A couple of weeks ago, Tristan came home with a permission slip for the running club at school. It said they were preparing for a 5K race in Osgoode, and the kids would be working their way up to the 5k during lunch hours over the next few weeks.

Tristan loves to run, and I am always in favour of finding new ways for the kids to burn off energy, so this sounded like a great idea to me. I have to admit, even when I signed the permission slip, I had vague ideas of backing out of the actual race by the time it came around, but the more Tristan talked about the perks (a t-shirt! a MEDAL!) the more I realized I was firmly committed and should make peace with the sacrifice of a Saturday morning to the run.

I was a little less enthused when a note came home about a week before the run saying that the school couldn’t be responsible for overseeing all the kids during the actual run, and parents were at all times responsible for the supervision of their own kids. Suddenly I was faced with the idea of actually RUNNING the 5K instead of simply spectating it. And I was not amused.

In the days leading up to the race, I resigned myself to donning my trainers and hoping that my weekly trips to the gym would be enough to keep me from embarrassing myself too thoroughly. However, in passing I spoke to one parent who was also spouse of an organizer of the run, and I was assured that he would need no supervision, that the runners were on a closed pathway (the newly minted multi-use pathway in Osgoode) and in fact out of sight for only 10 or 15 minutes. And really, does my lightning-quick 9 year old really need his lumbering mother like a ball around his ankle, slowing him down?

That’s how we found ourselves in Osgoode on Saturday morning, just Tristan and me, in the pouring rain.

Here he is at the starting line, twitching to go. He’s number 52, in the blue jacket.

Did I mention the rain? Not just a sprinkle, either. Driving, cold rain.

They were out of my sight down the path within minutes, but it seemed to take hours for them to run the kilometer or so to one end of the course and turn around. They’d run past the start, run another kilometer or so in the opposite direction, and then back to finish at the same spot they’d started. I peered up the path for what seemed like hours watching for him after the first turn.

He really doesn’t seem to think the whole run thing was such a brilliant plan anymore, does he? Once he saw me, though, he kicked his little engine back into gear.

I’m sure a week passed, maybe two, before the runners made the final turn of the circuit and headed back to the finish. I was wet and I’d been hiding under an umbrella. As the first runners crossed the finish line, I peered up the path watching for Tristan and staked a strategic spot for myself at the finish line. When he finally approached, I was so excited for him I almost forgot to take a picture. This is about four feet from the finish line.

I honestly thought my heart would burst from pride. It’s one thing to run on a warm sunny spring day, but this was the most sucky day imaginable, and his determination never wavered.

He crossed the finish line in 30:52. Was it really only half an hour? Because it seemed about five times that long. He was wet and dirty, red-cheeked and sweaty, but rather than beaming in pride, he was rather stoic about his accomplishment. Between you and me, I think it was way harder and way less fun than he’d imagined.

He’s the introvert to my extravert, but he’s got his mother’s need for external validation, and when I realized that there were no medals to be had, I thought we were in real trouble. No medals? The only reason he ran was so he could get a medal. Lucky for me, he’s also got his mother’s short attention span, and a medal was easily substituted by the promise of a stuffed yellow Pikachu he’d been coveting. He certainly earned it.

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118:365 Laces, a photo by Dani_Girl on Flickr.

(I’d originally posted this on Flickr, but by the time I was finished writing it, it sounded suspiciously like a blog post!)

Via Flickr:
My oldest is not good with change but even I was surprised by the depth of his aversion to even the most rudimentary changes. He wore through his school shoes (I’m happy we made it from September to April, I think that’s a new record) and when we went shopping we found a pair identical to the old ones, which he immediately picked up. I showed him a few other styles and suggested he might like to try one on, but no, the exact same shoe one size bigger was what he wanted.

The next day, as I was packing the new shoes in his bag, I told him to just throw the old shoes in the garbage at school — and he looked at me as if I’d suggested he set fire to them on the principal’s desk. "But they’re still good, they just have a few holes in them!" he said with obvious dismay. And that night, there they were in the bottom of his backpack.

I pulled them out to throw them in the garbage, and hesitated over the can. I dropped them on the floor, added the baseball, and now they’re memorialized. Good old shoes, thanks for putting up with a lot of boy stuff these last seven months. Then I buried them in the garbage a bit, so he doesn’t see them. And so I don’t have to look at them. Because I was tempted to just throw them in the closet, yanno, in case he needs a backup for his backup pair.

You can see why we won’t let him get a hamster.

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My dear, sweet Tristan,

Today you are nine years old – the last year of single digits! You, my eldest son, have had quite the year. I feel like I’ve gotten to know you much better as a person this year. I have seen bits of you that foreshadow the teenager you will soon be, and the man not far behind that. You already stand as tall as my chin, and you still laugh when every now and then I push down on the top of your head in an always-unsuccessful attempt to cram you back into the toddler that you were just yesterday.

You are still my adventuring son, the one with endless energy who will leave no snow-mound unscaled, no tree unclimbed, no ledge unwalked. You love to go places, to see new things, to explore new places. And yet you are also the most resistant to change — possibly even moreso than me, and I didn’t think that was possible. Our recent move was hardest on you of all the boys, but I think that six months later, you’re finally okay with it. Thank goodness for that treehouse, that’s all I can say!

Tristan, in your ninth year you like Sonic the Hedgehog, Super Mario Bros, Pokemon, Beyblades, Smurfs, and playing Wii and DS games. You still love Lego, and you will spend endless amounts of time at the table with nothing but paper and pencil to entertain you. You’ve drawn your own comic books, and on an average day you create at least three or more works of art. You are a scavenger for art projects, and make fascinating compositions out of kleenex boxes, paper rolls and whatever other trush ephemera you can lay your hands on. You’re also reading way above your grade level, consuming book series like Geronimo Stilton and Percy Jackson.

You are doing well in school, solidly in the B to B+ range. You joined the school choir this year, which you seem to enjoy. Math seems to come easily to you, but getting you to do journal entries is like herding angry cats. How can the son of a hard core blogger hate writing journal entries so much?!

This year you had a fun party for friends old and new at the movie theatre, and it was another smashing success. Your cake was decorated with Sonic the Hedgehog action figures, and we all laughed our way through Gnomeo and Juliet. Tonight, Granny is fulfilling your special birthday dinner request: roast beef, mashed potatoes … and stuffing! (You sure have come a long way from the finicky eater you once were!)

You are an amazing older brother. Lately, you’ve taken to teaching Simon the math and cursive handwriting that you’re learning in school, and you have endless patience for Lucas. When Lucas and I took a quick trip to Toronto this past weekend, my heart nearly burst with pride when you drew a special colouring page full of Lucas’s favourite characters to keep him busy on the plane.

You have a big and sensitive heart, Tristan. You’re thoughtful and creative and very aware of the feelings of people around you. You’re not particularly good at putting your clothes in the hamper or keeping your room tidy, and the way you bicker with Simon may yet make my head explode. But you make me proud every single day, and I can’t tell you how wonderful it is to feel like we’re friends as well as mom and son.

Happy birthday, my darling Tristan. I hope this year is your best year ever. We love you very much!

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My sweet baby Tristan,

You are eight years old! No longer a “little” boy, but a boy to your core. How could I call you “little” when I can rest my chin on the top of your head? Not so long now, my son, and we’ll be seeing eye-to-eye literally as well as philosophically — for a week or two, anyway, until you shoot right up past my height!

You are my adventurous spirit, my companion in neighbourhood walks, my artistic soul, my daydreamer. Your imagination is limitless, even if your attention-span is occasionally limited. You love to draw, especially characters from the books and cartoons and video games you love. Your walls are currently full of pictures you’ve drawn of Super Mario and characters from the Bone books.

To say you love Lego is an understatement. You can follow even the most complex instructions, and it won’t be long before you’ve moved beyond Lego and are building our Ikea furniture for us. You love to show off your various Lego creations, mostly exotic ships with secret trap doors and hidden missiles. There is not a room in the house that doesn’t have some bit of Lego that has drifted off of one of your creations.

You, my boy, are an extremely patient older brother to Lucas. You tolerate him colouring on your homework, yanking apart your Lego creations, and otherwise torturing you, with an impressive amount of tolerance. Usually. You don’t mind fetching a snack for him, or reading books to him, or otherwise finding ways of diverting him from mischief while I’m trying to make dinner. Your other brother Simon is your best friend and mortal enemy, and the two of you are locked in a power struggle that sees you bickering for solid hours at a time, only to be followed by cuddling under the same blanket to watch TV together.

In the last year, you have continued to impress us with your scholastic achievements. You read with an easy fluency that still makes my heart swell when I listen to you read out loud, and you speak French with a perfect accent that I could never hope to replicate. At school, you are exceeding expectations in both math and reading, and the only complaints we ever receive from your teacher are when you dig in your heels and decide to show your bullishly stubborn side. Lucky for us, this doesn’t happen too often.

Your best friends are Will and Colin, and you recount tales of recess adventures filled with opposing tribes and ne’er-do-well girls. Girls! You still have no use for them. You love physical play — running, tumbling, climbing, leaping. You come home from school soaking wet and dirty more days than not, but happy in your mess. You recently finished a second year of skating lessons, and you love nothing more than to zoom around the rink as fast as your legs will carry you. When I asked if you wanted to play hockey next year, you considered for a while but thought you might prefer something new instead, like guitar lessons. Be still my heart.

You seem almost incapable of remaining in your chair through an entire meal, so I’m not sure how your teacher manages to keep you in your desk all day. Just when I think that maybe I should be concerned about your absolute inability to restrain yourself, I catch you engaged in reading or drawing or some other creative act and realize that you’ve been absorbed and motionless for impressive stretches. Apparently colouring engages a calming centre in your brain that conversation with your family does not!

Right now you love Super Mario Brothers, Spore, Lego, Star Wars, Alvin and the Chipmunks, the Bone books, Calvin and Hobbes, Pokemon, Garfield and the Vancouver 2010 Olympic mascots. Your favourite foods are McDonalds hamburgers, chicken fingers, pogos, pizza with just cheese, cheddar Sunchips, and sweet red peppers.

You, who were my most finicky eater, have miraculously become my most flexible eater. In the last year, you’ve come to love meatloaf, chili and salad. In fact, there’s very little that I serve that you won’t eat, and I can’t tell you how grateful I am for that! Even vegetables are no longer your enemy.

My sweet baby Tristan, you are eight years old, and I love you with all my heart. Happy birthday, my son. You make me proud to be your mom.

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So I have to admit, I’ve been looking forward to today’s Lego birthday party with equal parts excitement and dread. Custom Lego birthday party for eight boys? Wicked awesome! Eight boys in my house? Questionable. Four of five family members felled by stomach flu in the five days leading up to the party, leaving the birthday boy vulnerable? Nerve-wracking. Three of said party guests, including the birthday boy, spontaneously and independently naming the party-in-progress “Best birthday party EVER!”? Priceless.

This is what an eight-year-old’s perfect birthday looks like:

The boys were astonishingly well-behaved, and utterly engaged with the Lego Guy’s instruction at every step of the way. Things only got a little crazy when they took their newly assembled Lego Mindstorm Robots into the wresting ring for a final challenge. Take a quick peek, it’s only 30 seconds but I bet if you’re even a little bit in touch with your inner eight-year-old boy (what, you don’t have one?) it makes you smile!

Did I mention? Best! Birthday! Party! EVER!

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Tristan and I are in the car, sitting in the Tim’s drivethrough on the way to skating lessons. We’re listening to one of my favourite radio program on CBC, Terry O’Reilly’s The Age of Persuasion. The episode is about tag lines and slogans.

As it runs through the opening, it plays a series of famous tag lines from past to present, including Obama’s infamous rallying cry of “Yes, we can!”

Tristan says, “Hey, I recognize that guy!”

“I’m sure you do,” I reply. We may be Canadian, but the average school kid can likely name Obama as the President before Harper as the Prime Minister.

“That was Bob the Builder!”

It took me a full minute before I could reconcile his response, and then I couldn’t help but laugh. Loudly.

Can we build it? Yes, we can!

I wonder if Hit Entertainment has filed the copyright violation suit yet?

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Please indulge me in a moment of shameless bragging. I’m practically bursting with pride.

I got a call from Tristan’s teacher this week. (I swear, getting a call from the school elicits the exact same physical response in me now that getting called to the principal’s office did when I was a schoolchild myself. That wincing anticipation of unpleasantness ahead.)

In fact, she was calling to tell me how delighted she was with a piece of work Tristan handed in. Can we take a moment and admire the kind of teacher who calls a parent after school hours to offer random praise? And can we find a cloning machine, please? They’d been working on descriptive paragraphs and given a sentence upon which to expand. Tristan took a sentence about a tree and apparently turned it into a very vivid description of a boy sitting in a tree reading a book, and his teacher was blown away by the thought behind it, the style, and the way he evoked the moment.

I laughed out loud when she started describing it, because right away I knew from where Tristan had taken his inspiration. Remember this picture from my 365 project last autumn?

Apparently, so does Tristan!

She went on to say through the year Tristan has proven himself a bright boy who has little difficulty with his school work, but that she’s had trouble encouraging him to fulfill his potential. While he is able to meet the standards expected of him with relatively little effort, despite her encouragement he has shown little interest in excelling beyond the standard. Until, it seems, this particular exercise. She wondered aloud if he should be put into the gifted stream in the next year or so, and while I was delighted to hear she was pleased, I am not going to even bother thinking about those things right now.

For today, I’m happy to hear that the same boy who has in the last few years shown an amazing aptitude for drawing inherited from his father has also inherited a certain grace when it comes to stringing words together. I think I might know where that one comes from, too.

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It was meet-the-teacher night at the boys’ school last week. Since Simon has the same two teachers he had last year (and that Tristan had as well) I’m pretty comfortable with that relationship. I was looking forward to meeting Tristan’s new teacher though.

I sat in Tristan’s desk in the back row and looked around, full of awe and wonder that he’s in Grade Two but I clearly remember Grade Two. The kids left stuff out on their desks for us to look through, and there were heaps of administrivia, much of it relating to First Communion later this year. They have two class Webkinzes and lots of affection from the teacher and 20 minutes of homework a night, which seems a little steep to me, but it looks like it’s going to be a good year.

One of the handouts on the desk was a booklet was called “Diary of a Second Grader.” It was filled with photocopied worksheets they had completed like, “My favourite recess activity is…” and “The thing I am good at is….” I was enjoying reading it, knowing most of the answers before I finished reading the question but happy to have this sweet insight into the mind of my occasionally stoic seven-year-old.

One page said across the top: “My mom says there are three things that I need to remember when I go out into the world.” These were Tristan’s answers:

1. Do not stand on the fernitur (sic)
2. Be polite at somebody else’s house
3. I will always love you.

Isn’t that the best? One of the three primary messages that my son carries out into the world is that I will always love him. I am a good mother!

Excuse me while I go take my shiny bauble of parental affirmation and frame it on the wall, for reference the other 99 per cent of the time when I feel like I’m making things up as I go along and really have no clue as to what I’m doing.

“I will always love you.” Sigh….

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Way back in early summer, Tristan saw a Pokémon backpack at Walmart, and every time the subject of back-to-school came up this summer, Tristan pined for that Pokémon backpack. He was due for a new one, as his Disney Cars one had held up remarkably well through both Senior Kindergarten and Grade One, so I had no problem with him getting a new one this year.

I was picking up a few things back-to-school items at Walmart (I do try to avoid it, but sometimes the siren song of convenience and cheap are hard to resist) one day, and saw the backpack with which he was so enamoured. I reached out to pick it up, and knew the moment I touched it that it was crap. It was thin, plasticky, and looked like it would fall apart in a hard rain. It was only $10, though.

For a few minutes, I played out possible scenarios in my mind. I bring home the backpack, and Tristan is ecstatic. It would definitely help overcome any potential back-to-school blues. The boy is seriously obsessed with Pokémon — not a day goes by that he doesn’t crank out two or three or eleven Pikachu and Tristan-the-Pokémon-Trainer drawings. $10 is easily worth that much joy.

But — the thing is going to fall apart inside of a month. Will he be heartbroken? Will we have to duct tape it back together on a regular basis, so that by December it’s more repair than backpack? Will we be able to negotiate an acceptable replacement? Will his homework be strewn all over the playground on a regular basis?

I decide on a carpé diem kind of approach, and figure we’ll deal with whatever repairs or replacements are required later. I pick the backpack up and put it in my cart, and that’s when the wave of chemical smell hits me. The thing *reeks* of that plasti-vinyl PVC stench that you just know must be toxic. (Oh look, it really is toxic. Lurvely.)

I put it back on the shelf. I can’t expose my kid to this. He’ll carry this every single day — and keep his lunch in it. I look at Pikachu. He’s been coveting this backpack all summer. Am I that mother, the one who denies her kid all the funnest stuff because of her personal agenda? I pick it up with the intention of giving it another sniff, but I don’t even have to get it up to my nose to smell it. I put it in the cart and pace around the store a while.

Eventually, I decide that I’ll buy it but not show it to him. I’ll look around online and in some other stores and see if I can find a Pokémon backpack that’s somewhat less nuclear than this one. I shop around a bit, but can’t find anything similar. I do find a really nice red and blue Roots backpack (I have a pathological addiction to Roots products, I’m not sure why) and buy that one too. It’s really nice, with lots of pockets and hooks and places to stash a seven-year-old’s treasures — but it’s not Pokémon. When I get in the car, I can actually smell the PVC smell from the bag sitting in the hot car, it’s that strong.

The whole way home, I agonize. I really, really don’t want him to have this particular backpack, but he has had his heart set on it for months. I can always tell him that they don’t carry them, that I couldn’t find them, but we’ll likely run into the problem all over again next time he’s in Walmart. He’s getting too old to trick. I get home and leave all the packages in the car. I surf eBay and a few other online places, all the while wishing (for the first and likely only time) that my computer had smell-O-vision so I could sniff the various wares for sale, but I don’t see anything remotely enticing.

Finally, I decide that I’ll leave it up to Tristan to decide. I’m not sure if I’m empowering him or chickening out. Maybe both? I tell him that I looked at the Pokémon backpack, but that I really thought it was a piece of junk. (He gets that his mother has quality issues. “It’s a piece of junk” is a frequent reason for being denied something shiny that has caught his eye.) I explain my concerns about the chemicals, and the smell, and the quality. I cross my fingers and tell him that I did find a backpack that I thought was really nice, but not Pokémon. I’m watching his face pretty closely, and have watched comprehension and disappointment flicker through his eyes. Now his face brightens as I suggest that maybe we can get a Pokémon keychain (see previous comment re: junk) to decorate this bag.

“Oh yeah,” he says, and enthusiasm lights his face like sunshine after a storm. “We can get some stickers, and I can draw some pictures.” And just like that, we’re good. I’m so relieved and so proud I want to cry.

The next morning, I notice the new backpack sitting by the front door. It has a Pikachu keychain dangling from one zipper, and a few other Pokémon tied to the straps with long bits of string. A fresh picture of Pikachu and Tristan-the-Pokémon-Trainer has been scotch-taped to the front, and there is a Pokémon trading card tucked in the mesh bottle holder. It is, by far, the most lovely Pokémon backpack I’ve ever seen.

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It tickles me that even though there is a fairly fashion-forward store in Canada called “Tristan”, *this* is the #2 search return when you google “tristan fashion“. (Srsly, you must click thru to appreciate the humour in this!)

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I’m guest-blogging over at Canadian Family magazine’s Family Jewels blog this week, and dredging up some of my favourite posts from the archives to keep you company over here. This one is from the summer of 2006.

Tristan: And did I tell you about that time when I was four, when my mother tried to kill me twice in the same month?

Therapist: Hmmm, I don’t think so. There was the episode where she locked you and your brother in a running car while you were sleeping…

Tristan: Right, and then less than two weeks later, she yanked me off some playground equipment and I dropped like a stone from eight feet in the air.

Therapist: Surely she didn’t mean to…

Tristan: It was one of those things where you dangle off a handle and zoom across a beam from one platform to another. She called it a zip line, but I insisted on calling it a zip code, which was pretty funny because we don’t even have zip codes in Canada. Anyway, I had just barely mastered holding my own body weight up but I loved that zip code. We went to a new park one evening on our bikes, and I was so proud to be able to actually reach the zip code from the raised platform, and all I did all night long was zip back and forth.

Therapist: And what did your mother do?

Tristan: Well, she was watching and cheering for me at first, but then she said it would be easier if I used my feet to push off the platform at the far end. The big kids could hurl themselves across really fast and bounce half way back on one push, but I kind of had to wiggle and squirm to make it all the way across and back. Remember, I was a big kid for my age, but I was only four years old.

Therapist: Mmmm hmmm…

Tristan: And so my mother said, ‘Here, let me show you. Just use your feet to push off the platform…’ and she grabbed me by the ankles to demonstrate, but she pulled me off balance and I lost my grip on the handle. I fell face first in the sand, and because she was still holding my ankles I landed with my whole body perfectly horizontal, basically doing a giant belly flop into the sand.

Therapist (cringes): Ouch! That must have hurt!

Tristan: Yah, it knocked the wind right out of me. There was a long minute where I just lay on the sand and tried to figure out if I was still alive or not, and my mother later said the entire city of Ottawa fell silent and every pair of eyes at that very busy playground turned to me to see what would happen next.

Therapist: Were you okay?

Tristan: After I cried for a couple of minutes and got over being pissed off about all the sand in my mouth I was okay. My mother said she had nightmares for days about how close my head came to hitting the platform on the way down. I mean, I got over it pretty quickly and once my mom finished wiping the tears off my face and the sand out of my mouth with the corner of her t-shirt, I went right back to playing on the zip code for the rest of the evening. Funny, though – when we got home my mother had a whole bunch of new grey hairs I had never noticed before…

Bonus conversation!

We were playing in the driveway last night, and there’s a little plastic toy that was supposed to have gone in the garbage. I’m not sure how it migrated back out into the driveway, but I ended up running over it when I backed the car out of the driveway to give the kids more room to play.

Tristan picked it up and ran over to me excitedly. “Look mummy! You sure broke the hell out of this thing, didn’t you?”

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My darling Tristan,

Today, you turn seven years old. Uncle Sean calls this your “champagne birthday”: seven years old on March 7. By coincidence, you’ve invited seven guests to your party, and the weather is even forecasting a high of 7 degrees! Remind me to go buy a Super 7 ticket for you, okay?

Tristan, this has been the year that you and I became friends as well as mother and son. This is the year you learned the fun of the inside joke, and the year you showed us a peek into what the future may hold with three big boys in our house.

When I look back on the last year, the image I will remember most clearly is of you hunched over the kitchen table, markers and pencil crayons arrayed around your latest creation, be it book or drawing or comic. You are endlessly creative, my son, and you never fail to surprise me with your ideas and your ability. I’ve watched you turn a cereal box into a guitar and a packing crate into a rocket ship, with no prompting or suggestions from us. In fact, the problem now is what to do with your endless creations: before I can recycle that old tissue box it gets reinvented as a school bus for Webkinz. Endlessly charming, for sure, but we’re already a family that has clutter issues and now we’re swimming in random drawings and discarded art projects, too.

You are my adventurer, my athlete, my explorer. This summer, you astonished me by learning to jump off the diving board and cavort in the deep end of the pool long before I thought you’d be ready for it. You took skating lessons and went from barely able to stand to zooming around the rink with fearless abandon in just a few weeks. You love to climb, to leap, and to run. It’s nothing short of lovely, if not exhausting, to watch you move. And I’m constantly scolding you to stop using the furniture in your athletic endeavours!

But you are a scholar, as well. You read well beyond your Grade 1 level, and because you are a renaissance child, you also do well in math. You have a sweet crush on your French teacher, and your accent is better at seven years old than mine is after 30 years of lessons. You want to please everyone so badly that sometimes you become overly anxious about performance and results, and you get that entirely from me. I’m so sorry!

You have yet to “discover” girls, but the girls have definitely discovered you. While I’ve long since become accustomed to sorting the love notes and heart-covered drawings from your school bag, I was left in open-mouthed shock just a week or so ago as one brazen little girl dashed over to kiss you goodbye on the cheek as we left the school yard. I think you are still generally nonplussed by the attention you get from the girls, and I think you’d be just as happy if they stopped their constant demands of “who are you going to marry,” but trust me: you’ll love it one of these days.

You are a wonderful older brother to Simon and Lucas. Simon is both your best friend and, not surprisingly, your arch nemesis. I love to listen in as you provide sage and worldly advice to Simon on the rules of school; ironically, just a few weeks ago one such nugget exclaimed in horrified reaction was, “There is NO kissing at school!” You are unbelievably patient with Lucas, and you love to make him laugh. You are even responsible enough now that I can leave Lucas in your care for a few minutes and know that he will be safe and well entertained.

At seven, your favourite things include Pokémon, Webkinz, Fairly Odd Parents and SpongeBob SquarePants. You have been working your way through the Warriors series of books at bedtime with Daddy for weeks now, and you all seem enthralled by them. You also love to play the Wii, including Star Wars Lego and Big Brain Academy. We see all of these interests come out in your drawings and in your imaginative play with Simon, and it’s fascinating to watch.

This has been a fun and playful year with you, my sweet and handsome Tristan. Every single day with you is a joy, and I wish you the happiest of birthdays and a year brimming with love and adventure.

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2. A love letter to Tristan
3. Young love

Playing with Flickr’s (relatively) new video sharing option. Aren’t baby laughs the best?

(Lucas and I had just picked up Tristan from a birthday party when we discovered that balloons are the funniest. thing. ever! The boys were laughing so hard I had to get out of the van and catch it on video.)

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Tristan, in a tone of hushed awe as he gazes out the window at the first few of what is forecasted to be in excess of twenty centimeters of snow: “Snow in October? It’s a miracle!”

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I knew it was coming. I guess I should count myself lucky to have made it two years into his scholastic career before it happened. I certainly count myself lucky for having been home to take the call when it came in.

“Hello, this is the school. Your little guy is here — he’s fine, but he’s taken a tumble, and you might want to come and get him. His nose was bleeding pretty badly, and he has a couple of scrapes.”

I’d been on my way to the grocery store and almost missed the call. Luckily, Simon was already outside in his coat and shoes. I finished the diaper change I’d been in the middle of and bundled up the baby in his car seat, and we were at the school in about five minutes. Poor Tristan was still shaking, and his little heart was racing. He’d been rolling down the hill with his friend, got dizzy and lost control. Then hit the pavement. Ouch. I’ve been trying to figure out exactly how a body hits the pavement to leave a welt two inches above his knee, on his hip, on the inside of his elbow and from the tip of his nose down his mouth to his chin. *cringe* Apparently his nose bled quite profusely.

I was highly impressed with the school. By the time I arrived, his teacher was there with another teacher who might have been a nurse. They’d bundled him up and were talking gently to him. His teacher had even given him a couple of Hershey’s Kisses, which had melted into chocolate-foil blobs in his clenched fist. His teacher offered to help us out to the car, and her concern for Tristan was obvious. A yucky thing to happen, for sure, but I was pleased by the reaction of both the school and his teacher.

Poor kid’s got his mother’s dexterity. He’s doomed.

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Second week of school, and I’m no longer welcome in the school yard. Well, not just me. In fact, no parents are welcome in the school yard. But, I have decided to take it personally.

I can see why the school has asked parents to drop their kids off at the school yard fence instead of walking them to the back door, as we have been doing. They have no idea who is a parent and who is not, and their first priority has to be keeping the kids safe. It’s only a couple-50 meters difference, and the school yard is supervised the last quarter-hour before the bell rings.

I still hate it. And worse, Tristan hates it. He said it makes him sad, which breaks my heart. He liked it when we hung around with him, waiting for the bell to ring. Now we kiss him off in a crush of kids bottlenecking through the gate instead of near the door where he queues up. Myself, I liked the time before and after school where I could scope out the other kids and their parents, and maybe even strike up a conversation with the familiar faces. It’s been nice being able to get to know the kids in his class and some of their parents over the last couple of months.

The funny thing is that in not traversing that final couple of meters across the school yard, we’ve cut a significant amount of our morning walk. If I’m only going to be escorting him to and from the school yard fence, I’m seriously wondering whether it’s worth doing at all. In other words, I’m wondering if at six he’s old enough to walk to and from school on his own.

What do you think? I’m torn on this one. Myself, I walked back and forth from the time I was four years old, and it was twice or three times the distance that Tristan has to walk. (And it was uphill both ways, in 10 feet of snow, and I had to park my dinosaur at the stable around the corner.) I don’t fear for his safety in any way, and I find that in general, Tristan’s a smart and responsible kid. I’m more than half-way inclined to let him try it.

But. But, but, but. It’s always the niggling little voice of worry that does me in. What if? What if something happened, what if he got lost (he can actually see the house for the entire walk and knows the neighbourhood like the back of his hand), what if something even more awful happened?

I’d be inclined to let him try it in the mornings (why do mornings seem less threatening, less full of potential mischief?) but I have to walk Simon over there anyway. It only really makes sense to let him walk home by himself after school. I’m sure he’d be fine, absolutely positive. But.

There are other options. I see tonnes of kids wandering by the house each morning and afternoon on their own treks to school, so I could try to find an older kid to escort him home in the afternoons. And I love the idea of the “walking school bus” so if I were feeling really keen, I could even try to organize something like this.

What do you think? How old is old enough to walk to or from school by yourself?

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I went out for an early-morning walk last week, and on the way back into the house I noticed that one of the neighbourhood cats had left a present in the driveway. One dead mouse. Cute little thing, too. I walked into the house, and asked Beloved to dispose of the poor little fellow on his way out to work. I’m all about equality between genders, but there are some jobs that just cry out for a manly touch, yanno?

I’d completely forgotten about it a couple of hours later when I was herding the boys out of the house to go to the grocery store. They were playing outside while I loaded Lucas into his car seat, and I remembered the deceased rodent at the exact moment they discovered it. I walked out and they were both on their haunches inspecting him, and I threatened them with nasty consequences if they even thought about touching the poor thing before I could pick it up.

I came out with a ziploc bag inverted over my hand and picked him up, cringing at the softness of his fur through the bag. I felt a little verklempt myself, which might be why I didn’t see coming what happened next. Not sure what else to do with him (we don’t – thankfully – get a lot of deceased rodents in the hood) I reverted the bag around him in much the same manner as I handle dog poops and zipped him inside. I didn’t realize that Tristan was right behind me as I walked into the garage and was about to drop him into the nearest garbage bag when he stopped me with a tiny voice.

“Mommy, what are you doing?” he asked, and I knew I was in trouble.

“Oh sweetie,” I said, my heart already breaking. “He’s , um, he’s dead, sweetie. I’m putting him in the trash.”

His face crumpled as he tried not to cry in front of me and was overcome nonetheless. I think it might have been the first time he really had an understanding of the finality of death. And his first lesson on the subject? Dead = trash. Good one, Mom.

I thought about burying him in the yard and making a bit of a ceremony out of it, but I was frankly afraid it would be a slippery slope leading to funerals for squashed spiders and road kill and who knows what else. So instead we just spent a little while talking about how he probably lived a good life, and how he’d go to heaven to play with all sorts of mousey friends in a big mousey field full of cheese. Eventually, the tears stopped and after a while, I even got him smiling. I was reminded that there is a big gap between four years old and six years old, and a big difference in the personalities of Simon and Tristan. While Tristan cried, Simon made jokes. Not mean jokes, but it was obvious that the dead mouse didn’t faze him in the slightest and he was perplexed by Tristan’s reaction.

Throughout the day, in quiet moments, Tristan would speak up again about the dead mouse, and I knew he was still processing it all in his little gigantic heart. Late in the afternoon, the boys were playing outside for a while, and when I came out later I found an inscription on the driveway in chalk: “I miss you moues.”

I wish I could wrap my arms around him and just hug him forever.

(I’d started writing this post a few days ago, and never got back to it. I was reminded of it again yesterday, when we got home from running some errands and Beloved noticed that a kitten had been run over in the road directly in front of our house. I am endlessly grateful to the city for their responsiveness. Within an hour of my call, while Beloved whisked the boys off on another errand, they had come by to scoop up the gory remains. Thankfully, they never saw it. I can only imagine the trauma that one would have caused.)

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Simon’s first day of Junior Kindergarten!

(My babies! What happened to my babies???)

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I never would have guessed that I’d be more worked up about Tristan going off to school all day long — Grade One already! — than I was when he went off to Junior Kindergarten the first time. At the end of June, I thought I would dance with glee when I finally sent him back to school. And yet here I am with a lump in my throat, thinking about how much I’ll miss him, miss the simple pleasure of his company.

I was so proud of him when Simon, Lucas and I escorted him to school. I’m so happy that I don’t have any serious worries about Tristan. He’s such a great kid. He found his buddy from last year, who is thankfully in his class again this year, and within seconds they were the centre of a gaggle of gangly Grade One boys. His teacher seems fantastic, and he already knows and likes her. She greeted the students she knew with a hug, and the ones she was just meeting with an effusive handshake. I think we’re in luck this year, again.

That’s not keeping me from fretting, though. Does he have enough to eat? Will he have the stamina to make it through a full day, every day? And, just to torque my anxiety a bit higher, he’s not feeling well. He spiked a fever yesterday, and though he was bright and energetic this morning, I think he’s still coming down with something. Sigh.

Who knew a house with three people in it could feel so empty? First Beloved left to go back to work, and now Tristan’s off. Simon’s integration into JK will be a little slower, but in two weeks, it will just be Lucas and I in the house. Much as I crave the quiet time and peace of an (almost) empty house, I feel sad and out of sorts right now.

I know myself well enough to know why I’m teary and regretful instead of excited to have my boys growing up and doing so well. Only a few short months until I go back to work. Whimper.

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It seemed like a straightforward question. On the enrollment form I completed on the first day of Tristan’s first day-long day camp: “Can your child swim 25 meters unassisted: yes, no, I don’t know.”

25 meters? How long is 25 meters anyway? That seems kind of far. So I checked “no”.

Then I thought of Tristan bounding off the diving board and dogpaddling happily the length of our friends’ pool, and his success in swimming lessons, and scratched out my “no” and checked the “yes” box.

Then I paused, and reread the question. And I had visions of Tristan foundering in the deep end of some lake-sized pool, alone and far from safety, going under for the third time. And I quickly scratched out my check in the “yes” box and circled the previously scratched out “no” box and drew a little happy face beside it.

Then I paused again. Suddenly, I was picturing Tristan sitting dejectedly on the pool deck in a life preserver as the rest of his camp mates splashed happily in the pool. I pictured him at 35, in his therapist’s office, describing how a childhood spent in a protective bubble ruined his life. So I drew a squiggley line through my circle around the “no” box and scratched it so definitively out that I bled through the paper. And I put a big X on the happy face, too.

I hovered my pen briefly over the “I don’t know” box. I tried to imagine in which universe a skinny, pimply-faced teenager with no investment in the future social and mental well-being of my oldest son was somehow in a better position to make this decision than I seemed to be capable of, and didn’t check that box either.

In the end, I redrew the little box above the “yes” and ticked it off. For good measure, I pointed a few arrows at it and wrote the word “yes!” at the end of the question, and underlined it. I think maybe I was trying to sell the answer to myself.

At the end of the day, I grilled Tristan with the usual questions about his day, and he answered with the usual dreamy inexactitude I have come to expect. He told me about his art class (it was an arts camp) and the monster he was creating in a distracted sort of way. I asked about the pool.

“Oh yeah!” he said, snapping awake into the story, eyes bright with the memory of it. “It was great! I jumped off the highest diving board!”

I paused to digest that. “You mean the one closest to the ground, right? The low board? Not the one that you have to climb up a ladder to get to?” Surely to god my six year old who only learned how to jump off the diving board in the last year was not jumping off the 3m (10 foot) board.

“No, Mommy, the big board! I climbed up the ladder, and the first time I was scared, but then it was a lot of fun so I did it a bunch of times! And it was great! I can’t wait to go back tomorrow and do it again!” At least, I assume that’s what he said. I think I died of fright somewhere around the first exclamation point.

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