And the best ye oldy blog post award goes to...

Tinbard!

Have you got your giggle on today?

Congratulations to Lily and all her family!

The long awaited Owen has made it out! After a marathon birth, he is here, surrounded by adoring family and attended by concerned and no doubt teary legions of Mrs Moon's fans and readers.

I wish I was there! I feel the strongest urge to bake a cake!

you know how sometimes a pop song just gits ya?

I love it.

pity it's a Bud ad

turmoil

I can't breathe. A vice of grief, resentment,jealousy and disbelief is gripping my heart and caving my chest in. Is this what a panic attack feels like? I can't focus, or concentrate.

I've just heard that the Pixies are playing the Olympia. Don't know how I missed it before. Not that I would have got tickets anyway, unsurprisingly they sold out in seconds.

The Olympia.

The Pixies.

But not me.

Does the world not see how wrong that is? How unfair.

The tragedy.

The Olympia: small venue



The Pixies: iconic band

From Xbox's Ten Lizard Tongues, I have never seen anything like this before. Incredible.

Axel and I just watched it transfixed.

Ukranian woman doing sand animation stories.

Took me a while to hear the Metallica, too. But if you'd rather not, you won't, don't let that put you off.
This is must see.

holy frick! things I love series

You know when Oprah does her favourite things show, and there's one for everone in the audience and the producer becomes instantly famous and wealthy? Well, I wish I could do that.

Oprah must love Etsy.

It's KILLING me that I didn't find these in time for the wedding. KILLING me.

Check out the other sweet little bitsies too, like the ninja draughts set. And the blank ones.

HIDE my credit card, please!

for Xbox

You need to imagine the cake on the top tier of the stand.

as close to perfection

I made wedding cake for two gorgeous young people who are sort of friend/aquaintances.

Check out their wedding in the Irish Times mag.

Aren't they pretty? See the landscape he is son of?

From the first time I met Alex, I was fairly certain that had I been ten (well, maybe twelve) years younger I would have been unable to stop myself clinging to his leg and refusing to be separated from it by anything barring a surgical intervention.

When I talk to him I have to sit on my hands so I don't fondle his bicep, and try to look like I'm following the conversation instead of just gazing at him. Ah me.

When I looked at their tables all set up for the dinner, and read their thing in the paper, I was struck by a slightly painful juxtaposition of reaction. On one hand it feels like in another dimension, an alternate reality of me, that was my trajectory, all sunkissed there. And at the same time, my heart just fills with a happiness and warmth that is almost painful, for them.

snapshots

When I was driving down the town the other day, portraits kept jumping out at me. The sun was shining.

First an old friend (now more of an acquaintance) emerged from his tattoo shop and crossed the road, followed by a woman with pale skin and long, long red hair in a pony tail with a quiff. She had on bright red Marylin lipstick, and scarlet high heels, all fifties looking. She ran across the road anxiously and after him, as he turned his head to blow out his smoke so he could kiss her. There seemed to be some drama there. Sadly, traffic moved on so I had to stop noseying. I'd love to give you a link to his facebook page so you could see what they look like, but that would be crossing a line, I think :)

Then a young guy, early twenties, shaved head, muscles, fairly hard but well turned out, walked up the road with his little daughter, blond pigtails, blue eyes, pretty and perfect in pink. That was sweet, but normal enough. The fun bit was that he was leading their dog, a pug, and it was wearing a little pink doggie t-shirt. Delicious contrasts.

Then I saw an old lady, stopping on the corner with her shopping, bag of toilet roll in one hand, ice cream cone in the other. I know the shop where she got it, they do good whipped ice cream. I was so happy to see that little bit of indulgence. And also because it reminded me of my favourite little illustrations of American tourists ofa certain age. Once in Dublin, Axel and I had ice cream from Baskin Robbins and we got accosted by a middle aged lady in golfing trousers. 'BASKIN ROBBINS?! YOU GUYS HAVE THAT HERE? WHERE'D YOU GET IT??' And then years later in Galway, again, eating a 99 on the street, almost the same character grabbed my arm: 'HEY!! WHERE'DYOU GET THAT ICECREAM??!' Love it.

And then,best of all, a stressed looking blond lady, a little bit bulgy of tum, struggling up the street carrying a net bag containing a bright red giant sized ball in it, that said PMS on the side. I swear to god.

RIP Patrick Swayze

You know what I'm talking about.

And if you don't know what I'm talking about with the clip below, well, you weren't a teenager in the early nineties. Surf on, Bodhi :)

woffert

Bodhi used to say 'kyeputsch' instead of ketchup, in a deep voiced russian accent. It was brilliant, and I was so sorry when he started saying it properly.

But now it's wasp season, and he keeps running in from outside, lamenting, 'Mama! I scared! I scared of the woffert!'

Kyeputsch is dead. Long live the woffert.

wee note on post below

Did everyone think I meant it was my mother in law telling me I worry about my children too much? She might agree in terms of my fears about their sugar intake and self esteem, but no, I wrote the post because it was my six year old daughter informing me of the fact. That seemed significant.

don't worry

Last night my mother in law took us out to McDonald's. She gets the occasional burger urge, it seems. I don't really like my kids going to McDonald's. Olivia was pretty old before she went. Four or so, though she did tell Axel she'd gone with her Granny and had 'chicken nuggets and Irish milk' - she subsequently retracted that statement so who knows if it was fancy, or Granny intimidating her before she could give a statement in court...

Afterwards, when I had cruelly denied my poor MIL a sundae on the grounds of my children's lactose intolerance, Olivia wanted to have a play on the statue outside. She insisted on getting up on the top bit, and standing up. Bodhi zoomed around it on all fours while I whizzed around after him, clutching his cardy. Olivia also insisted on standing up and when I protested, she told me I worry about my children too much and that I should save it for serious things. A lesson for all, I suppose.


Isn't our McD's great? It was a town hall once. Can you say McTudor?

milestones

Olivia lost her first tooth! It came out in the school yard today, I was greeted by a grinning girl with a gap and a tiny pearly milk tooth in a tissue, at hometime.


It feels somehow more significant than it did when the first one (probably this one?) grew in - I don't know why: the tooth fairy visits tonight - I am a real parent! It seems likea rite of passage.

The new tooth is placed way further back than her other baby teeth. I'm fairly sure expensive orthodontistry lies in the futures of both my children. Perhaps that's what makes you a real parent: the cost of braces. Ah well.


I remember finding our baby teeth in one of the vases that my mother kept on the mantelpiece in her bedroom, purple agianst the white wall.
I was old enough to not be disappointed, but the little graveyard collection of ivory was ... I don't know, fascinating, yet weird. Somehow, a collection of tiny ivory fairy sculptures made more sense.

fraught

Warning: The post below contains references to abortion. If sensitive to the topic, go check out some divorce cake fun instead, maybe? If you've just had a termination and a divorce, well, I'm really sorry!

I can post this little gallery of twee gorgeousness now, it's safe. My mooncup is securely in place, though to be honest it would seem more appropriate to be smearing blood on the walls in an orgy of celebration and gratitude.

So... I've had a slightly fraught month. I managed to convince myself I might have got pregnant. Having had unprotected sex in a moment of utter ovulatory confidence and conviction on the very first day of my period at the start of last month, I then spent every minute afterwards worrying about the fact that I might have miraculously got pregnant after all. I thought I was fine, that even the most tenacious of sperm live three days but then I googled it, and found something that said it was SEVEN, and it is possible to ovulate early, and blah blah, sure it's fine, but Oh God, are these various pregnancy symptoms I'm sure I'm displaying?

And that sort of went on for the month, until I'd convinced myself I was facing all the horrors of an unwanted pregnancy - and despite my vague disappointment at having had my last baby, I learned in no uncertain terms that it would have been a very definitely unwanted pregnancy. Stress gave me a little taste of the sort of exhausted and hormonal mother I'd be while pregnant with a third, and it was not such a pretty picture. The reality check lent wings to the idea that while I might dream of another birth, an other baby, it would have to be with my absolutely perfect soul mate who needs to be rich enough to buy me my own personal osteopath and a fleet of childcare experts to help me raise my existing two and stop me messing up the new one.

I was sanguine about solutions for the first couple weeks, and then emotionally swung wildly between horror at the thought of more years of breastfeeding and hormones and not being able to go anywhere and debt and marital breakdown and then reading abortion information and sobbing and fantasising about idealised Happy Families, bigger houses and a people carrier.

I've always been pro choice, and can't see that ever changing, but I've always maintained that there's nothing pleasant about the option and when faced with it (if only in my paranoid pessimism) the truth is that I've far more moral issue with the idea (of having one) than I thought I had. Guilt. I'd be crippled with it. I would have terminated the life of this hypothetical baby for my sake, first and foremost, but for my husband's, my children's and the child's own sake too, but I still felt a cold steel edge of guilt at the idea of denying it life based on my own weaknesses and shortcomings and selfishness.

This is not a comfortable subject. Nor is this post intended as a debate - it is purely a personal consideration. As such, I'm going to disable comments on this one, as I am emphatically not looking to comment on anyone else's feelings and experiences but my own, nor do I really want to discuss them.

For me, the horriblenesses of pregnancy, the hemorrhoids and thrush and skin problems and back pain and separating pelvis and sleeplessness and exhaustion and hormones, the pre and post natal depression (well, you can just read look back at the start of the blog for jolly examples)... are all subsumed by the vitality of being a protective vessel for the child I carry. I felt strongly aware and connected to both of my children before their birth and the thought of inverting, perverting? that role made me feel deeply... wrong. On all sorts of levels.

So anyway, I got talked down by the wonderful Ms Moon, and another friend who said that chances were with the breastfeeding, I wouldn't be ovulating til day 21 or so anyway, and had more than a couple clear weeks, no matter how tenacious the little swimmers might have been. So then I felt foolish.

But I did an early response pregnancy test anyway, in the toilet in Tesco (not the Bray ones, they're ganky and ALWAYS smell of poo, and it would have just been too tawdry and awful and I might have hit my head on the bogroll dispenser and woken up in Eastenders.

And it was negative, and I bought myself sunflowers. And Axel swore yet again that he would get round to buying condoms. And I swore that I would never have sex again.

And then my period was a day late, and I'd convinced myself all over again that the test was false, and I went and got another one, and it was still negative and I rejoiced all over again. And FINALLY got my period, and felt safe to write this post, and look at photos of tiny mini sweetie baby models again without my heart being in my mouth. There's a thousand other things to say about this all but ...

Back to the teenie baby dolls. I so want one of my newborns, I would love to have a little perpetual reminder of them at birth - I don't know about you all, but I've forgotten what they looked like. I'd like to keep that sight immortalised. I know they're overly cutesy, but I don't care! They remind me of Bodhi, those little dark haired boys.