Parental validation at meet-the-teacher night

It was meet-the-teacher night at the boys’ school last week. Since Simon has the same two teachers he had last year (and that Tristan had as well) I’m pretty comfortable with that relationship. I was looking forward to meeting Tristan’s new teacher though.

I sat in Tristan’s desk in the back row and looked around, full of awe and wonder that he’s in Grade Two but I clearly remember Grade Two. The kids left stuff out on their desks for us to look through, and there were heaps of administrivia, much of it relating to First Communion later this year. They have two class Webkinzes and lots of affection from the teacher and 20 minutes of homework a night, which seems a little steep to me, but it looks like it’s going to be a good year.

One of the handouts on the desk was a booklet was called “Diary of a Second Grader.” It was filled with photocopied worksheets they had completed like, “My favourite recess activity is…” and “The thing I am good at is….” I was enjoying reading it, knowing most of the answers before I finished reading the question but happy to have this sweet insight into the mind of my occasionally stoic seven-year-old.

One page said across the top: “My mom says there are three things that I need to remember when I go out into the world.” These were Tristan’s answers:

  1. Do not stand on the fernitur (sic)
  2. Be polite at somebody else’s house
  3. I will always love you.

Isn’t that the best? One of the three primary messages that my son carries out into the world is that I will always love him. I am a good mother!

Excuse me while I go take my shiny bauble of parental affirmation and frame it on the wall, for reference the other 99 per cent of the time when I feel like I’m making things up as I go along and really have no clue as to what I’m doing.

“I will always love you.” Sigh….

No strollers allowed

Following our apple-picking adventure on Saturday, we popped into nearby Merrickville for some browsing. The place is riddled with fun and funky boutiques, many filled with the wares of local artisans, with not a chain store to be found. I love the ecclectic character of the place, and that you’ll never know what you’ll find from one place to the next.

There was one store that looked particularly interesting, and I was just bending down to lift our compact stroller (and its passenger) up the stone step and into the store when an elderly gentleman stopped us.

“Sorry, no strollers allowed,” he said, blocking the door.

I was so surprised that for a minute I only gazed up at him, openmouthed. “Are you serious?” I finally asked, thinking maybe he was having a bit of fun with me and unable to imagine that he was actually denying me (and my baby) entrance to the store.

He replied in the affirmative, and started to say something about safety, but I wasn’t really interested in the rest of his answer. Beloved, standing behind me with the big boys, offered to take the stroller up the street a bit while I went into the shop, but there was no way I was going to give that merchant my business.

We wandered further down the street, and browsed a few other stores, but the experience of being denied entry had tainted my enjoyment of something to which I’d been looking quite forward. There were many other shops with breakables and other finery that did not bar our entrance, and quite a few where I had to bend down and boost the stroller up a step or two. I’ve never, in all these years, been denied access to any sort of establishment because of a stroller.

I’ve been puzzling over this for a couple of days now. I wish I’d listened to see exactly what the safety issue of concern would be with a stroller. I mean, are wheelchairs barred, too? That would be unimaginable. And yet, they’re a lot bigger than my little travel stroller. Or is it a matter of babies with grabby hands? Lucas on the loose, should I have chosen to leave the stroller at the curb, is far more of a menace to finery than he is belted securely into his stroller.

It’s not that I feel like my rights have been violated, that it’s worth making a stink over, but it does seem to me to be an issue worth discussing. I don’t want retribution or compensation or even to “out” the store in question, but I am curious as to your thoughts. Should my stroller and I have unfettered access to any public establishment? Would you have fought for your ‘right’ to enter the store? Am I missing a very good reason why we should have been denied access? Would it have mattered if I were pushing one of those SUV-type strollers that people so love to hate instead of a compact little Maclaren travel stroller? Have you ever been denied access anywhere because of a stroller? Is there a time or place when strollers should be prohibited?

What say ye, bloggy peeps?

Apple picking 2009

Apple picking is one of my favourite fall traditions. We’d never been before 2005, but now I can’t imagine going a year without a trip to the orchard. This year, we headed back to our first favourite, Kilmarnock Orchard. It’s the better part of an hour’s drive from Ottawa, but the drive is beautiful on a bright blue autumn morning, and if you make a stop at nearby Merrickville on your way home, it’s a lovely way to spend a day together.

Brothers

This tree is not indicative of the size of tree you’ll find at Kilmarnock, but I was charmed by it. It’s a Charlie Brown Apple Tree!

Charlie Brown apple tree

Lucas was even more adorable than usual. He loves apples, and calls any round-ish fruit an “abble” — nectarines, peaches, and tomatoes are all “abbles”. He was beyond excited to see not only the tractor-pulled “train” that took us out to the orchard, but the fact that there were apples as far as his eye could see. If he said “Abble!!” (you can actually hear the exclamation points) once, he said it five dozen times.

Lucas eating apple again

Why should you pick the apples way up there on those branches, when there are tonnes of apples just lying around in the grass, waiting to be collected?

Ground apples

(I’d like to assure you that in the picture above, he’s actually eating an apple I picked for him instead of one of the ground apples, but the odds are only about 50/50. *shrugs*)

I love the apples, I love the chance to get outside, I love to watch them enjoying themselves, I love to notice how much they’ve grown in the year since we last went apple picking. But what I really love? The chance to spend time with my menfolk.

Family portrait

(It’s not the best portrait, but I love the matching expressions on Lucas’s and Tristan’s face!)

I had better success with individual portraits. The orchard light in September is lovely!

My menfolk

(Lucas is in B&W because his skin tone was really uneven in colour, reflecting the red and green of the tractor we were in, and I haven’t figured out how to fix that in Photoshop yet! Besides, I like portraits in B&W.)

It was well after lunch time by the time we’d picked our fill, meandered the length of the orchard, gone for an extra train run, and picked up a home-made apple-caramel pie, so we scooted up to Merrickville for a bite to eat and a wander down the main strip.

fries and ketchup

Merrickville is a picturesque little town right on the Rideau Canal, a haven for the artistic sorts. These are just a few of the things we enjoyed.

Merrickville mosaic

So now we have three heaping serving bowls of apples, mostly Lobos and Macs. (I’m disappointed, my faves are Empires but because of the cruddy summer they’re slow in ripening this year.) Do you have any good apple recipes to share? I’m particularly looking for an easy apple crisp recipe. Mmmmm, abbles!

Perfect apple

(There are even more photos on Flickr! And about 150 on the computer that I didn’t post but don’t have the heart to delete…)

Project 365: dying flowers and magic places

Well, either it was a particularly beautiful week in the universe, or I’m actually getting good at this 365 thing, because I liked the pictures from this week a lot. A couple of days, I had a hard time choosing from very disparate shots (let alone the 16 shots I took of each composition!) to select a single picture of the day.

Of the week’s photos, I’m least fond of this one of the Laurier Avenue Bridge over the Rideau Canal. It’s okay, but I love this bridge and I didn’t manage to capture what I wanted to capture — the beauty of those iron supports, the grace of the structure. That’s why I put it in b&w, to emphasize the form. I think I might have liked it better if I could have taken it square on, but that would have meant taking a swim to the middle of the Canal, and I’m not *that* obsessed. Yet.

234:365 Laurier Avenue Bridge

I have always loved the quality of the light in September. The sun is lower in the sky, so the light is more indirect and often dappled through the trees. It’s a golden, flattering light. And of course, the early changing leaves are spectacular in their brilliant colours. But even beyond that, there’s an incredible amount of beauty in the autumn that I never noticed before.

These grow in my back yard. I’m not sure what its called, but it turns the most gorgeous shades of purple, red and yellow as the season fades.

235b:365 Purples and greens

I’m pretty sure this is the last of the coneflower pictures for this season. Even mostly dead, though, they’re still pretty! (Suddenly, I’m having a Monty Python moment over here. “I’m not dead yet. Feeling much better, actually…”)

235:365 Last of the coneflowers

This sunflower still has lots of life left in her! Do you see how the colour is a little less than natural in this one, sort of a blue tone to it? I set the white balance to “fluorescent” in the RAW editor by accident, and loved how it looked. From there I desaturated it just a bit. I really like the effect. Of course, a happy yellow sunflower against a red maple background and a blue sky doesn’t necessarily *need* my mucking about with it, but I think it makes it look just a little bit different… not necessarily a bad thing?

236b:365 Autumn sunflower

On the other hand, I did nothing to enhance the colour on this sunrise. I swear, it really was this colour! (Well, I had to adjust the colour once I uploaded it to Flickr, because I’m having a weird problem with Flickr desaturating my photos this week, so I had to tweak it to get it back up to the level of vibrancy it had straight out of the camera. I’m not sure if it’s because I’m shooting this week RAW and Flickr can’t handle the colours or what, but it’s really annoying!)

238:365 Sunrise in primary colours

This is another shot of the same sunrise. I love the pink striations and that hint of crescent moon!

Sunrise and the moon

Sometimes, taking the colour out of a colourful thing gives it a new kind of beauty. These mums were a vivid yellow, but I processed them in black and white. They look almost like they’re glowing, don’t they?

237:365 Mums

And sometimes, there just isn’t much colour to capture. I like the earthy tones of this garlic. (Annie from PhD In Parenting sent me a tweet one day after lunch, asking me if I’d been photographic garlic in the Market. I was! I wish she’d’ve spoken up, I’d’ve liked to meet her!)

Vampires beware!

I think this one is one of my favourite pictures this week. Something about the texture of the bricks, the peeling paint, that pop of purple against the red bricks… I love it! (And I had to adjust the colour again after I uploaded it to Flickr — I really wish I knew what was causing that!)

240:365 What's the story?

The same morning glory, closer to the ground. I desaturated this one for effect. It works, no?

240b:365 Morning glory

Note to self: always, always, ALWAYS carry your camera with you. You never know when you’ll need it. This is the roof of the grocery store!

Birds on a roof

I’ve driven past this house on Fallowfield dozens of times, but it took my breath away when I glanced at it with the morning light streaming down on it. Doesn’t that porch seem like a magical kind of place? It stirs my imagination every time I look at it. There’s an entire novel that wants to be written about the magical things that happened around this porch, with the glowing light on one side and the wizened, dying shrub on the other.

239:365 Perfect porch

And speaking of magical places, check out this curio shop. I swear I’ve covered every block in the Byward Market, looking for photo opportunities, but I’ve never noticed this shop on York Street before. I could spend hours just poking about, looking at stuff and taking pictures/ I was chatting with the curator, and she said she’d be happy to keep an eye open for antique cameras for my through-the-viewfinder project for me. I love how this shot turned out — if you look closely, you can see her reflected in the mirror on the table.

Curio shop

Last, but certainly not least… we were at the park with friends on the weekend. Six boys with a run of the playground, and this is where I found Tristan. This is not a set up. He climbed the tree, as he is wont to do, and then sent Simon to fetch his book for him. A little quirky, occasionally overcome by antisocial tendencies, a lover of books — that’s my boy!

236:365 Tristan in the tree

As of today, 240 days down and only 125 days to go. Next Wednesday, I’m two-thirds of the way done…

In which my vexatious breast get a check-up

I‘ve been meaning to blog about my mammogram appointment for a while now, but I kept forgetting how many Ms were in mmamogram. In case you missed it, at my annual check-up this year my doctor pronounced me ridiculously healthy, at the lowest possible risk score for my age, except she found a “nodule” in my left breast. Talk about good news-bad news!

There isn’t any breast cancer in my family, but it seems to be rampant in my life right now. I have two close friends who have recently conquered it, a colleague who is battling it, more than one friend who has lost her mother to it, and one dear friend who will inevitably lose his sister to it — mother of two small children no less. So when the doctor found that nodule I locked the information into a tiny little box deep in my subconscious and decided not to even think about it until I had to. I decided I wasn’t even going to tell my Mom — definitely a first! — until after the mamogramm, lest I worry her for nothing. (And then, in typical fashion, I forgot that I had decided not to tell her and blogged about it, albeit obliquely, the day before the mmammogramm, resulting in a rather uncomfortable phone conversation. Sorry Mom!)

I didn’t know a lot about mamograms going in to the appointment, but my only-barely-supressed anxiety was ratcheted up another couple of notches by the fact that I had the mmamogram and an ultrasound on my breasts scheduled back-to-back, which seemed uncommon.

My appointment was for eight in the morning one sunny day at the end of last month. I thought I’d been all over the campus of the Civic hospital, between walking the labours of my first two babies, various and sundry appointments and visits over the years, and about a million appointments at the Parkdale Clinic fertility centre, but there’s a whole bunch of buildings on the east side to which I’d never been. The Women’s Breast Health Centre is in the Grimes building, which seems like a standalone clinic from the outside but has all the fixtures of the larger hospital campus.

Walking into the breast health centre, I was struck by their efforts to make the clinic a gentle, hushed sort of place. A far cry from the usual moulded plastic and harsh fluorescent lighting of most clinics, here the light is rather dimmed and provided by lamps with a French country sort of feel to them, the chairs are done in flowery upholstery and the colour scheme runs to salmon and teal. It struck me as about fifteen years out of date, almost humourously so in a charming sort of way, but still a nice attempt to soften the place up.

As I sat and waited for my turn, I flipped through the informational brochures about the mmamogram and breast ultrasound. (It’s a testament to the depth of my head-in-the-sand reaction that I did not seek any kind of information about the procedures, or the possibilities they might diagnose, before my appointment. La la la, I can’t hear you, this isn’t happening if I don’t acknowledge it…) As I took a long pull from the extra-large Tim’s coffee I’d brought with me, I read “you should refrain from drinking caffeine before your appointment because it may make your breasts more tender or lumpy.” Oops.

After a not-very-long wait, I was called in for the mamogramm itself. I stripped to the waist, and a very kind technician explained exactly what would be happening that day: I’d have the mmammogramm followed by an ultrasound of my breasts, and then I’d meet with someone to discuss the findings. My doctor would have the results within seven days. I asked for clarification: so, would I have an indication of what, if anything, they found that morning? Yes, she explained, they would discuss the findings and schedule a biopsy or discuss other next steps right away. Although I was highly impressed by the immediacy — I’m so used to the standard “Sorry, we can’t discuss anything with you, your doctor will inform you if there is anything you need to know” — I felt the first icy stab of fear at that moment. Biopsy? For just a moment, I felt a vertiginous sense of falling through space as the yawing possibilities opened up before me and hundreds of uncomprehensibly terrifying scenarios played out. This is not a joke, this is not a game, this is real and this is my life. It must have played across my face, too, because the technician reached out and gently touched my shoulder. She didn’t say a word, but her warm fingertip grounded me again as I reeled the panic in and the moment passed.

The mammogramm itself was not at all what I was expecting. You stand up against a rather intimidating machine, and the technician arranges your breast across a tablet adjusted to your height. Your breasts get squashed, one at a time, between two glass plates in a manner that made me think of the hamburger-patty maker my mother bought from a tupperware party in the 1970s. It doesn’t hurt, per se, so much as it’s uncomfortable and awkward. Apparently, they stretch and compress your breast this way so the x-ray for a mmamogramm requires much less radiation than a standard x-ray.

After ten or 15 minutes, I went into a second room and had my left breast, the one where the doctor thought she detected the nodule, examined by ultrasound. Between the fertility treatments, the miscarriages and three babies, I’ve had more ultrasounds than I can count — but never on my breast. She scanned the breast thoroughly, while I craned my neck to see the monitor (I think a part of my brain is forever hardwired to search an ultrasound monitor for that gorgeous flickering heartbeat of a nine-week old fetus) as if I had the faintest idea what I was looking for. As she stepped out of the room to compare her results with the radiologist, she reassured me that she could find no trace of a nodule anywhere near where the doctor had indicated on the requisition — but that didn’t stop me from getting up after she left to closely inspect the image left up on the monitor of my vexatious left breast. My professional worrier’s eye couldn’t find anything of note either, despite going cross-eyed in the pixellular analysis.

I’d settled back on the exam table, but still not taken my eyes off the monitor in some sort of talismanic trance, by the time she returned. She told me that they could find nothing even remotely of concern, so much so that I didn’t even have to bother with the post-mammogram consultation. I was good to go, but I should consider coming back regularly, every couple of years.

As I walked back to my car, I felt another hint of that vertiginous sense of fear, of disaster narrowly averted. It was the same breathless feeling that kept me up nights for a couple of weeks after the accident this summer, my brain swirling with all the things that could have happened but didn’t, thanks to the grace of God and dumb luck.

It was, and is, a beautiful morning.

Ottawa’s Hidden Treasures: Valley View little animal farm

I‘m on a “Ottawa’s Hidden Treasures” tear these days! The photos from this post were actually taken a couple of weeks ago, but I’m just getting around to posting them now. No wonder we’re not getting any housework done — every time the sun shines, I feel the need to pack the boys up and celebrate with an excursion of some sort. Lucky for us, Ottawa never lets us down — there’s always something fun for a family to do.

We’ve been visiting Valley View Little Animal Farm since we moved to Barrhaven six years ago, but I suspect that a lot of people have overlooked this little gem. It’s right on the outskirts of Barrhaven, off Fallowfield Rd between Moodie and Eagleson. Admission is $6.50 per person, and kiddies two and under are free.

Valley View is the perfect place for the toddler to early school age set. There’s fun stuff to climb on at the front of the park, and a small barn with goats, chickens, rabbits and the usual petting zoo type creatures that you can feed by hand. My boys have always been fans of the dozens of metal yellow Tonka trucks strewn around near the entrance… when they were toddlers, I think we could’ve just paid our $6 to get in, play with the trucks for three hours and then leave again without actually looking at the rest of the farm!

Behind the small animals barn, there’s a path that meanders beside a duck pond on one side and some bigger animals in pens on the other side. This blue-eyed meanie scared the heck out of me when I got a bit too close — even though there was a fence in between us, I still jumped back hard enough to fall on my arse when he hissed angrily at my obnoxious camera in his face.

211b:365 Goose

This donkey was a lot more placid. Beloved and I agreed, there is something in his soulful eyes and “pet me, please!” demeanor that highly resembles our Golden-Shepherd mix, Katie.

donkey

Other animals include peacocks and llamas, deer and ponies, pigs and some very unfriendly emus. They also have some gorgeous horses.

The animals are my favourite part, and the boys like them well enough, but what they really want to do is run wild over the half-acre or so of play structures strewn around the end of the park. They’ve added quite a few since the last time we visited. There’s a few of the traditional climber-and-slide combinations, but they have a whole bunch of custom structures in adventure-inspiring shapes like pirate ships, trucks and airplanes. There must be a dozen or more in various shapes and sizes and styles.

Tristan airplane

I really didn’t think we were going to be able to get Lucas out of this tractor-train combination. He would stand aside to let other kids have a turn at the wheel, but would not, under any circumstance, consider actually leaving the vehicle for the best part of 20 minutes. (Is it me or do the terrible twos start earlier with each kid?)

Lukey tractor

You know how just about every city playground has the same basic look and feel, with largely the same sorts of stuff? The thing I like best about Valley View, in addition to the animals and the small, friendly feel to the place, is the fact that they have such unique things for the kids to explore, from the hand-built play structures and the sea of Tonka trucks to this really neat see-saw built from old wagon wheels.

tristan see saw

New this year, they’ve also opened up a whole new section with a farm machinery museum. It’s 365 heaven back there! I can’t remember what this does, but I love looking at it!

211:365 Contraption

And what is it about milk jugs that make them so interesting? Or is that just me?

Milkjugs

Something about this row of tobacco tins gave the farm museum barns a feel of authenticity. This is one of my favourite shots of the day, for some reason I don’t quite understand.

Tobacco tins

Of course, no trip to the farm is complete without inspecting the old tractor beside the equally weathered barn!

Tractor

Oh wait, you mean we’re not here to indulge in my endless quest for photo opportunties? This is about the kids, you say? Well then, no trip to Valley View is complete without a ride on the tractor train around the corn fields, sunflower valley and the pumpkin patch!

Valleyview train

I’d forgotten how much I love Valley View in the year or two since we’ve been, and it’s practially around the corner from us. We tend to go to the Experimental Farm when we need our farm fix, simply because we have the annual membership, but there’s a sweet quaintness to Valley View that makes it unique and worth the trip to the far southwest corner of town. This is a great place for a sunny autumn day family adventure – definitely one of Ottawa’s best kept secrets!

Hello Goodbye

Just dropping in to say fare ye well, all.

Beloved brought home Beatles Rockband for the Wii yesterday, and we tried it out this afternoon. It’s way too much fun. No really? WAY too much fun.

Since I simply don’t have any more room in my life for a new addiction, I’m going to have to give y’all up. The blog, the 365, everything. Play Helter Skelter and you’ll understand. Or Come Together on the bass. So very sweet.

So, this is goodbye. It’s been fun. So long and thanks for all the fish!

(Okay, not really, but seriously, it really rocks. Would anyone like to come and fold the laundry so I can play a few more tunes? It’s really wicked cool fun!)

Mothership Photography giveaway winners!

T hank you so much for your kind words and enthusiastic support of the Mothership Photography shop on Etsy! I was so excited to see your comments and tweets and blog posts that I decided to give away not one but five original prints. Here are the winners, in the order they were chosen by Random.org. (And, in case you wondered about methodology, I took out all duplicate comments, skipped over mine and anyone who said they didn’t want to be entered, and added extra entries for tweets and blog links where the first comment from you appeared. Those who only tweeted or commented on Facebook were given a number at the end.)

And, the winners are:

  1. Kerry
  2. Carly
  3. CoffeeWithJulie
  4. Chantal
  5. Ingrid

Thanks again to everyone who commented, tweeted and blogged! You guys are the best! I’ll be sending an e-mail to all the winners some time this weekend, but not right now because Lucas has decided I’m done on the computer right this minute!

Project 365: Storytelling

Before I start with the pictures this week, I’d like to take a moment to say a huge thank you to all of you for your encouragement during my project 365 trip and especially on the launch of the Etsy shop this week. I was genuinely touched by your responsiveness, by your kind words, by the fact that you really do seem to like the photos I’ve taken. (I know, I’m having a Sally Field – “You like my pictures! You really like them!” – moment here… bear with me.)

Doing the 365 out loud on the Internet has been extremely validating, and interesting too. I’m fascinated by your responses to the images, which ones you like and which ones seem to slip by unremarked upon. Seeing the images filtered through your perspective has helped me learn in ways I didn’t expect. I don’t know that I would have had the stamina (or the pure bullish stubbornness) to complete the project if it weren’t for your feedback and interest. You really do inspire me! (cue the swelling orchestra…)

Okay, enough with the schmaltz and on with the pictures. Last Friday, I walked into my office, put my fresh coffee down on the desk, hung my camera and my purse on the coathook and was just about to sit down when I glanced out the window — and saw five giant hot air balloons floating by. I grabbed my camera (and scandalously, completely forgot about my coffee) and headed up to the seventh floor picture window where I had a gorgeous view of the morning launch of the Gatineau Hot Air Balloon Festival, and the balloons floating over the Byward Market.

227b:365 Balloons over the Market

I loved the conjunction of the sun, the urban landscape and the balloons in this one.

227:365 Balloons over the Market

It was a spectacularly photographable long weekend in Ottawa, as evidenced by my posts about the sunset at Britannia Beach and our Mud Lake adventure. In case you missed them, here’s my favourite picture of the sunset. I love the gradient, how the red hot sunlight light fades seamlessly into cold indigo darkness. (I was tempted to photoshop in a tiny, twinkling star right at the top, but I figured it was presumptuous to think I could improve on Mother Nature!)

229:365 Last kiss of sun

And I love how this picture tells a rather timeless story of boys and adventure. (I went back to shooting in RAW this week — and for the first time, I can see the difference between RAW and JPEG files, especially in this one for some reason.)

230:365 Mud Lake dock

I had the idea for this one in my head for a long time. The light in Lucas’s room during naptime is so nice and soft, and of course, baby toes are a favourite subject of mine. When he’d been asleep for about an hour on Saturday afternoon, I crept into his room and dared to snap a few shots because I loved the way the blankets were perfectly framing his foot. I love this one so much, it’s my new desktop image at work!

228:365 Sleeping toes

Because the blinds were drawn, I had to shoot at my D40’s highest ISO setting, which is part of the reason it has that soft, grainy quality. (If you can’t get more light and you can’t use flash and you don’t have a tripod or a motionless subject, boost your ISO!) It also has a light touch of one of the Pioneer Woman’s photoshop actions, just to enhance the softness. I am seriously addicted to those actions!

As much as I wanted the toes to be soft, I wanted this one to be super crisp and tack sharp. I missed just a bit on this shot, which is too bad because I like the concept. I was going to call it “Dare to be different!” (But I still liked it enough to make it my alternate shot of the day!)

231b:365 September grapes outtake

Instead, I went with this one as the shot of the day. The composition isn’t as cheeky, but the focus is tack-sharp. It’s a tad dark, now that I look at it again — I think the brightness is cranked a little too high on the laptop where I do my photo editing. (My mom used to call these September grapes, so that’s what I call them. I think they’re really called Concord grapes. There is nothing like them! They’re one of the few foods that are still truly seasonal — you only get them for these first few weeks in September, and then you have to wait all year.)

231:365 September grapes

(Do you like my sophisticated photo studio backdrop? It’s the top of my stove, right in between the two back burners!)

Like the grapes and the tomato, this shot was an attempt at storytelling that didn’t quite work out as I’d planned — but wasn’t enough of a miss to discard entirely. This was the first day since Lucas got mobile that we went to the park and I could take some time to just sit on the rocks and watch them play, instead of hovering over Lucas or rescuing him from peril. That’s what I was trying to express, that a perfect day at the park equals a bit of a break for mom and but fun for the kids. A near miss, but I still like it!

232c:365 At the park

These shots of Simon and Lucas were just better images, even without the — or maybe because of the lack of? — scripting.

232b:365 Simon at the park

232:365 Lucas at the park

And this was another “scripted” image. I’d found the leaf and a few others like it in Major’s Hill Park, and wandered around for a while looking for interesting backdrops for them. I tried photographing them on some bricks (those were nice) and some cobblestones, and had just decided I’d had enough and was wandering into the Market for a coffee on my way back to work when I walked past the fountain at the intersection of York and Sussex. The square was full of people eating lunches on park benches, but that didn’t stop me from hopping up on the concrete lip of the fountain and throwing my leaves in, because I thought the colours in them would work really well with the bright sunlit water and the texture in the fountain.

233:365 Leaf

Because I am so grateful for your attention, your feedback, and your support (and your patience!) I’ve decided to give away not one but FIVE free prints from the Etsy shop. See this post for details, but you have to leave your comment before midnight tonight, Friday September 11.

Who loves you baby? I do!

On celebrity and social media

Last week, I was tickled to stumble across this fun list of “cool Canadians on Twitter.” I don’t know why, but Canadian celebrities just seem more accessible, somehow, don’t they? I promptly started following Bryan Adams, William Shatner, Jann Arden, Rick Mercer, Brent Butt, the Tragically Hip, Matthew Perry, and Great Big Sea on Twitter, rounding out my existing CanCon-follow repetoire of Burton Cummings, Douglas Coupland, Margaret Atwood, and Jian Ghomeshi.

For the most part, I don’t see the point in following celebrities on Twitter. I mean, does Oprah really tweet, or does one of her minions do it for her? With more than two million followers, she doesn’t need me. I simply haven’t been interested in following any celebrities up until now.

But there’s something about these Canadian celebrities (and *air quotes* celebrities */air quotes*) that immediately feel more intimate and accessible. When I read Brent Butt’s tweets, his voice and sense of humour are charmingly distinct — and his tweets are distinctly down to earth, like: “Ok… I should get back to work. Then again, I should also eat less cheese, and I don’t think THAT’S going to happen any time soon.” And reading Douglas Coupland’s tweets is like 140 characters clipped directly from his books: “If you read the NYTimes site right after reading The Onion, reality morphs in a not unpleasant way. It’s like the news just had a stroke.” They seem pleasantly — ordinary, somehow.

When I was 15 years old, I had a crush on a boy named Greg. I also had a massive crush on Bryan Adams. And Greg had an older sister who had a picture of herself on a train with Bryan Adams. I think I was more jealous of that girl than any other person before or since. Not only was she Greg’s sister and could see him each day at dinner, each morning at breakfast, any old time she pleased, but she had actually (gasp!) met (titter!) Bryan Adams (swoon!) in person. It was beyond imaginable to me. The idea of simply being on the same train as Bryan Adams was fodder for endless hours of daydreaming, that long ago autumn of 1985.

I laugh now when I think of how my 15-year-old self would shimmer and explode in a cloud of teenaged hormonal delight at the idea of following Bryan Adams on Twitter. It even gave my 40-year-old self a bit of a nostalgic shiver when he recently tweeted “Ottawa today, got my first real six string…right here”. (I missed that concert, but caught a terrific one about a decade back, at Lansdowne.)

There’s something about Twitter, when used properly, that invites an intimacy with both big and little C celebrity that would simply astonish my Tiger-Beat reading self of two decades ago. I’m under no delusion that Rick Mercer will ever follow my tweets (heck, he wouldn’t even pick up the bloggy gauntlet I threw down, back in 2005) but there’s still an undeniable thrill to feel even an illusory sort of connection to actual famous people, yanno? Apparently my inner 14-year-old is barely repressed, even at the best of times!

I’ve been idling over this for a while, but I keep getting tangled up in my own words. What do you think? Do you follow any celebrities on twitter, or through other online forums? Do you actually try to talk to them? Does the fact that an author (or actor, musician, or other celeb) uses social media in a way that invites insight into their personality intrigue you or change how you feel about them?