Category: Life, the Universe and Everything

A whimsical walk

My to-do list today had about 357 items on it. I’m sad to say that “take two hours out of the morning to go for a walk and play outside with the boys” didn’t even make the list. I’m hoping the fact that we actually did it redeems me just a little bit.

And what a whimsical walk it was! First, we came across these smiling pumpkins waiting for the trash collector. Something about the way his teeth have sunken in in the ten days since Halloween caught my fancy, and I was glad I had the camera with me to memorialize him before his date with the compost heap.

Jack waiting for the garbage man

Not even a block further down the road, we found this treasure trove of old tech magazines in someone’s recycling bin. I call this photo “Looks like someone got a Mac!”

Looks like someone bought a Mac

The magazine proclaiming PC’s untimely demise is from October 1995! Made me snicker and think of the old Mark Twain quote, “reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.”

*whispers*: Will you mock me if I momentarily thought of filching the whole pile? Part geek, part pack-rat, I could barely restrain myself.

It’s a good thing I did, though, because if I had loaded up the wagon with 15 year old computer magazines, there wouldn’t have been room left for the toilet tank cover that I did filch from another person’s garbage pile. Oh yes I did!! Someone in my house who shall remain unnamed but whose name rhymes with Smeloved accidentally cracked ours into half a dozen pieces recently, and do you know it costs over a hundred bucks to replace just the lid on the toilet tank? And that’s if you can find the right brand at Home Depot, which I couldn’t. And did you further know that no matter how lazy-ass of a housekeeper you are, every time you walk into your bathroom and regard your toilet-tank lid held together with duct tape, you lose just a little bit of your self worth?

So I’m actually quite proud of myself for stealing the toilet tank lid out of my neighbour’s garbage. It was both an economically AND ecologically sound decision, and I only felt a little bit ghetto walking home with it in my wagon while the baby had to walk. (And you should be grateful that I did not take a picture of it. Because I thought of it, I really did.)

I did take a picture of this, though:

Simon bubble pop

And this:

Lucas in the land of chalk drawings

And as for the 357 untended items on that to-do list? I don’t regret ignoring them at all. Not even a tiny bit.

Celebrating four decades with 5 things about Sesame Street

Today marks the 40th anniversary of the debut of Sesame Street. I love Sesame Street madly and deeply, and have since I was a preschooler. I may have mentioned that once or two dozen times before.

You know who else loves Sesame Street? My kids. Of all the children’s programming we have on DVD and tape, everything from Blues Clues to Looney Tunes to Pingu to Thomas the Tank Engine to the Schoolhouse Rocks series, the two things that Lucas wants to watch are the Muppet Show and “Bird.” Big Bird, that is. We have two old skool Sesame Street DVD collections comprising six disks of 1970s Sesame bliss, and they’re in nearly constant rotation at our place.

In honour of the best children’s program on television, here’s five things about Sesame Street.

  1. The same puppeteer, 75-year-old Carroll Spinney, has been playing Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch since Day 1. (Have you ever seen the very first episode, where Big Bird’s head is pointy and Oscar is orange? It’s very, um, disquieting.)

  2. In 2005, Cookie Monster went on a health kick and changed his iconic anthem from “C is for Cookie” to “A cookie is a sometimes food.” I think of this, together with the introduction of the inexplicably appealing but unbearably grating Elmo, as the show’s nadir in my own estimation. (Lucas, on the other hand, worships Elmo even though he doesn’t appear in the early episodes we watch on DVD. I saw a four-foot Elmo in the window of Mrs Tiggy Winkles and thought it would make a fun Christmas gift, until I choked on the $179 (!!!) price tag.)

  3. In its first season, the show won a Peabody Award, a Grammy and three Emmys, and Big Bird appeared on the cover of Time magazine. Sesame Street now holds the Guiness Record for most Emmy Awards, with an impressive 122. (Do the math — that’s an average of three each year for 40 years!)

  4. The guest star on Sesame Street’s first episode was James Earl Jones, long before he was the voice of either Darth Vader or CNN, reciting a very solemn alphabet directly into the camera. Apparently, the show receives more requests for guest-star spots than they can accomodate each season. Here’s the full list of celebrity appearances. And check out this terrific compilation by Musicradar.com of the 11 greatest Sesame Street guest songs — I think my inner indie fan loves the Feist and REM ones the best.

  5. The Old School DVD collections carry a disclaimer that says “These early ‘Sesame Street’ episodes are intended for grown-ups, and may not suit the needs of today’s preschool child.” I’m still perplexed by this. Is it the Ladybugs at the Ladybug Picnic discussing fire insurance? Is it the trippy, psychedelic animations? Is it the obvious Snuffleupagus-ism? Hell, I’d rather have the boys watching vintage Sesame Street than (insert name of any show produced by Nickleodeon or Disney here) any day.

And one bonus item: have you been watching the Sesame Street doodles on Google? If you’ve missed them, the Huffington Post has a slide show with all seven of them. The one with The Count is my favourite, I think.

(Hat tip to Shannon Proudfoot and her fun articles in the Ottawa Citizen this weekend, from which I filched some of the content for this post!)

Happy birthday, Sesame Street. 40 rocks!

Holiday cards – your preferences?

Yes, it’s early. I know, not even the second week of November and it’s my second post about Christmas — third if you count the Christmas light in my 365 post! But I’m trying to wrench a little organization into my life and planning ahead is giving me a small sense of control.

So! Christmas and holiday cards. Given that I’m such an avid photographer, you’d think I would like photo cards, but I’m not terribly fond of them for us. In the past, we’ve sent the boys’ Sitting With Santa photos as our annual card, but I’m more partial to an actual card. There’s more room for a message, and — well, I don’t know why else I like an actual card better, I just do! Not just any holiday card, though. I like a folky kind of image the best, simple and not glittery and not hokey. I spend way too much time thinking about this, don’t I?

For years now, more than a decade actually, I’ve been saving all the holiday cards we receive. The day the tree comes down, the photo cards go into one pile and the traditional cards go into another one. The photo cards get saved and the other cards get recycled into various Christmas crafts. Last year we made bead-marble fridge magnets out of Christmas card cutouts, for example. You can cut them up to make great gift tags, too.

So I’m really just rambling on because I’m curious… do you prefer to send out store-bought cards, hand-made cards or photo cards for the holidays? And what do you think of those annual newsletters? (I’d send out an annual newsletter myself, but it’s easier just to link to the blog!) Have you ever done an official portrait sitting for your card or do you use a favourite snapshot from the year?

You can mock me now, but blink twice and it will be mid-December…

DaniGirl versus the Mouse, round 1

It may or may not be coincidence, but it was right around the time we had to put down our 17 year old cat this summer that the first mouse appeared. I would have liked to type “when the mouse first appeared” but I’ve come to believe he is Legion.

I actually managed to catch the first mouse by hand the very first time we saw him, trapping him in a little toy bucket and releasing him in the field across the street. That was some time this summer and I more or less forgot about mice in the interim.

Many happy mouseless weeks passed. While waiting for the bus one morning not too long after, I heard from a neighbour that she too had seen mice in the house this summer for the first time and she even upped the ante by telling me she’d seen a porcupine (!) in the backyard, and another neighbour stopped me in the driveway to ask if we’d had mice, so apparently they’re in the ‘hood.

Last week, Tristan came up from the basement family room where he’d been building Lego spaceports with a wildly worried look on his face. “There’s a noise like (*insert sound of tiny demon claws scrabbing against the gates of insanity here*) coming from behind the door to the laundry room.”

Now, can we just pause for a minute for a confession? There are times when I am completely unable to suppress my terrified inner 10-year-old who is direly afraid of two things: the dark and basements. Those times are when it’s dark, and when I’m in the basement. I have read entirely enough Stephen King books in my life to know that things that make noises behind closed doors in a dark basement should be LEFT ALONE.

And so I found myself with my hand on the laundry room door, listening to that undeniable sound of chewing, for the love of god, thinking of six hundred and sixty six good reasons NOT to open the door and unable to come up with even ONE good reason to open it. Except the ginormous ocean-blue eyes of Tristan, firmly fixed on me.

If the act of suppressing 40 years of conditioning and ten thousand years of genetically imbedded instinct to open that door in the name of appearing brave in front of my son isn’t a testament to a mother’s love, I don’t know what is.

And so I opened the door and turned on the light and it took about three hours for the light to come on and then another seven hours for me to work up the courage to peer behind the door because the noise was obviously coming from directly behind the door and every hair on my body was actively trying to stand up and walk off my body by the time I swung the door back around and found myself looking at a scritching, scrabbling, wiggling half bag of dog food.

Huh. Demons probably don’t eat dog food. Mice, on the other hand…

So I carefully unrolled the not-very-carefully rolled up top of the bag, and sure as shit the little grey mouse came tumbling out. He was way too quick for me, though, and disappeared somewhere behind the laundry machines.

By the time my heart started beating again, I was okay with the idea of cohabitating with the mouse. We’ve never had mice in the house before, and based on the amount of scat I found around the dog food bag (which also went into the trash) he’s been living down there for a while. Then my nice twitter friends said that mouse poop is toxic and that they will start to get into the real people food, so I thought that maybe I’d get a humane trap.

The idea of actually killing the mouse disturbed me, but the idea of merely maiming the mouse and having him suffering practically undid me. We dithered and debated for a week or so.

On Thursday, I pulled out the rubbermaid bin full of Halloween costumes to get ready for the boys’ school Halloween dance and had Simon and Lucas try on three of the four plush costumes that had been stored in the box. It was only when I went to pull out the fourth costume that I found out that the bottom of the bin was covered in … you guessed it, mouse poop.

By the time everyone had had a scalding hot bath and the halloween costumes went through two wash cycles, war had been declared. It’s ON, mouse. Bring it. If I thought I could flush him out, I would have went after that sucker with a baseball bat. And so help me, if I find he’s been into the Christmas decorations, I’m going to nuke him.

So the very next day I found myself in the mouse trap aisle of Canadian Tire. I seriously thought about getting one of those giant-size rat traps, just to make my point, so annoyed was I. Who knew there was such selection and variety in mouse traps? Glue traps, humane traps, multi-mouse traps… In the end, we got a fancy plastic version of the standard wood-and-wire mousetrap. The label offered a high capture rate and instant kill, which made my karma shrivel only a little bit.

Beloved set the traps on Sunday night, putting one behind the furnace and one near the freezer, both far from human traffic but near where scat postcards had been found. Last night, as I was doing the ubiquitous loads of laundry, I checked on the traps. The one near the freezer had been knocked slightly out of position but was still set. The one near the furnace was… gone. The entire trap had disappeared.

WTF? I can imagine how they’d get displaced, how they might get shifted, how they might even snap shut and bounce up to a foot away depending on how violently they closed. But that sucker is completely and utterly gone, and trust me, we searched everything within a five foot radius.

So the way I see it, either we’ve got a partially disabled but frighteningly strong mouse running around the basement with a discharged mousetrap attached to one of its appendages or… well, let’s just go with option one, shall we?

I’m not sure I can open that door a second time…

H1N1 and Halloween

I’ve finally made my peace with the H1N1 vaccine and decided to get the shots for our family. For what it’s worth, this Wired.com article helped me decide to do it.

But I have another question for you. I heard a passing reference in the media the other day (note to self, must get over addiction to media!) to the fact that this may be one of the least-busy Halloweens in decades. I was surprised, considering it’s on a Saturday night and all, but even more surprised by the reason for the speculation. First, they said economic concerns may put a damper on trick-or-treating. Hmmm, okay, not so much for us, but then we’ve been relatively unscathed by the recession. The other thing, though, was fears stemming from H1N1.

My first reaction was to scoff. For goodness sake, is there no end to the chicken-little-esque panic over this damn flu? But, the idea keeps rattling around in my brain. Hmmmm. Do they have a point? Should I give all the little candy wrappers a swipe with a Lysol wipe before the kids dig in? Am I really going to buy that far into the hype?

What do you think? Have we gone too far, or do you think this is a valid concern?

The really odd post-script to the missing bra story

So I did, in fact, find my bra. It was behind the little end table beside the wing chair, but it had only slid part way down in behind and gotten stuck, so it never actually hit the floor. Aha!

The really weird part? This morning, I was at work and went to use the washroom on the first floor of our building. I was washing my hands, and glanced up at the little shelf more or less at eye level where people tend to put their coffee cups or agendas or other small items while they’re in the washroom stalls, and there was a bra sitting on it. It was not — fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your perspective — my red bra. It was a black bra, wrapped rather carefully in some of that thick paper towel that comes out of the dispenser.

I have no idea of the cosmic significance of this, but the random appearance of a black bra the very day week I lose, blog about and then find my favourite red bra? Seemed too odd to go unremarked-upon.

Talk to me about scarves

I’m wearing a scarf today that I got for a tremendous discount at the end of last season at the Gap. It’s gorgeous, a creamy white in the centre that changes to a colour somewhere between tangerine and coral at the ends. I love how scarves look on other people, and really think they add a beautiful touch of flair to an outfit.

I don’t think I’m pulling this one off, though. No matter whether I loop it around my neck, or leave it dangling, or pull the two loose ends through the little loop at the other end in the jaunty way I’ve seen countless other women wear their scarves, it just doesn’t look right. It seems to add a lot of bulk right about where I don’t need any extra bulk. Are scarves for skinny girls only? Am I missing something?

Scarves seem to be a hot fashion item this year, not to mention endlessly practical in a climate that’s hovering right around the freezing mark as I type. Surely wearing one is not as complicated as I’m making it out to be. I’ve got a pretty comprehensive understanding of woolen scarves that you pull up to your nose to keep out the winter chill, but pretty silky scarves as accessories are apparently beyond me.

Help! How do I wear a scarf? Really, this is not rocket science. Is there a right or wrong way? Is there a current hip way versus the way your grandmother wore one? Why can’t I make this work?

And, for the rest of you who are as clueless as me, what other accessories leave you baffled?

Five things that are freaking me out about H1N1

Are y’all feeling a little freaked out by H1N1, the so-called “swine flu”? I’m not usually one to get my knickers in a twist over the panic-du-jour (Y2K, avian flu, computer viruses — why are all the major media panic-attacks linked to either computer or human viruses anyway?) but this one is slowly but surely unnerving me.

Here’s five things that are freaking me out about H1N1.

1. Healthy 40-year-olds are apparently a high risk group, as are toddlers under two.

2. Schools may close, kids have to stay home for up to a week. So, I have an (extremely generous) one week of family-related leave, of which I’ve used most days already. One kid gets sick, needs to stay home for a week, then you know it will be exactly a week later when the next kid gets sick and has to stay home for a week, and there’s no chance that would coincide with whatever time the school is closed, and the nanny happens to be in another risk group so I need to consider protecting her… thank goodness for the generous leave, I couldn’t imagine facing it otherwise.

3. The seasonal flu shot may make you even more susceptible to H1N1.

4. I’m trying to keep the hyperbole from getting to me, but I do find myself conscious of all the shared surfaces I touch in a day — everything from the rails near the bus exit to the door handles at the Rideau Centre (I’ve actually started using my sleeve instead of my bare hand to push them) to the ATM keypad. It’s a slippery slope from here to OCD (and I haven’t even told you about my counting thing!)

5. I’m on the fence about the whole vaccination thing. I get most of the standard vaccines for the boys, and I’m mildly opposed to the Jenny-McCarthy-fearmongering that goes on around vaccines, but vaccinating Lucas for this one gives me the willies. Our family pediatrician doesn’t recommend the seasonal flu vaccine for kids who are otherwise healthy, but he does recommend H1N1 vaccination, which is enough for me. Almost. I read every word of every article like this one, though, trying to figure out which is the lesser of two evils. The one thing I can say is holy hell am I glad I’m not pregnant right now.

So what do you think? Will you get the H1N1 vaccine for yourself, and/or your kids? Is the hype getting to you, or are you rolling your eyes at the Chicken Littles among us? Have you made any other sorts of preparations?

Flotsam and jetsam – a “cleaning out my inbox” post

A few tidbits that have dribbled out of my inbox lately, worth a mention but not quite an entire post…

Remember when I blogged about the MoonJars? I just received their newsletter, and now you can enter to win a set of 25 standard MoonJars for your child’s classroom. Follow this link for details. (The contest is aimed at classrooms or community groups for Grades K-3. Entries should be submitted on behalf of classes/groups through their teachers or parents.)

I won my first-ever auction on eBay this weekend! I’ve bought stuff before, and I’ve bid and lost things, but I’ve never actually won an auction. I’m so stoked! The item was shipped from Mississauga yesterday, and I’ve been using Canada Post’s tracking feature to watch it migrate across the province. Did you know you can get e-mail tracking updates? How cool is that? I’m ridiculously excited to watch its progress across the province. It arrived in Ottawa at 6:36 this morning — with any luck, it will be waiting for me at home tonight. Yippee! (You’ll have to wait to see what I got, but it has to do with the 365. Fun!)

There’s a kids’ consignment sale happening on Sunday, October 18 called My Kid’s Funky Closet . According to the e-mail I received, ” It has been happening for 4 years now at The Glebe Community Center in Ottawa. The Ottawa Police provide their child finger printing service and Little Rays Reptiles put on a show. They collect for the food bank and snowsuit fund as well. They have consignors who make money selling their gently used children’s items and maternity wear and people at the show have an opportunity to dress their children at a fraction of the cost of buying new. There are toys, games, bikes, strollers, baby equipment, clothing, maternity wear and vendor booths to visit as well.”

Those of you with daughters might be interested in this one.

Plan Canada just released the 2009 edition of their ground breaking series of reports Because I Am A Girl (BIAAG). These reports highlight the plight of girls around the world and the unique role they play in the fight against global poverty.

Plan Canada in support of the 2009 BIAAG report is filming a documentary across Canada and will be in Ottawa from October 2nd to the 5th filming at locations across the city. This documentary is aimed at capturing the experiences of teens, tweens and their inspirations. These experiences will be captured and replayed as a documentary to be released in Spring 2010.

If you think your teen or tween might be interested in participating in the documentary, the latest filming schedule will have them at the Rideau Centre downtown on Saturday, October 3 from 12 pm to 2 pm.

If people are unable to attend the events they can still support the campaign by visiting www.becauseiamagirl.ca and find more ways to get involved. You can also follow the documentary crew as they blog about traveling across Canada and talking to girls who are helping to achieve positive social change around the world.

And finally, I’ve been chatting with one of the producers for All in a Day on CBC Radio. They’re thinking of doing a sort of parenting panel debate on when is the right time to let kids walk to school by themselves. We’ve had a lot of similar discussions here, so I said I’d ask y’all to see if anyone is interested. Even though I’m still shepherding Tristan back and forth at age seven, I think I’m pretty close to letting him walk by himself — assuming he’s ready for it.

I’m a little conflicted on the subject, but want to subscribe to the “free range kids” kind of ideals and believe that it is just as safe now as it was when I was a kid for kids to be roaming the neighbourhood. If you want to debate the issue, and especially if you’d argue a more conservative approach, let me know and I’ll pass your information along to Sarah at the CBC.

In which my vexatious breast get a check-up

I‘ve been meaning to blog about my mammogram appointment for a while now, but I kept forgetting how many Ms were in mmamogram. In case you missed it, at my annual check-up this year my doctor pronounced me ridiculously healthy, at the lowest possible risk score for my age, except she found a “nodule” in my left breast. Talk about good news-bad news!

There isn’t any breast cancer in my family, but it seems to be rampant in my life right now. I have two close friends who have recently conquered it, a colleague who is battling it, more than one friend who has lost her mother to it, and one dear friend who will inevitably lose his sister to it — mother of two small children no less. So when the doctor found that nodule I locked the information into a tiny little box deep in my subconscious and decided not to even think about it until I had to. I decided I wasn’t even going to tell my Mom — definitely a first! — until after the mamogramm, lest I worry her for nothing. (And then, in typical fashion, I forgot that I had decided not to tell her and blogged about it, albeit obliquely, the day before the mmammogramm, resulting in a rather uncomfortable phone conversation. Sorry Mom!)

I didn’t know a lot about mamograms going in to the appointment, but my only-barely-supressed anxiety was ratcheted up another couple of notches by the fact that I had the mmamogram and an ultrasound on my breasts scheduled back-to-back, which seemed uncommon.

My appointment was for eight in the morning one sunny day at the end of last month. I thought I’d been all over the campus of the Civic hospital, between walking the labours of my first two babies, various and sundry appointments and visits over the years, and about a million appointments at the Parkdale Clinic fertility centre, but there’s a whole bunch of buildings on the east side to which I’d never been. The Women’s Breast Health Centre is in the Grimes building, which seems like a standalone clinic from the outside but has all the fixtures of the larger hospital campus.

Walking into the breast health centre, I was struck by their efforts to make the clinic a gentle, hushed sort of place. A far cry from the usual moulded plastic and harsh fluorescent lighting of most clinics, here the light is rather dimmed and provided by lamps with a French country sort of feel to them, the chairs are done in flowery upholstery and the colour scheme runs to salmon and teal. It struck me as about fifteen years out of date, almost humourously so in a charming sort of way, but still a nice attempt to soften the place up.

As I sat and waited for my turn, I flipped through the informational brochures about the mmamogram and breast ultrasound. (It’s a testament to the depth of my head-in-the-sand reaction that I did not seek any kind of information about the procedures, or the possibilities they might diagnose, before my appointment. La la la, I can’t hear you, this isn’t happening if I don’t acknowledge it…) As I took a long pull from the extra-large Tim’s coffee I’d brought with me, I read “you should refrain from drinking caffeine before your appointment because it may make your breasts more tender or lumpy.” Oops.

After a not-very-long wait, I was called in for the mamogramm itself. I stripped to the waist, and a very kind technician explained exactly what would be happening that day: I’d have the mmammogramm followed by an ultrasound of my breasts, and then I’d meet with someone to discuss the findings. My doctor would have the results within seven days. I asked for clarification: so, would I have an indication of what, if anything, they found that morning? Yes, she explained, they would discuss the findings and schedule a biopsy or discuss other next steps right away. Although I was highly impressed by the immediacy — I’m so used to the standard “Sorry, we can’t discuss anything with you, your doctor will inform you if there is anything you need to know” — I felt the first icy stab of fear at that moment. Biopsy? For just a moment, I felt a vertiginous sense of falling through space as the yawing possibilities opened up before me and hundreds of uncomprehensibly terrifying scenarios played out. This is not a joke, this is not a game, this is real and this is my life. It must have played across my face, too, because the technician reached out and gently touched my shoulder. She didn’t say a word, but her warm fingertip grounded me again as I reeled the panic in and the moment passed.

The mammogramm itself was not at all what I was expecting. You stand up against a rather intimidating machine, and the technician arranges your breast across a tablet adjusted to your height. Your breasts get squashed, one at a time, between two glass plates in a manner that made me think of the hamburger-patty maker my mother bought from a tupperware party in the 1970s. It doesn’t hurt, per se, so much as it’s uncomfortable and awkward. Apparently, they stretch and compress your breast this way so the x-ray for a mmamogramm requires much less radiation than a standard x-ray.

After ten or 15 minutes, I went into a second room and had my left breast, the one where the doctor thought she detected the nodule, examined by ultrasound. Between the fertility treatments, the miscarriages and three babies, I’ve had more ultrasounds than I can count — but never on my breast. She scanned the breast thoroughly, while I craned my neck to see the monitor (I think a part of my brain is forever hardwired to search an ultrasound monitor for that gorgeous flickering heartbeat of a nine-week old fetus) as if I had the faintest idea what I was looking for. As she stepped out of the room to compare her results with the radiologist, she reassured me that she could find no trace of a nodule anywhere near where the doctor had indicated on the requisition — but that didn’t stop me from getting up after she left to closely inspect the image left up on the monitor of my vexatious left breast. My professional worrier’s eye couldn’t find anything of note either, despite going cross-eyed in the pixellular analysis.

I’d settled back on the exam table, but still not taken my eyes off the monitor in some sort of talismanic trance, by the time she returned. She told me that they could find nothing even remotely of concern, so much so that I didn’t even have to bother with the post-mammogram consultation. I was good to go, but I should consider coming back regularly, every couple of years.

As I walked back to my car, I felt another hint of that vertiginous sense of fear, of disaster narrowly averted. It was the same breathless feeling that kept me up nights for a couple of weeks after the accident this summer, my brain swirling with all the things that could have happened but didn’t, thanks to the grace of God and dumb luck.

It was, and is, a beautiful morning.