Month: May 2006

Happy at home

I’ve been in a crappy mood all day. Not really much reason, except for the dreary weather, and a lack of sleep, the snotty remainders of a rather bad cold, and an unpleasant amount of work foisted on me at the last minute. I’ve been feeling that “curl up in a ball and lick your wounds” kind of blue – without any real wounds worth licking – for most of the day.

But as soon as I walked through the door at the end of the workday, and peeled off my work clothes for a t-shirt and jeans, and was greeted by the dervishes of energy that are my boys, I started to feel better.

They’re gifts, my boys and my husband. I’m so very lucky to have all this waiting for me at the end of a long day.

Simon and I went to pick up some pizza, and it poured rain. We got soaked, along with the pizza, just getting in and out of the car – and yet my mood was brighter than it was all day. I found the energy to do the laundry I’d been ignoring since the weekend after dinner, and I played with the boys for a little while. Simple pleasures.

Beloved gave the boys a bath, and is reading a few last books to Tristan before we settle down for a night of finale TV, but I wanted to steal this last moment to share a moment with you.

The boys were brushing their teeth before bed, and as they do every night, they clamoured first for a drink of water, and then for their “Bob lipstick” – a Bob the Builder chapstick. Every night, they ask for it – my preschoolers are addicted to chapstick.

(Of course, you can’t apply it for them, and god help you if you actually take the cap off the Bob Lipstick before you give it to Simon.)

Freshly bathed, brushed, watered and lipsticked (!), Simon was saying goodnight to Beloved.

Beloved: Nighty-night Simon. Can I have a goodnight hug and
kiss?

Simon, turning his head to the side: Kiss my cheek! Don’t kiss
my Bob Lipstick, kiss my cheek!

Don’t look at me, I don’t know where he gets it from…

The Whole Mom

Oops, almost forgot to tell you there’s a new issue of The Whole Mom out this week! The Whole Mom is part e-zine and part mother’s community, edited and lovingly put together by Andrea and Kim. There’s fiction, non-fiction, columns, essays, and comics. I still haven’t gotten my act together enough to contribute an original piece, but the editors were kind enough to feature an existing book review from my 10-pages-in series.

There’s some wonderful stuff in this issue – a little something for everyone. Check it out for yourself!

No smoking

In August of 2001, almost five years ago, the city of Ottawa banned smoking in all workplaces – not just offices, but restaurants, bars, and (gasp!) bingo halls. People said the ban would cause restaurants to go bankrupt as patrons fled across the river to Quebec; they said the hospitality industry in the city would never survive. Turns out they were wrong.

Two weeks from today, the entire province of Ontario (population 12.5M, about 1/3 of the entire population of Canada) will ban smoking in all workplaces and enclosed spaces – restaurants, bars, schools, private clubs, healthcare facilities, sports arenas, entertainment venues, work vehicles and offices including government buildings. The initiative is called Smoke Free Ontario, and I think it’s wonderful.

You will not be able to smoke in the common areas of apartment buildings and condominiums. You won’t be able to smoke in a parking garage. You won’t be able to smoke on an outdoor patio if there is any kind of shelter, including even a plastic tarp stretched overhead. And, if you run a private daycare in your home, you cannot smoke in your home – even while the kids are not there.

And as if that weren’t enough, there will be a private members bill proposed in the Ontario Legislature to ban smoking in a private vehicle when children are present.

Bravo to the government of Ontario. Bravo!

Unfortunately, I think there are going to be a lot of problems implementing this legislation. Although there will be fines and penalties, Ontario is an awfully large province with a very small amount of resources for enforcement. And I feel genuine sympathy for those who are trying hard to quit but haven’t been able to do it yet.

Even though I’ve been raised in an era of a paternalistic government and believe in collective social responsibility, I can see where some people see this legislation as a draconian infringement on personal rights and freedoms. But your right to smoke ends when you exhale your smoke into my clean air.

In the five years since Ottawa became smoke-free, it seems we’ve adjusted pretty well from an economic standpoint. And it seems like a lifetime since we’ve had to deal with drifting smoke in restaurants and wretched-smelling clothes after a night on the town. (I used to go out! I did, I did!)

I love the fact that we can go practically anywhere now and not be exposed to second-hand smoke, and I applaud any measures that discourage people from starting. Smoke ’em if you got ’em… but not around me, thanks.

Tan in a can

One of my lifelong addictions has been sun exposure. Drugs, alcohol and cigarettes never had much allure, but I’ve always loved to sit in the sun. No matter how much I read about skin cancer and melanoma and wrinkles, I still think I look better with freckled cheeks and tanned legs.

I admit, I’ve come a long way from my high school days, when I used to slather on a thick coating of baby oil before laying out in the sun for hours. (A co-worker of mine when I was working for Zellers as a cashier actually ended up hospitalized when she used vegetable oil instead of baby oil. Yikes!)

Reading the whole Saturday paper cover to cover while sitting on my porch swing in the full sun with a regular flow of coffee is one of the few things I really miss about my childless days.

I’m careful about sunscreen now, at least this early in the season, and I’m fanatical about using it on the boys. But I just don’t have the time to enjoy the sun like I used to, and much to my surprise, I find I’m not as tolerant of the blazing sun as I used to be, either.

Despite the fact that I think I look so much better when I’m at least a little bit bronzed, I’ve always turned up my nose at anything to do with ‘fake’ tans. The gym where I work out has a couple of tanning beds, but I’ve always eschewed them as dangerous. Besides, if I am going to have a tan, I’m going to earn it, dammit. (Yeah, I have some weird ideas rattling around in my head. This is the line of thinking that won’t let me consider highlights for my hair.) And frankly, I was afraid I’d end up looking like this:

But here it is, the second week of May, and I’ve been too embarrassed to bare my fishbelly-white legs in public. Finally, my curiousity over the whole ‘sunless tanning’ idea got the best of me, and I bought some of this.

President’s Choice Sunless Tanning Lotion. I LOVE IT! (And no, I’m not being paid to shill anything. But if the marketing folks at Loblaws are reading, I can be bought, and the price is right.)

I’ve been a little leery of the whole tan in a can thing, but I think they’ve come a long way since the orange skin of the 80s. I had visions of having to do major exfoliation (who has the time?) or ugly brown streaks, but it goes on smooth and is very subtle. I can’t see the tan per se, but (most importantly) I am no longer blinded by the glare off my legs. Most impressive, and only $7.99.

So now I want to know, what else have I been missing? Maybe it’s time to get brave and actually (gasp!) colour my hair?

Do you use “cheater” products? Coloured contacts, lash lengtheners, teeth whiteners, tan in a can? What else can I buy that mother nature forgot to give me? And if you see me looking a little more orange than usual this summer? That’s just all the extra carrots I’ve been eating.

Roughing it in the bush

So you’ve been waiting for the update, right? You saw the forecast for rain, rain and more rain. You knew I was in a crappy mood heading out. You’re itching to hear how it went, right?

Three words: Best. Camping. Ever.

Here, for your reading pleasure, an essay on how to achieve the perfect camping weekend, by Dani.

When you are making a reservation for the KOA Free Camping Weekend, and they tell you that they don’t have any of these cabins left, but oooh, look at that, the villa is available, DO tell them yes, you will be happy to take the villa for the weekend, instead of the one-room, drafty, unserviced cabin. Because THIS little white cottage is the “villa”:

(DO notice that it’s right beside the playground, with a full kitchen, full bath including tub, sunken living room with gas fireplace, heated and air conditioned, with one bedroom, plus an alcove with TV and VCR and double futon, and two futons in the living room, and comes equipped with linens and plates and cups and pots and pans and cutlery – all this for $130 a night, one of which are FREE!!, in the most lovely campground I’ve ever visited.)

DON’T listen to the weather forecast with growing angst for a week before you leave. The forecast will call for biblical amounts of rainfall, and your friends back home will report a dreary grey weekend. But you will have discovered a magical micro-climate bubble where the rain peters out when you arrive, makes a sprinkling appearance the first night around the campfire, and then retreats completely until you are in the car on the way home. In fact, the skies will clear and the temperatures be so moderate that you will make time to enjoy the pool and outdoor hottub at the campground.

DO NOT try to light a campfire (for aesthetic purposes only, having used the gas range to cook dinner) using a dozen pilfered 1000 Islands Visitors Guides and two rolls of toilet paper. DO learn that the expression “where there’s smoke, there’s fire” is in fact not true.

DO take advantage of the campground’s ice cream social. DO NOT eat the chocolate reddi-whip in a can. (Beloved and the boys have a different opinion on this one but it is, in th end, my blog and my opinion that prevail.)

DO NOT be too disappointed if the boys choose to ignore your lecture on how to perfect the balance between the roasted and the burnt marshmallow and instead prefer to eat their marshmallows raw, straight out of the bag.

DO be kind and let your husband have the bed to share with your eldest son when the three of them fall asleep together while reading books before bedtime, leaving you to sleep on one of the futons in the living room. DO NOT assume you will get a better night’s sleep and think you will be able to sleep through your brother’s snores, rattling the entire cottage from the alcove.

DO feel free to get out and take a walk when it is 7:15 in the morning and you’ve already been up for over an hour and find the whole family crawling the walls.

DO NOT feel obliged to hurry. DO take the time to examine every stone, culvert, rock outcrop and interesting weed along the way. DO NOT drink three cups of coffee before you go off wandering away from civilization and bathrooms.

DO take some time to be touristy, and do something fun like taking a boat tour of the 1000 Islands with your parents and your kids, even if you have done it many times before.

DO be patient when your two-year-old is more interested in rearranging the chairs on the deck than in the islands and other boats. DO be glad you chose to travel in the off-season.

DO NOT worry if the ‘rain and twelve degrees’ forecast made you leave your bathing suit at home. DO be grateful for the discount stores in small towns where you can buy absolutely anything for practically nothing.

DO NOT fear lasting damage when you enter the pool enclosure with your four-year old and realize as you stand up from taking off your shoes that you don’t know where he is, and you find him struggling to get to the surface in the five foot deep pool that he has jumped into, thinking the water shallow. DO NOT spend too much time wondering ‘what if’. DO be grateful when it doesn’t seem to faze him, even though you are sure you will never forget the look on his face as his eyes locked on yours in the heartbeat before you jumped into the pool. DO NOT consider throttling him yourself when he makes the exact same mistake less than 20 minutes later in another pool. DO think the $50 swimming lessons have paid for themselves a thousand times over.

DO spend lots of time with your family. DO marvel at how your eldest son is far more patient with his 18 month old nephew than with his two year old brother.

DO bring along a fun toy like this ‘jumpoline’ (thanks to Andrea, who recommended it way back when I was looking for gift ideas for Simon’s birthday) and dollar-store toys like bubbles and ring toss and hundreds of stickers.

DO NOT be surprised that you can survive as well without the Internet as the boys can survive without TV. DO NOT take this message to heart.

DO let the rules lapse a little bit. DO NOT be alarmed when Simon absolutely refuses to sleep in the pack’n’play. DO have confidence that the boys will eventually fall asleep, even if it takes more than an hour. DO think they look even more angelic sleeping together than they do when sleeping separately.

DO play Texas Hold ‘Em with your folks and your brother well into the night. DO NOT chase the inside straight. DO admire your mother’s poker playing skills.

DO eat yummy meals like sloppy joes, curly hot-dog flowers, and steak and chicken brochettes on a pita with tzatziki. DO be grateful to bloggy friends for great suggestions. DO NOT stick to your usual food rules and DO consume vast quantities of chips, peanuts, and other garbage. DO NOT leave the smores on the fire for more than a minute or two, because carbonized graham crackers are really not that appetizing.

DO NOT let the worst cold of the year get you down. DO be glad that if you are sick, at least your mommy is around to feel sympathetic.

DO make the trip home fun by stopping at the Skydeck tower to look out at the 1000 Islands from 400m above the river.

DO NOT be surprised when the boys have much more fun running in circles around the sky deck than actually looking out of the tower.

DO take yet another moment to marvel at the weather when you pull out onto the highway and the rain starts pouring down. DO be grateful for a weekend of perfect camping weather.

DO decide to make this perfect little cottage your favourite family ‘camping’ destination. DO NOT feel guilty for having spent a weekend camping without actually unrolling your sleeping bag or spending a single night sleeping on the ground or picking a single speck of dirt out of your food. DO feel like you are roughing it when some campfire ash drifts into your beer and you decide to drink it anyway. DO believe that traditional camping is overrated.

DO be glad to spend Mother’s Day with the people you love most in the world.

Better luck next time

I got my French test results back.

I didn’t get the level I need. Again.

I can’t decide if I’m more disappointed or annoyed. I was pretty sure I nailed it this time, and I know I did much better than last time. Apparently just not better enough to hurdle into the next level, the level I need to get the permanent appointment.

It’s rather a new experience for me, failing something. I never actually failed a course, and while I’ve bombed a couple of tests through the years and not been successful on a handful of competitions, for the most part I get what I want.

The good news is the people that I work with are truly good people, and they are willing to support me through yet more language lessons and more testing. So stay tuned for more adventures from Unilanguage Girl!

In other news, we’re getting ready for our camping adventure this weekend (it’s absolutely pouring rain as I type this), and I wanted to say a huge thank you for all your meal and snack ideas and recipes! One of the domestic tasks I hate the most is deciding what to eat for dinner each day, and your ideas inspired me for regular meals as well as camping meals. Thanks!! For some reason, barbequing never seems like ‘real’ cooking for me, and if I can char it or grill it or burn the holy crap out of it, it’s less like work and more like fun.

And speaking of fun, you absolutely MUST head over to Helene’s blog and make yourself a SuperMom Trading Card in time for Mother’s Day. I love this idea! I started making one a couple of weeks ago and promptly forgot all about it, and I’m cutting this entry short so I have enough time to head over there beforfe I start getting organized for the trip today.

Baby jones

I have, as you know, two preschoolers. Two kids under the age of five. I am constantly exhausted by their demands, their neediness, their loving clinginess. Although there are still not enough hours in the day, and only barely enough hours of sleep at night, things are finally getting easier. One is potty trained, and I can only assume the other one will be someday. They go to bed with only minimal intervention, they feed themselves, they can entertain themselves for stretches sometimes exceeding four whole minutes, and they can even load their own DVDs into the DVD player.

Life is good, right? And yet, I am jonesing for a baby. I have baby fever now almost as bad as I did when we were working through our infertility.

I see babies everywhere and find myself staring inappropriately, often turning my head appreciatively to watch them pass in a manner alarmingly similar to the way I used to watch guys walk past in another lifetime. I linger in the baby supplies aisle at the drug store, eyeballing little jars of food and teething rings with nostalgia. I come across old onesies tucked away in the corner of a closet and marvel over their size, their softness. And socks, which I never seem to pack away and instead just pile the next largest size into the drawer as well – impossibly tiny baby socks that were already too small for Tristan at birth.

I must be nuts. Certainly, my husband thinks so. He thinks I’m certifiable, and gives me a big hairy eyeball roll every time I mention in passing how wonderful little babies are, how cuddly and cute and adorable and harmless. Which I seem to be saying with alarming frequency these days.

Now I’m sure some of this has to do with the whole frostie thing coming up. (For those of you keeping score, after pushing me within a day or two of buying a stick to pee on, the visitor in red finally showed up a week late. A week late!) But I think it’s more than that. Maybe because this is the longest I’ve gone without being pregnant, because Simon arrived a scant 23 months after Tristan did. I became a new person the first time I brought a new baby home, and that person has always had a baby around. It seems like something is missing now.

I know I can’t keep having them. Like cute puppies, babies have the rather troubling habit of growing up in disproportion to growing out of their neediness. And really, I had only ever expected to have two children in my life. But there is something delicious about babies, about the baby phase, that I miss. The drool, the brilliant toothless grins, the way they twitch their arms and legs to warn you that you have about two minutes before an all-out wail is on its way – and the blissful way they relax when you meet whatever need has overwhelmed them, the way they give themselves over so completely to the joy of the bottle, or the breast, or the cuddle they wanted.

It’s been the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life, turning my babies into preschoolers. But it’s been the best thing, too. Babies.

It’s not so crazy, is it?

If it’s raining, we must be camping

I need you, bloggy friends! I need your ideas, and I need your good wishes.

First, your ideas: we are going camping this weekend. It’s our second annual free camping weekend, and this year my brother, sister-in-law, 18 month old nephew, and the four of us will be joined by my mother and father – all in a one-bedroom cottage. One of those adventures that you just know we’ll be talking about for years, whether with affection or rolling eyes.

The weather forecast is not so good. Probability of rain varies from 80% to 60% to 100% over the three days we’ll be there. Yikes! (If we are ever having a drought of biblical proportions, just let me know and I’ll go camping. I don’t think I’ve gone camping once in the past 10 years that it hasn’t rained. The smell of rain in the morning invariably reminds me of camping.)

But what I really need, my bloggy friends, is ideas on what to eat. I’m not much of a camping person (thus the whole ‘camping in a cabin’ thing) and you know I’m not much of a cook. So besides the de riguer hot-dogs burnt on an open flame, can you give me any easy to buy for, store, prepare and clean-up-after camping food ideas? Elsewise we’re going to be eating a lot of Fritos this weekend, with maybe some apples thrown in for balance. And, of course, enough marshmallows that it will be another full year before I can even consider looking at them, let along eating them, again. And yes Marla, I did google camp recipes, but last time I tried a recipe off the Internet we ended up ordering pizza for dinner anyway.

And the other thing? At about 8:30 this morning, I’m going to be subjecting myself to yet another French test. This one is for all the marbles. Souhaitez-moi bien, s’il vous plait! (Or, you can wish me ‘merde’ if you must. It’s tradition, I know, but I still don’t get it.)

Bonus conversation:

Tristan: Girls suck and boys rock!

Me (sweetly): You know, Tristan, mommy is a girl.

Tristan: Well then YOU SUCK!

So much for mommy’s boy…

Strangest hit ever

Copied directly from my referral log:

Mon 8 May 2006 22:04:00 ws.churchofscientology.org LOS ANGELES
http: q=”pants&ie=UTF-8&ui=blg&filter=0&sa=N&start=10″

Nice, eh? Someone from the Church of Scientology in LA found blog last night while doing a Google Blog search on “pants”.

You know what? I really don’t want to know.

The green, green grass of home

This government job of mine pays pretty well, and the benefit package has indisputable attraction. But all this playing with words and ideas and abstract concepts all day is getting a little old, and on the weekend I think I found my one true calling. I think it’s time for a career change.

I want to lay sod for a living.

Turns out I’m pretty good at it. Who knew?

We had ordered sod, enough for our front lawn and our next door neighbours, to be delivered Friday afternoon with the intention of laying it Saturday while my mom took the boys elsewhere. When I got home from work Friday and looked at the neat stacks of rolled sod sitting at the end of the driveway, though, all it seemed to be missing was a sign: FREE SOD, TAKE AS MUCH AS YOU CAN CARRY! So even though Beloved was working late, I asked my mother to take the boys to her place for dinner, and I set to laying the sod myself.

No doubt, laying sod is dirty work. I was wearing socks and running shoes and my toes were still black with earthy toe jam by the time I was done. But it is also extremely satisfying. When your lawn is only the width of six or seven rolls of sod, you can measure your progress quickly. There is a soothing rhythm to the pattern of lift, haul, drop, align, roll, tug, push, re-roll, re-align… well, you get it.

Instead of just laying the strips of sod down willy nilly, I laid out each piece with compulsive attention. I learned to butt the edges against each other and “sew” the seams together just like the guy in Canadian Tire recommended when I went in looking for a “sod cutter” and instead got a free 20 minute lecture on sod installation. (There’s no such thing as a sod cutter, as it turns out, and asking for a sod cutter marks you as a gardening naif the same way a tie and pocket protector dooms to you a certain social caste on the first day of high school.)

Now that I am a sod-laying professional, I can impart upon you the wisdom of my experience. Aren’t you lucky? For instance, if you are going to start laying sod on a Friday at dinnertime in suburbia, don’t do it on an empty stomach. The smell of the barbeques will make you very, very cranky.

If you ever want to meet your neighbours, spend some time on your hands and knees laying sod in your front yard. I talked to more residents of Barrhaven Friday afternoon than I have in the three years we’ve lived here. Nobody could pass by without offering some comment, except for the elderly Chinese couple who passed by several times and simply stopped to smile at me, beaming wordlessly at my feeble attempts at conversation. Passers-by were fairly evenly divided into those who offered tips (“Ah, the sod dance,” observed one fellow nostalgically as I stomped down the seams. “You missed a spot right over there.”) and those asking for advice. “Do you, you know, DO this?” said one well-dressed but particularly unarticulate woman. “Um, well, I’m doing it now,” I hedged. “But I’m a sod virgin. This is my first time.” She moved along without another word.

It took me about two hours to finish the front lawn, a patch maybe 275 square feet that took 30 rolls of sod. It also took about four hours the week before to turn all the soil and pull out the weeds that had already taken root this early in the season, and shave away the last scraggly remnants of old lawn. But it is lovely, so very lovely now. Don’t believe me? Take a look for yourself.

Here’s the “lawn”, such as it was, about a month ago.

And here it is on Sunday morning, in all its luscious emerald glory:

Admire it now. With two boys who like dirt, shovels and trucks, and one slightly inattentive homeowner who has enough trouble ensuring the bipeds and the animals of the manor get water and nourishment, it will never last.

Think it’s too late for a career change? Sod laying and professional communications probably fall around the same salary range, right? Or maybe I could just freelance. You know, in all my spare time…