From there to here, from here to there, Funny things are everywhere
I thought I’d have more to say, but I don’t eve know where to start. After four and a half years of sharing my Wednesdays with Lucas, I’ve just come home to an empty house after dropping him off at his first day of school.
I miss him. Is it 11:30 yet?
I love September for many reasons (and dislike it for a few more!) but one of the best things about September are the morning drives to work. The sun is rising just as I leave the house, and the cool overnight temperatures often lead to misty or foggy mornings. Fog + colourful sunrise = irresistible!
There’s a couple of tricks you can use to capture really amazing sunrise photos. (The same applies to sunset photos, but early riser that I am, it always seems to be the sunrise I’m chasing.) If you’re using your camera, set it to capture the most saturated, vibrant colours possible. If you can pick your exposure, try to expose for the sky away from the sun and not the sun itself — you want to underexpose your image by a stop or two to make those colours nice and rich.
I love using my iPhone for sunrise shots. The filters often add a quick hit of saturation by torquing the colours and the contrast up a bit. This is a Hipstamatic shot, taken with the John S lens that adds a heavy vignette (darkened edges) and contrast:
While the sky colours are often spectacular in themselves, pay attention to the other things in your picture and try to use those elements to frame the sunrise, or to add interest or contrast. Since you’re exposing for the sky, which is bright, and you’re trying to underexpose it to saturate those colours, everything anything on the ground or in the foreground is likely to become a silhouette.
Think about the overall composition as well as the colours, and try not to put the sun or the horizon in the dead centre of your frame. If you’re shooting a gorgeous sky over a boring suburban skyline or an otherwise uninteresting foreground that will be lost in the shade anyway, just use a bit of it as a frame for contrast. Consider other elements of composition like balance, leading lines and shape/form.
And, as far as I’m concerned, a good shot is almost always made better with a human element. Since many of my sunrise shots are snapped on my commute to work, I don’t get the chance to play with people in my shots too often. This one is actually a sunset shot from this summer, but I love it so much I have it both as my iPhone wallpaper and hanging in the living room as a canvas.
A little planning goes a long way. This guide will tell you when the sun rises and sets each day, but of course not every sunrise or sunset is spectacular. My favourite conditions are when there’s fog and funky clouds covering half or less of the sky. Think about where the sun will come up (or go down) and think of a few beautiful foregrounds that might frame a beautiful sunrise. I have a few favourites picked out on my way to work, including the Long Island Locks (first shot above) and a handful of barns and silos before I hit the urban part of the city. Also, know that the colours of a sunrise are usually more intense just before the sun comes up or after the sun drops below the horizon, and that the colours change minute by minute.
Happy shooting!
For a while, it felt like our dirty little secret. Somehow, we’d managed to avoid getting my middlest son up on two wheels even though he’s now in the third grade, and I took it as an entirely personal parenting failure.
It wasn’t for lack of trying. We’d been encouraging him to get up on two wheels for years, but he was anxious and resistant and I never felt it was worthwhile to push him. I didn’t want to turn it into a power struggle or a thing for him, so we just kind of let it drift. Last summer we scoured the city for an appropriately-sized bike with training wheels on it (try finding a bike with training wheels for a 60 lbs kid some time!) and then removed the training wheels within a month. The boy was stressed every time we tried to get him rolling, though, and had a tumble or two and lost interest.
Every couple of weeks, we’d go back to it and try again with different approaches. For a while, I told him to just scooch around with his feet on the ground to get the feel of balancing on the bike, but he kept banging his shins on the pedals. It was turning in to a big deal, and I chose not to stress him out over something so simple, especially considering he was completely happy to putter around on a scooter instead. It doesn’t help that for living on an island, there sure are a lot of hills around our place. (I suppose the fact that the nearest intersection is called Hilltop should have given it away?) Between the death-defying slope of the driveway and the fact that the road slopes rather alarmingly after a couple dozen meters in either direction (let alone the blind curve just up the street), we never had a lot of room for him to practice without supervision.
But it bothered me. I’d see other kids riding their bikes and feel a pang of guilty regret. A boy in the second grade should be able to ride a bike, no? So when spring broke this summer, I was filled with new resolve and a reservoir of patience. This year, we’d get him up on two wheels. And that’s when his new bike broke. Something in the gears jammed up and the pedals wouldn’t turn. And in the way it sometimes happens with busy families, getting it fixed slid right off the priority list.
Still, the idea that he was not yet able to ride a two-wheeler bothered me. My eldest boy and I started taking bike rides together this summer, and while I was able to justify it as a priviledge for an older child, I still felt guilty. My middle boy did not seem particularly disturbed, probably because he’s a lot less inclined to adventure and activity than his older brother anyway. But with a littlest brother graduating from a tricycle to a two-wheeler with training wheels, I saw trouble brewing on the horizon.
All that to say, I was worried in a kind of distracted way about the fact that my boy had reached the ripe old age of eight without being able to ride his bike without training wheels. I’d worried about the other boys in other late-blooming ways, but was able to reassure myself that the youngest would not, in fact, still be gently sucking his soother as he spent his first night in a university dorm. I was not so sure that my middlest would not still be scooching along on a ten-speed with training wheels on his way to and from high school. Could it be possible that some children never learn to ride a bike? I was afraid we might be about to find out.
And then, miraculously, it happened out of the blue. Wee elves must have broken into the garage over the last few weeks, because the bike gears became magically unjammed when we poked at the bike yesterday. (Seriously, that’s what must have happened. I certainly don’t have the ability to do more than replace a fallen-off chain!) And so we decided on the spot to give it another go.
I honestly don’t know who was more surprised, me or the boy, when he wobbled off down the road, picking up speed and grace by the meter, leaving me cheering behind him. We practiced for a while longer, pinging back and forth between the blind curve and the steep slope, ever grateful that we live on a quiet street where people are always on the lookout for kids. And he rode merrily back and forth without my help, clearly as surprised and pleased with his newfound balance as I was.
I’m so proud. And relieved! And I think we’ve got a few good weeks of decent weather left, to start enjoying those family bike rides at last.
And suddenly it was September. Even though summer is still with us for another couple of weeks, it’s hard not to see the beginning of September as the end of summer. We had a pretty good time celebrating the end of summer this week!
Don’t believe summer is over yet? Try telling Mother Nature! (I love how this came out with the brush stroke textures – thinking this one needs some wall space somewhere!)
I love to quote Mark Twain on golf, about how it’s the ruin of an otherwise lovely afternoon’s walk, but I can’t say I have the same disinterest in putt putt. I’ve always loved it, but it’s only now that all three boys are old enough to actually play. We went to MiniGolf Gardens on Merivale on a sunny Saturday afternoon, which meant it was crazy busy – but even then we played two full rounds of 18 holes and found it a great way to spend an afternoon.
Another great way to spend an afternoon is to head up to Kelly’s Landing on River Road and get ice cream cones to enjoy while you sit by the Rideau and covet other people’s boats.
When you’re on a bit of an obsessive mission to wring every last bit of enjoyment out of summer, a stop at the park is in order as well.
And then, it was the first day of school. Grade 5, Grade 3, and Junior Kindergarten — I can’t believe all three boys are officially in school now. I like how someone commented on this picture on Flickr that all three boys were smiling, but in three very different ways.
They tolerate the posed pictures, but the outtakes are always my favourites. 🙂
Last year was the summer of Uno on the porch, but this year our game of choice was Yahtzee. Many happy hours were spent rolling the dice this summer. (Shhhh, don’t tell the boys they were working on their math skills the whole time!)
This is the sky over Manotick as the sun rose on Friday morning, pretty much exactly how it looked – no filters, no post-processing. The colours were amazing!
As much as I adore summer, I have to admit that there’s a wee tiny part of me that’s relieved about the return to routine that September brings. What do you think? Are you happy to be back to routine, or would you stay in summer mode forever if you could? Or is there no big change from August into September for you?
On Labour Day, I hopped on my bike for one of my favourite rides – across the island to the Long Island lock station. It’s a peaceful ride on rather crumbly but unbusy streets, past David Bartlett park, and down a dirt road that leads to the very northern tip of Long Island.
The first time we explored that path back in 2010, I was enchanted by the abandoned house at the end of the dirt path. I wondered who lived there and how long it had been abandoned. We often meander that way, either on our bikes or on foot, and I always meant to take pictures of the house and it’s out-buildings. Early in the summer, I happened to meet a fellow who lives just down from the locks on Nicholl’s Island (have you ever seen this little patch of heaven on the Rideau? It’s like cottage country in the city!) and he told me enough about the abandoned house so that I could google it.
Rowat House was built in the 1860s, right about the same time as Manotick’s famous Watson’s Mill. The city of Ottawa was petitioned in 2011 to designate the house a heritage building, and I was able to find a lot of little snippets of the history of the house, the lock station, and the immediate neighbourhood, all of which fed into my fascination for the history of Manotick and the Rideau Canal.
Apparently the house was occupied until at least the mid to late 1990s by descendants of the original owner, William Rowat, who opened a grocery and dry goods store in the former village of Long Island (on the east side of the Rideau River) in the 1850s, and then bought 40 acres at the tip of Long Island itself in 1860 for $1200, where he built his family home.
I’m not sure what happened in the last decade, but the house was in considerable disrepair by the time we “discovered” it in 2010. It really did feel like a discovery, because the house is on a walking trail (only emergency vehichles on their way to Nicholl’s Island are allowed to use the road that drives over the dam that joins Nicholl’s Island to Long Island) and nearly swallowed up by the surrounding trees. I found these heritage photographs of the house in its heyday in the city of Ottawa report and was going to write a blog post contrasting how the house looked then and how it looks now:
But, alas. On Monday I came zipping down the dirt road on my bike, scootched past the gate, and stopped with my mouth open in shock. The house was gone, absolutely gone, without a trace. The outbuildings were gone, too. This is what it looks like now:
I can’t believe there isn’t a hint of the house left. Tristan and I rode out there not more than four or five weeks ago, so they moved pretty darn quickly to take it down. I can’t find any mention of the decision to tear it down online either.
I’m not quite sure why I feel such a deep loss over this. We’d only been admiring the house for a few years, and it was coincidentally only in the last few months that I’d really gotten a sense of the place. But it makes me so very sad that it’s gone.
It’s not the only disappearing house in Manotick. I’d been curious about this tiny little house on Bridge Street, obviously abandoned and overgrown, since we moved here in 2010.
It disappeared this summer, too, to make way for a block-long senior’s home. And there’s the silo on this barn that collapsed in 2011:
I can’t figure out if I’m happy to have the photos preserving these lost beauties or concerned that I’m condemning them with my camera!
Are you interested in the history of the Rideau Canal and Manotick? I’ve been rather obsessive in my research over the last couple of years and have learned a lot of interesting stuff! Leave a comment if you’d like me to share more, or even better, if you have any info to share about the former Rowat house or the history of Manotick and Long Island! 🙂
… I’m blogging about kids and the value of play. Come on over!
Almost three years ago to the day, I wrote a blog post about the province of Ontario announcement that it would be funding in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatments. I wrote: “yippee!” Okay, so I wrote a lot more than that, and I’ll re-hash a lot of that in the next little while, because I’ve happily agreed to write a few posts about IVF funding for Conceivable Dreams, our newest bloggy sponsor. Conceivable Dreams is a grass roots patient advocacy organization advocating for better funding for IVF from government and private employers, a cause I support with all my heart.
The blog post I wrote back in 2009 about Ontario’s proposed funding for IVF treatments breaks my heart. Once every couple of months, someone posts a sad comment or sends me a heart-wrenching e-mail begging for information, for an update, for some glimmer of hope — and I have said so many times that I’m so sorry, but I don’t have any information. That announcement back in 2009 has been followed by three years of inaction and silence from the the government. Imagine waiting to start your family for three long years, with the family of your dreams tantalizingly close — but still not attainable.
With the cacophony of three little boys that fill our ears and hearts to bursting, it’s sometimes hard to remember the dark days of our infertility diagnosis and hard to believe that once upon a time, some doctor told us that we had practically no chance to conceive a child on our own. Infertility is so much more than a clinical diagnosis. It means giving up on a dream you felt entitled to your whole life. It is standing on a precipice with a yawing future devoid of the children you already felt were a part of you. It is losing what you never had but always expected.
Our only hope for pregnancy lay down the path of in vitro treatments, at a cost then that started around $7,000 — with no promise of success. Imagine spending that kind of money — on a maybe. I remember sitting in the armchair in the bedroom of the townhouse we rented, just me and Beloved and Katie, and crying my heart out to my mother on the phone. How could we ever afford something like that? We couldn’t even scrape together enough for a downpayment on a house. It may as well have been $70,000 as $7,000. And my wise, sweet mother asked me a question that I never forgot: “What else are you going to spend your money on?”
Indeed, that was the perspective I needed. For us, there was nothing else we wanted – not vacations, not cars, not a fancy house or toys or clothes. We wanted that family, and we had wanted it since we were each children ourselves. Beloved and I were born to be parents, and I believe that to my core to this day. It still seems so wrong to me that what stood between our younger selves and the family we dreamed of was money – the money to pay for a medical treatment.
Beyond the emotional, there are solid medical and financial reasons that the province should get moving on implementing coverage for IVF, and I wrote at length about them back in 2009. One of the driving factors behind funding IVF is controlling the number of multiple births, which are expensive on the health care system with higher incidences of premature births, c-sections, and intensive neo-natal care. Whereas (provincially funded) intrauterine insemination has no control over the number of embryos created, IVF allows for precise control of the number of embryos implanted.
And I still stand behind what I wrote, back in 2009 (really, just go read the blog post, it will be easier, and it’s a good one!):
You know what I would even consider as a reasonable compromise, for those of you who feel that taxpayer dollars should not be funding fertility treatments? Fund unsuccessful treatment cycles. Including two IUIs, a cycle of IVF with ICSI, four years of frozen embryo storage, and the costs to thaw and transfer Frostie, we easily spent $10,000 or $12,000 to overcome our infertility. I think you’ll agree that my darling Tristan is worth every penny times a thousand. We’re lucky that we never had to face the unimaginable agony of an unsuccessful round of IVF treatments compounded by the idea of spending all that money for naught — just try to imagine spending everything you have, financially and emotionally, and coming away empty-handed.
It’s for all these reasons and more that I am proud to support the work of Conceivable Dreams. If you have any doubt in your heart, read the comments at the end of the post I wrote back in 2009 for just a sample of the struggle facing thousands of Ontario families-in-waiting. For more information, you can visit the Conceivable Dreams website, or follow them on Twitter and Facebook.
Disclosure: I am a valued member of the Conceivable Dreams blog team, and I have been compensated for this blog post. However, the opinions expressed on this blog are always my own.
Wait, what? It’s September already? How the heck did that happen?
This past week was a bit of a disappointment in some ways. I’d booked the week off ages ago, way back in the spring, knowing we had no child care and that Beloved would be back at work. I figured the boys and I could have a week to do all the fun stuff we never got around to doing for the rest of summer, and blow out the last week of summer together in style. Then the flu mowed us down like dandelions. The boys were each sick for a day or two and I, who haven’t had so much as a cold in more than a year, was knocked completely on my ass for a couple of days. So while we still had fun, it didn’t quite live up to the week I’d been planning. (Then again, does it ever?)
When you’re really feeling out of it, there’s always the old typewriter to pull out an interesting picture or two. No need to leave the bed for this one!
By Sunday I was up enough for a walk into the village for ice cream, with a stop at the wonderful Dickinson House museum. This beaver pelt hat is pretty much the reason Canada exists.
On Monday, I fulfilled a longstanding promise (and a coupon!) by finally trekking out to Funhaven with the boys. I was very, very impressed, not just with the facilities and the prices, but also with the self-serve frozen-yogurt bar, the Deal or No Deal game (addictive!), and the fact that they not only let me bring my coffee (that I was clutching in a rather talismanic manner) but commented on it and absolved me of my guilt in trying to smuggle it in. Loved Funhaven, we’ll be back soon!
On Tuesday, we drove down a little south of Kemptville to another new adventure, a visit at Saunders Country Critters Zoo. You might remember hearing about them when their wallaby escaped a few years ago during a storm. I have mixed feelings about roadside zoos like this one. On the one hand, the boys love seeing the animals, and watching the owner/keeper interact with the animals at feeding time, it’s clear they’re well loved and cared for. On the other hand, well, animals aren’t meant to be penned up like this. We did have a great time – it’s a mellow little place, perfect for a wander on a quiet summer morning.
Wednesday was reserved for dental appointments. Be happy that I left the picture-taking to the dental hygienist. But oy, there is nothing like three hygiene appointments (and six follow-up appointments for various bits of work) to make you drop to your knees and thank god for your health insurance plans. And also, butterflies!
Oops! This was on the itinerary for the week, but we never did get around to it. But I found this photo in my phone from last week. That counts, right? Ceremonial Guard, marching past the Chateau Laurier on their way to the changing of the guard on Parliament Hill.
Fog, fences and sunrise, because even though I’ve wandered from the theme of summer fun, they are irresistible to me and my camera.
Not the quite the week I’d planned, but looking back it was a pretty good week anyway, if you look past the coughing and the kleenex. I can’t believe school starts back this week – this was an amazing summer but yeesh, it sure flew by quickly.
So how was YOUR summer?