Month: December 2006

Bed switching

It’s been a little more than a week since we switched Simon from his crib to a bed. He’ll be three in six weeks and he weighs somewhere around 40 lbs, so I’m thinking it was about time.

You might have noticed it’s not so much a bed as a mattress on the floor. We’re working on that. The bed frame has been ordered (no bunk beds for now) but in the interim, he’s thrilled just to be in a close facsimilie of a ‘big boy’ bed. And the bedding isn’t even a close match to Tristan’s because when I bought it on sale seven months ago, it was supposed to go in the purple and yellow room next door.

By the time we finally got around to boosting Simon from his crib, there was no longer any need for the boys to share a room, but we had done such a fine job of selling the idea of room sharing that we couldn’t have convinced them otherwise.

They’ve been surprisingly good. One night, Granny came over to babysit and there was giggling and shenanigans until well after she left after 9 pm. Other than that, though, they’ve both been great about settling in and actually going to sleep.

Even more surprising, Simon is actually staying in his bed. Those of you who have known me for a while will remember Tristan’s nighttime wanderings when we liberated him from his crib at the tender age of 21 months. He was so incorrigible in his midnight-to-three a.m. wandering and I was so sleep deprived and exhausted (still working full-time, eight months pregnant, in December) that one night I checked that the gate to the stairs was in place and locked my bedroom door to keep him out. The next morning, I woke up to find him curled up fast asleep against the door. It was one of my worst bad-mommy moments and I can still taste the bitter guilt three years later.

That’s why I’ve been nothing short of astonished (relieved, but astonished) at how easily Simon has made the transition that I’ve been dreading for three years. The only hiccup came this past Saturday night, on the one-week anniversary of his liberation from baby-jail. On my way to bed, I checked in as usual to kiss both boys goodnight. Tristan was snoring lightly, and when I turned to look at Simon, the half-smile on my face faded in confusion.

Simon’s bed was empty, and we hadn’t heard a peep from him. I checked his crib, thinking maybe he had crawled back into it, but it was empty, too. I finally found him deeply asleep smack in the middle of my bed, duvet pulled comfortably up to his chin.

I laughed and laughed and laughed. I was laughing so hard I could barely call Beloved to come and see, and was still snickering when I finally crawled under the – still warm! – covers myself after putting Simon back in his own bed.

When I asked him the next morning why he had slept in my bed instead of his own, he answered logically, “Because I just did, Mummy.”

Tristan was my well-sleeping infant. We had to wake him up every three hours to feed him when he was a newborn. Simon, by contrast, didn’t sleep a full six hours straight until until well after I went back to work, sometime around 14 or 16 months. As toddlers, they have switched places and Tristan is restless through the night where Simon falls asleep in minutes and stays that way.

Funny how that happens.

Christmas Lights on Parliament Hill

It was cold. Damn cold. Somewhere around minus 17C with the windchill, I think. And yet, we bundled up the kids, and coerced a few friends, and headed out to see the Christmas Light Ceremony on Parliament Hill last night.

I’ve lived in Ottawa for 18 Christmases now, and this is the first time I’ve ever gone to the Hill for the lighting ceremony. Might well be the last, too!

Kerry and Tristan keeping warm!

Oh, it was nice enough. They had free hot chocolate and Beaver Tails, if you wanted to wait in the massive queue for them. They had large bbq pits set up with free marshmallows for toasting, if you could get your marsmallow toasted before it froze solid. They even had free candles, and nothing says Christmas entertainment like watching your bored two- and four-year-olds in a stiff wind with open flame!

Tristan’s face DID actually freeze like that.

I had hoped for more carolling and Christmas music, but there was only the Peace Tower bells chiming festively. The boys were restless, completely understandable since it was about a hundred degrees below zero and all they could see was a bunch of shivering butts. I had also understood the 5:45 starting time to mean that the switch would be thrown at 5:45, but in fact, that meant that the political speechifying began at 5:45, carrying on in both official languages for the better part of half an hour. Just when we thought it was over, they started playing taped messages from every single provincial and territorial premier, and the shivering crowd groaned audibly.

Angie and Sam looking cheerful despite the chill!

And yet, in the endurance of the cold and the congeniality of a crowd of people all wondering together what on earth made them choose this escapade over a warm dinner and maybe a nice Seinfeld rerun on the TV, we found it was fun nonetheless. Because the crowd had densely packed itself in an attempt to conserve and share body heat, we couldn’t actually see any of the more than 100,000 lights that illuminate the Hill, Confederation Boulevard and the rest of downtown, but the crowd did gasp appreciately when the Parliament Buildings were illuminated by multi-coloured spotlights and giant drifting snowflakes.

(You can actually see me shivering as I try to hold the camera steady!)

A little something for everybody

I can’t even remember the last time we had a ramble around here. I’ve got a whole bunch of flotsam and pretty pieces of beach glass that I’ve collected, but I have no idea what to do with them. So, I’ll drop them unceremoniously into a single post and let you make something of it.

First, if you haven’t been there already, you should go check out Nancy’s blog. She’s doing a fun Christmas craft or activity every day leading up to December 24.

Second, speaking of holiday activities, my Christmas lights really hate me this year. Or is it the other way around? Back in November, when I was still pregnant, I found myself on a step-ladder hanging the outdoor lights. It was only after about 40 minutes, when I got all the way to the end of the string and my arms were aching from being lifted over my head for so long, that I realized I had started at the wrong end. I had to pull them all back down and re-hang them with the plug on the end nearest the receptacle and not furthest from it. I only mention it now because yesterday I noticed one of our three strings of indoor tree lights was not working. After some fidgeting, I decided the string was officially dead, and needed to be replaced. Of course, this was the middle string. So I very carefully unstrung it, trying hard not to dislodge too many ornaments, and very carefully wove a new string into more or less the same space. When I plugged it in, another string of lights died. When I tested the removed string, it worked fine. So I unstrung a SECOND string of lights and restrung the original string. With all the shifting and yanking and replacing of ornaments, the tree looks like it was decorated by a band of blind monkeys, but at least the lights are working. For now.

Third, some tips from the peanut gallery. Fryman sent me this article in the Globe and Mail about how 96% of Canadian women contribute to the control the family finances, and the vast majority, 63%, have sole control. I have to admit, even though in my house I have pretty much sole control over the finances, I was still surprised to see the figure as high as 63%. Does that figure surprise you?

Fourth, also from the peanut gallery, this amusing link from the one and only Marla. I’ve been trying for days to come up with a post witty enough to support it, but I have failed abjectly. Therefore, I simply ask you to try to imagine taking a refreshing walk along the beach and finding thousands of bags of Doritos, washed up like 200 gram beached whales. Go ahead, if you can make something funnier out of this, be my guest!

Fifth, for those of you who came of age watching television in the 1980s (like me), I offer you the 50 greatest television commercials from the 80s.

And finally, a follow-up to my horrible, terrible, no-good, very bad day. This morning in his Action Line column in the Citizen, columnist Tony Côté addressed my request for his help to find, repay and recognize the kindness of that cab driver who was so kind to me. Well, not so much addressed it as, much to my surprise, simply reprinted my entire e-mail to him (complete with my full name and all – and I mean all – of the gory details, including the miscarriage, the forgotten wallet and the tears) pretty much verbatim. I was hoping he might help me find my way to a real person at Blue Line who could put me in touch with the cabbie, but it looks like I’ll have to keep trying that avenue on my own. Instead, my most humiliating day is now available to a much wider audience than I could have ever reached through blog. Oy, how do I get myself into these things?

Our national preoccupations

You know I’m intrigued by the differences between Canadian and Americans; you know I’m mesmerized by search results. Many of you know I even have a vested interest in taxation.

How then could I leave unblogged this article in the Globe and Mail that intersects so many of my bloggy fascinations. It compares the top search terms from 2006 on Yahoo! and Yahoo! Canada.

Here’s a list of the 10 most popular search terms on Yahoo! Canada in 2006:

NHL
FIFA World Cup
American Idol
Rock Star Supernova
WWE
Neopets
Revenue Canada
Days of Our Lives
Environment Canada
Jessica Simpson

And here, by contrast, is a list of the U.S.’s top 10 Yahoo! searches in 2006:

Britney Spears
WWE
Shakira
Jessica Simpson
Paris Hilton
American Idol
Beyoncé Knowles
Chris Brown
Pamela Anderson
Lindsay Lohan

I’m not sure whether to feel smug or ashamed. I mean, it’s not pretty that seven of the top ten American searches are for the female celebrity flavour of the month, but it is also rather embarrassing (if not telling) that the top ten Canadian preoccupations in 2006 include hockey, weather, taxation, soap operas and – neopets??

100 Notable books from 2006

The New York Times recently highlighted 100 notable books of 2006 from their review archives. A few observations:

  • I have read exactly none of them. I choose to think this says more about my preference for waiting for the cheaper paperback version, or for my name to float to the top of the library’s months-long queues, than it says about my relevance as a consumer of contemporary literature.
  • I was pleased to see Stephen King’s latest, Lisey’s Story, make the list. He is so often denigrated as a populist writer, but I’d give my eyeteeth to be able to write like he does. I’m currently about 60 pages into Cell, his penultimate book, and after reading the NYT’s review for Lisey’s Story, and especially this paragraph, I don’t think I’m going to be able to hold out until it comes out in paperback:

    In a 1993 essay, King wrote: ”The question which haunts and nags and won’t completely let go is this one: Who am I when I write?” The same question lies at the heart of his new novel. Scott Landon, the fragile, prize-winning novelist at the book’s core, answers it like this: ”I am crazy. I have delusions and visions. … I write them down and people pay me to read them.” In ”Lisey’s Story,” King once again finds terror in the creative act, but for the first time he sees beauty there, too.

  • Apparently, if you’re going to write a successful non-fiction book, you have to use a colon in your title. Forty-four out of fifty of the notable non-fiction books can’t be wrong.
  • I’ve just added seven new books to my request list with the Ottawa Public Library.

What have you read recently that’s worth recommending?

An open letter to Proctor and Gamble

Dear Proctor and Gamble,

At the risk of being rude, could I please ask just what the hell your marketing department has been smoking lately?

First, you come out with the Tide “the difference between smelling like a mom and smelling like a woman” commercial. This ad insinuates that mothers have an inherently unpalatable smell, but fear not because Tide with Febreeze laundry detergent will mask or even eliminate that unpleasant mother smell. (To see the ad, go to Tide’s website, and click on “The Difference” under Tide Febreeze Freshness.)

Given that fresh baby is at the top of my favourite smells of all time, and Febreeze ranks somewhere after dog vomit and forgotten Tupperware container of month-old ravioli, I think I’ll do my best to keep smelling like a mother. If you think that ad was generally well received in the mothering community, you should read the 20+ comments on Ann Douglas’ blog, not to mention Ann’s excellent criticism. And don’t even get me started about how there is no campaign about the difference between smelling like a dad and smelling like a man.

Second, what is the deal with the Have a Happy Period â„¢ campaign for Always pads? I can tell you I was nothing less than infuriated to tear into a new package of pads last night to continue mopping up the flow of blood after my recent dilation and curettage to see your chipper Have a Happy Period â„¢ slogan printed on the paper attached to the adhesive backing.

“Have a Happy Period”? Not so happy, actually. I was looking forward to not having another period for at least five more months, to tell you the truth. I can only imagine how much I would have hated to see that chipper little strip of paper staring up at me every single month while we were struggling with the pain of infertility. Months stretch into years, the desire for a baby grows into an obsession, and each month dreams are crushed by the arrival of yet another period. But wait, I feel better, because Proctor and Gamble is telling me to have a HAPPY period.

The “manifesto” on your Have a Happy Period â„¢ website says, in part, “This is the time when, if something is even slightly annoying, the world should know about it.” Look at that, I’m taking your assvice! This campaign is insensitive, trite, and quite a bit more than “slightly annoying”. And if anyone ever sent me a Have a Happy Period â„¢ e-card that said “feeling whiney, snippy and bloated? Try self-aware, concise and curvy”, I’d block their e-mail address.

I’m all for providing resources for educators and young women who may have questions, but I don’t think we’ve made much progress when we’ve gone from shaming women about their bodies’ natural functions to trivializing them.

Sincerely, DaniGirl

(with credit to the Pixies at the Whiner’s Ball)

Half-baked

Baking is one of those skills that all mothers have, like healing boo-boos with kisses and controlling behaviour with the hairy eyeball. Somehow, though, when I was in the parenthood department store picking out my mothering skills, I went down the neuroses aisle twice instead of getting my supply of baking skills. I got too much Woody Allen and not enough Julia Child.

Baking should be easy. It comes with instructions. How many things in life come with explicit instructions? Do you remember the first time you changed a diaper or tried to put a child in a onsie? Oh sure, NOW you can do it in a washroom stall the size of a shoebox, balancing a diaper bag with one had and a wriggling baby in the other, while keeping the door with the broken lock closed with your knee and holding a box of wipes in your teeth. But the first time, when it took you three tries and 20 minutes to figure out which was the front end, didn’t you wish you had a nice set of instructions?

Baking comes with instructions. It tells you exactly how much of each ingredient you need, exactly the order to add them together, and exactly how long to cook them at a precise temperature. The question is not how I could screw this up once, but how I could screw it up more often than not.

I made a cake for Beloved’s birthday this week. A cake from a box, mind you. You know the ones – dump the box, add eggs and oil and water, mix, bake. No-brainer, right? Well, first of all, that cake had the density of a neutron star. I’m surprised the kitchen table had the structural integrity to hold it up.

As if that weren’t bad enough, it was a cake with attitude, and that cake did not want to be frosted. In fact, not only did it wilfully resist being frosted, it actually threw off the frosting as I was trying to slather it on. I’d pass the spatula (because I get that baking is about the right tools, and I have a spatula for frosting a cake, even though the cake inevitably doesn’t want to be frosted) over one section, and rather than the frosting sticking to the cake, the frosting peeled up layers of the cake and stuck to the spatula. The more frosting I tried to apply, the more cake ended up stuck to the spatula. It was not pretty. I used an entire can of frosting on one cake. Cake from a box, frosting from a can, and still I screwed it up. That takes a special level of culinary incompetence, don’t you think?

The one thing I really, really, really want to be able to bake is cookies. Mothers can bake cookies. I am a mother. Ergo, I should be able to bake cookies. In fact, I can make chocolate chip coasters, and large cookie sheets of an oatmealish material loosely identifiable as former cookie dough, and that’s about it. Sometimes they are overcooked, sometimes they are undercooked, but they are consistently unappetizing and often inedible.

My favourite cookies right now are the Farmer’s Market gourmet homestyle cookies from Loblaws. The other day as I was perusing the freezer section beside the bakery, a ray of light fell down from the heavens and a chorus of angels heralded my discovery of a box of frozen Farmer’s Market gourmet homestyle cookie dough chunks, complete with baking instructions.

Finally, a foolproof cookie! Place premixed, preformed chocolate chip oatmeal cookie dough pucks on a cookie sheet, bake at precisely 325F for exactly 11 minutes, and revel in the glory of being a successful cookie baker at last.

What actually happened was that they ran together into a massive cookie pangea, and were so badly stuck to the cookie sheet that by the time I pried them up they were less cookie and more chunks and crumbs. Chewy chunks and crumbs, but not in that melt-in-your-mouth way that a normal person’s freshly-baked cookies would be.

From now on I’ll just buy the already-baked cookies, and just nuke them for a few seconds to make the chocolate chips all melty. Five seconds in the microwave counts as baking, right?

Ooooh, pretty shiny silver!

I’ve always been fond of silver. The first ring that I wore on a daily basis was a silver and turquoise ring my parents gave me for Christmas circa 1983. My wedding rings and my other favourite ring are white gold, which is basically silver for spoiled girls. Even my teeth are filled with shiny silver fillings.

And now, blog has a beautiful siler maple leaf to wear with pride, thanks to our second place finish in the Canadian Blog Awards best family blog category.

(insert pretty silver maple leaf here, when Blogger deigns to let me post an image)

The finish was a real nail-biter, and we placed a mere 982 votes behind the winner. (I don’t even want to think about what kind of day I would have had to have last week to pull in that many votes!) Congratulations to Kristin and Ali and Carly and MetroMama and Catherine, and all the other bloggers who were nominated. I really thought I knew my way around the Canadian blogosphere, but I found a lot of great new blogs to read this past couple of weeks thanks to the CBAs.

And of course, thank to you all of you for your votes, and for your patience with this whole blog award silliness, and for your ongoing love and support. You know I’m fond of words, and I simply can’t find enough of them to tell you how honoured I am that you voted for me, and how touched I have been by your recent kindness.

I had a much longer, sappier post in mind, but I’m having trouble pulling the words together without sounding maudlin or saccharine. Plus, there’s a guy stage left with a big hook, and Chuck Barris just rolled the gong out stage right, so maybe I’ll leave it with a simple thank you.

Thank you. Really, and sincerely. Thank you!

Dani and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day*

All I can say at this point is thank the deity of your choice that November is finally over.

A new page on the calendar is as good a place for a fresh start as any. And December means the ramp-up to the holidays is in full glorious swing. I’m happy to leave November, with Nablopomo and grey skies and rivers of tears behind me.

But first, I have to tell you about my day yesterday, the day that is really the only kind of day that could end a month like this month has been. And since the other hallmark of this November has been my incessant nagging for your votes for the Canadian Blog Awards, it seems appropriate that I trade this story for the last of your votes on this, the last day of voting. I like to think that despite everything, I never once asked for a sympathy vote. Today, I ask for your pity vote. After reading the story of my day yesterday (you’ll have to click the ‘more please’ button to read it), I’m hoping you can acknowledge with your vote this new high in lows, this bad day to end all bad days, a day lamentable for its utter wretchedness.

As you know, the day started without power. It also started with rain. And in the crepuscular dimness of our foyer, I overlooked the umbrella left hanging to dry overnight by the front door.

By lunch time, the day was looking up. It was still raining, and I was still embarrassingly bedraggled, but I made my way to the mall on my lunch break and ended the hour with arms loaded to breaking with gifts for Christmas, for myself, and for Beloved’s birthday on the weekend. It was a great day for shopping, but because the outside temperatures were near 16C, I was stewing in rivers of my own sweat by the time I made it back to the office. Not to mention, of course, the rain and the lack of umbrella.

Midafternoon, I left the office for my final OB appointment with a heavy heart and more than a little dread. After peering through the window and seeing that the rain continued to pour down, I decided to leave my two large shopping bags in the office overnight, rather than haul them all over town. In the rain.

As I walked through the mall and considered the 10-minute walk from the last bus stop to the OB’s office – did I mention the pouring rain? – I had decided to just buy myself a new umbrella. I stopped at Sears, choked when I saw the price tag ($35.99!), but sucked it up and decided to buy one anyway. I got to the cashier – and realized I had left my wallet in one of the shopping bags tucked carefully under my desk.

It was too late to go back, so I decided to just go ahead. I walked across the street to the bus stop and huddled under the shelter, waiting for the 97 bus to come. Before the 97 could arrive, the 87 South Keys pulled in. The 97 and the 87 both go to the stop where I would catch the second connection, so I hopped on the 87.

Two stops later, the bus driver informed us there was a problem with the bus and we would have to disembark. Into the rain. Fortunately, less than a minute later, another 87 South Keys pulled in. For less than a moment, I debated just waiting for the 97 that I was originally going to catch, but I wanted to get out of the rain and just be sitting on the bus rather than standing in cold breeze.

It was just as the bus pulled out of the Billings Bridge transit station that I realized my mistake. The 97 goes directly to the South Keys station on the designated transitway – maybe a 10-minute ride. The 87, however, the bus I chose to ride, goes to the same stop after looping through several neighbourhoods. Three years ago, I used to take the 87 every day. You’d think that an important detail like that would have burbled to the forefront of my consciousness sometime before the instant when it was irrevocably too late.

There was no way I’d make my connection at South Keys. The connector bus only runs every 30 minutes. I had the OB’s last appointment of the day. I was going to miss it entirely. My only hope was a taxi, which would be about a $20 fare from that end of town.

I had about a minute to think about it, and in the end decided to get off the bus at the next stop, which just happened to be next to a large government complex (the Canada Post building on Heron, for you locals) where I knew I could catch a taxi. I hopped off the bus – into the rain – and made my way through a tunnel under the road and across a sopping wet field. There was probably a concrete path somewhere, but I had the taxi stand in my sights and I made a beeline for it, across the marshy lawn.

I made it to the cab, pulled open the door, dropped into the seat, and just as I was about to swing my legs into the taxi, I remembered. No wallet. No credit cards. Not a single red cent on me.

I was more or less stranded. I could have caught another bus, but I’d completely miss my appointment. My mother was supposed to pick me up after the appointment to give me a lift home, and I wasn’t even sure I could make it there in time for the ride by this point. And my cell phone had been dead for a week.

I can’t imagine what I must have looked like to the driver, but I explained to him that I had forgot my wallet downtown, that I was trying to get to an appointment near Merivale and Hunt Club, and that if he could help me at all, I’d repay him somehow. If he would consider an IOU, or let me call him later in the day with my credit card number, or let me pay him in cash later in the day I’d be grateful, I told him, but I understand if he couldn’t do it.

He told me to shut the door, as the rain was running all over the back seat of the cab. And me. He never clarified what his expectations were, but he started driving in the direction of my destination. I was so embarrassed, so grateful, so filled with dread about the upcoming appointment that I burst into tears. I sat in the back of the cab, trying hard to cry in complete silence, and absolutely unable to get enough control on my emotions to explain anything to him, not even the precise location of my destination.

Eventually, just half a block from my destination, I managed to ask him how I could pay him. He gestured toward his credit card reader and said he’d need the card to charge the ride, so I told him I would send him cash, a cheque, whatever he wanted. I gave him my business card, and told him to call me when he was near my office building and I would give him the money.

By that time, we were in front of the medical building. The meter said the fare was $18.05. I am still not sure whether he intends to follow up with me to collect the fare or not. Only when I stepped out of the cab did it occur to me to take note of his plate number so I could find him again, but by that time he had pulled away. I only saw the number painted on the side of his cab.

I’m going to call the taxi company today and see if I can find him, and I’m going to try to think of places I can commend him. Maybe a note to the newspaper. I just don’t want to get him in trouble for not collecting a fare.

Taxi drivers often get a bad rap, but the kindness of one stranger for a soaking wet, nearly hysterical, and badly embarrassed woman on the last day of a very bad month is a story worth telling, don’t you think? And isn’t it at least worthy of a vote?

(*with apologies to Judith Viorst)