PATTERN: Owls, Penguins and Robins

This pattern comes as a free PDF. It's basically one very simple pattern that can be used to make little owls, penguins or robins. You can put them on a keychain or attach a thread to hang them from a Christmas tree, or simply make them as a little gift for someone special. Feel free to make them for gifts or to sell at craft fairs, but don't re-sell the pattern or claim it as your own work. That would be very naughty!
The pattern can be downloaded HERE (links to Ravelry.com)

P.S. Since apologies to any ornithologists who may read this for my blatant disregard of the anatomical differences between these three wingèd creatures.

Autumn

 
Being a grandparent allows you to behave like the worst parent ever. As we passed the local frozen yoghurt café, my two-year-old said, "Ithe kweme, please! Please, an ithe kweme!"
His winsome lisping for ice cream on a cold evening in the middle of October could only be ignored by the hardest of hearts (= his parents') but his grandparents - my visiting father and mother - are just suckers for his big, blue eyes.
"Ah, Lord above!" they cried, "Would you not get the child some ice cream?"
as though we'd been denying him life-saving medicine, rather than unseasonal frozen yoghurt.

The look of triumph on a dirty face.

Autumn is well and truly here, and some days it feels like we skipped ahead to winter already. Let me show you what we get up to on our daily walks ... but be warned: I'm going to show you some pictures of scary mushrooms, but they'll come at the end of the post and I'll warn you in advance.

Acorn collecting - and every acorn has to have a hat.

Earnest faces in unusual places.

What better way to advertise a wine merchant's than with a big bunch of golden grapes?

While father and son explore the playground...

... baby sleeps and mama knits.

"Hello, cat!" ("Get lost, boychild. I disdain to answer your grovelling for I am a FELINE!"
My poor child has a lot to learn about cats, I fear.)

 Now: the scary mushrooms. Click away if you have a fear of fungi.

Why am I so grimly fascinated by these?

I hope you're having sunny autumn days, wherever you are!

My Mother

At the tender age of nineteen, my mother fell pregnant. 'Fell' being the operative word: she kind of tripped over and by the end of that same year, was married and had a child (me). You might think she and my father had learned their lesson, vis à vis important, life-changing decisions regarding family planning, mightn't you? Well, no, they didn't. She fell pregnant again, then she slipped into pregnancy, careened into pregnancy, stumbled into pregnancy - okay, no need to get the thesaurus out to tell you she had eight more children after me. Why didn't she stop, I often wondered? Life as an only child often seemed like a beautiful dream, one where I had a bedroom of my own and a Barbie doll's house, instead of sharing a room with younger sisters, while Barbie lived in a shoebox. My mother maintains that, having attained perfection with their first child, she and my father felt compelled to try to recreate this miracle eight subsequent times. And failed.

Of course, she was cackling with laughter when she said that, so take it with a pinch of salt.

My mother turns A Certain Age today, a round birthday. I can't tell you her age, that would be rude, but you might be able to guess it. She's a tour de force, my mother. She's involved in various committees and boards and groups in our small town, and she claims she's giving them all up ... but I've long suspected that she just likes being in the middle of it all, bossing people around and chairing meetings. I wanted to write a moving tribute to her, but found it difficult to sum up her essence in a few paragraphs. Thus, I decided to tell you about her using some key words.

These are the things she loves:
1. Tea
Ma drinks a lot of tea. Like, a lot of tea. As in: somewhere around ten litres daily (three or four cups an hour ... yup, that's about right). I think her blood is a dun shade of brown, her liver pickled in tannins. When she enters the house, she shouts "That kettle had better be on!" before the door has a chance to fall shut behind her. If someone suffers a trauma, my mother alleviates the situation by shoving a mug under their nose, along with homoeopathic remedies. (But more about them anon.)

2. Tissues
Mother to so many children, a multitude of tissue paper was always needed to keep her and her offspring reasonably clean. She stashes them everywhere: in her pockets, up her sleeves, down her bra. When she removes her jumper due to The Heat (coming to that later as well), a shower of crumpled tissues is released into the atmosphere like snow. If you want to track her down through the house, just look for the tissues.

3. Cigarettes
She's fond of a cig, my mother. Yes, she's tried to give up but 'giving up' just meant that she smoked in the chicken coop instead of the sitting room. Watching my mother puffing under the pear tree in torrential rain throwing desultory scraps at bewildered hens became too much for the family to bear, so she gave up the pretence and smoked inside again.

4. Downton Abbey
I don't quite get this one. I know Downton has a massive appeal that transcends cultural borders, but it's not quite my cup of tea. It's just a soap opera, but with nicer frocks. My mother likes to watch it because of the nice frocks, of course, but also because everyone is jolly nice to each other in a sexless (sorry: s-e-x-less) way and difficult issues are resolved quickly and to everyone's satisfaction, usually by topping one of the characters. When a lead met his doom a couple of seasons ago, my mother - like millions of viewers all over the globe - was aghast. But why? I wondered. Downton Abbey is cursed: pose any kind of difficulty to Mrs and Mrs Downton and their lockjawed offspring, and you'll be killed off! Unwanted girlfriends, wayward daughters, drunken exes, unhappy sons-in-law: the Doomton Abbey will strike you a fatal blow and everyone's grief will be dealt with by the time the village fete takes place, two episodes on.

5. Homeopathy
My mother practises homoeopathy from the cupboard over the deep fat fryer. If anything ails you, she'll produce a small bottle and try to foist pills upon you. You might wave them away, you might point out that the expiry date was 2009, you might not know whether you feel better in hot or cold weather (upon which the success of the remedy hinges), it's often easier to take the pills and pretend they work, regardless of whether or not they do.

Some of the things she dislikes:
1. The Heat
My parents' house is freezing. It's an old stone farmhouse and it's draughty and cold. When you tell my parents this, they are deeply offended.
"This house is perfectly warm!" thunders my father. Not that he's bad-tempered or anything, but he has to thunder so you can hear him through his thermal vest, three t-shirts, woolly jumper and fleece-lined waistcoat. If - God forbid!!!!! - the temperatures in a room should creep towards 17°C or 18°C, panic sets in and my mother goes about flinging windows open
"We'll die of The Heat!" she says, wiping her brow with a tissue she's dug out of her bra.
She has a morbid fear of The Heat. One of her worst nightmares is being at someone's home where they might have - clutch your pearls, readers - central heating on and double-glazed windows. The Heat! Think of The Heat!

Luckily, though, there is something that combats The Heat, namely A Healthy Draught. This is the icy wind that blows down the stair case and whistles under the door, ensuring that the sitting room never gets properly warm. This, my dears, is The Healthy Draught that stops us all from ending up with all kinds of Fevers, Agues, the Humours and all kinds of other Dickensian illnesses that could only be cured by a trip to the cupboard over the deep fat fryer.

2. Strange Food
Strange Food is any kind of food that was not available in Ireland in the 1950s. This covers about 90% of the foodstuff available in Ireland in the 2010s. But this is not just my mother - all of her sisters are the same. When forced to eat anything Foreign - say, pizza or curry - they smile their rigid smiles and raise the fork to their face ... but don't actually put it in. At the last moment, disgust causes them to reflexively turn their faces away. And I'm not joking: I've actually sat at tables and watched my mother and my aunts jab their faces with the silverware, rather than put a spoon of chilli con carne in their mouths.
Oh, go on, then: I'll admit it. It's a funny sight. It's worth dishing up a chicken korma at a family occasion, just to see them struggle with their compulsive politeness and genteel repulsion. Basically my mother would never survive any kind of torture: if someone wanted to get some state secrets out of her, all they'd need to do is force-feed her spaghetti alla carbonara.


3. Alcohol
She doesn't drink. And never has. My mother never touches a drop. She's occasionally been put in a position where taking a sip might be required of her (handed a champagne flute at someone's wedding, for example) but she simply jabs her cheek with it or jams it into her forehead, before hiding it on a table and shedding a layer of outer clothing to combat The Heat.

4. Books with s-e-x
My ma is an avid reader, but a choosy one. Nothing ruins A Nice Book like a steamy scene. Given a choice, she'd like a nice historical novel, where bosoms are encased firmly behind a corset and throbbing members never see the light of day. She has never quite understood the appeal of Fifty Shades of Grey: reading a book about people prancing around in the nip, spanking each other and having s-e-x would be enough to have her go through several tissues at once.

5. Marilyn Monroe
We're going to leave aside the scurrilous rumour that The Blond One had shenanigans with John F. Kennedy - no, we're not even going to go there - and focus on the fact that she is, in the words of my mother, a terrible twit. She can't understand how any man with a screed of sense could possibly fancy her.
(My father thinks she's gorgeous.)

Is that my mother? I think that might give you a sense of her essence. But in actual fact, I can't sum up what she means to me or to my family.
She's the heart that beats at our centre, that's all.
And that's all there is to say.

Owls and Penguins On Their Way

Ah, charity.
Don't get me wrong. Big charities are the ones with the clout, the ones that can make changes, lobby governments, make a significant difference. But I live in the centre of a small city and I am accosted daily by toothily attractive young people out collecting direct debit details (no, they don't shake a can under your nose any more, they want a permanent recurring donation direct from your bank account), handing out shiny literature and unwanted compliments. So while I could never say a bad word about UNICEF or the Red Cross, I sometimes also like to make a donation to a charity with the feeling that I am directly contributing to something, that my money or my effort goes directly to someone in need, and does not get used in part to pay an hourly wage to collectors, printing costs, advertising, directors' salaries ... or anything else the big charities need to continue to function and make their difference.

One of my friends runs a Christmas bazaar to collect money for our local children's clinic. Helped by an army of elderly ladies, they spend the year knitting and crocheting and jam-making for their stall during the holiday season. The money they make is used to buy equipment for the local clinic or to fly children in from crisis areas for needed operations. The medical staff at the clinic will operate for free if the ladies can fly the patients and their parents to Germany. So this is what they do: a handful of pensioners spend the Advent Saturdays in the freezing cold, selling chutneys and scarves and candles, and euro by euro they make enough money to make a small difference in a global sense, but a huge difference to a small group of individuals. That's good, too.

Last year I made a stack of owl key rings and they sold out within an hour. This year, I've started again. I plan to make thirty of them - and more if my fingers don't fall off. And I'm finally going to post the pattern for you! (just give me a day or two...) While some people feel a bit odd about the results of their patterns being sold (which, by the way, is apparently not illegal under US copyright law, so there you go - you learn something new every day), I have no problem with you using this pattern to make gifts for the holiday season, to give to or sell for charity - and if you make a few bob for yourself as a result of making them ... well, good for you. Be warned, though, the little blighters have a mind of their own. When I set up this photo, they were all facing upwards, I swear. But the one in the bottom lefthand corner is trying to escape and the pink one in the second row is pulling his neighbour's feathers. Spooky!

Caught in the act. Can't leave them alone for a second.

PATTERN: The Margaret Square

 This free pattern is for an afghan square that I named the Margaret square: Daisy was a popular nickname for girls called Margaret, but this square seemed a little bit more demure and less whimsical than the name Daisy merited, so it goes by the more formal Margaret instead. Using a 5 mm (H) hook, it creates a 15 cm / 6 inch square. Using a worsted weight yarn and a larger hook, this square would measure close to eight inches.

The pattern can be downloaded as a PDF from the Ravelry pattern store for free (you don't have to be a member of this site to download the PDF.) download now

Me and the Y Chromosome

I have a husband and two sons. This greatly influences my crafting endeavors, primarily because of all the (cough) "help":

"This is MY street!"
"No, this is MY crochet."
"NO, this is my STREET!"

"Wheeeeee!"

Craft basket hemmed in by vehicles. I waded through a sea of Matchbox cars to take this photo.

Thanks, love.

Surrounded as I am by cars, tractors, diggers, front-loaders, trucks, trains, helicopters and planes, it's very nice to make things that are ... more feminine. I recently knit my niece a jumper - more about that in another post, but here's a picture for now, because we all need a bit of colour:

In my defence, she wanted "a jumper in rainbow colours" 

 ... and that blanket in the craft basket? It's a new, free pattern that will follow before the weekend is out!

Tutorial: Lo-So Crochet Tote Bag

While rooting through one of the large bags of yarn that I keep hidden stored in the bedroom cupboard, I found a bag-within-the-bag that is - cringe - my Bag of Shame. Therein I found my little stash of started projects that had been abandoned in favour of something more exciting. Including a bunch of neat little cotton squares, bordered and stacked and ready to go:

They were supposed to be a cushion cover but upon looking at them again, I thought they might make a nice bag ... but the sewing! Bleurgh: sewing a lining for a cotton bag is just so much hassle.

Then I had a brainwave: instead of sewing a lining for a bag, why not sew a bag for the lining? And the Low Sew (Lo-So!) crochet tote bag was born. I wish it were a No-Sew (No-So :-) ) bag, but I haven't figured that one out yet.  

You need - 

- crochet squares in a pattern of your choice
- a linen shopping bag (even one that has a printed logo: the logo will be covered by your crochet work. I bought plain linen bags on Amazon for 99c.)
- a darning needle
- a sharp sewing needle
- strong sewing thread in a colour close to the colour of the bag

 
I simply sewed the squares together (but you can crochet them together or use the join-as-you-go method) and placed them on the bag to determine how much bigger the bag was: 

Toy car not necessary, but apparently helpful

You want your panel to be slightly bigger than the linen bag, so I crocheted two rows of double crochet at the top and bottom, and one row of half-double crochet on each side. I did this on the front (pic on the left) and back (right) panel.

I then turned them face to face and sewed them together on three sides, leaving the top open. I turned the crochet bag/cover right-side out, and slipped the linen bag inside.

Taking a sewing needle and strong sewing thread (I simply doubled mine), I sewed the top of the crocheted bag to the top  of the linen bag, so that the linen bag became the lining of the crochet bag! Sneaky, eh?

Please look closely at amazing sewing technique and do not look at unmanicured nails. Thank you.

To stop the linen bag from wrinkling up inside its crochet cover, I simply turned the entire thing inside-out again and stitched the crochet bag and the linen lining together at the corners - just a few strong stitches to anchor it, that's all.

The last thing I did was to crochet a small strap to close it at the top and add a button. That's it. Easy-peasy!

 

 

Weight Now

My true love.

I love cake.
I really do. A few years ago I met an old friend and over the course of our chat, he told me that his abiding memories of yours truly were of me asleep and eating cake. At this point, let me just say that I used to sleep a lot. I can't count the number of concerts, parties and films I slept through. I slept on epic bus rides across Europe and down Asia. I could sleep anywhere, at any time, in any position - a bit like a cat. And as I haven't had a good night's sleep in nearly three years, I do not regret a single snore. As for the cake eating ... well, let's just say that he astutely summed up the essence of my twenties.

Of course, all that sleeping and eating of cake eventually catches up with you and, meanly, it's often not in your twenties but in the decades thereafter. I've had two children in nineteen months and it's left me two clothing and one shoe size bigger. Now, I don't really believe that size matters. I think a person who feels comfortable in their skin exudes a certain kind of radiance: I've known very svelte women who wear their size like an itchy hairshirt; I've known large women - very large women - who manage to look jaw-droppingly fan.tas.tic in a way I can only envy because they wear their size like an expensive coat.

See, it took me a long time to align Outside Me with Inside Me, so finding Outside Me out of kilter with Inside Me again is a bit disconcerting. I don't carry too much extra weight well, I don't look like a curvy goddess, I tend to look like a strudel-scoffing Hausfrau (which, I suppose, I am.) More alarmingly, I never realised that childbirth can make your feet stretch - and they don't go back!!! - so I not only have a wardrobe full of clothes that don't fit, I also have half-a-dozen pairs of beloved pick-me-up shoes (hello high-heels! Toots to my suede boots!) that I can't even get my feet into. Sartorially, I feel like an ugly step-sister.

I caught sight of myself in a mirror three weeks ago and realised how ill-at-ease I look. Two days later (after a day of eating chocolate and banoffee pie - seriously, I'm not a martyr) I started a diet. I don't want to be skinny, I don't even want to be thin: I want to be comfortable. No, more than that: I want to be powerful. I want to be full of energy and dynamism ... preferably in that nice skirt I bought five winters ago.

I'd never dieted before, so some of the things I learned about myself were a little shocking, namely:

1. My idea of a portion size and a nutritionist's idea of a portion are entirely different. Fancy that! I, apparently, like to eat a Brontosaurus' portion of pasta, rather than a human's.
2. It takes about twenty minutes for my sated feeling to kick in. Until it does, I feel hungry and continue to eat, but I'm actually not. I think my stomach and my brain need counselling because they don't communicate very well.
3. I love sugar, but it hates me. It really does and I don't know why, because I have loved it dearly since early childhood. It makes me hyper, gives me headaches, encourages cravings and it has cost me at least one second-hand car in dentist's bills.

Three weeks later, I'm 4 kilograms / about 9 lbs lighter. I'd like to lose the same amount again. At which point, I'm going to put on my nice winter skirt, squeeze my feet into my high-heeled boots ... and eat half a banoffee pie. 

Rainbows

 

 A friend asked me to make blankets for a friend of hers, who's expecting twins. I was told that the mother-to-be wanted "rainbow blankets". Rainbow-coloured blankets, I asked, or blankets with rainbows? It's always hard to guess what will appeal to someone you haven't ever met, so I made this pair of blankets in the hope that she'll like them.

  

World Breastfeeding Week

My next post will actually be about crocheting. And it will be soon. I promise. Pinky swear.

This photo has made me realise that my child has extraordinarily large ears.

The first week of August was World Breastfeeding Week, which - in blogging terms - I missed because I was busy breastfeeding. My son had an inkling of the week that was in it and decided to attach himself to me like Superglue. Not that I would've done much to celebrate, to be honest, not least because this year's slogan was 'Breastfeeding: A Winning Goal - For Life!'. I really don't know what to do with a statement like that; it leaves me feeling a bit bewildered and slightly edgy, as in did-I-just-see-a-mouse-out-of-the-corner-of-my-eye edgy or what-do-you-mean-you-just-put-your-tarantula-down-for-a-second-but-now-it's-gone? edgy. I don't know why. The slogan is a bit meaningless, really. Or it might be the excitable exclamation mark.

But on matters of punctuation I digress.

Just after the birth of my second son, another new mother rang me for breastfeeding advice. I am possibly the worst person to ring for breastfeeding advice because I am one of the (I suspect) many women who breastfeed because they can and they feel they should, but don't derive the astronomical pleasure that Good Mummies get out of it. What do I mean by that? Well, in the context of WBW, many intrepid bloggers pounded the keyboard to showcase breastfeeding in a positive light, bearing in mind that encouraging new mothers to bare the nipple is often a battle. To my astonishment, I discovered other mothers referring to breastfeeding as "a delight", or "delicious" or likening it to the high achieved by smoking marijuana. For me, it often feels like someone is chewing my nipple, which is essentially what it is. I don't feel delicious or blissed out on a natural high, although I sometimes feel very sleepy - and not in a good way. I have occasionally passed out on the sofa in a deep-phase micro-sleep, awakening seconds later to the infant hanging onto the nipple by his gums and the toddler drawing tractors on the carpet.

Of course, it doesn't help that I (have) had circulatory problems and vasospasms (don't ask, they're horrible. Imagine someone sucking glass splinters out through your nipples. There: that's all you need to know. Thankfully, though, this has subsided and my extremities are behaving themselves again.) Added to this is the sad fact that my children frequently do/did not latch on to the breast in that gentle Madonna-and-Child way: often it's like trying to get a feral cat to suck your bosoms. Apparently you can be hungry, impatient and incredibly interested in your surroundings at the same time and the way one expresses this is with flailing limbs, scratchy nails and twisting your mother's chesticles about so you can suck AND watch your older brother jumping off the sofa at the same time.

So when this other mother rang me for advice, I dolled out all the practical bits: drink non-alcoholic beer for milkflow. Put cabbage leaves in your bra for sore nipples. Feed on demand to regulate milk production.
"Can I ask you one more thing?" she said.
Fire away, I replied.
"Did you actually like breastfeeding?"
You mean, did I like smelling of sour milk and cabbage, with scratched breasts and inflamed nipples? Did I like sitting underneath a snoozy baby for hours at a time, looking at all the housework that needed to be done and holding in a need to pee in case he woke up again? No, of course not. It's horrible. There are times when I feel like my body is a dairy and little else. I'm sick of milk stains on my clothes, either through leaky nipples or regurgitated by an over-excited baby (because his sofa-diving older brother is just too exciting for his digestion). I want to wear an underwire bra again! And I'm aware I'm breaking a huge taboo here, because you're supposed to breastfeed and LOVE IT. You're supposed to feel CONNECTED to your childer in a way a plastic bottle and latex teat could never bond you. If you don't breastfeed or if you belong to the quiet minority that does and isn't exactly a fan, you are somehow an INSUFFICIENT MOTHER. And this other mother just ... didn't like it. It was painful, it made her emotional and tense, the baby cried with too much milk or because he wasn't getting enough, and her midwife told her that bottle-feeding her child when she could breastfeed him was just lazy parenting. I, apparently, was the only breastfeeding mother who told her that it quite often, literally, sucked and it nearly made her cry in relief to hear it.

Truth be told, I don't actually mind breastfeeding. I don't love it, no. I won't shed a tear when my youngest weans. But I don't hate it either, or I wouldn't be doing it. Let's take all the positives about mother+baby's health benefits as a given and look at the other (superficial) pluses: it's immensely practical. You can breastfeed anywhere you feel comfortable, and plenty of places you don't feel comfortable, too! (I know, because I've had to breastfeed everywhere but would much rather do it in my rocking chair at home.) It allows you to eat A LOT after birth (this is important. I'm not joking: I left the delivery room with a raging appetite and it hasn't abated). And - most importantly - you don't have to get up in the middle of the night to make bottles. If La Leche League wanted to persuade teenage mothers to breastfeed, they'd only have to arrange for someone to wake teenage mother-to-be with a recording of an angry baby, drag them out of their deep slumber and make them shuffle down to the kitchen in the bitter cold of a winter night to make a bottle at 2 a.m. Then again at 4 a.m. And maybe at 6 a.m. for the laugh. Voilà: problem solved. Next year's World Breastfeeding Week's slogan would be 'Breastfeeding: You won't know how much you love it until you realise you don't have to get out of your bed to do it!' Even with an exclamation mark, I think it has a broad appeal.

And there are other pluses as well, the ones that recompense you for your angry boobs: my child, for example, has started laughing at my nipples. He falls asleep, mid-feed, and wakes up to chuckle at my chest. It's one of motherhood's highlights and I don't mind occasionally smelling like rotting cheese just to see that sight. You are forced to abandon dirty dishes and/or social media and/or shopping lists to sit down with your little one and look at his fluffy head and wriggling ears as he chomps away determinedly at your breasts. Nature plugs your baby in to make you turn life down and sit still for a while. Because having your baby this close is a finite experience and, who knows? Once it's over, I might even miss it.

Cabbage leaves and all.

Stuck

I'm a language teacher, so I've been following my older son's language learning process avidly. (He's twenty months. I was recently asked by a 15-year-old why people refer to small children's age in months - I guess it's because every month brings a huge jump forward in terms of ability, so you have to be accurate when you're boasting at the playground, or whatever.) Watching a child learn language is really interesting and all the more so if more than one language is being learned. With enormous efficiency, children learn the words that are most valuable and important to them: for example, young John has learned that 'Please' ('Peas', actually, but we're happy with that) gets results, but 'thank you' is an irrelevant chore that only features after he's got what he wants. Pleases are abundant, thank yous are sparse. But we persevere.

He has an extensive vocabulary and often shocks us with what he knows. "Silly Mama," he said to his truck the other day, "silly Mama." I don't think he believes the truck gave birth to him, but he was obviously practising his new vocabulary for a more opportune moment. He knows how to ask for most of the things he likes to eat, in both languages, so if "Cake, peas!" fails, "Kuuuuuchen!" might work its magic. One of the most useful and used words in his repertoire is 'stuck', which reflects shockingly badly on our parenting skills as it's used a LOT. He tends to get stuck quite a bit (toddlers don't really know how big they are) and he has a lot of toys that are remarkably clumsy. Tom, for example.

This is Tom. He's a helicopter pilot on one of his favourite television shows, Fireman Sam (no, he doesn't watch television. What kind of bad parents do you think we are? He watches it on my iPad. Haha. Yes, I know, but you try to change a newborn's dirty nappy while your toddler attempts to climb up your IKEA bookshelf - he needs to be anchored somewhere safe for ten minutes and Sam kindly does the job.) In any case, Tom and his helicopter are his most beloved toys; sadly, Tom is a bit of an eejit and tends to get stuck on a daily basis.

For a start, he has difficulty with the concept of doors:

 

He seems to nosedive into the laundry basket a lot. Very disturbing - my smalls might be in there.  

 

He requires a lot of tissues:

 

 

But, on the plus side, has proven to be a very capable babysitter. He hasn't become stuck here yet, and we dread the thought that he might.

 

 

Football

 

Happy 4th July, American readers! And belated Happy Canada Day, Canadian readers! Your official leaders had the good sense to place national holidays in the middle of summer, unlike the Germans (3rd October) or the Irish (17th March - I mean, come on. What are the chances of a dry day in Ireland, much less a dry day in March?)

Over here, we're in the midst of the World Cup, the football World Cup - or soccer, as people call it in places where football involves men in very tight trousers and Dynasty-style shoulder pads. This evening, Germany qualified for the quarter finals and a spontaneous street party erupted outside my house. The noise of cheery revellers aside, I'm very glad to see it: Germany has an uneasy relationship with displays of national pride. Their history makes it difficult for many Germans to discern an appropriate amount of patriotism: overt displays of love for the Vaterland often make people embarrassed or uneasy. Like a person who can only show emotion after a couple of drinks, tearful flag-waving often only comes after a victory in one of the big football championships.

And it's taken very seriously over here. Aside from the fact that people have flags hanging from their houses - which is probably utterly unremarkable to a lot of American readers, but extraordinarily rare here -

- news channels  report daily on the players' constitutions. Yesterday, we were breathlessly informed that seven of the players - yes, seven - were suffering from colds. Goodness! The big media groups are given a daily update on the team's schedules, thus we all know that they start training at nine and have a break after lunch for Kaffee und Kuchen. Yes, they might be training in tropical Brazil. but that's no reason not to stop for Schwarzwälderkirschtorte and Donauwelle at 3.30 in the afternoon. 

Were that not exciting enough, an octopus called Regina was appointed the official World Cup oracle.  I don't know what qualified this particular octopus to forecast match outcomes - I wasn't aware of octopuses' footballing talent in general, though having eight tentacles does suggest a certain advantage - but the sight of her flailing around her aquarium warrants a good 20-minute report on many TV channels and a terrible number of newspaper columns. (She predicted a draw for the Germany/USA match, by the way, which might have attributed to the rise of a new fortune-telling star, a pig - as yet unnamed - which is apparently having good luck picking out the winners. We wait and hope.)

  

 

 Worst of all, however, are the bandwagon fans, of whom I am the leader. You know who we are - you might even be one yourself. I know nothing about football, neither the tight-trousered nor the baggy-shorted variety. I never watch a football match from one end of the year to another, except when there's some big tournament, like the European Championships or the World Cup - and luckily they only come every four years, because 90 minutes of football at a time is exhausting. All the more so, because I have to support Germany, my adopted home, and Ireland, my real home. Being a supporter of the Irish team is just pure heartbreak: we seldom qualify, we're better known for our ability to sing than to play football. Our fans are universally loved, but our football team seldom qualifies. But when the Germans play, I mutate into the kind of smart-alecking back-seat football player (mashing idioms there, for the laugh) that must make anyone who knows anything about football rolls their eyes.

And I have this from my mother, who - on the rare occasions when Ireland do play - turns into a raging fury: "Come on! COME ON! What the heck are you doing? PASS THE BALL! PASS THE BALL! For the love of God, that was a foul! Is the referee blind?" (alarmingly, in real life, there's a lot of bad language, too. From my mother. Good job it's only every four years.) She knows as much about football as I do, we could fill the back of a postage stamp with our combined knowledge. 

All of which I will proudly demonstrate when shouting at the television next .. um  ... weekend, when Germany plays ... eh, another team. Oh, okay, I promise I'll know a bit more by then. In the next few days, though, I'll make important-sounding noises about the team's form and how well their opponents ... eh, ... France, yes, of course, France - played.

Ahem.

Birth and Other Business

 

Birth.
I don't want to insult anyone's deity or anything, but I happen to believe that there are a few basic design flaws in the female body, vis à vis procreation. For starters, pythons manage to dislocate their bottom jaws to accommodate the eating of much larger prey - wouldn't it be spiffy if women could pop their pelvis open a few inches to facilitate the exit of their very large offspring through their nether regions? This would be quite wonderful because - and allow me to put this delicately - giving birth is inconveniently painful.

Such is the inconvenient pain, that one has brief moments of lucidity when one can ponder the ludicrousness of the situation. At one point I looked down at what was happening below my navel and at the assembled crowd of strangers looking expectantly at parts of me that normally never feel the breeze and wondered what on earth I was doing. Five total strangers, to be exact. And, of course, the sixth hovering by the door - who was that? Oh, that was my Dignity. I dumped that before I crossed the threshold of the delivery room, it turned out that I didn't need it at all. It sat outside and drank coffee with Care, who occasionally made an appearance in the delivery room to mock me:
 "Do you know how gruesome you look right now?"
"I don't, Care."
"Do you wonder what all of these people are thinking about you at this moment?"
"Seriously? I don't, Care."
"And what about that noise you just made - do you know you just screamed?"
"Honestly, I DON'T, CARE!"
The pair of them probably twittered updates to Self Control and Modesty, who didn't come anywhere near the building.

To be sure, there are women who have orgasmic contractions and feel empowered by the experience: good for them. Really: well done. I can't talk myself into loving childbirth, I really hate it - and that's despite the fact that I, apparently, am really good at it. I've had two uncomplicated, epidural-free natural births with no injuries to my person of any kind and was walking around, without a care in the world, within an hour of each delivery. Midwives keep telling me that I should have more babies. I laugh my hollow laugh and keep telling them that they're nuts: I've beaten the odds twice, I'm not going to push my luck. Having a healthy child is like winning the lottery. Having a healthy child without great difficulty or lasting distress is a bonus.

See, I hate the word blessed - and it's an irrational hatred. It makes me feel like you've been picked out by Someone Upstairs for being extra special, a reward for your all-round goodiness. (I'm also not keen on it because, to my mind, its opposite is cursed - which is just as random and lightning-bolt-struck as blessed. I know - but I just can't help not liking it.) I prefer the more down-to-earth lucky: I know that my good fortune is random, not a pay-out for my being a better person than anyone else, I appreciate every minute of it and recognise that many other people are much less fortunate. I am extremely appreciative of my two sons and my husband, our good health, our togetherness.
I hope it lasts.
I take nothing for granted.

 

Barbecues, DIY and Divorce

A couple of weeks ago, my husband and I went to the DIY store on a rare, but cherished, child-free shopping trip. I had a short list of things to buy and, mindful of the fact that our toddler was probably in the process of wrecking our kindly babysitter's house, I set about gathering my bits and pieces on one of the over-sized trolleys.

In the gardening section, on my way to purchase any plants that are to be found in the Easy Care section, we passed a display of barbecues. Now, I have a rather nice balcony and a husband with pyromaniac tendencies, so the purchase of a barbecue seemed (at the time) like a no-brainer.
"You go and pick out a barbecue," I said to my husband, "I'll get a few pots of herbs and meet you back here."

Oh, readers, I am so naive. My husband is the worst shopper ever. He's a ditherer, and any household purchase is treated with the same level of earnest marathon dithering, regardless of what it is. He has spent the same amount of time vacillating between new toasters as he has between new cars. It's exhausting. It's exhausting because it always follows the same pattern and I allow myself to become embroiled in it every single time. When I came back from the plants section twenty minutes later on this Saturday evening, my trolley loaded down with a Scarborough-Fair-like selection of parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme, my husband was in the midst of Phase One, a look of concentration on his face. I whipped out the phone and sent the babysitter a text: we were going to be delayed.

Phase One: Establish That All the Goods Are Of Shoddy Quality
Phase One involves going up to every article on display, shaking/pulling/poking it roughly till it trembles and wobbles, then declaring that these articles are of inferior quality and will not last a single month. They were made by clowns. They'll be on the rubbish heap within the year.
"They will if you keep bashing them about like that!" I shriek, as he violently shakes the barbecue to reproduce the hurricane conditions he seems to think we will be using it in.
Reluctantly, he stops, looking disappointed that the little €29.99 hasn't fallen apart and proved his point.

Phase Two: Rhetorical Traps
Having systematically mauled all of the barbecues on display, he stops at one.
"I think we should probably go for one of these round barbecues with a lid. This one looks good," he says. Finally. A decision has been made, praise the Lord!
"Grand," say I. "They don't take up much space and a lid is handy."
"The thing is, you could burn your fingers on the lid. Do you really think it's safe?"
"Well, barbecues by their very nature tend to be hot. But didn't you want a lid for storage purposes? And I thought you said you wanted a round barbecue because they don't take up much space?"
"But aren't they a bit small?" he wonders sadly. "Do you think they'd be big enough for us? I don't know (shakes barbecue violently) ... this seems a bit on the small side, don't you think?"
At this point you might have noticed that I, apparently, am the one who wanted a round barbecue with a lid, this one specifically. Readers, I do not give a flying fig about barbecues, round or otherwise. I would agree with him on anything, just to get the heck out of there fast. But he outsmarts me every time by making me agree with him and then disagreeing with me. It's dizzying and costs a lot more energy than I care to expend.

Phase Three: Philosophical Klugscheißen with Shop Assistants
In German, klug means smart or clever. Scheißen, as you might guess, means, um, pooping. Together they mean something similar to smartalecking. At some point, my husband will be approached by a bored shop assistant, launching the third and final phases of the shopping expedition: Competitive Smartalecking with a Layer of Philosophical Meandering.

Let me tell you that, by this point, I will have said, clearly and concisely, that I want to go home at least four times - as in: "Please make your mind up. I would like to leave in the next ten minutes." However, overcome by the plethora of shoddy, second-rate barbecues, my requests are disregarded. I have no other option (well, no other option that's any fun) but to resort to passive aggression. When the shop assistant arrives, I heave my pregnant self off and begin a slow perambulation around the store, waiting for Phase Three to finish.

The first time I wandered past my husband and the shop assistant on this particular Saturday, they were trying to figure out which barbecue is most likely to withstand extreme weather conditions and not burn fingers. The second time I puff-puff-puffed past the duo (I am nine months pregnant you see, there's a lot of huffing and puffing involved), they were bemoaning the downfall of German manufacturing and listing the shortcomings of the barbecues made in China. Third time around, they had long since left the realm of reality and were fantasizing about the perfect barbecue, painting pictures in the air of a grill set-up that could survive a tornado, flash-flooding or a blizzard, be easily storable yet kind to sensitive fingertips. I lowered my pregnant bulk on to a stack of charcoal sacks and glared at my husband evilly till he returned to earth.

"Pick - one - out!" I hissed. " I don't care which one. I don't care which shape. I don't care what price. Pick one out in the next five minutes or I will clock you with this pot of thyme and leave you unconscious among the charcoal."
He picked one out - quickly, after all - and hauled me up off the display. At this point I was hot and tired, my feet hurt, my plants were wilting. He, on the other hand, was exhilarated by the thrill of his purchase and on the high best known to bargain hunters and coupon users.

As we drove home, our car jammed with plant pots and the barbecue, it started to rain. And it has more or less rained since then. The barbecue hasn't even been unpacked yet: it sits in its box, looking gloomy on our balcony. But never mind: my husband has decided we need a new sideboard! A shopping trip is eminent.
Readers, I can't wait.

Where Did You Go, Gingerbread Lady?

Nowhere.
Nowhere exciting, that is. I hung around Exhaustionville for a bit, then I moved on to Pregnancy Grumptown and finally took up residence in Denial. It's been a busy time.

I'm now nine months pregnant and three days overdue. I've reached the stage where people greet me with "Oh, no!" or "Are you still here?" My 19-month-old brought me his football the other day and tried to stuff it up his jumper, saying "Big belly! Big belly!" Yes, son, I know.

But aside from the fact that I'm in a limbo of waiting and am living like someone under house arrest (because husband and concerned friends feel the need to accompany me everywhere, lest my waters should break in line at the bank or next to the frozen foods at the supermarket), I'm doing well and I hope you are, too. Your lovely comments in the past few months have been dearly appreciated and I plan to get myself back on track soon, baby or no.

Never Again

When I was making this blanket, I started crocheting little colourful squares to use up bits and pieces of yarn that were left over. I began to accumulate a lot of squares. And a lot more. And even more.

So I started to sew them together. And at some point, I had a larg-ish blanket that needed to either be made smaller and turned into a baby blanket, or made larger and turned into an adult-sized blanket. Why take the easy way out, you ask? Exactly - just make more squares.

When it was finally finished, I was happy to swap it for ... a rocking chair. The giver of the rocking chair wanted to buy it off me, but how do you put a price on a blanket made up of over a hundred little squares, each with five colour changes, all of that end-weaving and sewing? In monetary terms, you just can't. But a rocking chair is a fair deal.

My assistant.

 "What's the name of this pattern?" a non-crafting friend asks.
"Never again," I say. "It's called 'Never Again'. Or just plain old granny squares, if you prefer."