Sleeping leprechauns, Sandy!

Happy St. Patrick’s Day! Actually, I had no clue it was today until I took the kids into the Scandinavian Home Restaurant for lunch and realized that all the waitstaff were wearing green. Still, I can’t feel too bad — I’m not really a Shamrock shake kind of girl, if you know what I’m saying. That’s Rachel’s department: her father was born on this day in the north of England in 1938 and dutifully named Patrick by his terribly Catholic parents, who went on to have three more children, in addition to his older twin sisters. The name, however, didn’t stick, and he went by Bob in the end. (On the other hand, I’m not sure what a restaurant specializing in Finnish pancakes is doing putting green food colouring in the clabbered milk, but I digress.)

But forgetting: that seems, more and more, to be my department these days. Just little things, like the fact that I completely erased any memory of the doctor’s appointment I made for Isaac last week, or that I couldn’t hold it together to remember to call my brother on his birthday, or that I forgot about the end of Daylight Savings Time. That Sunday morning, I was obliviously making muffins when our friend Judy showed up uncharacteristically early for 10 o’clock brunch. “I was going to ask you guys if you remembered that the clocks changed last night ...,” she began, and then trailed off as our blank faces answered the question for her.

We can be forgiven for Daylight Savings, too, given that it came a month early and given that it is a ludicrous invention obviously created by sadistic people without small children. Isaac acclimatized almost immediately and Rowan has not, meaning that their bedtimes are now an hour and a half apart, which makes for some long evenings for the grown-ups and some misery for our toddler, who just can’t stand the fact that his beloved older brother is still bouncing around the house in his crazypants while he is being bundled off — successfully or not — to bed.

(Another digression: you would think here would be a great place to update you all on sleep situation, but I’m not going to be drawn into that ahora again. See? I’m learning.)

Forgetting, though. I’m chalking up mine to the cumulative effects of sleep deprivation of late (because it can’t be aging, can it? Wait, don’t answer that.). And then I read this article in the Washington Post about real forgetting, agonizing forgetting, forgetting of nightmarish proportions, the kind of nightmare you don’t wake up from. And I have nightmares about forgetting already. And the really scary thing? This kind of forgetting starts out simple, like forgetting a doctor’s appointment or your brother’s birthday.

Where am I going with all this? I'm not quite sure. St. Patrick's Day to Finnish pancakes and my father-in-law to doctors’ appointments and Daylight Savings and, as the Post puts it, “fatal distractions.” Dunno. I guess I will leave it at that, and join Rachel for a half-pint of O’Douls, the non-alcoholic beer that has been a staple in the household ever since I first became pregnant, and that is the symbol of all things pathetic and sweet that parenthood has done to us. I love it. It comes in a green can, and it certainly sounds Irish. And then one of us will go to sleep in the basement, the other in the bedroom. With the luck of the Irish, there won't be any nightmares tonight.

PS: I forgot this as well: Termiknitter, the recipe for hamantaschen is here.