A love letter to Tristan, Age 8

My sweet baby Tristan,

You are eight years old! No longer a “little” boy, but a boy to your core. How could I call you “little” when I can rest my chin on the top of your head? Not so long now, my son, and we’ll be seeing eye-to-eye literally as well as philosophically — for a week or two, anyway, until you shoot right up past my height!

You are my adventurous spirit, my companion in neighbourhood walks, my artistic soul, my daydreamer. Your imagination is limitless, even if your attention-span is occasionally limited. You love to draw, especially characters from the books and cartoons and video games you love. Your walls are currently full of pictures you’ve drawn of Super Mario and characters from the Bone books.

236:365 Tristan in the tree

To say you love Lego is an understatement. You can follow even the most complex instructions, and it won’t be long before you’ve moved beyond Lego and are building our Ikea furniture for us. You love to show off your various Lego creations, mostly exotic ships with secret trap doors and hidden missiles. There is not a room in the house that doesn’t have some bit of Lego that has drifted off of one of your creations.

You, my boy, are an extremely patient older brother to Lucas. You tolerate him colouring on your homework, yanking apart your Lego creations, and otherwise torturing you, with an impressive amount of tolerance. Usually. You don’t mind fetching a snack for him, or reading books to him, or otherwise finding ways of diverting him from mischief while I’m trying to make dinner. Your other brother Simon is your best friend and mortal enemy, and the two of you are locked in a power struggle that sees you bickering for solid hours at a time, only to be followed by cuddling under the same blanket to watch TV together.

84:365 Brothers

In the last year, you have continued to impress us with your scholastic achievements. You read with an easy fluency that still makes my heart swell when I listen to you read out loud, and you speak French with a perfect accent that I could never hope to replicate. At school, you are exceeding expectations in both math and reading, and the only complaints we ever receive from your teacher are when you dig in your heels and decide to show your bullishly stubborn side. Lucky for us, this doesn’t happen too often.

Your best friends are Will and Colin, and you recount tales of recess adventures filled with opposing tribes and ne’er-do-well girls. Girls! You still have no use for them. You love physical play — running, tumbling, climbing, leaping. You come home from school soaking wet and dirty more days than not, but happy in your mess. You recently finished a second year of skating lessons, and you love nothing more than to zoom around the rink as fast as your legs will carry you. When I asked if you wanted to play hockey next year, you considered for a while but thought you might prefer something new instead, like guitar lessons. Be still my heart.

335:365 I am Canadian

You seem almost incapable of remaining in your chair through an entire meal, so I’m not sure how your teacher manages to keep you in your desk all day. Just when I think that maybe I should be concerned about your absolute inability to restrain yourself, I catch you engaged in reading or drawing or some other creative act and realize that you’ve been absorbed and motionless for impressive stretches. Apparently colouring engages a calming centre in your brain that conversation with your family does not!

Right now you love Super Mario Brothers, Spore, Lego, Star Wars, Alvin and the Chipmunks, the Bone books, Calvin and Hobbes, Pokemon, Garfield and the Vancouver 2010 Olympic mascots. Your favourite foods are McDonalds hamburgers, chicken fingers, pogos, pizza with just cheese, cheddar Sunchips, and sweet red peppers.

You, who were my most finicky eater, have miraculously become my most flexible eater. In the last year, you’ve come to love meatloaf, chili and salad. In fact, there’s very little that I serve that you won’t eat, and I can’t tell you how grateful I am for that! Even vegetables are no longer your enemy.

405:1000 Happy Birthday Tristan!!

My sweet baby Tristan, you are eight years old, and I love you with all my heart. Happy birthday, my son. You make me proud to be your mom.

Best! Birthday! Party! EVER!!

So I have to admit, I’ve been looking forward to today’s Lego birthday party with equal parts excitement and dread. Custom Lego birthday party for eight boys? Wicked awesome! Eight boys in my house? Questionable. Four of five family members felled by stomach flu in the five days leading up to the party, leaving the birthday boy vulnerable? Nerve-wracking. Three of said party guests, including the birthday boy, spontaneously and independently naming the party-in-progress “Best birthday party EVER!”? Priceless.

This is what an eight-year-old’s perfect birthday looks like:

creator 2

creator 1

Creator 3

Tristan's gears

Paper crinkler

Lego mindstorm movie

Meeting the mindstorm

Building bots 1

Building bots 2

Building bots 3

building bots 4

Sumo lego robots

Bow to the enemy

Robots ready!

Sumo lego

a banana

Lego cake

Blowing candles

The boys were astonishingly well-behaved, and utterly engaged with the Lego Guy’s instruction at every step of the way. Things only got a little crazy when they took their newly assembled Lego Mindstorm Robots into the wresting ring for a final challenge. Take a quick peek, it’s only 30 seconds but I bet if you’re even a little bit in touch with your inner eight-year-old boy (what, you don’t have one?) it makes you smile!

Did I mention? Best! Birthday! Party! EVER!

Oooh, pretty!

I feel like crap, because the stomach bug that started with the baby and worked it’s way to the middle boy visited me last night. And I feel bad because I am totally neglecting the blog lately. Too busy, and a little unsettled.

And so to assuage my guilt for ignoring you and to distract you with a gorgeous hint of spring — hey, look over here! Pretty!

402:1000 TtV Tulips

More soon, I promise!

In which she is crushed by the fact that she is not, in fact, uniquely named

Curse you, Facebook!

For my whole life, I have believed that I was unique in the world. To begin with, Danielle was a very unusual name in London, Ontario where I grew up. There were no other Danielles in my classes as I moved through school, and I didn’t meet another Dani until I moved here. Back in London, there were three listings for “Donders” in the phone book: my dad, his dad, and his uncle. Now that we’ve moved to Ottawa, Dad and I have cornered the Donders market in the phone book.

Oh, I know there are other Donderses out there in the world. In fact, I have a whole book written in inscrutable Dutch, following the various Donders lineages. But never, ever have I imagined there could be another Danielle Donders.

Until now.

I found the other Danielle Donders on Facebook when Beloved set up his account last month, and not too long after found this profile from a social media hub called Hyves. We don’t seem to have too much in common, based on this limited profile information. She lives in the Netherlands, and likes Armani, Bacardi, Diesel, G-star, Hyves, Jean Paul Gaultier, Opel, Replay, Samsung, T-Mobile, Vero Moda, and Zwitsal. I’ve once visited the Netherlands and heard of a few of those things — but not most of them.

It’s weighing heavily on me, this sudden challenge to my uniqueness of nomenclature. I suppose it’s still a relatively unique name — my cousin Mike Smith would certainly argue that it is! But for 40 years I’ve been comfortable in the knowledge that I was the *only* Danielle Donders in the world and find myself surprisingly unsettled to be disabused of the notion.

I wonder if she googles her own name and is annoyed by the first three or four pages dominated by references to an obscure Canadian blogger with an addiction to the Web? (And, yes, it was this post that I was writing a couple of weeks ago when I stumbled upon the infamous “creepy thesis.”)

Are you uniquely named? How would or do you feel about sharing your name with a stranger?

Looking for an Ottawa family to make pancakes on CBC. (No, really!)

Got this note just now from a contact at CBC:

CBC Ottawa is doing a food series and is looking to film a mom making pancakes/waffles for their young children sometime in the morning this week (the earlier the better). We’re hoping to also have one of the children read the ingredients off the pancake box. SO, if you’re a mom with a kid who can read and would like to be on TV, please email (sannah.choi@CBC.CA) for more details! Thanks!

Mmmm, pancakes!

Send your replies of interest directly to Sannah, but do let me know when I should tune in to see you on CBC should you be the featured pancaker. 🙂

It’s a good day to be Canadian!

Does it get any more Canadian than this? We go to bed on a wave of Gold medal fervour and wake up to Roll Up the Rim to Win. It’s Canada’s Best! Day! Ever!

163:365 Happy Canada Day!

If you watched even a bit of the Olympic coverage (Go Canada GO!) this year, if you felt that nascent tug of patriotism deep in your heart, if you stood as I did with tears running down your cheeks as your kids bellowed the national anthem at each gold medal victory, then you’ll enjoy this: Stephen Brunt’s touching essay about the Canadian Olympic experience, from its rough start to its glorious gold medal finish. (You might be asked to download a program called “Silverlight” which is Microsoft’s version of Flash. Annoying, but worth it!) If you can’t get the video to work, you can read a text version of what seems to be an early draft on Brunt’s Olympic blog.

And if you’re feeling a little snarkier, you might enjoy this essay courtesy of our Vancouver correspondent Fryman on how the “musical phenomenon known as “I Believe,” the official anthem of Canada’s Olympic Broadcast Media Consortium, may in fact provide the true legacy of the Games: another generation of Canadian kids who don’t know me from you, nor their “I” from a hole in their head.”

Cuz you simply can’t be Canadian if you can’t poke a little fun at yourself and your country, even after celebrating it all night long. Now where’s my coffee?

Mindless Internet distraction #312

Tensely clicking through various websites looking for info on the tsunami off the coast of Mexico for reasons I will more fully discuss in a few days, and I came across this. Via tweetstats, a wordle of my tweets.

Completely and utterly useless? You betcha. And yet, kinda cool nonetheless. And quite frankly, a welcome distraction. Now back to CNN I go…

“RIP Gordon Lightfoot.” Or not.

Surely you heard the twitter-storm that turned into a media frenzy last week, about the wildly exaggerated rumours of the death of Gordon Lightfoot. But did you know it was an Ottawa woman and mom of two, nothing more nefarious than a biologist, who was the catalyst for the rumour? Read the full story from her perspective in this Globe and Mail article. Best line in the whole piece? “Thankfully, Gordon Lightfoot didn’t believe the radio, or he wouldn’t have made it to his dentist appointment.” *snicker*

I’m just glad I wasn’t the most infamous person on the interwebs last week — for a while there, it was beginning to feel that way!

An experienced mom’s guide to kid birthday parties in Ottawa

We’re thick in the midst of birthday party season at our place: all three boys have birthdays in a five week span. Over the years we’ve mostly contracted out the birthday party, largely because the idea of avoiding 10 caked-up boys drunk on adrenaline on the loose in my house is worth just about any price! As such, I thought it would be nice to share our perspective on some of the various birthday party options for the school-age set in Ottawa.

Our perennial favourite has been Starr Gymnastics. They have two locations, one east and one west. I’ve never been to the Lancaster location, but have only good things to say about the west-end location. We’ve done four, maybe five birthday parties there, plus taken a couple of years’ worth of gymnastic lessons and even done a week of summer camp there. Starr gets a gold star in our book!

We tried Cosmic Adventures one year when Tristan was wee, I think it was his third birthday. It was fun, but the location is not convenient to Barrhaven, and we’ve never gone back. The boys have been to parties at Midway and Fun Junction, neither of which are convenient to Barrhaven although the boys had a good time.

One year we went with a few friends for an informal playdate at Playtime4Kids before having cake back at our house (that was the year Simon turned four and I was eleventy-hundred months pregnant with Lucas — we were looking for simplification that year!) and I was not really impressed with them at all.

This year, we did Simon’s party at A Gym Tale in Barrhaven, and we were extremely pleased with everything. The package included nearly an hour of free play on their indoor playground (very clean and very safe for toddlers), then a half an hour “adventure” led by a hilarious party helper. The kids did an obstacle course, and then the leader dressed up as an alien and let the kids pelt her with balls — the kids thought it was fantastic and the grownups watching couldn’t help but laugh. Then we had the standard 30 minutes for cake and presents in a private room. All told, I was highly impressed by the value and quality — another gold star!

375:1000 Happy Birthday Simon!

We’ve considered parties at the Agriculture Museum and the Museum of Science and Tech — would like to get around to those one year. Last year, we did Tristan’s 7th birthday at Merivale Bowling Centre, and I found that to be another excellent value that seemed to be a lot of fun for the kids. We toyed with a Cineplex party, as the kids have enjoyed attending parties there in the past, but there were simply no good movies on around the kids’ birthdays this year. And speaking of movies, did you know you can rent a movie theatre at the Colliseum to play Xbox on the big screen? How awesome is that! We’re *so* considering that for next year!!

But I don’t think any year will top this year’s party for sheer awesomeness, at least in Tristan’s mind. This year, I am so delighted by finding the perfect personality-theme mix that I am even willing to risk hosting it in my own house. Next month, I’m inviting five 8-year-olds (plus a nephew and two little brothers) to a Lego birthday party for Tristan. We’ve contracted “The Lego Guy” to come to our house for the event. You might have heard of him, he does a lot of Lego workshops around town. Here’s what he offers for birthday parties:

My party starts of playing the LEGO Creator Game, then building machines and structures using LEGO Technic pieces, example projects are amusement rides, hand drills, paper crinklers, etc., most of the projects can be motorized. The last part of the party is spent building LEGO robots using NXT Robotic System, and then do some sort of activity with them such as Sumo Wrestling and / or exploring with sensors to make the robots react to their surroundings.

Isn’t that perfect for a kid who lives and breathes Lego? And lookit me go, instead of dollar-store invites, I made personalized Lego invites with my mad photoshop skillz:

395:1000 Lego birthday invite

Fun, eh? The mini-fig is Tristan’s own representation of himself, made from this awesome “create yer own minifig” site. (If you’re doing this with the kiddies, make sure you use the kid-friendly version *without* cigarettes and handguns available!!) Of course, there will be a full report after the fact. Wish me luck on actually having the kids in my house!!

Now to see if we can find an alternative to loot bags (hate them!) that the kids loved as much as their personalized birthday CDs to give away!

Care to share your experiences? Any suggestions for fun kids’ parties in or around Ottawa? What has been your kids’ favourite or most memorable party experience?

The Creepy Thesis Hangover

Leave it to Marla to come up with the perfect final word. By the time I’d gone to bed last night, I was feeling that vaguely hangover-y, regretful way she describes in her comment. You know, that guilty and indulgent way you feel when you’ve eaten too many chips or wasted too much time on the Internet when you could have been doing more productive things with the real people in your life? Not that spending a couple of hours with y’all is a waste of time, and anyway, I was already feeling tired and cranky for reasons that have nothing to do with the Internet and everything to do with a toddler who thinks he’s a newborn and wakes up 4x a night now, so I didn’t mind sitting on my ass tapping away and not washing the floor for a couple of hours.

And it was a really interesting conversation, wasn’t it?

So here’s the thing. Today, Theryn sent me an e-mail to say hello. Theryn, aka Heather Lyn, the author of the thesis, who is still a regular reader and even a blogger herself. Look, she even said hello on the comments, and I’m not sure anyone noticed. And here’s the big lesson of the day, one I should have known better: she’s a real person, not just the two-dimensional author of some obscure (less obscure than last week, though!) thesis. And whatever we might have collectively inferred about her academic abilities, turns out she’s pretty nice, too. Certainly she’s got a thicker skin than me, and bore all of our criticism and commentary with grace and good humour.

As I told her in our e-mail exchange, I’m still not sure how I feel about her thesis — but I do regret bringing down a hailstorm of unsolicited and occasionally savage criticism on her head. And so Theryn, I’m sorry that you had to endure a verbal assault on your work that would have brought me to tears, thin-skinned and praise-needy as I am.

Funny thing, this Internet. Even for someone like me who lives and breathes it, who prides herself on hosting fair and respectful discussions, it’s easy to forget that there are people behind the keyboard, people with feelings and biases and opinions that are different. I can’t say that I regret my original post, because I wrote it in good faith and I think it resulted in a truly fascinating conversation. I haven’t changed my mind about thinking that Theryn crossed a line in her assumptions, and that she took my work out of context. But I do regret that I was naive enough to think that Theryn wouldn’t see the commentary if I didn’t explicitly name her, and frankly I regret that she did see it if only because I would have been hurt by those criticisms if there were directed at something I’d invested a lot of time and energy and myself into.

Ironic or what?