Once, Twice, Three Times a Baby

In a frantic bid to rid myself of Bloggers Block, I am posting this photo of three photos:

We found them over the weekend by the method by which most things are found in the Tinhouse, i.e., we were looking for something else. The three pictures were together because we had intended putting them into a frame years ago, but never got round to it.

The pictures, in order, are Tinson1, Tinson2 and Tingirl, and each picture was taken, in the same pose on the same armchair, on the day on which each baby was six months old. When Jo asks why I don’t show my kids my blog, it’s because I occasionally do things like this to them.

(Brief digression: just as I was typing that sentence, the guy on Sky Sports News was announcing that Everton’s striker Jo has been dropped to the bench for tonight’s match).

And that’s really all there is to say about the photo.  The really eagle-eyed among you might notice that Tinson2 has a photo of Tinson1 on the table beside him, and experienced parents among you will know that our babies did not always look that happy.

Any of you in the mood to be critical of our parenting might look at the size of Tinson2 and conclude that we fed him on a diet of Big Macs and lard. All I can say in our defence is that he didn’t stay that shape, and indeed now is so thin that I think he’s about the same weight as he was in that picture.   

So,that’s it. Nothing else to say today.

If I don’t think of something soon, I’m going to post pictures of their fridge drawings.

And you don’t want to see a six-month old’s drawing of a fridge, do you?

I’m Weawwy Sowwy

Jo’s lovely post about her son’s baby words has reminded me of an incident which I had pushed deep into the darkest corner of my memory, since it is unlikely ever to win me Parent of the Year, and indeed is more likely to have my children taken away from me by Social Workers.

When Tinson2 was a toddler he used to replace both ‘R’s and ‘L’s with ‘W’s. We used to tell ourselves that he’d grow out of it, which he did, but in the back of our mind was always the thought that Jonathan Ross’s parents had probably told themselves exactly the same thing.

Anyway, I was reading a book with Tinson2 one evening – one with cartoon-like drawings of animals. “What’s that?” he’d say. “That’s a cow,” I’d reply. “Cow,” he’d say. “What’s that?” “That’s a rabbit.” “Wabbit.” And so on.

Eventually we came to a picture of a reddish furry creature.

“What’s that?”

“That’s a squirrel.”

“Squiwwooww.”

We had to wipe the spittle off a surprisingly large area of his face.

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“And how is that bad parenting?”, I hear you ask.

Well (sigh)…

It was actually a picture of a fox.

I just wanted to hear him say ’squirrel’.

I am an evil man.

Boy Zone

We’ve been minding our two nieces, aged 12 and 9, for the last two weeks while Mrs Tin’s sister was in Oz (no, I mean Australia, I’m not suggesting that she’s the Wicked Witch of the West. Honestly). Anyway, she’s coming home this weekend, so Mrs Tin has taken the nieces down home to Sligo (which, now I come to think of it, is the West). Tingirl has gone with them, and they’re going to stay for a few days, so, like the attendance at a Star Trek convention, the Tinhouse is currently one-hundred-percent male.

So I’m back house-husbanding again. Again I’m discovering that objects that we think are inanimate are actually mischievious bastards with a vicious sense of humour. When I approach the sitting room to collect crockery for the dishwasher one cup will be delegated the task of hiding behind a chair, and when I go to the kitchen it will then climb back onto the centre of the coffee-table to stare accusingly at me when I come back in. (And even as I’m typing this I’ve just noticed a knife on the kitchen table that I’m typing at, though I collected everything up about ten minutes ago). Sometimes I swear I can hear giggling from the dishwasher.

Clouds too play hide and seek, rushing to glower blackly overhead whenever they hear me open the back door with a pile of washing, and then vanishing again as soon as I decide not to leave the clothes out.

In general I’ve a more laid-back approach than last April, when Mrs Tin went to her cousin’s wedding in Barcelona. Then the kids were at school, & I’d to make sure they got up in time, had the right books and clean uniforms, and were fed a comforting and nutritious meal when they came home. In other words, every appliance in the kitchen (washing machine, cooker, fire extinguisher) was on at the same time, all the time.

Now it’s the summer, the Tinsons get up ridiculously late, and then vanish either to their friends’ houses or their rooms. And since there are no girls in the house, there’s no real point in making a big effort with the cooking, since the Tinsons would eat lino if I put it in front of them, as long as it came with chips.

In other words, the pizza shop is going to make a fortune.

I Don’t Think So

Tinson2’s friend was here yesterday, and at one stage as I walked through the living-room they were on the computer. Out of the corner of my eye I caught sight of the word in the Google search-box and got all the way to the kitchen before my brain, which had been thumping frantically on the inside of my forehead with it’s fist, finally got me to listen to what it was trying to tell me. I walked back to the living-room.

“Why are you looking up Sky-Diving?” I asked.

“We want to see how old you have to be before you can do it”, said Tinson2.

“Ah crap, it says you have to be eighteen,” said Tinson2’s Friend. “Wait though, it says you can do it if you’re sixteen as long as you have parental permission.”

“Great,” said Tinson2, “only a year & a half to go (they’re 14 & a bit).

“I think you’ll find,” I said, “that the most important part of what TS2’sF just said is not the word ’sixteen’, but rather the two words ‘parental permission’.”

As this sank in they became crestfallen so quickly that I could actually see their crests falling. Then I saw a thought jump into both their heads so clearly that it was as if I could actually see a light-bulb turn on above them.

“Listen,” I said, “I want you both to promise me something. If you know somewhere where you can get really good fake ID, I want you to promise me you’ll just use it to go drinking.”

Sometimes parenting is just about accepting the lesser of two evils.

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Just after I wrote this I went off on a blog-tour, and found that LaughyKate had written this.

Weird.

Tour de France

I did watch the Italy-Ireland match last night, but by the time the players left the field at the final whistle I was already in bed. This was because I’ d to get up at 1.45 this morning to drive Tinson2 to his school, so he could go on his school tour to Paris.

I should point out here the meeting time was 3 a.m, and that his school is ten minutes drive away, so with either of the other two I could have had an extra half-hour’s sleep, but we allowed the additional 30 minutes to get Tinson2 awake.

Years ago Tinson1 described him as “the Indestructible Sleeper”. On numerous Christmas mornings Tinson1 and Tingirl have stood patiently waiting to go and see what bounty Santa might have left while we tried to wake their brother.  Often we would think we’d succeeded, in that his eyes would open & he’d reply, but as soon as we’d turn he’d flop back onto his pillow, and would later have no recollection of the event.

Anyway, early this morning we listened while his alarm went on and on, then went and got him up ourselves. We got him sorted, Mrs Tin said tearful goodbyes, and I drove to him meet the rest of his class, then stood in the dark watching as the two coaches headed off towards the airport.

As they left I was reminded of my own big school tour, to the Lake District in England. The year was, staggeringly, 1971 (not only did we not have the Euro, we didn’t even have the Decimal Currency that preceeded it. We used LSD, though not in the same way that Jimi Hendrix and Van Morrison were doing at the time).

It shows what a tremendous impact a school tour has on a young mind that I still have distinct memories of the trip. I remember, and this is not nostalgia talking, that the weather was fabulous. I remember that the old wooden Menai Bridge that connected Anglesey Island to mainland Wales had burned down, so we’d to sail not to Holyhead but to the cargo port of Heysham, and I was astonished at its size and the size of the ships it contained.

I also, rather embarrassingly, remember that we stopped off in cafe somewhere, and someone pointed out that the toilet door said “Men and Women”. Immediately the whole horde of us, from our boys-only school, rushed through the door. To our disappointment, one we got inside there were two further doors, marked “Men” and “Women”, though God knows what exactly we’d been hoping for. The Tinkids have always gone to co-ed school, and it now seems so natural and right.

And, most of all, I remember that several of the class bought water-pistols and had a running battle along the main street of one of the little villages, and that a guy called McGonigle (another legacy of boys-only schools, we were all referred to by our surnames, and I actually never knew the first names of some members of the class) turned while running, fired over his shoulder, then ran straight into a pole, breaking his nose.

Sadly this is not available on U-Tube, because (a) the video camera was unheard of and (b) none of guys who set up U-Tube had yet been born. I still remember it, however, and still giggle, if only at the memory of the look of absolute astonishment on his face as he toppled backwards.

I hope Tinson2 and his lot have a great time. Their teachers have organised a terrific itinerary for them. They’ll remember the next four days forever.

Don’t Rain On My Parade

Last year Mrs Tin walked in the Greystones St Patrick’s Day Parade, with the new Educate Together School.

For the three years before that Tingirl and I were in it with Tingirl’s baseball club.

So yesterday was to be the first time in five years that no member of the Tinfamily was in a Parade.

And it would have been, if I hadn’t had to drive Tinson2 to Wicklow town, and decided to save time by driving through Newtownmountkennedy (sorry, LK, that’s the longest name we’ve got).

I didn’t know that Newtown has its own Parade. I do now. For anyone who was watching it, Tinson2 and I were the ones driving in the opposite direction to all the other entrants.

In the car with steam coming out of its radiator.

I wonder if we won anything – Best Entry Depicting the State of the Economy, perhaps.

It’s a Hard Knock Life, For Us

Tinson2’s class are performing their school musical this Friday. Tinson2 doesn’t have a large part, he’s just part of the chorus, but still we have to go.

It’s Annie.

When people talk about the pain of giving birth to children, it’s nights like Friday that they have in mind.

Mrs Tin has a large desk diary where she keeps track of the meetings, matches, parties etc., that people in our house are expected at. For Friday she has written “Tinson2’s play”, and underneath it Tinson2 has written “it’s gonna be savage”.

How right he is.

Doggone (and Back)

Tinson2 and a friend were in Kilcoole yesterday evening waiting for the bus home. As they had time to spare before it was due they went into Centra to buy something un-nutritious and full of e-numbers. A dog that had been near the bus stop followed them in, and followed them round the shop wherever they went.

At the counter Tinson2 noticed a missing dog poster, complete with photograph. He looked from dog to poster and back, and it was definitely the same dog. He rang the number on the poster, and about ten  minutes later an old guy (Tinson2’s words, which means the guy was aged anywhere between ninety and forty-two) arrived. The dog raced straight over to him, and the delighted owner said that he had been missing for nine days.

That’s it. No moral, no real point, it’s just a nice story with a happy ending. Though they did miss their bus.

It reminds me of a day when I was walking along St Stephens Green. Ronan Keating had just founded the Marie Keating Foundation in memory of his late mother, and near where Planet Hollywood used to be there was a huge billboard with a picture of the pair of them and a plea to help the Foundation. I looked up at this and when I looked back down Ronan Keating was walking past me.

Small world.

The West’s Awake

Spent the weekend in Spiddal in the Gaeltacht visiting Tinson2.

First, a short moan (I’ve been called that before). The Galway road is about fifteen years behind the Sligo road, in terms of development. While the new Moate by-pass looks about ten minutes away from completion, the road from there to Galway is a nightmare of single-lane, double-white-line dreariness where, if one person wants to drive at 51 miles per hour, that’s what we’ll all do. The people of the West deserve better.

The Cruiscín Lán

For the last two years, when we went to visit Tinson1, we’ve gone down on the actual Saturday morning and come back that evening. This year we decided to go down on Friday, visit T2 on Saturday and stay over again that night. As soon as we decided that I rang An Crúiscín Lán in Spiddal, since I so much wanted to stay there.

I still remember it from family holidays, although they were probably nearly forty years ago. It wasn’t a hotel then, so we stayed in a B&B somewhere nearby, but there would be traditional Irish music, the food was fabulous, and I still have a vivid picture of moonlight playing across the water of Galway Bay out the back window. The trad music is gone now, but the food is still terrific, and the staff are charming and friendly.

And not just there. On each of the three years now we’ve gone for lunch to Paraicín’s, which is a couple of miles on the Galway side of Spiddal, and again the food there is great, and the view is lovely. There is a large shop just outside the town called Standún, like an Avoca or a Kilkenny design, which is visited by tour buses and which sells all the tweed, báinín, Newbridge & Guinness related stuff that you’d expect, but at a reasonable price that you wouldn’t.

In Spiddal itself there is a little craft centre, with shops selling candles, celtic jewellery, weavings and things

The craft centre

like that. One of the shops, An Spailpín Fánach, sells T-Shirts & hoodies with humourous slogans in Irish, and a new T-shirt this year says “Tabhair dom an cáca milis” on the front, and “Ciúnas, bóthar, cailín, bainne” on the back.

In all of these shops, and in the supermarket, and by the bean an tí, we were made welcome. The weather, while not sunny, was warm, and you found yourself really hoping that, even at this late stage, we get some sort of a summer, as these people deserve to do really well.

Tinson2, by the way, is tanned and happy. He has made new friends, tried new foods and new pursuits, and his Irish has improved enormously.

The people who run these schools, and the women who turn over their homes to the children, are providing a wonderful service, not only to our native language, but also to the youth of our country.

Go raibh maith agaibh go léir.

Boy meets Gael(tacht)

Another milestone this week. Tinson2 has gone to the Gaeltacht for 3 weeks.

Tinson2 is thirteen. While any parent will love and defend their children to the ends of the earth, most of us know what they are really like deep down. And my son is the sweetest person on this planet.

He was the grumpiest, angriest baby of the three of them. It used to bother me that he didn’t smile when you appeared in front of his cot the way the eldest had, but simply held his hands up, demanding to picked up so he could get on with his busy day of crying, turning his face away from food and sticking out his lower lip. Like his elder brother he made no effort to walk, but would rocket along the floor (we have wooden floors) on his butt. Indeed, he was even better than his brother at it, as he would use one hand as a paddle and sort of flip himself along, with his bum practically coming off the floor as he galumphed along. He did try to walk one day. He got up, toddled one or two steps, then obviously thought to himself “sod this for a game of pokemon, I can move twice as fast on my arse” and went back to the backside shuffle. It was only when we were teaching his younger sister to walk, getting her to stumble along between two of us kneeling about five feet apart, that he got up and joined in, walking beside her & encouraging her.

Because by then the miracle had already occurred. He had become his sister’s great mate. To say we were terrified of what his reaction to the new baby would be was putting it mildly. He was just 18 months old, surly, often angry, and all the worst horror stories of children trying to hurt younger siblings were in our heads as my wife sat at home with our new arrival while I collected him from my sister-in-law’s. I got home and carried him into the sitting room where the moses basket (God, I couldn’t remember there what the thing was called, how quickly you forget) held centre stage. “This is your new baby sister Susan” we said. He knelt beside the basket and put his hand gently on the blanket. “Soo-soo”, he said, with a big smile on his face. I still have the photos (oh, I wish I knew enough about all this stuff to be able to publish them) of the whole thing – him in his big outdoor one piece coat-thingy, hair all sweaty because of the heat in the room, with a huge grin on his face.

And from that second on they were like twins – absolutely inseparable. I’ve already spoken about how Tinson1 became an only child again, and it’s as good as true.

Tinson2 did have middle child syndrome, though, which I realised even before I knew such a thing was a recognised problem. Older child knew more than he did, so there was no point trying to compete on knowledge, and younger child was more cute, so there was no point trying to be babyish. He developed into a child almost desperate to do eveything right, having seemingly decided that if he couldn’t be the clever child or the adorable child, he could at least be the good child. Every time he did anything wrong, like spill a drink, he would dissolve into floods of tears and say “I’m sorry” over and over again. I sure people who saw us when we were out must have thought that we beat him regularly for mistakes at home.

So this little bundle of fears and worries, who spent all his time with a far younger playmate, headed off to school. As if things weren’t bad enough for him, his April birthday meant that it was borderline as to which year he would start, and by starting him in the earlier of the two possible years he was one of the youngest in the class, continuously going to friends’ sixth birthday parties before he himself had his fifth. Occasionally he would get teased about how babyish he was, and how quick to get upset, and would arrive home in tears.

The great thing, though, is that he did have friends. His time spent with his younger sister had by now given him a kind, caring nature that couldn’t help but shine through. (I still remember how we met a barking dog on the street in Kusadasi, and how he immediately stood in front of his sister.) He was warm, helpful, considerate and, by now, very funny, and quickly established a group of close little friends. He still worried a lot about what people thought of him, and still hated to look babyish, but this grew out of him in time. One evening at the age of about ten he announced that he had to get a photograph of himself for some poster they were putting up at school. He went through a load of old pictures and eventually found one of him at the age of about two, with a baseball hat backwards on his head, and those thick baby socks on his feet. “I’ll have this one,” he said.

He finished national school and has just completed his first year in secondary. Again, he seemed so much younger and smaller than all the others on the first day. None of his friends from the BSP were going to the same school, yet in no time at all he was part of a new little group of closely knit friends. They all went to their first disco last month, so again the house stinks of Lynx (his elder brother has graduated to Lacoste), but it was more a rite of passage thing I think than any serious attempt at getting off with women (I may be the most naive parent on the planet for all I know). He had astounded us all, a family for whom changing a light-bulb counts as DIY, by taking wood-work and metalwork, and our house now contains a key-hook, a letter-rack, a tortoise, a toothbrush holder, a wooden ship, a minature sliothar and a metal shovel that he has made over the course of the year. He bought a second-hand Scalextric set at a school fair and wired it up himself. He dug out an old Nintendo 64 that his brother used to have and worked out how to fix it. I sometimes thinks he was accidently switched at birth.

And now the Gaeltacht. Interestingly, he didn’t want to go to the one his brother has gone to for the last three years, but once his brother said he wasn’t going (he has a girlfriend now) he was quite happy to go there. Again, he seemed too young, sitting all on his own on the coach with his head barely visible at the window, but apparently the older ones were discussing whether the eldest son would be coming. “Are you talking about Tinson 1?” he piped up, “because I’m his brother.”

He seems to have no fears anymore. He is sweet, kind, thoughtful and almost always good-tempered. He has a very dry, and very funny, sense of humour.

He’s just great.