Weighty matters

And yet another reason why I don’t come out and play in blogland much these days: I’m spending four or five hours a week at the gym.

Sigh. I’m almost six months post-partum, and I still have 20 lbs to lose. That’s 20 to get to my pre-pregnancy weight, and another 10 lbs after that would be ideal. But I’m not so much looking at the scale for validation, I just want to fit into the clothes I used to wear and not have those awful folds of back fat anymore. Ick!

I didn’t do too badly with the pregnancy weight, I guess. I lost track at the end, but I think I gained 40 to 50 lbs overall. I’m surprised at how hard it is to get rid of what’s left, though. Yet another way in which the breastfeeding thing isn’t quite working out like I planned this time around!

I’ve finally started to see some results from my three-day-a-week gym habit, but the going is still slow. I started with weights two days a week and a 45 minute cardio on the third day back at the end of June, thanks to Beloved being home and able to take care of the boys. I’ve managed to reclaim one pair of shorts that were too tight for public consumption on Canada Day that are now just a little bit uncomfortable now.

Funny, though, rather than feeling energized by all the working out, I’m feeling so drained all the time lately. Makes it hard to keep as active as I’d like to be, let alone active enough to chase after the boys!

My cousin has recommended a doctor here in Ottawa who specializes in weight loss (no, not “Dr” Bernstein) and I think I’ll check him out after our vacation. For $100 you get a 60 to 90 minute consultation and body analysis, and you go for weekly or biweekly follow-up appointments at $15 each. Cheaper than weight-watchers, which never worked for me anyway, and with a real GP supervising. It’s about time I learned how to eat properly once and for all, because I really think that’s the root of my ongoing weight issues.

Because it feels like I’m always at the gym these days, I keep looking at myself in the mirror, expecting the fat to just me melting off visibly. Even though that isn’t quite happening it does feel great to be going to the gym every other day. At least I can feel those neglected muscles growing — under the protective layer of fat!

Five-thousand pages in: Stephen King’s Dark Tower books

Once upon a time, I used to write 10-pages-in book reviews. I haven’t written one in a very long time, and a large part of the reason for that is that I’ve spent the last six months immersed in the seven books that comprise Stephen King’s epic Dark Tower series. I got the first four books for Christmas, and settled in to read them just after I finished the Phillip Pullman His Dark Materials trilogy. (It was, in retrospect, apparently a dark Christmas.) It was prolly mid-January when I turned the first page of The Gunslinger, and I was reading book three, The Waste Lands, while waiting for the pitocin to ramp up my contractions in the delivery room when Lucas was born. I took a bit of a breather from reading for those first blurry six weeks or so of his life, and have been charging headlong through to the end of the series since then.

To steal a phrase: what a long, strange trip it’s been.

I loved these books. They moved me, they inspired me, and they gave me the creeping willies more than once. Hell, more than a dozen times. They also deeply annoyed me at times, and I rolled my eyes in exasperation in a few places. I don’t think anyone can maintain perfection through a full novel, let alone seven of them, but much like JK Rowling’s Harry Potter books, this series was on whole much more good than bad, and the characters and the stories both got deep under my skin and into my head. Especially as I rolled through the last couple of books, I frequently found myself wanting to reach out to Stephen King somehow — to e-mail him, to give him a call, to pace back and forth in front of his fence for a while until he came out for a bit of a palaver*. I wanted to know more, to chew the fat about these characters and this world, to have the chance to savour them just a little bit more.

So what are the books about? This dude named Roland, who lives in a world like ours but not quite ours, is on a quest to the Dark Tower. That’s it in less than 25 words, but it takes about 5,000 pages to get there. It’s about an obsessed man’s single-minded quest, but also about love and friendship and fear and some nasty things that make squelchy noises in the dark — this is, after all, a work by Stephen King. If you’ve read a lot of King’s books, you’ll recognize visiting characters from Hearts in Atlantis, ‘Salem’s Lot, The Stand and a whole whack of others. Towards the end, there’s a surprising homage to the Harry Potter books, and even King himself makes an appearance as a character.

As I’ve written before, I avoided these books for many years. I’d see a new Stephen King book on the bookstore shelves, and then sigh in dismay. “Ugh, another stupid ‘Gunslinger’ book. Bah!” and I’d turn away. In a way, I’m glad I was late to these books, as I truly loved being immersed in the world of the Dark Tower so completely, and for such a long time. The books are set, as I said, in a world like ours but not quite like ours. Eventually, we find out that this world intersects ours, and that there are innumerable parallel worlds (another neat crossover with the central idea of Pullman’s trilogy.) The story weaves back and forth through wheres and whens in this world and others. King has not only sketched a set of alternate universes, but has coloured and contrasted them with their own histories, customs and linguistic quirks. I think this was my favourite part of these books, how rich and textured the worlds are, and after a while it felt less like reading the books and more like inhabiting the worlds. You know how sometimes when you’re reading a fantasy book, it’s like there is a little bit of scenery sort of half-imagined directly around the characters like the shadow of a spotlight, but everything else is kind of hazy? I felt like I could crawl right into these books and the scope of the world(s) around me would just go on forever.

I was fascinated by the fact that this series took Stephen King the best part of his life to write. He started it in 1970, before Carrie was written or published, and finished it a quarter of a century later in 2003. I think that fact contributes to the sprawling, epic feel to the books. In a way, Roland the Gunslinger ages and matures in Stephen King’s real time. Time is major theme in the books, almost a character in its own right.

Stephen King says in the forward to the books that what he wanted to do as a young writer was get inside peoples’ heads. He’s always been able to do that to me, always been able to crawl deep into the tiniest hidey-holes of my soul and shine a light on the bits that I try hard not to think about. In the Dark Tower series, he’s done it again. It’s been called his magnum opus, and I can see why. As I paged relentlessly through the last book of the series, I watched the dwindling amount unread pages with dismay. Now that it’s done, I think I’ll head out into the interwebs to see if I can find a discussion group or fan site somewhere. I’m deeply hooked on Roland and his ka-tet and his quest, and not quite ready to give them up just yet.

*Actual goosebumps raised on my arms when I was reading the afterward to the very final book, and King spoke about how much he values his privacy and how he intentionally obscured details of his location even as he incorporated himself into the stories so as to protect his ever-eroding privacy. To me, it was almost like a personal “thank you” for not disturbing his privacy when I was stalking him that sunny Saturday morning last year. Chills.

Two reactions

I’m not overly shy about breastfeeding in public, but I’m also not very good about being discreet. I have to be able to see what I’m doing, yanno? Even so, through two and a half boys worth of nursing wherever I had to do it, I never really had any reactions that I’d noticed. Mostly people seem to try to ignore the fact that I’m doing anything at all, which seems a reasonable enough reaction.

In the past couple of weeks, I’ve had two notable reactions. On Canada Day, we were out at the festival at Andrew Haydon Park with my mom. There’s a chip stand with a little covered patio, and we were sitting at a picnic table having some fries and surprisingly good hamburgers. The place was crawling with people, and the picnic table was larger than we needed. A mother with her young son were sharing the table with us, with the woman sitting beside me and her son across the table from us.

I’d just finished wrangling Lucas to my breast when I looked up to see her gathering their half-eaten meal up to quickly hustle her son off to another table. At first, I simply assumed they were moving to join friends — the idea that my nursing would cause someone that much distress didn’t even cross my mind. But no, they were just moving to another table to get away from me nursing Lucas.

I get that it’s a free world, and people can do whatever they like. I suppose it was the best possible reaction for someone who didn’t want to be near someone who was breastfeeding — she didn’t, for example, say “Ewww, could you please put that away” or something like that — but I was still kind of sad for her and for her son. He looked to be about eight, maybe nine. What kind of message does that send to him? What possible harm could be done by me feeding my baby in front of him?

Earlier this week, I took all three boys to the Experimental Farm for the morning. The sheep and pig barn is closed for renovations, but we enjoyed the horses and the tractors, and found two calves that were born the same week as Lucas. (For the record, they’re a lot bigger than him!) We had a wee snack, and the boys were climbing on the play structure when Lucas woke up from a little nap and started fussing for a snack of his own.

I was again sharing a picnic table, this time with a woman busy pulling tupperware boxes of fruit and crackers and cheese out of a backpack. She looked over and noticed me nursing Lucas and said a quiet, “Awwwwwww.” I looked up at her and she smiled, and we started chatting. When the boys wandered back from the play structure and needed help unwrapping a fruit bar, she did it for them because I still had my hands full. It was a lovely little interlude in a lovely little morning. I wonder if she has any idea that she made me feel good about myself, and my boys, that day?

***

The nursing is still not going as smoothly as it did with Simon and Tristan. The good news is, Lucas is not so voraciously hungry as Simon and doesn’t wake up every two or three hours through the night like Simon did. The bad news is, he still fusses a lot more than either of the other boys did with nursing. Some days are fine, other days he howls when I try to nurse him like I’m putting hot pokers in his ears. Some days he drinks contentedly for 15 or 20 minutes at a time, other days I almost have to force him to drink, and he sips and pulls and chews on my nipple until I’m sure they’ll be down to my knees by the time he’s weaned.

It might be the reflux, it might be that he doesn’t like the taste of whatever I’ve recently eaten, it might be the alignment of Pluto in the seventh house of Capricorn. Who knows? With two formula bottles a day, we’re still on a 1/3 formula and 2/3 breastmilk split, and he’s plenty healthy with just the right doubling underneath his chin, so it’s working out overall. We still get a lot of green poops, though. I just hope we can keep nursing for a while longer now that I’ve started to introduce solids. We’re almost to the six-month mark, which is the bare minimum I wanted to achieve, but I’d be happy if he kept up at least a little bit of nursing through his first birthday. So far so good and one day at a time, I guess.

My dufus-savants

I know, the term is officially “idiot savants.” They’re not quite idiots, my boys. They’re plenty smart, they’re just not overly clever sometimes. Dufus seems about the right term for someone who walks out of a public washroom with a vaguely puzzled look on his face and asks, completely lacking in guile, “Did I have underwear on when I left the house this morning?” (They likely got left in the pool changeroom at day camp. At least, that’s what I choose to believe.)

Anyway, dufuses, yes. But savants as well. At the dinner table recently, Tristan announced à propos of nothing, “Mom, I can spell my name backwards.” And proceeded to do so. Then he went on to spell Mommy, Daddy, Simon, Lucas, Costco, Webkinz, and bacon backwards. We were suitably impressed. He even did a few requests. He’s barely learned how to spell things forward by sounding them out, and can do it backwards in his head as well.

But we were positively gobsmacked when we were out with Simon the other day and he announced from the back seat that he could spell “Tristan” backwards — and proceeded to do it flawlessly. Beloved and I regarded each other with open mouths of astonishment. I frankly didn’t think he could spell his own name reliably forwards, let alone spell his brother’s name backwards. This from a four-year-old preschooler who regularly omits the number 14 when counting to twenty.

I’m thinking with a little practice, they’ll be those freakishly precocious kids you see on TV, the ones who can name any country you point at on the map or have memorized the periodic table of the elements in utero. Anybody have the contact info handy for David Letterman’s people?

The summer of my life

I’ve been thinking about my greatest summer hits. In chronological order, I think these are the best five summers of my life.

1987. I’m seventeen years old. I’m working part time selling magazine subscriptions by telephone, but my hours are 5 to 9 pm, so my days are free. My folks have a little 16 foot motorboat, and many days are spent with my dad or my whole family, puttering about on the Thames River or Lake Huron. I have a boyfriend, but he lives in Sudbury, so I’m free without feeling lonely. My mother buys a brand new blue Mustang, coincidentally on my 17th birthday, and is willing to share it with me.

1995. I’m twenty-four years old, and divorced a little less than two years. I’ve just met Beloved a few months before. With a small inheritance courtesy of my grandfather, I spend four weeks backpacking through Europe by myself. I am by equal measures terrified and amazingly proud of myself to be travelling alone. I come home knowing that Beloved is the man I want to spend the rest of my life with.

1999. I’m twenty-eight years old. I have just graduated magna cum laude from university after five years of part-time study. Beloved and I get married and spend a week in Paris as our honeymoon. We move from our tiny, crowded but adorably bo-ho attic apartment to a townhouse, and the week we move in we also get Katie, the doggy love of my life.

2007. I find out I’m pregnant at the end of May, starting the summer on a high note after a long year of frustrating low notes. We go to Bar Harbor, Bayfield, and Smuggler’s Notch by the end of the summer. The boys are finally old enough that I can play with them and relate to them as real people, and we have a blast as a family all summer long.

2008. Our family is complete with the arrival of Lucas. We travel to Windsor, and plan to travel to Lake Placid with our extended family. We hope to visit northern cottage country as well. The days are long and unstructured, and it is very, very good. I’m off work but still getting paid, spending time with the four men who make me happiest. While I feared spending the whole summer with all five of us in the house together might have ended up with at least one of us dead and buried in the back yard, so far it’s been great.

(As I was writing the title to this post, it occurs to me that it’s a double entendre. I was thinking about my greatest summers thus far, but I’m also smack in the golden sunshiny summer of my life, aren’t I? Blue skies and sunny days, my friends.)

What have been the best summers of your life?

Lucas’s first cereal

Every now and then I feel the need to conform to the expectations of those who castigate mommy blogs as self-reverential shrines to minutiae. What could be more self-indulgent than four minutes of baby’s first cereal posted to YouTube?

But seriously, could he BE more adorable? If nothing else, watch for the infectious baby giggles in the second minute.

(or, click thru and watch it here)

Save me from myself

June 30, 2006: “Oh no, you’re all sold out of Canada Day temporary tattoos, too? But I’ve been to three stores, and everyone is sold out! I guess we’ll have to do without this year.

May 2007: “Aha! Look at this great selection of Canada Day temporary tattoos — and only one dollar for a sheet! I’ll buy some now and tuck them away for a month.”

Early June 2007: “I’m sick of having these tattoos sitting right here on the counter, but I know if I stash them away I’ll forget where they are. They’re just contributing to the clutter, but I’ll try to ignore them.”

June 27, 2007: “I wonder if it’s too early to put these Canada Day tattoos on the boys? Nah, I’d better wait, they might rub off.”

July 5, 2007: “Crap. Forgot the tattoos. Now where should I put them so I remember them for next year? Oh look, something shiny over there…” (drops tattoos on counter, walks away)

November 2007: “Okay, all the papers have been filed away or recycled — except this little sheet of tattoos that’s been floating around for six months. I can’t just throw them away, that would be wasteful. I’ll just put them here on the corner of the desk for now while I sneak onto the computer to play on the internet, then I’ll decide where to put them.”

February 2008: “These damn tattoos. I should just pitch them. Sigh, it’s only four months until Canada Day, I suppose I should keep them.”

Late June 2008: “Finally, it’s almost Canada Day and I can get rid of these things once and for all! I can’t believe I’ve kept them for an entire year, and I actually know where they are when I need them!”

July 10, 2008: “Crap. Forgot the tattoos…”

All that anxiety for just one dollar. You can’t beat the price.

Crazy mornings

We’re early risers around here. Most mornings I’m up somewhere between 5:30 and 6:30, and at least one of the boys is up around the same time. I can’t remember the last time all of us weren’t up by 7:15 with the exception of Beloved, who would sleep until tomorrow if we let him.

Even so, it takes us a while to get going in the mornings. I nurse Lucas when he wakes up, put on a pot of coffee, make a pre-breakfast snack for the big boys (this is a holdover from the old days when they were wee, and they probably don’t need it anymore but we are nothing if not creatures of habit around here) and read the paper for a bit before nursing Lucas again on the other side to take off the overnight milk pressure build-up. By then it’s time to shower and do my morning ablutions, get the boys dressed and breakfasted, and get Beloved up. Lucas likes a wee nap in the morning, and usually gets held by one of the grownups while he’s doing so. Yes, he’s spoiled rotten. I know. I’m okay with that. He’ll wake up for a bottle around 9:30 or so, which takes the best part of a half-hour to drink, and then get him dressed. Three mornings a week I sneak off to the gym and leave Beloved to tend to the boys, but nobody else gets dressed and goes anywhere without a major effort. We’re ready to face the day in public by 10:00, maybe 10:30.

We live close enough to the school that I can hear the schoolbell ringing. Each morning for the last month or so of school, I’d hear the bell ring for 9:00 and suppress a little shudder. Starting in September, we move from our leisurely both-boys-in-school-afternoons-only to both boys in school mornings and Tristan in school all (gasp!) day. How the hell we’ll get all of us out the door and across the street for 9:00 am has been a puzzle I’ve been worrying for a couple of months now.

I found out today just how ugly it will be. Without even realizing the foreshadowing, I’d enrolled Tristan in an all-day arts camp and Simon in a mornings-only camp at his former nursery school. The chaos of getting everybody out the door was nothing short of insanity, but it’s now not quite 10 in the morning, Lucas is sleeping in his car seat on the bathroom floor with the exhaust fan on (his second most common napping place, after our arms – don’t judge me, it works!!!) and I have both a hot Tim’s coffee and an entire blog post at my fingertips.

This might work out after all!

The question now is what on earth will I do with myself all day with only Lucas to take care of? For at least the mornings this week, with Beloved home the parents outnumber the kids!! How did we ever find just one child so difficult to manage? The silence (aside from the hum of the exhaust fan) is blissfully deafening.