Lady Adventure

By chance I stumbled across a few old episodes of Little House on the Prairie on YouTube and spent a happy couple of hours in a simpler age. Those were the days when children almost burst an artery with joy at the prospect of getting a piece of liquorice for their birthday. Oh yes, and Nellie Olsen is every bit as mean and nasty as she was 30 years ago - just in case you were wondering.

The sad thing is that we, as children, derived a significant amount of our LHOP (that's Little House on the Prairie, by the way - apparently that's what the cool fans call it) viewing pleasure from mocking our mother. When LHOP was shown on the Irish television network in recent years, it was shown on Sunday morning. My mother liked to plonk herself down in front of the telly with a bowl of cornflakes and a plate of cold, burnt toast (cold and burnt her preference, not a reflection on her gastronomic skills) to watch Maw and Paw Ingalls battle with the hurricanes, earthquakes, outbreaks of measles, tuberculosis and plague, blizzards, droughts, alien invasions and all manner of disasters that seemed to hit Plum Creek on an almost spookily regular basis. Rather than realise that they'd chosen the most unfortunate - nay, cursed - spot on God's green earth to set up their little homestead, the Ingalls and their fellow townspeople battled a broad spectrum of catastrophes and misfortunes, and there was always - always - a happy ending. Unless it was a two-parter, then you'd have to wait till the following week. In any case, my mother liked to eat her cornflakes and have a cry while Paw Ingalls singlehandedly built an orphanage or Maw Ingalls nursed a foal back to life. I'm quite sure she looked forward to her weekly weep with relish.

You see, part of the series' attraction was the fact that it was shown at a time when my father was still comatose in bed. His reaction to LHOP generally involved a rant about what a stupid, sentimental, soppy heap of nonsense it was (and please note: I have considerably condensed a 30-minute rant, and have also edited it to remove some of his more colourful euphemisms). Unbridled, my father's rant would extend beyond the one-hour episode and we'd be treated to a treatise on the failings of the media world in general. Entertaining and all though it may have been, it certainly spoiled my mother's ability to really enjoy the episode.

Apparently, this was a common problem in Irish homes, because some bright spark in the programming department of our national television stations decided to air LHOP at a time when most Irish fathers were sure to be enjoying their Sunday morning lie-in so mothers all over Ireland could sob into their Rice Krispies with gusto (while their heartless children fell about the place laughing in the background.) It seemed to work because it ran in that slot for years; I'm sure many marriages were saved as a result.

So what's the point of all this, you ask? (But let's be honest, here: you ask that a lot while reading this blog.) Basically I found myself crying into the baking bowl this morning while watching Laura Ingalls give Bunny - her beloved pony - to Nellie Olsen, in exchange for a new stove for Maw. As I filled cupcake cases, I was battling a trembly lip when Paw lost his job at the lumber store and the family were faced with starvation and Certain Death. In the fine Irish tradition of husbandly lie-ins, my gingerbread husband stumbled out of bed at a disgraceful hour, hair a-fuzzed, and found his wife icing cakes and contentedly sniffling.
It was great. I'll have to make it a regular Sunday morning ritual.

At this time of year, I often while away the time spent in the serpentine queues before cash desks thinking about a story that appears in a Christmas reader for our students. Blithely ignoring the woman behind me, who's decided to remove the skin on my shins with her child's pushchair (no, really, misssus, shoving the vehicle in the back of my legs will not make the fifteen people before me magically disappear or even make them move faster), I think of the story of a teacher at an African school who explained the meaning of Christmas and how Christians celebrate - and how they give each other gifts in the Christmas season. Some time after, one of the children turned up at the school with a sea shell, which he presented to the teacher as a Christmas present. The teacher realised that the shell could have only come from the coast, several hours' walk away.
"You didn't have to go so far to get me a gift," the teacher said.
"Long walk part of gift!" the child replied.

This is my zen-mantra during the worst periods of Christmas shopping. While waiting in line for a free counter while the post office workers chat to each other beside the parcel depot, I grin brightly and think, "Long queue part of gift!" When poked in the legs by errant rolls of wrapping paper, I think "Weird bruises part of gift!" When I suppress the urge to smack the bottom of the wally that thought it would be a good idea to bring their red setter puppy on a last-minute Christmas shopping expedition at our city's crowded mall at 4 p.m. on the 21st December, I breathe deeply and think, "Great patience part of gift!" By the same token, when I hold the door open for someone and that person looks me in the face, smiles and says, "Danke schön!" I also think, "Small kindness part of gift!" 
I hope the recipients of my clumsily-wrapped Christmas presents appreciate all the extra intangible bits and pieces that have been wrapped up inside them, along with the gifts themselves.

In any case, I am simultaneously disorganised (72 hours and counting down!) and breathtakingly organised at the same time. First of all - the organisation:

I decided to knit a couple of soap socks for the colleagues that I work most closely with, the ones I see every day. Five or six, I guesstimated. (Pause for laughter.) Twenty socks later, my apartment smells of Yardley's Rose and Lavender soaps, and I can only thank the heavens that my husband has been struck by the near-death experience of a mancold (= do watch this. It will be familiar to many of you), rendering him incapable of smelling anything.

I've also made some yarn-covered pens. This idea is from my sister Emily, who has been doing Trojan work on her blog, coming up with quick and easy gift ideas for every day of Advent. Really: if you're reading this post with cold sweat running down your back, your pulse racing at the thought of all the uncrafted and unbought gifts on your list, have a look at her blog here. The yarn pens are super cute and quick to make (mine are a lot less neat and a lot more woolly than hers).


The disorganisation? No decorations up. No tree bought. No presents wrapped. No washing done, no floors vacuumed, empty fridge. Oopsie.


And how did the soap socks go down at my school? Well, after the astonishment that I'd actually made them myself had died down, and after I'd explained what they were and that, no, you didn't have to actually use them, you could also stick them in your among your bed-linen or use them to scent your drawers, one of my colleagues did a quick tally of the soaps knitted and said, "How many did you make? Have you been knitting non-stop for the last week?"
More or less, I thought. Long knit part of gift!

On Monday afternoon, we dropped the Gingerbread Bros off at the train station and sent them back to Ireland. I won't lie to you, it was an action-packed week: we brunched. We ambled around town and looked at things. William - a talented photographer - snapped pictures of interesting things I don't even notice any more. We watched innumerable episodes of popular sitcoms and quite a few films. I spent an evening, bewildered, in front of a Harry Potter film. I've never read the books, so the plot of the film was entirely lost on me:
"Oh, no! It's the mirabillus crocaeus spell that entranced Romularo in the Cavern of Dark Secrets! Harry, whatever shall we do?"
("What kind of a spell is that? What was the Cavern of Dark Secrets? Who's Romularo? What are they doing with that broom? Why's Alan Rickman dressed like he's going to a funeral? What's going on?")

One disadvantage of being around The Youf (Robert's 23, William's 21) is the sad realisation that Mr Gingerbread and I are getting old. We could've gone to the beer festival, but quite frankly, it was chilly and I'd already put on my slippers and Mr Gingerbread had a sniffle. This outbreak of wussieness was only underlined by the fact that at the grand ol' age of thirty-six, this excites me

Gingerbread hearts! Popcorn! Macaroons! Liquorice laces! Toffee apples! Altogether now: Nom, nom, nom!

 much more than the prospect of having to down one of these:

No, these aren't my flower pots - they're tankards from the local beerfest

Sensing a sorry lack in our general education (and, it was hinted more than once, a dire ignorance of what was Cool and In), Robert and William took it upon themselves to educate us in Popular Youf Culture. Whilst single-handedly updating the waiting world on their statuses via a variety of high-tech iGadgets, the Brother Gingerbread showed Mr Gingerbread and me a heap of YouTube videos to rescue us from our Fuddy-Duddiness. I am now au fait with Rebecca Black, The Lonely Island, Twitter and Angry Birds. In short: I rock once more.
 
On Monday, Mr G and I sat at home in our big, empty house and experienced premature Empty Nest Syndrome. Luckily, Robert had left us a little pile of coins on the coffee table as a memento of their stay.

This mightn't mean much to you -


but it means a lot to us. This is our mediaeval Advent Market - or what will be the mediaeval Advent Market. At the moment it's just a crowd of chain-smoking chappies in blue overalls, hammering the little wooden houses together, but in a matter of days, it'll be a little village full of hairy locals in hemp robes, selling hot chestnuts and wooden swords.

The pre-Christmas period is always jolly nice, but nowhere nicer than in Bavaria. This part of Germany is known for its Christmas gingerbread - yes, really, that's why I chose this name (I've ginger hair, too. A happy coincidence) and its Christmas markets. Nuremberg's Christkindlsmarkt (Christchild's Market) is world famous and almost eye-poppingly picturesque. You could happily guzzle your way from one end of the market to the other: slurping candy-floss, sucking candied ginger, munching toffee apples and swilling mulled wine. And rest assured, dear readers, we do this once a year as a matter of tradition.

Anyway, before I get carried away with a rhapsody of Christmas treats, let me tell you about this week's trauma:
I turned (whisper it) thirty-six. Thirty-SIX. I've spent the last five years recovering from the shock of turning thirty, so it came as quite a surprise when I realised that I was rapidly sliding towards the big four-oh (whisper it) - yes, forty. My pain was eased slightly by the arrival of pretty cards (look at the cards my little sisters made me. Aren't they purdy?)



and the appearance of presents. Obviously, I'd like to think that I'm the kind of person who eschews presents in favour of good deeds (e.g. a donkey donated in my name to a Third World village), but I cannot tell a lie: donkey, yes, and a skein of yarn for me.

No, actually, my attitude towards presents has changed. I've become a rabid re-gifter: despite being surrounded by stuff, I hate it. I don't like all these things. I have very little sentimentality, I don't attach great meaning to very much.  Use it or lose it has become my motto. I don't keep fancy glasses for A Special Occasion, I don't save handmade soap for Sometime in the Future, I don't put expensive wine aside to gather dust. Essentially, my possessions are either Mine (I use them and love them) or On Their Way To Someone Else - and that's good, too. In my peculiar view of the universe, everything has a home and everything has an owner, and the things that are currently resting in my possession might really be destined for someone else who will love them more.

In this spirit, I've tried to re-examine what I gift. For example, I spent yesterday afternoon making my Christmas cards.

I started making my own Christmas cards years ago. I thought it was going to be a one-time thing but it's become a kind of Christmas tradition as well ... along with a growing Christmas card list. A couple of years ago, I ran out of steam after a long afternoon chopping and sticking tiny pieces of paper and affixing intricate little shiny stars, so I gave up and and bought a few Christmas cards for colleagues. They hated them. Well, no, they didn't, but they each made a point of remarking that they really missed my handmade cards - and I realised then that actually the handmadedness was really the gift, not the card. They actually appreciated the effort, the uniqueness and the slight wonkiness of my handmade offerings. So back to the drawing board (desk) I went, armed with my glitter glue and wooden reindeer. They each got two cards that year and a crisis was avoided.

This year, I've even made little parcels with a half-dozen handmade Christmas cards for my favourite friends and colleagues - an Advent present, not a Christmas present. Fingers crossed that they'll like them.

Abbreviations:
American English: DC = double crochet
[British English: TR = treble crochet]
This pattern is in American English terms, the British terms are in [brackets].

Start by chaining 4, then join with a slip stitch.
Chain 3 (counts as the first DC [TR]), do 1 DC [TR] into the ring. *Chain 2, 2 DC [TR], repeat from *four times, then chain 2 and join to the third chain of your first 'fake' DC [TR] - like this:



Add a new colour or continue with the same, starting in a corner gap. In every corner do 1 DC [TR] + chain 2 + 1 DC [TR], then continue with a DC [TR] in every stitch in the previous round :



And around and around and around you go. Here's one I did earlier, using the leftover sock yarn from my SiSoYa hat:

Especially for Monica!

Most of us learned to do the traditional granny square when starting off:



The Babette blanket also uses a solid granny square, a square I use a lot for baby blankets, for example, because little baby fingers won't get caught in the gaps between the stitches.

Abbreviations:
American English: DC = double crochet
[British English: TR = treble crochet]
This pattern is in American English terms, the British terms are in [brackets].

Start by chaining 4, then join with a slip stitch.
Chain 3 (counts as the first DC [TR]), do 2 DC [TR] into the ring. Chain 2, 3 DC [TR], chain 2, 3 DC [TR], chain 2, 3 DC [TR], chain 2 and join to the third chain of your first 'fake' DC [TR] - like this:



Either continue crocheting in the same colour or join a new one.



Chain 3 in a corner gap, then do 1 DC [TR] in each DC [TR] in the previous round, 1 DC [TR] in corner, chain 2, 1 DC [TR] in same corner gap, then continue with 1 DC [TR] in each DC [TR] of the round below, and 1 DC [TR] + chain 2 + 1 DC [TR] in each corner.



Second round done:



When I join the third colour, or continue with the same colour, I like to start in the corners. There are two reasons for this, both practical: (a) the starting chain-3/'fake' DC [TR] is less noticeable in the corner gap, and (b) when you finish your last row, you can leave a long yarn tail, which I later use to whipstitch the squares together.

The pointer shows where the starting chain-3/'fake' DC [TR] has been done in the corner:



After that, you just continue, round by round, till your square is the desired size.

It's finished. At long last!


Laid out on the floor:



The pattern can be purchased here: Babette Blanket.
Normally this pattern requires 17 different colours, but I only worked with eight: black, purple, cerise pink, deep red, bright red, orange, sunshine yellow and a paler yellow. Because I was working with fewer colours, I adjusted the pattern as I went along, so this finished blanket is actually more like a Babette-inspired blanket, rather than a true Babette.

Twittering.
Nowadays it's better known as the compulsive desire to let the world know what you're up to on a minute-to-minute basis, but remember the good ol' days when twittering was the domain of birds, not politicians, popstars and people with a life that's apparently so exciting, they have to chronicle it, blow by blow?

We're in the middle of a massive twitter attack right now because - tada - the migratory birds are back. This, our first spring in our new-old gingerbread house, has brought many surprises - not least the fact that the big tree behind our house is the meeting place for (what seems like) the entire local bird population. We hear them chirping late at night, long after the sun has gone down. In fact, they're still twittering long after midnight. In the darkness!
Yes, honest!

And the first sound we hear in the morning is the sounds of manic twittering at 6 a.m. Do birds ever sleep, we wonder? Do they twitter in shifts? Maybe there's an avaian trade union?

("Okay, lads, we'll take the late shift if you take the early one. I reckon we can keep going till close to one a.m., if we all pull our weight. We'll give the neighbourhood a couple of hours of sleep, then you guys hit 'em with the dawn chorus."
"Right, boss!"
"Sounds good!")


Here are the culprits. It looks slightly grim, doesn't it? There are Hitchcockian echoes, I'm sure. If I were paranoid, I'd go so far as to suspect that they were plotting something.

Cripes. What a week.
We'd only been in Scotland for 45 minutes, when our Fearless Group Leader slipped in a well-known British supermarket, fell over and broke her kneecap, leaving the three remaining teachers in charge of 40-plus students. We gathered our nerves and left her in the care of capable Scottish medics and on we went to Inverness.

Scotland is lovely. It looks very like Ireland in places. The people look like Irish people: hardy, red-cheeked people inadequately dressed for the inclement weather (well, so were our German students, but they'd just underestimated how darned chilly the Atlantic winds can be, bless their little cotton socks. You have to experience them to believe them.) The Scots also share our Celtic easy-going attitude to ... well, life, really. (If you've been living in Germany for a while, you become accustomed to a very straightforward way of dealing with things: if you say you'll be somewhere, you're there at the appointed time and place.) But, hey, we adapted and rolled with the punches and enjoyed a lovely week oop North:

Eilean Donan Castle

One of hundreds of lovely lochs

Loch Ness - don't get excited, that's a boat, not a monster.

Yes, there were standing stones! Yes, I went up and had a grope! No, I was not transported back in time. Sadface.

Beach at Skara Brae, on Orkney

Unfortunately, though, I missed the wedding of my sister-in-law to her fiancé. I also missed several fantastic parties in its celebration. If you want to celebrate, find a group of Germans. Honestly. These people invented Kirchweihe - beer festivals to celebrate the consecrations of new churches (our local Kirchweih is a week-long carnival that has been going strong for 254 years. The church itself is long gone, by the way.) Sister-in-law and new husband had a two-day, three-party wedding. Hats off to the newly-weds!

Yesterday, my 8-month-old bit me. This is the toothmark:

He looked up at me with his toothy smile, proud as punch - "I have teeth! Just in case you hadn't noticed!" I shrieked in surprise, then turned him away from me so I could laugh into my sleeve. Just another example of what a bad parent I am: I'm sure there's some Theory out there that would enlighten me as to how I could use this as a Teaching Moment. The friend who was with me at the time reappeared from behind the door where she'd hidden herself to laugh and said: "Bite him back!"
The next time I will.

See, I feel a little remiss about my son's non-appearance on this blog, because everyone else who blogs with children spends a lot more time talking about them than I do. They frequently share their birth stories and outline the various Theories they ascribe to. So I think it's time for me to do the same.

My birth story
"Do you have a birth plan?" asked the midwife.
"Yes," I said. " 'Get him out!'"
"Okay," she said.
Eighteen hours later, I got him out. It was a bit weird: more people saw my nethers in that one day than had in my entire life hithertofore. The pain was unpleasant but it was finite, so I dealt with it.
That was it, really. No biggie, thank goodness. Hope the next one - if there's ever a next one - will be as straightforward.

My Parenting Skillz

Sleeping
So we took the baby home and put him in the nursing bed. The first night he mewled in the darkness and waved his little fists about and he looked so lost that I pulled him into bed with us. I figured that people had been doing it for millenia, so it couldn't be too bad. I made him his own space, with his own little blanket, and he slept there till he was happy to sleep in his cot by himself, five months later.

Eating
Having been given a bombastic set of chesticles, I decided to make them pay their way. I breastfed the baby whenever he felt hungry because I thought the poor little bugger was too young to fake hunger. At five months, he started grabbing our food and regularly enjoyed a stolen croissant for breakfast, so we gave him some solids. Which he pegged into himself at lightning speed. One day, at six months, he unlatched himself from my bosom, fake-gagged, and refused to ever breastfeed again. I closed the doors of the dairy, happily consigned my ugly maternity bras to the back of the closet and returned to underwear that held all my bits in place.

Entertaining
From the beginning onwards, he wanted to be in the middle of everything, and this desire was somewhat handicapped by my not having more than two hands. So I bought an excellent baby carrier from a German company called Storchenwiege and plopped him in there. I could go around doing stuff and he could be on board interfering in the stuff I was doing.

All good so far, right? Not a single parenting book or forum did I read. I just did what had to be done when it had to be done and if it didn't work, we tried something else. However, I've been reliably informed that I wasn't just being sensible or pragmatic, I was actually practising Co-Sleeping, Breastfeeding On Demand, Baby-Led Weaning, Baby Carrying and maybe even Attachment Parenting! Yay, me!

 And, even more exciting: were I looking for confirmation about the above, reams of paper have been sacrificed in the writing of tomes on each of them. Entire forums (fora?) are dedicated to mothers talking to each other about all the Capitalised Things they are doing to benefit their offspring. From remarks made by other mothers on the subject of the above, I am led to believe that you are entitled to be a little bit smug about how well you are parenting if there's an academic paper online somewhere to back up your decisions.

Who needs expensive toys when you can sit your child in a laundry basket in front of the washing machine?

Best of all, one should read it and quote it to other mothers ("You stopped breastfeeding when the baby was six months old? Umm, well, I breastfed till Ivor was nearly 25 months. After all, the World Health Organisation's paper on breastfeeding recommends you do it till the baby is at least two. Would you like me to send you the link to the paper?")

But here's the thing, readers - and brace yourselves for some salty language:
I am frikken knackered.
Like, exhausted.
I have very little time for myself and the time I do have, I don't want to spend it online with a bunch of wimmin going on about how well they're parenting their children, when they probably actually should be offline doing it in real life instead. I don't have time to read books about how to develop my child's creative urges or how women in Borneo have been carrying their babies in shawls for 60,000 years and no Bornean child ends up in teenage therapy. I'm happy if some of the food that enters his facial airspace actually goes into his mouth. I'm ecstatic about a poop. As long as he's laughing, and I'm laughing, and we both get a few hours' sleep every night - well, I'm delighted.

My Parenting Goal is to raise a decent human being. And not mess him up too much. And still be talking to him when he's 30. That's about it. I'm not quite sure how I'm going to achieve that yet - or, if indeed, I will at all - but I hope I can manage it with a bit of common sense and good humour. If I ever have free time in the next eighteen years - which looks unlikely - I'll borrow a few books or go online and be informed about what I'm doing wrong.

In the meantime, I'll muddle on. And if the little stinker bites me again, so help me, I'll bite him back.