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I’ve stumbled upon another one of life’s great mysteries. Like the solution for pi, the divine proportion, and the secret of how they get the caramilk into the chocolate shell, this one will be puzzling humanity for aeons to come.

How did they work it so that it takes exactly one roll of paper towels to soak up the entire contents of a freshly opened bag of milk?

And did you further know that if you hear Simon poking about in the kitchen, followed by a thunk, a splash, an “oh oh”, and a “Hey, my feets wet!” you’ll be well on your way to discovering this ancient mystery for yourself?

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

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

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

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

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

Or:

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

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

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

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

I don’t know what makes me feel worse: that Tristan has had two appointments with the dentist recently; that one of them required a filling (with a second to follow in two weeks); or, that I completely forgot about one of the appointments and didn’t remember it until Beloved called me at work to tell me it had gone well.

I’ve slid from micromanaging the parenting of my children to being an absentee mom. Oh, the guilt.

Poor Tristan; I just don’t know what to do about his teeth. He had a couple of fillings last year, which I attributed to neglectful brushing on our part. After that appointment, I vowed to be more diligent, and we were. Except here we are, a year later, with two more fillings. The dentist assured Beloved that he simply has deep grooves in his teeth, and that’s where the cavities are hiding, but I still feel awful.

When he went for his first fillings last year, he went to a paediatric dentist who used gas to relax him before doing the work, but since he was fine during the exam appointment a few weeks ago, yesterday they just did the fillings in my family dentist’s office.

Beloved said he was a trooper, never squirmed or complained and did exactly what was asked of him. Maybe a fear of dentists is a nurture thing instead of a nature thing after all! (Sorry, Twinmomplusone – nothing personal, but I have a deep and abiding fear of dental procedures.) Beloved was highly impressed with the dentist herself, a new partner of my usual dentist. She told Tristan that she was putting the tooth to ‘sleep’, and that the cotton balls were pillows for the tooth to snooze on, and that she was cleaning out the ‘sugar bugs’. (That last one would have freaked me out, but it seemed to work for Tristan.)

Toothbrushing is an ongoing source of drama at our house, at least with the preschoolers. They both start out willingly enough, but I can’t get either of them to keep their mouths open long enough, or really give their teeth the scrubbing they need. There is much flailing and wriggling, a few threats, a lot of pouting, and some tears – every. single. time. we brush their teeth.

We’ve tried creative solutions, like telling the story of Tommy the Toothbrush and his visit to molar land. We’ve tried pinning them to the floor and just forcing them into submission. And we’ve tried most points on the spectrum in between. They always resist, they always complain, and it’s always annoying. We’ve just bought Tristan a new Spiderman electric toothbrush, and I’ll probably pick one up for Simon, too. Despite all that, though, toothbrushing is a battle of wills and tempers every single time.

If y’all are having the same struggles, I won’t feel so bad. (Hey look, misery does love company!) Any thoughts on how to make this a little easier?

The vision: celebrating our sons’ baptism in a gorgeous old cathedral, hushed voices echoing off vaulted ceilings, sun streaming through stained-glass windows, wooden pews buffed to a dull gleam, well-behaved boys mesmerized by a captivating sermon.

The reality: a touching but blissfully informal ceremony on plastic stackable chairs in the “gymnasium / cafetorium”-cum-church, punctuated by Simon asking every three or four minutes just loud enough for his voice to carry across the entire crowd, “We go now?”

The vision: returning to our sparkling clean house with my folks and my children’s godparents and their adorable daughter to snack on coffee and cake and delicate little sandwiches with cucumber garnish on the back deck in dappled sunshine.

The reality: ten frenzied minutes of throwing clutter out of the main part of the house just before we left, stopping on the way home to pick up a dozen and a half doughtnuts at Timmys, and sending Beloved out for takeout Kentucky Fried Chicken when noon rolls around and there is nothing even remotely suitable for lunch in the house.

You know what, though? It was perfect, even with the stacking chairs and the KFC**. The boys weren’t angels, but they were adorable in matching white GAP polo shirts and tan cargo pants and sandals. Amelia, the 16 month old daughter of the boys’ godparents, was angelic in a way that makes my ovaries pop with covetousness. Father John was kindly and patient didn’t seem to notice that Simon squirmed and wriggled incessantly and Tristan sang under his breath through most of the readings. Simon provided comic relief with his ongoing query of “We go now?” and by excitedly hopping up on the little stool in front of the baptismal font and declaring, “It’s my turn now!” after watching his brother being baptized.

Warning: sentimental moment pending.

Despite my misgivings and concerns about the Church as a whole, I found myself just a little verklempt standing at the baptismal font, basking for a moment in the spontaneous applause of the gathered families as Father John pronounced Tristan and Simon as baptized. (Not only were we in the front row, but we were first at every step. So much room for possible disaster, and yet it all went well. Another blessing!)

I may have trouble with a lot of the teachings of the Church, but I do believe, in my own way, in God, and in community, and especially in family. We made the right choice in baptizing the boys, even if the path to the baptismal font was a little convoluted.

I just have to learn to stop thinking about things so much.

** What is it about KFC? I spend months thinking of it purely toxic food, then somewhere a switch gets flipped and I start craving it. And over the course of another couple of months, the craving builds, and the whole time there is a little voice in my head that says, “Don’t do it. You’ll regret it.” And then I start talking aloud about wanting KFC, kind of like a little test to see if hearing it out loud will somehow alter the craving, and there is the voice of Beloved, who has seen this cycle more than a few times, saying, “Don’t do it. You’ll regret it.” But the craving builds up to an obsession, and I break down and order the damn KFC, and oh that greasy, salty crispy goodness, and the fries smothered in gravy and ketchup… and about a half an hour later and for the next three days, a grumbling, greasy bellyache and a vow to never, ever eat that crap again. And yet, a few months later…

Filched from Angry Pregnant Lawyer and Phantom Scribbler:

Which Princess Bride Character are You?
this quiz was made by mysti

Isn’t The Princess Bride just one of the best movies ever? Certainly, it’s one of the most quote-worthy ones. I was in high school when it came out in theatres, and we were so blown away we went back to see it the next night, too. I’ve seen it dozens of times since then – when we learned in our prenatal classes that the labour and delivery rooms at our hospital had VCRs, this is the movie we chose to bring with us. Sadly, we couldn’t get the VCR to work. Too bad, too, because with a 27 hour labour, during which I didn’t sleep at all, there were a few lulls that I would have loved to pass with this wonderful movie!

Coincidence? Yesterday, they released two new DVD sets of The Princess Bride – the Buttercup Edition, and the Dread Pirate Roberts Edition. From what I can tell, they’re the same set with different covers. Given my score above, I guess it will have to be the Buttercup Edition I add to my wish list, because this is one movie that I must own on DVD.

There are only a few movies I’d buy in DVD format to duplicate my VHS copy – Star Wars, Bull Durham, and this one are the only ones so far, and I’ll invest to upgrade the Indiana Jones series some day.

What movie favourites will you continue to modernize as technology progresses?

Simon, at the grand age of 28 months, has decided to go from one three-hour nap in the afternoon to no nap. In a classic case of bad timing, this is coinciding with Beloved being home with the boys almost full-time. I’m not even going to bother with a description – you can imagine what it’s like.

Saturday and Sunday, I tried all the tricks in my arsenal to get him to take his nap. A tiny, childish part of me figured that Beloved just wasn’t trying hard enough to get Simon down, that’s why he couldn’t get him to nap. Right. Not so much.

For at least two hours each day, Simon was in his crib (yes, we’re still dragging our heels on that transition, too – give me a break, we just retired the highchair yesterday) in varying states of wakeful agitation. He would lie peacefully for stretches, which I realize in retrospect was to lull us into a false sense of accomplishment, and then move through the spectrum of annoyance all the way to raging tantrum and back again.

Sitting on the top stair, listening to him pitch a wailing tantrum on the other side of his door and hoping it was a short-lived prelude to an actual nap (idealist to the end, I am), I was thinking back to the early days, and the first times I had to let the boys cry themselves to sleep. Letting my tender, innocent ten month old baby cry for five minutes seemed like such a horrendously hard thing to do, but in retrospect teaching the boys to fall asleep on their own was one of the best things we could have done. (Hmmm, best choice = hardest road. Who knew?)

Tristan, always my good sleeper, was outraged at being left to cry for the first few nights but was happily falling asleep on his own within a week. Simon, who taught me what sleep deprivation really means by not sleeping more than three hours at a stretch well past his first year, was a lot more reluctant to be ‘sleep trained’. The first few nights that he cried himself to sleep, he continued to do that post-hysterical-crying hitching thing long after he fell asleep, and it took many days of heart-hardening resolve to convince him to fall asleep on his own.

I give a lot of credence to our eventual success with the infamous “cry it out” method to Richard Ferber’s classic sleep book, Solve Your Child’s Sleep Problems. I hated the idea of letting the babies cry at the time (anybody remember that episode of Mad About You on this? I thought they were nuts.) but after reading everything on the market at the time, Ferber was the only thing that made sense, and it worked for us.

The weekend Citizen carried a great reprint from Slate magazine (click through and read it, it’s a great piece) about the re-issuance Solve Your Child’s Sleep Problems, where Ferber clarifies his position on sleep training. I loved this article, mostly because it perfectly encapsulates everything I learned from Ferber. And I’m hugely relieved that he has not, in fact, recanted his original advice. In retrospect I realize that my own personal discipline style is strongly rooted in his “you might not like it but I’m the boss and I know best” style. From Ferber I learned to stand up to my children’s willfulness, and that’s probably one of the most valuable parenting lessons I’ve learned.

When I heard Tristan upstairs ‘reading’ to Simon, I thought I’d creep upstairs with the camera and catch the moment. I should have known it wouldn’t last, but it was cute for the half a second or so before they started misbehaving.

Or click through to view it on YouTube.

Actually, it’s a good capture of life with the boys in a microcosm – adorable blending seamlessly with mischevious, until they get caught. The book they are ‘reading’ is, appropriately enough, Five Little Monkeys Jumping on the Bed.

Have you heard about Project Gutenberg? They’re one of the oldest purveyors of free online books on the Internet, and to celebrate their anniversary this year, they’ve teamed with the World eBook Library Consortia to create the World eBook Fair. Starting in July, they’ll be providing free (FREE!) access to over 300,000 e-books.

According to an article in the Chicago Tribune, “The Gutenberg books, typed and scanned into computers by thousands of volunteers, mostly are those that are no longer protected by copyright. They include fiction, nonfiction and reference books and will be available for worldwide readers in about 100 languages.” You can also download audio e-books read by a human or computer, and (for some reason I love this the best) digitized sheet music.

The Gutenberg site lists the top 100 downloaded books and authors in the last day, last week and last month. Here are the most downloaded books this month (parentheses are the actual number of downloads):

1. The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci — Complete by Leonardo da Vinci (16365)
2. Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great – Volume 01 by Elbert Hubbard (9540)
3. Hand Shadows to Be Thrown upon the Wall by Henry Bursill (8950)
4. Kamasutra by Vatsyayana (8649)
5. Fifteen Thousand Useful Phrases by Grenville Kleiser (8637)
6. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (7589)
7. Great Britain and Her Queen by Annie E. Keeling (7463)
8. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (7457)
9. How to Speak and Write Correctly by Joseph Devlin (6534)
10. The Art of War by 6th cent. B.C. Sunzi (6163)

While I think the whole project is most excellent in theory, I’m not sure about the whole “e-book” thing. I’m a very tactile person. I judge a book not just by its cover but also by its font, by its paperweight, and its heft. And the idea of reading through a palm pilot or a crackberry or on the computer monitor doesn’t have much appeal to me. I may, in fact, be the most tech savvy of the Luddite clan.

What do you think? Have you tried e-books? Would you pay for a subscrition or for access to e-books, or like me, are you suspicious of even the free kind? Could lying on the beach with an e-book ever rival doing it with a tattered paperback? And if we all move to e-books eventually, where will I stash all my Canadian Tire money – my summertime bookmark of choice?

Talk to me about babysitters.

The only babysitters we’ve ever left the boys with have been my mother, our daycare provider, the daughter of my cousin (while her mother was in the house) and once, I think, an adult friend of ours. I’ve never hired the teenager from down the street, or even used a (fee-based) referral service like www.canadiansitters.ca. While the boys love to visit their Granny, I am always afraid of imposing, or that they are too much to handle. (Sidebar: how strange is it that we get to a certain age and begin to mother our parents?)

The eleven year old girl next door told me about five times last summer that she had completed her babysitting course, but I’m just not confident in her ability to keep my boys out of trouble, let alone do something like put them to bed. There’s a family situation back story, too, but mostly she just seems so … so… so young!

This seems hypocritical even to me. I was babysitting at that age. Heck, when I was 13 I not only babysat a two- and four-year old sibling set for the March break, but brought them downtown on the bus and bought some shoes for them, all at the mother’s request. I was maybe 11 or 12 the few times I babysat a six-month-old baby down the street – I remember calling my parents because no matter what I did, that baby would not stop crying.

Even though we live in a family-friendly community, aside from the young girl next door I don’t know anybody in the babysitting demographic. I guess I could put up a poster on the mailbox. How do you find a babysitter?

And then there is the minefield of compensation. The registration page for the Canadian Sitters service says, “A three month subscription to access the Canadiansitter.ca database costs $39.95. This approximately equates to the expense of a baby sitter for just one night.” Yowza! Is that right? Forty bucks just to get a babysitter for the night? Sure, it was 20 years ago, but I used to get two dollars an hour!

(Pardon me, I ‘m still reeling a bit that my babysitting days are 20 years behind me. Crap, I’m old.)

I’ve heard of babysitting cooperatives, where the parents trade nights out, but I don’t really know too many families with kids in my neighbourhood. (Yes, we live in the most family-friendly neighbourhood in the city. Yes, we are social recluses. All my friends live in the computer. I’m hoping being part of Tristan’s school community will forge at least a few new ties for us.)

What’s it like where you are? What’s the right age for a babysitter and how do you find one? How much is this going to cost? Should we just resign ourselves to waiting for the new releases on DVD until the boys are old enough to fend for themselves?

Yesterday was just so jam-packed that even with two posts, I didn’t have a chance to reflect on everything worth saying. Consider this the spill-over post.

Thank you for your votes on how we should spend our summer vacation. Ya know, living my life according to Interweb plebiscite has a certain appeal. I’ll be consulting you for input on our life decisions much more frequently.

In the end, Beloved and I decided to skip the road trip to St Thomas and TtFTE in July. I am, quite frankly, hugely relieved. If anybody out there would like a deal on four great tickets to see the sold-out Thomas the Tank live in St Thomas (20 minutes from London) on July 22, drop me a note.

Yesterday was also a day of weird coincidences and convergences. Some funny, some profound, and some a little sad. For instance, you have to laugh that the calendar date for the first time I wandered back in to a church since (thoughtful pause, head scratching…) well, in at least a couple of years, was 6-6-6. Snicker.

Poor Tristan. In my ongoing crash course on God for preschoolers, I was explaining to him that we were going to the church, and the church is where you talk to God, and that we were going to talk to the priest about making Tristan and Simon a part of God’s family. Then we left him with my parents while we went to the ‘how to have your child baptized’ seminar. Poor Tristan wasted no time telling my mother that he liked his old family, and didn’t want a new one. Oops!

So then we’re driving to the church high school, and you know what song is on the radio? ‘Counting Blue Cars’ by Dishwalla, with this lyric:

And ask many questions
Like children often do
We said,tell me all your thoughts on god?
cause I would really like to meet her.
And ask her why were who we are.
Tell me all your thoughts on god,
Cause I am on my way to see her.

And you know what the strangest part is? By the end of the night, I was feeling pretty keen about the whole Catholic thing. I was relieved to see that for the boys’ baptism, we will be in the company of lots of other lazy and / or indecisive parents of toddlers, preschoolers and even a seven-year old – in fact, not a mewling newborn in the lot.

The priest, Father John, was one of those kindly, soft sorts of fellows to whom you really do want to entrust your spiritual upbringing. I got to thinking maybe we’d even go to church every now and then, and maybe I’d even (gasp!) sign up for one of their committees. I left the church high school feeling warm and fuzzy, but I just about fell out of my shoes when Beloved turned to me and said, ‘You know, maybe I’ll take my confirmation sacrament one of these days.’ You think I’m cynical about the church? I’m PollyAnna compared to him.

And then I wake up today and I hear that yesterday the Catholic Church issued yet another sweeping condemnation of abortion, birth control, same sex marriage and … reproductive technologies like artificial insemination and IVF. More weird convergences – day one of my frostie mock cycle happens the same day I think that maybe I will give the church another try or at least an open mind, and is also the day the Church issues this closed-minded, archaic and out-of-touch epistle.

All I can do is shake my head and shrug my shoulders.