Category: Mothering without a licence

Brown bag angst

I’m thinking about it all the time right now, and whatever I am thinking about is inevitably what populates blog. Might as well make it formal. I’m hereby declaring it Food Week here on the blog. Today, brown bag angst. Later, sample “menus” (I use the term loosely) based on my Plan B diet. Might squeeze in a recipe exchange if I’m still focused enough to stay on topic.

Let’s start with school lunches. Thanks for all your comments about Tristan staying for lunch. Turns out his entire class eats in and he loves it, so that was another one of those things I worried for no reason. Again. But, now I have a whole new set of lunchtime angst.

Take one mildly neurotic mother. Combine with a persnickety eater whose favourite lunches are peanut butter sandwiches and macaroni and cheese loaf (bleah) sandwiches. Mix in one national cold-cut meltdown over listeria and a peanut-free school. Liberally sprinkle with morning chaos. It’s a recipe for school lunch disaster.

So far, I’ve hit a home run with tortillas and shredded cheese in a make-yer-own roll up and with kraft cheese slice sandwiches. The jam sandwich and the breadsticks and hummus were less well received. One brilliant tip I came across was to freeze the juice boxes to use them to keep lunches cool. Works great with disposable or reusable juice boxes.

At this rate, I’ll be packing Doritos and Lunchables by the end of the week. Save my child from his mother’s lack of inspiration — what’s your failsafe kids’ lunch?

One dead mouse

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In which she realizes there is more than one reason it’s a good thing her maternity leave is a year long

I was really excited about attending a bar camp event to discuss government and social media, something you might remember I was specializing in back in my other life before Lucas came along. I’d even managed to get Beloved to take the afternoon off work and take care of the boys so I could attend.

I’d been looking forward to it for weeks, and thought it would be an excellent opportunity to not only stay current in my field, but to make some good contacts, too. After all, this blissful interruption of my regular life otherwise known as maternity leave will end in February.

I wore make-up! And my shiny shoes with the kitten heels. My home-with-the-boys shoes never go click-click-click when I walk.

They were discussing some pretty cool stuff – current practices, common hurdles, governance issues. All of it very relevant to what I was doing before February, fascinating to me personally, and all of it in a very open, informal, engaging discussion. There was a great presentation on how one department was using wikis, and for the first time I really *get* why people use them.

And you know what? I totally flaked out and left after two hours. Matter of fact, I kind of left in the middle of a conversation with one of my colleagues during the coffee break. I’d gone down to get a bottle of water and some cash from the ATM to pay for parking (one thing I don’t miss — driving and paying for parking downtown. Yikes!) and when I got outside, I just kept walking. I realized that interesting though the presentation was, I’d simply rather be at home. The job will still be there in five months waiting for me, and the social media universe will have evolved again. I can make and remake all my contacts then.

February is not going to be pretty.

Grade One already

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

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

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

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

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

Lucas at six months (and a bit)

Did you hear the choirs of angels singing, and did you see the beam of light shoot down from the heavens to glow lovingly over Lucas’s high chair last week? Or maybe that was just me singing the Hallelujah chorus. We’ve made one of those huge developmental leaps that makes Mommy’s day so very much easier. Lucas can cram food into his own gob now.

Aside from sitting up independently, which he is still on the cusp of doing, this is one of the best milestones in babydom, as measured in units of maternal freedom. I’d been slow in integrating new solids into his diet, taking a week or so between each new food, but now that I can give him something to hold and nosh while I eat or empty the dishwasher or put dinner on the table, we’ve progressed quickly through all the old standbys in the course of the last week: Cheeries, toast, Egos, organic cookies, Mum Mums (do y’all have Mum Mums in the States? Best baby cookie ever!) and even pizza crust.

It’s been a while since I’ve given you a Lucas update, no? Lucas at six (almost seven!) months is a dream baby. He’s pleasant, sweet, and friendly. He continues to (*shhhh, don’t tell anyone!*) sleep through the night. He’s only disagreeable when he’s hungry or tired or is not the centre of attention, much like me. When I brought him for his six-month checkup, I was quite sure I’d find out he’d grown out of the baby bucket car seat/carrier. (Maximum is 22 lbs and 29 inches long.) We had only half an inch to spare, but a whopping five pounds of room to grow before we have to give it up – another hallelujah, please! – because he was 28.5 inches long but only 17 lbs. He’s the longest and the lightest of his brothers at six months, on the 50th percentile for weight and the 95th percentile for length.

My only two concerns going in to the appointment were that he still lolls his head a bit, and he still spits up ferociously. The head-lolling is resolving itself quite well, and the ped said he is not at all concerned. While Tristan sat up independently at five months, Lucas is not quite there yet at almost seven months. He does it for a minute or two, sometimes as much as five, but mostly because he’s propped up. He’ll get there, I’m sure.

The spitting up is driving me bananas. He still does it up to ten times a day, or more, sometimes enough to make a “splat” sound as he launches it over my shoulder and onto the floor below. (My apologies to the people at Canadian Tire, where he christened not one, not two, but three aisles in the sporting goods section while I was looking at skates for the boys last week.) We switched his meds from Ranitidine to Zantac caplets, but if anything he seems to be spitting more. Anyone else out there have a champion spitter and if so, when did it resolve? Seems to me that although Tristan and Simon were both like this, both of them dried up a lot when solids were introduced. Lucas just spits up more colourfully now.

One of my favourite things about this age, aside from the tiny increments of independence (tiny is okay, huge is not allowed) is his affection for me. My favourite is the “I love you so much I must grab you by the hair and suck on your face” kiss. It makes me laugh out loud every single time.

And does he ever love his brothers and his daddy. His whole body wriggles with delight when they talk to him or even walk into the room. Tristan can make him laugh just by looking at him. Is there anything better in the world than a baby belly laugh?

Does it get any cuter than this?

DSC_1948

The inevitable back-to-school post

Oh my goodness. In just one short week, my baby Tristan will be starting Grade One, and my other baby Simon will be starting junior kindergarten. How did THAT happen?

I’ll save the hand-wringing and angst for another post (or seven) because I have a practical question for y’all. We live more or less right across the street from the school. For the first time, Tristan will be in school all (gasp!) day, and Simon will be attending in the morning.

I’ve always assumed that since I’m home on leave, I’ll just pick up both boys at lunchtime, take them home with me for lunch, and bring Tristan back for the afternoon. And I’ll have to go back and get him again in the afternoon. This means 9:00 drop-off, 11:30 and 11:45 pick-up, 1:00 drop-off and 3:30 pick-up. That’s a lot of time spent shuttling in and out of the school yard with Lucas in tow.

In talking to other parents, most have said that even if they live near the school, they don’t have their kids come home at lunch time. While this would make my day very much easier, it seems to me that having lunch at home might be a bit of a relief for Tristan in dealing with his first all-day school experience. (And, not incidentally, means that I don’t have to worry about packing his lunch each day. Also a post for another day.) Not only that, but whenever I lived within walking distance of school when I was a kid, I went home for lunch and I liked it that way. I have very fond memories of open-faced grilled cheese sandwiches and sweet pickles eaten while watching the Flintstones or Droopy the Dog on TV.

What do you think? Is it better and easier for the kids to stay at school during the lunch hour, or if you were in my situation would you be schlepping back and forth four times a day?

Tristan takes a dive

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.

Lukey’s boat is painted green

When he’s really frothed, I can rely on three songs to calm Lucas down. “You are my Sunshine” is my lullaby standby, and I have sung it to all three boys. It reminds me of my Granda, my grandfather on my mother’s side, and I cringe when I hear it used to huck orange juice. Chet Baker does a much better version of the song than I do, but Lucas seems content to listen to me serenade him endlessly as he fights off sleep.

The second song is Great Big Sea’s “Lukey.” Beloved sang this to him ’round about the time he was a week or two old, and in those first colicky weeks we must have sung it hundreds of times since then. I like this song because it comes with many verses, and Lucas doesn’t seem to mind if you mix and match them so long as you just keep singing. On a good day, humming may be permitted.

I have one failsafe song in my arsenal: I have never seen him so worked up that “Head and Shoulders, Knees and Toes” doesn’t immediately calm him. (Yes, it’s weird. Don’t judge me, it works!) He will settle and listen as long as you keep singing, and will resume his histrionics with renewed vigour if pause for so much as a quarter-rest worth of time between repeats. I have bellowed it across the back yard to him, trying to yank just a few more weeds from the backyard jungle while he demands attention from his swing; I have blushed rather furiously while singing it to him in a crowded waiting room over and over again; I have danced a little jig while singing it in the grocery store, just to spice things up a bit. Did you know that the song comprises only 10 words, and even with repetitions the whole thing only draws out to 23 words? Do you have any idea how many times you can sing a 23 word song in the average trip to the grocery store, let alone when traversing a highway across a national park? Many, many, many.

Anyone who has had the misfortune to hear me warble in person knows I’m no Amy Winehouse (which, all things considered, may not be such a bad thing), but I have to say there is something sweetly empowering about being able to soothe my baby simply by singing to him. One of my favourite memories of this age will be of Lucas with his face red from bellowing against some indignity, chin trembling and tears held in abeyance. “Well, okay then,” his teary gaze says to me. “I’m righteously ticked off, but as long as you keep singing, I suppose it’ll be alright. But don’t you dare stop. And no, as a matter of fact you may NOT sing any other song. Don’t even think about trying that Old Macdonald had a farm shit with me.”

For the record, it has not escaped me that the song my son best loves me to sing has no actual melody to speak of. And no, I do not accept this as a criticism of my inability to carry a tune.

Two reactions

I’m not overly shy about breastfeeding in public, but I’m also not very good about being discreet. I have to be able to see what I’m doing, yanno? Even so, through two and a half boys worth of nursing wherever I had to do it, I never really had any reactions that I’d noticed. Mostly people seem to try to ignore the fact that I’m doing anything at all, which seems a reasonable enough reaction.

In the past couple of weeks, I’ve had two notable reactions. On Canada Day, we were out at the festival at Andrew Haydon Park with my mom. There’s a chip stand with a little covered patio, and we were sitting at a picnic table having some fries and surprisingly good hamburgers. The place was crawling with people, and the picnic table was larger than we needed. A mother with her young son were sharing the table with us, with the woman sitting beside me and her son across the table from us.

I’d just finished wrangling Lucas to my breast when I looked up to see her gathering their half-eaten meal up to quickly hustle her son off to another table. At first, I simply assumed they were moving to join friends — the idea that my nursing would cause someone that much distress didn’t even cross my mind. But no, they were just moving to another table to get away from me nursing Lucas.

I get that it’s a free world, and people can do whatever they like. I suppose it was the best possible reaction for someone who didn’t want to be near someone who was breastfeeding — she didn’t, for example, say “Ewww, could you please put that away” or something like that — but I was still kind of sad for her and for her son. He looked to be about eight, maybe nine. What kind of message does that send to him? What possible harm could be done by me feeding my baby in front of him?

Earlier this week, I took all three boys to the Experimental Farm for the morning. The sheep and pig barn is closed for renovations, but we enjoyed the horses and the tractors, and found two calves that were born the same week as Lucas. (For the record, they’re a lot bigger than him!) We had a wee snack, and the boys were climbing on the play structure when Lucas woke up from a little nap and started fussing for a snack of his own.

I was again sharing a picnic table, this time with a woman busy pulling tupperware boxes of fruit and crackers and cheese out of a backpack. She looked over and noticed me nursing Lucas and said a quiet, “Awwwwwww.” I looked up at her and she smiled, and we started chatting. When the boys wandered back from the play structure and needed help unwrapping a fruit bar, she did it for them because I still had my hands full. It was a lovely little interlude in a lovely little morning. I wonder if she has any idea that she made me feel good about myself, and my boys, that day?

***

The nursing is still not going as smoothly as it did with Simon and Tristan. The good news is, Lucas is not so voraciously hungry as Simon and doesn’t wake up every two or three hours through the night like Simon did. The bad news is, he still fusses a lot more than either of the other boys did with nursing. Some days are fine, other days he howls when I try to nurse him like I’m putting hot pokers in his ears. Some days he drinks contentedly for 15 or 20 minutes at a time, other days I almost have to force him to drink, and he sips and pulls and chews on my nipple until I’m sure they’ll be down to my knees by the time he’s weaned.

It might be the reflux, it might be that he doesn’t like the taste of whatever I’ve recently eaten, it might be the alignment of Pluto in the seventh house of Capricorn. Who knows? With two formula bottles a day, we’re still on a 1/3 formula and 2/3 breastmilk split, and he’s plenty healthy with just the right doubling underneath his chin, so it’s working out overall. We still get a lot of green poops, though. I just hope we can keep nursing for a while longer now that I’ve started to introduce solids. We’re almost to the six-month mark, which is the bare minimum I wanted to achieve, but I’d be happy if he kept up at least a little bit of nursing through his first birthday. So far so good and one day at a time, I guess.

Lucas’s first cereal

Every now and then I feel the need to conform to the expectations of those who castigate mommy blogs as self-reverential shrines to minutiae. What could be more self-indulgent than four minutes of baby’s first cereal posted to YouTube?

But seriously, could he BE more adorable? If nothing else, watch for the infectious baby giggles in the second minute.

(or, click thru and watch it here)