Ireland–Day 7

Since we had to be at the airport at like 5am, or some ridiculously early hour in the morning, we decided to go to Dublin the night before and spend the night in a hotel near the airport so we could actually get a little sleep before our early flight.

We got checked in to our hotel and then decided to head downtown to check it out.  We decided to drive, which probably was a mistake.  It took quite a while to get to the downtown area from the airport with the way traffic was, but we eventually made it.  I thought it was interesting that Dublin had the same thing going on that most of Italy does – crumbling buildings in the middle of downtown surrounded by a bunch of newer buildings.

We wanted to find a place to eat an early dinner since we hadn’t really had lunch and ran into the same problem we have every other place – finding a child friendly restaurant is next to impossible sometimes.  There were bunches of restaurants around, but my parents didn’t want to eat at an American place like Hard Rock Café, and we walked in to about 3-4 other ones and none of them had high chairs available for Ben to sit in. 

We eventually found one and had a good meal and took a few pictures while we waited for our food.

After dinner we walked around a bit more to check out the Dublin Castle and St. Patrick’s Cathedral, which ended up being expensive to go in to, so we skipped it.  I hate having to pay to go inside a church.  That just seems odd to me, especially when it’s something like 5 or 8 Euros a person.  Give me a break.  I would have loved to spend a bunch more time in Dublin, since it seemed like a fun place to be, but I was glad that we’d concentrated more on the “natural” part of Ireland versus the city life during our visit.

Overall, Ireland was a lot of fun.  It was on our travel wish list and I’m so glad that we got to check it off.  There’s still a lot there that we haven’t seen, so hopefully someday when the kids are much older, we’ll be able to make a trip back to see more of this beautiful country.

Thoughts

I just read the eulogy a mother wrote for her 6 year old son who was killed in the Sandy Hook shooting.  She referred to him as “little man”, which is what I call Ben also.  It absolutely broke my heart to read it.   I also read where the father of a 6 year old daughter that was killed in the shooting said he was going to pray for the shooters family also.  He is a much better person than I am, that’s for sure.

There is so much controversy surrounding this shooting about the gun laws.  I’ve seen people arguing both sides of that argument to the fullest and also read people’s statuses on FB saying that they think it’s horrible people are turning this in to a political thing.  But how can you not?  How can you not think about what your views are on gun laws when some kid walks in to a primary school and kills 27 people?   I can’t imagine going through what those poor surviving kids and parents have gone through.  I can’t imagine having one of my children killed in a shooting at school a few days before Christmas.  Having presents bought and wrapped for them that they’ll never get to open.  Already having their stocking hung up some where.  It literally makes me sick to my stomach to think about it.  And it makes me scared to send my kids to school.  Or to the movies.  Or to a mall.

I realize that bad things are going to happen whether guns are banned or not.  People will find other ways to do harm if they really want to.  And I can see both sides of the argument.  People want to carry guns to be able to protect themselves, and people don’t want other people to carry guns so they don’t have to worry about protecting themselves.  What I don’t understand is why those sort of assault weapons need to be available to the general public.  If you want to have hunting rifles or small hand guns, then fine.  I get that.  But why does anyone outside of the military or law enforcement need to be able to own guns that can kill 27 people in under 2 minutes?  The ONLY purpose of those guns are to kill or injure as many people as possible in as short of time as possible.  I was part of a discussion on FB and my stance was what I wrote above and another person said something like heroin is illegal too, but people find a way to get ahold of that so banning guns isn’t going to do any good because people will still find ways to get them.   I understand what she was saying, but by that rational, maybe we should make heroin legal also?  I mean if we know people are still using it and they’re going to find ways to get it whether it’s legal or illegal, why not just legalize it?  You know people are going to speed even though limits are posted, so maybe we should just take those down also?  I realize that criminals don’t follow laws, and I’m not saying that all guns need to be banned.  But I do think it would do some good to not make certain weapons available to the public.

On the flip side of that, I read an article about how if some people (school principals, banks, etc) were required to have guns that maybe it would deter criminals from trying to do mass shootings.  If they knew they most likely wouldn’t get very far because there was someone armed with a gun nearby, maybe that would make them think twice about doing a mass shooting.  I don’t know if it would work, but I suppose it’s at least worth considering.  Anything is worth considering at this point.

Mark and I were talking about how messed up Americans seem to be these days.  According to this article, 15 of the last 25 mass shootings worldwide have taken place in the US.  Why are Americans so nuts?  I do feel safer over here in Europe than I do in the States.  I don’t know if it’s because there are so many broken homes in the US, or the access to decent healthcare isn’t as easily available to everyone, or the media influence there or what.  Maybe some sort of combination of all of them?  I have no idea really, but it seems like there is something in our culture than provokes people to do these sort of things. 

My heart goes out to the families that lost family members in the shooting.  I hope that this will spark actions that attempt to make the US a safer nation to live in, however that may be.

Ben at a year old!!

I can’t believe my baby boy is already a full year old.  It seems like just yesterday I was in the hospital worrying about him being a ginormous baby.  (He wasn’t huge – only 8lb15oz. – Abbie was bigger.)  This little man is such a good boy.  He’s the smiliest little thing ever and he’s generally very happy, unless you’re wiping his face or trying to change his diaper or being too slow in getting his food for him.

Ben is now crawling EVERYWHERE and he’s in to everything.  His favorite things to get in to are the Christmas lights hanging on the wall, any cupboards that are not locked shut, or pulling stand lights over on himself.  He has a push toy that he can stand behind and push and he LOVES to push that thing all over the place, except that he can’t turn it so he just goes straight until he runs in to something and then waits for you to reposition him so he can go again.  He pulls himself up on the couch and cruises along anything he can hang on to.  He’s managed to get up on the bottom step twice now and as I write this, he’s working on a third time.  He’s so tall, he can reach on top of our TV trays that we have in our living room and grab things off of them very easily, mostly remotes, markers, or any sort of paper than he can shred.

He’s a super tall boy.  At his appointment on Dec 12, he weighed 23.81lbs (63%), he was 32 inches tall (96%) and his head circumference was just under 19in (90%).  (At one year, Abbie was 21.11lbs, 31.5” long and her head was 16.5”.- although I just noticed on the blog it said it was 42 inches.  Haha!  Oops, that’s supposed to be cm.)  On his first birthday he started having a bit of separation anxiety and cried when we put him to bed at night.  That lasted about a week, and then he got over it, and him crying for 5-10 minutes was NOTHING compared to Abbie’s 2-3 hours.  I don’t know if it’s because he’s not our first child and we know what we’re doing with him more than we did with Abbie, or if it’s their extreme personality differences, or a combination of the two, but Ben is such an easy baby.  He’s getting to his “into EVERYTHING” phase, but he doesn’t throw fits like Abbie used to if you take something away from him or redirect him.  He’s such a “chill” little boy.  He was sick with a cold, congestion and a cough for 2 or so weeks and he wasn’t himself at all.  He was very subdued for that whole time – didn’t interact with much, barely smiled, kind of stared off into no where a lot.  I was pretty worried about him showing signs of autism, especially since this started up after I got him 2 of his 6-7 shots he needs at a year (even though I know that’s not true that shots cause autism, I can’t help it, I still worry), but he’s completely back to normal now that he feels better and is very interactive and smiley again.

Ben doesn’t seem to be too interested in baby food any more.  He’ll eat it, especially if I warm it up for him, but he mainly likes to eat whatever we’re eating.  Since he has a whole mouth full of teeth, I give him little bits of whatever we’re eating and most of the time he eats more than Abbie does.  He probably gets between 16-20 ounces of formula/ organic whole milk a day.  We’ve been mixing the formula with the organic milk for a week or so now, and he seems to be doing fine with that, although he prefers it to be warmed up a little.  He likes to hold his own bottles and sippy cups and he’s finally learning to tip the cups up and put his head back to get the liquids out.

Ben does a lot of really cute baby babbling now.  He inconsistently says mama and dada and sometimes he says baba (for bye bye).  He signs milk, more, all done and waves bye bye.  He knows where his tongue is and sticks it out when you ask him to and we’re working on pointing to his belly and ears now.  I think he’s getting ready to get rid of his morning nap, although sometimes when we’re home, he’ll sleep for 30-60 minutes, but not often.  And honestly, we’re usually not home.  I try to be home before 2pm every day though, to get him down for his afternoon nap (and Abbie too) and he’ll usually sleep from 2pm to about 5 or 5:30.  He goes to bed between 8:30-9pm and he’ll generally sleep until 8:30am, but I usually have to get him up earlier than that to get Abbie to school.

Ben still loves to be outside.  He usually laughs and claps the whole time we’re walking from the car to a store.  My friend, Jennifer, got him this little toy woodworking set for his birthday, and one of the settings on it plays music and he LOVES dancing to music.  He bounces and claps and bangs his head and wiggles all over the place when he hears music.  If he’s ever unhappy, he turn on music for him and he cheers up right away.

We love you so much, bubba.  Happy first birthday to our favorite little boy.

 

Here is Ben at a year on the left and Abbie at a year on the right.

Ireland–Days 5 and 6

On our 5th day in Ireland, we decided to have a low key day and stay around the house.  We headed to Portumna to eat lunch at a typical Irish restaurant (that I didn’t take any pictures of).  The food was good and it was fun to see Portumna a little bit.  I ran out of formula for Ben while we were there, so we found a grocery store that was open on a Sunday and spent quite a bit of time trying to decide which one to get him.  They didn’t have any American brands of formula so I was trying to read the descriptions of them and ingredients to figure out which the best would be for him.  Apparently my mom thought I got lost because she came in to find me after a while.  I would have loved to have more time (and not my whole family waiting in the car) to browse through the store.  I love looking in foreign grocery stores.  Sometimes you can find some neat stuff.  The Irish store also had a bunch of organic baby treats, which Italy doesn’t have at all.

On our way home we took a quick drive around a park that we passed.  The road was HORRIBLE.  I’ve never seen so many deep holes in a road and they were impossible to avoid because they were everywhere.  But the scenery was worth the bumpy ride.  It was beautiful and I’ve never seen trees like the huge ones there.  And the fern covered forest floor was amazing.

On day 6, we headed down to southern Ireland to check out Cobh (pronounced Cove).  Cobh is one of the major ports of Ireland and has been for a long time.  It is said that the first settlers arrived to Ireland in Cobh and also almost half of the Irish that immigrated from Ireland, left from Cobh.  Cobh was the Titanic’s last stop before it headed out across the ocean.

We grabbed lunch at a coffee place that was not very good food, and then wandered around the little downtown area a little bit.  As you can see, we were blessed with another great day, weather-wise.

St. Colman Cathedral (above) is one of the tallest buildings in Ireland.  There were quite a few dogs in Cobh, and apparently they dine with their owners.  I cracked up when I saw the dog below.  I had to take a picture.

When we were near the cathedral, Abbie asked us if uncle Ryan lived there.  (Uncle Ryan is a deacon, soon to be a priest.)  And then she saw the pulpit inside and asked if that’s where uncle Ryan talks from.  How she knew that’s what that is for is beyond me.  She’s such a little sponge with info like that.

After we wandered around Cobh for a while, we headed to Cork to check it out.  We really only went to the shopping area because I wanted to get a shirt, but it was a neat town from what we saw.  (Side note:  On our way from Cobh to Cork, we were on a pretty busy ride near a large shopping center and there was a pony running down the middle of the road with a car following behind it slowly.  It was really kind of odd to see, and the pony seemed to be on a mission, even though it was very obviously not where it was supposed to be.  I was tempted to help them catch it, but we were in a hurry.)  Cork had Penney’s (Irish version of JC Penney’s) and TK Maxx (Irish version of TJ Maxx).  We didn’t get to go into TK Maxx, but we went into Penney’s again and I got Abbie a bunch of socks.  They were 3 pairs for 2Euro!  We ate dinner at McDonald’s and headed out.  I only took one picture in Cork.

We headed to Blarney Castle after we left Cork, but it was closed by the time we got there, so we went to a wool store instead and my mom and I bought a few things.  They had lots of great stuff, but it was expensive, so we didn’t go too nuts.  I got a sweater dress that I really like.  I can’t remember what my mom got, but I do remember she bought Abbie a book there.  We only had 15 mins in that store before it closed too.  That was probably a good thing..

 

So I am obviously WAY behind on my Ireland posts.  I only have one more left – Dublin.  The photos are edited so I just have to get the blog written!  Soon!!