Category: It IS all about me

730 days, 762 posts, too many words to count

Today marks two years since I started this blog. Two years = 730 days, and in those 730 days, I’ve put up 762 posts. This is what a year of blog posts looks like when you kill a small forest of trees in fear of losing your precious words to the interwebs, stored somewhere far from you with no backup:

I saw over at Elizabeth’s place in early January that she had put up a post with her favourite posts of the preceding year, and I liked that idea. So, if you’ll pardon the inherent narcissism, here are a selection of my favourite posts from the last year:

Coincidence (February – on registering Tristan for kindergarten)

Picture this (February – on getting our family portraits done)

Transitions (March – on the boys growing up)

The day my pants betrayed me (March – anecdote)

Bad words (May – on what makes a ‘bad’ word)

The one with the conspiracy theory (June – on sleep deprivation)

The one with too much information (June – on frostie and buying an OPK)

Sketches of Quebec City (July – a six-part series on our trip to Quebec City)

Saying goodbye to frostie (August – the end of our frozen embryo cycle)

Notes from a therapy session (August – on Tristan)

The memo (September – early pregnancy results)

Getting ready for school – a monologue (September)

I’m outraged (October – a rant on grammar rules)

The one with the coconut (October – anecdote)

Random attempts to cope (November – after the miscarriage)

An open letter to Proctor and Gamble (December – consumer rant)

CBS announces Rockstar: Wiggles! (December – a bit of fun)

How do you know? (December – on families)

Don’t ask me what criteria I used to category a post as a ‘favourite’; I have no idea. Some of them I liked because I think they’re well written, some of them are funny (to me, at least), some of them mark significant moments in the past year, and some of them just resonate with me.

It’s been a truly amazing year, and I’ve had the chance to do things and meet people I never would have imagined because of this blog. Thank you for making it possible, and thank you for coming along for the ride.

First kiss

Although I truly love to travel, I’m glad that my job doesn’t require me to be away overnight very often. I’m off to a conference in Kingston for the next couple of days, and while I relish the idea of no cooking and no diaper changes and a bed I don’t have to share for just one night, I’ll still miss the men in my life.

I just realized yesterday that this isn’t the first time I’ve stayed at the hotel where the conference will be held. The summer I was fourteen, we took a family vacation to Kingston and stayed at the same hotel. It was there that I met a boy, a boy who was seventeen and lived in Kingston. What he was doing hanging around the inside of a hotel when he lived in town never was clarified. What I do clearly remember was making out with him in the hotel stairwell. It was my first mouth-open “french kiss” as we called it back then. (Do they still call it french kissing? Why do I feel suddenly ancient and out of touch?)

I’d had my first kiss earlier that year at a school dance. I spent the rest of the year with a painfully unrequited crush on the boy who never wanted to acknowledge my existence after the end of that night. But I don’t think I spent a lot of energy that summer pining for the guy from Kingston. I can’t even remember his first name. It might have been Steve.

So, anyway, I’m out of here for a couple days and I’m not sure what my internet connectivity is going to be. Talk amongst yourselves… as if I have to compell you to do that. Tell me the story of your first kiss, and I’ll look forward to reading your stories when I come back Thursday night.

Ms Fix-It

I went on a home-improvement tear this weekend.

First, I decided our kitchen chairs were long overdue to be reupholstered. I’ve never actually reupholstered furniture before, but that didn’t stop me.

I got some fabric at Bouclair. I remembered to choose a fabric without a complicated pattern (too hard to centre) but with a nice, thick weave that won’t easily pull or fray. In the end, this navy denim was on sale and I got more than enough for the whole project for $13.

I also picked up one of those fancy front-end staple guns at Home Depot. It was much easier to use than the rusty clunker we inherited from god-knows-where.

In one of my home improvement books, I found basic instructions for reupholstering a dining room chair. I had a little bit of trouble making neat corners, but the denim was fairly forgiving and in the end it was close enough.

I’m happy with the finished project.

It only took me about an hour and a half to do all four chairs, and the navy is nice in my yellow-and-white-with-blue-accents kitchen.

After that, I decided I needed to fix Simon’s dresser. I bought it second-hand at a garage sale long before I was even pregnant, in anticipation of the need for a kid’s dresser some day. Tristan used it when he was a baby, and Simon inherited it when he was born.

Its shallow drawers are perfect for small baby clothes, but over the years, the sides have bowed out just enough that the drawers in the middle were falling off the runners. Every time you pull open a drawer, it slips off the runner and tips into the drawer under it. Rather than buy a new dresser, I’ve been puzzling idly for months on a way to increase the width of the runners by half a centimeter or so, so we could get another couple of years out of it. (As if six years out of a $25 dresser isn’t enough!)

I went to Home Depot, and they recommended a little strip of wood that is ordinarily used in laying hardwood floors, called a ‘slip tongue’ (snicker). It fit perfectly! I tried two different iterations, one to thicken the drawer runner and one to make a wider shelf to sit on the runner. To my great surprise, they both worked. A little bit of glue, a couple of C-clamps, and we’re good to go.

I also bought two under-bed storage boxes from Ikea, and put up some metal bars over the boys’ work table, so they can display their artwork on a rotating basis with magnets instead of masking tape.

What, you might be wondering, was the inspiration for this flurry of activity? Remember how inspired I was feeling by that single lost pound last week? Yah. I found it again. All that hard work last week, and I’m back up a pound. Gah. So if I can’t get my weight under control, I’m damn well going to wrest the rest of my life from the chaos.

I even bought a plant. Poor thing doesn’t stand a chance.

In which I keel over dead from embarrassment

I’ve written before about how sometimes I wonder whether too many people in the office read my blog. As of now, I wonder no longer.

There’s a really nice guy who used to work in tech support in my office. He’s quiet, but kind, and I always enjoyed chatting with him. I knew he’d moved on to another job, and the way things often go in an organization as large as this one, I had no idea where. He slipped off my radar screen, as they say.

Out of the blue, I got an e-mail from him recently. He said,

Hi Danielle
In the fall I was using an old copy of a Ottawa Citizen for
protecting the bricks of my outside window ‘cos I was painting it, and your mug was staring at me ‘cos they did a story about your blog. I am like, that looks like Danielle at work!
So, I have been reading it and it is wonderful.
I especially like the 101 things…
As for #26, this will get better over time, trust me!
Take care and hope to run into you soon!

Now, I wrote that 101 things about me way back in the summer of 2005, when I had tens of readers each week. I’ve often thought about going back and updating it, partly because some of the stuff is out of date but mostly because there is one line in particular that I really always felt didn’t need to be in there. I kept it there all this time out of some sense of moral obligation to editorial integrity, but I have increasingly come to believe that there is a “too much information” threshold that simply should not be crossed.

As I read this very sweet e-mail, I thought to myself, “He couldn’t possibly be talking about that one, could he? Please tell me #26 isn’t that one.” There are surely more than 100,000 words on this blog, and only half a dozen or so that I would truly be uncomfortable discussing over coffee with my most intimate confidantes, let alone with a casual acquaintance.

Cringing, I clicked on my own link and scrolled down. And winced. And blushed. And wished for a giant hole to open up and swallow me and my damn computer whole. Read it while it lasts, because this weekend, number 26 gets plutoed off my list.

Do you think maybe it’s too late to move to a pseudonym?

A perfect storm of self improvement

It’s a killer combination. The January resolution thing, the weight loss thing, the really freaky weather that makes it seem like I should be spring-cleaning instead of putting away the Christmas decorations… it’s a perfect storm of self-improvement, and it’s charging me up and making me want to change the world, or at least to better myself – and, heaven help them, my family.

As if all that weren’t enough, last week, Beloved and I watched Super Size Me for the first time. Yikes! Although I’d read and heard a lot about it, seeing it – and we were glued to the screen for the whole thing – went a long way toward curing us of our fast food addiction.

The same week, I was making my daily trek through Chapters. I like to see what’s new and hot and intriguing and add the titles to my library wish list, but on this particular day the book You On A Diet : The Owner’s Manual for Waist Management leapt out and practically threw itself into my bag. Since it was discounted by 40% with my membership, I bought it on impulse and have been inching my way through it in spare moments. (It’s the first non-infertility health book I’ve ever bought, which is an interesting peek into my state of mind, IMHO.) I found out later that Oprah recommended it, which is ordinarily enough to make me walk quickly in the other direction, but so far it’s been at least interesting, if not as compelling as watching the guy’s liver fail on Super Size Me. If you’re interested, I’ll post a longer review of it when I’m done.

So yesterday I came home the grocery store with a cart full of enthusiasm and – remember this complaint from last month? – no less than FIVE DAYS worth of meals. And not just crap, either – actual healthy meals. And healthy snacks, too. Go, me!!

Beloved unpacked the groceries into the cupboard while I cleaned up the poop in the back yard. (Sidebar: this weather is freaking me out. It’s mid-January and I just picked up half a season of poop from the back yard, which I often do during the January thaw – except I am usually shovelling it off a crust of deeper ice and snow. I have never, in the seven years we’ve owned Katie, picked up poop off grass in January.)

“What’s with all this healthy crap?” he queried from the deck as I shovelled shit into a Glad bag.

“There’s a new regime in town, baby!” I told him.

“Overthrow the regime!!” he responded in mock disgust before returning to the kitchen to put away the rice cakes, veggies, and whole-wheat pasta.

You know what the best part is? I lost a pound. Just one pound, but a pound nonetheless.

My colleague, the commenter otherwise known as Trixie, made my day by likening that single pound to a pound of butter. I like to think I melted it directly off my tucus.

Stand back. There’s no stopping me now.

How do you know?

How do you know your family is complete? How did you decide? Did you always know? Did you just stop? Were you forced to stop by circumstance, or forced to accept more than you expected?

What’s it like for families who don’t have the spectres of infertility and loss lurking in the shadows of their hearts? How different would all this be if we hadn’t struggled so hard to earn the two precious boys we have?

In one minute, I’m perfectly content to stop. Two beautiful boys is a lifetime of blessings. And then the pendulum swings, and with entirely the same amount of conviction, I know that we’ll have another child. Know it in my bones. It’s a truth, a certainty. That lasts about an hour, and then I don’t know again.

When I look at Tristan and Simon and how truly wonderful they are, I can’t help but think that having another child – boy or girl – would be more of the same, therefore wonderful. How can I say no to the idea of more of the most amazing thing that ever happened to me?

And then the fear kicks in. The fear of pain, the fear of loss, but mostly the fear of really fucking things up. It’s not the idea of the third child that scares me. It’s the risk. The what-ifs.

What if we decide to try, we commit to the idea of that third child, and then we can’t conceive? How long do we try? How do we decide to stop trying? Can I face month after month of not conceiving – again? Can Beloved?

And if we can get past the fear of trying (and let me tell you, even after Tristan and Simon, the struggle with infertility has left deep and painful scars on my heart. Mine, and Beloved’s too)… even if we get past the fear of trying, there are so very many things that can go wrong.

If we are lucky enough to conceive again, I’m now 37 years old and officially of advanced maternal age – and with a history of infertility and miscarriage. Can I deal with nine months of paranoia? What if I have another miscarriage? What if I don’t have another miscarriage, but something is wrong with the baby and we have to face a horrible decision? What if the baby is born, but that baby has needs beyond our ability to cope? Do I even have the right to risk my family’s collective future simply because I selfishly want that which was denied to me?

And these are beyond the more pedestrian worries of whether the boys will be content with another sibling, whether Simon be okay as a middle child, whether I’ll have enough time and energy for a whole other person in the family, how we’ll cope with the logistics of five in a world that favours families of four. All these things seem trivial now, but just six weeks ago seemed like epic problems.

I need closure, trite as that expression may be. I need to know that I can give away my maternity clothes, get rid of the crib, and pack up the baby gear for good. I need to be able to pick out a few favourite things that I’ll keep for sentimental sake, and get rid of the rest of it. I have boxes on boxes of baby and toddler clothes, toys, bottles and spoons and bowls, a baby tub and a cradle and a playpen. I have baby gates and booster seats, stacks of bibs and blankets and towels, and shoes in every size. I have three strollers and three car seats and a beautiful pine crib – and I just to know whether I’ll ever need them again.

That’s a lot of clutter in my house, but mostly it’s a lot of clutter in my heart. I need to know. I can’t just let the idea of my next child drift away like the sunlight fades out of a summer day, dragging on for months or years. I don’t want to feel this sad yearning uncertainty forever. I need to know.

Post-Christmas wrap post

(Editorial note: please stop to admire my careful wordsmithery before proceeding. That’s two devices in three words in a four word title: the post-post repetition, and the wrap as in gift wrap/it’s a wrap pun. What, you don’t love it? Sheesh, you people are hard to please!)

Ahem, well then, on with the show. Without further ado, I’m pleased to present to you this round-up of the Gifts of 2006.

The Theme of the Year award goes to Pixar’s Cars movie. Between the two boys, they got maybe ten or a dozen of the cars characters, including duplicate Lightings and Maters; the Mack playset; the movie; a set of board books; the deck of Uno cards; and a toothbrush each. Close second is the Wiggles, making an appearance in a Memory card game, two DVDs, and two board books, including one with a surprisingly un-annoying digital music player that makes a good toddler-friendly impersonation of Mommy’s iPod.

The If I have to play another round of Candyland I’ll swallow this cyanide pill award goes to Cariboo and Uno. While Cariboo is still a little bit simplistic, it’s a game the boys can play with each other – and without parental engagement. They actually prefer just using the key to open the boxes and hunt for balls, bypassing the rules entirely, but so long as they are playing with each other instead of torturing the dog, we all win. And in Uno I have finally found a game that I could sit for hours and play with Tristan. He needs to be prompted a bit, but can play independently without showing me his cards. We are well on our way to family game nights!

The Have I told you how much I love my mother award goes to – surprise! – my mother, who gave me a small package with a gift tag that read, ‘To Danielle, with love and admiration. From Mom.’ Inside was a small silver key chain, inscribed with the word “mothership”. She printed out the blog banner and brought it to the engraver to duplicate the font – and they did a damn fine approximation. Does my mom rock or what?

The Ohhh, I love a good deal award goes to the Bob the Builder Electronic Workshop. We were in WalMart when I saw a bunch of these stacked on a skid in the toy section. They were reasonably priced at $14.97, so I picked one up for Noah, my two-year-old nephew who has recently become a Bob devotee. The boys were so fascinated by the box that Beloved went out that night and picked up a second one for Simon. A few weeks later, we were in our favourite specialty toy store and they had the same set – for $54.99!!

The Indoctrinate them while they’re young award goes to the 65-piece kitchen set for Simon. He calls it his ‘tea set’ and loves it. He was especially excited by the ‘flipper flopper’, which Tristan precociously informed him was called a spatula. (How he knows from spatulas is beyond me.) I’m hoping to have Simon cooking dinner by the time he’s in grade school.

The I know you better than you know yourself award goes to Beloved, who got me the Penguin Book of Popular Canadian Quotations (he specifically said he thought it would make for good blog fodder), and the first season of the Muppet Show and Sesame Street Old School (1969-1974) on DVD. We’ve recently discovered old Sesame Street clips on YouTube, and have spent hours watching them. Ironically, the boys’ very favourite clip from YouTube is the first sketch on the first episode of the Muppet Show DVD.

The How to flummox the staff of Future Shop award goes to me for trying to find tapes on December 24 to go with Tristan’s portable cassette player. The first clerk I asked had no idea what I was talking about and sent me toward the VHS cassettes. The next two clerks hemmed and hawed and said they didn’t think they carried that kind (insert tone of disdain here) of thing. I finally found them in the car audio section. Sheesh, it’s not like I was looking for laser discs or 8-track tapes, for goodness sake. I bought bulk, just in case.

The Most Annoying Toy award goes to Mr Bucket. In the weeks leading up to Christmas, Simon has developed a peculiar obsession with Mr Bucket, going into paroxysm of excitement every time he spotted it in a flyer or catalogue. We have no idea why, even going so far as to ask the caregiver if she has this game. She does not. Simon has simply become fixated on this particular toy for some reason. So of course, we bought it for him for Christmas. And he hates it. Well, that’s not entirely true. Mostly, he’s afraid of the noise it makes. Unfortunately, he forgets about every three hours that he hates it, and takes it out of the box, plays with it for 90 seconds, and puts it back.

The No really, I bought it for the kids award goes to two winners this year: Marble Run and Superfort. It’s a natural progression from the hours I’m willing to spend building intricate and looping wooden train tracks to building intricate and looping marble runs and really fun and funky forts. Bonus marks to Cranium, makers of Superfort: after watching me just once, Tristan is already building his own forts. I am highly impressed! Now, could somebody please add an expansion pack for Marble Run to my Tristan’s birthday wish list?

On a less commercial note, the Awwwwww award goes to Simon, who loved everything he got. Everything! Every time he opened a gift, it was the best gift ever. Not once did he ask for more presents, even when the festivities paused to regroup or welcome a late arriving guest.

And finally, the Big brother award goes to Tristan, who has made my jaw drop open more than once in the past few days with the tenderness he has shown in helping Simon open stuck toys, reach high shelves and find lost toys. There has also been plenty of bickering and sniping, but I’ve been so impressed with Tristan’s behaviour that it merits a mention.

In retrospect, it was a blissful, bountiful Christmas. I’ve said it before: I’m a lucky girl!

Now I’ve got two preschoolers and my mother’s birthday coming up in the next ten weeks. Any recommendations for more great gifts?

Too big for my britches

I had to go shopping for pants yesterday. I was down to two pairs for work and one ragged pair of jeans, and not having any pants that fit was making me unbearably cranky. I’m not thrilled about buying in the larger size, but it’s better than the other two unacceptable alternatives of pants that don’t fit and maternity pants five weeks beyond being unpregnant.

Much to my dismay, when I lost the pregnancy last month, I didn’t lose a single pound of accumulated pregnancy weight. Thankfully, I hadn’t gained much in four months, but with the extra two pounds I’ve added by self-medicating with Doritos and shortbread cookies in the month-long recovery phase, I’m a solid 10 lbs heavier than I was this summer – which was already a solid 10 lbs heavier than I really wanted to be.

So while losing 10 lbs seemed achievable enough in an “oh, it will come off eventually” sort of way, losing 20 lbs seems rather daunting. I bought some new pants because being naked in an Ottawa winter will be pleasant for neither me nor any onlookers, but I’m hoping that I don’t have to rely on them for too long.

I know myself well enough not to bother dieting, nor to make sweeping declarations that I will never eat a potato chip or drink a coke again. And the weight watchers thing did nothing for me. Rather, I’m trying a ‘moderation in all things’ approach where I pick and choose my indulgences, rather than giving over to every whim and craving, and to try to be conscious about what I’m eating and why. That’s the plan, anyhow.

Mostly, I’m planning on increasing my physical activity. I’m hoping to add two days a week to my existing once-a-week gym habit. I currently do 25 minutes on a cardio machine and a weight circuit every Saturday morning, and my gym membership covers access to both a club in my neighbourhood and one downtown where I work. I’m hoping to add a morning workout one day a week before work, and there’s a class called ‘on the ball’ that I’m thinking of taking one day a week at lunchtime.

So why am I iterating all of this in what may be the most boring blog post ever? Well, pretty much because I tend to blog what’s in my head, and this is definitely taking up a lot of space in my head right now. Mostly, though, I want to hold myself accountable, and being open about all this will be help me with that – knowing it’s not only me but all of you who want me to lose 20 lbs in the next couple of months.

Building a bed for my boy

Like many of you, I was out searching for the perfect tree this weekend. However, while you simply strung some lights and decorations on yours, I hauled mine into my woodshop, cut it into just the perfect amount of boards, stained a few and built this lovely little bed for Simon:

What’s that you say? You can see the assembly instructions right there on the floor? Busted. Okay, so I didn’t carve the raw lumber, and the holes were pre-drilled. But I did get to use my power screwdriver and some sandpaper, and even had to hammer in a few dowels. That’s the tricky part, you know.

(Beloved tried to suggest that maybe he could build the bed, but I wouldn’t let him anywhere near it. I so love to assemble DIY furniture. It satisfies my urge to make things while taking the more dangerous power tools out of my hands. Win-win.)

And judging by the three-hour nap, Simon seems to like it, too:

A little something for everybody

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

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

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

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

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

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

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