Category: Uncategorized

It’s been an extremely validating day in Mommy Land.

Remember back a couple of weeks ago, when I was angsting over Tristan’s swim lessons, and I was pretty sure he wasn’t going to pass?

I was wrong!

Behold the latest graduate of Preschool AquaQuest Level One. I’m so proud! I can only imagine what a mess I’ll be some day when he does something really exciting, like graduating from Kindergarden. (whispers) And you know what the most delicious part is? (looks over shoulder) The teacher said he was the best in his class! (insert radiant beam here)

And then, as if that weren’t enough to make any mummy radioactive with pride, look what he did tonight:

If you look really closely, you can barely make out the TRISTAN through the chicken scratch (three times, no less!) It’s the first time he’s ever tried to write his name, and he was so adorably excited and proud of himself.

It’s so cute when he makes the Rs – he draws the legs first, then sits a ball on top of them. The first half a dozen times or so, he started from the right and wrote to the left, almost like mirror-writing. Is that common when they first start to make letters? Also, he starts at the bottom of the page and works his way up (you can see he improves as he warms up – these are takes six through nine, I think. Like his mother, once he finds something he likes, he’s rather obsessive about it.)

We now return you to your regularly scheduled Sunday evening…

Categories: Tristan

It wasn’t so much that I forked over nearly $200 to watch the Wiggles, as it was I forked over $200 to watch my kids watch the Wiggles. And you know what?

It was worth every penny.

Our seats were toward the back of the floor section, but right on the aisle. Which was a good thing, because Simon did not spend a moment actually sitting in his chair. I wish I could find a way to stream the video I took of him dancing his little heart out in the aisles, in the lovely way not-quite-two-year-olds heave themselves back and forth to the music.

I was just barely quick enough to catch a three second video of the moment Jeff Wiggle (the sleepy guy in purple) came down our aisle and right past an astonished Simon. The look on Simon’s face is truly priceless. (Anybody know how I might somehow stream some short video clips through Blogger?)

Simon has always been the real Wiggles fan, so I was thrilled to see Tristan dancing and singing along as well. He was mostly content to sit or stand in his Daddy’s lap, while Simon danced up the aisles and wandered around the sound crew, saying hello to the security staff.

Toward the end of the night, for what turned out to be the finale, I gave up trying to corral Simon and brought both boys right down to the stage. It was a gorgeous chaos of excited preschoolers, who seem to be all standing stock still in this photo, but were in fact a darting, dancing, singing mass of highly torqued munchkins.

This last one is my bad mommy picture. It’s not a very good photo, but you can just see the beginnings of an “oh no you don’t” expression on Anthony Wiggle’s face. That would be the look he is shooting my son as Simon lifts the curtain hanging over the edge of the stage and contemplates diving underneath while his inattentive mother snaps photos in blissful oblivion.

Yes, a Wiggles not only noticed, but disciplined my child. How’s that for a claim to fame? It’s almost as exciting as the time when, at the tender age of 15, Corey Hart sprayed me (and about a thousand other overwrought teeny-boppers) with a garden hose at a particularly steamy July concert.

I didn’t actually catch most of the concert myself, but would pay the $200 again in a heartbeat to see my boys dancing together, their little faces bright with excitement. Through the whole night, there was not a single tantrum, not a single tear, not even a defiant word. And they didn’t even fall asleep on the car ride home.

How could it get any better than that?

Did you know that if you post a picture on your blog, it gets indexed under Google Images? I figured it out when I was playing in the referral logs (I know, I know, but it’s like potato chips – I know it’s bad for me, but I can’t help myself) and I kept seeing Google hits like this one. Those are all my pictures from Tristan’s Day Out with Thomas.

It indexes all the pictures posted on Flickr, too. When I key “Tristan and Simon” into Google Images, this picture of the boys with their cousin is the fourth image on the list of search returns.

I dunno why this is so unsettling to me. Maybe because it’s one thing to place the images deliberately in one space, and another to have them added to the giant Rolodex that is Google. I put those images up in context to show you, the people who read my blog, but having them churning out there independently is just wrong. I’ve been getting tonnes of hits from those Thomas images, too. I think it’s the first time a spike in traffic ever freaked me out in a bad way.

As if that weren’t weird enough, a friend recently pointed this out to me. Yes, that’s right, I seem to have my very own official page on Answers.com. How the holy hell that happened, with my full real name no less, is a complete mystery to me. I register for absolutely everything as DaniGirl, so I can’t imagine how blog got hooked up to my real name. I guess I don’t mind so much, but I sure would like to know how it happened.

Who would have guessed it? Even attention-whores and media sluts have boundaries.

When I started writing this blog, I didn’t even use the boys’ real names. I called them Frankie and Luigi (pet names from their middle names, Francis and Louis) but I couldn’t stand writing about them without using their real names. My mother continues to be rather anxious that I post pictures of the boys at all, especially the one in my profile that shows Tristan in nothing but a diaper – to say nothing of the nudie shots I posted this summer of adorable boys running nekkidly rampant through my backyard.

The Internet is such a big place, and I am such a naive girl. What do you think? Is having your personal information out there a bad thing? Would you be as freaked out about the pictures as I was?

Sigh….

I was coming out of Tim Horton’s the other day with one extra-large coffee in each hand. Not only did one gentleman hold open the door for me, but another guy just stepping out of his car reached over and opened the passenger-side door for me as I tried to work my fingers underneath the handle and pull it open without dropping my coffees.

It confirms a theory I’m working on – chivalry is back.

Just in the past few months, I’m noticing a lot more doors being held, seats being relinquished, and “no-you-go-okay-I’ll-go-no-really-I-insist” dances with total strangers. It’s been quite refreshing!

Now, it could be that since I spend a lot of time with both hands full and a preschooler or two dangling from my limbs, people are just more prone to take pity on me, or are trying to help me out so I don’t do damage to any innocent bystanders, but I’ll take it nonetheless.

I was getting a ride home from a work colleague recently, and as we approached his car he actually came around to my side of the car first and opened the door for me. I have to admit, that’s the first time anyone has ever done that and I loved it. Such a simple gesture, but so very classy.

I never understood the argument that courtesies like this were somehow demeaning to women. Maybe it’s because I’m secure in my ability to open my own door that I don’t feel threatened when someone else offers to do it for me? I admit, though, to feeling rather bad the few times that a gentleman has stood back to let me get on the bus first and I ended up getting the last seat, leaving him to stand for the 35 minute ride home. It’s sometimes a little embarrassing to be an able-bodied recipient of someone’s kindness when you feel you are really no more deserving than they are.

I’m proud of the boys’ manners, inasmuch as preschoolers can have manners. Tristan’s “thanks” whenever I hand him something is now so ingrained that I can see he doesn’t even think about it, and Simon is the most adorable toddler ever with his similar sounding “here-go-mummy” and “thang-u-mummy” whenever he gives me something or gets something from me. It’s important to me that they grow up to be the kind of boys who think of others, and who are respectful and courteous.

What do you think? Is chivalry back? How important a role do manners play in your opinion of someone? Is it still appropriate for a man to step back and let a woman go first, or is it insulting?

My sweet friends Cooper and Emily of Been There are writing a book. These are the same two wonderful women who launched the Hurricane Katrina Clearninghouse that continues to run as a meeting place for people who need help and people who can offer help.

Cooper asked me if I would share their questions with you. You can reply in the comment box if you like, or you can e-mail Cooper and Emily directly at parentingbook@comcast.net.

1) Describe a time (s) of great meaning that you experienced with your family (as a parent, as a child or both.) Details, please!

2) What gets in the way – if anything – of spending time with and truly being in the moment with your kids? What are the biggest time drains on family life, for you? Is it hectic lives, too much to do, other parents/family? Please be specific, a story or two to describe would be wonderful.

3) Along those lines, what do you see as the greatest challenges to you in your parenting or in childrearing in general? What are the roadblocks? Again, specifics and anecdotes are encouraged!

4) Describe something (s) you and your family are doing well. What is it you are best at and why (communicating, having fun etc.)? Please describe with stories if possible.

Thanks!

One of my favourite TV shows is Corner Gas. I’m sure most of my American friends have never heard of it, but if you get the chance, do check it out. It’s a witty, slightly bent ensemble comedy set in rural Saskatchewan. Every single episode makes me laugh out loud at some point, sometimes through the whole thing. You don’t have to be Canadian to get it, but it helps.

Last night’s episode started out looking like an interruption to previously scheduled programming in the form of a national address from Prime Minister Paul Martin, which would not be entirely unexpected given that we are anticipating the tabling of the first Gomery report today. (I’m not getting into Gomery here. Google “Gomery” and “Adscam” if you want a tutorial in what’s hot on the Canadian political scene right now.)

The Prime Minister is interruted by Brent Butt, the star of Corner Gas:

Brent: “Hello Mr. Prime Minister. Um… I’m just kind of wondering what you’re doing?”

PM: “I’m speaking to the nation. I’m addressing Canada!”

Brent: “Um… is this something you have to do right now?”

PM: “Is now a bad time?”

Brent: “Sort of… For me, anyway. I kind of had the next 30 minutes planned out. This is really the only half-hour in the week they let me do anything. The rest is pretty much Canadian Idol.”

PM: “But what about my message?”

Brent: “You can do a mass e-mailing. You can “cc” the nation.”

PM: “You know I like the way you think.”

Brent: “Really? You can make me Minister of something!”

PM: “I gotta go…”

Some days it’s great to be Canadian…

I need your advice, oh clever and wise bloggy friends.

I’ve blogged before about our troubles with the teenager next door. I don’t think he is a particularly bad kid, but he is on the road to trouble. He lives with his mom, whom I like on a “chatting in the driveway” kind of way, and his younger brother and sister, who are sweet and well mannered but wild. The teen is surly, he smokes dope at all hours of the day without much attempt to be covert about it, he skips classes and he is rude to his mother. He can also be quite polite, even to me, when the mood strikes him. Like I said, I don’t think he’s so much bad as misguided.

But…

Last night at about 1 am I woke up to loud voices in the driveway. I stumbled to the window just in time to see somebody coming up our walkway about six meters from the front door and without even thinking about it, I opened the window and yelled, “Hey! SCAT!” (Scary, eh? What can I say, I was still half asleep.) He turned on a dime and ran back to his house – I saw when he turned it was the teen next door – and I heard him thumping around inside, probably running up the stairs.

I was a little perplexed, and actually felt a little bad for yelling at him. I don’t know whether he was up to mischief and maybe wanted to smash the three pumpkins still sitting on the porch, or whether he was in trouble and was coming to knock on the door (I’ve told the littler ones that if they ever need help and their mom isn’t home, they can come and knock on my door), or something else. I yelled mostly because he and his friends have previously made a habit of sitting on the park bench on our front lawn and smoking or chatting rather loudly in the wee hours of the morning, and while I don’t begrudge them the use of the bench, I’m less than tolerant of the butts on the lawn and being woken up by someone I didn’t recently give birth to.

Less than a few minutes later, I again heard voices yelling in the driveway (this is through closed windows, mind you) and got up to look out the window just in time to see him stalking off toward the playground nestled in a small copse of trees across the street. I recognized his mother standing in the driveway calling after him, then rifling through her purse looking for something. She disappeared into the house and while I stood there in a sleepy stupor too tired to crawl back into bed, a police car came down the street with spotlight blazing, searching between the houses. As I watched, he scanned the park with his spotlight before parking in the driveway and going in to talk to my neighbour. For at least another 15 minutes, he and another squad car prowled the neighbourhood, shining their spotlight between houses and through the darkened park and schoolyard across the street.

I have no idea whether they found him, what they did with him when they did, or why they were looking for him. Mostly, I would really like to know what he was up to when I chased him away from my front door.

This isn’t the first encounter with the police I’ve watched through drawn blinds. A month or so ago on a cold and rainy night, I was getting the kids ready for a bath when Beloved told me two squad cars were in the driveway next door. The teen was in the back of one of the cars and the officers were talking to my neighbour. I got the impression that she had called the police and not that he had been picked up somewhere. At one point, they pulled the kid out of the back of the squad car to pat him down, and he was handcuffed. The mom went back in the house, and the two squad cars – with the kid still in the back seat – pulled out of the driveway and onto the grass of the soccer field across the street to talk to each other in that driver’s window to driver’s window pose you often see cops and taxi drivers doing in parking lots.

All that to say, I’m getting a little worried.

I’d like to talk to my neighbour about this, to let her know I’ve seen the police visiting. She’s a really nice lady who seems to be trying hard, but is maybe a little overwhelmed to find herself a single mother to three kids. I’d like to ask her what’s up in a mother-to-mother sort of way, to offer a bit of camaraderie while at the same time make sure that he’s not into something that might have some consequences for my family, for my precious baby boys.

What do you think? Should I talk to her? Do you think it’s reasonable that I ask her what’s going on? Last year when Tristan had his seizure and the fire rescue truck and ambulance showed up with lights blazing after I called 911, she asked me the next day if everything was okay, so there’s a sort of a precedent. I was even thinking of calling the police station myself and asking about the nature of the call, but I’m guessing they won’t divulge that sort of information.

It’s not that I’m curious (okay, yes I am) or being nosy – I’m genuinely concerned that there’s a risk (small but real) to my property and my family now. You don’t call the police on your own kid just because you’re having a bad night, and they showed up WAY too quickly after the kid disappeared (one minute, maybe two) for them to be responding to a call that she made after he stalked off, so I can’t help but wonder if she called the police because I chased him away.

Any thoughts?

Much to my disappointment, the weather in October wasn’t conducive to our annual trip to the pumpkin patch this year, so we don’t have the kind of truly adorable pictures we’ve snapped in prior years (if I do say so myself!)

However, since this is blog’s first Hallowe’en, I have no trouble hauling out the old photos to give you the proper chance to ooh and ahh over my scrumptuous pumpkins of years past.

First, Tristan the Great Pumpkin of 2002:

Then, the pumpkin became a monkey in 2003, and I became the pumpkin (at 6 months pregnant):

Last year, there was a new pumkin in town, and the monkey morphed into a caterpillar:

But I really do love a good pumpkin patch photo (also 2004):

Happy Halloween!!

Categories: Pix

I’m curious. What do you think about this whole avian flu thing? Are you stockpiling peanut butter, paper masks and drinking water? Are you getting a flu shot? Are you rolling your eyes at people who even mention the words “flu pandemic” in conversation? I know about a hundred people drop by here on the average day, so if you haven’t joined in the conversation before – speak up! I’d really like to hear from a wide range of people on this one (God bless the Internet.)

Up until a couple of weeks ago, I was pretty quick to dismiss the pandemic fear-mongering as much ado about nothing from the wingnut and fringe crowd. You might remember that Canada was hit particularly hard by the SARS virus in 2003, and I dialed in to the daily federal government communications conference call on that, so I had a pretty good view from the inside. In the end, it was the hype and hyperbole that scared me more than the virus. Up until recently, I was lumping the public’s reaction to an inevitable pandemic in with their response to SARS and the Y2K thing – and dismissing it as mass hysteria based on hype, misunderstood facts and rampant speculation.

Then I read a blog entry from someone for whom I have immense respect, and she was taking this whole thing very seriously. Within three days, another mummy friend – whom I would consider the antithesis of the chicken-little type – told me about all the research she’d been doing, and how genuinely frightened she is. It was enough to make me stop in my tracks and take a good look around.

This week, Canadian health ministers and representatives from international public health organizations met here in Ottawa to discuss plans and options in the case of a flu pandemic. That’s probably a large part of why at least the local media has been saturated with all things avian this week – and part of the reason I’m interested in your view from out there. I read an article a month or so ago in Macleans magazine that reinforced my previous opinion that the fear of the flu is out of proportion to the actual risk we face. Read it if you have time, it’s a reassuring counterpoint to some of the more scary information out there.

And that’s exactly the problem. Instinctively, I want to read information that confirms what I want to believe – that this whole flu pandemic thing is hype, and that the risk to me, to my kids, to my family and those in my life, is minimal. After all, only 60 people have died so far. (Perspective check: each year, 250,000 to 500,000 people die from the flu globally, 500 to 1500 of them in Canada, and most of those people are already sick or elderly. Stats courtesy of Health Canada.) The bird flu has not yet transmitted person to person. Yes, the Spanish Flu pandemic in 1918 decimated the population around the globe – but think of the advancements in medicine and science since 1918. There was no public health care, no vaccines in 1918. That’s the year my grandmother was born – we’ve come a long way, baby.

Waffle alert!! And yet – I’ll be lining up next Saturday to get my flu shot for the first time ever. They’re holding a clinic near my house, and it’s just too convenient not to do it. I’m going to get the boys vaccinated for the first time as well. I’m a believer in vaccines, and since they’re free I can’t come up with any good reason not to have everyone get their shot.

That’s my concession to fear, I guess, although it’s more because I think it’s a smart and practical thing to do, rather than because I believe we are facing the possibility of society grinding to a halt when the pandemic hits. (Touches wood.) I’m not stockpiling peanut butter just yet. But I’m not sticking my head in the sand either.

Just this morning, I had to resist the urge to get my knickers in a twist when I read that if there were a flu pandemic and a vaccine were developed, the Canadian Public Health Agency has said that kids aged 2 – 18 would be the last ones vaccinated. They’d have a hell of a fight on their hands if they denied me when I took my kids in to get vaccinated in my place. Take a deep breath, I told myself, that’s a lot of “ifs”.

What do you think? Please comment, because I’d really like to hear a range of perspectives on this. Are you taking steps to protect yourself, your family? Are you worried? Are you stockpiling fresh water and tins of soup? Or do you think the whole thing is just the latest media frenzy and that we’ll all be shrugging sheepishly when this, too, peters out to nothing?

I like the Word of the Day doo-hickey in my sidebar. Most days I know what the word means in a general context, if not the specific definition, but I’m always pleased to see an entirely new word that I don’t recognize at all. (Yes, I am that geeky.)

Today’s word is virago, a word I don’t think I’ve ever seen before, so I clicked on it. Here’s the definition:

Word of the Day for Wednesday October 26, 2005
virago \vuh-RAH-go; vuh-RAY-go\, noun:

1. A woman of extraordinary stature, strength, and courage.

2. A woman regarded as loud, scolding, ill-tempered, quarrelsome, or overbearing.

The intrepid heroines range from Unn the Deep Minded, the Viking virago who colonized Iceland, to Sue Hendrikson, a school dropout who became one of the great experts on amber, fossils and shipwrecks. –Ann Prichard, “Coffee-table:
Africa, cathedrals, animals, ‘Sue,'” USA Today, November 28, 2001

This virago, this madwoman, finally got to me, and I was subjected to the most rude, the most shocking violence I can remember. –José Limón, An Unfinished Memoir

Virago comes from Latin virago, “a man-like woman, a female warrior, a heroine” from vir, “a man.”

Now, I’m not much of a feminista but I have to tell you, I’m a little troubled by this definition. What, is number one how women define the term and number two is how men use the word? There’s a lot of ground between being a woman of courage and extraordinary stature, and being a raving shrew. Which one do you think I’d prefer to see carved on my tombstone?

And then, to add insult to injury, we get to the etymology of the word and apparently a strong, courageous woman is — manlike? Oh please!

You know what? You can call me a virago any day.