language but generally when you live bilingually, everyone speaks their strongest language at the table. I remember being bemused by this the first time I visited my first husband's parents (he was French with a German mother). She spoke only in German, he replied just as fast in French. Had I not been studying both, I'd have been completely lost. At first I figured they were weird and unique but as every one of my kids has since followed the same pattern, unprompted over the years, and Thomas too speaks to his German father mostly in Danish, I realized it is simply human nature. 

 I do fondly remember a night last year when I spent the evening with Thomas and Peter (his father). We were discussing Greek politics and the ideas of Yanis Varoufakis, quite vociferously, for a few hours and it was only when I was lying in bed later that night I found myself smiling at the realization that I had spoken only in English, Thomas only in Danish and Peter only in German that night and yet all of us had fully understood the conversation. I wish I'd recorded it to show just how much fun these kinds of households are!

Cats

I grew up with cats. First, there was the grumpy, chunky one with the odd name 'Snoopy' (we were kids!). Then there was the skinnier, more placid lapcat 'Muffin'  (named by a friend of the family who stepped into our squabble over what to call him, with the simple statement 'He's kinda muffin-coloured, isn't he?') So from 1981-1996 I was around cats a lot of the time. Although the cat stayed with my parents when I left home as a teenager, I was his holiday babysitter. I haven't had one of my own since, originally for the simple reason that with family abroad, I was away too many times a year to bother with the holiday cover, but latterly more because I've lived on a bus route since 2007. I figure with a double-decker passing every ten minutes, 19 hours a day, it'd have to be a very street-wise cat not to end up dead meat and I don't fancy having to scrape the kids' dearly-beloved off the road once a year. Hence the succession of (safely-caged) hamsters...

However, I always sort of figured I'd spend my old age, once the kids had flown the nest as some kind of crazy cat woman - perhaps a bit like Mrs McTats in one of the kids' favourite books.

As early as fifteen years ago, I started to notice Persian cats were starting to make me a wee bit wheezy, but normal moggies were fine... then a few weeks ago Charlotte and I visited a friend with a cat. Lots had told me she'd been having sneezing fits every time she was around her friend Hannah's cat, and sure enough, as soon as Siobhan's cat wandered in Charlotte's nose started to run. I was fine though and even let the cat sit on my knee for a few minutes. On the way home, however, I started to feel as if my airways were literally clogged with fur and I started to wheeze. By the time I got home I was in a much worse state than Lots and it took antihistamines and three blasts of an asthma inhaler to make me comfortable enough to get to bed and fully 24 hours to get back to normal. So I've monitored it since and it seems I have indeed developed an allergy to ordinary cats of the type I used to live with. My doctor has now advised me to try having coffee with my friend who owns a golden retriever as she suspects that fur is my trigger. 

Am I really going to have to end up a crazy old woman with a house full of these?

Children really make you laugh

Overheard on a car trip:
Léon: ...then I'll pretend to be a serial killer...
Anna: what? 
Léon: it's someone who steals your breakfast before killing people!

Big man, little girl

It's funny. When you have nearly 13 years between your kids, you wonder what, if any, relationship they'll have growing up. But one thing that has always been obvious between my oldest and youngest is the sheer pleasure they derive from each other. Marcel has a greater need to return to the nest more often than most teenagers who've left home, because he feels he too has some sort of parental responsibility for his youngest siblings. And Amaia is absolutely thrilled every time he walks through the door. She loves her Monday school news to be something about her ever-so-exotic brother who lives in Edinburgh. She drops him nonchalantly into conversation when classmates are often still sharing a room with their less-interesting siblings.

I'm not sure who looks more pleased here. Marcel because of Amaia's obvious pride in hanging off his arm, or Amaia for having such a big and exciting brother she can boast about to the other p1s.

Sweet misunderstandings

One of the p1 teachers at Amaia's school left over the Easter break to take up a new job at the primary school on Millport. Amaia is quite upset about it but was trying to see the positives for the teacher herself last night. I had to smile when she explained 'Poor Mrs Cameron used to have to drive very far to work in our school but now she's going to Millport, she'll have so much more time with her own kids because she says she's going to be going to work every day on a fairy*!'

What a sweet image that conjures up!

* This misunderstanding may in part have arisen from the teacher's Australian accent!

No cake today

Scanning some old photos last year, I came across this one, taken on 5/4/86. I remember it vividly because Derek and I had thought it a great joke to buy him an age 4 and an age 3 card, so he could wear 43, his age that day... as you can see though, he had the last laugh!

So today he'd probably have been wearing 37, I guess. But he isn't and there will be no birthday cake, or tomato soup for that matter. The only thing we'll have today, like every other year since we lost him, are more memories to add to that ever-growing list of things he missed out on. Memories both good and bad. Last time, I started to list those memories, but I don't know that that helps, so I'll just get through the day quietly, as I do every year.

Just appalled

Charlotte has been doing some past listening papers for her Nat 5 Spanish exam. She then goes on the SQA webpage to check the marking schemes to see how she's done. 

Yesterday she turned up in the dining room completely appalled: You shouldn't go on the marking grid for Spanish, mum! she warned... I just did a passage on how modern technology and the Internet can be bad for kids' development and you'll never believe what it said in the marking grid!! It said you got a mark for mentioning that as a result of being online, kids are reading less books!!! Can you imagine - you get a point for saying less books - books are countable!!! And she wandered off, shaking her head and rolling her eyes. She's my girl, and she knows me well!

Following in her brother's footsteps...

although in a more westerly direction...

Back when Marcel was in fourth year at high school, he was chosen as one of the forty pupils in his year (of 250 kids) to be given the opportunity to take part in the India World Challenge. The kids spent a year fund-raising before flying to India where their time was split between trekking through the Himalayas, through a natural tiger reserve and working on a project to bring water to a mountain village that had no water supply. Although the digging and carrying in the heat was hard work, getting to see how these simple people lived and getting to help them changed Marcel forever and he came back an older, more mature and incredibly caring young man. He will always remember the gratitude in those villagers eyes and in the warm hugs of their children. So when Charlotte got the opportunity to apply last month for the equivalent experience, this time in Nicaragua, she jumped at it and hoped that her determination would show through her more reserved character. I hoped too that the school would see beyond her shyness and pick her as one of just forty kids once again. Many pages were written as an application explaining what she thought she could bring to the expedition and then the waiting game began. Today (I'm hoping the fact that it is April Fool's Day is meaningless!) it was a very smiley girl who jumped into my car at home time, despite the torrential rain and freezing temperatures. I wasn't expecting her to have heard back yet, but she proudly pulled a letter from  her pocket offering her the chance to follow in her brother's footsteps, helping those whose lives are a bit different to her own. I hope she comes back as humbled and inspired by it all next summer as her brother did two years ago! I'm proud to see both her caring nature and her wanderlust rewarded with this opportunity.

I've never been a fan!

Amaia has been a great sleeper since she was about one. I can honestly say I can't remember the last time she (or for that matter, any of the others) turned up in our bed. She's a content wee soul without a worry in the world... that was until someone decided to teach her about religion!!! This morning around 5am, she turned up in our room scared witless and squeezed in between us. Happily, she calmed down and went back to sleep and given how small she is, we didn't bother to bump her back into her own bed. By this morning, I had completely forgotten to get the reason behind it all out of her and off she went to school. Over dinner, I suddenly remembered what had happened so asked what had got her so scared.
"I had this horrible dream someone was doing that thing to me that they did to Jesus!" 
"What? You dreamt someone was crucifying you?" 
"That's it!"
Poor baby.

Celebrating the lack of celebration

Today, in some parallel universe, I am celebrating my silver wedding anniversary! Even writing that down seems insane as I don't feel old enough to be celebrating twenty-five years of marriage, but then again, that was probably a great part of the problem. I am not old enough to be...

By 1991 I had been seeing my boyfriend for six years. Six whole years! We had travelled Europe together, lived in our own little flats in France together and studied together. When you are 23 years old, six years is a sizeable chunk of your past, and it's an even greater part of the past you have memories of. Any doubts I might have had before my big day were quashed by the knowledge that I had invested so much of my past in that relationship, that it would be madness to start again. After all, hadn't my own parents married even younger, hadn't my mum been 23 when I was born? And my husband-to-be was 27 so we were a fine age... I loved speaking French, I loved France and French culture so I'd have been mad to turn away the opportunity of being married to someone I could speak French to all day and all night. I was even getting an exotic name in the package. It was perfect... except it wasn't. I think more than anything I was in love with an idea but my greatest mistake of youth was that in looking backwards, I forgot to look forwards. Yes, six years was a large investment, but the sixty I had ahead of me should have set alarm bells ringing. I just didn't have the life experience to hear them.

Of course, if I could talk to 23-year-old me I could not advise against it because the children I got from that marriage make up half of my life today, but let's just say that if my own kids suggest marrying at 23, I will be first in the queue to suggest living together for another six years first!

If my marriage was underwhelming and lonely, my divorce was spectacular in its bitterness and has, by today, reached a point I would never have chosen to go to myself. So today I will celebrate thoroughly the fact that I now live with my best friend, a man chosen when I'd reached the right level of maturity to commit my life to someone, and with my large blended family and I will not regret that other universe for one second in time.

Naked schooling?

Fed up with always having to wear her dreary uniform, Amaia sweetly asked this morning: 'When's the next dress if you please day, mum?' 
Isn't it amusing how slipping up on just two letters can change the meaning so much?! Lol.

Big birthday bash?

Here's a photo of my parents' wedding, 51 years ago. On the right of the picture is my dad's dad (William Buchanan) and my mum's mum (Jean Stirling). They would both have turned 100 years old this weekend, had they still been alive. That would have been quite a party! Maybe we should throw them one in their absence, or at least bake them a cake.

Something that is important to me

Given my husband has worked here paying taxes for 14 years and his kids have UK citizenship, I am beyond appalled (though not surprised) that he can't have a say in his own future and that of his family. Thanks David Cameron for dumping EU citizens out of the Brexit vote.

Self deprivation

With Pancake Day on Tuesday, and Fastelavn last Sunday, I think Amaia has being hearing a little about Lent over the past week from various sources. Though not from us, as we don't observe Lent, I suspect she's been hearing about the concept of depriving yourself of something up till Easter.

Today she came in from school and announced 'I've decided not to eat chocolate till Easter'. When we inquired why, the answer was simply 'Because'. Fair enough, we left her to it. An hour after school, however, she asked if she could have a drink and a chocolate biscuit. Anyone who knows Amaia knows this was presented as 'Can I just have one last bar and then I'll give up chocolate'! Half way through a caramel Rocky, she reconsidered... 'Maybe I'll give up crisps instead.' Of course later again, walking past the crisp box she reconsidered that too! Finally over dinner, she came up with a real gem. 'I've thought about giving up chocolate or crisps, but I just like them too much, so I have finally decided what I'm giving up for Easter'. I figured she was cunningly going to come up with something she's not fond of such as cold meat or maybe sandwiches, but no she stunned us with. 'I don't like being cold, so I'm going to give up cold weather till Easter!' Good luck with that one in Scotland, pet!

Potential Oscar candidate?

Driving to school today, Anna came out with a very sweet attempt at emotional blackmail!

Anna: We had PE yesterday, mum.
Me: Was it fun?
Anna: (Sighing dramatically) Well, I really struggled, not like the others...
Me: Why do you think that was?
Anna: I think it had to do with sugar... their blood sugar.
Me: (concerned) What?
Anna: Well, Tuesday was Pancake Day mum, so they'd all had pancakes. We forgot to make some this year!

What's your name?

Charlotte has been going by the surname Buchanan since she was about twelve but without her (absent) biological father's consent she couldn't change it legally till she turned 16 last month. Needless to say, when that date came, it was her top priority to finally get a passport and bank account that matched everything else that she had already managed to change over the years.

The younger kids have obviously overheard bits of conversations about 'I'm 16 now', 'I'm old enough to change my name' etc. So with the absolute clarity of a six year old, Amaia got it into her head that you had to change your name at 16! One day over dinner, I heard Amaia ask Charlotte (who, of course, she has only ever known as Charlotte Buchanan) if she had thought about a new name for herself. She suggested Sophie, then Holly (the two most common names in her class). Charlotte decided to have some fun with it and told her she was going to change it to Baby-Magic Buchanan. (When I was pregnant with Lots, Marcel was two years old and had insisted two things throughout my pregnancy - 1) that she'd be a girl (I didn't know what I was having) and 2) that she'd be named Baby-Magic!) I couldn't guarantee the gender but there was never any way she was going to be Baby-Magic. When she turned up and we named her Charlotte, Marcel cried for two days solid. I even asked if he wanted to choose between the final two names on our list: Charlotte and Élodie. Nope, he still wouldn't talk to me, feeling I'd betrayed him!

So the surname changing came and went without Amaia noticing any change in Charlotte's name... but it is still leading to some rather odd questions and conversations. Tonight I was lying in the bath minding my own business when Amaia burst in: 'Mummy, see when granny was six? What was her name?' 
Me: 'She was called Ann, even when she was six'
Amaia: 'So did she change it back then?'

This is starting to get surreal!

Sibling love

I had a very sweet conversation with Anna yesterday. She's eight now and becoming aware of boys. She came in and announced: I think one of the boys in my class likes me. He keeps following me about and talking to me, yuck!

Me: Do you not like boys, then?

Anna: Well, I don't like him! He's boring and just not very clever. When I grow up the only kind of boys I will be interested in will be nice, clever, good-looking, kind boys... just like Marcel!

Awwwwwh!