Flickr has new functionality that links it directly to WordPress, so I am testing it out!

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Ack, I completely forgot that today at noon I was supposed to choose the winner of the tickets to Mysterioso: Music and Magic at the National Arts Centre! Sorry about that!

I just ran the comment numbers through the random number generator, and the winner is lucky #3: Suze!!!

Yay! Thanks to the NAC for providing the tickets, and stay tuned for my review later this week!

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1. Snacktime winner!
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I’ve said before I’m a fan of Mabel’s Labels, and they just keep setting the bar higher with new and interesting products. They kindly offered me and my readers a limited-time special offer discount of 15% off any order to celebrate the arrival of their new line of Invisible Sticky Labels. I’ve often wanted to have a more discreet label,and this would work perfectly. I’m getting them for all my camera equipment. Click through before noon on Thursday to receive 15% off your entire order!

1. Getting ready for school – a monologue
2. Keeping kids entertained on the go – and a giveaway from Fisher-Price!
3. A Christmas Story

Hooray! We have a winner for the iTunes gift card!

Congratulations to the tenth commenter on the original post, Madeleine!!! (Bonus points for her 80s reference, and for the cost-saving tip that you can buy gift cards at Costco for less than their face value. I had no idea!!)

Thanks to iTunes Canada and their PR agency for the freebie, and special thanks to all of you for your music suggestions. I’ll spend far more than the value of my own gift card loading my iPod with cool new tunes!

Edited to add: because I am so pathetic that I could not properly count to 10, I have decided to give away both gift cards, one to Madeleine, who was in fact #9, and one to Andrea. Oops!

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Lucas is sick. Not serious sick, just buckets and buckets of snot sick. So much snot that I’ve given up on kleenex and now use receiving blankets like giant flannel hankies. (A good tip, BTW. Works like a charm!) He’s fitfully asleep in my lap as I type, and I have just enough mobility to blog, if not brainpower to come up with something engaging. And lo, I have a meme to do, courtesy of one of my bestest bloggy buddies Dean Dad.

THE FAVORITE MEME. Fill in your favorite for each of the following:

1. Political show Rick Mercer Report. Watching him skinny dip with Bob Rae was one of my favourite moments in Canadian television.

2. Picnic food Plain potato chips and lemonade.

3. Mixed drink Not really into cocktails. Does gin and tonic count?

4. U.S. President Let’s go with Obama on this one. Optimism rules the day.

5. Kind of student to teach This one doesn’t really apply to me, but I do love how open the littlest kids are to everything.

6. Hobby you do or wish you still did Hobbies? Snort. I wish, truly wish, I had time for anything like that right now. I miss the crafty stuff the most at this time of year. It will come back someday, I know…

7. Sports commentator Tom Cheek and Jerry Howarth, from Blue Jays games on the radio

8. Sport to watch on TV Baseball. Hockey is growing on me, year by year.

9. Animal to have as a pet Big, friendly dogs.

10. Halloween costume you have worn When I was in Grade 8 I made a Rubic’s Cube out of a cardboard box and construction paper. That was pretty clever, I think.

11. Kind of dessert Cheesecake drizzled with melted chocolate. Whimper.

12. Comic strip I have grown fond of Betty lately. Also fond of vintage Calvin and Hobbes and Bloom County.

13. Style or make of footwear Just bought new Columbia hikers to replace my six-year-old Timberlands. Sooooo comfy!

14. Ice cream flavor Not overfond of ice cream at the best of times, but mint choco chip when I do indulge. I prefer a slushie, to be honest.

15. College or university president I’ll take a pass on this one.

16. Internet news source CBC.ca

17. Vacation spot Bar Harbor was a treasure.

18. Wine I’m tiiiired. Oh, I thought you said “Whine”.

19. Way to waste time instead of working Maternity leave.

20. Student excuse for late work When I was getting divorced back in 1993, I was in second year university (part time). I approached my media prof — a crazy Greek named Costa who taught me how to really THINK — and explained what was going on in my life, and that I’d just that week moved out of my house and in with a friend, and could I please have an extension on the paper that was due the following Monday. He was quite sympathetic, told me he’d been there and knew how hard it was and how physically and emotionally drained I must feel, and then told me that the paper was still due on Monday. A good lesson I’ve never forgotten!

21. Reality show Survivor, of course. (And, shhh – Cops.)

22. Jewelry on a man The wedding ring I gave him.

23. Pizza topping I’m on a pineapple and hot peppers kick.

24. Children’s movie Toy Story. Did you know they’re working on a third instalment for 2010?

25. Celebrity you wish would retire Stephen Harper.

Now I get to tag some peeps: Alison, Barbara, Annie, Fawn… and you, if you want to play along!

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I was flipping through Tristan’s baby calendar the other day, comparing Tristan and Lucas at seven months of age. (Heartbreakingly, I seem to have lost my 2004 kitchen calendar with all of Simon’s baby milestones. I have every other year since 2001; I’m hoping it presents itself out of the clutter one of these days.) It was interesting to compare my first and my third. I can see, for instance, that they’re nearly the same weight, give or take half a pound on twenty pounds. (Simon, I seem to remember, hit 20 lbs around four months of age!)

What really surprised me, though, was that Tristan was standing and “cruising the furniture” and up on his hands and knees rocking in a pre-crawl motion at this age whereas Lucas has only just reliably mastered sitting up. I’m sure this has everything to do with their own developmental clocks and nothing to do with the fact that every time Lucas begins to lift himself up I sweep his knees out from under him and squash him back down to the ground. Sorry, kid, I’m just not ready for you to get mobile. How’s two years from now by you?

On the other hand, my mother is on the cusp of getting banned from the house. Every time she gets near Lucas, she’s got him standing up on his feet, holding him while he bounces and encouraging him to walk. And muttering something about “Granny’s Revenge.” I don’t think she believes me, but so help me I’ll ban her from the house if she teaches that baby to walk before his first birthday!

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As I mentioned recently, I’ve been spending a lot of time on Twitter. Microblogging (you’re limited to a paltry 140 characters) appeals to where I am right now… only one thought at a time need be expressed, without editorializing or rambling. It’s kind of refreshing.

Twitter must have been featured at the latest BlogHer or something, because all of a sudden this summer all my favourite mom bloggers showed up on Twitter, and that was cool, too.

Any site with the raging popularity of Twitter has plenty of people lining up with add-on features and clone sites. This morning, I stumbled upon TwitterMoms, a social networking site for moms who tweet on Twitter. I noticed that TechCrunch had a post up about them, and I’m a sucker for signing up for new toys, so I joined and took about three minutes to poke around. I’d hardly taken a boo at the front page when Lucas ran out of Cheerios and I left the computer to get on with my morning.

There’s a good chance that I would have likely forgotten completely about the site by now, like so many of the sites I’ve signed up for in the last year or so. (I’m an irrepressible joiner, and I especially love to join things when they’re new.) We went out, ran a few errands, and when we got home I popped on the computer to check my e-mail… and found my inbox full of messages from Twittermoms. In just a couple of hours, I had half a dozen welcome notes written on my “wall” and four friend requests. Yikes! Real messages, too, not just computer-generated ones. It’s a little bit scary, actually. I guess I’m used to the old days on the bulletin boards, when you had to hang around and prove yourself before you started making friends. I’ve never seen people come running out of the woodwork to say hello before.

I feel kind of bad accepting those “friend” requests, even if they are from complete strangers. But considering my bloglines account is practically bulging at the seams and my Facebook status hasn’t been updated in a month or more, I don’t know when I’ll next get around to TwitterMoms again. If you’re looking for a new place to hang around, they’re certainly a friendly crew over there!

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There is no end to the things I’ve learned through blog. Like, how to parse PHP and SQL on the fly. And also, why slings are better than baby bjorns and some great places to shop online. And about a thousand other things.

In return, I try hard to send quality information out into the Interwebs. Say, for example, you need to know “What are cheesies?” Turns out blog is the number one search return. Yeah, baby. Educating the universe about snack food, that’s my higher purpose.

(I still can’t believe “cheesies” isn’t a universal term. “Cheese puffs” just doesn’t cut it.)

Used to be weight watchers and tim hortons, but I’ve been dethroned on that one. I think I’ll keep my cheesie crown.

(Speaking of cheesies, I’ve been thinking of dredging my archives for fodder. That post is a fun place to start: Buttertarts, cheesies and poutine.)

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I’m in the process of switching blog hosts. I have only the vaguest idea of what I am doing. Expect service interruptions, likely not lasting longer than a day or two.

I hope!

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Anyone who has been reading for a while knows I’m (cough) pretty lax about the idea of kids and TV. Baby Einstein came crashing on to the scene just about the time Tristan was born, and I have fond memories of plopping him into his exersaucer and queuing up the Baby Mozart for 30 minutes of blissful diversion. We were equally charmed and perplexed by the boys’ addiction to the DVDs, and called them “baby crack”.

By the time Simon graduated from DVDs to broadcast TV, we had a dozen or so of the Baby Einstein DVDs kicking around — some of them even free enough of scratches, fingerprints and drool that they still play. Not that it does us any good. (As a side note, it’s kind of funny to look back and see what background TV each kid was exposed to. Tristan watched a lot of Trading Spaces on TLC when he was a baby, and Simon listened in on a lot of Tristan’s Bob the Builder and Thomas the Tank Engine shows. Lucas, on the other hand, gets a steady diet of Sponge Bob.)

Perhaps that has something to do with the fact that, in this house of four people who are hopelessly addicted to the electric nipple, Lucas shows absolutely no interest whatsoever in baby TV. And don’t think I haven’t tried. Little heretic doesn’t even make it through the first five minutes without fussing.

Scandalous, I know. It’s like Tiger Woods’ kid choosing a paintbrush over a golf club. A child of mine who doesn’t watch TV. Hmpfh.

There is good news, though. There is one thing he seems to particularly enjoy watching, sprawled out on his blanket in front of the TV. He is fascinated by Rock Band on the Wii, and will lie contentedly for long stretches, watching song after song as Mommy and Daddy rock out on the guitar and drums.

(I’d come back from washing my hands after a diaper change and he had inched his way over and grabbed hold of the whammy bar. Rock on, little dude!)

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Beloved and I have an ongoing debate. I believe the best in people, and for the most part I like people. I think, on the whole, people are good. Beloved likes few people, and mistrusts the population as a whole. Beloved locks doors and windows obsessively; I am cavalier about such things, locking car doors when I remember to do so and when it is convenient.

My faith in humanity has been tested this week. First, someone stole my iPod out of the car. While I’m cavalier about locking doors, I am pretty careful about not leaving valuables in it, especially in plain sight. The iPod was half-hidden under the cup holder, and someone must have been rifling through the van to find it. It took me about three days to decide that it was actually stolen and not misplaced by me, but after a thorough search of the usual places and a clear memory of bringing it out to the car with no corresponding memory of bringing it back in, I resigned to the fact that someone had in fact snatched it some time during a given 24 hour period.

As if that weren’t insult enough, less than a week later I realized the transmitter I plug into the lighter to broadcast the iPod through the car radio had also been stolen. Not at the same time, mind, because it was looking at the empty transmitter that made me realize the iPod was missing in the first place.

Now, I can see someone stealing an iPod. It’s $150 worth of electronics, easy to steal and probably easy to resell or just use. But stealing a $10 transmitter? That’s just insulting, and somehow the latter bothers me more than the former.

And yes, I know, I should have been more compulsive about locking the doors and learned my lesson with the iPod. But when I’m hauling 25 lbs of Lucas and his baby carrier and the backpack and my purse and gods know what else in and out of the van, it’s not always at the forefront of my mind to lock the doors, especially in the never-ending rain we’ve been having lately.

Sigh. Could have been a much more expensive lesson, true, but I prefer to imagine I live in a world where I can leave my doors mostly unlocked. Now I lock the doors regularly, and am just a little bit sad every time I juggle the baby and the bag and whatever else I’m holding, trying to find the switch to unlock the doors.

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I told the boys yesterday morning over breakfast that we would be going to get some family pictures done that day. I told the boys I had laid out some clothes for them on the couch and asked them to get dressed and put their jammies in the hamper in their room.

As I was putting the cereal bowls into the dishwasher, Tristan came into the kitchen saying he had picked out his own clothes for the portraits.

That’s a white turtleneck under a white button-down shirt (two sizes too small) and track pants. He would have had to get a chair to get the shirt off the hanger in his closet. Oh, and the Winnie the Pooh tie I bought for him four years ago when he was the ring-bearer at JoJo and Jaimie’s wedding. Where he found that, I have no idea. Isn’t he adorable? So much for his father’s latent metrosexual side.

Much as I loved the look he put together, I had to insist that he change before we left. He seemed mollified by the idea that I wanted to capture them in their “everyday” clothes.

The portrait sitting went reasonably well, I think. I’ll get the results later today and share them later.

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Filched from Raising WEG, a meme of fives:

What were you doing five years ago?

We had just found out that I was pregnant with Simon, and were getting ready to move into this house. I had only been back at work after my maternity leave with Tristan for about five months, and had come back to an entirely new job, my first real “communications” job. I was in way over my head in trying to manage some aspects of our departmental communications about SARS — and trying not to be freaked out about it. It really was a transitional point in our lives, one of those hinges that divides everything into “before” and “after”.

What are five things on your to-do list for today?
(Five? Only five? I could probably give you fifty.)

• laundry. and more laundry. then some laundry. and some more laundry.
• scour the kitchen to try to combat the ant infestation and look into some baby and pet friendly chemical solutions.
• get out to Home Depot to get a new hose and an extender-thingee to get our faucet to a more convenient and reachable location that is not buried deep in behind the shrubberies.
• hang the baby swing for Lucas I picked up on UsedOttawa.com for $5.
• do some online research about our multi-generational family trip to Lake Placid next month.

(Sigh, I don’t think I’ll get to all five.)

What are five snacks you enjoy?

• BBQ chips – just like Geddy Lee on BNL’s Snacktime CD!
• Oatmeal choco-chip cookies that have been nuked to make the chips melty.
• Tostitos ‘hint of jalapeno’ bite-sized rounds with Jack’s Garden salsa.
• Fundips.
• Oriental rice crackers.

What five things would you do if you were a billionaire?

• How about I just say “everything” and be done with it?

What are five of your bad habits?

• Eating out of boredom or stress.
• Dropping things wherever I lose interest in them, instead of taking ten seconds to actually put things away.
• Reading e-mail and then forgetting to reply.
• Procrastinating.
• Stopping by the Tim’s drive-thru for coffee every time I have an errand to run.

What are five places where you have lived?

I’ve only lived in two cities (London, ON and Ottawa), but here are five different living arrangements I’ve had:

• Renting a room in a house, which I lost when they kicked me out because a friend had lost her apartment and needed a place to live.
• My own tiny apartment in a sixplex in old Ottawa South.
• Renting a room in a seven-bedrooom student slum, even though I was a full-time worker and only going to school part-time.
• Renting a couple of rooms with a friend in the attic of a mansion in Sandy Hill, from a man we later found out was under observation by CSIS for suspicion of running guns to Iraq.
• Sharing ownership of a triplex in the Glebe with my ex-husband, his parents, his aunt and uncle, and his cousin. Yes, all SEVEN of us were on the deed.

What are five jobs you’ve had?

• communications advisor
• video store clerk
• assessing and correcting income tax returns
• ice-cream scooper
• computer systems tester

I’m supposed to tag five people. (I hate tagging people. I want to tag everyone, because I love to be tagged, but then I forget to do the meme and I feel guilty and I don’t want to add to anyone’s stress levels. I know, I just have to get over myself sometimes.) Um, okay, I know Theresa has a new blog, so she might like to be tagged. And Alison and Miche are always up for a meme, right? And Chantal might like to play along. And I’ll leave the fifth space open for anybody else who wants to give it a go.

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One of my favourite Tragically Hip songs contains the lyric: “Like boots or hearts, oh when they start to fall apart, they really fall apart.” Yeah. We’re falling apart over here.

• Lucas had his four-month vaccine yesterday, and like two months ago, he’s reacting to them. Poor guy is clingy and noticably off, and woke with a high-ish fever. Sigh.
• I have a migraine.
• We’re on day 175 of a humidity-dense heatwave. Ordinarily, this wouldn’t bother me too much, but with a migraine and a clingy, feverish baby who wants to be held all day, even the AC isn’t enough to keep the edge off my temper.
• At 2 am, Beloved poked me awake and said, “There’s an alarm going off downstairs.” I called the non-emergency number for the fire department in between pushing the button to silence the howling carbon-monoxide detector every three minutes and he talked me through taking it off the wall and searching for an expiry date. When we couldn’t find one, just to be safe they sent out some firefighters (on a ladder truck!) with a CO detector. It was, thankfully, a false alarm. We have bad luck with false alarms, you might remember. This was apparently the carbon monoxide detector in its death throes. It took at least two hours for the adrenaline in my system to subside enough to get back to sleep.
• While we were waiting for the fire department to arrive, I noticed that we seem to have an infestation of tiny ants coming in from the patio door in the kitchen. Given how bug-phobic I am, ants are not the worst possible invasion, but I am still not impressed. Ugh.

Bugs. Illnesses. Malfunctioning electronics. Weather. What’s the next plague, flood? No, don’t even think about it…

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You know I love you, right? And as my mother taught me, “if you love me, buy me things.” Well, I haven’t exactly bought something for you, but I do have some freebies and a great deal to offer, too.

First, the great deal. Remember when I told you earlier about how my friends at Smugglers’ Notch gave me my first writing credit for their resort magazine? Well, at the same time we worked out a special deal for any of you who might have been inspired enough by my most excellent and unbiased travel reporting to plan a family vacation at Smuggs for yourself.

Book any FamilyFest Summer Vacation Package at Smugglers’ Notch for this summer (June 13 – September 1, 2008) and tell them you want the “Postcards from the Mothership” deal, and you’ll get a 20% discount! In addition to the fun I blogged about last summer (remember the segways, the excellent day camp for kids, the waterslides and pools and mini-golf, not to mention the endless canoe trip?) this year they’ve got some cool new stuff like chocolate tasting and bike-boards (three-wheeled scooters) and adventures in kayaking and rock-climbing, plus a whole lot more.

If you go, let me know! I’d love to hear about it. And, as a self-appointed bloggy ambassador to Smuggs, I’d be happy to answer any questions about our trip. For more information and to make a reservation, visit the Smuggs website. Don’t forget to tell them you want the “Postcards from the Mothership” deal!

And now the freebies: the nice folks over at Hachette publishing sent out Mothers Day book packages to a handful of bloggers recently, and I’d like to share mine with you. These are the books they sent (minus a few I’ve already given away):

1. Your Best Life Now For Moms by Joel Osteen
2. How Not to Look Old: Fast and Effortless Ways to Look 10 Years Younger by Charla Krupp
3. Bobbi Brown Living Beauty by Bobbi Brown
4. Sew U Home Stretch: The Built by Wendy Guide to Sewing Knit Fabrics by Wendy Mullin & Eviana Hartman
5. Jewels: 50 Phenomenal Black Women Over 50 by Michael Cunningham & Connie Briscoe
6. On Becoming Fearless: …in Love, Work, and Life by Arianna Huffington
7. Days: From the Heart of the Home by Susan Branch
8. Starting Your Day Right: Devotions for Each Morning of the Year by Joyce Meyer
9. Ending Your Day Right: Devotions for Every Evening of the Year by Joyce Meyer
10. Send Yourself Roses: Thoughts on My Life, Love, and Leading Roles by Gloria Feldt and Kathleen Turner

If you’d like to win one, leave a comment… but not just any comment! Leave me a comment recommending a book that you have loved, or think I must read. Also, if you have a particular preference for one of the books listed, be sure to let me know.

I’ll leave this open for comments until June 15.

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Lesson learned: three things you should never say in the fitting room of a clothing store:

1. Are you looking at me? Do you see me? (and, in a really, really bad Robert De Niro) Are YOU lookin’ at ME?
2. Lookit those cheeks, you chubby thing!
3. Peeky-peeky-peeky, I see you!!

I’m sure the woman in the next cubby has never been more relieved to see a woman emerge from a fitting room chattering at her baby.

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There are a lot of wonderful things about mothering a baby not quite four months old. It’s fascinating to watch his personality emerge, bright-eyed and curious and more than a little stubborn. (Fancy that! Who would have guessed it?) It’s equally fascinating to see him growing before my eyes, gaining folds and bursting through footie sleepers each time I blink. And the quest to make the baby laugh has turned into a competitive sport around here, with Beloved as the champion but closely followed by me and even the boys. Lucas loves to laugh, and often at the simplest of gestures.

Considering he’s not quite four months old, he has a pretty impressive arsenal of communication tools. He coos up a storm, talking happily to himself or his hands. He cries with an impressive bellow, and it melts my heart when he sees me coming to give him the attention he is demanding and immediately smiles through his tears. And I had forgotten how much I love the “stick out your tongue” game. I remember playing this with Tristan if not Simon, but Lucas seems to be the champion, and I’m still astonished that it’s a game that can be played with such a young baby. If you stick out your tongue at him, he immediately sticks his tongue back out at you. He’s become so adept at this that it’s become a bit of a salute; when he knows he has your attention, out comes the little pink tongue in a drooley greeting. It’s clear from the sparkle of delighted accomplishment in his eyes that the exchange is intentional, and understood by him as such. I don’t remember how long this phase lasts, but I hope it’s quite a while!

But my very favourite part of mothering this lovely little boy of mine who still wants to be held all of his waking hours and many of his sleeping ones as well? It’s the look, that adoring, worshipful gaze he bestows upon me when I least expect it. He studies my features with intense concentration, as if burning each freckle into his newly-firing synapses, and then a smile sweeps over his dewy face like sunshine on a summer day, and I truly fear my heart might burst. All the injustices of the world are forgiven, all the wrongs are righted, and the universe is a place of blissful joy when I am bathed by the glow of that loving gaze.

How can anyone ever recover from such love? In all my long years of being loved, and I am lucky to say I’ve been loved by the best, nobody has loved me with the shining and silent adoration of my four-month-old son.

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Was it just me, or was that one of the best seasons – and most satisfying finales – of Survivor in a long, long time? And wouldn’t you just LOVE to see Ozzy and Amanda do the Amazing Race together just like Rob and Amber did?

I usually find the first hour and a half of the Survivor finale rather tedious. They tend to recap and rehash just a little bit too much; even with my shoddy memory, I can remember what happened eight weeks ago. Mostly. But I really enjoyed watching it last night, mostly because it was like replaying our lives with Lucas so far.

You might remember that my water broke the morning of the season debut, but Lucas held off arriving until the next day just so we could watch Survivor that night. Seeing Jonny Fairplay and Mary again reminded me of how I’d missed a lot of the details of those earliest episodes as I paced in and out of the room with a wailing babe against my shoulder, trying anything to get him to settle down. By the time Jonathan Penner had to leave the game, we were giving Lucas his extra bottle at night, and he was starting to settle in to a workable routine. By the time Jason found the fake immunity idol, my little angel was sleeping rather reliably (shhhh!) through the night. And by last night’s finale, I could no longer remember what it was like to not have Lucas in our lives. Once again, Survivor and my life as a mother are inextricably intertwined — so it seems plenty appropriate that the Fans versus Faves series ended on Mother’s Day.

Is it just me, or is Jeff Probst getting hotter by the season?

Speaking of celebrity crushes, I’ve finally figured out why I find American Idol’s David Cook so compelling. I said before that I had a crush on him, but even then I knew “crush” was the wrong word. In watching the dual performances last week, I realized why I like David Cook so much: looking at him, I can imagine what my grown-up Tristan might be like. I don’t know what it is, but there is something in his face, his build, and even his demeanor that is so evocative of Tristan that once I noticed it I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

It might be the eye colour. Like Tristan, David’s eyes seem to shift from gray to green to blue. I stole this photo from a fan site. And David is tall and broad-shouldered, like Tristan will be. And he has reddish brown hair that doesn’t really behave. Tristan is genetically predisposed to all these things, thanks to Beloved and I. My father was a professional musician when I was a kid, and Beloved’s cousin was the lead singer of the moderately popular Canadian band, The Tea Party, so he definitely has the potential for some musical chops. The more I think about it, the more similarities there are.

That’s not too weird, is it?

Good thing the nice weather is here. I think I need to get away from the TV…

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3. Survivor Heros vs Villians = AWESOME!

It’s my Mom’s birthday today. I had wanted to write a long and lovely post telling you about all the things that are wonderful about her (and to capture them all, it would be a long post indeed!) but the whole newborn-in-the-house thing coupled with the I’m-brain-dead-from-sleep-deprivation thing, with a heaping helping of mothers-of-newborns-aren’t-supposed-to-get-sick, is playing havoc with my muse. The great thing is, she’d be completely sympathetic to this and just tell me to not worry about it. It’s the thought that counts. And she’d really believe it, too.

If you’ve been reading the blog for any length of time, you know my Mom and I are quite close. It’s wonderful to be at a stage in my life when she can be both my mother and friend. And it’s somewhere between funny and scary how much of a mother she can still be to me, her 38-year-old baby, and how often she comes through for me when I need her for things both large and small. She has been an ideal role model as a mother, and the best of what I am as a mother is directly attributable to her. (The worst, I take responsibility for myself. Either that, or you can blame my Dad!)

A few of the many things I learned from my mother:

• Bullshit baffles brains.
• There is nothing you can’t do. But, you don’t have to do it all.
• Treat everyone with kindness and respect, but pay special attention to the support people in an organization. Make friends with the secretaries, the clerks and the janitors, and your life will be much easier.
• If you love me, buy me things.
• There is no higher law than a mother’s word.
• Corollary: don’t mess with Mom.
• Be easy on yourself. If you are doing the best you can, it’s the best you can do. Don’t expect more from yourself than you would from others.
• If you’ve got it, flaunt it!

I’ve been pecking away at this post in stolen moments all day, and it’s not coming out anything like the tribute I’d like to pay to the most wonderful woman I know. I was thinking about her when I was nursing Lucas just now, and realized that perhaps the most telling thing about my mother and my relationship with her is this: I can’t recall a single time in my life, as a child or a teenager or an adult, when I wished someone else were my mother. No matter whether we were butting heads (and luckily for me, we didn’t do that often) or whether I was misbehaving outright (and because of her, I really don’t think I did that too often either), I always knew – I always know - that my mother loves me dearly and deeply.

My mother is a strong, smart, funny and immensely likeable woman, and I’m fiercely proud to be her daughter. The highest compliment I can pay her is that I hope I do as good a job raising my boys as she (and my Dad) did in raising Sean and me. Looking back, there is nothing I could hope to do to improve my relationship with my mother, and nothing I would ever want her to change about herself. And I hope to be as good of a friend to my boys when they are grown and with families of their own as my mother is to me today.

One of the very best things about my relationship with my mother now, aside from the fact that she is one of my very best friends and confidants and co-conspirators, is watching the boys loving her. I had a great relationship with my grandparents, and hardly a day goes by that I am not grateful that five years ago this month my folks made the decision to move across the province from London to Ottawa to be closer to us. She spoils the boys silly, of course, but she’s earned that right. It’s truly lovely to see her firmly ensconced as the matriarch of a family of the five grandchildren who have appeared over the last six years, a gift that my brother and I have been happy to share.

Happy birthday, Mom! We all love you, more every day.

Related posts (automatically generated):

1. A love letter to my daughter, who will never be
2. Rerun week continues with A Love Letter to My Daughter, Who Will Never Be
3. Pink or blue? Lay your bets!

Wow!!! Thank you all for your sweet words – Beloved and the family and I are as delighted by your joy as we are by the newest little member of our family. It will take a while for me to reorient myself to mothering a newborn (it’s harder than I remember!) but I so loved Mad’s comment about me not missing a blogging day that I had to stop in and say hello. (It was Beloved who posted the photos last night.)

I know y’all are dying to hear the details and I can’t wait to tell the story, but for now you’ll have to wait until baby is willing to be put down or I learn to type faster with one hand!

Oh, and as for his name? We still have no idea!

Related posts (automatically generated):

1. A bloggy year in review
2. The one where she bans Star Wars from the house
3. In which I give up my last morsel of dignity in exchange for blog fodder