Ugh

I just remembered why I don't like school time and it has to do with my alarm clock going off at an obscenely early hour every day. Which is why I have not been especially profound recently.

Also why I got into the habit of frumpiness, it takes precious seconds to check if your clothes match and your socks have no holes in them, seconds which I could more profitably spend blissfully snoring.

What am I doing living somewhere I have to wear socks in August, anyway?

Brown bear, brown bear, what do you see?

I went to the eye doctor today. It appears that my vision has, for the first time in my life that I can recall, improved.

Or that my contacts have been too strong for about a year, hard to tell.

I went because I was having trouble seeing small print near my eyes. To be specific, I couldn't read the card in Trivial Pursuit without holding it at arm's length. I thought it was time to be nearsighted and farsighted at the same time which meant reading glasses or bifocals. Many eye doctors have promised that this is in my future. *

After much testing and being sent from one person to another, it appears that my prescription of -7.5 was too strong. I wear a -6.75 apparently.

The doc (whom I ended up with after apparently puzzling several opticians and their automated instruments) He asked me if it was usually in the evening, and I agreed that it was always in the evening. He says that's because my poor little eyes have been working very hard all day to focus and in the evening they are just slap worn out. Or some such a thing. I can indeed read tiny print close up, he gave me a card to be sure.

He gave me a pair of the new ones to try for a couple of weeks to see how they work in different light and so on and sent me on my way.

If I live long enough do you think I'll get to 20/20?

*Of course many eye doctors have also promised that I would be entirely blind in short order, so what the hell do they know?

Help

I found myself in a perfume store today unable to decide between Cool Water and Echo.

Help, I think I'm going down for the third time. Somebody call Gloria Steinem on the emergency phone.

I want you all to know that I think all of this is purely opressive and intended to distract women en masse from important matters by causing them to think that it matters whether they buy Cool Water or Echo.

Or that by doing so they are making some kind of statement about their person- hood.

Or that by doing so they will be magically altered from thir real boring selves to some kind of delicious and exotic creature.

Fuck that, I am already a delicious and exotic creature and do not require the house of Davidoff to be it.

So whadda ya think, Cool Water or Echo?

Splash. Splash.

Happy Dance

I still habitually think of Douwe as starting kindie, even though they don't have kindie here. They have group one and two, which are the rough equivalent of prek and k in the same classroom.

Play school is optional and is generally 2 half days a week from about age 2 until your 4th birthday, whereupon they have a big party and pack you off to group one, whenever your birthday might be. It seems to me it must be a very abrupt transition, from 2 half days a week to 5 full days. However, I am told that this is handled by the fact that children are not required to go to school until they are 5. So in that in between year, parents can send them as often or as seldom as they like.

I was all set to send Daan to the play school associated with the Montessori, as he is already registered to start there in January when he turns 4. Then it occcurred to me (duh) that this meant a new school and new teachers and new kids for September to December, then another new school in January, which seems to me rather a lot of school change. So now I have 2 kids in 2 school in opposite directions in a car free kind of culture. So we bought one of those carts that hangs on the back of the bike, which the kids think is the coolest thing ever. I suppose I will get good legs out of it and become a truly Hot Mama for the first time in my life. But don't hold your breath.

Daan was overjoyed to go back to school, though he walked around with the eyes-as-big-as saucers thing for about five minutes, until his teacher noticed this and got out the toy cars and the racetrack carpet. The it was "so long mom, I'm busy, see you later". This is why he loves her, she knows just what to do and does it sort of unobtrusively. It is also one of the reasons I kept him there for the duration.

Daan is rather sad that Rowan and Max are not there, they turned 4 over the summer and went on to group one. He has asked me to invite Rowan in particular over to play. If I can find his mother, I suppose I will, I like Rowan, too. Rowan is a real boy, a bouncer, so this will require either an outdoor venue or putting up all the breakable objects.

ANd speaking of holding your breath, Douwe cleared the first day hurdle without clipping the fence. According to his teacher he pretty much did what all the other kids did, anyway, and she didn't have any problems. She has no idea she just witnessed a miracle.

However, here's the big news (which is very small news indeed, so I count on your indulgence of my momminess, lol). Douwe has been for an entire year highly resistant to drawing and writing. He made about 10 drawings the entire year last school year, despite much (really very much. quite a lot really) effort on the part of his teachers. He made tiny little marks on the paper and then tore them up.

This made no sense to me, as I have literally boxes of his drawings from school in the Ststes prior to the age of 4, and he has been able to write his name for nearly 2 years now. But there you are.

So yesterday his teacher said to me, "I thought you said he didn't like to draw?" and showed me the drawing he made. At drawing time, with the other kids apparently. Okay, it was not a Picasso; Sort of a Mondrian really, with red crossed lines on white paper. But then he came home and just before dinner got out the paints himself and sat down at the kitchen table and painted a picture of Oma. With a head and ears and hair and socks and shoes and the whole shebang. Then he made a picture of himself with "Douwe" written underneath. While I stood around and pretended this was a completely ordinary thing for him to do.

The picture of himself has a great big smile, which takes up two thirds of the paper and goes right off his face. So I'd say it is going well thus far.

Ancient Chinese Secret

As some of you know, my anxiety levels are peaking about back to school, as another year like last one with Douwe and I am going to pack it in and home school the child and then go to jail probably because homeschooling is very far beyond not approved of here.

While of course pretending not to be at all concerned about the subject in order to slide under the finely tuned Mommy Radar possessed by my children.

So because I am an eminently sensible and stable person I of course consulted the I Ching on the matter and here is what it said:

The problems are from within. You need a change of attitude regarding those around you. Avoid suffering through altruistic behavior. To cultivate yourself, you must contemplate from a broader prospective. Narrow and superficial views do not generate a person of public responsibility.

Okay, which one of you has tampered with my yarrow sticks for crying out loud?

Did I miss something or is this a very fancy and suitably enigmatic way of saying, "get over yourself"?

Back to School

It must be time to go back to school, because kermis is in town. I would say the carnival, because that's what it is, but then since we also have Carnaval just before Lent, I wouldn't want to confuse anybody. But anyway, this is the summer travelling carnival which is in many ways the same all over the western world. Tilt-a-whirls and knock down the cans and cotton candy and throw the ball through the hoop and merry go rounds and a fun house and so on. It began Friday at 7 pm and goes on until Wednesday.

It is always, I am told, the weekend before and the first week of school in this town. That's how you know it is time to go to school in these parts, kermis is in town. There are worse ways, I imagine. I have it on good authority that people save money the entire year for kermis, sort of like a Christmas Club account. Which would be sensible, as you find that a lot of money goes out in "6 rides for 3 euros" repeated for every ride you pass. Oh, well, Kerstmis, whoops, sorry, Kermis comes but once a year.

Kermis is set up right through the center of town, not on its outskirts which is the setup I am more familiar with in the States. If you need a loaf of bread after 2 pm, your shopping trip is enhanced by the music of the carousel and the squeals of little children trying to grab the bouncing ball. The ball is suspended over a moving ride on a pulley which is bounced around by the carnival workers -- if you grab the ball and hold it you win another ride for free. The Dutch version of the brass ring, I think. The workers are very good at preventing the same child getting it more than once.

The hip tweens and early teens spend all their time in the fun house -- in fact, you can buy a card which gets you unlimited entree for 5 hours at a time and most of them have one. The bad boys and girls, the ones in the denimn jackets and multiple piercings who tell their parents they are going "out" (oh, how I longed to do that as a teen; no chance I am afraid, I think my mother would have pulled me back into the house by my long and silky hair had I tried it) spend all their time working out their adolescent angst on the bumper cars. Luckily for my own offspring, who have not yet attained that age or attitude, there is a seperate bumper cars ride for little kids.

There is no Tunnel of Love, unless you count the benches outside the bumper cars, lol. There are indeed very few sedate rides of any kind; this kermis runs heavily to the "stuff that spins around and goes upside down very fast while making lots of noise" kind of ride. Many rides have a musical sound track, and the people who work the rides can slow them down or speed them up and often do so in synchronization with the music, which is a new experience for me.

A week ago at a fair in a nearby town, my elder child had to work up the courage to go on an attraction where you jump on a trampoline with bungee cords attached to a belt at your waist which enables you to jump very high and turn flips and so on. By the end of today there were no further misty eyed mommy moments watching him work up his courage I am afraid. He is now all in and gung ho for all things which go very fast in circles and bounce a lot -- the approximate turning point is in the photo above, actually.

By the end of that ride, Nel was terrified, Paul was terrified (becasue it turns out Douwe is barely over the weight limit for the ride and so kept sort of tending upward with the centrifugal force, a fact I am very glad I did not know while watching the ride), and Douwe was game for the next "spin me around until I nearly barf" ride. I shall have to save my tristesse for Daan, who wants to go on the barf rides but is not nearly heavy enough to keep him in the seat. He did, however, enjoy the haunted house ride which sent Douwe bolting for the exit -- which Daan pointed out repeatedly.

My, that sibling thing starts early, does it not?

They went in the Hall of Mirrors with their father yesterday, which is a sort of mirror maze with one way glass so that onlookers can stand outside and watch you be hopelessly lost. This is good, becasue Nel took them in today, and well, Nel's sense of direction is indeed better than my lost-in-a-paper-bag one, but not by much. So they went in in this order: Nel, Daan, Douwe. They came out in this order: Douwe, Daan, Nel.

And I even made the ultimate sacrifice and went on one of the make-you-barf rides with Douwe. Which is how I knew they coordinate with the music. I got to be spun around and raised up and down and otherwise moved around at high rates of speed in three dimensions to the sound of dance music today and all I have to say is this: he enjoyed it very much, but I should have held off on eating until afterwards.

Resembling a female person

I have bought shoes. I have bought pants, which pants have flared bottoms and this beady shit all over the right lower leg from knee to ankle. Which makes them very difficult to sit in, as I always sit with my right leg curled up under me. * So I can't do that in them and have to sit like an adult person. And a shirt with a hood (in Dutch it is a capuchon, which is much more hip, don't you think?) and even a denimn jacket which is very closely fitted and has lapels out to there and very long french cuffs and really cries out to be worn over a really fluffy skirt, maybe even a petticoat if I can find one. I replaced my makeup, all of which was older than my eldest child. I even painted my freaking nails, and not a french manicure but a frosted dark rose color. And I took Nel with me shopping, which means none of it cost that much (Nel has a terrible allergy to paying retail and will go to almost any lengths to avoid it).

It's all hip, and it's mostly colorful. Not through any fault of mine but because I now wear a girls' size in clothing and they do not apparently make girls' clothes in frumpy. At least not where Nel shops. Alas.

I suppose, after about six years, it is high time I began to resemble a female person in some way. I may even actually wear the shirt my sister gave me, though it has a neckline with goes right down to my navel and not, let's face it, very much else. And I have no, er, line to put in it. Which brought Nel to the subject of my undergarments which are a scandal I am given to understand except for one dark blue set (thank you, sister #3 ) and one purple set (thank you, sister # 1).

To prevent my sisters' bursting out with tell-all stories of my unrelieved frumpiness, may I just say that I was never a clothes horse, okay? I miss uniforms, to tell you the truth, at least all I had to worry about was whether they were clean. I enjoyed the uniform aspect of being a lawyer. (The good news is, tailored in in this fall, so I get to wear all my suit jackets again, lol). However, even I must admit that beginning with the cycle of preganant, nursing, pregnant, nursing, chasing Very Dirty Boys I have exceeded even myself in frumpiness.

I am unrelievedly lazy in matters of appearance. No matter what I do, I shall never hold a tiny candle to the roaring bonfires that are my lovely sisters, so I have thus far settled for Cleans Up Nicely. ** Well, I do clean up nicely. I am presentable, I rarely actually embarrass anyone. But you know, I mostly Just Don't Care.

However, I just want to say to my Very Fashionable Sisters (and you know who you are) that I have for the past six days actually worn at least one completely pointless accessory item every single day (apart from my wedding ring, I mean). Sometimes even more than one. I even tied a bloody scarf around my neck which irritated me no end but did look very nice, so I did not impatiently yank it off and stick it in my pocket after 20 minutes as usual, lol. And I have worn at least some form of entirely purposeless artificial pigmentation on my face every single day as well. ***

So there. I shall next go out and buy a pair of purple suede boots with fringe on them and revive the Stevie Nicks look. Oh, maybe not, I am really too short to pull off all that hangly dangly stuff. And also too impatient.

* Because I am too short for a regular size chair and my feet do not reach the ground in them, which problem was not improved by moving to the Land of the Giants, that's why.

**I trust you ladies will remember this comment come Christmas.

*** And to my worry wart father I would like to add that this was in addition to the sunscreen, which I really do actually wear due to our shared genetic legacy of a certain absence of natural pigmentation, lol

The camera

I am pleased to report that the camera was found and was not at the bottom of the harbor despite certain dire predictions. It was found still ensconced in its waterproof and childproof bag (which was in another incarnation the insulated bag they gave me at the hospital to carry expressed breast milk around in, it makes an ideal camera bag) in, as The Much Beloved said, "the last, the very last place I looked,".

Well, duh. That's where everything is.

Pech

"Pech" is an excellent Dutch word, it has a satisfying sound when you say it. It means, oh, something like "bad luck". Not deadful, looming bad luck but really annoying bad luck. Like the blade on the boat breaking plus the repair guy being on vacation, which together mean we do not get to have the vacation we wanted to have. At least not when we wanted to have it. Or like this: you go out on the bike to get bread. Because it is only two minutes away you carry an open, canvas bag to put the bread in. Just as you step out of the store, the heavens open and it begins to pour buckets. * That sort of thing.

Or perhaps you have left your camera on the boat when you are going to the Breda balloon fiesta and thus will just have to remember what it looked like. And your darling husband went to get it but it is not, he assures you, there and is lost forever and probably Daan threw it off the side right after the flag. Which you find hard to believe, he wasn't gone long enough to have looked in the whole boat and you could have stuck it nearly anywhere to keep it safe.

Hopefully you, er, I did not stick it anywhere really clever or the kids'll be graduating high school before I find the stupid thing again.

*ahem*

The festival was fun, even though owing to rain there was not a balloon in sight. Well, there was one lying on its side on the ground which was for people to go into and look around. Lucky for us we were amoung the first in, as we were thereafter chased out and the attraction was closed -- too much wind making it hard to keep the thing in place.

But it was fun, sort of a very small town carnival thingie, with moon walks and ball pits and really crappy food. Dutch snack food when it is not fried involves Coca cola served warm and hot dogs served cold -- I always want to yell "Why do you think they call them HOT dogs, you moron?" but I have not yet done so. Ugly American and all. Trying not to let down the Side.

And furthermore they serve hot dogs (when bread is incuded at all, some places you are treated to a room temperature hot dog wrapped in a napkin and otherwise naked) on french bread rolls, which is really a violation of the laws of nature.

In any event, without going into it, it has been a week which has caused me to wonder whether Mercury is not going retrograde -- when traditionally messages go astray, things get lost, and the poltergeists are generally on the rampage. In other woods, Pech. Just Pech.

If it does not get better I am going to have to resort to drawing a picture of the black cloud plaguing me on a piece of paper and mailing it to a fictitious address. Well, or a real one, if any of you really piss me off this week, lol.

*This actually happened, on the same day we had to come home from vacation (which is why there was no bread in the house). I actually started laughing, as the whole day was beginning to resemble a bad movie.

The Breda Balloon Fiesta

The Breda Balloon Fiesta is this weekend. We will probably go, since we will not be sailing. Somehow this event has made me realize: I have been here for a whole year.

This makes no sense, I have been here for fourteen months. But we went to the Breda Balloon Festival last year. And now here it is again. I have no idea whay this seems so significant all at once. But there you are; the Breda Balloon Festival as a marker of time.

Anybody miss me?

No, I don't expect you did, as I was staying with most of you, my Teeming Dozen, much of the time I was not blogging. Well.

We had planned to go sailing immediately upon our return, except that the weather was filthy. Really disgusting, rain and hail and god knows what all. So we sat around until Tuesday when I pointed out to Dearly Beloved that we were stuck inside when it rained anyway, so we might as well be stuck in a boat as in a house. So off we went, flags gaily waving -- er, well, actually not gaily waving as Daan decided to check out the consistency of a couple rules of physics and threw our flag over board in the harbor right before we left. The Belgian who was moored right next to us helped us in our attempts to drag the harbor for it, but he found it just awfully funny and offered to loan us his extra (Belgian) one. Dearly Beloved was not especially amused and was even less amused when I offered to put up an American flag.

However, we steamed off in good order, even though the boat was unaccountable difficult to handle and made quite a lot of racket, even for a diesel motor. So we stopped in the lovely Biesbos, a forest preserve, and checked the motor over. It was working fine and we began to think it was some kind of timing problem.

"Timing problem" is Dearly Beloved's code way of saying "I have no idea". In the South where I grew up, the code phrase is "It's yer lankidge'" or at least it was when I had a series of junkers. It was always my linkage, no matter what it actually was.

So I stepped into the boat to get some more coffee. Please note for future reference: do not step into a boat when your husband has removed the ladder in order to get at the motor which is in the middle of the boat. It hurts quite a lot when your foot discovers there is no ladder there and it leads to your small children remembering words they have not heard since you had to move continents in less than three weeks about a year ago. It also leaves a bloody scrape and beautiful technicolor bruises. And causes your husband to say things like, "but I thought you knew I moved it, I was looking at the motor after all,".

After the blue streak in the air cleared from my multilingual swearing session and first aid was administered to the dying, Paul decided to go into the water and see if it could be the aforementioned flag, which might have fouled the motor blades. Please note, the water in Holland is very, very cold just now, so this was a very brave thing to do. He came immediately back up, only a trifle blue, and announced that he was now certain that the motor was fine.

Because one of the blades on the motor was missing. By this time it was already afternoon, so we decided to just stay there until morning. No sense in running home, the repair place would be closed anyway. So we played many rounds of snakes & ladders and walked around in the woods and killd pirates and picked many flowers and so on. Even the wildflowers in Holland are civilized, all the purple ones grow together and the yellow ones and so on. We ate a lot of blackberries and Daan had another practical lesson in why you do not try to pick a nettle. I swear, he will never learn. Hard headed, that child.

Then we went home to find that the boat cannot be repaired until Monday, as the repair guy is on vacation until then. So we may be going to the Breda Balloon Festival this weekend after all.