Grin and Tonic

The Payback begins…

Posted on August 12, 2011 by Grin & Tonic by Alana Kirk

It would not be an understatement to say it hasn’t been a struggle. Six pregnancies, three children under six, and several life-changing events, untold dramas, adventures and crises. Then let’s not forget the mundane – the endless, endless, endless, endless, endless, endless meals to be planned, bought for, prepared, force-fed (ahem, gently coerced), washed up, wiped up; the countless, countless, countless, countless nights of vomiting, crying, nightmares, wet beds, ‘I want a hug and I don’t care that it’s 3am’; the various hideous child-related tasks that NO-ONE warns you about – lice, worms, leaking nappies, leaking nappies that defy belief as it creeps up their back and down their arms, children who walk slower than a snail; the relentless, relentless, relentless picking up of other people’s clothes, especially when with three girls and multiple changes per day, this can amount to a full time job. Ok, so I’m omitting the wonderful too – their beauty, their exhuberance for life, their wonder, their belief in you, their expressions, their cuddles.

But.. last night, the payback really began. All those nappies? Forgotten. All those wretched meals left uneaten? Almost forgotten. All those early mornings? Forgotten. Why? Because last night, after I’d put Ruby to bed, I was indulged in the most perfect 15 minutes of my life….. Daisy gave me a foot rub with baby lotion, while Poppy brushed my hair. It just doesn’t much better than that.

Posted in children, parenting | 1 Comment

Donegal Daydreams 3

Posted on August 3, 2011 by Grin & Tonic by Alana Kirk

They are indeed daydreams now. The bubble has burst and reality is seeping back in. Home and happy and determined to keep my Donegal Spirit alive -more living, less letting the minuite cast a shadow over the big picture. But I miss it already… the expanse of sky, the length of laughter, the long days, the fire-warmed nights. I felt like I was in some weird parenting programme, living those experience you think are what parenting is all about before you actually become one and realise that parenting is really about crap, vomit and crying at 3am.
No, we actually made sandcastles, clambered over rocks, went on nature hunts, ate chocolate early in the morning, and read books about ballerinas in front of a turf fire. Poppy even provided the classic parenting bad hair day… as hubby and I sat toasting our toes with fire and our bellies with wine, Poppy came into the room with a large smile and a larger handful of hair in her hand. She’d taken the scissors to her glorious long locks. Looking like something from a bad 1980’s orphanage, we eventually had to take her to a hairdresser to make some sort of sense of her cutting style. Just another notch on the parenting headboard – no doubt to be eclipsed in time by tattoos, pink hair and piercings (all by Poppy I have no doubt either.)
For four weeks I lived the parenting daydream….. and now reality has woken me up and I can only try and hold onto the feeling as long as possible…. and count the weeks until I am back…. 47 to go.

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Donegal Daydreams 2

Posted on July 17, 2011 by Grin & Tonic by Alana Kirk

Donegal is like one of those boys your mother always warned you about.. moody and unreliable, glorious one moment, dumping on you the next, but always, irrisistable.

It’s the same as it always was. I came here every year as a child, so many memories merged into one mish mash of feeling and nostaligia. I can close my eyes and see the rugged mountains and coastline, taste the chicken maryland we had as a treat every holiday in the Nesbit Arms Hotel, smell the turf, hear the silly names my brother and I gave all the funny sounding Irish places. But mostly I remember my mum’s white tupperware box, always full of her fudge squares and caramel squares she had made the night before we left. The glorious days on the beaches, the long walks as my dad dragged us over ‘just one more hill’, the interminable days inside the smokey cottage as the rain lashed outside.

Donegal has a personality complex. When the weather is clear, the horizon is further than anywhere I’ve ever been in the world. The sky seems endless, life is limitless. But when the dark clouds brood and close in, spewing torrents of ‘wet rain’ like sheets of water, the sea mist creeps around until there is nothing in your vision at all – just you, your house and if you’re lucky, the end of your path. No sky. No mountains. No road. Donegal can make you feel tall and small in one day.

The smell of turf burning takes me back 30 years in an instant to my family sitting round the fire, life at it’s most basic, the rain thrashing the windows as the clump of the tupperware lid opened and our family hands tangled in desperation as we grasped mum’s chocolate treats.

And so here I am again. I am the mum now. The schizophrenic weather has us changing clothes three times a day. Last week I burned in the sun, the beach so vast, skies so wide it felt unwordly. And today, rain is so dense, the weather so close, we can’t see past the wall. My mum and dad were meant to be with us this week, and I know without a doubt, that if she had been able to come, the tupperware box would have been on her knee as the car drove up. So, with a heavy heart, and a happy memory, I opened up her recipes, and I made her fudge squares. My girls now love them as I once did, and so it continues. My mum will never share a holiday with us again, but we sit in the turf-smoked room, the rain dancing furiously outside, and the clip of my new tin opens, and our family hands tangle as we reach for my mum’s chocolate treats. Like Donegal weather, life is unpredictable. You never know what’s around the corner. But like Donegal, it is the things that stay the same that keep life going. I miss you mum. But I’m creating new memories in your shadow. Memories I hope my girls will take through their lives as mine still take me.

Posted in Donegal, memories, mum | 3 Comments

Donegal Daydreams

Posted on July 8, 2011 by Grin & Tonic by Alana Kirk

Aghh. That first deep breath. The suck in of freedom. The exhale of space and landscape and horizon. Booked a year in advance. Months of planning. Weeks of lists. Days of shopping, packing, sorting. Hours of driving – screaming baby, disgruntled daughters. Late arrival, sleepless night. But then. The first early morning walk on a vast deserted beach as the sun says hello to the sky and the water laps the shore like a child licking ice-cream off her lips. The horizon so wide, so distant, it feels unworldly. A different world certainly from the cement claustraphobia of the city. I feel like I’m in the Great Escape – albeit without the motorbike. And Steve McQueen…. more’s the pity.

I have travelled the world, and nothing, and nowhere compares to the wonderful wild, ravishingly rugged, energetic expanse of Donegal on the west coast of Ireland.

We’ve been here 4 days and explored 5 beaches, catching crabs, fish, shrimpy like creatures, and some rather unidentifyable jelly monstrousity. The girls have run, jumped, rolled along beaches, down sand dunes, clamberd over rocks, swum naked in the sea (yes! In Donegal. At 8.30 in the morning!). I’ve always maintained the sign of a good day is a bruised knee and dirty clothes. The girls are obviously having a ball. They have fallen so many times they look blue, drawn blood and we’ve even had a resident tick lodge itself in Daisy’s hip. She refused to have it removed, called it Tessa Tick and talked to it for a day and a half until it eventually fell off satiated with blood. Fortunately the next pet – a curly caterpillar lasted a bit longer and slept on Daisy’s pillow for a night.

I’m here for a month with the girls, and hubby is up at weekends. Despite the fact it feels like I brought the entire contents of the house – the change mat, the apple slicer (don’t ask, Daisy eats about 5 apples a day so this is essential equipment for my sanity), the food mixer, and 25 packets of gluten-free pasta (only to discover the local shop stocks more gluten-free food than our supermarket in Dublin!). But my 13 lists and near mental breakdown did not compute ‘wellies’. In Donegal. That’s like a fish & chip shop not having salt. That’s like somebody not liking chocolate. It’s just not right. I’m surprised they let us over the border, wellies being part of the national dress up here. Still, in line with my new attitute to life – the wronger it is – the better it is – who cares? Wet feet can dry.

Ruby has experienced her first taste of sand – literally. She’s at that irritating, sorry – delightful, 9 month old stage of crawling everywhere, eating everything and listening to no-one. She’s eating sand like no tomorrow, but hey. Isn’t that every child’s rite of passage? So I’m going to be all wrong again and not worry about it. I’m going to suck in that freedom and exhale that space and landscape and horisons. I’m going to feel the sun and the rain on my face in equal measure – it is Donegal after all. That’s the plan. Once hubby goes and I’m on my own with 2 girls and a baby on a wet and windy beach for a month I may be back to tell a different story. We’ll have to wait and see…..

Posted in Donegal | 4 Comments

The right way down a wrong way street

Posted on June 27, 2011 by Grin & Tonic by Alana Kirk

Things are going wrong. Drastically wrong. A sure sign I suspect, that things are beginning to go right. There aren’t many people who know me well who wouldn’t use the words ‘anally retentive’ at least once in a three word choice to describe me. Colour coded charts are my passion. Checklists and to-do lists are my best friends. Perfect retail therapy? A rampage in a stationary shop – the more colour segmented notepads and highlighter pens the better.

So you can imagine I embraced motherhood with as much energy, exhuberance and practical planning as an A4 folder with colour dividers would allow. I religiously followed Gina Ford’s rules to a letter, I enforced Annabel Karmel’s healthy menu’s to a tea, I restricted TV, drowned in Arts & Crafts and read each book enthusiastically 164,493 times (sometimes in one night it seemed). I put pressure on myself like a cherry on top of an icing cupcake of pressure. But recently things have been changing. I’m not sweating the small stuff any more – perhaps because I’ve so much big stuff to sweat these days.

Last week alone, I did so many ‘wrong’ things, I might as well have been following the Bad Book of Parenting. Here’s a few tasters:

I let the girls watch TV still in their pyjamas. At 3pm.

I took them to Eddie Rockets for burger and chips because I couldn’t be bothered to make tea and fancied somewhere that threw away the plates

That was how my precious baby who only eats home-cooked organic foods celebrated her 3/4 year – with a chip in each hand and 4 in her gob.

I didn’t wait for the girls to be in bed before I opened a bottle of wine – it was 6.15 and the sun was shining, and I thought I should raise a toast to the glowing sky

I didn’t retch, scream, or pull out my hair when circumstances of a day out meant Ruby didn’t go down for her 12 o’clock sleep until 3pm.

One day I rejected every pore in my body and sat on the sofa while Ruby slept and the girls played and ……. read my book. I did not hoover. I did not bake. I did not clean behind the pot plants. I read. A Book.

I’m wallowing in my wrongness. I’m rather hoping this week is an utter disaster.

Posted in Uncategorized | 6 Comments

Tap Tap

Posted on June 20, 2011 by Grin & Tonic by Alana Kirk

I don’t know about you, but 6 years and three children in, I still look over my shoulder occassionally to see who might be coming close enough to tap me on the shoulder and tell me I’m not a real mother, please move along. If only there was a manual – one that doesn’t tell me to listen to my inner gut which frankly only tells me I ate too much chocolate and drank too much wine last night, or one that tells me exactly what time I can eat a slice of toast (honestly, one does) and lays out my parenting tasks like a military opertion – with as much loving as that would entail. No, we just have to muddle through, hoping against hope that we aren’t on the social services list for mad mothers, and gaining strength in numbers by hanging out (or blogging alongside) other mad mothers, in every form the word mad entails.

And just when I think I’m really not very good at this (last week my 6pm phone call to a friend went like this: ‘is it ok to open a bottle of wine before the kids go to bed?’ My friend replied, ‘well, what are they doing?’ to which I confessed they were eating chocolate and watching TV. ‘Oh you’re way past wondering if drinking before their bedtime is ok!” she replied) my cohorts in co-parenting (for that is what friends are), boosted my confidence by confessing their own wayward ways. There is nothing like someone else’s badness you make you feel good.

On Friday night, during a much needed girlie night drinking wine (it was after the kid’s bedtime!) my friend and I decided to watch our favourite girlie night DVD. Oh come on! We are grown women but admit it – we all love a teenage vampire! After fiddling with the controls for a few moments, she announced she was off to get her daughter up. “But she’s been asleep for two hours!” I gasped. “Yes,” she said, as she carried her sleepy 8 year old into the room, “but she’s the only one who can work the DVD player.”

Did that make me feel good or what! Then, at a lovely afternoon tea with some other girlfriends the next day (it’s been an amazing rare, but gorgeous friend-filled weekend) my child pyschologist friend – who for years has been guiding parents on how to bring up their children, confessed she’s too confused and traumatised with her own two children to follow her own advice. “I used to be a parenting expert until I became a mum,” she wailed as we all smiled and consoled her with the reminder that we had never been parenting experts. And maybe that’s the point. We do the best we can….. with a little help from our friends. Thank you mad mothers everywhere for living in my world.

Posted in blogging, friends, mum | 3 Comments

Family Friends

Posted on June 11, 2011 by Grin & Tonic by Alana Kirk

When you become a parent you don’t think that your children will start having an influence on who you become friends with. But they do! One of my best friends is the mum of Daisy’s best friend. How weird is that? Because Daisy made friends with a little girl in playschool, Ruby has Liza as her godmother. And now as Daisy ends her first year of school, I realise that some of the mums and dads I say hello to every morning – and who I will share time with for the next eight years – have slowly become friends. One a really good one. I never expected to make close friends at this stage of my life. Thought that was all done years ago.
I have always admired and envied my mum’s circle of friends. As long as I have been alive, they have been around. I called them ‘Auntie’ and they shared every momentous and mundane moment of my mum’s life, and by association, mine. They know me as well as anyone. Apart from the fact that ‘The Girls’ (as they still call themselves 40 years later) met every other Tuesday night for over four decades, they also chinked drinks and wrapped arms around each other at every significant event in their lives – children’s births, divorces, parties, celebrations, bad days, good days and all the dramas and dilemmas that mark everyday life. There were days when they kept each other afloat and I always wished I had something similar.
But I didn’t. Or so I thought. Sure I don’t have the close knit circle, but I have something else. At my 40th I was pregnant so I decided to have a birthday lunch with my best girlfriends – a disparate group who I realised had also shared every moment of my life with me – just not all at once.
I realised I had a friend from every part of my life, and together they had chinked drinks and wrapped their arms around me for every significant event in my life. But, life has a funny way of keeping the circles intact, like a swirl, making circles within circles. One of the first phonecalls I made after my mum’s stroke was to her best friends. Their devastation was profound and gave depth to mine. Over the last nine months they have kept me afloat. I text them, I ring and ask for advice, they call in to see me when I’m up with mum, and our lives now entwine once again, the love of my mum our common language. My mum’s friends have become mine, friendship stretching generations. And as my new layer of friendships develop around the lives of my children, I hope the circles continue to spiral and my girls too will know that my friends are there for my life and theirs.

Posted in children, friends, stroke | 5 Comments

Simply complicated

Posted on June 4, 2011 by Grin & Tonic by Alana Kirk

There is one phrase I’ve been saying a lot of over the last couple of years….. “how did life get so complicated?”

Never mind the added extras – hubby’s job insecurities and working away, miscarriages, chromosome disorders, mum’s stroke, Poppy’s coeliac – but even the bare basics of life as a mother – money moans, lack of childcare and support, planning and catering for umpteen meals a day for umpteen ages, timings and diets, school runs, 28 hours of jobs in 24 hour timeframe – life is simply, complicated.

I often wonder how my carefree days where the decisions all centred on, well, me… (what should I wear, red or white wine, which party??) ended up so crammed with conundrums and challenges created by the responsibilities of the lives of other people. I look at my girls and wistfully wonder at their frivilous freedom. Pulled back and restained by the few obligations in their little lives – teatime, bedtime and school /playschool – they shout “can we play?” at every opportunity of freedom, their battlecry of life as a child.

But recently I’ve realised the grass isn’t greener, it’s just a different shade. My little 5 year old daughter Daisy was forced into the position of older sister by two giddy siblings and the responsibilities and expectations that hang on that mantle are… simply complicated.

Since last September when she was just about to turn five, she got a new sister, her nanna was struck down with a devastating stroke, her mum dived into a dark remote place, she started school, her other sister went through tests and got lots of attention to diagnose ceoliac and now has ‘special’ food, her other sister sucks the air from her parents, ill, young and needy. Quite a lot for little shoulders. On top of that, recently, she’s had trouble at school – a little bit of bullying that has made her retreat into herself, battering that wall I’ve built up to protect her, dashing that confidence I have tried so hard to instill, clouding over that sunshine that eminates from her. Schoolyard socialising can be a dynamite place. How do I teach her to stand up for herself while being the good person? How do I not put too much responsibility on her when I need so much help? How do I protect her and guide her and teach her to cope? How do I help her make her complicated life simple?

But, like so many things in life that I have been taught by my children, she is teaching me again. She is teaching me to smile through it all, to take the complications on the chin and to seek the one thing that gets us through it all – family. At times like this, we turn to the ones that know us inside out. We stop trying to think outside the box for once, and get right back inside that box where it’s safe and secure. Simply? We uncomplicate things whenever we can.

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Four and Fabulous

Posted on May 28, 2011 by Grin & Tonic by Alana Kirk

So Poppy is four. For so long she has been my little baby, and now – with a shock almost – I realise she is a little big girl (as she calls herself). Little because, yes, she is petit and pretty, and big because, yes, she is bold and beautiful. She spent her birthday in hospital having a biopsy taken of her stomach to confirm ceoliac disease. After the surgical team sang her Happy Birthday, they put a mask over her little face and as she stared wide-eyed at me, she went limp in my arms, her eyes slowly closing. As they lifted her onto the table, I wanted to hold on a moment longer, so small and delicate, so strong and determined, my heart sometimes can’t contain the love I feel for her.

We pretended her birthday was on Saturday, and our little princess partied with her pink princess friends (some battles aren’t worth the fight). She laughed and danced and ripped open presents. We got her a bike, the smallest we could find and she struggled and practised and persevered until she willed those feet to turn the pedals forward. She has always had to work harder, and try longer to do the normal things – get on the toilet, scoot and run, climb on the bed, keep up with us walking, riding a bicycle. But she is the most determined little big person I’ve ever known. Her first sentence was “I do it!” and she has never stopped saying it (despite being ill for the last two years).

Surgery confirmed ceoliac disease and so a new way of life begins for her. I will have to control everything she puts in her mouth. Every birthday party she goes to, she will have to pass on the cake and the buns and sausages and biscuits and crisps. It’s going to be hard. I’m daunted by the massive change in our lives now (we can’t even toast her bread in our toaster). But, I’ll take a leaf out of her book. I will try and I will succeed.

She’ll have to try harder than anyone else just to thrive. But she will. Because she is petit and powerful. She is dainty and determined. The doctors tell us we will start to see a huge change in her personality over the next few weeks once we cut all gluten from her diet – more energetic, sleeping better, improved moods, happier. And maybe, maybe, she’ll even grow a little.

I find it weird to think the child we know and love so much is going to change – but it will be a bigger, brighter, bolder version of the same lovely girl.

Our little big girl is four, and no matter what else, always fabulous.

Posted in ceoliac, gluten | 7 Comments

Birthday love

Posted on May 20, 2011 by Grin & Tonic by Alana Kirk

Today is my mum’s birthday. As she lies locked in her body and mind in Belfast, for the first time in probably 15 years I won’t be spending the day with her. Since I had children, she would come down to Dublin and I would take her to Avoca for lunch… we would while away a couple of hours nattering about nothing and everything, sharing each other’s lunch, and always, finishing up with a ‘goodie’ with our cuppa. Then we would come back to mine and I’d throw a birthday teaparty for her with the girls. They would make buns and they’d sing happy Birthday till they were hoarse.

Then she would help me with Poppy’s birthday party two days later, blowing up balloons, making marshmallow Top Hats, clearing up exhuberant princess spills and smiling at the mess a bunch of toddlers can make. Poppy will be four, and tomorrow’s Princess Party (very important distinction!) will be her first without Nanna. Every ‘first’ cuts like the first cut – her stroke. A body blow, painful and bruising. The memory of last year so sharp, it cuts into the wound afresh.

But. Among all the firsts, there is also a comforting constant. The next day after Poppy, it’s my Hubby’s birthday. (May is the triple wammy!). He may be the one celebrating, blowing out candles and getting birthday cuddles, but I am the one that is lucky. I am the one with the best present of all….him. He looks after me, quietly, dilligently, without fuss. I’ve noticed him staying an extra 5 minutes in the morning even though I know he is so pressured at work, just to help me out because I’m struggling. He holds my hand in the dark of the night. He tells me dinner is gorgeous even if it looks like a bowl of cat food (lentil roast is not my forte). He doesn’t take lunch so he can come home early on Monday to let me out to pilates, and never complains. He loves me. Simply and beautifully.

So I’d like to add a bit to my previous post – the sandwich filling. I am the filling. My girls and my mum are the bread. But he is the relish. He is the flavour. He is the part that makes it all worth while. Happy birthday hubby.