Category: Flashback faves

Flashback Faves: The one with the Pokemon backpack

I was poking around in the archives looking for something and found this story from 2009. Given that we’re creeping up on back to school time, not to mention the enduring family fascination with Pokemon, I thought it would be a good story to re-share. Heading into high school next month and he’s still a Pokemon fan!

PokeTristan

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.

Flashback faves: 10 years ago this month

One of my favourite features on Facebook is the “On This Day” app. There’s something wonderful about dipping into the minutiae of years gone by. It got me thinking that I now have enough years of content that I can look back and see in (occasionally painful and cringe-worthy) detail exactly what was happening in our lives ten years ago.

It was ten years ago this month, for example, that we were beginning the last of our infertility treatments, having “frostie”, our little frozen embryo left over from our IVF, thawed and inserted into my uterus. Also ten years ago this month, we had two-year-old Simon and four-year-old Tristan baptized: “Father John was kindly and patient didn’t seem to notice that Simon squirmed and wriggled incessantly and Tristan sang under his breath through most of the readings. Simon provided comic relief with his ongoing query of “We go now?” and by excitedly hopping up on the little stool in front of the baptismal font and declaring, “It’s my turn now!” after watching his brother being baptized.”

Ten years ago this month, also wrote this sweet tribute to Simon, my quirky two year old. I thought I’d share it in its entirety:

Simon is becoming more of a character every day. Inasmuch as ‘character’ means mostly adorable, occasionally insufferable, and often hilarious. He seems to develop a new peccadillo every week, and I’m writing this as much to capture them for posterity as for entertainment value.

For instance, he’s picked up a couple of phrases from the bigger kids at daycare, and I’m by turns mortified and amused every time they come out of his mouth.

The first is a very blasé ‘That’s BORing.’ Any time he doesn’t want to do something, wear something, eat something, it’s ‘BORing’. Imagine it uttered with all the disdain a teenage girl could muster, multiply it by three an infuse it with a world-weariness unprecendented in your average two-year-old.

The other is a very staccato ‘No way!’, as if whatever you’ve suggested is the most idiotic thing he’s ever heard.

“Simon, would you like a banana?”
“No way!”

Or:

“Simon, could you please let go of the dog’s lips?”
“No way!”

He’s also exhibiting vaguely alarming tendencies to hoard things, and to depend on rituals. Bedtime has become a complex series of arcane protocols – first books, then the story of his day, then soothers (three, always three, and he will cycle through them looking for just the right one. If one is not to his liking, he will pull it out with a very lispy “Too small,” and repeat until he finds just the right amount of suction and resistance. And yes, they are all the same size.) I’ll push play on the CD player to start the lullabies, place him into his crib, and start the blanket ritual. He must have at least three or four blankets. It can be February or July, but if he sees a blanket you haven’t put on him, he will hector you for it – he’s kind of like a reverse princess and the pea, except he’s the pea. And then there’s the de rigeur rounds of “Hey, you! Put your feet down” as you place the blankets. And he needs companionship as well. Just now, I put him to bed with three blankets (it’s 25C in his room), Gordon, Percy, Scoop, Wags the dog and Dorothy the dinosaur. There’s barely room for him in there.

I have this image of him, twenty years in the future, in a bingo hall somewhere. He’s about 6’5″, 300 lbs, and you’ll loose a finger if you touch the collection of treasures arrayed out in front of him with his bingo daubers. Either that, or he has to touch the doorknob five times before he leaves, tap the glass twice, turn around once, and walk to his car without touching any of the cracks in the sidewalk, with one eye closed and his finger resting against his right earlobe.

If only I could argue with any conviction whatsoever that he doesn’t get it from me.

IMG_3320

That quirky little toddler still sleeps in a bed so full of stuffies that there’s barely room for him, and he graduates from grade school this week.

Who, me? No, um, it’s nothing, I just have something in my eye…

Flashback faves: Tristan takes a dive

I was poking through my archives looking for information about Blog Out Loud Ottawa (did you know BOLO 2016 is this weekend?) and came across this post, which I read at the very first BOLO in 2009. It made me laugh, so I thought I’d share. This is pretty much my whole parenting life in one anecdote!

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.

Six year old Tristan on a much more appropriately-sized diving board!
Six year old Tristan on a much more appropriately-sized diving board!

Flashback Faves: This is how they grow up, quietly and quickly and right under your watchful eye

Thanks to Facebook, I know that five years ago today I wrote this post. Tristan is now in middle school and safely walks to and from the bus stop without incident. What I find charming is that he was in Grade 3 when I wrestled with the idea of the risk of letting him walk home by himself, and Lucas in Grade 2 has done it several times now without incident or angst on my part. Not only do the boys grow up, but the parents do, too. 🙂

I am standing at the fence as I do every day, waiting for the bell to ring and the tsunami of energetic children to come spilling out of the school. I brace myself, as I do every day, for Simon’s enthusiastic hug that will one day knock me clear off my feet. Tristan too still hugs me, but in a more reserved and shy way that leads me to believe that while third graders still bestow public hugs upon parents, I’d best be prepared in case fourth graders do not.

WalkingWe’re headed toward the car together when Tristan stops. “Mom, can I walk home by myself?” he asks. We’ve talked about this a few times before. We live exactly 0.9 km away from the school, down one reasonably quiet and safe street with a sidewalk and two very quiet streets with no sidewalks. We’ve walked it together on many occasions, and I know Tristan prefers to walk. Most days, however, we have to drive as I make it to the school from work with barely a few minutes to spare, and we still have to drive over to pick up Lucas from daycare a couple of blocks in the opposite direction.

I take a searching look at his face, weighing in my mind the walk, the traffic, the buses, the snow, his relative trustworthiness, how long it will take me to pick up Lucas and make it home, and my mother’s reaction if and when she ever hears that I’d let him walk by himself. Another part of my mind is busy admiring the fat snowflakes caught in his gorgeous eyelashes and how his gray-green eyes mimic the stormy clouds above us. He looks so grown up to me in that heartbeat of a minute, pleading his case not with words but by simply returning my gaze. It’s the briefest of exchanges, and yet it resonates with me as a milestone in progress. I can trust him or not, trust the world or not. The choice is mine.

“Are you sure you know the way?” I ask. I make him describe it to me, each corner and turn. We’ve walked it a dozen times and driven it a hundred — I’m pretty sure we could both do it blindfolded. I briefly wonder if we should ponder this more, hold a family council and debate the pros and cons, but in this moment I trust my instincts and acquiesce.

“Okay, but you go straight home,” I tell him. “And if you get lost, I want you to step back from the road and just sit down on someone’s lawn, okay? No wandering around. If you make a wrong turn, stop moving and I will come and find you.” It’s less than a 10 minute walk with three intersections. There is really so little chance of him being lost that I can only laugh at myself and the lasting impressions of the time I got lost the first time I walked home by myself from a new school back in 1975. Remember that one, Mom?

As expected, Simon also wants a piece of the deal once it’s brokered, but I’m having none of that. First, being older must come with some privileges, and second, I think walking home is enough of a test without being responsible for minding your little brother at the same time. Simon, who generally prefers driving to school over walking anyway, is easily persuaded that walking alone is more of a second or third grade sort of activity.

As we pull out of the parking lot, I scan my rearview mirror for signs of Tristan and can see him bobbing along in the stream of children burbling down the sidewalk. It takes me only a few minutes to retrieve Lucas, and although respect all traffic laws regarding speed and full stops, I do forgo the usual end of day chat with his caregiver in my haste to pack him up and get him out.

We pass by the school, and I begin scanning the sidewalk and snowbanks for Tristan’s blue snowsuit and black watch cap. There’s no sign of him on the way home and as I pull in to the driveway I catch sight of him, swinging gently and patiently on the porch swing, with not even a self-satisfied grin on his face.

The next day when I meet them at the fence, I expect Tristan to ask to walk home by himself again. I’m secretly pleased when he does not. He may have trod a few more snowy footprints on the road to independence, but I’m glad he still knows I’ve got a warm car standing by for those most bitter and blustery days.

#TBT: These are the things I want to remember

One thing I really, really love about having had the blog all these years is finding these little morsels of joy. I wrote this for me six years ago, and I was right — I had forgotten almost all of these things, and each one of them is exquisite and worth remembering. For #TBT (throwback Thursday), here’s a treat from the archives – October 2009.

Lucas in the land of chalk drawings

These are the things I want to remember about life with 20-month old Lucas. I write them here because they are ephermal, because they’ll disappear in the blink of an eye or the beat of a heart and I won’t even notice they’re gone, and someday I’ll be sad that I didn’t capture them a little bit better.

I want to remember how he says “Yeah!” with such enthusiasm when you ask him a question, like “Do you want to wear your Bob the Builder jammies tonight?” and he says it so that you cannot mistake the exclamation mark at the end.

I want to remember how he grabs me around the neck and squeezes hard when I pick him up, often crushing his face into mine in a sweetly aggressive sort of mashed-up kiss, as if he has just a little bit too much love for an ordinary hug and kiss to express.

I want to remember how even though he is perfectly capable of saying “Nimon” he calls both of his brothers “Tittan”. He started out calling them “Ninon” and “Ninnan”; now, they are the two-headed brother monster with one name.

I want to remember how he begs for whatever bit of tasty treat you’ve got not unlike a labrador puppy might, by standing as close to you as he can making obvious eye contact with you, all the while encouraging you to share with a musical “Mmm hmmm! Mmm hmmm!”

I want to remember how he must be just like his big brothers in all things, and how he loves to draw when they draw and play with lego when they play with lego. I really don’t think it’s occured to him that they are any older or any different than he is.

I want to remember how he loves certain videos and how he asks for them by ‘name’. Bob the Builder is of course “Bob!” (always with the audible exclamation mark) and Blues Clues is “Puppy!” The Muppets episode with Mark Hamill is less easy to convey; he gargles in the fashion of Angus McGonagle, the Argyle Gargoyle who gargles Gershwin. I’ll need to get the new Flip video camera out for that one, I think.

I want to remember how he loves for us to sing “Old Macdonald” in the car, and how when we pause to allow him to name an animal, he says “Cow!” each and every time, over and over again. (And yes, the exclamation mark is audible on that one, too. I think like any new skill that gets acquired by a toddler, he’s busy incorporating the exclamation into his repetoire through fierce and constant repetition.)

I want to remember how hard it is not to laugh when he is vexed and falls to the floor in a disappointed heap, not exactly throwing a tantrum but utterly exasperated by being denied the whimsy of his desire.

I want to remember his good ear for mimicry, and how he can repeat several words in a sing-song of sounds even though he’s only stringing together a word or two at a time. He will stack up a couple of blocks and then look at me and say, “Don’t you do it!” daring me not to knock over his tower the way he knocks down the ones I build for him. And he is pitch-perfect in capturing my tone as he climbs up onto the table and then scolds himself: “Git DOWN!”

I want to remember the way he chortles with glee and relief when we say it’s time for “Blankey and Soo” the bedtime duo. “Banky Sooooooo” he repeats.

I want to remember the way he looks solemnly into my eyes each night as I tell him the story of his day, agreeing with “Mmm hmm” to the key points, around his mouthful of soother.

I want to remember how utterly beautiful, and exasperating, and exhausting, and fulfilling it can be to parent the ball of curious and relentless and lovingly adorable energy that is Lucas at 20 months. It’s so hard to believe some days that it won’t be like this forever, that it might not be like this next month…

I cried when I read this again. Wasn’t this just yesterday? And how, how, HOW had I ever forgotten how he called both brothers by the same name? Even now, he refers to them as “the brudders.” And how he used to gargle when he wanted that Muppets movie – priceless.

I think maybe I’d better get to work writing a post that captures the boys at 7, 11 and 13, before the wonder of now is lost to the rushing sea of time.

Flashback faves: Lucas’ most excellent day

I heard on the radio today that carbon monoxide detectors are now mandatory in Ontario, and it reminded me of this old blog post which I thought would be worthy of re-sharing in my ongoing celebration of my 10th anniversary of blogging. From 2011: Lucas’ most excellent day.

A day that starts with fire trucks in the driveway is a pretty exciting day for a toddler. When you get to the part of the day that has a boy-sized carton filled with packing peanuts? You’ve hit Nirvana. Such is the day Lucas is having today.

It started innocuously, and early. It was just before 7 am. Lucas and Simon were watching TV, Beloved and Tristan were still sleeping, and I was two sips and four pages into my morning coffee and newspaper routine, when I heard the chirp. I cocked my head, listened to the silence for a minute, and then went back to my paper. When it chirped again. I let it chirp two more times before I finally resigned myself to tracking it down.

I figured it was a smoke detector, but when I followed the aural trail, I ended up in the furnace room. I looked all around for the smoke detector with depleted batteries I was expecting to find, but saw nothing. Well, nothing except the 19 year old furnace and the five week old hot water heater. I watched the flashing LED on the hot water heater for a while, and tried to decode the rather unintelligible translation of the signal. Greek. So, I picked up the phone and called the gas company who installed the hot water heater on the day we moved in to the house.

The attendant I spoke to was perplexed. “There’s nothing in the manual for a chirping alarm,” she told me. We chatted as I walked around the hot water heater, trying to figure out exactlly what was emitting the sound. She was just reassuring me that it was likely nothing of concern and getting ready to book a service appointment when I looked up from my squatting-between-the-furnace-and-hot-water-heater-in-my-pyjamas position and saw it.

“Hang on,” I told her as I peered at it, trying to read the writing beside the red flashing LED. I had to stand on the tool box to resolve the label. “Um,” I said, “it’s not the hot water heater that’s chirping. It’s a carbon monoxide detector.”

“Oh,” she said, and in that syllable I heard a complete about-face in her demeanor. “Well, that’s a bit of an emergency, then.” Before I knew it, she had me conferenced-called in with the fire department, and the fire department and the gas company were on the way, and we were supposed to ventilate the house and go wait outside. My first thought was for my coffee, waiting patiently on the side table. My second thought was for Beloved, still snoring in blissful oblivion.

And then we were all five of us outside, sitting on my grand verandah, watching the fire trucks pulling up. Cuz nothing says good morning like fire trucks in the driveway at 7:07 in the morning. The boys, of course, were delighted with this spectacular break from our morning routine. Me, though, I’d begun to feel a little uneasy. The adrenaline rush of, “You must evacuate your family from the house” had begun to wear off, and I had a niggling little worry I was trying to suppress.

Sure enough, when the rescue truck driver did his walkthrough of the basement, he detected no measurable levels of carbon monoxide. He did, however, detect a detector with failing batteries.

Yep. The fire department and the gas company came for a pre-breakfast visit to help us change the batteries in the carbon monoxide detector. In my defense, it was actually the gas company who called the fire department. Had I not been on the phone with them and panicked by the sudden onset of their sense of urgency, I would likely have thought to test the batteries before calling in the civil authorities.

Heh. At least it makes for good blog fodder, right? My humiliation for your entertainment.

And THEN! As if that weren’t enough excitement for one day, a REALLY BIG BOX arrived mid-morning. I’ll save the story of what was in the box for tomorrow, but look how much enjoyment a curious toddler can derive from one box and a whole shitload of packing peanuts.

“Hmmmm, what are these things?”

Lucas and the packing peanuts - 1 of 6

“Hey! This big box is FULL of them!”

Lucas and the packing peanuts - 2 of 6

“They squeak when you walk on them!”

Lucas and the packing peanuts - 3 of 6

“Get these things out of my box!”

Lucas and the packing peanuts - 4 of 6

“Wheeee, I’m upside down!”

Lucas and the packing peanuts - 5 of 6

“Yeesh, who’s gonna clean up this mess?”

Lucas and the packing peanuts - 6 of 6

And at naptime I carefully picked up each damn one of those styrofoam peanuts and put it back in the box to save for another day. If you’re looking for Christmas gift ideas this year, you might want to check the packing supply aisle in the post office!

Flashback Faves: Zed versus Zee, a love letter to Nancy

To commemorate 10 years of blogging, I’ve been sharing some of my favourite old blog posts. This one is from way back in 2005, when I still had enough energy and clarity of mind to research a topic and mount a passionate debate about minutiae, rather than just whinge in 140 characters or less, and when it wasn’t completely lame to quote Wikipedia as a source.

header history collage

It’s Nancy’s fault. She asked “So, which one is it (zed or zee)? Anyone know? And should we really care? Is it really a Canadian versus American thing? Or something else?”

Ooo ooo ooo! (dances in chair, waving hand in the air) I know, I know! I care!!

In fact, my darling Nancy, it is not so much a Canadian thing to say “zed” as it is an American thing to say “zee”. According to wikipedia:

In almost all forms of Commonwealth English, the letter is named zed, reflecting its derivation from the Greek zeta. Other European languages use a similar form, e.g. the French zède, Spanish and Italian zeta. The American English form zee derives from an English late 17th-century dialectal form, now obsolete in England.

Is it really worth all this debate? Even Shakespeare himself cast aspersions on the dignity of the 26th letter of the alphabet with an insult I’m going to try to work into at least two conversations today: Thou whoreson zed! Thou unnecessary letter! (King Lear, act II, scene II.)

You got me curious, though, so I did a little bit more research on the subject. According to the Concise Oxford Companion, “The modification of zed to zee appears to have been by analogy with bee, dee, vee, etc.” It seems Noah Webster, the dictionary guru, seems to have mass-marketed the “zee” pronunciation, along with the incorrect spelling of “centre”.

Apparently we Canadians aren’t the only ones feeling the effects of the Americanization of the “Sesame Street” phenomenon you mentioned and its influence on how you learned to say zee versus zed. I found a research paper titled, “Can Sesame Street bridge the Pacific Ocean? The effects of American television on the Australian language.” The introduction to her thesis talks about how just like here, Australian kids learn to say “zee” by watching Sesame Street and their parents correct them to say “zed”.

Sesame Street’s influence also gets mentioned in this chapter from the textbook Sociolinguistic Theory: Linguistic Variation and Its Social Significance. He says,

With the use of “zee” stigmatized, it is perhaps strange that children should learn it at all. One source is pre-school television shows beamed from the United States, notably one called Sesame Street, which was almost universally watched by children in the 1960s when it had no serious rivals… Sesame Street and its imitators promote the alphabet with zeal, almost as a fetish, thus ensuring that their young viewers hear it early and recite it often. The “zee” pronunciation is reinforced especially by the “Alphabet Song,” a piece of doggerel set to music that ends with these lines:

ell em en oh pee cue,
ar ess tee,
yoo vee double-yoo, eks wye zee.
Now I know my ey bee sees,
Next time, won’t you sing with me?

The rhyme of “zee” with “tee” is ruined if it is pronounced “zed,” a fact that seems so salient that many Ontario nursery school teachers retain it in the song even though they would never use it elsewhere.

More than just ending the alphabet song with a jarring non-rhyme, the zed/zee conundrum poses problems for people trying to market technology across the border. CNews reports on a Toronto law firm who lobbied Bell Canada and Nortel to change the pronunciation from “zee” to “zed” in the directory on their voice mail system:

“We’ve had inquiries about why it is the way it is when we’re Canadian,” said Tammie Manning, a communications analyst at the law firm. “(People said) we’re not the States. We’re independent. Why should we be subjected to that?”

Several officials from Nortel insisted the technology to make the switch from “zee” to “zed” was simply not yet available. But by mid-afternoon Friday, following several calls from a reporter, the company’s director of corporate communications said Nortel would change the “zee” to “zed” as soon as possible.

And then, of course, there is the infamous Joe Canadian rant from Molson’s, which although overplayed and out of date, still merits mention in the discussion:

Hey, I’m not a lumberjack, or a fur trader, and I don’t live in an igloo, or eat blubber or own a dogsled. And I don’t know Jimmy, Sally or Suzy from Canada, although I’m certain they’re really, really nice. I have a Prime Minister… not a president, I speak English and French, not American and I pronounce it About, not A-boot.

I can proudly sew my country’s flag on my backpack, I believe in peacekeeping, not policing, diversity not assimilation, and that the beaver is a truly proud and noble animal. A toque is a hat, a chesterfield is a couch, and it IS pronounced Zed, not Zee… ZED!! Canada is the 2nd largest land mass, the 1st nation of hockey, and the best part of North America. My name is Joe and I AM CANADIAN! Thank you.

So you see, dearest Nancy, it DOES matter, in a patriotic sort of way. Aren’t you sorry you asked?

Flashback faves: Is this my life?

In honour of the blog’s tenth birthday this month, I’m revisiting a handful of favourites from my archives. I think this post from 2005, which I refer to as “my epic wail,” was a seminal moment for me in a lot of ways. Years later, people still mention it to me, and it brought a lot of readers to the blog – people who I’m assuming felt exactly the same way. I think it resonates with people because it’s very close to a universal thing in parenting – we all at one point or other feel this sense of being stuck on a hamster wheel that’s spinning out of control.

It’s interesting for me to look back on that. I remember how raw and ragged I felt when I wrote this, and how exhausted and miserable I was. I want to go back to 2005 me and say three things: first, hang on. It gets better. (Ironically, this is the same thing I want to tell 14 year old me, and nine year old me.) The second thing is: breathe. Having two babies in the house while working full time was an insane thing to do. I stopped feeling like my life was spinning out of control when I dropped from five to four days a week, even though I’d subsequently added another child to the mix. I’m still stupidly busy, with all the other squirrels I’m chasing, but it’s been years since I’ve felt that desperate panic. The third is: iron. Whenever I start to get that breathless, anxious feeling, or when I find myself worrying over everything – and I mean everything – I make myself take two iron pills. They’re better than antidepressants for me.

The final thing that fascinates me about this blog post from 10 years ago is that I could bare my soul like this. I could never write with this sort of vulnerability any more. Blogging has given me many, many gifts – almost too many to count! – but it’s left some scars, too.

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Warning: you are now exiting the whine-free zone. Serious self-pitying ahead.

Is this it?

Do I spend the rest of my life on this out-of-control treadmill, trying to please everybody and succeeding to please no-one?

I’m feeling a little overwhelmed.

Revision: I’m feeling completely overwhelmed.

There is simply not enough of me to go around these days, and I feel like all the most important relationships in my life are suffering because of it. I don’t like the person I’m becoming because of it.

I don’t know how I’m supposed to keep working eight hours a day, plus commuting almost an hour each way, and still find enough time at home to be the mother I want to be to my boys. (As I typed that sentence, tears began to cascade down my cheeks. Shit.)

The boys wake me up about a half an hour before the alarm goes off most days, and although I’d really like the extra 30 minutes of sleep, at least it’s a little more time we can spend together. Then I have to ditch them on their father as I get ready for work and rush out the door, missing my bus about 1 day in 3.

I spend my day at work trying to cram in more work than I can possibly accomplish and leave almost every day feeling like I’ve worked my ass off but accomplished very little. Lately I haven’t been able to keep up at all.

By the time I get home, it’s time to start dinner. Dinner itself is a nightmare of stress lately. Tristan eats almost nothing, so I have to choose between letting him starve (tried it- doesn’t work), bribing him with treats (only works half the time) or just giving in and making him something he will eat. Then it’s a challenge to get him to sit at the table throughout the meal. Three times a day, each meal is a power struggle, and I just feel that if I had more time, more energy, I could approach this from an angle that would allow me to solve the problem rather than just riding it like a wave every single day.

Even if I manage to keep myself together through the day and evening long enough to have some fun with the boys, by the time we put them to bed I have absolutely nothing left over for Beloved. Nothing. We sit together and watch TV and chat for an hour or two and then I go to bed. He’s told me he is frustrated by my constant exhaustion. I don’t blame him.

Weekends don’t really provide any respite. There are so many things that need to get done around the house I could make a to-do list as long as my arm, so I have to balance spending time doing something as a family, whatever that might entail, or catching up on endless domestic tasks.

I can’t imagine how we’re ever going to get beyond the things that are desperate for attention (the 6-inch high lawn covered in weeds, the dirt scooped out of my plants last week and still waiting to be vacuumed off the bedroom rug, the endless loads of laundry) to get to things like painting, fixing the chips in the drywall, cleaning out the garage, replacing the broken banister spindle and all those other little routine maintenance tasks which really aren’t such a big deal, if you can find an uninterrupted hour or five and get around to them.

Is this it? Am I always going to feel this out of control?

I just don’t see how it can get any better. It’s been four months since I’ve been back to work, so it’s no longer just a matter of readjusting to a routine. Simon is finally sleeping through for the most part, so I get around seven hours of sleep a night and although I’d prefer nine, I should be able to function on what I’m getting.

I am constantly sacraficing one thing for another. As the old cliché goes, every day I rob Peter to pay Paul, except my currency is time. Revision: my currency is pieces of me, of my attention. I don’t know how to make “me” a bigger pie, so there is enough for everyone.

And that’s to say nothing about having anything left over for myself. Frankly, I’m the least of my worries. The biggest thing I do for me and me alone is what you’re reading right now, and for now that’s enough. But I have to steal time for that too. Usually from Beloved, occasionally from work. So I do it, but I feel bad about it. But I’d feel worse if I didn’t.

I am perpetually behind, perpetually running, perpetually forgetting things, remembering things I should have done yesterday, last week, last month.

I am not convinced I am doing right by my beautiful boys. I am short on patience, short on energy, short on creativity. Short on time. Short on quality. They deserve better than a frazzled, frustrated, tired mommy struggling with guilt and inadequacy.

Because we spend less time together, I want our time together to matter more. I have less time to mother them, so I must reach a higher level of mothering in the time I have.

It seems like every day is a struggle. I talked to my mom on the weekend, and she tried to tell me that this is just life with babies in the house, but I’m not mollified. Is it this hard for everyone? It sure doesn’t seem like it.

I want to do more, be more as a mother. I feel awful about the very dear friend who has called me about five times in the past month, whose calls I am now actively avoiding, just because I don’t have anything else to give to anyone right now. I feel awful because I should have more to give to my husband. We need to do more to strengthen our friendship, our marriage.

If I just knew that by holding on for X amount of time, things would improve, I think I’d be okay. But I’ve been on that verse for over a year now, and my CD keeps skipping.

Sorry, no big conclusion here, no epiphany, no relief. Just me sitting here with my mouse hovering over the delete button, wondering whether to even bother posting this.

Flashback faves: Picture this!

This month, I’m celebrating an anniversary-palooza of ten years of blogging by revisiting some of my favourite old posts. I have to tell you, I was utterly delighted to find this post about us getting family portraits done from the winter of 2006. I wrote long before I had even the faintest idea of opening my own portrait photography business, and to be honest I completely forgot that I wrote it and I find it hilarious now. Although I had forgotten this post, I never did forget the experience, and it has served to inspire me in my career as a family photographer, because NOBODY should ever have to go through this to get decent family portraits. Trust me, my lovely bloggy peeps, you do get what you pay for and I genuinely do know whereof I speak on this one!

Our grocery store has a dry cleaner, a café, a tobacconist and a women’s gym on site. They have a portrait studio as well.

Each time I’m in there, which is about three times a week, I stand in the checkout line and admire the oversized portraits of cheeky babies posed with adorable props – fluffy white teddy bears, giant daisies, stainless steel tubs. And I look at those pictures and wonder why I never get around to getting professional portraits done of our boys.

My sister-in-law brings my 14-month old nephew in to her local version of the same grocery-store/portrait studio every few months, and we have a series of exquisite photos of him, from sleeping peacefully on a pillow (barely a few weeks old) to sitting proudly on a rocking chair (his one-year-old portraits.)

One day, all the tumblers clicked into place, and I had an epiphany. My boys are plenty photogenic. They are growing like weeds. They have sweet dispositions and are natural hams. We are in the grocery store every two days anyway – while we’re in there, we should get some portraits done!

*cue ominous music*

For weeks, I was excited. Despite a complete lack of foresight on my part, the portrait sitting happened be the week before my mother’s birthday. What grandmother wouldn’t love a framed 8×10 of her beauties as a gift?

I spent idle hours minutes considering which outfits the boys should wear. I made sure all the laundry was done so we would have my first choices plus full back-up outfits to wear. The day of the sitting, I waited until 15 minutes before we went out the door to dress them, to avoid any potential unpleasantness with half-chewed goldfish or mashed-banana bits. We made it to the grocery store with just the perfect amount of time to spare – not late enough to be frazzled, not early enough to have to spend excessive effort corralling idle preschoolers.

And that’s when the dream of the perfect family portrait began to fade away like film exposed to bright sunlight.

The session before ours ran late, so we waited in an alcove in tantalizingly full but unreachable view of the toy section. Oversized babies leaning on giant blocks looked down on us as the boys went from disinterested to impatient to agitated in the span of minutes. Simon heard the voices behind the black curtain and became obsessed with getting into the studio. Tristan whined that it was taking too long. The oversized babies began to look less cherubic and more sanctimonious with every passing moment.

After a tense quarter hour of waiting, which included some of our lesser moments in public parenting, we were finally allowed into the studio. The photographer was a seasoned professional, likely old enough to drive but certainly not to drink. Which was unfortunate, because I could have used a drink by that point.

There were no giant daisies, no rocking chairs, and no big steel tubs. We chose the fake rock as a prop. (We could have gone with the paint-chipping-off wooden blocks. Maybe there is a reason professional photography studios charge more than $24.99 a package?)

Naïvely clinging to the idea that the picture-taking itself would go smoothly, we had Tristan lean on the (fake) rock while trying to entice Simon out from behind the curtain, where he was playing peeky-boo with himself. Tristan discovered that the (fake) rock was not level, and in fact could act as a catapult, should an unsuspecting brother be placed near it.

Neither boy would look anywhere in the vicinity of the camera.

Tristan was suddenly and chronically afflicted with an inability to smile in anything other than an ironic grimace.

Simon would.not. sit. still.

Eventually, Beloved and I hopped into the picture, hoping at least to confine the boys within boundaries of the frame for the length of a shutter-click. We poked, we begged, we implored, we ordered, we tickled. Finally, regretfully albeit successfully, we made fart noises.

After what seemed like mere moments, our session time was up. Beloved shepherded the boys back out into the alcove while the photographer (I am making air quotes around the word photographer as I type – I can’t help myself) showed me the scant few images she had deigned to capture.

With every passing image of painfully forced smiles, blurry toddler escapes and maternal hairy eyeballs (nobody should have to look at a picture of themselves giving the hairy eyeball), I felt my standards lowering from perfectly composed, beautifully realized portraits that captured the complex but ultimately sweet essence of their personalities and the magic of being a parent to one marginally acceptable pose that didn’t feature someone with a finger up his nose or looking like (s)he had been recently lobotomized.

And then I saw these.

(Oh, and the bit about the fart noises and that throbbing vein over my clenched jaw muscles? Let’s just keep that as our little secret, okay?)

Flashback faves: So THIS is why we don’t host dinner parties

In celebration of 2015’s anniversary-palooza and 10 years of blogging, I’m revisiting some of my favourite blog posts ever. This is from the spring of 2005.

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We had some friends over on the weekend for dinner. No no, we didn’t have them à la Hannibal Lecter, we had the grilled chicken fajitas you told me I couldn’t have on Friday when I had to have takeout. Did I thank you for that yet?

So we had these terrific friends of ours over, and they brought their baby daughter. Okay, I can see it’s going to take me forever to tell this story, because I already have to correct myself again. What really happened is, we really really wanted to see, hold, cuddle, play with and otherwise fawn over their beautiful two-month-old baby daughter, and since she isn’t getting out much without a chaperone these days, we had to invite them along for the ride.

So anyway, they all three come over for cuddles and fawning and some dinner on the side. They are there exactly long enough for me to serve them each a drink when J (aka the guest who might not want to be named on the Internet) caught Simon with his hand submersed up to his wrist in J’s drink. This is the first of many times I will think throughout the evening that I am incredibly glad these are very good and patient friends of ours who genuinely love our boys and who are on the cusp of some major parenting foibles themselves. So J is pretty good about the whole thing, gets a towel and wipes off Simon’s hand and the drink spilled all over the end table and doesn’t even mention the fact that I totally didn’t offer to get him a new drink. Can you believe I only just NOW thought of that?

Now, you’d think that with the ratio of parents to children rising from 2:2 to 4:3, the odds would be improving in our favour over your average level of household mischief. Not so much. Beloved is so completely enthralled with beautiful baby girl that he forgets he even has boys, let alone that said boys are running rampant through the house. Not even 10 minutes after the Simon-as-stir-stick event, somehow Simon gets into the bathroom, closes the door behind him, and makes his way – in the pitch black, mind you – to the toilet, lifts the lid, and begins washing his pop-soaked hands in the toilet water. Beloved intercedes and washes Simon’s hands, I go back to making dinner, and within five – I’m guessing it wasn’t even three – minutes, Simon was back with his hand up to his wrist in J’s drink. God bless J, who only asked Beloved, “Are you sure you did a good job washing his hands?” And you know what? I honestly can’t remember if I got him a fresh drink even then.

So we have dinner, and it’s the usual chaos of dinner with Tristan not wanting to eat (a blog for another day) and it’s too late for Simon who passed through hungry the previous hour and had arrived at too-famished-to-do-anything-but-holler-and-throw-food, and JJ (as opposed to J) has to leave the table mid-meal to be a meal to her baby girl, and I remember the days we used to have dinner when it was just the four of us and we’d linger over dinner and dessert and conversation for hours. Or was that somebody else’s life?

You’d think having his very own baby in the house for the past 14 1/2 months would have left Tristan jaded on the concept of babies in general, but just the opposite is true. He really had no use for Simon as a baby, but he is fascinated by the new babies in our life, particularly his almost six-month old cousin Noah and beautiful baby girl. Beautiful baby girl is particularly special, however, because she is the only baby girl in any of our lives. My brother has a son, my closest friends have sons, my cousin has a son – even the day care provider has nothing but sons. So you can see why beautiful baby girl is a princess in all of our lives. On the way home in the car from our first visit to introduce beautiful baby girl to the boys, Tristan pronouced (with no prompting from us) that beautiful baby girl is his girlfriend. (pauses to let you “awwwwww” properly)

So anyway, JJ finishes feeding beautiful baby girl while we clean up the kitchen, and of course the next thing on the agenda is a diaper change. Tristan, who hasn’t really moved more than a foot away from beautiful baby girl all afternoon, is ‘helping’ and JJ is extremely patient with him. As she removes beautiful baby girl’s diaper, Tristan begins to howl with laughter, and I am mortified when he exclaims “Look at how small her penis is!”

Needless to say, we won’t be hosting too many more dinner parties this decade. We might even have to hold off until the engagement party of Tristan and beautiful baby girl…