Happy birthday, Mom! Many happy returns!
Anyone care to join me in wishing my mother a very happy birthday? If you want to help make my mother's birthday as special as she is, please go ahead and add your birthday wishes to the comments. Let's see how many we can get!
Last Sunday was the first Mother's Day since I became the mother of two children. Since it was also the day before my sister's birthday, we marked it by going to stay with my own mother for the weekend. This was not only the first overnight trip we'd been on since having a second child, but the first in about six months, as we'd stopped making long trips in the latter months of my pregnancy and had not been organised enough to anticipate that we would be doing this and arrange a Last Trip Before The Baby's Here at the point where I still felt up to doing so. So I approached the weekend with a major degree of trepidation - on top of the extra difficulties caused by having double the number of small children to transport around, I felt totally out of the swing of packing for a night away at all, and was convinced I'd forget something crucial. (I'm always convinced I'll forget something crucial, but at least when we're going somewhere every few weeks I feel I'm staying in practice in the not-forgetting-anything-crucial department.)
In fact, however, it all went swimmingly. Katie slept for the entire trip there and Jamie entertained himself beautifully with the Zen, an MP4 player purchased by my technogeek husband for just such occurrences. (An MP4 is like an MP3, but records and plays films as well as music.) On the trip back I did a slightly less good job of timing Katie's feeds around the trip (difficult to do with a baby who still feeds both extremely frequently and very irregularly) and she decided she was hungry just as we set off on the long drive home, but I revived my nursing-in-car technique as tried and tested with my first child (which enables me to nurse a baby in the car seat next to me without either of us needing to remove our respective safety harness - uncomfortable but possible and exceedingly useful), and she went back to sleep for the remainder of the trip, thus allowing me to do the same.
And, during the time period between those two journeys, we had a brilliant time. I took full advantage of having my mother and sister around to help with the children, we enjoyed my mother's delicious cooking and my sister's birthday cake, and Katie took the new environment completely in her stride, settling in the travel cot just as well as she does in her Moses basket back home. On the Saturday afternoon after lunch, while Jamie had what was at least nominally his nap (actual sleep was a bit too much to hope for, but he spent the time alone in the bedroom that used to be my room once upon a time, and it afforded him and us some much-needed downtime) I took Katie in the carrier and went for a walk up to the nearest Mothercare to hunt for bibs. Katie is the spittiest of babies and for some reason, probably the fact that I am a moron, it had not occurred to me until that week that perhaps I did not have to spend quite as large a proportion of my time as had hitherto been the case on putting clean clothes on her only to have to remove them a minute or two later as she spits up yet again, as these highly useful inventions known as bibs do at least minimise the need to change her entire outfit. So I bought out a large proportion of their stock of bibs, getting a nice and healthful walk in the process.
Jamie had great fun with Granny Constance, especially since she had been stocking up on puzzles and books since he was last there - I was quite bowled over by the amount of stuff laid on for his amusement. The most notable purchase she'd made for him was two enormous laminated posters with numbers on - one of them listing the numbers from one to one hundred, one of them counting to twenty with associated pictures of numbers of items and labels stating that there were seven shirts or whatever - the sort of thing people normally buy because they feel they really ought to be educating their child rather than because the child actually wants them. Jamie, of course, was delighted. "I love number 4!" he announced in ecstasy, proceeding to read his way through that one and all the rest of the numbers. We were very impressed by how many of the words on the poster he knew. He also loved being asked how many of one object or another there were, a game instigated by my sister which he then wanted me to play as well: "Mummy should say 'How many?'," he assured me.
And I got my Mother's Day loot - a card with a No. 1 Mum badge, chocolates, and a small pot of primroses (the latter being a triumph of hope over experience on Barry's part, but maybe this time I'll actually remember to water the poor things occasionally). Best of all, I got the fruits of Jamie's most recent nursery session - a peppermint cream and a hand-made card bearing more glitter than a 70's disco night, hand-made for me by Jamie.
Did you know that car batteries are quite likely to develop faults after about five years or so?
I didn't, and neither did Barry. This is rather a shame, because it means that neither of us realised that his car's recent tendency to have some difficulty starting up might be due to something more serious than just "Oh, well, we've only been on very short journeys in the past few weeks and the battery's probably just running a bit low - we've got the trip to London coming up, and that'll charge it up." So it came as rather a nasty shock when we got into the loaded-up car for aforesaid trip, packed and ready to set off, and discovered that the battery was making the average pancake look well-rounded by comparison. Well, not that we knew it was the battery to start with - all we knew was that the car wouldn't start. At all. Not a cough, not a flicker. All packed up, somewhere to go, and no way of getting there.
"Sorry, little one," I told Jamie as Barry got out to see what he could find under the bonnet, "but Daddy's car's not working."
"Maybe battery," suggested my two-and-a-half-year-old.
I agreed that this was indeed a possibility, although we could not as yet be certain.
"Get new battery put in," Jamie advised.
Which was exactly what we had to do, once we'd headed back into the house and Barry had rung the dealership for his car barely in time to catch them before they closed for the weekend and confirmed with someone slightly more qualified that that did indeed sound like the problem. Barry tried going round to our next-door neighbour to see whether he could jump-start the car, but the neighbour checked the voltage on the battery and told him that it had just become too defective to rely on. We were better off just getting a new one. Which pretty much seemed to put the kibosh on the planned weekend at my mother's - even if we could manage to get one today, by the time we'd done that and Barry had put it in it would be too late to be worth setting off. (My car is a lot smaller than his, and not practical for a lengthy trip with a six-foot-four husband and the vast amount of luggage that we always seem to need whenever we travel anywhere.) We explained regretfully to Jamie that we probably weren't going to get to Granny Constance's house this weekend after all.
"Can walk to London," Jamie suggested helpfully as he sat down on the bottom of the stairs to pull his shoes off.
It was an enterprising suggestion. We felt quite bad having to tell him that it just wouldn't be possible.
"Can see Granny Constance and Great-Grandma Martha on 'puter instead," Jamie concluded philosophically, toddling into the living room to look for the webcam.
This did, indeed, seem to be the option we were left with, but it was a shame. As Jamie had said, the proposed trip was meant to give us the chance to see my grandmother, who had arrived from the USA that week for her annual visit and who was longing to see just how much her one and only grandson had grown. We had also discovered the change in plan too late to tell my mother, who even as we discussed the situation was out buying food for the weekend in quantities that, if past experience was anything to go by, would be comparable not just to fatted calves but to entire fatted herds. This seemed like somewhat of a waste.
Fortunately, when we did manage to get through to my mother, she was willing to throw all the food into her own car and drive to our house at extremely short notice, and so she and my grandmother are now here for the weekend instead. Barry did indeed manage to get a replacement battery (and Jamie had great fun climbing up and down the stairs in the shop, an activity that holds quite amazing levels of fascination), and so that problem is now solved. And we had an extremely pleasant evening with my mother and grandmother admiring Jamie's charms and Jamie admiring the new toy car, book, and set of number cards they'd brought for him. So, as annoying as the whole business with the battery was, it has at least all ended up well. Not to mention that we now know that my son will, at the rate he's going, clearly be ready to go into business as a car mechanic advisory in just a few more years and support us all in our dotage.
I've always been someone who gets nostalgic at the drop of a hat ("Ah, the memories that brought back of hats I have seen drop in the past!"), so New Year's has always been an important date to me - the time when one is officially meant to reminisce about what's happened since last year and the ways in which things have changed, along with musing on what the upcoming year might be hoped and/or expected to bring. Oh, boy, do I do that. Normally, I wallow in a level of introspective nostalgia that almost has me disappearing up my own dropped hat.
However, this year I was pleased to realise that I seem to be getting a tad more laid back about the whole thing. Instead of obsessing about finishing all my musings in time to write a formal farewell to 2006 and get all worked up about leaving the year behind, my level of reaction was more like "Cool! Midnight! Time to watch the fireworks." In fact, the part of the whole deal that stirred me by far the most was the four-day weekend. (I don't go into work on Tuesdays, which is highly pleasant on any week but particularly good on Bank Holiday weeks - I get the double bonus of four days off in a row and missing the worst of the post-Bank-Holiday rush back at work.) So, I got four wonderful days off work, and I got caught up on sleep, and on the Journal Backlog Pile, and on some e-mailing and blogging, and got a couple of letters written that I'd been meaning to write, and a bit of my ironing dealt with, and some general relaxation time, and, oh, yes, somewhere in the middle of all this a new year started. So, this was all pretty cool.
What was also pretty cool was that Barry's parents came to visit for the weekend, thus meaning that we could enjoy having someone take the baby off our hands the pleasure of their company without having to drive for hours in order to do so. We went to the park on New Year's Eve morning, and watched Jamie running around and climbing and bouncing and jumping, and then on New Year's Day the two of them went out for a walk in the nearby field and took Jamie with them. The first thing he did, when we let him out in the back garden, was to get his little watering can and start trying to water the plants with it, busy and satisfied and absorbed in his work the way he always is.
I watched him go as he toddled away with Nana and Granddad, in his Thomas the Tank Engine wellies he got for Christmas with the flashy lights he loves, and his khaki-green outdoor coat with that snuzzly-looking furry-edged hood. I don't know exactly what it is about the sight of him running round in that coat that makes my heart feel so full with contentment that one drop more would make it overflow; I think it's the way he looks so big in that little-boy way. I used to dress him up warmly because he was so little and helpless. Now I dress him up warmly so that he can go out and explore the world. It was one of those moments when of just standing there and savouring my overwhelming good luck in life. My good luck in having such a wonderful son, and my good luck in having someone to take him off my hands for half an hour so that I could get a bit of a break.
A little later, after they'd got back and after I'd changed Jamie out of a very muddy pair of trousers, my mother appeared bearing food and gifts - the latter coming under attack by Jamie even before we'd brought them all through into the living room. Jamie's main present from my mother was an electronic piano keyboard - a present that she'd cleared with me in advance and that I'd happily agreed to, given his passionate love of anything with buttons and anything that he can make do something, such as make a noise. What neither my mother nor I had realised was that, since this keyboard wasn't designed for toddlers but, rather, for people who actually play keyboards, the default volume was at a setting that could best be described as "Large noisy hall", and, for a household living room, it was a bit much. It could of course be turned down, but it took Jamie an astonishingly short space of time to realise that all he had to do was turn the keyboard off and then on again in order to put the volume back to the initial ultra-loud level. By the next morning, the keyboard had been stowed behind the Christmas tree, a place from which it did not find its way out for some time.
Jamie also got a set of Little Bear books, which he absolutely loves, and I got some books which I'd asked for, and we gave my mother her presents - a National Trust gardening calendar, a crocus bulb in a pot for growing, and a set of super-duper fancy cookie cutters as a present from Jamie, to include, hopefully, many happy hours of grandmother-grandson time using them. Then my mother cooked up a storm providing us all with a delicious lunch, and, after that had been eaten and Jamie settled down for his nap, she and I embarked on the next book in the Harry Potter series, which I've been reading her chapter by chapter for the past several years - an endeavour which has been a lot slower since Jamie has reached the actively mobile stage, since I don't really think Harry Potter in the style of Joyce Grenfell would be the way I'd want to do things and thus we can only get the reading done in those extremely infrequent moments when not only are we visiting her or vice versa, but when Jamie's asleep and we're both awake. Such a moment occurred on New Year's Day, and we made the most of our chance to read the first chapter of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. It was an excellent start to the New Year.
After all this, I got back to work on the Wednesday to discover that the reason we'd been so busy the previous week in the few days between Christmas and New Year wasn't just, as I had thought, because this is always a busy time of year (the extra burden of illness due to winter, combined with the backlog from the extra days off), but because one of the doctors was off sick. Two of the receptionists were off as well, including the one who normally handles the repeat prescription system - one of the others covered for her, but, since she hasn't had the extra training to know that, for example, when someone orders Zoton it does actually mean the Lansoprazole listed on their repeat list, this meant that a lot more of the requests had to be printed out by us instead of just signed. One more thing to add to the workload.
All of which is why this post is so late to appear - I haven't had any time to post at work, and when I get home in the evenings I've just been too tired. Even though everyone has been back at work for a good couple of weeks now, and, even though the general workload has now dropped from 'run ragged' to 'general winter busy-ness', I'm still trying to catch up with the backlog that accumulated in that time.
But I did feel a lot better for having had an excellent New Year's. And to round it off, we went to my mother's house the following weekend for Christmas, Installment 3, so that we could meet up with my sister for further exchange of presents and good wishes. Jamie got even more books, and my sister got me a new bag that I'd needed for work, and I got her book tokens, as she'd finally given this as her heart's desire after giving up on trying to think of anything else after I'd pestered her for a Christmas list for the half-dozenth time. I got her Amazon gift vouchers, having been assured by Barry that if you buy vouchers from Amazon they would post a proper certificate that I could give to Ruth, and only discovered after 11 p.m. on the evening before we were due to set off to Mom's that, in fact, what they send is a gift code in a standard e-mail that's addressed to the recipient of the voucher. This was slightly less snazzy than I'd been hoping for, so, since I wanted to give my sister something to unwrap that looked marginally more exciting than a printed-off e-mail to herself, some frantic last-minute searching of the Internet for appropriate certificate designs ensued. However, I did manage to find rather a nice one, so I put her gift code on that with a message and printed it off to bring with us for her present. And, although my mother and I didn't manage any more Harry Potter, the cookie cutters did get a try-out (while I took full advantage of my mother entertaining Jamie in order to nap).
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Looking back on 2006, my overriding impression is that it was a good year. As soon as I look in more detail, I can see that a certain amount of parental amnesia seems to have gone into that conclusion; this was the year of Jamie's most difficult toddler period, the time when the ratio of common sense to mobility is at its lowest, and most of what I remember about the details is a sort of blur of frustration and irritation and no-Jamie-don't-do-that. But, somehow, looking at it from this distance and taking the longer view, that's not what I see. What I see is a year in which my wonderful, healthy son made huge strides in growing up. I've said it before, but somehow I can't stop saying it again - Jamie has been turning into a proper little boy instead of a baby, the fledgling person emerging just that little bit more with every passing month until I find myself looking back and marvelling at how far we've come. For that, it was an amazing year.
Christmas, this year, was spent with Barry's parents, up in North Wales. I was working up until the Friday and we drove up there on the Saturday. Driving a couple of hundred miles through pre-Christmas traffic with a toddler somehow never quite made it onto my list of Things I Have Been Eagerly Looking Forward To All Year, and the fog-induced travel nightmares of preceeding days didn't make me any more enamoured of the prospect. But, in fact, it went better than I'd dared to hope. The fog had lifted, everybody appeared to have either done their travelling already or decided to stay home (at any rate, the traffic was minimal), and Jamie put up with the whole thing wonderfully, aided somewhat by the episodes of Teletubbies downloaded to my laptop. We stopped for lunch after a couple of hours and then Jamie (and I) napped the rest of the way until we got there.
Since Jamie's long since outgrown his travel cot, my mother-in-law has been making up little beds for him on the floor as best she can when we stay, but this time she'd found something better - an inflatable mini-bed shaped like a car, complete with steering wheel. It was actually a ball pool, but she spotted that it would do just fine to put a little mattress in and make into a bed. While it unfortunately didn't make Jamie any more inclined to leave the day's enjoyments and settle down to sleep at bedtime, it did mean that at least he could be more comfortable at night. And he did like the steering wheel.
We had a wonderful time. We relaxed and enjoyed the presents, and the delicious meals (including goose for Christmas Day), and the recording of Hogfather that they'd saved for us (they get Sky and we don't). Which, although it's something of a tangent, would be a handy point to mention that we also went to the Hogswatch meet in Wincanton earlier this year, which I meant to tell about in my post about December stuff but completely forgot about. Not that there's a huge amount to tell - the bit we could get to was mainly just market stalls selling stuff, which is the kind of thing that's interesting for about half an hour. Emms came down to stay with us for the weekend, which was great fun, and Elaine Stibbons and Melusine were at the meet as well, but there wasn't anyone else there that I knew. We couldn't stay for the sausage supper and showing of 'Hogfather' extracts in the evening because of having to get Jamie home to bed (not to mention me - these days, by that point in the week, I'm ready to keel over with exhaustion) although fortunately Emms managed to find someone to give her a lift back, so at least she was able to stay for the evening's events. Most of the meet, for me, just consisted of stopping Jamie from running amok in an area fairly full of stalls, drinks and half-played games of Thud.
But the meet did give us a chance to see Hex from the film (which was brought in for the auction) - I've got a photo of myself standing next to the keyboard. And Emms managed to get us a few of the teeth from the Tooth Fairy's palace, which were being given away. So it was well worth going for that alone. And Emms got Jamie a little ball with flashing lights and a Mr Potato Head, both of which he has found endlessly fascinating, so I think he found it worthwhile as well.
Getting back to Christmas, Jamie's presents were as follows:
From my grandmother, one of those educational thingummies with letters and numbers that you can press to hear an electronic voice speaking the letter or number in question aloud. While this is normally the kind of present designed for parents rather than children, for Jamie it was the perfect present. He's been fascinated with numbers for a while now, and, more recently, this particular interest has expanded to include letters - and, of course, buttons have long since been high on the list of his absolute favourite things. A toy which has buttons shaped like letters and numbers and, just to round it off, flashing lights as well, might have been designed for him. He played happily with it for hours.
From Barry's parents, a magnetic easel/mini-blackboard for his letters and numbers - also a big favourite with him. Also a doll designed for practicing buttons, zips, laces and the like, which rather mystified him - he pulled the clothes part way off, discovered he couldn't get them off completely, and abandoned it as a bad job. I have a feeling there was something else, but, if so, it's escaping me.
From Barry's brother, a little wooden fire engine, as well as a cheque for his savings account,
From Barry, a Tinky Winky that waves its legs in the air (looking worryingly like a stranded beetle) and laughs when you press its hand. Well, it's theoretically laughing. In actual practice, it sounds more as though it's uttering strangled choking sobs. It's among the more disturbing toys I've ever seen. I'm not sure whether or not to be worried about the fact that Jamie loves it.
I got him bits and bobs - a book with pictures of farm animals, a packet of magnetic numbers (which turned out to be a bit of a waste, as there were plenty with the easel), a box of picture dominoes, and an inflatable globe. I chose the last because he's fascinated by both maps and balls, so combining the two seemed like a good bet to me, and it certainly was - he was absolutely intrigued, especially when he saw Barry blowing it up. He kept pointing excitedly and signing "Ball!" The main fun he's had from the dominoes is from tipping them out over the floor, but he does like the book, which I'm relieved by because after buying it I realised that it was actually below the level he's at now - he's moved on from the sorts of books that just have labelled pictures, and these days he 'reads' the sort that actually have some kind of simple storyline to them, even if it is just finding things behind lift-up flaps. But he didn't seem to mind - he's insisted on reading the book with me over and over since he got it. He picked it out as his bedtime book tonight.
I got lots of books - the Octavia Butler and Diana Wynne Jones books I wanted, and also, in a lovely burst of childhood nostalgia, the 'Nurse Matilda' books, reissued as a single volume under the title of 'Nanny McPhee' in honour of the film. (Does anyone know why the name was changed, by the way?) And a new pair of slippers (big fluffy ones shaped like teddy bears - or maybe small dogs, it's not quite clear which) from my brother-in-law, which I was very pleased with, as my old ones were practically falling to bits and I hadn't relished the thought of a shopping trip to try to find another pair I liked. So I've done very well, as well.
The trip back on Tuesday afternoon didn't go quite as easily as the trip up - Jamie was fine for most of it, but he did get pretty whingey before we stopped for lunch - and when I restarted work on Wednesday, the combination of the backlog of patients that had built up over the four-day weekend and the fact that I was on call meant that it was one of the busiest days I'd ever had in general practice (how in holy hell did Dr Crippen manage to have a 'reasonably quiet' day? How??) and I eventually managed to leave shortly after eight o'clock in the evening after my final visit. But I was so relaxed after that lovely break that I didn't even care. Well, not too much, anyway.
An update on some bits and bobs that have been happening in my life:
The bad news first, to get it over with. After months of faffing around with the GP and the hospital appointment system, my mother-in-law finally got the horrible-looking thing on her back looked at by someone who knew what they were doing, and it's a melanoma. Ick. Breslow thickness 5 mm, which, in plain English, is Not Good. It's been removed successfully - at last - and she feels fine and we had a great weekend with the two of them visiting, but she's now been called back for a scan next Monday and we're waiting to see what the outcome of that is. So. Not great. Ack.
In happier news, despite Jo being snowed under with stuff to do before her trip to China (to meet! her! daughter! How exciting is that?!) she actually managed to make time to meet me for a coffee on Saturday morning. Well, she had a coffee and I had one of the lime milkshakes that the café had been promising on their menu for months but which never seemed to be available when I was in there (and, yes, it was delicious), and we talked about Xue and the upcoming trip and this, that, and the other, and I had a brilliant time (while Jamie stayed at home with Barry, thus giving us probably about the only chance we'll have for the next ten years to have a chat that isn't punctuated by constant Joyce Grenfell-style asides).
And then, later, when I was thinking back on the conversation, it suddenly occurred to me that every damn time she'd said something about her daughter, I had immediately used it as the lead-in to an enthusiastic, and sometimes lengthy, anecdote about my son. Hello, my name is Sarah and I am a Doting Mother. It started off so simply - a quick mention of his activities here, a lingering thought about his charms there... Anyway, the point is, I think I'd better work on this. While he is indeed a child of rare adorableness and fascination, so is Xue, and I do genuinely want to hear all about her even if it didn't sound that way at the time, and I'll get to hear more if I can actually shut up about my own child for a bit. Jo, if you can bear to meet me again once she's here, I promise I'll do less talking and more listening this time!
On which note, I move smoothly on to talking about my son again. Specifically, an update on his squint. (Categorising this under 'the ugly' is stretching things more than somewhat, as he is a child of such beauty that passing acquaintances go into raptures about his eyes and their slight misalignment is the merest blip on this perfection. However, I'm not one to pass up a shot at a good blog title, so consider it poetic licence.)
Since my previous post on the subject, Jamie's been reviewed by both the optometrist/orthoptist (no, I still haven't figured out what the difference is or which one she actually is, but she's one or the other, anyway) and the ophthalmologist. His vision in the squinting eye is, apparently, fine, and we have been given permission to reduce his patching time from two hours a day to one (which is good, as he's getting more narky about keeping the patches on and I swear lately it's been harder to keep one on him for an hour than it used to be with two hours). His glasses prescription has also been updated.
Now, we have the decision about the squint operation. The ophthalmologist recommended that we should go ahead with it. He says it's purely cosmetic and won't make a difference to his vision (thinking about that later, I'm confused. Surely, once his eyes are aligned and he can look at things with both eyes at the same time, we'll be able to stop worrying about the whole issue of him potentially losing his vision in the squinting eye through not being able to use it at the same time as the other one? Or did the ophthalmologist mean that it wouldn't make a direct difference? Must ask about this when he has his next appointment.) However, it's a very simple, quick, and low-risk operation. The waiting list is about six months, so if we put his name down for it now he'll have it when he's around two and a half. Alternatively, we could wait and have it done at any time down the line, although the ophthalmologist doesn't want to leave it until after he's started school (with which I totally agree - I don't want to be taking him out of school for something that we can sort out at a time of his life when the most important thing he's likely to miss is a Tumbletots' session, so if we do this at all, then I think we should do it before he starts school).
So, we can choose to have him operated on any time between the ages of two and a half and five. Alternatively, we can leave him to grow up with the squint still there and concentrate on teaching him that beauty's only skin deep anyway. Personally, I'm in favour of just putting his name down now and getting it over and done with. Barry's a bit more leery about it - the thought of the general anaesthetic has him concerned (what if it ends up being one of those horrible the-anaesthetist-hooked-up-the-wrong-pipe stories that end up in women's magazines with lurid headlines?) Anyway, we'll talk about it a bit more and if we do manage to reach a consensus on going ahead now, I can tell the opt-whatever at his next appointment (end of this month) and we can get his name put on the list.
(I don't know whether or not I'll leave this article up permanently, as it has more identifying information in it than I'll usually put on the blog; but, right now, I'm going to post it.)
A London coalition of societies working for the homeless have set up a new award, for innovation in dealing with the problem of homelessness. They've named it after a past chairman of their group who, sadly, died a few years back, but whom they wished to honour for his work and achievements for their group. Michael Whippman. My father.
The award ceremony was on Tuesday night. I got dolled up in my posh frock (surprising my son, who, even at the age of nineteen months, has apparently worked out that Mummy doesn't do the posh frock thing), and my mother and I headed into Central London and met my sister at Sadler's Wells for a buffet and drinks and speeches and displays about the winners and the runners-up, and street art for entertainment (oh, well, you can't have everything).
One of the people who'd worked with my father made a speech about him. He used to be quite intimidated by Michael Whippman, he said, when he first got to know him. Michael's sheer incisive brilliance and his way of calmly cutting through everything extraneous at meetings and making sure everyone stuck to whatever the point was and actually got things done - these traits could be somewhat nerve-wracking to the people who worked with him, until they got to know the dry wit and the sheer gentleness that tempered them. I grew up knowing the wit and the gentleness, and, although I can see that from a different perspective working with that kind of intelligence could be intimidating, those were never the eyes through which I saw my father. To me, he'll always be the man who told us stories about a little girl and her talking teddy bear and an amazingly surreal cast of peripheral characters including a dancing ant and a large vat of green slime.
The people who win the Michael Whippman prize in the years and decades to come won't know any of these sides of him, of course. To them, Michael Whippman will just be a name, and the only meaning it will have to them is the honour of the prize. And that's a pretty damn good meaning for it to have. People who never knew my father or anything about him will associate his name with innovation and with receiving a high honour. For this, and for so much else, I'm prouder of my father than I can say.
"So what does this person look like, anyway?" my husband asked me as we headed for the café where I'd arranged to meet Magpie.
"Tall, shifty, and looking as though she'd rather be someplace else, apparently."
"Hmm."
"Oh, yes - and her partner used to have a photo of her on his blog. But I think he's taken it down, because I couldn't find it when I looked for it." (Incidentally, either he's sneakily put it back up again to confuse me, or else I am an idiot who can't find a perfectly obvious link again on a webpage, since it was certainly there when I checked out the link just now.)
"Hair colour?"
"It was a black and white photo." (All right, so I am also an idiot who can't remember whether a photo is in colour or not.") "I think she had long straight hair. So, given what my memory for faces is like, it was probably a tightly-curled perm."
"Bah."
Fortunately, Jo and Charlie were already there when we arrived, and accosted us with excited smiles and waves while we were still casting round looking for tall shifty-looking women. Which is just as well, because Jo doesn't look shifty in the slightest and I would never have recognised her from her description. (She may well be tall, but since she was sitting down I didn't particularly notice. Besides, I live with a husband who is 6'4", which has reset my tallness perceptions to a whole different scale.)
And we had a wonderful time. Well, I did, my husband did, and Jamie did (since the café had some decent toddler-appropriate toys and LOTS of good chairs and tables to climb on) and the other two certainly seemed to. We talked about adoption, about blogging, about other bloggers, about random matters unrelated to the InterWeb. It was a lovely relaxed get-together and I really hope we get to do it again at some not-too-distant point.
After which, my husband and I picked up a few things from the supermarket, headed home for lunch, and then drove to London to spend the rest of the weekend at my mother's, being fussed over and cooked for and generally spoiled rotten. And we found time for me to read her another couple of chapters of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. (I love reading aloud and my mother loves being read to, so we spent years of my childhood working through Diana Wynne Jones and sundry others before lapsing when I went off to university. Then, because the Harry Potter books were crying out to be read aloud, I started reading them to her on weekend visits home, and we've been working our way through the series for the past... oh, goodness, must be a few years by now. It's highly debatable which of us is enjoying the experience more.)
So - no profound thoughts on life, the universe or anything right now. Just a really lovely relaxing weekend.
