Posted on in Holidays, parenting, travel

Irish Theme Parks; Compare and Contrast

As the Summer holidays headed towards their conclusion I suddenly realised that the list of “must do” items which the boys had put together at the start of July was lacking a number of “ticks” in the completed column. That’s not to say we hadn’t been busy, hey every day with four kids is busy in my book, but we just hadn’t travelled far beyond a 500 metre radius from our house as often as the kids would have liked. Well I say if you can’t find joy in the Botanic gardens and Glasnevin cemetery, then there is no hope for you! The boys didn’t exactly agree and demanded trips to Clara Lara fun park and Tayto Park within the space of a week or they would be giving me (and my first summer as a stay at home Dad) a less than favourable review when they got back to school!

For those of you not familiar with Clara Lara and /or Tayto Park, I will give you a quick initial guide to each. Clara Lara is an Irish institution and has been around for more years than I care to remember. I can even recall going there on a primary school trip and falling off one of the numerous rope swings into one of the freezing cold pools / ponds / lakes that abound the “attraction”. Tayto Park on the other hand, is a more recent arrival on the scene and has morphed from a mini challenger to Dublin Zoo into an all singing all dancing american style theme park complete with roller coasters, high wire adventure zones and queues, lots and lots of queues.

Clara Lara was first up and the initial signs weren’t promising and by signs I mean the dirty big black cloud which hung in the sky as soon as we started our drive into the Wicklow mountains on the outskirts of Dublin where the park is located. Let me say that the inhabitants of the Wicklow mountains are renowned for a certain requirement for sanctuary, whether it be the holy men of Glendalough or criminals trying to evade the Guards! Thankfully Clara Lara seems to be quite aware that it is constantly running the gauntlet of the Irish weather for they have placed wooden huts (some are even raised off the slightly sodden ground) all around the park so that the paying customers can keep their stuff and most importantly their spare clothes dry. For Clara Lara you see is primarily about water, lots and lots of healthy Wicklow mountain water, sure there are a few other bits and pieces around like the crazy golf, a zip line, etc, but it is really all about splashing about whether it be on water slides, in kayaks, in row boats or the aforementioned rope swings (did I mention that there are a lot of them).

The weather was nicer for our trip to Tayto Park although this and the fact that we chose a UK bank holiday meant that the place was mobbed. There were so many Tyrone and Armagh jerseys around that you could have been forgiven for thinking that you had just arrived in Clones on Ulster Final day. To our credit we had anticipated crowds so we had made sure to be at the gates at the very second they opened. First we headed for the big attractions, Viking Voyage, a splash water coaster which had terrified Lochlan (8) on our previous visit (to his credit he went for it again this time round) and then onto the Cu Chulainn roller coaster which were both enjoyed (although the former did leave me with a wet bum for the rest of the morning which wasn’t great), while queues were less than half an hour. But then we made the fatal mistake of stopping at a playground (goddamn those pesky kids and their need for some unscripted fun) and we never really got back on top of the queuing situation.

In comparing the two I would say that the boys enjoyed both equally but for parents (we travelled with friends on both occasions albeit with a larger group in Clara Lara), or at least from my own point of view, Clara Lara was far more user friendly. In Clara Lara it was possible to set up a base and while the kids might wander off anywhere, they would always know where they could return to, this is simply not possible in the much larger and much more crowded Tayto Park. That’s not to say that Clara Lara wasn’t busy, including a very large hurling team from Kilkenny (how did we know they were a hurling team from Kilkenny, well because they kept their hurls with them at all times as if they were surgically attached!) and Oscar (6) did become slightly disorientated at one point but I quickly found him by one of the aforementioned rope swings. For clarification’s sake and before social services are called, Ella (2) remained with me at all times and was not given license to roam like the others. Clara Lara was also considerably cheaper and had the added bonus of not being absolutely jam-packed with high in salt and / or sugar food outlets which definitely couldn’t be said for Tayto Park. Last but not least, while Clara Lara did have its fair share of wasps it didn’t have anywhere near as many as Tayto Park (see the above comment re availability of sugar).

On a side note the availability of wet suits (God bless you Lidl and /or Aldi, we can’t remember which) was also key to the boys enjoyment of Clara Lara where the water temperature wasn’t quite the same as that which we had experienced in our Brittany camp-site pool earlier in the summer. I mean if I had a wet suit when I was younger maybe I wouldn’t have dreaded those trips to multiple west Kerry beaches.

As a closing comment in my opinion the best thing about Tayto Park is usually the World of Raptors show where you can get up close with stunning birds of prey such as eagles, owls and vultures. However this time the show was cut short when the Bald Eagle on display made a run / flight for it. He must have been getting fed up with the wasps and the queues also!!

 

Posted on in parenting

Divide and Conquer

The key question of my current existence i.e. during the period after the away from home holidays but before school has returned, is how to best deal with four children under the age of ten? Well in reality, it’s really how do you deal with three boys under the age of ten because Ella (2) is always a pleasure to have around, well except when she is cranky due to lack of sleep, but hey that is something that can be said about everyone including yours truly. Actually, there is another time when she is a bit difficult and that is when she has to be strapped into her car seat. I think this stems from the fact that she can see her three older siblings in their relatively looser booster seats while she is held fast like an air fighter pilot in a contraption that would not seem out of place in Top Gun. “Daddy my straps are really hurting me” is a common refrain from the back of the car and no amount of adjusting or manoeuvering  seems to ease her pain, real or psychological! At these times, she will also use her big blue eyes and cuteness factor so I invariably have to look away as I am trying to get the hook thingy to fit in the fastener thingy (don’t look into her eyes whatever you do, don’t look into her eyes!). It almost goes without saying that I’m really looking forward to the end of car seats, it’s nearly up there with nappies as the number one thing I can’t wait to get rid of.

But back to my main topic, how to prevent my home turning into wrestlemania 24/7? A typical daytime scenario usually starts off normally enough. I’ll be enjoying a quiet moment chopping onions when suddenly there’ll be a loud crashing noise from the adjacent living room usually followed by a roar (for wrestling fans this will have a similar effect to the announcement music of a new contender entering the ring, cue objects flying through the air, macho posing and somebody feigning life threatening injury on the ground). I will rush in like some under-qualified and outgunned referee trying to bring order to proceedings, gesticulating and roaring wildly without much success. In order to prevent this, I have implemented an edict which allows me when I sense the mood of the house turning, to send each brother to his room for 20 minutes on a rolling basis enjoying some “quiet” time. When all three have done their 20 minute stints, we are magically one hour closer to the end of the day! In all seriousness, this approach has actually been quite successful, without the distractions of their siblings the “banished” boy can spend his time doing pretty wholesome stuff like reading, building lego or just simply playing with the vast array of toys which he has accumulated in his relatively short lifetime but seem to spend a lot of time gathering dust. It’s also an opportunity to catch up on some rest if he happens to have gotten up really early in order to maximise television time before daddy comes downstairs. Harking back to my own childhood, I used to really enjoy spending time alone in my room finding wholesome ways to keep myself amused. I can remember games of Risk where I was all 6 players at once (red = communists, pink = socialists, black = capitalists, blue = fascists, yellow = liberals and green = pacifists; greens had a very poor track record in the game) enabling myself to experience the full range of emotions associated with Risk (principally anger, hurt and sadness for the losers and extreme triumphalism for the winner). I also invented a rugby tournament involving Star Wars and GI Joe figures which I’m sure would have been a big hit if only I could have sorted the multiple licensing agreements. I have yet to see such flourishes of imagination from my offspring but I remain hopeful.

It’s a weird part of the dynamic between my three boys that when there are only two of them, they usually find ways of playing with each other in a civilised and sometimes constructive manner. Now I’m not saying it is perfect and there are still arguments but it never seems to descend into the “he’s coming at him from the top rope with a metal chair in his hand” phase. Maybe they realise they will never be able to claim full alpha male supremacy if there is someone absent so they just don’t bother with it.

The other way of separating the boys is to involve third parties i.e. go on play dates. Strangely enough this tends to work better when I can ship one of them outwards, as play dates chez Doyle inevitably seem to end up in some dispute over the playstation. Of course I don’t have an endless supply of outward play dates before payback is required, there is only so long that the new dad hopelessly underwater routine can be tolerated!

In an effort to solve and provide a reasonable alternative to this I have lined up some daytrips in the hope that the boys will be distracted enough not to spend their time endlessly trying to annoy each other. More on this in the next blog post.

 

Posted on in Leinster, parenting, rugby

Going Back To The Things I Learned So Well In My Youth

Last week I happily packed off my two eldest (Aaron (10) and Lochlan (8)) to the Leinster rugby summer camp. The venue was the Clontarf rugby pitches on Castle Avenue on the northside of Dublin. To give some personal context to this I grew up within a stones throw of these pitches and spent a large part of my childhood sneaking through a gap in a hedge (that formed the external boundary at the time) in order to play rugby, soccer, gaelic football, hurling, cricket, hell we even gave frisbee a try. When the rugby pitches became too muddy or waterlogged to use we would simply shift to the adjacent cricket pitch instead. This did cause some consternation for the club groundsman particularly when he discovered us playing five-a-side, using kegs for goalposts no less, on his well manicured grass. As a kid I loved going to Tarf to watch rugby matches of all types and standards with my dad. I would spend my time running up and down the touchline trying to figure out where the ball was likely to be kicked out of play so that I could catch it (or more likely chase after it) and kick it back. From what I can remember the ball would spend an awful lot of time being walloped into touch back then so it was a pretty good way to get some exercise and also develop a bit of tactical knowledge around positioning, game management, etc. Although this probably left me ill suited to the ball-in-hand strategies / keeping the ball in play tactics of the modern game!

Given my proximity to the ground (and the fact that my dad was a rugby coach) it was pretty natural for me to sign up for mini-rugby at Clontarf from an early age, probably around 7 years old. Apart from the usual benefits of playing a team sport this also had the bonus of giving me an early lesson in south Dublin geography for this was where rugby was predominantly played at the time (and still is to some extent). Every week we would pile into some coaches’ car in a non health & safety focused way (well before the era of rear seatbelts) and head to an exotic location such as Seapoint, Terenure, Churchtown or if we were going to get a hammering Blackrock! Hey the only thing exotic on the northside at the time was the opening of Artane Castle, I mean a Quinsworth and a Penneys under one roof it didn’t get much better than that! One thing that always struck me about these highly cramped journeys was that it always seemed colder on the southside which appeared positively mountainous when compared to the lowlands of the northside. Perhaps this is a throwback to a particularly cold journey to Palmerstown when I can definitely remember getting frost-bite (or at least very numb hands which was the same to an 8 year old). On another southside trip I can remember playing a team who called themselves Guinnesses (“come on Guinnesses” was a frequent refrain) which I subsequently learned is a rugby club founded by staff at the brewery but at the time I knew of no such things and was just very confused by how often the letter “s” could appear in a name. God help anybody with a lisp.

Anyway back to the rugby camp and I couldn’t help noticing how much the place had changed. The hole in the hedge has gone and while the senior pitch looks pretty much the same the second and third pitches (as we used to call them) have been transformed into an all weather pitch complete with blue run off area. When I saw it first it instantly reminded me of Last Chance U on Netflix but without all the swearing! All the memories came flooding back to me, the thrill of spotting a gap and scoring a try, the pleasure of the deft offload, the satisfaction of the well executed tackle quickly followed by the pain from the poorly executed one! Clontarf are now one of the top clubs in the country (having won the All Ireland League “AIL” twice in the last decade) while in my day they were still struggling in the Leinster league and could never quite make it to the nirvana of the AIL. The best thing the club had going for it back then was that it was close to the airport so the Irish team would train there before heading for a plane to bring them to the location of their next 5 Nations match. Of course this brought out all the local kids searching for a brief glimpse of these amateur heroes. I even remember buying a notebook for autograph hunting purposes. I have 5 squiggles on it and to this day I have no idea as to the identity of the squiggle writers, probably some reserve forwards from Ulster or Connaught who weren’t quick enough to avoid the onrushing masses, unlike Ollie Campbell who was the main target.

This is my boys’ first experience of playing rugby given they have very much been indoctrinated in the church of GAA until now. You see Glasnevin is certainly not a stones through from Castle Avenue, and while the journey by car is not an overly long one it is on a different level compared to my own childhood jaunt to those pitches of dreams. Indeed on arrival at camp on Monday I was surprised by the number of kids from the Glasnevin Drumcondra area who were in attendance at the camp. I suppose Clontarf has become a rallying point / Mecca for rugby on the northside of Dublin. To capitalise on this they probably should have thrown in a guided tour to the childhood home of BOD (Brian O’Driscoll, Ireland’s greatest rugby player and former Clontarf resident until his head was turned by a southside lass). His Dad was my doctor don’t you know!

The camp itself is very well organised with the usual plethora of multi-coloured cones and enthusiastic coaches. The appearance of the Pro14 trophy and a visitation from two members of the current Leinster squad added a bit of glamour to proceedings. Although I did have a chuckle when I asked my boys to divulge the owners of the autographs on their jerseys and they responded with the same blankness that I had experienced 35 years previously! Apologies to Scott Fardy and Joe Tomane!!

Posted on in health, running

And I Ran

Let me start by saying that I used to hate distance running. In my school days, rugby was my sport and I would resent having to run more than a pitch-length at any given time. I mean if I wasn’t going to do it in a match, what was the point! Good for building up fitness and endurance they said, more like good for building boredom and fatigue! But then as I got a bit older and my time playing team sports came to an end (and no, I don’t count my brief run out for the Bank of Ireland Corporate tag rugby team), I needed something to keep the pounds off the midrift or at least slow the inevitable onset of middle age spread, so I became a jogger, in the words of Blur, somebody who goes round and round and round.

I must confess that this turn to jogging also coincided with meeting my beloved as it turned out that she was an avid jogger (although I think in her case a runner is more appropriate). Oh you’re training for a 10 mile run in Ballycotton and if I do it too, I’ll get to hang out with you for numerous evenings and have a scenic trip to Cork together to look forward to at the end of it, winner! Although I don’t think I took my training as seriously as Niki and may have been a bit undercooked when it came to the 10 mile event itself (having only run max 5 miles prior to the actual race). The weather on the day itself was ideal and while the sun may not have been splitting the stones (this was Ireland after all), it was definitely better than I had expected for March. After an initial mile where Niki dutifully ran beside me, she took off at her normal pace and left me to suffer for the remaining hour and a half! Strangely enough I actually got a second wind after 6 miles and caught sight of Niki up ahead as we began the final mile. Thoughts of a glorious victory filled my head as I envisioned myself punching the air in delight a la Eamonn Coughlan (see Helsinki 1983) as we crossed the line. Unfortunately I hadn’t factored the big hill at the start of mile 10 into the equation, all visions of victory disappeared to be replaced by pain, burning lungs, burning quads and a burning heart.  The best I can say about that final mile is that I completed it and came away with the knowledge that I had reached my absolute limit in race length (no marathons, or half marathons for that matter, for me ever).

Since then I have realised that 5km is my perfect distance. Long enough to burn up a good chunk of calories but short enough that it can be done in half an hour so doesn’t overly impinge on time with the kids, wife, friends, life in general. Besides, whenever I try to increase my runs beyond the 5km limit I end up getting injured, and why does this always happen at the farthest point from help i.e. 4km into an 8km run up and down Griffith Avenue (the longest tree lined residential road in the northern hemisphere). Luckily I had my mobile phone with me that time but I wasn’t so lucky when 5km into a 10km charity run my right calf gave out and I was forced to limp the remaining 5km back to my car at the finish line as the whole field streamed past me.

Fortunately 5km is also the distance of the excellently organised parkrun events. For those of you not aware what a parkrun is, it is a series of timed 5km runs which take place every Saturday morning at 9.30am around the UK and Ireland. Results are provided online and it is a great way to keep track of your progress or lack thereof. For me it is the mere fact that you are running with a bunch of people of varying abilities and ages all trying to some extent to finish in the quickest time possible that gives me the incentive to push myself a little bit harder and makes it more enjoyable. Many a great battle I have had (at least in my own mind) with the 50 year old woman (ages are shown on the results page and can be quite surprising) where I am picturing Coe and Ovett (see middle distance running in the early 80s) going toe to toe, whereas in reality she is getting fed up with me hanging on her shoulder until the last bend so that I can kick hard in the home straight! That’s what’s great about growing up with a love of athletics on TV as every week becomes a different scenario from the screens of my youth. When you have 23-27 minutes of running ahead of you, it is these thoughts going through your mind that sustain you.

There are 75 parkruns in Ireland and I had my first opportunity to become a parkrun tourist last week while I was in Killarney. Now I didn’t wear my Dublin jersey for the event (as one brave man did) but I did enjoy the added competitive edge of being on foreign soil, so to speak. Also I was running with Niki, in the picturesque surroundings of Killarney House, so there was a chance for revenge, a decade and 4 children later. This time I did manage to reel her in during the last km and when it came to a kick for home I channeled Steve Cram, Said Aouita, El Guerrouj et al to win the day (or finish 50th out of 200 if you want to look at the actual result). The next installment will probably take place in another decade or so, hopefully my knees won’t have given out by then!

 

Posted on in Holidays, parenting

Summer Holidays

Ah summer holidays, longer days, slightly better weather (it is Ireland after all), lie ins (well getting up at 8.30am rather than 7am) and the constant task of trying to keep my energetic, curious and occasionally annoying kids occupied. Let me preface everything by saying that I am the eldest child of two secondary school teachers so basically I had access to both parents for the entirety of my childhood summers. This, when added to the fact that I only had to share my parents with my sister, had given me a kind of skewed, utopian expectation of July and August. Basically I got to hang out and play sports with my Dad for two months solid while my sister had my mum all to herself. In particular the tennis courts and pitch & putt course of St Anne’s park were favourite (and very enjoyable) haunts. When our “sunshine holidays”, as we used to call our trips abroad, were over I had the luxury of another 5-6 weeks of quality time with exclusive parent attention in Ireland to look forward to. At the time, little did I know how lucky I was.

This contrasts significantly with the world of “professional” parenting where annual leave days are more treasured than golden nuggets and the first thing that comes to mind as June rolls to a close is the number of summer camps which are available. Hey are the boys interested in archery? Sure it’s a two week camp in August, let’s stick their names down and give it a lash!! Also the fact that we have 4 children means that we are constantly overloaded when looking to occupy them, to use a rugby analogy we are constantly on “scramble” defense rather than “man to man”. I don’t know if you have ever tried to manage four under 10s of varying abilities on a pitch & putt course but it’s full of “watch where you’re swinging that!” rather than “get in the hole” and more time is spent searching for children than golf balls!

So now I have the situation where our “sunshine holidays” are over (Brittany seems like a distant memory despite the fact it was 10 days ago) and I am the sole source of entertainment, distraction and nourishment for my children. For some strange reason, the boys don’t seem to have been enrolled in as many Summer camps as previous years. I seem to recall (although I admit my recollections may be subject to unconscious bias) endless weeks of GAA camps, summer schools, golf camps, tennis camps, DCU camps but we only appear to have a rugby camp this time round. Now I’m not sure if this is because (a) I’m just not as organised as my wife (the traditional summer camp enroller), (b) the dates didn’t suit our other commitments, or (c) it’s part of some wife driven conspiracy to throw me in at the deep end! So the boys and Ella (2) are with me pretty much all the time with no respite in sight, suddenly that precious hour and a half of housework when Ella was asleep and the boys were in school is a paradise lost (only to be regained in September), who’d have thought I’d get so emotional about housework!

In my own mind I thought that perhaps having three boys aged within 4 years of each other would somehow mean that they could occupy one another and keep each other out of trouble! Indeed this has occasionally been the case, but only for brief periods of time before somebody has somebody else in a headlock or more commonly, somebody is rolling around on the ground exaggerating an injury and squealing as if they only have seconds left to live (only to jump up with glee once the offending party has been punished). The premier league has a lot to answer for!!

Another issue with having 3 boys who have inherited their father’s (and dare I say it their mother’s) competitive streak is that they all want to win all of the time. So first of all I have to invent a handicap system which gives Oscar (6) the same chance of winning as Lochlan (8) and Aaron (10). Now when it’s a team event like football or tennis I simply buddy up with Oscar and that normally ensures a tight contest but if it’s a singles event like golf or dare I say it a board game like Monopoly, Game of Life, Hotel, or Risk (the best way to alienate your children known to mankind) then it becomes much more difficult and complicated. Invariably one of the boys will storm out of the room when it dawns on him that he is in a metaphorical hole he can’t escape from. Sore losers, oh yes every single one of them (when I’m losing I just tend to use my greater knowledge of obscure rules to get back in the game).

So, in desperation I am bringing the gang to the Gleneagles Hotel in Killarney in order to recapture excellent holidays of past years (kids clubs!) and to meet up with cousins. The catch, Niki is only joining us for 4 of the 6 days so I will be on my lonesome for the journey down to Killarney (be kind to me Adare) and getting them settled into the holiday apartment (please let the oven work unlike last year). I foresee a lot of “go have a run about and I’ll see you for dinner-time”.

Pray for me and in any event how much screen-time is really too much?!

Posted on in France, Holidays, parenting, travel

Les Vacances part 2

Week 2 and the kids had started to call our 3 bedroom mobile home / cabin “home”! I think Ella (2) actually believed that we had permanently changed residence. When are we going home they cried as we visited another historic, well-kept and pretty Breton town. Mommy and Daddy had grown tired of sitting around by the pool and the waiting for the kids club to finish so in week 2, excursions became the norm rather than the exception.

Despite the fact that I had spent numerous holidays in this region as a kid, I have no recollection of the really picturesque towns in Morbihan such as Quiberon and Auray, although the numerous sailboats of La Trinite-sur-mer did induce a mini Proustian moment of recollection (definitely was bored there as a youth!). I do remember visiting Vannes and not being impressed by it, whereas this time around it appeared to be a nice mid sized town with an impressive pedestrianised old town, complete with medieval parade on the day we visited. We tried to convince the boys that the parade was just for us but they weren’t buying it.

I must say that Brittany seems to have really gotten behind tourism as a way to bring visitors and by extension cash into the region. Plenty of artisinale this and organic / bio that. Everything clean with tours (mostly in the form of road bound trains) and parks by the dozen. There is a great emphasis on local products and nowhere is this more visible than in the many La Trinitaine biscuiteries (fancy biscuit shops to you and me) around us. Now I had a vague idea that Breton biscuits were a thing, but not to the extent that La Trinitaine has turned into the French equivalent of Starbucks in expansion mode! Just to explain, La Trinitaine was founded in the 1950s in the aforementioned La Trinite-sur-mer. It become famous for its cigarette biscuits, you know the ones that look like a cross between a sea shell and a spliff, and commonly found stuck into the tops of ice creams. From there, it has morphed into an organisation with 46 shops that produces 11,500 tonnes of biscuit a year. Perhaps the most noticeable thing about La Trinitaine is that it has become a beacon for Breton produce so if you enter one of their stores, in addition to the multitude of biscuits, you’ll be confronted with Breton cider, Breton fish soup, Breton crepes, Breton, well you get the jist. Safe to say that it was a one stop shop for all our homecoming present needs!

On a more philosophical note, why is it that the first week of a fortnight’s holiday seems to last forever while the second week goes past in the blink of an eye? Is it because even I can become tired of going down a water slide at breakneck speeds everyday, like an aqua junkie, do I need a bigger kick, should it be longer, higher, faster? Is it because during the first week of the holiday you load up the fridge, while in the second week you become aware of the pressing and quite Irish requirement to eat everything in the fridge, hey there is nothing wrong with a Camembert and blue cheese sandwich covered in dijonnaise! Is it because you have exhausted your collection of €1 coins so the boys can only hover around other kids racing motorbikes in the camp-site arcade and look at you with downtrodden puppy dog eyes? Or is it simply because that phrase “this time next week we’ll be back in Dublin!” hangs over you like a cloud in the otherwise clear perfectly blue Breton skies.

I’m really going to miss Brittany. I did have some reservations about this trip and the prospect of the 6 of us being in such a confined space for a fortnight, but the weather has been excellent and camp-site holidaying is better than I remembered it. Even taking the boys for pony rides wasn’t the pain I had expected (I’m deeply distrustful of horses and also a bit allergic). In typical French manner, once we paid we were left to our own devices with the ponies. We were given a suggested route and told how to hold the bridle and then ushered on our way with a gallic wave. Being the dutiful sort, we followed the route to a T (well apart from the time Niki let the pony eat some grass “off track” and he quickly deduced that she was a pushover), but could have headed to Paris and enrolled in the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe for all the pony owner cared!! Most importantly the kids loved Brittany. Sure, they didn’t drink any milk because they didn’t like the taste and their diet consisted of more pizza and chips than it had in the previous 6 months, but they want to go back next year and suggested we book while we were on the ferry home.

I have previously written of my love for Paris but now I think that amour can be extended to France as a whole. The bread and pastries are great, the hypermarches are fantastic, the weather is for the most part a lot better than back home and the cheesy music is exceptional. Every evening the camp-site would host a mini-disco for kids which included not one, not two, not three, not four but five songs with intricate dance routines. I think I looked forward to that more than the boys did, “hurry up with your ice creams there lads or we’ll miss the start of Danse de la Pingu!”.

So it is definitely a case of merci and au revoir France.

Posted on in France, Holidays, parenting, travel

Les Vacances Part 1

Ah the big family summer holiday. So much preparation, so much expectation, so much time with mommy around to help with the kids! This year, after a break of three years we had decided to return to France. I think the boys would have kept on going to Killarney indefinitely but Niki in particular wanted to improve the odds of seeing the sun so we had decided on a two week camp-site holiday in Brittany.

Our previous trips to France had involved less kids, longer journeys south (this being related to the first point) and holiday rentals with friends. They had also involved the ferry departing from Rosslare so it was a bit discombobulating to stare at the Bull Wall and Dollymount beach from the top deck of our ferry as we began our journey south, with Dublin being Irish Ferries new starting point. The crossing itself was a calm one although I (being a very bad sea traveller) kept on imagining the ship moving up and down even before we had left the port! The best that can be said for the sleeping arrangements was that we all got some level of sleep although I would never recommend the six in a cabin approach (I think we broke the world record for the number of times saying “be quiet” in an 8 hour period). Niki woke up early the next morning to say how badly she had slept but was quickly berated by four of us for her loud snoring during the night (Ella remained strategically quiet on the matter).

The first thing we noticed when we got to France was the heat. The car thermometer immediately headed towards 30 degrees and didn’t budge for the rest of the day. This was quite a relief for yours truly as I had pushed hard for Brittany despite having first hand knowledge of how erratic the weather can be from my own childhood holidays. A fortnight listening to rain on the metal roofed mobile home would not have been fun. The 4 hour drive to Carnac went smoothly with Niki taking up her customary role as driver and me as navigator (basically confirming that the sat nav was correct and handing out sweets to those in the back). We did switch for one hour of the drive but my slightly more gung-ho approach to the numerous French roundabouts had Niki quickly suggesting that we return to our original positions.

We made it to La Grande Métairie in Carnac just as “rush hour” traffic was kicking in i.e. plenty of campervans on a narrow road. I had been to La Grande Métairie twice as a youngster so it was with a fondness that I spotted the alignements again just outside the campsite. These standing stones or menhirs for Asterix and Obelix fans are the main tourist attraction in the Carnac area. Our three bed mobile was a bit cramped but we quickly realized that the covered decking outside would in fact become our most used “room” and added significantly to our space. We had planned an early night but the noise from the soirée in the camp bar (they still love their cheesy dance songs in France) kept us all up until close to midnight which the boys loved and the adults just about tolerated.

The next morning we were faced with the cool empty shelves of our new accommodation so there was only one thing for it, L’Hypermarché!! I love hypermarkets, I remember being astounded as a child that you could buy car tyres and bread in the same shop! I still have the same sense of wonder but now it is mainly focused on the cheeses, so many cheeses and only 2 weeks to eat them!! It’s also a good place to legitimately lose the family for five minutes of quiet time, oh a free crepe sample, merci beaucoup! We loaded up on €200 of top French produce (Niki had pillow cases on top of her list, Lochlan an inflatable stingray, Ella a pain au chocolat, Aaron & Oscar icecreams and I was only allowed 5 types of cheese) and made our way back to the camp site.

La Grande Métairie has been significantly upgraded since my last visit and in particular, the addition of water slides and a lazy river has been a real bonus. There are lifeguards near the water slide but let’s just say it’s no coincidence that laissez-faire is a French word. You’d want to be trying something pretty Evel Kneivel-esque for those boys (and girls) to get involved. At one point Lochlan was about to head down backwards on his back before I grabbed him. This level of enjoyment has meant daily visits to the pool are the very least of the boys’ requirements. While this is great on many levels, I had not been prepared for the amount of sun cream this would involve. Being married to a true Irish freckled cailín means that we are extra careful with the kids and we need a good half an hour each day set aside to it. Oscar seems particularly aggrieved at this, maybe because he senses that he wouldn’t look out of place in a Swedish travel brochure. I also grumble occasionally but honestly my skin has never been so moisturised in my life as a result of the sun factor regime!

Otherwise the week has flown by with the experience being generally positive. Although there have a few standout peculiarities along the way, such as why Aaron didn’t specify the difference between feeling sick and feeling like he was about to get sick (vomit in a mobile home is not pleasant), my puzzlement at what smurf flavor ice cream tastes like (in Quiberon the kids went with all the plain and normal flavors much to my dismay) and the look of disdain and disgust the creperie waiter gave us when we asked if his chocolate crepes contained Nutella! Ah France, never stop being French! Really looking forward to another week of it!

Posted on in parenting

Where Does The Time Go

Turn back the clock to when I was working in the bank and I used to think my days were pretty full. My standard hours of business 9am to 6pm together with a 60 minute commute each way meant there was little time for activities especially if I wanted to see the kids, let alone try to carve-out a bit of quality time outside of weekends. Also there was the small matter of regular day-trips for business meetings in London, Paris, Frankfurt, etc. These generally involved flights at ungodly hours in the morning and returning home in the evenings close to bedtime (mine not the kids). So when I took the plunge and became a stay-at-home parent, I foolishly thought that, along with the many offspring related advantages, I might have a bit more time to myself to focus on long-term projects e.g. get that novel started / completed and /or abandoned in a fit of pique. Nine months later I can put my hand on heart and say that this has definitely not proven to be the case so I wonder to myself where does the time go.

Now I didn’t go into this new arrangement with my eyes closed, I knew all about the school runs and the after school activities, the food preparation requirements and the GAA sessions. Sure hadn’t I seen my wife undertake the full-time parent role on a number of occasions over the past 10 years. As our family has grown in size I have seen her zombie-like stare harden as I returned from work each day (and proceeded to sit down and have a cup of tea) but I thought how difficult could it be to sneak in a bit of reading time or god forbid TV time once I had eliminated the requirement to spend two hours in a car every day. However there were a number of factors that I didn’t take into account in my ignorant wage-earning state. Firstly, there is the volume of questions you get asked by inquisitive young minds in any given day. These can vary from a simple homework question such as, find five items in your house that contain more than a litre of liquid (I didn’t want to resort to the drinks’ cabinet straight away, I mean if Aaron came back to his class with 5 different alcoholic beverages on his list what message was it sending out, so this took a bit longer than expected) to the extremely repetitive, have we done enough to get our screen-time privileges back yet? To which the answer is invariably “it’s nice that you have behaved for 10 minutes but that does not outweigh the outbreak of Wrestlemania and /or scribbling on the chairs earlier on today”. I’m thinking of limiting questions (like wishes) to three a day (per child, I’m not an animal).

Another factor which I had failed to consider is that quality time with your children can actually be very time consuming so whether it’s reading fairy tales to Ella or bringing Oscar to the playground, kicking ball with Lochlan or discussing the intricacies of the offside rule with Aaron, before you know it an hour has passed and the next hard deadline of school pick-up / cooking / bringing to training is fast approaching. That doesn’t even take into account potentially playing a board game, do you know how long it takes to set one of those things up nowadays? I don’t seem to recall from my youth that a number of games (I’m looking at you Mousetrap, Hotel and Game of Life) seem to require longer to assemble than it actually takes to play the game!

By far the largest element of my miscalculation relating to timings has been housework and all that surrounds this broad and wonderful category! How can something so simple be so vast as to appear never-ending? Tidying up in itself is a task that just seems interminable, so like a modern day Sisyphus there is always at least a half an hour in my day dedicated to it. I write this in a room where unicorns, tank engines and various hard plastic toys are strewn all around me. In my mind I had believed that hoovering was a weekly task not a daily one, there are times when I look at our kitchen / dining room floor after meal times and wonder if more food has ended up on the ground than in my childrens’ collective stomachs! We have a dish washer yet I don’t understand how I seem to spend a lot of my time washing stuff in the kitchen sink, I’m thinking of binning items that aren’t dish-washer friendly, good-bye exotic butter knives (yes I know, notions). I was quickly relieved of clothes washing duty, I mean one small error with an overly delicate blouse and you’re in the laundry dog-house forever, but the folding and the subsequent sorting of clothes, particularly when you have 3 boys with very similar fashion tastes i.e. sports jerseys and track suits, seems to take an age. Why are labels always so small and hard to find?! That being said apparently my folding is excellent and I have really found my niche. It is the one area for which I consistently get praise, get in there!

So my plans for beginning that novel will have to wait until I can get the boys to start helping out with tasks around the house or maybe I’d be better off trying to invent a time machine, if only I had the time!

As I finish this blog I am also well aware that my wife is going to read this and say he doesn’t do half the amount that I did, but I also haven’t perfected the zombie-like stare. either!

Posted on in births, parenting, weddings

10 Years Ago Something Changed

My eldest turns 10 today so in honour of this momentous occasion I thought I’d recount the story of his birth and why we occasionally tease him about being from Louth. And besides, it is one of my favourite tales!

My wife Niki was due on 30th June 2009 so when we were invited to a friend’s wedding on 12th June I saw it as my last opportunity to let off some steam before my duties as maternity taxi driver kicked in. I knew that firstborns were usually late so I thought it would be probably at least 3 weeks without booze so I planned to make up for it on this joyous occasion. The location was Nuremore Hotel near Carrickmacross in Co Monaghan. I happened to be very familiar with the venue as I had been a country member at the golf club there when the exorbitant fees of clubs in the Dublin area sent me further afield for my fix of fairways and greens!

The day was a very pleasant one and from what I can remember the ceremony, food, company and in particular the red wine were very agreeable. Once the meal was over Niki and I hit the dancefloor hard and in hindsight, the excessive gyrations to Valerie by Amy Winehouse and various other tunes probably had something to do with events in the early hours of the following morning. Not that we went completely overboard I mean we gave “Rock the Boat” a miss! Also given the late stage of Niki’s pregnancy we did retire at a fairly reasonable hour, so I drifted into a happy slumber of the well imbibed. Then the real “fun” began!

Niki woke me at c. 2.30am complaining that she had some form of food poisoning which was causing severe stomach cramps. Knowing how particular Niki had been about her food intake during pregnancy and the quality of the fare on offer in Nuremore I knew this was highly unlikely but in my addled state I wasn’t overly sure of anything. To my shame I initially tried to convince her to sleep it off but when that didn’t work we settled on ringing the Rotunda for advice. It was only when Niki had to hand over the phone to me while speaking to a mid-wife because the pain was so severe that we realised that something was really amiss. The mid-wife stated quite clearly that it sounded like my wife was having contractions and was in fact in labour and that we should make as swift progress as possible to the nearest maternity hospital. So not the Rotunda in Dublin I bleated, no Drogheda I was informed, but what about our costly consultant, tough luck was the response! Then of course we had the issue of getting to Drogheda which was about 40 km away. We were having an argument about whether I (very inebriated) or Niki (in labour with contractions every couple of minutes) should drive, when luckily one of us (take a guess who) had some sense and sought out advice on the matter. As we made our way back downstairs the wedding was still in full swing but luckily we knew that one of the guests at our table happened to be a mid-wife. She had also retired to bed but thankfully was easily woken from her sleep when we came banging on her door. She confirmed what we already suspected about our situation and most importantly ordered us a taxi (thanks Deirdre).

I do remember that the taxi driver was more than a little anxious when he saw his passengers and was told that our destination was Drogheda maternity hospital. Perhaps this encouraged him to drive in a manner that Lewis Hamilton would have been proud of. He was certainly motivated by Niki’s heavy breathing routine in the back-seat. Less than half an hour later we were at our destination. The staff at Drogheda hospital were very nice to Niki, they were less so to her drunk husband. Every nurse / mid-wife / doctor was sent to observe the sozzled, eejit, husband from Dublin who had just been to a wedding. The rest of the labour is a bit of a blur, but I do remember a bath (not for me) and I do remember a gym ball (also not for me) and not much else. At this point I should point out the Niki was using a birthing technique called hypno-birthing which involves focusing on the contractions and working with them rather than against them. It did involve watching some pretty graphic DVDs at a lady’s house in Castleknock but that’s another story. It also meant that Niki wouldn’t be using any form of unnatural pain relief which again brought huge admiration from the assemble mid-wives and seemed to increase the level of scorn for yours truly! Well the hypno-birthing worked pretty damn well because shortly after 10am (after only 8 hours of labour) Aaron John Doyle arrived into the world. Well he didn’t have a name initially because we were still in our name deciding phase but nothing like the arrival of a baby to focus minds. Our world changed forever thereafter.

As an epilogue to this tale when I dragged my very sorry body back home via a very excited Nuremore Hotel I found that my father-in-law had removed the blinds from our bedroom at home, making it almost impossible to catch up on some much needed sleep that afternoon and thus prolonging my hangover that little bit longer. He claimed it was something to do with re-fitting our bedroom but I had my doubts!!

 

Posted on in parenting, paris, travel

Paris Je T’Aime!

I have recently returned from a lovely long weekend in Paris with my wife and two year old daughter and it moved me to try and express my affinity for that great city. Having spent a year on Erasmus studying in Paris, it is the place on this planet, apart from my home town of Dublin, that I am most familiar with. Furthermore on the fateful night that I first met my beloved I had been struggling to find my mojo in the chat-up department when I mentioned the special place in my heart for Paris, suddenly her eyes lit up and the rest as they say is history.

Although I must say that Paris has not always been so good to me. My first trip there was as a teenager on a camping holiday with my parents (already I can hear warning bells). Camping in Paris is not something that has much of a following (unless you are down and out along the quays of the Seine) but I can confirm that there is a camp-site in Maisons Lafitte which is about six RER / train stops from the Arc de Triomphe. I can also confirm that there was a dog in the local camp-site bar who liked nothing more than to nip /bite Irish teenagers when a goal was scored during the Euro football tournament but the less said about that the better!

A more significant and entirely more satisfying trip to Paris occurred in the summer of 1994 when I travelled “sans parents” but “avec beaucoup d’amis” to the city of light in search of part-time work, adventure, enlightenment, and a certain je ne sais quoi! The stories from those six weeks could probably fill an entire novel (think of a coming of age tale involving the destruction of a pretty apartment with a lot of Bob Dylan vinyl LPs) so I will keep it to the bare bones. What impressed me first was the sheer scale of the place, from provincial Dublin I had arrived in a true capital of the world. Then there was the uniformity of everything, Baron Haussman did a great job when he designed all those boulevards back in the day and it is a great legacy. Into this grandeur and heat we arrived as doe-eyed innocents but left as hommes (or at least slightly wiser youths). Paris welcomed us with open arms and we consumed it all, from the noxious smells of Chatelet Les Halles on a sweltering summer day to the idyllic calm of the fountains in Palais Royal, from singing Beatles songs to an assorted crowd on the Champs de Mars to being maced by a vagrant on the Quai d’Orleans (even the vagrants in Paris have weaponry). We took in the full experience and lapped it up. Even when things were bad and they did occasionally get a bit too real like when a friend was questioned by the gendarmes for selling sandwiches without a license to taxi drivers (hey somebody had to pay our rent while the rest of us were having adventures, thanks Barry), or when the locals ran us off their territory for trying to sell water to the other tourists (that’s one cooler box we never got back). We just endured it because we were living life and besides, we were doing it in the most beautiful city in the world. Also we were at that stage of our life when sleep was an afterthought so quite often we would be found wandering the arrondissements in the early hours of the morning almost always with some cheap French wine or 1664 beer in our hands and almost always ending up at Pere Lachaise cemetery, which was right beside our accommodation (10 people in a one bed apartment). Exchanging tales near Moliere, Jim Morrison, Edith Piaff and Oscar Wilde, there’s your fantasy dinner party guests right there!

Two years later I returned to study, improve my French and re-acquaint myself with pastis du vin (think the French equivalent of Buckfast). While I wasn’t actually studying in the centre of Paris, every spare moment would be spent taking the half hour train ride into the Champs Elysees. I loved walking (and still do) or cycling along its entire length, from the majesty of the Arc at one end through the glitz of the high-end shopping and eateries (and the obligatory McDonalds), through the greener section by the Grand Palais down to the traffic chaos of the Place de la Concorde. In more recent times I was fortunate enough to visit Paris on the one day of the year when the Champs is pedestrianised and that was even more fun. This was a less intense time than my previous visit, mainly because I had more cash and therefore I didn’t have to deny myself food for a few days in order to afford a value meal in Quick! I also managed to find myself a girlfriend and really enjoyed walking hand in hand around the Quartier Latin or Place des Vosges (although not as much as I enjoyed doing it with my wife more recently!).

And what about the Parisians you may ask and their notorious arrogance. Well apart from the odd outburst on the metro or occasional incorrect directions, I have to say that Parisians are a pretty pleasant bunch (particularly once they realise you are not English). I have even found that this bonhommie has only increased on the more recent occasions when I have brought my kids with me. Indeed on my most recent trip, a Parisian gentleman at the table beside us in our restaurant made an elaborate crane (the bird not the building facilitator) for Ella (my two year old). It even flapped its wings when you pulled its tale.

Of course Paris has been further cemented in my good books by the fact that I witnessed both of Ireland’s recent rugby Grand Slams while in Paris purely by coincidence. This almost wipes from my memory the sad and sorry tale of the 2007 rugby world cup which I also took in at first hand at the Parc des Princes and Stade de France.

So now I try to get an excursion to Paris at least once a year whether it’s with kids (and the inevitable trip to EuroDisney) or just with Niki and the potential to experience Paris after dark (if you can live with the sky high price of drink in the bars).

There have been a few lowlights in Paris over the years but these mainly relate to work and trying to recover debts from French businesses with huge trade union involvement, as our legal advisor once said “This is the last communist country in Europe. If you insist on enforcing your rights the trade unions will hold a barbecue at your head office!!”

But overall I have to say that I will forever love Paris and I wholeheartedly endorse the words of Audrey Hepburn “Paris is always a good idea”.