Hello to you all! I hope you are all keeping well and thank you for your lovely messages about the podcast, do keep them coming in! In the last couple of episodes we have had super chats with wonderful The Daly Dish couple: Gina and Karol Daly all about their life and the amazing success they have had with their cook books over the past few years and we decided they should do another book all around the Air Fryer and call it Frequent Fryer Miles and they even inspired me to go out and get one of my own! So far I’ve made toasted cheese sandwiches and that’s it, but sure listen there’s always next week... We also had the brilliant Georgie Crawford on, what a wonderful, brave, honest and inspiring woman. And our latest episode is with the hilarious funny woman Emma Doran. Along the way they have all imparted their parenting wisdoms and fails so listen in on your next walk. I’m not sure why but I’ve had a recent fascination with Irish superstitions and piseógs! Especially around pregnancy, babies, and having kids. I was reminiscing with a friend recently about being pregnant and someone asking me if I knew the sex of the baby and I had said I didn’t. They then told me of an old belief that if you held a needle over the bump on a piece of string and it went in one direction it was a girl, and if it went in the other direction it was a boy. Sounds fairly straightforward. I mean you could just ask your doc in one of the scan appointments but failing that I guess this does sound like a fairly sound alternative not based in any way whatsoever on medical science. I, however, had misheard and thought the person had said “If you hold an eagle over the bump...” and spent a good two subsequent years thinking this was a pretty common, if not highly dangerous and terrifying practice to determine the sex of a baby (spoiler alert, it definitely isn’t and you definitely should not try that at home. I didn’t have any eagles lying about anyways so I was safe). It got me thinking though about all these superstitions that get passed down the generations and which ones are still about to this day. In Ireland, we had a rich culture of piseógs and superstitions and it seems a lot of it came from a fear of upsetting the fairy folk and landing yourself with some pretty back luck. We’ve all heard of an itchy nose
meaning you are about to have a fight with someone, or itchy palms foretelling you may come in to some money. But what superstitions existing around babies and children? Well I asked the interweb and I found a few... If you ate yams you would have twins (I think yams are sweet potatoes? If they were regular potatoes I reckon the entire country would be made up of twins), if someone threw water on you during pregnancy your baby may have a birth mark, you were never to allow a pup in the house before a child had its first tooth, when you met a newborn baby you were supposed to rub saliva on it (GROSS!), the seventh son of a blacksmith was always in great demand for curing boils, you were meant to put a piece of wood near the baby’s cot to prevent it being stolen. A rural Irish tradition was that it was bad luck to compliment a baby too much, so you’d have to counterbalance it with a blessing to protect the baby, such as; “He’s gorgeous, God bless him!” Then there’s this one which is mildly terrifying… when a baby first laughs, its laugh breaks off into a thousand pieces and skips off into little fairies. Yikes. Must try not to make faces to make babies laugh. Well, I guess nowadays whoever is in charge of PR for fairies has done a stellar job as we even have cute little doorways in our homes to invite them in and we seem less worried about being cursed for a hundred years by them. Some superstitions have lasted though... That age old magpie counting practice “three for a girl, four for a boy”. I mean, again, it’s probably more accurate to just ask your doctor. And please whatever you do, just do not bring out the eagles.
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