Sex Sells
Posted: April 16, 2013 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Abby Wambach, dutch news, feminism, Holland, Netherlands, sexism, women's football Leave a commentYes indeed, there it is a headline grabber to hook you in.
But here’s the real story.
It is an average morning. I am on my way to work. I lock up my bike at the station and throw a few coins to the busker who is playing guitar. He’s quite upbeat considering it’s 7am and drizzly. He’s giving ‘yesterday’ by the Beatles a positive and charming overtone, smiling at all the passengers as they rush by. It’s one of the favourites I sing to my children at bedtime, so it makes me smile thinking of them probably just waking at this moment.
S will probably be driving P mad with his regular morning meltdown about being first to open the cupboard or it could be the speed at which the milk is being poured into his bowl that is all wrong. Small crucial details to a 2 year old that if you get wrong can ruin the morning.
A will be getting ready for school. Putting on her tights and her favourite ‘twirly whirly’ skirt. At the moment she is following a trend amongst the girls in her class. They seem to always wear dresses or skirts. I thought it odd for a while until I had a chat with some of the parents who said that this was what all their daughters wanted and they’d mostly given up arguing. So it seems that gender is on the agenda for 5 and 6 year olds. I have agreed with A that she can alternate between trousers and a skirt every other day.
I pick up the SPITS newspaper as I walk into the station and up to the platform.
P is dealing with the morning mayhem at home, I have made a lucky escape and it gives me the time to relax on the train and peruse the newspapers.
I shouldn’t have bothered.
The headline immediately disturbs me. There is a full page picture of a female football player smiling a big grin under the headline SEXY SOCCER. My heart sinks – another average day and another very average case of sexism. The SPITS may not be the pinnacle of journalism but nonetheless it’s read by about 2 million Dutch commuters per day. An article about women’s sport where the headline has to immediately denigrate all the effort, hard work and skill of getting to the top of their game and simply refer to their body is insulting but unfortunately also not surprising. Later that day I mention this article to a friend and I’m told that I’m ‘reading too much into it’. SIGH…The objectification of women is so normalised that we don’t notice it anymore and when we do we are told that it’s no big deal, we’re so surrounded that we assimilate and overlook.
I flick past page 19, the movie review page which today is a feature on a new release and displays a promotional shot of the movie, 3 svelte bikini-clad young women and their pimp. I find the sports section. I’m expecting the article to continue in the same vein. I’m ready to be outraged by more blatant sexism, more objectified representations of the female form. But it turns out the article is a bit simplistic but ok, mainly focusing on the rise in popularity of women’s football. There’s an interview with American player Abby Wambach, described as the female Messi. Now we could just discuss her as an international football star in her own right but we better throw in a male comparison for our poor readers who are otherwise too simple-minded to understand. Wambach won the best player at the recent FIFA awards but the fact that Messi also won the men’s award is a constant reference point throughout the article, just to make sure we get it. Yes she’s a brilliant footballer because he’s a brilliant footballer.
But hey, I’m sure Messi has the same problem. No doubt he struggles to be recognised for the talent he is and every article about him is peppered with comparisons to Abby Wambach. It must get annoying for him.
There’s a picture of Wambach hugging her team mate. She looks muscular and has short hair. Yes I know, shocking for a woman and especially one with her public profile! The article goes on to mention Alex Morgan, who according to SPITS is talented, successful, good-looking and a media-hit. After all she has more than a million followers on twitter! I look again at the front cover and I notice that it’s the ‘media friendly’ long haired Alex Morgan who is in the picture. Wambach obviously needs to focus more on her hair and make up and less on winning awards for her football skills if she wants to up her social media profile and to be the face of the SEXY SOCCER headline.
But on the whole the article is more balanced than I had expected and there’s not a lot of reference to the sexiness of either Wambach or Morgan. That’s what makes it even worse that they went with such a cheap lazy headline. I have no experience here, but isn’t the headline supposed to be the promise of the article. Here are a couple of my own suggestions next time boys:
Wambach wonder
Fifa la Wambach!
Football’s new heroine!
Wambach winner!
Soccer finally scores big time for US
Shit I’ve been so busy getting annoyed by the newspaper that I get off the train at my stop and realise I haven’t got around to putting on my mascara.
Mouse Hunt
Posted: February 10, 2013 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: dutch family, expat, family, Holland, hysterical, mouse, nervous breakdown, Netherlands, windmill Leave a commentIf you remember there’s a cute little kids song entitled A Windmill in Old Amsterdam which goes like this:
I saw a mouse!
Where?
There on the stair!
Where on the stair?
Right there!
A little mouse with clogs on
Well I declare!
Going clip-clippety-clop on the stair
Oh yeah
I am up early as usual. I haven’t slept more than 6 hours a night in weeks. Today the alarm call is A shouting from her bedroom that she’s scared. It’s 6.15 am. This is becoming a daily occurence and also wakes up her brother so it’s a perfect start to a dark winter weekend. I’ve given up on decent parenting decisions at this hour of the morning so I’m letting them watch Charlie and Lola while shoveling in the rice crispies and I’m nodding off with my nose dipped in a cold cup of tea. I keep hearing a sort of rustling noise coming from the corner of the room. I ignore it for a very long time and just keep my eyes shut. It’s probably one of the various drawings and bits of paper falling off the wall.
We’re down on the floor now killing time doing puzzles until the day begins for the rest of the world. Eventually I decide I better go and investigate. In the corner I remove a hobby-horse and a toy pram to reveal a bag with books in it. Under the bag I find some mouse droppings and something wet, which from it’s smell must be wee. A small plastic dinosaur and some magnetic letters are lying in the pool of wee. I consider throwing them out and then chuck them in the sink with some detergent. I don’t know what specific kind of detergent it is, just the nearest thing I find in a yellow bottle. I then use the same stuff on a load of kitchen paper and wipe the floor. Weird. There also seems to be some red blodges on the floor. Maybe the cat has killed a mouse and it’s wet itself in fright?
Ok, back to the puzzles, but I can still hear something. I pull A’s toy oven away from the wall but there’s just some pen lids and a cherry tomato under there. Then I pull a cupboard from the wall and a tiny grey streak zooms between my legs and out the living room door.
“AAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH” I am shrieking.
“CALL DADDY!!!! I NEED HIS HELP!”
“DAAAAAAAAADDY” calls A up the stairs.
He comes in half asleep looking bewildered “What? What is it? What’s happening in here?”
“A MOUSE” I shout
“God, do you need to be so melodramatic! I thought someone had been murdered!” says P
“Sorry, it’s just a mouse, I didn’t mean to scare you” I’m saying to A who looks worried.
“It’s just because it ran so fast under my feet, it made me jump.”
“Ok, can we all just calm down in here” says P
P closes the door to the living room and chases the mouse around the hallway with a pink bucket until it seeks refuge in the toilet.
“Can you get me a box?.. quick” he asks
I root through the recycling and find a bent bit of cardboard that once was a box. P has barricaded the toilet doorway with some magazines and an air freshener.
He is poised at the door with the bucket. It looks like he has come up with a mouse trapping system, so I leave him to it.
“Pixie” A runs at the cat and closes the door. “I don’t want her to get the mouse.”
I babble on about nature and hunting and predators for a while.
A climbs up on the coffee table.
“I’m a hunter” she’s saying “I’m not scared of anything”
Outside the door I can hear some movement and P calls me to open the front door.
“I’ve got it” he says
He carries the pink bucket and the cardboard outside to the pavement. He opens the bucket.
“What? There’s nothing in here! I really thought I had it.”
I find the mouse burrowing down next to the drain pipe in the toilet. I can see it’s furry back writhing about trying to wriggle under the linoleum.
We put the cardboard barricade back in place and watch, but there’s no way to get at it now.
“Forget it, I’m going to have a lie down” I say
An hour later I come back downstairs. P is in the living room. Kids are still in their pyjamas having a great time making whizz, boink, klaxon comedy noises on daddy’s computerised piano. Everyone seems to have forgotten about the mouse invader.
Except me.
After a lie down and a renewed sense of purpose I’m on task, ready for the hunt. The mouse is still there in the toilet. There’s a lot of tiny black pellets on the floor. It’s nasty long tail is flipping about from the hole under the drain pipe.
I pick up the pink bucket and freeze.
He pokes his nose out.
I wait.
I lose sight of him for a second, then suddenly he’s there under the radiator.
I put the bucket down.
I poke at him with an empty toilet roll tube.
He scuttles into the bucket to hide.
I grab the cardboard and try to place it over the opening on the bucket, but he darts out before I make it and the barrier is down so he runs out the doorway of the toilet and towards the coats.
“AAAAHHH! NO!” I shout and I’m clenching my fists and looking around for him everywhere.
“NO!!!!!!! I’ve messed up the system!”
P is at the living room door. “What’s wrong? what’s wrong?” he’s asking.
But I’m beyond help.
“I HAVE TO GET THIS MOUSE!” I’m shouting “I CAN’T FIND HIM!”
I’ve croached down on the floor and I’m starting to cry. I throw a walking boot in the direction of the shoe rack. The mouse runs between the shoes. He’s under a welly. I close the sliding door in the porch and open the front door. I pull the shoe rack away from the wall and find a mass of cobwebs. The mouse isn’t there! He’s already shot across to the other side, under the kids coats. I’m getting hysterical, groaning and flapping at him with the cardboard trying to usher him out the front door.
P opens the living room door and looks at me.
“Can you just be normal?”
“NO!” I snap back
The mouse runs back the other way under my legs and squeezes himself through a 2cm gap in the sliding door and back into the house.
“AAAAAHHHHHHH……He’s on the stairs! Help! He’s going upstairs!!!!!!”
I run at the staircase with the pink bucket and somehow I manage to interrupt one of his mouse hops. I fling the bucket down onto his head.
“RAAAAHHHHHHH!”
He runs in the other direction, jumps over the 2 potties and the toilet brush and he’s back in the porch between the walking boot and the umbrellas. I lunge at him with the bucket in one hand and the cardboard in the other and suddenly I seem to have scooped him up and he’s made a dash for it out the open front door. I see him running over the flower bed and through a gap in the wall.
I stand there holding the cardboard like a shield for a moment and then slam the door shut.
When I go back into the living room I am triumphant, but I feel a bit strange.
“I got him out!” I announce and I’m kind of laughing with a weird squeaky wheezing noise.
The cat is asleep on a chair.
“Well done” says P.
“Are you Ok? It sounded like you were having a nervous breakdown.”
Naked Snails
Posted: June 22, 2012 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: children, English, expat, gardening, Holland, mum, Netherlands, sandpit, slug 2 CommentsI’ve been in the garden scooping slugs and snails out of the sandpit. The slugs have been an on-going problem for a while now. Last summer I must have found hundreds of them. I am not a very keen gardener, or more to the point I haven’t got a clue what I’m doing, but we have inherited an oasis of green and even an overzealous grapevine that seems to sprout new shoots on a daily basis. The branches creep down trying to invade the house through the back door.
I remember a time last year that the garden in all its blooming glory almost gave me a heart attack. I was sitting watching a film on the sofa and I kept hearing a scary tapping noise at the window. Luckily it wasn’t a horror film, but we have all seen enough of those film scenes to imagine a light tapping at the window to be the scrape of a scythe or a meat-cleaver. I bravely drew back the curtain to discover that the wind was repeatedly knocking a particularly gnarly shoot of grapevine against the window pane. It just goes to show that I have the mind of a city dweller. I have never really had a proper garden before and I wasn’t aware of the noises they are capable of making.
I am equally naïve when it comes to slugs. Last summer all my pot plants were eaten, and that felt hugely unjust since it took me an enormous effort to even have any pot plants. I had a tiny baby. I didn’t have time for gardening! I just shoved any pretty looking flowers I found into random jars and containers. They were only annuals (my new word) but all the same it is a shame to have your fledgling efforts spoiled by a plague of gluttonous molluscs.
They even started trespassing through our kitchen. I don’t know where they got in but the evidence of their silver trails was there in the early mornings and I wouldn’t risk walking in bare feet. When my sister came to stay, P had warned her about them,
“Don’t be alarmed if you see any naked snails in the kitchen”
“Ok I won’t” she said
In dutch they have one word ‘slak’ . This can mean a snail or a slug, but to clarify when referring to a slug they say that it is naked.
Today I am outside with my daughter and her friend. It is a surprisingly warm day and they want me to open the sandpit. It has been decked in black bin-liners for weeks to guard against the summer rain (?) but now I am peeling it back. There are scores of slugs all over the plastic, both the naked and the clothed variety, and then I discover yet more wiggling through the sand itself. I find a bowl and a spade and I start picking them off. A and her friend stand at a safe distance watching me recoil in disgust.
“Urgh”
I also have to spoon up trails of black poo all over the sand toys. I never realised that slugs poo so much. The bowl is starting to get very full. They’re writhing over each other, like one wet mucousy mass of black slime. Their tentacles are wiggling trying to escape. I have to work fast, as with each new slug I scoop up into the bowl I discover several more that have squirmed their way to the rim and I have to push them back down with the back of the spade. Why did I use this shallow bowl? It’s too late now. I have to keep going.
They’re repulsive creatures, but I’m not exactly trying to harm them. When I was about 6 I kept a family of snails in a tupperware box in the kitchen as pets and I fed them on lettuce.
“ooooghhh” I shout when my hand squelches against a runaway on the underside of the bowl.
P is inside with his back to me, head burried in the computer. He’s sniggering.
“What’s the big deal, it’s only a few slugs”
“I know but you’re not the one dealing with them!”
I run in and shove the convulsing bowl under his nose. I go out front and open the green bin. Is it ok to put them in here I wonder? It is supposed to be for all green waste – this counts as garden rubbish doesn’t it? I start throwing the slugs in, but seeing their tentacles reaching out towards me at eye-level is too much so I just throw the whole bowl in. It’s made out of wood anyway. That’s green.
I can see the neighbour looking over. She says she heard me in the garden. Apparently I was using the word ‘slimy’ a lot.
“Don’t worry I throw slugs in the green bin too.”
Well at least she’s admitted to the militant slug abuse act, so we’re in it together. They’ll be fine. They probably love it in there anyway. All dark and moist.
I go back into the garden to find A and her friend picking the leaves off my pot plants to mix up into a soup. They have lost interest in the sandpit.
It starts to get chilly so I poke and prod at the wayward vine to struggle to close the back doors. There’s a blackbird out there on the path nibbling at a slug, probably one that I dropped.
“Go bird! Kill!”
The Crunch
Posted: June 10, 2012 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: children, cucumber, English, festivals, Holland, jam tart, juffie, mum, Netherlands, rebel, reggae 13 CommentsA few days ago I was making my daughter a sandwich for school. It was very early in the morning so I still felt a bit bleary headed. I asked her what she wanted in the sandwich.
“Cream cheese and cucumber?”
“Yes that’s fine” she answers “no no uum I won’t have cucumber”
I find this puzzling since cream cheese and cucumber has always been a winner.
“Why don’t you want cucumber?”
“Because when you’re at school and it’s time to eat the juffie turns this thingy round and it plays a tune on the music box and then you all have to be quiet.”
(Juffie is the generic term for female teacher)
Listening to this I suddenly feel a lot more awake and attentive.
“Ooh” I say “so you mean cucumber is too crunchy and it makes a noise?!”
“Yep”
“I’m sure the juffie doesn’t mind if you crunch a little bit when you’re eating”
“Yeah, but I just don’t want to anyway” she says
I am thinking to myself that this is ridiculous. How did I ever produce such a law-abiding goody-two-shoes? How could a bit of cucumber ever be rebellious?
I make a vow to myself to try to encourage a bit more wild disobedience.
I did recently fail to read the note pinned up on the classroom door so I baked jam tarts for a school trip instead of pancakes as all the other mums had done. I was the only one that did something different but this was more an act of disorganisation than of rebellion. A jam tart is not really a symbol of living life on the edge so I needed a new plan.
I bumped into a friend and her two kids at the farm and while our brood were stepping on the goat poo and stroking the rabbits we managed to have a short conversation about our music tastes. This was a good start, just to talk about something other than the kids. It turned out that she was a reggae DJ and I am a big reggae fan. Talking to her was bringing back memories of wilder days at festivals, being young, dancing all night. She was going to be Dj-ing at the weekend.
Here was the perfect opportunity to liven up an old passion with a few “Irie vibrations.”
So I turn up very keenly at 8pm on the dot. Maybe a bit too keen, the place hasn’t even opened it’s door yet! My friend is the first to play at a whole evening of reggae. I have really built this ‘going out’ thing in my head since it happens so seldom. Things start off very slowly and the place is empty for the first hour apart from us two mums and then a few friends of the DJ start to arrive, one of whom is heavily pregnant. We swap birthing stories and talk about pregnancy yoga. Wait! This is not the wild evening I had planned. Then my friend, the DJ needs to go to the loo and quickly shows me what to do in her absence. I’m standing in the DJ hotspot and I’m switching the faders! My heart beats a bit faster and I feel like I’m very cool…I look up from my brief moment of triumph and remember that I’m playing to an empty dancefloor!
By the time the second band of the night plays and it’s really filling up with the proper late night party crowd, ie. the young people I start nervously looking at the time and I sensibly head back home. I have to retrieve my coat from the backstage area though and typically enough the band members are in there taking a breather – smoking up a cloud of marijuana. The smell from outside is enough to almost knock me off my feet and I’m getting a bit nervy about the idea of going in, but I just hold my breath and make a dash for it. OK so my really reckless days are in the past, but I did get close to the ‘rebel music’, at least I danced to some tunes about the ‘uprising’. And I had four beers! And was home at midnight!
My rebellion might be on the back burner, but I hope my daughter’s is still to come. On Monday I’m planning on slipping carrot sticks into her lunch box.
One Man and His Bike
Posted: June 2, 2012 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: bike, children, dutch family, English, expat, hobbies, Holland, laundry, mum, neighbours, Netherlands, obsession 5 CommentsHobbies?!
Why do certain men have this urge to take up precious and valuable time with pointlessness? As I have mentioned to P several times of late I consider hobbies a luxury that I don’t expect to have time for until I’m at least 65. There will be plenty of time for leisure activities when we’re retired and the kids have left home. I’ll join a choir, grow potatoes, make wonky pottery mugs with the best of them, but for now, there are bums to be washed, sandwiches to be made, washing up to be done, tax returns, greasy fingers to wipe, sweetcorn to be swept from the floor etc etc. The list goes on…. By the way these domestic chores are not my idea of a pastime, if there are any men reading this I would like to point out that we women have not invented the concept of laundry, it is just there spoiling our fun too.
As far as having hobbies goes, P doesn’t agree. He has a new one to add to his list.
He is building himself the ultimate fan-daby-dozy racing bike. Apparently it has a rare Japanese frame that someone once won the ‘Tour de France’ using in about 1980….I have definitely got these facts wrong, but I am not a geek so I don’t care.
It is not enough for P that he already has a racing bike in the garden, plus a folding bike, a mountain bike, a city bike and a bakfiets (container bike). This might sound like an affluent collection of transport but showing them off would make a laughable episode of ‘cribs’. They are an assortment of rust and various states of disrepair, so they make up a scene fairly typical in a dutch family’s front garden. And handy for visitors of course.
His new hobby is like the super-duper optimum hobby since it combines other hobbies into one streamlined obsession. One is racing of course, another is spending an inordinate amount of time searching marktplaats (the dutch ebay) for parts, another is general tinkering and the final hobby is photography. Flicking through his camera recently wanting to see his snaps of the kids I found one picture of the chain rings laid out next to the crank set (yes I now know what it’s called) and several shots of the frame without wheels taken from different angles. It’s reminds me of a lover who can’t stop snapping pictures of their sweetheart.
Whether it will ever satisfy him I have no idea, I’m sure that once the bike is finished, he’ll use it of course but the thrill of the challenge will fade and be replaced by the next obsession. No doubt, the flush of new love will lose some of it’s luster, those photos won’t be saved but discarded as the next project begins. I know from experience that there will be a next project.
Meanwhile the laundry. Today I was upstairs with little S just after his nap. We’ve just been on holiday and the suitcases are lying around the hallway not being dealt with so I thought I better get on with it. There are also huge piles of unsorted clothes all wedged in the doorway of our bedroom so I start chucking them vaguely in the direction of the laundry basket. S keeps pointing up to the attic and saying “dada”.
“No dada’s not up there” I say
“Dada” he says again and starts trying to climb the stairs.
“OK I’ll show you” I say and pick him up under the arms and go up.
When I get up there I find the racing bike suspended from the middle of the ceiling, like a sacred centrepiece. The metal parts are gleaming silver and there are several scary looking cleaning products and blackened toothbrushes on the floor.
Apart from that the attic is clear, it has exposed bare wooden walls and no floorboards. P has been up there a fair bit recently. ‘Renovating’. Basically for the last year we’ve been trying to get around to getting it finished and habitable so that it can be our new bedroom.
I go back down the stairs and continue sorting through the heaps of clothing but S keeps on pointing and I have to show him the bike several more times before he’s satisfied.
This evening after dinner I see P is outside talking to the neighbour over the fence. Initially he’s thanking him for watering the plants while we were away and politely listening to him talk about his new job. The conversation quickly moves along and his pet subject comes up, his bike. The neighbour turns out to be a racebike enthusiast as well. P is showing him pictures on his phone. They’re out there a long time and P comes in clutching some brake cables that the neighbour had left over in his shed.
“That’s the chattiest he’s ever been” he says smiling.
Toast!!!
Posted: May 24, 2012 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: broken iphone, children, English, expat, Holland, mum, Netherlands, tantrum, toast, toddler 3 CommentsThe baby has started talking. Well he is a toddler really I suppose. He totters about in his dungarees kicking a ball, chasing balloons, tripping over and banging his head on tables a lot. Maybe from now on I will give him his very own grown up letter – S.
Anyway he is talking, just a few words, like ‘mooo’ for a cow, ‘nose’, ‘ow!’ (when the said bumping and banging happens, he is very dramatic about it). He can also say ‘wow’, often when there’s a large rubbish truck going past or I produce strawberries from the fridge. It is all very cute really and like any parent I coo in wondrous appreciation as his vocabulary grows (even if other people can’t distinguish a moo from a shoe, or a juice from a cheese for that matter) His current favourite word is ‘toast’! He loves the stuff. The only time I am a little less charmed by this new ability to talk is at 6am. When he wakes up in the morning he stands up in his cot and shouts ‘toast!’ at the top of his lungs, he doesn’t stop until I go in and get him. He used to accept a little cuddle in mum and dad’s bed in the morning, but now it is no-nonsense, dead-on target, ‘let’s get down those stairs and get the toaster going mum’ and he will not tolerate a single moment of faff in between. If mum is not properly organised the night before with socks, pyjama bottoms, a handful of nappies at the ready, if I need to go back into my own room to pull on my slippers for instance I am greeted by a full on tantrum. And tantrums at 6am are a whole new kettle of stinking rancid fish that you don’t even want to know about. So I try to minimise the risk and have the necessary clothing/changing equipment piled up on the landing.
Then we run downstairs in the dark, and I slice the bread. He continues saying ‘toast’ until I tell him he needs to wait for the pop. Then he changes his mantra to ‘pop…pop’
P claims that I have already infiltrated little S with my English toast obsession. I have mentioned before in a previous post the Dutch crazy love of bread, and it having an almost holy place in the average Dutch diet, they wouldn’t pollute the pureness of the beloved ‘broodje’ (sandwich) by toasting the stuff.
Once the toast is ready and S is happily in his high chair munching we can relax and chat, as long as we stick mostly to a conversation using one-syllable words that contain the letter ‘O’.
Another new word that I’m not overly keen on is ‘phone’. Typical up-to-the-minute baby that he is, he grabs the phone out of my hand and uses his grubby little teeny weeny index finger to slide through all the various apps looking for something that he can accidentally buy for me. It is amazing how fast things seem to be moving along. A is 4 and a half and when she was his age and she grabbed the phone out of my hand it still had buttons to press.
Unfortunately he also likes throwing things. Yesterday he grabbed the iphone and threw it on the floor. We have a wooden floor and the impact cracked the front panel of the phone. I picked it up and bellowed in that half drill, half ox giving birth like way that P is always telling me off for. (Quick aside: In my opinion if P was a 24 hour parent like I am and didn’t get to escape to ‘work’ he would have developed his own equally annoying noise). It is a noise of utter frustration that I make instead of swearing or hitting anyone.
I am shouting “I DO NOT BELIEVE THIS!!”
I wouldn’t have reacted so severely, if it was not for the fact that this has just happened to me not even a month ago. I had been holding onto my bike with one hand, I had leaned across to pick up the potatoes I was buying at the market and the phone had fallen out of my pocket and onto the ground, where it had royally smashed. I had had to ring a whippersnapper of a young iphone fixing boy to drive over (charging me petrol money by the kilometre) to replace the glass. It cost 80 euros!
How could I be so idiotic? How could I not have bought a cover for it the first time this happened? And why did I let a toddler anywhere near the damn thing? Now I start directing my frustration at the stupid thing itself and those abominable people at Apple for making it. It is clearly a way of fleecing all of us suckers who fall for their ‘must-have’ marketing. How can it be so easy to break that a hock high teeny toddler can smash it by dropping it on a wooden floor?
This is the cycle of thought that I am trapped in for the rest of the afternoon. I stick sellotape across the screen and set about grumpily trying to get dinner ready. S totters about with his bare feet pat-patting on the wooden floor bumping his head on the dinner table. He occasionally runs into the kitchen and climbs up onto a high step to examine the vegetables I am chopping. He fingers the courgette without enthusiasm and shouts ‘toast!’
The Sleep Rota
Posted: May 18, 2012 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: children, English, expat, family, grumpy, Holland, mum, Netherlands, parenting, sleep deprivation Leave a commentP and I are arguing, well in point of fact, we both maintain that we are not arguing but that the other is. We are extremely grumpy. The baby has a fever and is awake constantly throughout the night and A has a hacking cough that wakes her up. For the last couple of nights she’s slept in with us. Her coughing wakes the baby when I’ve just got him detached from my boob and back into his cot and likewise his crying wakes her up in between coughing fits. Last night at about 5.30 I finally remove the baby from the bedroom and stumble next door into A’s bedroom so as to stop him waking everyone else. He cries but I force him into a huddle and pat him gently til he stops and gives in to another hour of sleep. I drift off my legs bent up and cramped against the end of my daughters minibed, and I wake up amazingly refreshed! As long as you get to sleep at the end of the night for an hour or so your body tricks you into thinking you’ve had a nights sleep! What a revelation. Worse are the nights when the kids keep you up from 4 and that’s it. Don’t be fooled, no amount of love for your children can override the sleep deprivation and keep you patient and calm on those mornings. We are all bad parents.
Before I had children someone once asked me to predict what would be the biggest challenges about being a parent. I said
“Accepting bad behaviour”
“Allowing my children to be themselves”
“Over-worrying”
Little did I realise that the answer was a lot simpler. The biggest challenge is coping without sleep.
In our house sleep has become like a form of currency between P and I. We have invented a system. I get up on the school mornings, and P gets up on the other mornings. On our morning to get up we both bark and complain looking at the clock. It has never been said in so many words but I’m sure we both have the same thoughts when the kids are wide awake and the clock has just ticked past 6, we secretly direct rage at the other who we are sure had the luck of it being closer to 7 the day before when it was their turn. Today was Saturday and the morning waker was P. When I got up after an amazing lie-in at 8.30 he went back to bed. The baby was also having his first nap of the day and rudely woke up crying so that P was again roused from his sleep. I eventually took the baby downstairs and P continued sleeping til lunchtime. The weekends tend to be basically just a rota of who gets to be asleep. So from 8.30 until almost 12 I am letting him sleep the morning away while I try to keep A busy with the lego with a feverish snotty baby clamped to my leg.
At around 11 I am having a mental conversation with myself,
shall I send the kids in to wake him up?
God I’m so annoyed with him
No I’ll let him sleep, he’ll be so happy and amazed at how long he’s slept, and then we’ll all have a pleasant day being calm and rational with each other
No but this is torture, how dare he still be in bed, I’m sure I never get to do this
Don’t persecute yourself, just go and bloody get him up! It’s about time he came and helped with the weekend
I’ve toed and froed about it all morning and now it’s practically lunch time, so just to show everyone how heroic and good at coping I am I’ve wiped the snot off my legs, plonked the baby in the high chair to stop him climbing up my pyjamas and into the oven and I’ve started making the cheese on toast when P finally comes downstairs.
I’m trying to look all unflustered and cool but I am perplexed when I notice that he still looks grumpy!
“It’s too difficult, I couldn’t really sleep”
Ok so now I think I’m going to punch him in the head, all illusions of a pleasant weekend family day are shattered.
What a luxury it would be to over-worry about “allowing my children to be themselves” and to make mistakes, blah blah, this all sounds like a lot of touchy feely babble. I’ve got a whole ton of books on parenting sitting on my book shelves unopened. My eye suddenly scans over the debris of ketchup, juice and scattered paperwork on the table and rests on a book lying horizontally on top of the shelf.
“How to talk so kids will listen and listen so kids will talk”.
Brilliant title anyway.
Telly Addicts
Posted: May 18, 2012 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: BBC, children, daytime telly, English, expat, Holland, Netherlands, parenting, Steiner school, TV mum 3 CommentsNow that we live across the road from A’s school my TV anguish is increasing. I dread the day her teacher cycles past and glancing through our front window, which I have come to realise is unusually large sees A slumped infront of some dodgy cartoon. This is a Steiner school as well. TV is practically outlawed! Possibly the worst example would be the animated series about a Chinese girl who looks like manga gone too far, her eyes take up more than half her face. I’ve been putting the telly on every day after school because that’s when the baby has his nap, so A is practically imprisoned, safely held captive while I’m busy upstairs. If any of the other parents or teachers do pass by regularly at that time then they’re bound to think of me as the TV mum.
Anyway today I reached a new level of telly anxiety. I was exposed, found guilty of day-time telly watching. I am embarrassed and now I’ll have no legs to stand on in the busy busy parent stakes. I was eating lunch, which was an exciting cheese and marmite sandwich and now I was having pudding, a cup of tea and wait for it…..a nutella sandwich! A childish diet is sometimes needed to refuel the motivation for more rounds of “she’ll be coming round the mountain.”
I was enormously frustrated that my laptop was not allowing me to listen to radio four. The droning on of those proper British radio voices is reassuringly nostalgic. I am turning rapidly into my dad. I draw the line though at ‘The Archers’. This for anyone who doesn’t know is a stalwart of the BBC. A long running radio soap about farmers. There are west-country accents, probably just so the actors can enjoy the ludicrous and authentic pronunciation of the word ‘tractor’ and there are mooing sound effects in the background. In any case if I hear the well known theme-tune starting I quickly turn off the radio to try and delay the fast approaching onset of middle-agedness. As far as I’m concerned you shouldn’t really be allowed to listen to The Archers until you’ve got time for hobbies and crossword puzzles and you’ve got a shed.
Being away from the UK I can only listen to BBC radio online and for some reason my laptop has a time and calendar that is wrong and won’t match up to the BBC iplayer so it doesn’t work. I tried my phone, but the phone in this out of bounds region. So I turned the telly on for a fix of BBC. As I was standing there in front of the vast front window with the remote in my hand I worried that a neighbour might walk past and it did occur to me to draw the curtains for this illicit act of TV watching but then I thought I was just being weird and paranoid. On BBC 1 it was something to do with some people selling some apparent antique thingy in a box for 35 quid so I continued flicking until I got to a BBC Entertainment, which was a sort of drama/sitcom about 30 somethings getting divorced I think. It was a programme I had never seen before but it had some lovely familiar British TV faces in it, so I sat down on the sofa and balanced my nutella sandwich on my lap. Just as I did this I looked out the window and saw the local council politician walking past my house! He is the father of one of the girls in A’s class and he lives further up the road from us. Now this was too pitiless. I should always listen to that paranoid self, I should have bloody closed the curtains. Now I’m already aware that when this man’s daughter came to play after school that I allowed her and A to watch an episode of Dora the Explorer.
Shall I quickly run outside right now? I think
Shall I tell him the whole story about the radio not working and that I never normally would watch TV in the middle of the day, honest?
Shit, in half an hour from now I will be picking A up from school and I’m sure he’ll be there to pick up his daughter too. Strangely enough a local council politician seems to have a lot of time on his hands for bringing and picking up his kids from school and meandering up and down his street checking up what other people are up to.
Right then, I decide,
When I see him I will have to pull myself together. I will calmy make intelligent polite chit chat. I will pretend that I’m not just a daytime telly addict, but a normal capable fellow parent. I will enthusiastically greet A with a healthy interest in her day at school.
Seriously, what am I going to do? I’m looking down at a half eaten chocolate spread sandwich watching my integrity take a backslide.
Daddy
Posted: May 18, 2012 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: absent father, children, daddy's girl, English, expat, Holland, mum, Netherlands Leave a commentMy daughter is a daddy’s girl. She is extremely keen on him. Her ears are tuned to the clank of his bike against the front window when he gets home from work and she rushes to wave at him, beaming and hopping about, she whoops for joy when it’s his turn to put her to bed, she won’t even allow him to be alone when he’s in the toilet. She stand outside the door talking, encouraging him on and asking if he’s nearly finished.
A few days ago we were eating breakfast and A was drawing. At the moment she draws the family a lot, daddy, mummy, herself and baby. Maybe a rainbow or some clouds and birds. Familiar childhood themes. A typical 4-year-old’s world. She’s making sense of things. I ask her who the people are in the picture.
She says. “When I am a grown up can I also have two babies?”
“I don’t know” I say “maybe, but first you need to grow up”
“yes, first I’m going to be a child, then a bit bigger child, then a bit bigger child, then a teenager” she giggles, the idea of one day being a teenager always makes her smile. “then I have to choose someone to be the daddy and then I can get a baby in my tummy”
She seems to have got it all worked out…”well” I say “you can be a grown up first, maybe for quite a long time, you might not just go straight from teenager to mummy”
“Yes of course” she laughs
“Where is your daddy?” she asks P
“I don’t know” he says brightly
P has never known his father. He left when P was about 4 and never stayed in touch. A knows that her daddy doesn’t have a daddy.
“But where did he go?”
“We don’t know where he went” P answers
This is a line of questioning that crops up now and again.
“Why did he go away?”
“Maybe he didn’t like it in Nederland. It’s always raining and cold, maybe he wanted to go back to his home.”
“But why?”
“You know that daddy’s daddy came from Croatia?” I say. “That’s quite far away. It’s a different country and it’s sunny there”
“But your daddy’s always going to stay with you. He won’t go away”
“Nooo” she says and she gets down and crosses around to the other side of the table to give her daddy a hug.
First Parents’ Evening
Posted: May 18, 2012 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: children, Dr Winston, English, expat, first day at school, Holland, lunch box, mum, Netherlands, parents evening, Steiner school 2 CommentsMy daughter has started school. It is a huge event for us. You can see the school yard from our house so she has already watched the kids coming and going and this has been a point of great excitement for the last year. It was almost too good a fantasy that one day she would be one of those rucksacked children filing in to the building that she has seen so many times from the outside. To me it looks like so many other schools, but to her it has taken on the mystery of a fairytale castle.
Like good responsible parents we read through all the stuff that the school sent us, the structure of the school, the philosophy, learning goals, various celebrations, holidays, staff, bullying protocol etc. I remembered what Dr. Winston had said about preparing your child for school in that programme on the BBC, so I told A that she was going to school because she was going to learn, which was apparently the key word and also there were going to be lots of other children to make friends with. We went out to choose a school bag and a lunch box (actually in Holland it’s called a bread box due to the fact that bread seems to be the top and most important food staple to all Dutch folk and I say all because it transcends class, political leanings, health freaks, food philistines, everyone, if a Dutch person thinks it’s lunchtime they don’t ask, “shall we break for lunch?” they are far more likely to say “shall we eat a sandwich?” and while we’re on the subject a sandwich is a slice of bread topped simply with cheese, ham or chocolate sprinkles, yes even for adults!) So we’ve got the breadbox.
The first day arrives and A is suitably quaffed and neatly plaited. I am very proud. The other parents seem friendly and one mother helpfully introduces herself as Anouk, one of the parent reps and says I can ask her anything I need to. When we leave A smiles and waves goodbye, then turns back into the circle and listens to the teacher, who has achieved a trance-like atmosphere in the classroom by her morning ritual of playing the harp! (I should add at this point for anyone who is wondering whether I am lying that the school is a Steiner school….”ooooh” I hear you say)
When we pick her up A shows us a picture she has drawn and is smiling from ear to ear, so all in all I’d say it’s a good start.
Things continue to be successful for the first few weeks, she has a couple of friends, she’s been baking bread every Thursday, she’s been on a woodland walk to collect conkers, she’s learnt some ancient songs about gnomes and she’s even had a couple of playdates. One minor hiccup was when A turned to me while we were eating our evening pasta and said,
“Mummy, why is the teacher not teaching me things?”
“Ahh” I replied
I had to have a bit of a think about how to answer this and then I tried to explain that all the playing and stories and making stuff was also a form of learning. I think I had, by way of Robert Winston accidentally given her the impression that she would be proficient at reading and maths now that she was already 4 years old and well into her first month of school!
Because we live just across the road I have to admit that I have already quickly pulled yesterday’s jeans on and put my jacket on over my pyjama top to take her to school. For the first few weeks A’s dad and I tried to keep up an element of decency in our attire, but due to the proximity we knew there was always a strong likelihood of going to school in our pyjamas, it was just a surprise how soon. As soon as I open the front door, I see other parents cycle past me smiling always wearing the appropriate rain gear. I’ve usually got the baby on my hip (who’s also got his jacket over his pyjamas) and wild non-brushed hair, but A has got clean clothes and teeth so I don’t mind.
Anouk cycles past me and I call out,
“Hi, I’ve got a question. P gave me this envelope for the class kitty, but I don’t know exactly what I’m supposed to do with it”
“Oh” she says “You just put €25 in it and pass it to the next parent on the list, it was all explained on parents evening”
This was like a heavy clout and I feel my face drop the smile from my face. SHIT SHIT, parents evening! It was last Wednesday and I forgot it! How could this happen? My first parents evening! Now I vaguely remember reading all the important emails with the attachments that we got in the first week, but what the hell! I didn’t write it down and now we look like negligent fools! This is how I feel at that moment. Deeply ashamed. And mortified. Maybe this sounds a bit extreme but I was trying so hard! I apologise to the teacher and make an excuse about being a scatterbrain because of the baby keeping me up all through the night. This is actually very true. I’ve been up at least 4 times a night for the past week, but it feels like a cop-out, we’ve all had babies that’s why we’re here and looking around I don’t see any other parents in their pyjamas forgetting parents evening.
A is blissfully unaware of my failures, she greets the teacher cheerfully, sits between her 2 new best friends, waves goodbye and turns back to the circle eager to start learning!
Run of the windmill 