My second sister's second child was born today - my mother's second grandson. Mother and baby are doing well. Which is a huge relief. Home for Christmas!

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If you got one and don't want it please decline it so I can offer it to someone else please. :)
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I don't know which of you already have a paid account/would be interested so comment if you want me to chuck one your way?

I'm sure there's a temperature low enough to make the kids keep their clothes on. But I do so love my central heating, and I already have four layers including a big synthetic gilet thing...

I hadn't told stories for ages but over the past month I've been telling them to Emer, at night, when I'm trying to calm her down enough to sleep. Lots of them are about Emer and Mrs Large (the elephant from the books) or Emer and the Piplings, but last night's was about a little butterfly called Emer and a big butterfly called Linnea who flew through the forest and shared food with caterpillars.

My mother arrived, taimatsu did a lot of pipling-making, my in-laws and taimatsu came for Lucia stuff involving children in white dresses, three-course meals, and the "silver" cutlery and white tablecloth - it went very well. My mother has gone again now, and I have a hideous headcold with a strong earache and grotty throat element. And haven't had as much online time as I'd like.

Perhaps I'll crawl out of the pit tomorrow.

There is a plan to go and see 'Where the wild things are'.

There is likely to be a Me, a Holly, an EmJ and a Benji

Anybody else fancy it?

It's like to be during the day that we're going.

When I got to the Placebo concert tonight I was exhausted. I was utterly unenchanted by the support acts, and gaining steadily more tired as the evening wore on, to the extent where I was thinking I might only be able to hold out for a couple of songs when Placebo came on.

Boy was I wrong. The minute Placebo walked out on stage I was just flying with excitement and hormonal energy.

Seeing Placebo live is always electric, and I always seem to fall completely and passionately in love with Brian Molko for the duration of the evening. I don't generally *do* the celebrity thing, and never did really but there's just some part of me that will always resort to being an impressionable little goth-glam kid of my early teenage years in even the mildest proximity to him.

Brian Molko made me admit that my bisexuality was not simply limited to fictional characters when I was fourteen or fifteen. When I saw him in a magazine at the age of fourteen my first words were 'Oh god, she's gorgeous'. My sister giggled and pointed at the title beneath. "Ohh" I said, and went very quiet as it sunk in that my reaction was not 'Oh my god, it's a trap!' but 'Wow' as I immediately decided that I wanted to both be and bed him..and not necessarily in that order.

All in all a fantastic night.




Here's to you, Brian.

And because well, I gotta..

The most important thing to her is to get a gender-appropriate gift. She chose a little bird toy for a male friend, but spent ages choosing a little bird in colours she deemed sufficiently masculine. I told her I thought it was ridiculous, because I happen to know that this little boy likes a LOT of colours, but she was adamant.

Later we had discussions of whether boys or girls were allowed to use certain Christmas crackers.

Now, she wears a wide range of colours, in boy and girl style clothes - brown, black, grey, orange, red, yellow, green, blue, pink, purple. She plays with "boy" toys quite happily and without any apparent sense of irony. But in spite of my best efforts - thankfully upheld by the people we spend time with - she has figured out a lot of these rules and is trying to apply them when it occurs to her.

I hate this stuff. I hate that I was scolded when she was a toddler for dressing her "like a boy" in the same orange top and blue jeans I wore myself, all from H&M children's section - I wore the Age 13 ones and she wore the Age 3 ones.

And then there was the day she was playing in a playground with a group of children; she and a male friend of the same age (the Oyster, as it happens) arrived to find a large mixed-age group already there, and the boys of that group were playing a form of football. Linnea waded in and got involved, Oyster was somewhat less forward. The game involved running and kicking and having the ball hit one by accident and so on. Until they found out she was a girl; then the older ones warned the younger ones to be gentle with her, not to kick too hard, to be careful... It was shocking to me and to radegund.

With Emer it's a bit simpler; we have all, as a family, fallen more into the normative pink and fluffy way of doing things, and at the same time the people who really wanted us to have feminine daughters have backed off a little with their pink-pushing and are less inclined to assume that little girls won't break things, or will want to be well-behaved, or whathaveyou. But it's still a bit... difficult.

But it's Christmas now, and we're both buying and receiving gifts. I'm half-tempted to do a little tally on The Day to see how many of them are strongly gendered and very pink (Linnea has actually asked for some fairly strongly gendered gifts).

Got to sleep about 2 am. Was up and dressed by 8. Morning was ok, then went out about 10:30 to get a train (wow the rain) and finish the errands we didn't do on Sunday. The children weren't particularly happy - possibly because of the wet - and we had some feeling-faint-and-furious food emergencies so we spent more than we ought to have done on lunch (which was excellent, but even so). Much hysterical running away in shops, too. When we finished the errands and eating, it was about four o'clock and Emer announced that she had wet trousers. We set off home and as we were waiting in the train station Linnea put something into a woman's bag. I shouted at her - I assumed it was a leaf or something - and had to chase her in a train station, which is completely against the rules - and it turned out to be a small milk chocolate frog which she had obviously shoplifted.

We couldn't go back out and pay for it so we shall have to do so on Wednesday when we're going to collect Mum's gift. Grr, ho hum.

I wish I knew why she did it. Apparently it was under a Christmas tree covered in owls made of cardboard, so I imagine it was at the right height and very appealing... but really. No. She HAS money. And anyway, milk chocolate... Gah.

We'll keep working on it.