Endorphins through Ireland’s spine
I thought what with all this nasty budget stuff in the news and whatnot, that you might like to hear a nice story.
Once upon a time, there was a man named Shay Kinsella. He met a little girl in the 1980′s who had leukaemia, and when he found out that her dream was to visit Disneyland, he decided to sort that out for her. Unfortunately she passed away before that trip came to be. The news woke something within him;
“At that moment he promised that he would do everything he could to bring a little magic into the lives of sick and disabled children all over Ireland and so was born the “Share a Dream Foundation”. Now in its 21st year, the Share a Dream Foundation has worked with thousands of children North and South to help their dreams come true and give them a break away from hospitals, painful treatments, loneliness and fear.”
It’s a funky thing, living with someone with special needs. A cocoon is formed by gizmos… one regulates, another sucks, some blow. Wheelchairs and syringes and tubes and general accoutrements that are needed to keep a dude alive can be kind of limiting, when it gets to travelling away, especially seeing as we’ve had to sell our wheelchair van. Lack of escape can drive a person nuts, especially if you’re only eight years old. Siblings of disabled children get used to the sacrifices but I feel my daughter’s pain that we can’t just up and leave to sleepover with Auntie Mary whenever a spare weekend comes around.
Plus! There’s the fact that funding for Carers in Ireland is pretty low right now, so I can only imagine the huge amount of families out there who are in the same boat, bursting to be free of their same four walls every day, just for a day or two. I think it’s amazing that organizations like these exist, they’re the backup generator for happiness crashes in this country, running invisible like endorphins through the nerves of Ireland’s central backbone.
They offered us a wee holiday, which we returned from today.
Our hotel room was bigger than our entire house. It was a twin suite at the Carlton Hotel in Blanchardstown with enormous beds very suitable for bouncing on, and an ice machine right outside the door. The people that work there couldn’t be doing better jobs, they have good instincts with children and ways to soothe volatile situations like soft butter on toast. The hotel had no playroom, but there was much potential for hide and seek in the foyer. We had adventures in stairwells, and searched for secret doors and leaflets to make into paper aeroplanes later on.
We went to Tayto Park yesterday, which was only a half an hour away from the hotel. Turns out the hotel does regular deals for families, the four-star sleepover and free entry to both Tayto Park and the Aquatic centre and a picnic for just south of €150. Nice. It seemed like the hotel was set in the middle of nowhere, nothing but fields, pylons and legoblock buildings for miles around but it’s self-contained perfection, really in a great spot if you’re in to family stuff. If they’re sick of children by now though, they don’t show it.
Share a Dream arranged for a fella to bring us for a tour of the park, through a teepee village into jungle territory with enclosures full of monkeys and weird breeds of cats and a falcon or three, rescued seals barked unexpectedly at the children and made them jump and giggle. The playground would have been a haven if it wasn’t so chilly, I imagine the place gets a great trade during the summer. There was a mother of all zip-lines jutting from one part of the park, but judging from the frozen people at the top we figured we’d just brave it in the gift shop and picnic beside the fire in the restaurant instead. It was a good call, I can feel it in my waters.
She’s taller in person.
Sifting for moon rocks and sapphires
Baby spud
“Ma! I’ve a wedgie! I really do!” Never have I been so proud.
Go on, let your toddler in here to play. You go for coffee. I won’t eat him… much.
Please, if you’re in the position to be able to give to charity in 2013, send it Share a Dream’s way. I can’t thank them enough for the break. For crisp sheets, and not having to cook for a day or two, for smiley children and fuzzy dressing gowns… everything was amazing. Amazing work for amazing children.
The End.
Weird rituals
The handy thing about being the overlord of the school library is the ability to make it my hovel. If there was a zombie apocalypse I think it’s the first place I’d go to hide out. I have a Lord of the Rings poster in there, not the new release one, but a graphic that was done for the book series a while back. I like to scatter odd poetry books and fact books about whales and motorbikes about the place. And cushions. Lots of cushions.
There’s a blackboard at the rear of the little library room, this year I’ve decided to chalk up an aul’ Word of the Week for the laugh. It’s difficult to decide what the week’s word should be though, it can’t be too long or too short, and must be relatively comprehensible to your average nine-year-old.
This week’s word is:
Delenda
De`len´da
Meaning: Things to be deleted or destroyed.
To use the word in a sentence, ‘The spam comments on this blog are among my delenda today.’ It would make a lovely name for a cat, if you’re a fan of irony.
So far the past words of the week have been ‘Jagged’ and ‘Laconic’. Have you any ideas for good words? I run frequent blanks.
I leave you with a creation of Puppychild’s;
I made the skull out of scrunched-up newspaper sticky taped together, which Puppychild wallpapered over with kitchen paper and a PVA dilute mixture. When it was dry she painted it and skewered its brains with a coat-hanger and hung ripped-up plastic aprons onto it before performing her weird ritual which of course I asked nothing about.
Happy Halloween, pagans!!
The sort of post that should really be TWO posts.
Don’t you hate it when you can’t remember your username and password for your blog site? That’s a bad sign. Baad blogger. Baad girl.
So I learned an interesting fact recently…
-o0o-
Onions are spurious artifacts. They make you cry. They’re good for clearing paint-smells out of a room. They are the base of any good bolognese recipe. But they are also toxic under the right circumstances. Did you know that?!?
Apparently in the olden days whenever somebody was sick, a half-onion was placed by the bedside, because onions absorb bacteria. It’s one of their better traits. So when you’re at a barbeque and you’re about to sue the dude that’s frying the burgers because you got sick after eating a double-decker with onion relish, think twice. It’s not the meat that’s at fault, nor the cook. It’s the chopped up onion that’s been sitting there for hours absorbing the E-coli around it. It’s why you should -NEVER- store a half onion in the fridge… it’s absorbing the random bacterium in fridge-land and it’s going to make you hurl unless you cook it properly. That is all.
-o0o-
The second part of this post shall be…
How to amuse 100 children?
I like doing the whole fundraising thing for Puppychild’s school. It’s nice meeting with parents and shooting the breeze. It’s nice to share the fact that children don’t just drive you crazy, but keep you sane at the same time.
But…
Movie nights are an integral part of fundraising and they’re the background money-spinner, and yet they’re a dodgy entity.
I mean… I can’t sit still for a whole movie, and I’m an adult. I start wanting munchies, I start wanting to roam or knit or chew my nails and I’m middle-aged for gawd’s sake. How on earth are a whole bunch of 5 – 12 year olds supposed to sit out an hour and a half of film quietly?? We’ve tried it before, and the first-aid kit was broken out because there is such a thing as attention deficit disorder but it’s not limited to those special children, it pretty much exhibits itself in 50% of the ticket holders in most of the films we’ve shown so far. Sugar will do that to small dudes. Parents are starting to not send their children in for these events for this reason, because boredom breeds injury.
I need an alternative to the standard run-of-the-mill movie night. I need a murder-whodunnit-night, or a disco-on-an-extremely-low-budget-night or something. Do any of you have any strange or crazy ideas?
When I say strange or crazy, I mean strange or crazy.
Is there anybody out there who’s ever had to amuse a hundred children on a low budget? I’m guessing that most of you haven’t… but if you had, how would you do it? Should we be sacrificing hamsters to Hermes?
No suggestion would be too weird or inappropriate.. you know me by now.
The rhythm of life
CPR practice. There are about eighteen other people on this first-aid course with me, and as I looked around I noticed that every single one of them was at a different rhythm as they compressed the chests of their creepy limbless dummies.
I called over the dude with the fancy uniform and put it to him that I was confused as to how many beats per minute I was supposed to be pummeling this potential victim’s chest.
“Do you know that song ‘Staying Alive‘?” he says.
“I do indeed” says I.
“That’s how fast you go.”
How ironic is that?!?
Life continuum
Yet more apologies for being so anti-social. I don’t mean to neglect this writing lark, it’s just that two months goes by awful fast. As do six months, and twelve. I wouldn’t know where to start in my descripshuns to you of the minutiae of it all, so I have just brief highlights for you.
I organized a table quiz! We made about twelve hundred quid which brought us nicely up to the halfway mark of the final €10,000 we need to raise for the school. Sweet. It was an excellent night, a spurious friend of The Accidental Terrorist saved the day by acting as compere when the usual dude chucked a sickie at the last minute, so I’m hoping this redeems me from random committee scattyness to come.
Some of my questions were;
Olympus Mons is the largest volcano known to man. Where is it?
Which country has a birth rate of zero?
Who was the first Bond Girl?
How many Oscars has Alfred Hitchcock won?
What is the only Olympic sport that has a finish line that no competitor will ever cross?
How many grooves are on one side of an LP record?
Which Irish Saint is said to have discovered America a thousand years before Columbus?
Which is the non-contagious disease that is most common in the world?
What is Borborygmus?
What does the circle in the centre of the Celtic cross represent?
I made a dingbats round, a caricatures round and a lyrics round. The latter backfired on me totally.
Someone on the committee (a pox on her!) decided it would be good craic if I sang the lyrics, so sing them I did. As embarrassing as it was, it was amazing how easy it is to spark a song in collective people. There was Whiskey in the Jar, Frank Sinatra, and Parklife (John’s got brewer’s droop, he gets intimidated by the dirty pigeons) and this one bloke even lept into the air when I sang ‘Her name was Magil and she called herself Lil… But everyone knew her as Nancy‘ and carried on with ‘Daniel was hot, he drew the first shot, and Rocky collapsed in the corner-errrrrr!‘ ‘Twas awful funny. I should have given him the mike in hindsight, dammit. His name was Dan. Figures!
Apart from that, there are Nazi Zombies (as usual), various knitting projects, yoga(!), disciplinarianism with terrible two year old, cupcake practice for communionisms, and many many sleepless nights.
There have been the throwing away of old things:
And restoration of old things.
I wonder is there money to be made in photo restoration? I need a job. Still. Ugh.
I hope you’re all suckin’ diesel out there?
Laterz
x
PS. Here are the answers (not necessarily in order, heheh): Mars, Vatican City, Ursula Andress, None, Swimming, 1, Saint Brendan, Tooth Decay, The sound of a rumbling stomach, The Sun.
Ten things they don’t warn you about before you get pregnant #7
Daddies… know your place!
He was just a small kid. I noticed he was tired at the start of the karate class, his punches were lacklustre. Throughout the Satory Dragon creed, through the warm-ups, even through the highly energetic high-kick lesson the kid was tired and thirsty much like the rest of them. Karate lessons can be hard going that way.
Ten minutes before the end of the class however, his father walked in. I could tell that this random man sitting suddenly beside me was the kid’s father, because out of the blue the kid’s attention was sidetracked from his Sensei, he kept a special reserve of backward glances for this stranger who somehow didn’t seem to notice the admiration. The kid’s activity miraculously transformed. His Katas were sharp, precise and well-timed, he was a pleasure to watch all of a sudden… child certainly knew his stuff. I donated a corner of my eye to the bloke beside me who was nose-deep in his smart phone and felt sad for said child. (What if it wasn’t his Dad?! Maybe was child’s first childhood crush??? (Ew.)) Turns out it was indeed his dad, pops had the velcro shoe straps pre-unwrapped, ready for exit sharpish. Burger-time, perhaps.
How strange is that though? That a kid will suddenly perform amazingly in the presence of a parent who doesn’t seem all that bothered… maybe the kid’s obnoxious and this guy is used to it, I don’t know… I just wish he could’ve seen that transformation!
It was like Puppychild’s Christmas play. I and her Daddy were (slightly(!)) late, the concert had already started and as I mooched a spot just inside the main door of the crammed hall, I spotted her searching randomly through the faces in the audience. I saw it straight away, the fact that she felt alone. When she spotted her Daddy’s dodgy haircut through the crowd however, I saw an amazing transformation – she sand loud and proud, her beaming smile did her Angel costume great justice. She pulled faces mid-song and elbowed her buddy beside her…
…’That’s my Daddy.’
There are some parents out there that can’t see that magic and it kills me. It’s an ultimate sort of love and it’s far greater than any salary or smartphone, greater than anything I’ve ever known. It’s a sort of power, maybe. To leave a superpower untapped is criminal, if you ask me. It’s another thing about parent-hood that they never tell you about, the power to inspire greatness in a random dude. How do they not see it, those random few?
Half a job
Story of my life, innit? This blog’s looking like my teenage diary, large gaps filled with absent memories, a half-assed diary of mystery. Still, I’m glad I still have them both, as haphazard as they are.
I’ve learned exactly half of Xtreme’s song ‘More Than Words’ on the guitar. I spent half the time in college that I was supposed to. My house is semi-clean, semi-cluttered. I’m a half a job, a quitter, a loser even.
But that’s good, right? If there were no losers, there’d be no winners. You can’t have night without day, hey.
If I’d been more commited, I would’ve told you about Laughingboy’s brush with botox last month. Not just for those with more money than sense, the stuff happens to be quite useful it seems. I was only too happy to have them inject poison into my kid, in fact.
He mutated earlier this year, you see, from a little boy into a strapping young man. His schoolteachers panicked and swiftly ordered larger equipment to handle him, I rushed out to buy big-boy clothes and meanwhile Laughingboy suffered. Nature would have it that a child’s bones grow first, but their surrounding supportive tendons can take up to a year to catch up. Cruel, isn’t it? Seems Mother Nature’s a bit of a half-a-job, too.
That’s what the botox was for, to relax those muscles, to make them sleep and stop hurting while his cells multiply. You should see the difference it’s made! No longer frog-legged, no longer squirming in his wheelchair, he’s his old Laughingboy self again, but taller.
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again… I’m so glad he lives in the 21st century.
Why nobody had a sense of humour before 1960
Rain has been pelting on damp soil, the fire has wanted to be lit, a dreary week in July such as this would have been very boring if it hadn’t been so much fun.
It started last week on the bus to Galway with friends and a hip-flask and several spurious games of dirty 20-questions. It travelled through a night of drinking and dancing and marshmallow fighting and on into the next evening for several sober games of cards and deep thought and soulful talking… old wounds were unexpectedly torn apart and spilled upon the kitchen table, our agonies seemed less agonizing once their funny sides were pointed out. It was like drinking champagne after a long walk through a desert, only it wasn’t champagne, it was peppermint tea.
The following night, I returned home and received the welcome of a queen. I was quite pleased to see that my pretty flower hadn’t been eaten by slugs too.
Say hello to my pretty flower!
Of course, a dampner can be placed on such an idyllic weekend upon close examination of snapshots stolen by an inebriated trigger finger… embarrassment is bound to ooze at the state of one, and the drunken poses one can pull when suitably excited. It made me think of old photographs, and the restriction that was imposed on their subjects.
“Stay fucking still, you little shit.”
Before daguerrotype photographs were replaced by better photographic equipment in the ’60′s, there was no barstool posing, no sneaky bathroom shots or arms-length group photography. They had to sit with as fixed an expression as possible, and a serious face is the easiest to hold for the hundred seconds it took to expose their images. It’s a sad thing missed, all those instances of happiness that happened back then, it’s as though they never happened.
It’s only eighty years later, and my one-year-old is taking his own photographs, albeit very spurious ones. How times have changed.
Crocs my arse.
‘Would you not put some aul’ shoes on the poor child’s feet?’
they say to me, eyeing me up and exchanging worried glances with onlookers as Sir Fartsalot wombles barefoot, only two weeks qualified as a provisional walker. It’s adorable.
He jaunts around on hot tarmac and stony patio and squishy grassy patches, on sharp pebbles and fluffy carpet, the more textured the better. Touch is so important for learning and what better way than through your feet? I’ve no idea why they make shoes for babies. Welly boots are pretty much all they need. Shoes are often too tempting for babies to remove anyway… have a look at the floor of your local toy shop or supermarket, littered with socks and sandles they are, in a little oddsock parade of wasted money.
And ANYWAY, runners are a hazard to your health!
I’ve always thought it funny that sports brands advertise shoe support so well and get away with it. They put cushioning in every available crevice of the sole of your foot and tell you that you’ve just parted fairly serious money for something that’s great for your feet when it’s entirely the opposite case! They have us all suckered!!!
Think about it, if you support something, you make it weaker don’t you? If you try to correct something that’s already perfect, say by walking around on just your left leg and a pair of crutches for a year… chances are you right leg won’t thank you for it. It’s why marathon runners usually end up with dodgy knees, apparently.
Imagine running barefoot through a forest on a warm summers day after a rainshower to absorb it of all its squelchy nourishment, and tell me it doesn’t sound tempting. And how good for your body would it be if you actually went and did it every now and then?
I read Born to Run by Christopher McDougall and loved every word of it, it all made so much sense.
Doesn’t it?
Which reminds me…
Here’s a video showing you how to put your cat in standby mode:
Maybe this trick will distract the neighbours from the baby’s feet for a feckin’ change.
Buried Treasure
I was clearing out my bookmarks this evening and looked what spilled out!!
-Floaty-mouse images of Dublin City in June 1961 and June 2011, a then-and-now sort of collection. Look at all the dinky cars! (Stolen from Jo :)
This is what real love looks like.
-US Actress Tina Fey’s ‘A Mother’s Prayer for Her Child’; it’s as though she’s inside my head.
-10 Words You Need To Stop Misspelling Read these, and write them out twenty times, you naughty children!
-How to make a gift box out of a bank note. For when you couldn’t be arsed buying that voucher.
-Arty Bollocks Generator because everybody needs an artist statement!
Oh, and a creepy picture by Lori Nix. Click the image to magnifify it.
