Category: Uncategorized

Jen over at MUBAR has written a lovely story about how she chose her as-yet unborn baby son’s name on the spot after being forced to provide a name to an airline reservation clerk. It’s a cute story, you should read it.

I love name stories. We knew we would name our son Tristan long before we managed to conceive him. He is named after the hero in the classic story Tristan and Iseult, but it doesn’t hurt that Brad Pitt struck just the right combination of sexy, wild and vulnerable as Tristan in Legends of the Fall (right, SnackMommy?)

Simon we had more trouble with, and although I liked the name all along, we weren’t completely sure until we met him that we had the name right. And now that Tristan calls him Simey, I begin to second-guess our choice. Sorry to saddle you with that one, big guy!

If you like to play with names, check out the Baby Name Wizard. Just type in any name in the top left corner and it shows you its popularity through the last 100 years or so. Or, just drag your cursor around the screen and watch what pops up.

For us, the challenge was not first names but family names. When I got married the first time, aka “the practice marriage,” I changed my name to his, and I think that’s a huge part of the reason I cried for hours the night of our wedding. (I’ll take “hints that maybe you weren’t ready to get married” for $300, Alex.) Even before we split, I had begun thinking about taking back my maiden name. So when Beloved and I got married, keeping my name was a non-issue.

(As an aside, it amazes me that the majority of women continue choose to change their name to their husband’s surname when they get married. I don’t know why this astonishes me, but it does. My name is such a deeply ingrained part of my identity, I couldn’t imagine giving it up.)

When we started talking about having kids, I was fine with the idea of having my surname as a second middle name, but as I got more and more pregnant, I became increasingly agitated at the idea of the kids not sharing my name. Beloved, on the other hand, was morally opposed to hyphenated names. It got so bad that we couldn’t leave the hospital after Tristan was born because we weren’t allowed to leave until we filled out his health card application, and we couldn’t decide what his name would be. We sat in the hospital room with bags packed, baby dressed, and arms crossed, each not looking at the other until Beloved eventually caved and we hyphenated Tristan’s family name. If they keep the applications on file, you can probably still see the tear stains from me trying to fill out the form while sobbing with relief.

So here it is, three years later, and every single time I have to spell out the whole damn name for a pharmacist, or to register with a city program, or just about any other time I give out the boys’ names, I cringe. It’s a lot of name. It’s only 13 letters, but it’s four bumpy syllables in unharmonious Dutch and French, and I’m starting to feel just a little bit regretful for saddling them with it. However, it’s damn cute to hear Tristan pronounce it all.

Once the boys are of an age that they are using their full names regularly, I’ll probably relax and let them use their paternal surname for every day stuff. And I’ll just hope that when they grow up, fall in love and get married, they have the sense not to marry a girl with a hyphenated name who is as stubborn as their mother.

Do you have any name stories to share?

We had some friends over on the weekend for dinner. No no, we didn’t have them à la Hannibal Lecter, we had the grilled chicken fajitas you told me I couldn’t have on Friday when I had to have takeout. Did I thank you for that yet?

So we had these terrific friends of ours over, and they brought their baby daughter. Okay, I can see it’s going to take me forever to tell this story, because I already have to correct myself again. What really happened is, we really really wanted to see, hold, cuddle, play with and otherwise fawn over their beautiful two-month-old baby daughter, and since she isn’t getting out much without a chaperone these days, we had to invite them along for the ride.

So anyway, they all three come over for cuddles and fawning and some dinner on the side. They are there exactly long enough for me to serve them each a drink when J (aka the guest who might not want to be named on the Internet) caught Simon with his hand submersed up to his wrist in J’s drink. This is the first of many times I will think throughout the evening that I am incredibly glad these are very good and patient friends of ours who genuinely love our boys and who are on the cusp of some major parenting foibles themselves. So J is pretty good about the whole thing, gets a towel and wipes off Simon’s hand and the drink spilled all over the end table and doesn’t even mention the fact that I totally didn’t offer to get him a new drink. Can you believe I only just NOW thought of that?

Now, you’d think that with the ratio of parents to children rising from 2:2 to 4:3, the odds would be improving in our favour over your average level of household mischief. Not so much. Beloved is so completely enthralled with beautiful baby girl that he forgets he even has boys, let alone that said boys are running rampant through the house. Not even 10 minutes after the Simon-as-stir-stick event, somehow Simon gets into the bathroom, closes the door behind him, and makes his way – in the pitch black, mind you – to the toilet, lifts the lid, and begins washing his pop-soaked hands in the toilet water. Beloved intercedes and washes Simon’s hands, I go back to making dinner, and within five – I’m guessing it wasn’t even three – minutes, Simon was back with his hand up to his wrist in J’s drink. God bless J, who only asked Beloved, “Are you sure you did a good job washing his hands?” And you know what? I honestly can’t remember if I got him a fresh drink even then.

So we have dinner, and it’s the usual chaos of dinner with Tristan not wanting to eat (a blog for another day) and it’s too late for Simon who passed through hungry the previous hour and had arrived at too-famished-to-do-anything-but-holler-and-throw-food, and JJ (as opposed to J) has to leave the table mid-meal to be a meal to her baby girl, and I remember the days we used to have dinner when it was just the four of us and we’d linger over dinner and dessert and conversation for hours. Or was that somebody else’s life?

You’d think having his very own baby in the house for the past 14 1/2 months would have left Tristan jaded on the concept of babies in general, but just the opposite is true. He really had no use for Simon as a baby, but he is fascinated by the new babies in our life, particularly his almost six-month old cousin Noah and beautiful baby girl. Beautiful baby girl is particularly special, however, because she is the only baby girl in any of our lives. My brother has a son, my closest friends have sons, my cousin has a son – even the day care provider has nothing but sons. So you can see why beautiful baby girl is a princess in all of our lives. On the way home in the car from our first visit to introduce beautiful baby girl to the boys, Tristan pronouced (with no prompting from us) that beautiful baby girl is his girlfriend. (pauses to let you “awwwwww” properly)

So anyway, JJ finishes feeding beautiful baby girl while we clean up the kitchen, and of course the next thing on the agenda is a diaper change. Tristan, who hasn’t really moved more than a foot away from beautiful baby girl all afternoon, is ‘helping’ and JJ is extremely patient with him. As she removes beautiful baby girl’s diaper, Tristan begins to howl with laughter, and I am mortified when he exclaims “Look at how small her penis is!”

Needless to say, we won’t be hosting too many more dinner parties this decade. We might even have to hold off until the engagement party of Tristan and beautiful baby girl…

As if I weren’t already demanding too much of my seriously overtaxed neural networks, I have signed up for French lessons. Ours is an officially bilingual country, and I’ve reached a point in my government career where I need to achieve at least rudimentary second language skills. Plus, they pay you an extra $800 a year if you can pass the test every five years. In 2000, I managed to convince them I was of sufficient linguistic mediocrity to be classified of intermediate ability, but with two full years of maternity leave under my belt since then, my second language skills have slipped to at least sub-par, if not abyssmal.

So for four hours each week, I sit in our little class of eight, struck dumb in both senses of the word and unable to form a coherent thought in either official language. French class has become a lesson in humility perhaps long overdue.

How can I say this without sounding horribly conceited? I’m used to being — to being just a little bit smarter than the average bear. I’m used to being ahead of the curve, and I’m used to finding learning easy. I’m used to being clever. French classes are doing a very good job of disabusing me of that notion.

Each class begins with everyone taking a turn talking about what we did on the weekend or telling a bit of a story about ourselves – something to display our conversational prowess. As I listen to the others, I try to simultaneously hear their narratives, translate them back into English for comprehension, come up with something worth saying myself and translate that back into French, all the while feeling my stomach knotting and flop sweat forming on my brow as my turn approaches.

Rather than relating long, colourful and detailed anecdotes like this one, I find myself reduced such feats of conversational daring as “I ate dinner”, “I read a book” and “I saw a brown dog.” Me, whose compulsion to talk, to elaborate, to construct fabulous run-on sentences with no end in sight – reduced to earnest and empathetic nods and one-word grunted replies. It’s killing me! I have so much to say, a captive audience, and an anxiety attack every time I open my mouth.

I would write more, but I really should spend some time trying to master the conjugation of the future anterior – or to find a polite way of saying, “I have no comment” in French.

Categories: Canadianisms

I’ve always liked the idea of daylight savings time. In my pre-children life (there was such a thing?) I argued that gaining an hour of daylight for the entire summer was worth the shock of having to get up in the dark again for a while, and losing that hour of sleep. I would have said that if I were able to change anything, it would be nice if we could lose the hour in the middle of the afternoon on Friday while I’m at work, rather than in the middle of the night on a weekend.

This year, I have been nothing short of pathetic in my anticipation of daylight savings time. The boys have been waking up on average around 5:30 am every day, going so far as to wake at 4:30 am (for the day, mind you) two days this week. For weeks, I have had daylight savings day circled on my calendar with stars, happy faces and bouncy trails of Zzzzzzzs painted in the little square. For one magical day, I would be heaved into the day to see a perfectly reasonable 6:00 or 6:15 am on the digital readout of my bedside clock, and I would be satisfied with the sham. For that magical day, I would not glance up at the clock after my fourth cup of coffee, our third viewing of The Knights of Sir Fix-A-Lot, and after chasing Simon out of the cupboards for the ninth time, and weep to see it was not even 7:00 am yet.

Not friggin’ likely.

I guess it was partially my own doing. I went out to dinner with some friends last night, and I didn’t get home until nearly 11:00 pm. By the time I reset the clocks and crawled into bed, it was already after midnight EDT. But, I remained optimistic that I would get at least 6 hours sleep. Optimism sucks.

4:30 am EDT (that’s 3:30 EST, if you’ve lost track already), Simon wakes crying. I tell him in no uncertain terms that we are NOT getting up. After 20 minutes of rocking, he goes back to sleep.

5:30 am EDT, Tristan wanders in. Too pathetic to protest, I simply open the covers and invite him in. He has had a fever on and off for the last two days, and since our scare with a febrile seizure in December, we don’t mess around with fevers. He is hot, and I stagger off in search of some tylenol for him. By the time I crawl back into bed we are both wide awake. After much snuggling, we are both on the cusp of drowsy when…

5:50 am EDT, Simon calls out. He hasn’t mastered the words yet, but it is quite clear he is placing his room service order for some lait de mama.

Let me do the math (takes off socks and counts on fingers and toes) – that’s 5, maybe 5 and a 1/4 hours sleep in total, give or take. Ugh. Safe to say, the daylight savings renewal plan was a bust. Anybody have any other bright ideas on how to keep a one year old and a three year old from waking at ungodly hours?

I’m feeling a little cranky today. If you have a penis and you’re reading this, you might want to move along. Consider yourself warned, there be girlie stuff ahead.

So, as I was saying, I’m feeling a little cranky today. Rather than having my knickers in a twist, I’ve got my boobies in a bind. For the first time since the second or third trimester of my pregnancy, I’m wearing a real bra instead of a nursing bra. Okay, another caveat before we begin, just so you know where I’m coming from. I’m no A cup. I aspire to a C cup. Last I checked, I was somewhere in the netherworld the far side of a DD cup, at which point I stopped measuring. Damn breastfeeding.

I have a love-hate relationship with bras. I know some women who peel them off the moment they are in the privacy of home (Mom, are your ears burning?) and some women who don’t even bother. Personally, that’s just a little bit too much freedom for me. I’m like a toddler that way; I need boundaries. But bras are evil! If they don’t have enough give, you are likely fidgeting all day trying to get comfortable in them or, worse, bulging over the edges. Not a pretty sight. If they’re too loose, you might as well go commando – the bra isn’t accomplishing anything.

For those of you who haven’t had the pleasure, let me say that to me nursing bras the fuzzy slippers of bras – nice and stretchy and comfy, but not incredibly supportive. Fine, if you don’t mind your nipples in the vicinity of your navel. Underwire bras, the industrial strength kind you need to defy gravity with anything larger than a C cup, are like stiletto heels. They make an outfit look fabulous, but they are uncomfortable as hell.

Which brings me back to my crankiness. I can’t pull a full breath without having some epoxy-coated wire digging into my armpit, I’m all chafed in the chest, and I think the straps are digging a permanent groove into my shoulder. All things considered, I’m not a happy camper. But at least I can run down the stairs without crossing my arms in front of me!

So tell me, which do you value more – comfort or fashion?

I’ve been feeling a little out of it lately. Tired, cranky, ass-draggy – even moreso than usual. It’s been especially bad on the weekends and I just haven’t been able to figure out why. Yesterday afternoon, I was so sluggish (or, more accurately, slug-like, in that I was lying on the floor in a puddle of my own drool) in the middle of the day that I asked Beloved to throw on a pot of coffee, in hopes of sparking some spring into my step. Or at least being able to sit upright.

Through bleary eyes, I noticed he was scooping from the decaf canister instead of using the real coffee. I was about to whimper, not having the energy to wail, in protest when it struck me… sweet mother of columbian supremo, no wonder I’ve been feeling like crap. I’VE BEEN DRINKING DECAF!!!

We’ve had the same two coffee canisters for years, one with pretty flowers that holds the real coffee, and a glass one that holds the decaf, which we often drink in the evenings. Some time in the last couple of weeks, my adled brain had crossed up which canister has the aromatic grounds of perky goodness, and which canister has the “it’s two hours until bedtime, I’d better not or I’ll be up all night” decaf poser.

I could cry. It’s been weeks since the boys have slept later than 5:30 am, and I’ve been medicating myself with decaf? The horror!

Okay, so this is a bit of a lazy blog, but I’m having too much fun in the springtime sun with my boys to come in and write a decent entry.

As promised, here are a dozen lamebrained things I swore I’d never do before I became a parent. Heck, some of this stuff I do daily!

1. I’d never give a baby a pacifier.

2. I’d never tiptoe around the house or whisper because baby is sleeping. (Fact: I nearly throttled the mailman one day because he had the temerity to ring the doorbell during nap time.)

3. I’d never consider cheetos and olives an acceptable dinner.

4. I’d never let naptime schedule my day. (Fact: naptime is the only thing that schedules my day.)

5. I’d never say “because I said so.”

6. I’d never rescue a dropped lollipop from the mall floor, lick the germs off and give it back to my hysterical toddler.

7. I’d never nurse a baby once his teeth grew in. (Fact: he’s almost 14 months and I see no end in sight. Probably soon, but maybe not.)

8. I would never bribe my children with candies or other treats. (Fact: if it weren’t for smarties and jelly beans, nothing would ever get done around here.)

9. I would never give my children snacks in their car seats.

10. I would never speak to my children in that annoying singsong-y voice.

11. I would never use TV as a babysitter.

12. I would never spend $20 on a little wooden train. (Fact: we have at least a dozen of them.)

So those are my confessions. Yours?

I wanted to come up with a witty and eye-catching title for this post, but my heart just isn’t in it. Tristan has finally given up his soother, and I’m surprised by the strange mix of emotions I feel. Before I had kids, I swore I’d never use pacifiers. “Take a beautiful baby and hide half his face with a big hunk of plastic? No way!” (Note to self: blog for another day = lamebrained things I thought about parenting before having kids.) For whatever reason, both my boys are pacifier junkies and have been from the start.

He’s three, so it’s about time he gives it up. I know that, he knows that, but it’s still been rough. This is a boy who only gets his soother(s) – he actually has three of them and wants them all at the same time – when he’s in bed, but who is a bona fide suck junkie. (Hmmm, I guess obsessive personalities are genetic.) I would occasionally find him in his room in a corner, having scaled the furniture to snatch a soother off the high shelf, sucking surreptitiously away like a smoker in a windblown alley. I’m sure the reason we had regular daily afternoon naps for as long as we have, and the fact that he tells me every day when it is nap time and not the other way around, is entirely about the need for a suck fix and has nothing to do with sleep.

Having seen it work for a friend, we decided when the time came to give them up for good, we’d take the soothers to Toys R Us and use them to “buy” a Gordon (from Thomas the Tank Engine). We’ve been talking it up for a couple of months now, but on the weekend he brought it up himself and told us he was ready. All morning and for the entire drive to the toy store, Tristan babbled excitedly about how he was going to trade his soothers for Gordon and we praised him for being such a clever big boy.

I love the Toys R Us staff. I called ahead to make sure a Gordon was available, explained about the soothers and asked them to hold one at the customer service desk for us. They must go through similar rituals fairly often, because nobody blinked an eye and they were incredibly sweet about it. Later, while we played on the in-store train tables, Daddy went to “get a bag” for Gordon and it was all we could do to convince Tristan to release his precious cargo for even that long.

It was all good. We were having lunch when Tristan announced it was time for a nap. “I want to take a nap with my…” (Beloved and I held our breaths during the longest pause in conversational history) “…Gordon!” (Immense sighs of relief.) So up he went, but when he got to bed he did ask for the soothers again, and when reminded that he had traded them for Gordon, he simply decided he wasn’t tired anymore. He spent the rest of the afternoon building sprawling wooden tracks for mighty Gordon all over the dining room floor. For the entire day Gordon was golden.

Knowing that the worst was yet to come and yet fortified by the success of the day, I hadn’t really been dreading bedtime as much as perhaps I should have. It was all good until Tristan, on his way up to bed, sat down on the stairs and said in a tiny, heartbreaking voice that he didn’t want Gordon anymore, he wanted his soothers. Tantrums I could have handled, but that tiny poignant voice nearly did me in.

He did eventually go to sleep without too much more complaint, but woke up a few times in the night crying for them. Simon must have been feeling sympathetic anxiety, because he woke up on the alternate hours crying. I have to admit, I was at a bit of a loss as to how to comfort Tristan when for the last three years, any nighttime trouble was instantly resolved by stuffing the pacifier into his mouth. Cuddles and kind words seemed to do the trick for the most part. And this morning he was his usual cheerful self, minus the plastic plug that has been our bane and our saviour for the past three years.

This is a major transition for us, even bigger than CIO and the move to a big-boy bed. To me, this is the first time Tristan has had to live with the consequences of his own decisions, and watching it has been by turns exhilarating and heartbreaking. I imagine this is a small taste of things to come, when parenting is more about providing emotional support and moral guidance than changing diapers.

It’s been a long night.

Categories: Tristan