Month: June 2008

Duck and cover

One of my favourite Tragically Hip songs contains the lyric: “Like boots or hearts, oh when they start to fall apart, they really fall apart.” Yeah. We’re falling apart over here.

  • Lucas had his four-month vaccine yesterday, and like two months ago, he’s reacting to them. Poor guy is clingy and noticably off, and woke with a high-ish fever. Sigh.
  • I have a migraine.
  • We’re on day 175 of a humidity-dense heatwave. Ordinarily, this wouldn’t bother me too much, but with a migraine and a clingy, feverish baby who wants to be held all day, even the AC isn’t enough to keep the edge off my temper.
  • At 2 am, Beloved poked me awake and said, “There’s an alarm going off downstairs.” I called the non-emergency number for the fire department in between pushing the button to silence the howling carbon-monoxide detector every three minutes and he talked me through taking it off the wall and searching for an expiry date. When we couldn’t find one, just to be safe they sent out some firefighters (on a ladder truck!) with a CO detector. It was, thankfully, a false alarm. We have bad luck with false alarms, you might remember. This was apparently the carbon monoxide detector in its death throes. It took at least two hours for the adrenaline in my system to subside enough to get back to sleep.
  • While we were waiting for the fire department to arrive, I noticed that we seem to have an infestation of tiny ants coming in from the patio door in the kitchen. Given how bug-phobic I am, ants are not the worst possible invasion, but I am still not impressed. Ugh.

Bugs. Illnesses. Malfunctioning electronics. Weather. What’s the next plague, flood? No, don’t even think about it…

Smuggler’s Notch special deal just for you

You know I love you, right? And as my mother taught me, “if you love me, buy me things.” Well, I haven’t exactly bought something for you, but I do have some freebies and a great deal to offer, too.

First, the great deal. Remember when I told you earlier about how my friends at Smugglers’ Notch gave me my first writing credit for their resort magazine? Well, at the same time we worked out a special deal for any of you who might have been inspired enough by my most excellent and unbiased travel reporting to plan a family vacation at Smuggs for yourself.

Book any FamilyFest Summer Vacation Package at Smugglers’ Notch for this summer (June 13 – September 1, 2008) and tell them you want the “Postcards from the Mothership” deal, and you’ll get a 20% discount! In addition to the fun I blogged about last summer (remember the segways, the excellent day camp for kids, the waterslides and pools and mini-golf, not to mention the endless canoe trip?) this year they’ve got some cool new stuff like chocolate tasting and bike-boards (three-wheeled scooters) and adventures in kayaking and rock-climbing, plus a whole lot more.

If you go, let me know! I’d love to hear about it. And, as a self-appointed bloggy ambassador to Smuggs, I’d be happy to answer any questions about our trip. For more information and to make a reservation, visit the Smuggs website. Don’t forget to tell them you want the “Postcards from the Mothership” deal!

And now the freebies: the nice folks over at Hachette publishing sent out Mothers Day book packages to a handful of bloggers recently, and I’d like to share mine with you. These are the books they sent (minus a few I’ve already given away):

1. Your Best Life Now For Moms by Joel Osteen
2. How Not to Look Old: Fast and Effortless Ways to Look 10 Years Younger by Charla Krupp
3. Bobbi Brown Living Beauty by Bobbi Brown
4. Sew U Home Stretch: The Built by Wendy Guide to Sewing Knit Fabrics by Wendy Mullin & Eviana Hartman
5. Jewels: 50 Phenomenal Black Women Over 50 by Michael Cunningham & Connie Briscoe
6. On Becoming Fearless: …in Love, Work, and Life by Arianna Huffington
7. Days: From the Heart of the Home by Susan Branch
8. Starting Your Day Right: Devotions for Each Morning of the Year by Joyce Meyer
9. Ending Your Day Right: Devotions for Every Evening of the Year by Joyce Meyer
10. Send Yourself Roses: Thoughts on My Life, Love, and Leading Roles by Gloria Feldt and Kathleen Turner

If you’d like to win one, leave a comment… but not just any comment! Leave me a comment recommending a book that you have loved, or think I must read. Also, if you have a particular preference for one of the books listed, be sure to let me know.

I’ll leave this open for comments until June 15.

You should have seen the look on her face

Lesson learned: three things you should never say in the fitting room of a clothing store:

  1. Are you looking at me? Do you see me? (and, in a really, really bad Robert De Niro) Are YOU lookin’ at ME?
  2. Lookit those cheeks, you chubby thing!
  3. Peeky-peeky-peeky, I see you!!

I’m sure the woman in the next cubby has never been more relieved to see a woman emerge from a fitting room chattering at her baby.

The look of love

There are a lot of wonderful things about mothering a baby not quite four months old. It’s fascinating to watch his personality emerge, bright-eyed and curious and more than a little stubborn. (Fancy that! Who would have guessed it?) It’s equally fascinating to see him growing before my eyes, gaining folds and bursting through footie sleepers each time I blink. And the quest to make the baby laugh has turned into a competitive sport around here, with Beloved as the champion but closely followed by me and even the boys. Lucas loves to laugh, and often at the simplest of gestures.

Considering he’s not quite four months old, he has a pretty impressive arsenal of communication tools. He coos up a storm, talking happily to himself or his hands. He cries with an impressive bellow, and it melts my heart when he sees me coming to give him the attention he is demanding and immediately smiles through his tears. And I had forgotten how much I love the “stick out your tongue” game. I remember playing this with Tristan if not Simon, but Lucas seems to be the champion, and I’m still astonished that it’s a game that can be played with such a young baby. If you stick out your tongue at him, he immediately sticks his tongue back out at you. He’s become so adept at this that it’s become a bit of a salute; when he knows he has your attention, out comes the little pink tongue in a drooley greeting. It’s clear from the sparkle of delighted accomplishment in his eyes that the exchange is intentional, and understood by him as such. I don’t remember how long this phase lasts, but I hope it’s quite a while!

But my very favourite part of mothering this lovely little boy of mine who still wants to be held all of his waking hours and many of his sleeping ones as well? It’s the look, that adoring, worshipful gaze he bestows upon me when I least expect it. He studies my features with intense concentration, as if burning each freckle into his newly-firing synapses, and then a smile sweeps over his dewy face like sunshine on a summer day, and I truly fear my heart might burst. All the injustices of the world are forgiven, all the wrongs are righted, and the universe is a place of blissful joy when I am bathed by the glow of that loving gaze.

How can anyone ever recover from such love? In all my long years of being loved, and I am lucky to say I’ve been loved by the best, nobody has loved me with the shining and silent adoration of my four-month-old son.

Lucas

To price or not to price

If the weather forecast holds true, we’ll be holding what has turned out to be our annual garage sale this weekend. I’m feeling particularly ruthless and in need of a good purge this year… everything must go! Three boys for the price of two, and I’ll throw in a well-broken in and still in prime condition husband for free!

We’re finally carpeting the basement to turn it into a proper playroom for the boys, so a lot of stuff I have stashed down there has to go — like the papasan chair I so adored when we got it as a wedding present nine years ago but has languished as a cat bed these past few years, and the book cases used primarily to store my class notes and essays from university. (The papers will stay, just in a different hidey-hole. I’m not feeling THAT ruthless!)

It’s also time to start recycling some of the boys’ lesser-used toys. I’ve been keeping nearly everything for Lucas, but recently realized he’s going to be adding his own share to the collection through his birthdays and other gift-worthy events. I’ll keep the really good stuff like the Thomas trains and the Little People garage, but we can probably part with the Caillou treehouse we bought for $2 at another garage sale four years ago, and our collection of Hot Wheels cars and Rescue Heroes could do with a little pruning. I imagine I’ll have to either banish the boys to Granny’s house for the duration, or offer them at least some sort of compensation for parting with toys they haven’t even glanced at in the last year or two. I might even let them take back one item each from the piles I put out — think it will work?

I’m vacillating between putting little masking tape prices on everything, and just leaving items unpriced for best-offer. What do you think? Myself, I hate it when things don’t have prices on them at yard sales and often won’t even inquire about the price unless I find something I really like. I’m also not much of a haggler, and always feel a little foolish when I try. On the other hand, I’m often willing to take just about any price to get rid of something during a garage sale I’m hosting, and would hate for someone to walk away just because they’re put off by the price sticker.

What’s your preference, price or no price?

We now return to our regularly scheduled blogging

Sorry about the downtime. I dunno what happened, but my host’s server crashed in a big way. They said they fixed it around midnight last night, but I was still getting funky error messages that you might have seen if you dropped by earlier today. After raising four tickets in eight hours, all of which they ignored, I took matters into my own damn hands and restored my own database and upgraded my WordPress installation to boot.

And I cooked up a mean pot of chili while I was doing it!

Sorry about the interruption.