Category: Uncategorized

Continuing with our all-memes-all-the-time theme… As seen at Decomposition and Mystery Mommy.

Are you spoiled? (My initial answer before completing the meme is a resounding YES!! And I like it that way!) You are if you can check of 40 of the following:

Do you have…

 your own cell phone (we have one for the family, but I don’t have my own)
 a television in your bedroom
x an iPod (not an iPod, but an MP3 player)
 a photo printer
 your own phone line
 TiVo or a generic digital video recorder
X high-speed internet access (i.e., not dialup)
 a surround sound system in bedroom
 DVD player in bedroom
 at least a hundred DVDs
 a childfree bathroom
X your own in-house office
x a pool (12′ seasonal kiddie pool)
 a guest house
 a game room
X a queen-size bed
 a stocked bar (does three bottles of red wine and half a bottle of something called firewater count?)
X a working dishwasher
 an icemaker
X a working washer and dryer
 more than 20 pairs of shoes
 at least ten things from a designer store (is Roots a designer store? If so, my answer is yes. I am all Roots, all the time. Cell phone, purse, clothes for me and the boys. It’s all a little embarrasing, actually.)
 expensive sunglasses
 framed original art (not lithographs or prints)
 Egyptian cotton sheets or towels
X a multi-speed bike
X a gym membership
 large exercise equipment at home
 your own set of golf clubs
 a pool table
 a tennis court
 local access to a lake, large pond, or the sea
 your own pair of skis
 enough camping gear for a weekend trip in an isolated area
 a boat
 a jet sk
 a neighborhood committee membership
 a beach house or a vacation house/cabin
 wealthy family members
 two or more family cars
X a walk-in closet or pantry (closets)
X a yard
 a hammock
 a personal trainer
X good credit
X expensive jewelry (define expensive? Real diamonds and pearls and rubies? Yes. Worth keeping in a safe deposit box? No.)
 a designer bag that required being on a waiting list to get (there’s waiting lists for designer bags???)
 at least $100 cash in your possession right now (snort – I had to fish money out of my desk drawer to buy a sandwich)
X more than two credit cards bearing your name
 a stock portfolio
 a passport (expired last year)
 a horse
 a trust fund
X private medical insurance (additional drug coverage through work)
X a college degree, and no outstanding student loans (but Beloved is still paying $400/month)

Do you:
 shop for non-needed items for yourself (like clothes, jewelry, electronics) at least once a week  do your regular grocery shopping at high-end or specialty stores (is Farm Boy a specialty store?)
 pay someone else to clean your house, do dishes, or launder your clothes (not counting dry-cleaning) (I wish!!)
X go on weekend mini-vacations (these are the *only* kind of vacations we go on)
 send dinners back with every flaw
 wear perfume or cologne (not body spray)
X regularly get your hair styled or nails done in a salon
 have a job but don’t need the money OR  stay at home with little financial sacrifice
 pay someone else to cook your meals (again, I wish!)
X pay someone else to watch your children or walk your dogs (what does daycare have to do with being spoiled?)
 regularly pay someone else to drive you (does the bus count?)
 expect a gift after you fight with your partner (hmmmm….)

Are you:
 an only child
 married/partnered to a wealthy person
X baffled/surprised when you don’t get your way (who, me?)

Have you:
 been on a cruise
X traveled out of the country
 met a celebrity (define celebrity? define met? I once cornered Margaret Atwood in a bathroom for an autograph, and shook Mikhail Gorbachev’s hand… I’m going to leave this one as a blank.)
X been to the Caribbean (I was nine. Barbados.)
X been to Europe (Holland, Germany, Austria, Italy, France in 1995, then Paris on our honeymoon.)
 BEEN TO HONG KONG
 been to Hawaii
 been to New York
 eaten at the space needle in Seattle
 been to the Mall of America
X been on the Eiffel tower in Paris (twice!)
 been on the Statue of Liberty in New York
 moved more than three times because you wanted to
 dined with local political figures
X been to both the Atlantic coast and the Pacific coast (but in different countries)

Did you:
X go to another country for your honeymoon
 hire a professional photographer for your wedding or party
 take riding or swimming lessons as a child
 attend private school
 have a Sweet 16 birthday party thrown for you

Twenty-six. As unspoiled as the virgin wilderness! (I know, I’m having a hard time keeping a straight face too.) To paraphrase Andrea, the Internet has decreed me as not spoiled, and so it shall be known forevermore.

And that sound you hear? It’s Beloved’s and my mother’s eyeballs rolling in their sockets.

Oh look, it’s another meme from Phantom Scribbler. Plus, I got tagged by Renée of Froggie Mom on the ‘weird facts about me’ meme, and these two dovetailed nicely.

Accent: Not that I know of, but when I first moved here I was told I had a Toronto accent. Eh?

Booze: Not usually. I’ll have a glass of wine or a beer on the odd social occasion, but alcohol is a big migraine trigger for me, and a three-day hangover is rarely worth it. My brother is slowly educating me on the world of good red wines.

Chore I hate: washing lettuce. (Really, I despise washing lettuce. Don’t mind washing peppers, or cukes, or whatever, but I really hate washing lettuce.) Cleaning the backyard of poop-dogs in the spring. Ironing. Making the bed.

Dog or cat: yes. One of each. I am admittedly a dog person, and not nearly so cruel to my pets as some people might have you believe.

Essential electronics: laptop. TV. Coffe maker. Hairdryer. Simon’s CD player for lullabyes.

Favorite cologne(s): eau de fresh-washed preschooler (tied for first with eau de fresh-washed Beloved).

Gold or silver: yes please. Rubies and diamonds, too. (My wedding rings are white gold with yellow gold detail, and my heirloom ring from my mother is white gold with a ruby.) But silver looks nice on me, too, especially in the summer.

Hometown: I was born in London, Ontario but after 18 years I guess I now call Ottawa home.

Insomnia: Sometimes. But not lately.

Job title: Senior communications advisor.

Kids: Yep. Two now, maybe more by this time next year???

Living arrangements: nuclear family with grandparents the perfect distance of a 20-minute walk away.

Most admirable trait: Infernal optimist.

Number of sexual partners: You really want to know? This is personal stuff – promise you won’t think me a tramp, okay? Three.

Overnight hospital stays: Two, one for each baby. Two nights for Tristan, one for Simon. Trips to the ER? Countless.

Phobias: This could be a whole post unto itself. Executive summary: things that grow (weeds, some more than others), things that rot (mould), things with wings or more than four legs (insects – again, some more than others; spiders are fine, but junebugs terrify me), things that go bump in the night, inanimate objects coming to life, lightswitches that don’t work…

Quote: “My theory on housework is, if the item doesn’t multiply, smell, catch fire, or block the refrigerator door, let it be. No one else cares. Why should you?” (Erma Bombeck)

Religion: Recovering Catholic.

Siblings: One brother, five years younger and six inches taller than me.

Time I wake up: Between five-thirty and six. Big improvements since daylight savings time, so much so I’m reluctant to see it in type!!

Unusual talent or skill: I can clap with one hand.

Vegetable I refuse to eat: Hmmm, nothing comes to mind. There are plenty of which I’m not overly fond, but I don’t think I’d outright refuse to eat any vegetable.

Worst habit: I leave things wherever I happen to be when I lose interest in them or get distracted by something else (as opposed to putting them away), and then become pathologically oblivious to them. I also hate clutter. This is a very bad combination.

X-rays: Teeth. Lungs for pneumonia. CAT scan for headaches when I was a teen. Probably various limbs during trips to the ER when I was a kid, but nothing stands out in my memory.

Yummy foods I make: Guacamole (my mother and Simon fight over it). Chicken fajitas on the barbeque. Peppered steak brochettes with grilled veggies.

Zodiac sign: If you’ve read more than three of my posts, this is almost as obvious as the question about how many kids I have. Leo, of course.

Thank goodness for memes on a bad day. Saw this orgininally at Phantom Scribbler and Mystery Mommy, but it’s been everywhere. It’s from this list of “movies you just kind of figure everybody ought to have seen in order to have any sort of informed discussion about movies.” (Looks like, as usual, I know enough to fake it but not credibly. Again.) The ones I’ve seen are in bold.

“2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968) Stanley Kubrick
“The 400 Blows” (1959) Francois Truffaut
“8 1/2” (1963) Federico Fellini
“Aguirre, the Wrath of God” (1972) Werner Herzog
“Alien” (1979) Ridley Scott
“All About Eve” (1950) Joseph L. Mankiewicz
“Annie Hall” (1977) Woody Allen
“Bambi” (1942) Disney
“Battleship Potemkin” (1925) Sergei Eisenstein
“The Best Years of Our Lives” (1946) William Wyler
“The Big Red One” (1980) Samuel Fuller
“The Bicycle Thief” (1949) Vittorio De Sica
“The Big Sleep” (1946) Howard Hawks
“Blade Runner” (1982) Ridley Scott
“Blowup” (1966) Michelangelo Antonioni
“Blue Velvet” (1986) David Lynch
“Bonnie and Clyde” (1967) Arthur Penn
“Breathless” (1959) Jean-Luc Godard
“Bringing Up Baby” (1938) Howard Hawks
“Carrie” (1975) Brian DePalma
“Casablanca” (1942) Michael Curtiz
“Un Chien Andalou” (1928) Luis Bunuel & Salvador Dali
“Children of Paradise” / “Les Enfants du Paradis” (1945) Marcel Carne
“Chinatown” (1974) Roman Polanski
“Citizen Kane” (1941) Orson Welles
“A Clockwork Orange” (1971) Stanley Kubrick
“The Crying Game” (1992) Neil Jordan
“The Day the Earth Stood Still” (1951) Robert Wise
“Days of Heaven” (1978) Terence Malick
“Dirty Harry” (1971) Don Siegel
“The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” (1972) Luis Bunuel
“Do the Right Thing” (1989) Spike Lee
“La Dolce Vita” (1960) Federico Fellini
“Double Indemnity” (1944) Billy Wilder
“Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” (1964) Stanley Kubrick
“Duck Soup” (1933) Leo McCarey
“E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial” (1982) Steven Spielberg
“Easy Rider” (1969) Dennis Hopper
“The Empire Strikes Back” (1980) Irvin Kershner
“The Exorcist” (1973) William Friedkin
“Fargo” (1995) Joel & Ethan Coen
“Fight Club” (1999) David Fincher (one of my favourite movies)
“Frankenstein” (1931) James Whale
“The General” (1927) Buster Keaton & Clyde Bruckman
“The Godfather,” “The Godfather, Part II” (1972, 1974) Francis Ford Coppola
“Gone With the Wind” (1939) Victor Fleming
“GoodFellas” (1990) Martin Scorsese
“The Graduate” (1967) Mike Nichols
“Halloween” (1978) John Carpenter
“A Hard Day’s Night” (1964) Richard Lester
“Intolerance” (1916) D.W. Griffith
“It’s A Gift” (1934) Norman Z. McLeod
“It’s a Wonderful Life” (1946) Frank Capra
“Jaws” (1975) Steven Spielberg
“The Lady Eve” (1941) Preston Sturges
“Lawrence of Arabia” (1962) David Lean
“M” (1931) Fritz Lang
“Mad Max 2” / “The Road Warrior” (1981) George Miller
“The Maltese Falcon” (1941) John Huston
“The Manchurian Candidate” (1962) John Frankenheimer
“Metropolis” (1926) Fritz Lang
“Modern Times” (1936) Charles Chaplin
“Monty Python and the Holy Grail” (1975) Terry Jones & Terry Gilliam
“Nashville” (1975) Robert Altman
“The Night of the Hunter” (1955) Charles Laughton
“Night of the Living Dead” (1968) George Romero
“North by Northwest” (1959) Alfred Hitchcock
“Nosferatu” (1922) F.W. Murnau
“On the Waterfront” (1954) Elia Kazan
“Once Upon a Time in the West” (1968) Sergio Leone
“Out of the Past” (1947) Jacques Tournier
“Persona” (1966) Ingmar Bergman
“Pink Flamingos” (1972) John Waters
“Psycho” (1960) Alfred Hitchcock
“Pulp Fiction” (1994) Quentin Tarantino
“Rashomon” (1950) Akira Kurosawa
“Rear Window” (1954) Alfred Hitchcock
“Rebel Without a Cause” (1955) Nicholas Ray
“Red River” (1948) Howard Hawks
“Repulsion” (1965) Roman Polanski
“Rules of the Game” (1939) Jean Renoir
“Scarface” (1932) Howard Hawks
“The Scarlet Empress” (1934) Josef von Sternberg
“Schindler’s List” (1993) Steven Spielberg (really, I must get around to watching this)
“The Searchers” (1956) John Ford
“The Seven Samurai” (1954) Akira Kurosawa
“Singin’ in the Rain” (1952) Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly
“Some Like It Hot” (1959) Billy Wilder
“A Star Is Born” (1954) George Cukor
“A Streetcar Named Desire” (1951) Elia Kazan
“Sunset Boulevard” (1950) Billy Wilder
“Taxi Driver” (1976) Martin Scorsese
“The Third Man” (1949) Carol Reed
“Tokyo Story” (1953) Yasujiro Ozu
“Touch of Evil” (1958) Orson Welles
“The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” (1948) John Huston
“Trouble in Paradise” (1932) Ernst Lubitsch
“Vertigo” (1958) Alfred Hitchcock
“West Side Story” (1961) Jerome Robbins/Robert Wise
“The Wild Bunch” (1969) Sam Peckinpah
“The Wizard of Oz” (1939) Victor Fleming

I gotta admit, as a pop-culture junkie I expected to have seen more of these. And so many of them I’ve seen parts of, even can recite scenes from, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen the whole movie.

I’d list Empire Strikes Back, Fight Club and any Monty Python from this list as my favourites. I’m surprised Bull Durham isn’t on here – I think it’s a star among sports movies. Are your favourite movies in here?

It’s National Organ Donation Week here in Canada. I had a post on the topic half written before I realized I was repeating myself nearly verbatim from last year. (Those of you who know me well are of course shocked and scandalized to think I would repeat a story I have told once or twice or thrice before.)

So, I’ll wait here a minute while you go read that post from last year, and then you come on back and we’ll talk some more. Go on, really – I just re-read it myself and it’s a pretty good post. It’s about my dad, and his liver transplant in 2001, when I was about five months pregnant with Tristan. And if you’ve got a little bit of extra time, read this wrenching story of a five-year-old girl in Illinois named Annika who has endured two liver transplants, and will probably need a third.

In case you’re in a hurry and you only pretended to click on the link, here’s the important bits.

In 2003, 250 people died in Canada while waiting for waiting for new organs.

In the United States, 17 people die each day waiting for an organ transplant.

In 2003, just over 1,700 organ transplants were performed in Canada.

At the end of 2004, over 4,000 people were on an organ donation list in Canada.

All you have to do is sign an organ donor card (here’s the Canadian and American versions for you) and tell your family what you want. Yes, it can be that simple. If you want to do more, and you’re in the Ottawa area, join the living green ribbon campaign on Wednesday on Parliament Hill. I hope to be there.

Last night, my folks invited us over for dinner. The boys had run off downstairs, and I asked my dad if I could talk about his transplant on my blog. We sat and talked for the better part of an hour about the chronology – was it 1995 or 1996 that he started getting really sick? – and the details. It seems like another lifetime, the bad times when my dad was sick.

We talked about the false alarms. He had been on the list for a liver transplant for a year or so when the first call came. They waited for hours, my mother and father, having already been admitted to the hospital but then left to wait as the hours ticked by. They were told that the donor had hepatitis C, like my dad, but they had to wait to find out whether the liver would be too damaged by the disease to transplant. After hours of waiting and anticipation, they were told to go home. But wait! As my dad got dressed again and prepared to leave the hospital, they were stopped and told to wait yet again. They weren’t sure yet – maybe the liver was still good. For three more hours they waited alone in the hospital room before word finally reached them that the liver was not viable.

The second time they got a call, they were told my dad was the back-up recipient and would receive the liver only if the intended recipient couldn’t make it in from Thunder Bay in time. This time, they didn’t even admit him to the hospital. The recipient made it on time, and my parents went home, again, to wait.

We discussed last night, from the safe distance of four and a half years and 600 km, how the liver disease was horrible to endure, how the waiting and the not knowing were agonizing, but most of all how the hope was crushing. In his case, the fourth time was the charm. The fourth call came, and the liver was healthy, and the transplant was done. When they removed my dad’s liver, they found it riddled with cancer. It had been a ticking time bomb of cancerous cells.

Last night, after a reflective discussion about the days of my father’s sickness and transplant, I listened to Simon’s belly laugh as Papa Lou played with him. I watched my father’s eyes shine as he laughed right back at Simon’s antics. It was a moment, a perfect moment, the joy of my father and my son loving each other, and it was a gift. A gift from a stranger we will never know.

Imagine if it were your father, your wife, your son or daughter, your friend. Imagine watching them waste away, knowing that a call could come at any moment to rescue them, with the grace of God and a surgical team, from death itself. And imagine how you would feel listening for a call that does not come.

Discuss organ donation with your family. Sign a donor card. Give the gift of life.

When Beloved and I moved in together, way back in 1995, he came with baggage in the form of two slightly neurotic cats. The skittish tabby was Tiny (in name only) and the fierce, ill-tempered black one was Ben.

Ben and Tiny had been with Beloved for a couple of years before I came along and bumped them down the totem pole of Beloved’s affections. I still remember one of the first times I visited, having Ben stand on my lap and butt his head against me as I sat next to Beloved on the couch. “Awww, he likes me!” I said, having been forewarned of his tendency to hate everyone except Beloved. It was only after a few minutes that I realized he was not so much being affectionate as trying to shove me out of the way and away from Beloved. It was a moment that would come to define our relationship.

When we lived in a little two bedroom apartment perched in the attic of an old house in the Glebe, Ben would wake us up every single day between three and four in the morning, yowling for breakfast. You didn’t walk past Ben too quickly, or he would try to sink his teeth into your achilles heel on the way by. My friends took great joy in baiting him, because it didn’t take much to turn him into a hissing, spitting ball of angry black fur.

That’s why when Beloved and I got married and moved into a town house and I could finally get the dog I had been dreaming of for years, I didn’t have a lot of problem relegating the cats to the finished basement family room / office when the dog and the cats proved incompatible. We tried over the years to integrate them, but Ben’s fierceness coupled with the fact that we were enjoying not being yowled awake hours before the first sparrow’s chirp eased our guilt about how this integration never seemed to work out. And so the cats dropped another notch down the totem pole.

And within a couple of years after Katie the golden-retriever/shepherd mix arrived, the boys followed… dropping the hapless cats another couple of notches down the family totem pole. I bet you didn’t know totem poles even had basements.

The cats have always been well-cared for, and had each other for company in the ‘cat cave’, as we came to call the basement. One Christmas we returned from a brief visit with my folks in London to find Ben lethargic and obviously sick, with mucus around his anus. It was New Years Eve, and the emergency appointment to the vet ended up costing us more than $700… to have the vet shave Ben’s ass, do a few tests, and tell us that his illness was likely gastrointestinal upset as a result of a new food we were trying.

Both cats were fat, Ben especially. At his largest, he was 18 lbs. That’s why when he started dropping weight in the last year, we knew something was up. Then a few months ago, he started licking bare patches into his fur. But he was still feisty and spry, and although we suspected his days were numbered, as long as he seemed content (by Ben’s standards, anyway), so were we.

That changed yesterday. It was obvious he was suddenly in pain. His feet slid out from under him and he just lay on the floor before getting up. Beloved brought him to the vet, who could without invasive testing diagnose more than one ailment, which probably still did not account for his pain and obvious lethargy. We could do more tests, we could try a pill-a-day for the rest of his life (those of you who own angry cats can imagine how much fun this would be for the cat, let alone the person trying to do it), but none of these things would be guaranteed to make an improvement. He was fifteen years old. It was time to let him go.

He wasn’t my cat, despite the fact that we lived together for more than ten years. He was, to the end, Beloved’s cat, and it’s for Beloved that my heart aches.

As I said, the cats lived in the basement, and while Beloved or I were often downstairs (the computer was down there, and Beloved’s office) the boys only came down occassionally, so much so that they often confused which cat was Ben and which was Tiny. When Beloved came home from the vet without Ben, we decided to leave the door open and let Tiny join us upstairs if he so chose. He can fit through the baby gate to the basement stairs while the dog cannot, and he spent much of yesterday on the stairs, not courageous enough to come all the way up.

Yesterday, Tristan was aware that Beloved had taken Ben to the vet, but we had been evasive on exactly what had happened. We said that Ben wasn’t coming back, but Tristan didn’t seem overly concerned. He was, however, tickled at the idea of Tiny coming upstairs and spent quite a while near the stairs, coaxing him up. You can imagine why Tiny was reluctant, with Tristan, Simon and Katie as a welcoming committee on the far side of the gate!

This morning, we had all just tumbled out of bed and into the living room when Tristan asked when Ben was coming home. The need for honesty caught up with me, and I told him, “Ben died, honey. He died.” To my surprise and regret, Tristan began to cry. I hadn’t expected him to grasp the concept so quickly, or with such empathy. He cried for a few minutes, gentle tears running down his cheeks, while Beloved and I tried with choked voices to combine platitudes with honesty to reassure him.

The short attention-span of the preschooler is sometimes a gift, and Tristan was soon more interested in coaxing Tiny upstairs than in mourning Ben. A few times, he asked a version of “when is Ben coming back”, and one more time he cried when he grasped the finality of it. I found myself invoking God, and heaven, because they are comforting ideas and at least make the concept of death manageable and bearable, especially for a four-year-old.

Good-bye, Ben. I promise to take good care of our Beloved for you.

There are now two stories already attached to this little book. The first is from Marla, called The Very Long Tale of How Marla is Offering the Tale of Peter Rabbit with a Few Other Tales Thrown In Because Marla Finds Brevity Painful

The second story is from me. Yesterday, I realized I had almost missed the deadline to buy my raffle tickets, and while I was at work, I pulled out my credit card and very surreptitiously made my donation. I was just putting my credit card back into my wallet when my boss’s boss came into my cubicle, startling the holy hell out of me and catching me red-handed conducting Internet commerce on the company’s computer, and proceeded to ask me whether I had bought a 50/50 ticket from our social committee that day, because the ticket sold before his was the winner. Sure enough, as I had been buying my raffle tickets, karma took note and I won more than $100!

So buy a raffle ticket today… it’s good karma! And check out the other cool things up for raffle, too!

Silken Laumann is a Canadian Olympic medalist , national sport hero and, more importantly, mother to two kids, age six and eight. She’s here in Ottawa promoting a new book called Child’s Play: Rediscovering the Joy of Play in Our Families and Communities. One of her key messages caught me by surprise, coming from a former professional althlete: take your kids out of organized sports. [Edited to add: according to an e-mail I received from Silken’s Active Kids, the Citizen actually attributed this idea incorrectly. The e-mail stated: “Silken is not suggesting that we pull our children out of organised sport. Silken is encouraging all of us to create more opportunites to allow our kids to play so they experience joy from movement and in time will want to pursue more a more organised sport.”] She argues that kids need to face long stretches of unstructured time with no organized activities, when kids should be outside the house playing, riding their bikes and having fun moving their bodies for the sheer joy of it.

In theory, I love this idea. I wasn’t the most athletic kid (in fact, it was a heady day that I wasn’t the last one picked for a team) but I still have the most wonderful memories of riding my bike all over the neighbourhood by the time I was six or seven years old, and running in a big pack of neighbourhood kids. We played hockey in the street, skated on the frozen pond in the empty field, played tag and hide and seek and all sorts of those games. I even walked to school from the time I was in junior kindergarten, by myself.

The problem, of course, is that we’re not in the 1970s anymore, Toto. It makes me so very sad to think that my boys won’t have this kind of freedom to roam. On the weekend, we conceded two major milestones to Tristan’s eventual freedom. We let him ride his bike (on the sidewalk, of course) all the way to the stop sign and back by himself. Total distance of about six driveways. And the first three times, I pretended to be busy in the garden but instead hunched behind the car and watched him the whole time.

Later in the weekend, he asked if he could stay out and play by himself while I went in to start dinner. It was the first time he was allowed to stay out in the front yard unsupervised, and when we heard the screech of car tires on the road a few minutes later, Beloved and I nearly died of fright – but the car was at the stop sign and Tristan was safely on his bike in the garage. My heart still constricts at the memory.

Silken Laumann’s book, which I am about to request from the library and haven’t yet read, provides 20 pages of information, resources and ideas on getting kids to be physically active without registering them for swimming, soccer, T-ball and hockey. She suggests parents organize “Play in the Park” evenings, where one or two parents supervise a whole group of children. Isn’t this what parents in our parents’ generation did instinctively? Now there’s a ‘not my kid, not my problem’ mentality at the park, from what I’ve seen.

In an article in today’s Citizen, Silken acknowledges that our culture of fear has led us to organize and structure our children’s lives. She says, “It’s about starting a dialogue, where people are asking, what are we doing with our kids? Could kids walk to school again? How can we get them playing in the parks and open spaces of our community again? We show people how.”

I am 100% behind this idea, which even has its own Web site with a community action plan, an activity guide and a movement you can start where you live. I wholeheartedly believe in the importance of kids getting out and being physically active, but I have mixed feelings about organized sports. (I started to go on for a bit on my angst over organized sports, but I think I’ll save that for a whole ‘nother post.)

The weather has been so unbelievably gorgeous the past couple of weeks, and there isn’t an evening we’ve stayed in the house. We go to the park, we go for a bike ride/wagon pull, we play in the driveway. The house is a disaster and I’m woefully behind on laundry, but when the sky is clear and the temperatures above freezing, I can’t convince myself, let alone my preschoolers, to stay inside.

I think kids are hardwired to want to run and ride and play. So what happens? Do they become jaded to play as they age, or is it something we’re doing that discourages it? Does all this rigourous scheduling of activities make kids lazy when someone isn’t directing their energies? And then, of course, there’s the whole issue of the kids being able to entertain themselves and think creatively without parental intervention, which I haven’t even touched on but which is a huge concern of mine.

I’m interested in your thoughts on this one. My kids are just on the threshold of this kind of thing, taking tentative baby steps out of my yard and into the big world, and I’m full of thoughts on how the world should be, just like I was full of righteous ideas on handling fussy eaters and non-sleepers and tantrums in public — before I had my own to deal with!

I’ve got all sorts of themes tangled together in here, but I’m interested (as always) in your thoughts. When do you let your kids play outside unsupervised? Do you / would you let them walk to school, or the corner store? At what age do you think they’d be ready for that? Is ‘stranger danger’ more frightening than obesity and heart disease and diabetes and the other worst-case outcomes from inactive living? Is it naive to think we can make enough of a difference in our communities to allow our kids the kind of freedom we enjoyed?

(With props to Andrea, from whom I blatantly stole the phrase that titles this post.)

When in doubt of what to write about, you can always just post a run-down of cool stuff you’ve recently stumbed upon on the Interwebs. With bonus commentary, bien sûr.

I have one of those new Google personalized home page thingees, which I used at work to peek into my Gmail account. The firewall prevents me from actually opening any of the mail, or going to the Gmail home page itself, but I can see if there are messages in there and who they are from. It’s actually a little bit torturous, seeing mail in there and not being able to read it. And yet I continue to peek…

Ahem, I seem to have sidetracked myself from my point, which was that I also have a Reuters “odd news” feed on that page, which is how I found this news story. The first one is about how women in Cyprus are planning to make the world’s longest bra chain on April 30, to heighten awareness of breast cancer. They hope to string together as many as 100,000 bras, which will form a chain more than 50 miles long. I think I have about half that many in my “these bras don’t fit any more, or have pokey bones sticking out of them, so I don’t wear them, but I am pathologically unable to throw them away” drawer. Too much information?

Without even attempting a segue, hows about we talk about families? (Yah, I know, if I worked at it a little harder, I could come up with a segue. But it’s early and I’ve only had half a cup of coffee.) And you know what? Even having said that, it’s going to take some back story to get there.

When I first started blogging, I had just spent an evening with a bunch of girlfriends, admiring their lovely and lovingly rendered scrap books. (I loved the idea behind scrapbooking, and even had some of the requisite supplies. But I could never get the opportunity (read: time) and the organizational capability and the creativity to intersect. But I still went to scrapbooking nights, mostly to mooch the food and wine and admire my friends’ books.) One of my friends said that in scrapbooking, she sees herself as the family historian and that idea stayed with me.

When I’m blogging, I always have that idea of myself as the family historian (and documenter of minutia) in mind. So I really like the idea of JotSpot’s Family Site. I haven’t had a lot of time to play with it yet, but it looks way cool, especially if you have a large and geographically dispersed family.

I particularly like the idea of an online family calendar with everyone’s birthdays and milestones. I’m pretty good at remembering that stuff, but I feel horrible when I do miss something. And I like the geneology, too. I’ve got a book (inconveniently written in Dutch) that documents my family way back to its ancestry with the de Beers – yes, those famous diamond people – and my links to my great-great-great-great-great uncle, an actual canonized saint. Sadly, neither the righteousness nor the riches seem to have trickled down the bloodline to my generation.

Oh alright, if you want a segue so badly, how about: “And speaking of fun online time-sinks…” or “And on the subject of your relative importance in the world…” (get it? relative importance?? I slay me.) … the useless and yet somehow compelling little aplet called BlogInfluence allows you to rate your ‘influence’ in the Blogosphere by aggregating your Google page rank, your Technorati and Bloglines stats, and some other Meaningful and Relevant bloggy data.

Lucky for you, that’s all I’ve got for today’s ramble. Don’t worry, I’m out of time, not out of arcane links and obscure commentary – there’s lots left where that came from!

Ahem. I would like to register a complaint.

Back when parenting was just a theory, people told me all sorts of things to watch out for. They said I should sleep when the baby sleeps, and that no matter how many receiving blankets we had, we’d need more. Check.

They said that when baby learned to walk there would be lots of bumps and bruises, and that when he started to talk he would melt my heart every single day. Check.

They said I should stop wearing white shirts because they would be spattered by an endless parade of leaked substances, from breastmilk to the alarming neon orange residue of alphaghettis. Check.

They said I might have to learn to let the baby cry, and that the first day I left him at daycare would be the day I came to understand what heartbroken really feels like. Check.

They said that a smiling, gurgling six-month-old is perhaps the most endearing creature on the face of the planet, and that the tantrums of the two-year-old are like thunderstorms in a perfect summer day. Check.

They said it would be the most rewarding, difficult, exhilarating, frustrating, heretofore unimaginable experience of my life, every. single. day. Check.

What they didn’t tell me is that my four-year-old would be more moody than a menopausal woman deprived of chocolate and coffee crossed with a lovesick fourteen-year-old girl.

How can a child who is so sweet, so good-natured, so clever and so loving be such a tremendously unpleasant creature? Within the same hour?? This is, by the way and in case you haven’t figured it out, one of those posts where I pretty much beg you to say, “Oh yes, me too!” Please.

I expected the “He’s looking at me!” kind of complaint at this age. I expected to referee a lot of roughhousing, and settle a lot of disputes over toy possession. I didn’t expect the “Everybody is mean to me!” whine on a daily basis. (Uttered whenever he is compelled to do pretty much anything, from eating his dinner to taking off his shoes before coming into the house.)

He has more than one weapon in his martyr’s arsenal. When he is contradicted (“No, you cannot ride your bike in the house.”) he yells, “FINE then!” and runs up to his room to sulk. He will look at me with his stormy grey eyes brimming with tears and tell me he’s “not having a very good day” because of one small thing that has happened in an otherwise near perfect day. It’s both frustrating (especially for an infernal optimist like me) and disappointing to see him fixate on the negative aspects to the exclusion of the positive.

If this is just a phase, I don’t mind riding it out. I’ve tried to sit down with him and explain all the wonderful things that happened in a day to offset the single bad thing, but he just squirms and is obviously having a hard time listening to it. I’ve tried to reason with him that everybody is not so much being mean to him as enforcing rules that we all have to live by. None of it seems to sink in.

My friend Twinmomplusone wrote a post the other day about four-year-olds that got me thinking about this. She has TWO of these mysterious creatures – imagine!!

So, for those of you who have four-year-olds, or have recently endured the phenomenon – please tell me: is this moodiness typical of your average four-year-old? And how do you deal with it? Most importantly, is five better? Or (cringe) worse?

Our internet connection died on Saturday, which would have been horrendous on a dreary winter long weekend, but was barely noticed on this busy and sunshine-filled couple of days. (If you had told me I’d spend two of four days of a long weekend with neither shopping nor Internet, I’d’ve told you I wouldn’t make it through half of it with my sanity intact.)

I spent most of Friday rehabilitating my gardens after a long winter. I raked, I pruned, I turned the earth – and it was good. I only meant to do 15 minutes of work and ended up spending two hours on it. If only I could sustain that kind of enthusiasm throughout the season.

Friday night we went out for dinner with my folks to a great little upscale burger joint called The Works. If you ever get the chance to check it out, I highly recommend the sweet potato fries. And the boys were tickled by beverages that arrived in pyrex measuring cups.

My father and the waiter sustained an ongoing banter throughout the meal, starting with the waiver my dad had to sign to have his burger cooked only to rare. They actually had a waiver (how very un-Canadian), and to the statement that he indemnified the restaurant of any gastrointestinal dismay as a result of undercooked meat, he added a clause that the choice of vehicular or helicopter ambulance would be his. To which the waiter something else clever that escapes me, and my father rejoindered that his remains should be available for takeout in a white styrofoam box. The waiter replied that all remains become the property of the restaurant, and get fed back into the meat grinder. It was that kind of conversation, reminiscent of many, many childhood experiences watching my dad kibitz with whomever would play along. It’s one of my favourite things about him, to this day.

I don’t know whether it was the day spent outside, or the loud music and laid-back atmosphere of the pub, or just a cosmic warm spot, but it was one of the best restaurant meals ever with the boys. Tristan was a little squirrelly, but occupied himself driving toy cars on the bench beside me, and Simon entertained himself for the best part of an hour with two ice cubes, a lemon wedge, and 52 ml of water in his small-sized measuring cup. We took a loping drive back across town on roads I never drive through neighbourhoods I forgot exist. It was like being on vacation in my own city, and it was lovely.

All the bending and turning of the yard work must have loosened something in my caboose, because I was pulling Simon’s pyjama bottoms up when the subtle forward-leaning movement caused something to shift ever so slightly in my back and I was briefly but painfully unable to move. I think I pinched the sciatic nerve, given the intensity of the pain radiating down my leg, and I couldn’t sleep that night because every time I turned on to either side, pain radiated down my hip and into my leg. I spent Saturday gingerly running errands and gasping when I forgot and moved too quickly.

We spent a good portion of Sunday outside as well. (How will I ever reclimatize myself to an office after four days of sunshine and fresh air?) We went to the park, we wandered the ‘hood, and we sated ourselved on turkey dinner chez mes parents. It was the first time we could open the back door and shoo the boys outside to entertain themselves – and it was good.

Today, the boys, the dog and I went for a wander through a little conservation area a few clicks from our house. There’s a kilometre or so of trails, plus another click or so of boardwalk through marsh grasses beside the Rideau River. It’s lovely in any season, but we don’t get down there in the winter, so being back makes the arrival of spring official. The river is as low as I’ve ever seen it, which I can only guess means they are filling the Rideau Canal for the summer boating season. Winter really is over – every year, I can hardly believe we’ve made it through another one.

There really should be more long weekends sprinkled through the year. The house is as clean as it ever gets – which, for what it’s worth, is not really very clean, but what the hell. Playing is more fun. The garage is reorganized, and the dead leaves are out of the flower beds. The tulips and daffs are peeking out, and the worst of the dog crap is lifted. Most of the laundry is done, and the cupboards are overflowing with chocolate eggs. And I got a sizeable chunk of a good book read. It’s been a good weekend!

(Hmmm, look at all the stuff I managed to get done without Internet access. I wonder if there is a message hidden in there somewhere? What’s that? La la la, I can’t hear you….)