Category: Uncategorized

To me, junk food is comfort food. If I’m in a pissy mood, or particularly stressed, junk food makes me feel better. I’m particular, though. I’m not too fond of pies or pastries, not a chocolate kind of girl, not even a big fan of ice cream.

That’s why when I saw an article – front page and above the fold, no less – in yesterday’s Citizen that said that eating a small sugary snack actually reduces the stress hormones in your system, I thought they were talking directly to me.

The article mentions two snacks in particular – a Tim Horton’s doughnut, and a can of Coke Classic. Both have about 200 calories, just the right amount of sugar to combat those nasty stress hormones. (The article even confirms what I have long suspected, that artificial sweetners just don’t make the cut. It has to be real sugar.)

It’s as if they were reading my mind… in my world of junk food as anti-depressant, a Timmy’s chocolate glazed or an indulgently fizzy cold Coke would be two of my top three choices. The third, for what it’s worth, is a jumbo sized bag of Lay’s ruffled barbeque potato chips.

(Digression: it has been five, maybe six months since I’ve quit Weight Watchers, and if you google “Tim Horton WW points”, blog continues to be the number one search return. This is my legacy for the Internet.)

It’s been a rough couple of weeks, and I have to admit, I’ve indulged in each of my top three comfort food faves more than once recently. The good news is, at least they’re all under $2.00 a piece. It might not be great for my waistline, but at least I’m not blowing the kids’ inheritance.

What say ye, oh wise bloggy friends? What’s the balm for your soul on a bad day? Vintage red wine? Mashed potatoes and gravy? Fancy truffles that cost $8 each? Beer by the litre?

Sorry, you’ll have to type a little louder, these bbq chips are making quite the racket…

Categories: Peccadillos

(Sheesh, as if I weren’t verbose enough, now I feel the need to qualify every reference to Christmas with an inclusion to all the other winter holidays. If I slip, it’s nothing personal. Consider yourself officially included, okay?)

It must be holiday purchase frenzy time – the toy reports are out. According to this report, the lowly cardboard box was enshrined in the National Toy Hall of Fame, along with old favourites CandyLand and the Jack In The Box.

If you’re looking for something a little more modern to wow the kiddies this year, the Canadian Toy Testing Council has released their annual (and excellent) report on the best and the worst toys of the season. They have categories like “Children’s Choice”, “Best Bets” and “Greatest Books.” You can read the report at Award Winning Toys 2006. I particularly like the look of Balloon Lagoon, under the Children’s Choice category, for Tristan this year. If you go back to the CTTC main page (my first link) you can see prior year reports as well.

This got me thinking – wouldn’t it be nice to have a thread where we talked about favourite toys and best gifts for kids? Sort of like our own bloggy toy testing council. For example, last year we got Simon this Playskool Ball Popper. Not only does Simon love it and still play with it a year later, but Tristan loves it, I love it, and every kid who comes over to play loves it. It is noisy, but so are my kids, so that doesn’t bother me much.

Our gift list this year will be, as usual, full of all things Thomas, with a healthy dose of Bob thrown in for good measure. The boys (and their father) love these toys so much that it’s hard to resist the tidal pull of them. In addition to a roundhouse, a DVD and some Thomas lego, I managed to find a 36 piece puzzle that will keep Tristan busy for hours. We’re also hoping to expand his train horizons with a GeoTrax set. Simon is a little harder to buy for, as he isn’t as demanding or particular as his brother. I’m thinking along the lines of musical or creative expression for him.

What do you think? What are your favourite toys? What are your kids’ favourite toys? What toys would you only give to your evil sister-in-law’s mouthy brats? What will they still be playing with in January? What toys did you bury in the backyard at first thaw?

Ugh. I’d have to be feeling pretty crappy to not want to blog. Yep, feeling pretty darn crappy this morning. I think I picked up some sort of stomach bug in Toronto this weekend. Poor Simon yakked all over himself and his car seat about 40 minutes from my brother’s place on Friday, so I’m guessing there is something going around.

And by the way, thank my lucky stars that it was my mother and not Beloved in the car when it happened. Beloved – well, let’s just say he doesn’t exactly shine in a crisis, and I’m glad my mother was riding shotgun when Simon started hurling on the 401 in rush-hour traffic.

(In retrospect, it was pretty funny, what with Tristan screeching “My brother is barfing! He just barfed again!”, followed by a very panicked gag of his own. My mother interrupted her ongoing “It’s okay, it’s okay” patter of reassurance to both Simon and me to tell Tristan “Just look out the window. Don’t look at Simon. Ooo, look at all those big trucks.” What a scene.)

Anyway, this is both probably the most unappetizing blog I’ve ever written, plus way more than I was intending to write. I had booked today off as a personal day to get organized after our trip and to start getting ready for Christmas, so I’m kind of annoyed be feeling so blah on a day I was supposed to have to myself. Maybe a nice nap and some mindless daytime TV will make me feel better.

Come back later, and we’ll find something a little more cheerful to discuss…

I am fascinated by the linguistic differences between Canadians and Americans. I mean, we share the same last land mass, are saturated by same media, surf the same Internet, read the same blogs, so it fascinates me that we have idiosyncratic differences in our common language.

All this is predicated on an article I read last weekend in the Ottawa Citizen. (I’d link to it, except of the entire Sunday edition, it seems to be one of the few articles that wasn’t online. Hmph. Oh well, credit where credit is due and carry on.) The article was an interview with Katherine Barber, the editor-in-chief of the Canadian Oxford Dictionary.

What I really want to know is, what the heck do Americans call one of these?

We call it a butter tart. What other name could there possibly be? And what about “cheesies”? According to the article, that’s a Canadianism, too – but what the heck else would you call them?

There were other words that surprised me, too: bachelor apartment, for example. What do you call an apartment that is smaller than a one-bedroom? And collector lanes – those extra lanes beside the really big expressways where you can get on and off.

Speaking of collector lanes, think a kind thought for us today as I haul the boys across the province to bring everyone down to my brother’s place outside of Toronto for the weekend. It’s my adorable nephew’s first birthday party and my folks and the boys and I are heading down there, but Beloved has to work.

Tristan was so excited when I let it drop into conversation on Sunday that we’d be heading down to visit “Uncle Sean” that he ran into his room and started pulling jammies out of his drawers and choosing books to pack. So cute! It’s been a week of “How many more sleeps?” and now that we’re counting down in hours instead of days the boys are practically nuclear with excitement.

Deep breath….

On behalf of the endlessly energetic and creative and thoughtful Andrea, and her lovely assistant Marla, consider yourself officially invited to join the (fanfare) Winter Holiday of Your Choice Blog Bonanza.

All the cool bloggers are doing it. Dontcha wanna be cool?

There are gifts! There are crafts! There are photos! There are crafty photos of gifts! There’s even a blog ring! How much more fun can holiday blogging be?

All are welcome; all you need is a blog and a winter holiday. Click on over to Andrea’s blog and sign up today!

Most days, I have a pretty tight grip on my emotions, and I tend to the cheerful more often than not. For the most part, I am in control. Some days, though, I can really relate to the emotional whirlpool that is my toddler.

Lately, I feel like my emotions are driving the truck. They are driving the truck through a really bumpy field, and I am holding on to the back bumper by my fingertips, trying not to get thrown off and run over. I’m all strung out and covered in bits of manurey straw, emotionally speaking.

You get the idea.

Do you think it’s possible that we get emotional viruses just like we get physical viruses? This is a new theory of mine. A regular virus is some sort of bug that invades the body, reproduces alarmingly and manifests itself with physical symptoms like a hacking cough, runny nose, fever and the like.

What if there are emotional viruses, too? Viruses that somehow get into your system and completely mess up your emotional responses to things, so you are inordinately crabby for a couple of days, or sensitive to the point of hysteria. Ever noticed how emotional instability sometimes spreads through the family just like a virus, and a family that is perfectly well-balanced and content one day can be a typhoon of overwrought emotions the next?

What do you do on days like that, when know you’re on the edge? Any coping strategies you’d like to share? Don’t worry, I’m not heading for a bell tower with a rifle (not yet, anyway)… it just seems that everything gets under my skin immediately, instead of giving me a bit of a grace period to see it coming and dial down the burners. (Ugh, what a stew of mixed metaphors. And you know what, I’m not even going to go back and edit them out. Ha!)

Oh look, I’m officially rambling at this point. Time to wrap this one up, cohesive ending be damned. Comment if you want to. Or don’t. See if I care.

(I care.)

Bah! I don’t care how much credibility you give a seven foot animated ogre, change is never good.

The good news is, Beloved’s part-time teaching looks like it might be morphing into a full-time position in the relatively near future. The term “tenure” has even been dangled tantalizingly, as the school’s current staff of baby boomers drift toward retirement.

“That’s great!” you say. “Congratulations to Beloved!”

And I say, “Yeah, but…”

I’m glad that he’s getting some respect from his school, because he’s worked hard to prove himself. It will be nice for him to have a regular, guaranteed day job instead of a patchwork of courses that are subject to cancellation and change on a whim. (It seems every semester leaves us scrambling as last minute schedule changes are made, courses are added and subtracted, and we struggle to balance three jobs in two provinces with daycare priorities.) And let me tell you, the extra cash certainly won’t hurt.

Except if Beloved is working full time, that means he can’t stay home with the boys part-time anymore. And that breaks my heart.

For three years, I’ve been able to temper my role as working mother with the thought that the boys are only in daycare part time, and spend more of the week with at least one of their parents than they do with the daycare provider.

The irony is that it took me a very long time to get over my resentment of being at work while Beloved was at home with the boys. I wanted to be the part-time worker, and at the beginning I know Beloved was a little overwhelmed by being a primary caregiver. I used to worry that Beloved wasn’t doing things the right way (read: my way), that the boys watched too much TV and didn’t get outside enough and that the dishes got stacked backwards in the dishwasher.

And then somewhere in the last few months I realized that it’s been working out great for all of us. The boys are thriving and Beloved makes a great stay-at-home dad. While I still wish it were me working part-time, it no longer feels so terribly wrong to be at work while the rest of them are at home or out and about. I don’t worry about them anymore.

Nothing is finalized yet, but there is actually more than one potential position opening up for Beloved, so the chances are good he’ll be in a full time position within a few months. However, I’ve learned not to count on anything until the contracts are signed!

I know we’ve been lucky, that Beloved’s staying home with the boys this far has been a gift. I know Simon is almost two, and Tristan will actually even be going off to school in the fall. I know that even if I’m not 100% satisfied with our current daycare arrangements (a blog for another day), the boys are treated like members of the family there and are genuinely loved.

But it still sucks. Change is not good.

I remember the first few months after Tristan was born, but only vaguely. It was a scary and exhilerating, but it was also a very isolating time in my life. I remember how our week revolved around going to the well-baby drop in, where I could actually talk to other mothers of babies the same age and realize that so much of what we were going through was just garden-variety infant mothering and not the crisis that each day seemed to be.

I wish I had seen something like Wee Welcome back then. It’s a new site for Canadian moms, especially moms of babies under one who live near Toronto, Vancouver and Ottawa.

In their own words:

Our goal is to help Canadian moms get the most out of their babies’ first year – to have a baby and a life. To that end we are:

* Shining a light on baby-welcoming locations through our print and online guide.
* Helping moms connect through our moms’ group community.
* Providing no-crap, original articles that don’t pander.
* Leading events that make sure you get out and have a good time.

And that’s just the beginning.

We’re working to create a more baby-welcoming society, where moms breastfeed longer, are more connected to other moms, and are busy, active and happier. Happy moms make for happy babies.

I love their “Go” feature. It lists local places that are “baby welcoming”, and provides a list of ammenities offered by each location. There are also places to form online mom’s groups, and some great articles – including some written by one of my favourite authors. Even if you don’t live in Vancouver, Toronto or Ottawa, it’s worth a few clicks just to page through and see a great idea well executed.

(P.S. In the interest of fair disclosure, I should probably mention that I found this site because one of the co-founders, Jody, sent me a note and told me to feel free to mention Wee Welcome on my blog, if I felt so inclined. After I came down off the high of being considered a big enough fish to have blog mention solicited, I clicked through and realized that I would have promoted this site even if I’d stumbled upon it independently. But it sure was nice to be asked!)

Categories: Mothering

When I was growing up, I was the only Danielle I knew. I was the only Danielle in my grade school, and there was one other one in my high school. Well, she was a Daniela, actually, but that’s about as close as it got. When my folks won a trip to Paris when I was fifteen, my mom brought me back a gold charm with ‘Danielle’ written on it, simply because none of the personalized trinkets in late 1970s / early 1980s southern Ontario ever featured my name.

I remember being enthralled with the covers of Danielle Steel’s books when I was young, because she was a Danielle and she was a writer. Even as a hopelessly romantic preteen, I couldn’t stomach her writing – give me Stephen King any day! – but I could at least see she was making a living with words, and I knew I wanted to do that, too.

I was living here in Ottawa before I actually encountered another Dani. Ottawa, across the river from La Belle Provence, has a much higher concentration of French names, and now there are Danielles everywhere I go. One of my co-worker’s daughters is named Dani, and there’s another one who works in the IT branch of my organization.

Given that rudimentary analysis of the volume of Danis in my universe, it must be that every other Dani on the Internet has visited my blog this month. In the first seven days of November alone, I’ve had 41 hits on the keywords “Dani needs”. Remember that meme?

I’ve met some really cool Dani bloggers, after they linked to me through the meme. There’s Dani from the East coast, also a mom of two preschoolers. She’s got a girl, though (she said covetously). She writes at The Yellow Wallpaper, a very funky-looking blog, and plays regularly in the comment sandbox.

There’s another 30-something Dani from Long Island who writes a knit-blog at Yea, I Knit. (I’m beginning to think all the Danis have cooler blog designs than me. Hmmmm…)

Perhaps most endearing, I have found my inner 14 year old blogging thoughtfully more than 2000 km away. This Dani is a high school freshman in Forth Worth, Texas, and her profile includes the line, “I can do anything I put my mind to.” She’s smart, thoughtful, and she’s a competent writer… but reading her blog is like reading me 20-odd years ago, and it feels so very odd!

Who knew there were so many Danis out there? Welcome! Maybe we could form a Dani Blog Ring or something?

You’re about to lose some respect for me. (If you had any to begin with, that is.) I’m about to confess to something particularly shallow.

Not only do I watch TLC’s What Not to Wear on occasion, but I’d love to have someone do that wardrobe makeover thing to me. Not so much with the humiliation on national TV – lord knows there’s more than enough humiliation right here on the Interweb – but I’d really like someone who knows clothes and quality and makeup walk me through the whole style thing. I don’t have a style. Where do you get one, anyway? Can I buy it on eBay? And one day I’d like to spend some serious money on real clothes, instead of collecting separates pell mell like a magpie building a nest.

I keep making the same mistakes over and over again. For example, I have this addiction to striped turtlenecks. I buy at least one every season, each one worn a few times until I catch sight of myself in some passing reflective surface and realize how unflattering a look it is for me. I’m a curvy sort of girl, and stripes are not always kind to curves. And turtlenecks? Let’s just say the push-up effect works better in a bra than it does as a turtleneck supporting my chin(s). I can rationalize this is the cold light of day, but once I get into the mall and see all those long-sleeved striped turtleneck sweaters in the seasons brightest colours I can’t help myself.

I went to Winners the other day, and promised myself I would try on anything except a striped turtleneck. I tried on 12 black sweaters and tops (did I mention I just this year discovered black on black? Where have you been all my life?) and not one of them was worth buying. Last weekend, I was in the mall with the boys and got sucked into Northern Reflections (of all places – so much for urban chic at the office) by a conspicuous display of – you guessed it – striped turtlenecks. I bought two. I am incorrigible.

And things are further complicated by the fact that I’ve recently realized that as a 36 year old mother of two, I’m a woman of a certain age. Just how firm is that “no miniskirts after 35” rule? Damn, one of my best features is my legs! How mini is mini? I also have an addiction to plaid skirts cut about four inches above the knee – not Britney Spears don’t-bend-over short, but certainly shorter than the matronly to-the-knee length I’ve been seeing all over town. Please tell me I don’t have to give those up yet!

So there’s the media-savvy part of me that is horrified by shows like What Not to Wear, where you expose your inadequacy on national TV and eat a good helping of humiliation for the edification of the armchair-fashionista potato-chip-snarfing audience at home. But there is a part of me who wants to be Cinderella, to be Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman or Ally Sheedy in the Breakfast Club. Despite the fact that I am mostly a confident, satisfied, happy woman, there’s a marginalized teenager deep in my heart who would love to find out she’s more beautiful and stylish than she ever imagined.

So if you see me in the mall, please do us both a favour and drag me away from the striped turtleneck sweaters that I will inevitably be coveting. I am weak.