Month: June 2006

Beloved and I have a hot date tonight. We’re dropping the kids off with my parents and going to – church.

Actually, we’re going to a pre-baptism information session, because we’ve finally decided to go ahead and get the boys baptized this summer. I’ve gotten over most of my initial concerns about the whole Catholic baptism thing, and grappled with other minutia like actually finding out where our church is physically located (in a high school gymnasium, apparently, so I don’t feel so bad about not finding it earlier) and deciding on a set of godparents.

The godparents thing was an easy choice, once we thought about it. We asked our very dear friends Jojo and Jaimie, mostly because we love them so much but also largely because when Joanne’s mother heard about our struggles with infertility, she went to her church and lit a candle for us to ask the Big Guy to bless our IVF. We often joke about Maureen’s magic matches. And when I asked Joanne if she and Jaimie would honour us by being the boys’ godparents, she said, “Will they pour water on the boys’ heads and do the oil thingy? If not Jaimie and I will bring water guns and fill them up with holy water and we’ll chase the boys in and out of the pews”, which assured me that we had made the right choice.

The more this whole baptism thing crystalizes into reality, the more I’m realizing that having your two year old and your four year old baptized is not so much like having your four week old baptized. First off, what are they supposed to wear? Beloved, pious soul that he is, has decreed that they should wear ornate white Christening gowns in the traditional style. Hmm, I’ve got a wedding dress or three I could sacrifice for the cause – it would be worth it just to have the pictures for blackmail purposes in later years.

And suddenly I have a vision of baptism day. We’re in the church high school auditorium with the other dozen or so families whose newborns are being baptized this month. The babies are tiny and fresh, and the tired but blissfully happy new parents are beaming with pride at perhaps the first major social appearance of the new family. All the families are sitting patiently and respectfully, absorbing the solemnity of the occassion, and even if one of the babies cry, it’s that lovely mewling sound that only newborns make.

And then there’s us, trying to corral Simon and keep Tristan relatively engaged, surrounded by a mountain of dinky cars, books and playdough that are doing absolutely nothing to distract the boys from the pursuit of mischief. And it’s beginning to occur to me that Simon absconding with a hymnal is perhaps the least of our worries, because maybe the priest might even try to TALK to Tristan on this most sacred and auspicious day, and not even the Lord knows what might come out of his mouth. I’ve been working on a crash course version of Catholicism for Preschoolers (lesson one: God does not buy his car at the corner store, nor is he something to be shouted in traffic) but it may be too late.

I get it now. The Catholics baptize their new recruits when they’re pre-verbal and the Baptists wait until they are adults and have social skills and functioning self-edit features. There’s a reason no major religion indoctrinates preschoolers!

Leave it to us to make it a uniquely memorable, if not sacrosanct, occasion.

It’s been a week since Beloved’s semester finished, and he’s been home with the boys almost full time.

It’s hard for me, being in my cube and knowing they are off playing somewhere together without me, but I think it’s a lot harder on Beloved. He’s getting a little twitchy, and I can see just a little bit too much of the whites of his eyes. It’s not that he doesn’t enjoy being with the boys, it’s just that the anti-sleep conspiracy coupled with Simon’s relentless mischeviousness would tire even Super Nanny. On evenings and weekends, we tag team rather effectively, but when the day begins at 5 am, finding enough stuff to keep them occupied is an ongoing challenge.

I have lots of holiday time this summer – being in my 16th year with the government has its advantages – and I’m taking my first of three weeks off at the end of this month, so they only have to get through another couple of weeks on their own.

What do you do to keep your kids occupied in the summer? Beloved is just getting comfortable with bringing them both to the library or the mall, but anything that requires intense supervision (i.e. a wading pool) might be a bit much. They all love going to the “new bookstore” to play with the train tables, and the grocery store has a little play zone where you can drop your kids for an hour of supervised play for free, so long as you stay in the store. (I wonder if taking a nap on the hammock display in the garden centre counts as staying in the store?)

I suggested the sprinkler, and our little inflatable kiddie pool with ten centimetres of water in it. We have an annual pass to three museums in town, including the science and technology museum and the experimental farm – both favourites of the boys. I just found out you can get free passes to some of the other museums in the city through the library, and we spent this past Saturday morning discovering the absolutely fabulous Children’s Museum in town. (Can you tell I’m a road-trip kind of mother? I hate staying in the house when I’m home with the boys. Beloved is the opposite – he’d rather stay in, but acknowledges the boys get a little squirrelly if they spend too much time in the house. Just like their mother, they are.)

So bloggy friends, help preserve Beloved’s tenuous grip on his sanity. What’s your favourite summertime distraction for the preschool set?

The endlessly clever Andrea is hosting a candy swap on her blog. It’s not too late to sign up – you can join until next Saturday, June 10. To quote Andrea, “If you like candy and getting mail, this is the swap for you!”

To play along, you’ll also have to complete your own version of the official 2006 Candyswap Questionnaire, thusly:

1) When I was a kid, Halloween was all about:
a) collecting as much candy as I could (my glutton-esque tendencies started early.)
b) collecting candy to eat as I go
c) sharing with my siblings
d) Who cares about candy? I was too busy egging my teacher’s car.
e) Halloween was forbidden in my house and I’ve never gotten over it.

2) What is more important to you: quality, or quantity?
Hmmm, I think I’m going to go with quantity for this one, not so much because of the gluttony thing above but because I love penny candies and I don’t have much of an appreciation for “fine” candies.

3) If you were on a desert island (haha, I wrote “dessert island” but that would be a totally different question now wouldn’t it?) and could only have one sweet treat, which would it be?
Willy Wonka’s Everlasting Gobstoppers, the ones with the sugary centre, not the gummy ones. And I’d pop each one in my mouth and swear that I was under no circumstances absolutely NOT going to bite through it, but then I’d start playing with it in my mouth, kind of nicking it with my teeth and testing it, and then I’d experience a moment of weakness and chomp down on it, filling my mouth simultaneously with shattered, slobbery shards of fruity, gobstoppery love and shame at not being able to control myself. Again.

4) You arrive at “Dessert Island” – where you discover a river of pudding flowing freely through a swamp of Cool Whip. No one is watching. What do you do?
Wait until someone is watching and THEN strip off and dive in, swimming judiciously to avoid the cool whip (yuck – not a fan of whipped cream or the fake stuff.)

5) Sweet, sour, or savoury?
Oh, the agony of choices! Um, sour. No, savoury. No, sweet! No, no – definitely sour.

6) Sex or chocolate?
Ya know, I’m not really a huge fan of chocolate. I mean it’s good and all, but I’m not sure I’d choose it over sex. Now if we’re talking those marshmallow strawberry thingees or sex, that’s a tough call.

7) What kind of candy, if any, would you turn down if someone offered?
Chocolates with goopy centres like butter cream or orange liqueur. Blech!

8) You’re at the grocery store, you’re children/husband/pets have been The.Worst.Ever. They’re throwing cans at each other, tripping little old ladies, taking bites out of the produce and putting them back in the bins, and piercing the milk bags with diaper pins. You feel yourself getting woozy. That vein in your forehead is throbbing. You need an immediate sugar kick before you do something crazy. What do you reach for?
A roll of duct tape, or perhaps something really heavy to turf at the children/husband/pets. Oh wait, you mean what kind of *candy* would I reach for? A Twix bar. Mmm, melty caramel salvation.

9) What are your feelings regarding Thrills gum, ribbon candy, scotch mints, and other “grandma candies”?
Scotch mints were the only thing that kept my nausea at bay when I was pregnant with Simon. I must have eaten 40 lbs of scotch mints – I had little baggies of them stashed everywhere. And of course, now I can’t stand the sight of them. In general, I’d give the thumbs-down to Grandma candies, except my Granny always had tins of Kerr’s hard candies and Kerr lollipops lying about for us, and they were delicious. So that would be no to your Grandma’s candies, but yes to my Granny’s candies.

10) How adventurous are you? Do spicy dried mealworms or candy-coated crickets give you the willies, or are you willing to try anything once?
Not so much.

11) Do you have dentures or other dental issues? Do you have a good dental plan?
My dentist recently told me that it was only the fillings holding my teeth in my head. I am a dental issue. And as for the dental plan – what, you think I do this job for the mental stimulation and the satisfaction of a job well done? It’s all about the benefit package, baby. Bring it on!

Marla wrote a great, rambling post the other day (you think I ramble? You ain’t seen from ramble ‘till you’ve been to Marla’s place) about how ideas for a blog post just jumped out and hurled themselves at her over the course of a rather strange afternoon.

I’m so jealous! Why don’t blog ideas leap out of the shadows and assault me? After 503 posts, am I finally out of material?

Not hardly.

I have a bunch of stuff. What I lack is a unifying theme. Let’s call this the pocket lint post, where I show you bits I’ve been stuffing in my pockets with the idea of doing something creative and interesting, and instead just turn my pockets inside out and show you the goods.

For starters, did you notice the cool little blog trick I added to the sidebar last week?

(Ack, tried to reproduce it here, but it’s not showing. You’ll have to look over on the right and scroll down. It’s the pretty box with the colourful words.) It’s called a Zoom Cloud, and unlike this word cloud, it continues to aggregate words from your RSS feed, so over time you can see which words you use with the most frequency. Quelle surprise, my most common words seem to be Tristan, Simon, mom, love and coffee! But what’s really cool is that you can click through on the words, and it shows you a list of posts that use that word. So it’s kind of like an index, or a category system (which Blogger sadly lacks.)

I love it! I love watching how the words change from day to day. (If you make one yourself, make sure you put in your blog’s site feed, and not just your site URL. )

Speaking of creative, did you read that Martha Stewart is launching her own version of My Space, but aimed at adult women in the 25 to 45 demographic. A spokesperson says there is currently nothing on the Web for this demographic to share photographs, scrapbooks, recipes and similar projects. Um, have they heard of blogs? I dunno, I’m smack in the heart of their target market, but I don’t think I’ll be stampeding over there to check it out. And they don’t launch until late 2007 (16 months or more away!) – don’t they have any concept of how quickly Web 2.0 is changing social networking? Who knows what the state of the Web will be in a year and a half. From a biz perspective, making this announcement now seems a bit ridiculous.

You know what’s a really cool and rather useful tool? Google Calendar. I’ve been using it for about a week, and I think it will be incredibly helpful as the boys get older to keep track of appointments, social engagements, birthdays and other events. I suspect my own family doctor has turfed me as a patient because I missed my last physical appointment, and we’ve had to reschedule a bunch of things lately because we’ve double-booked ourselves. I can keep one calendar with family stuff, another with work stuff, and Beloved can keep his own calendar, but we can view them all concurrently. And it has reminders! (Sadly, I will still have to transcribe things from the Google calendar on to the wall calendar in the kitchen, because it is the absolute authority on all events. If it ain’t on the kitchen calendar, it ain’t happening.)

And finally, speaking of calendars and birthdays (hey, look – sometimes segues just crawl out of the Interweb on their own!) a friend sent me a link to the Birthday Calendar. Not only does it calculate your age in days, hours, minutes and seconds (ouch), but it does some kewl numerological analysis, gives some astrological information and a bit of other trivia. The candles on my next birthday cake will generate enough heat to boil 4.2 oz of water. Not nearly so cool as the Zoom Cloud, but worth a click if you’re bored.