Dalkey Sound: Sea Shore: 2013

This is where I grew up, and where we spent our endless summers

beanmimo

This may only be of interest to my family  (including cousins), Coliemore Road neighbours and all our friends who had the pleasure, fun and adventure of  spending time on the stretch of rocks that led from the bottom of our garden and ran all the way up to Dillon’s Park in Dalkey.

From Dillon’s Park this is the run as it looks today (2013)

The New Year would bring a new challenge.

Storms would adjust the shoreline.

Different rocks would move when you landed on them.

While others that moved the year before would be forever jammed tight.

This was the view from the back of my house.

Tide in or out it was always an adventure.

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Alphie and Rosie Jammin’

Not that you’ve missed me, but it’s been a while.

Here’s a link to the kids getting their wiggle on.

http://fdotoole.com/jammin/Movie.html

News: Daddy day care’s sojourn in West Cork is nearly at an end. The new house in Dublin will be ready to move back into over the weekend. Now the painting begins. I will blog the gradual destruction of the new kitchen and floor by the kids over the next month or so.

Sad News

My big sister Helen died at around 15:20 last Friday the 22nd of March. She was 56 and had been fighting cancer for the last good few years.

Here are, in no particular order, some memories I hold of her.

Cutting her finger trying to make us a bow and arrow or carve a pumpkin or doing something for us with a Stanley knife! but I do remember she needed stitches.

Taking over from my Ma as hair cutter in chief and leaving us looking unlike the three stooges for the first time in our lives.

Making me record my voice screaming for a sound effect as the brakes in a school play she was doing the sound effects.

A party thrown in the downstairs of our family home, namely our bedroom. And the mixed tape that was the music for it. I can remember lots of Supertramp, and the novelty song of that year – ‘oh yes they call it the streak, buggedy buggedy !! ‘

Her bringing the first stereo boom box into our compass, I think she got it in Holland where she worked for a while, it was a Phillips and my Ma used it until it wore out only a few years ago. I listened to my first music on it.

Her buying a motor bike when we were still in school, I thought she was very very cool.

Her letters back to Ma about where she was in the world and what she was at; whether in China, Australia, Thailand or just  throw a dart a globe, as she pretty much travelled everywhere over the years.

Her love of ‘Reggae’ her cat and of ‘Billy’ her most recent feline.

My visit to stay with her in Vancouver, how I met her friends for the first time and got to see how she was so happy in her chosen country to live and work in.

How she in turn came to visit us in Cork in June which turned out to be her last trip home. The photos I’ve included here were taken then.

Being brought for my first legal pint in ‘The Club’ pub with her and getting served by Seamus.

Her trying to teach me to drive in her VW  beetle. She gave up, way way too scary.

Her sending of a present to her new niece Rosie from the hospice with a poignant note.

My realisation now that many of the visits, calls and things she did over the past few years were, in the back of her mind, last time gigs and while for me they were of small importance for her they must have been momentous.

Our final visit to her in the hospice a few weeks ago was a necessary horror that I wouldn’t wish on anyone but I was and am very happy we undertook it. We left her in the bosom of her Vancouver family of close friends who tomorrow night are having a party in her house which my elder brother has gone over for.

All of these are just a little fraction of my memories of  times I shared with her during of her full and varied life. She may have gone, like her father and her eldest brother before her, a tad early but she was happy that she had lived life to the max and left it looking forward to the next journey.

 

 

Throwing the spoon out of the weaning process

Throwing the spoon out of the weaning process.

this article appeared in today’s Irish Times and is what we did and are doing with Alphie and Rosie.

Getting out of Cork for the winter

This was winter two years ago which we spent in centrally heated luxury of our flat in Dun Laoghaire. On ‘mature reflection’ and for loads of other reasons we have been moving back up to Dublin over the last few weeks. The year we spent in Clon has been great, I have had the opportunity denied many fathers of being at home for the year and enjoying/hating/tolerating all that comes with being a full time parent.

This last week being a prime example, really bad tummy bugs, horrible colds and usual lack of sleep punctuated by Alphie really starting to explore words and Rosie beginning to explore space by bum shuffling around to house, and hand-held walking everywhere else.  A pot puree of misery and happiness.

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But it’s back to the capital for the O’Tooles. Looking forward to exploring the child care it has to offer and of course the ‘geo-thermal’, if you don’t mind, centrally heated new home. 

 

new home

I have migrated to wordpress. 

Your say

Fellow parents or aunties/uncles or anyone who has ever looked after kids.

Please send me your three, that’s 3, best tips when it comes to rearing, playing with, feeding and/or any verb/gerund of your choosing kids.

This can be to do with anything, for example – how do you discipline a two year old that doesn’t really understand badness yet; but is beginning to find your buttons and test his pushing ability? When you’ve got them to bed and you are about to sit down for an hour before you yourself collapse and one of them wakes up and wants to play more; what do you do? Food, drink, weaning, teething, things that worked and things that didn’t?

Send them all, anonymously or not and I will try to weave them into a blog.

Send to my email or just throw them into comments.

First Steps

if it doesn’t work click below

http://fdotoole.com/firststeps/First_Steps_for_Rosie.html

You can get really tired of everything, begin to wonder if they are always going to be coming down with something or other. Then they do stuff that makes you grin from ear to ear. Rosie has decided to bypass crawling and go straight to walking. Click on the link above if you aren’t afraid of a saccharine overdose. Al is rocking his new wetsuit below.

Rosie, the story so far….

Rosie Zita

if this doesn’t work please click on this link

Rosie Movie