Fear of flying (with short people)

You may have noticed that last week was a quiet one around Chaos HQ. This is because I went offline for a spell to hang out with the real world's cutest little boy: my nephew. Spending time with Neffe is one of my heart's true joys. Flying with kids, however, is one of my biggest fears. Unfortunately getting to Neffe involves planes, trains, a gazillion flights of stairs, and an entire galaxy of pacification devices (mostly LULAS).

Cousin airlift. 

Neffe is growing up in Berlin, a magical city where nobody has a proper job and graffiti takes the place of magnolia paint. Visiting from London is a great shift in perspective. Wealth inequality isn't such an awful glaring beast in Berlin, and consequently people seem more relaxed and less preoccupied with money - a nice change.

Ana loves to fly. Nothing could ruin her excitement, even the discovery that her airplane wasn't purple, as requested. Ali took more convincing. But she proved herself to be an excellent judge of character at passport control, where she screamed like a banshee (which is frankly what I always feel like doing). 

Wandering around over the weekend, Tanta and I came across a beatboxing/freestyle rap duo at a flea market. The rapper took thematic suggestions from a rather kid-infested crowd, so his ditties wound up being about ice cream and toys in outer space. The little kids danced in circles at his feet and the grown-ups laughed at the word play. It was wonderful to see kids and grown-ups both having fun at the same thing, mingling freely and naturally.

Faith, trust, pixie dust.

I had to compare this experience to some of my lonely early motherhood afternoons spent cloistered off from the world at the local bounce and rhyme. Those afternoons were like eternities suspended between lunch and teatime in a roomful of other sleepless mamas, all mumbling in monotone about that most soul-crushing of words - ROUTINE - while taking on an increasingly pithed look with each round of 'Wind the Bobbin Up'. 

Perhaps those dark days would have been better spent at a Berlin flea market, mingling freely with all sorts. To this day, I want to scream like an Ali-banshee whenever I hear 'Wind the Bobbin Up'.

Tanta took me to Tempelhof, of Berlin Airlift fame, which ceased to be an airport 2008 and is now a park. But instead of going to the trouble and expense of converting it into an actual park, the local government has simply left it as is and you have to use your imagination. So people have BBQs on the grass in front of the terminal building, and windsurf down the runway with kites and skateboards.

Ant flies into the great wide open.

I love the idea of Tempelhof Park: the notion that you can recycle anything no matter how humongous it is and how broke you are, just by employing collective imagination. Funny how concrete things can become fluid if we agree to see them differently.

The physical landscape at Tempelhof is unchanged: the buildings, the runway, even a couple of airplanes. The only major new addition is a biergarten - which seems sensible enough - beer is tricky to conjure up in your mind, and crucial to the enjoyment of a sunny afternoon in Germany.

Walking down the runway - a habitat normally reserved for giant winged things - is a strangely intimidating and invigorating experience. I felt like an ant. An ant sadly bereft of wings and lots of other stuff. But an ant who could do just about anything, given a little time just a lucky break or two.

Mama culpa

Dear Mom,

I'm sorry. Years late, I know. Perhaps it will bring you comfort to know that your granddaughters are currently locked in a vicious intergalactic war with no exit strategy. I'll explain.

As Ana sees it, her little sister is Zuul, destroyer of worlds, habitat-thief and crowing monster. She is like the evil penguin in The Wrong Trousers, the one who takes all of Gromit's stuff and then convinces the Wallace - allegedly the responsible household adult - to behave like a complete tit and a bit of a criminal.

From Ali's perspective, Ana (who is actually just a giant hairball in need of vigorous hair-pulling) should adopt a more relaxed attitude. Ana's toys need a lot of breaking, because they are more fun broken, especially balloons. And if you rip the pages out of books, you get to make up your own story, right? Crowing to high heaven helps to drive this point home.

THIS IS SPARTA!!!

Their perspectives are clinically insane and totally irreconcilable. There is simply no way to communicate to them in Babish, their native tongue, that 'favourite' is a pretty dumb word to include in the same paragraph as 'I love you both more than the cosmos and would gladly go under a bus for you tomorrow - yes both of you - if only you would just stop squabbling about who gets to push me under.'

You see, all I really want is a little quiet. And to sit down. And for the bickering to go out with the tide, or on the breeze, or with the rubbish - I'm not picky about how it leaves. I suspect you know this feeling well.

Mom, I am guessing that you had a pretty relaxing life before my sister and I landed from Mars. Maybe you didn't enjoy separating claws from scalps on a daily basis for a decade and a half. Maybe the necessity to always have TWO OF EVERYTHING ALL OF THE TIME because we were too primitive to share ANYTHING drove you completely batty and left you with little option but to ABuse the CApslock FunCTION. Maybe as you went to bed each night, just the thought of waking up in the morning made you feel profoundly beat, because you knew we'd be up by 6 and locked back into our demented prizeless tussle by 6:15.

Keep your friends close and your frenemies closer. 

It's a sick cosmic joke really: kids do the most damage to their captors in the early years before they are even capable of forming memories. It's a watertight defense - better than insanity and innocence put together. Which is why prior to having kids I never even realized that I owed you such a huge apology for all the million awful things I surely did to you in my pre-school years that I can't even remember.

Mom, I wish I could return to you the years of lost sleep and peace. However, rest assured that your revenge is currently being enacted by two very talented horsetoddlers of the apocolypse. Their dedication to the job is admirable, and you'd be proud to know that they have both been nominated for a Nihilist of the Year Award - they are currently trying to out-campaign each other, Miliband-style. They are clearly worth every fruit shoot you (or Zuul) paid them, and more.

'Would I fire my sister? No, but I'd sell her for ice cream in a Night Garden minute.'

Take solice in this: your years of exhaustion paved the way for a great life-long friendship - seriously - Tanta is my best friend. She is not even paying me to say that, although she will certainly dash off and pen something even nicer about me, and then we'll be stuck in a bitter flying compliments war that could last for weeks - who knows, maybe years. But seriously, I haven't clawed her scalp in over a decade and I don't know what I'd do without a friend like her. Or you.

With much love and thanks on this and every Mothers' Day.

Mama

*Not that I know what the word means. Seriously, is it Greek?

Short and bookish

As one of the dork persuasion, I am contractually obligated to love books. My mum read The Lord of the Rings to my sister and I when we were very young. I can only assume that she had an entire universe of lozenges to hand. Perhaps this is why I currently sport an Orc-like hairstyle.  

One moon to rule them all. 

I am chronically short of lozenges, so my daughters are treated to some less hefty evening reads. Here are some our favourites, as per a lovely suggestion from Kate Takes 5 and MummySquared :

1. Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak. About the night that Max donned his wolf suit and sailed off into the stubborn wilderness of childhood. A manifesto on how to face down parents and monsters alike with awesome belligerence.  
2. What Was I Scared Of? by Dr Seuss. A tale of spooky green pants, er trousers, with nobody inside them. Featuring pecks of snide, doubt-trout, and being nice to scary things.
3. The Snail and the Whale by Julia Donaldson. An apology for snails with an itchy feet, or as per the infinite wisdom of Tanta: the best way to explain wanderlust to the under-fives. 
4. The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein. If you can read this bittersweet tale of a tree who loved a boy without weeping, then you need to get new tear ducts installed.
5. Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown. The classic American goodnight book. Our copy, gifted by the lovely Auntie S, only retains structural integrity by a duct-tape thread. I consider I Took the Moon For a Walk by Carolyn Curtis to be the imaginative soul-mate of Goodnight Moon - complete with weeping grass, moon-shoes, and ghosts in the belfry.  

There is a pale bearded man who haunts these parts. He might be Santa or Odin, but he is lanky, chain-smokes, and doesn't appear to own a raven. He pilots a vast mobile library around on tiny pot-holey roads; he knows everything about any book under the sun, and hands out Bookstart packs like they are pure, magical gold. I reckon his RV is actually some sort of spaceship from another dimension.   

My favourite grown-up book, Something Wicked this Way Comes by Ray Bradbury, features one library, two boys, and a flock of carnival bad guys. Naturally, the boys run to the library when they need to escape from evil. 

Libraries are wonderful places - especially in painfully-quiet neighborhoods like mine. I'm no expert - heck, I'm hardly even awake to be honest - but closing down libraries does seem a bit like binning cats to save on cat food to me. 

Fairy tales out of school

We tried something different this half term: we didn't try. Instead of elbowing for room at the museum, we caught rain fairies in the backyard with a butterfly net. Ana concocted a pink gauze castle, which also doubled as a spider's web for Ali (courtesy of a long-suffering, half-broken birthday present from Tanta). The weather was rubbish, but we were happy. 

I used to dread half term, because pre school was a survival crutch for me. It was the only thing that made looking after two very different little ones even possible. Ana and Ali used to live in different galaxies, but they are nearly on the same planet now - still not my planet, but we are getting closer. Now they can chase and tackle, and hug and cuddle each other. When Ana gives Ali a kiss, she squeals with delight. It's perfect.

Last week I realized that I miss seeing Ana around in the mornings during term. It was such a pleasure to get a solid week with her, and I am looking forward to next half term already. Somewhere along the way she turned into a little person, with a rich imaginary world running full-tilt in her mind non-stop.

I started blogging back in darker days with two babies underfoot. It was my attempt to piece my tired mind back together. Now I want to record precious, finite days just like this, before they slip through the cracks of my forgetful memory and disappear out into the ether.

Aside from what it may look like, it's not all finger-painting and toy slapstick here at Chaos HQ - I have my troubles too, and some of them aren't even imaginary. But I prefer to focus on the silly stuff and the quotidian moments of pure joy, because that's my means of escapism. I reckon I won't even remember the worries in five years, but I want to remember the nonsense forever.

The first thing I say to my girls every morning is: 'I'm so happy to see you!' And I always mean it, more than they can possibly imagine. 

10: Gingerbread 2, the over-budget sequel

Day 10 in Advent photos, day two in gingerbread terms. As you can see, the infinitely wise Grandma included not one, but a handful of cookie buttons on the calendar.

 Sugar squared. 

The aforementioned baking mission is complete. This house is fully stocked with gingerbread individuals, every one of them a person of (toddler) interest.

Ample opportunity.

Ampelmann, by the way, is someone I met back in the carefree BC days, while hanging out with my lovely sister, Tanta, in Berlin. He is the old East German pedestrian crossing guy, who narrowly survived takeover by the very boring West German walk/don't walk dude, and is still hard at work on the streets of Berlin today. Ampelmann is not only an Ostalgie superhero, but the quintessential Berliner (and no relation to jelly doughnuts). Tanta gifted me a pair of Ampelmann cookie cutters last Christmas. Now with a house full of sugary Ampelmenn, I suspect I will doze off this Christmas Eve with visions of Mitte dancing in my head. 

9: Political gingerbread gone mad

Day 9 in Advent picture terms, and I find myself up against a gingerbread ceiling.

Gingerbread formerly known as man.

There are a gazillion ways to serve up Christmas sugar. Most of them are included in the American cookery bible, 'The Joy of Cooking'. Papa and I received a copy as a wedding present, and it has lived, much-loved and very food-spattered, in our home ever since. The cookbook's status as the yankee kitchen manual of choice obscures what is, to my mind, the greatest joy of the book: its thorough eccentricity. For instance, in my 1997 edition, there is a reduced fat (a joyless 90's fad) recipe not for gingerbread, or gingerbread men, but for 'gingerbread people'. There is a handy illustration of a 'gingerbread person' to drive the baking appropriateness point home in case you were too busy making/consuming cookies to ponder their inherent gender-neutrallity. 

Walk gingerly and carry a big stick. 

There are a hundred other delightful oddities contained in the book. More on this later, since I don't currently have time to dissect it recipe by recipe in the manner of Julie Powell and Julia Child (or The Joy of the Joy of Cooking, a blog on a similarly ambitious and thorough foodie mission as the Julie/a's). Instead I offer you Berlin's answer to the gingerbread person: the Ampelmann cookie cutter (see above). I plan to make a full-fat batch of Ampelvolk today and I expect the whole family, girls and boy alike, will be much more joyfully ample after eating them. 

8: White

This is the 8th day of Advent photos and my first submission to The Gallery (a lovely idea, thank you Sticky Fingers).

Two years BC (before children), Papa and I took a road trip in Germany with Onkle and Tanta. We drove from an unusually snowy Berlin (my favourite city) to an icy Dresden, then onwards into Saxony-Switzerland and the whitest Christmas I can remember.

Pre-snowflakes. 

At one point we happened upon the most perfect, untouched field of snow this side of heaven. We couldn't leave it that way, so we jumped from the car and tore through it like a pack of rabble-rousing kids. I made so many snow angels that the back of my head grew numb. We played until we were cold and tired to the bone, then piled back in the car and reverted to adulthood.

Footprints in the snow.  

The snow that day was the lightest, freshest powder imaginable: the consistency of icing sugar and twice as delicious. When my kids make me feel old, just thinking about that snow makes me feel like a kid again.