In need of a good home?

I know of a home in search of a dog. (No, not mine, but if you’ve been reading recently, you’ll know who.) If you might happen to know of anyone in the Ottawa area who knows of a big, friendly, mature dog in need of a good home, I’d love to hear from you. Ideally, the dog is well-socialized to people, tolerant with kids, decent on and off a leash, good for long walks and rides in the car, and playful without being overly hyperactive. E-mail me at danicanada (at) gmail (dot) com and I’ll put you in touch with someone who would love to hear from you!

Edited to add: found one! They adopted a lovely year-old shepherd mix they found through petfinder.com and named her Max. I guess that takes “Max” out of the running for naming the Player to Be Named Later!

At least they have good taste in music

For the longest time, my iPod was generally something I used only at the gym. I’m not overly fond of headphones because (and I know this is why most people like them) I don’t like being insulated from the outside world. And there is something about my ears that actively rejects ear buds.

We got a transmitter for the car, but didn’t seem to remember to use it except for longer trips… and even then, the power outlet was often prioritized to the DVD player for the boys. (When it worked.)

Eventually, though, the boys came to realize that they liked the music on my iPod and started asking us to bring it into the car more often, and I started building up one of those “on the go” playlists of the songs that they were asking for again and again.

For Christmas, Beloved got me an AM/FM radio thingee where you can just slide your iPod into the docking station and listen to it through the speakers, which I love. And so, unfortunately, do the boys. I’ve got hundreds of great songs on there, a handful of playlists for upbeat or mellow or nostalgic moods, and yet every time they see the iPod, we’re stuck listening to the same five songs over and over and over and over and over again.

Now, I suppose it could be worse. The Wiggles CD hasn’t been dusted off in a while, and I don’t remember the last time we listened to the Pixar Cars soundtrack, or one of the ubiquitous Disney movie CDs that Beloved collects. They have, after all, selected these songs from the ones that I liked enough to include on the iPod in the first place, and truth be told they’re even among some of my favourites. But there’s too much of a good thing, right?

Tristan and Simon’s favourite songs, circa winter 2008:

  1. I Don’t Like Mondays – The Boomtown Rats (Tristan’s fave)
  2. Superman Song – REM
  3. It’s Not Easy – Five for Fighting
  4. Crabbukkit – KOS
  5. Home for a Rest – Spirit of the West (Simon’s fave)

I can just imagine them at school, singing their favourite lyrics out loud. Tristan singing about a schoool shooting “And he can see no reasons / ‘Cause there are no reasons / What reason do you need to die?” and Simon doing his inimitable fiddle dance as he bellows ” You’ll have to excuse me, I’m not at my best / I’ve been gone for a month / I’ve been drunk since I left / And these so-called vacations / Will soon be my death / I’m so sick from the drink / I need home for a rest / Take me home….”

That’s not too inappropriate, is it?

Counting down

Now that the holiday season is officially packed away for another year and the boys are back in school, I am running out of distractions. Still another three-and-a-half weeks to go until my due date, which I fully expect to stretch out to an agonizing five weeks or more left in this pregnancy.

And so begins the obsessing. Since I can’t seem to get my head out of my uterus (and lord knows there’s little enough room in there right now as it is!) consider yourself officially warned that blog is about to go all-pregnancy, all the time.

Baby boy will be full term (37 weeks) on Friday, and given the latest ultrasound projections, he’s well over 7 lbs by now. Any time now is fine with me, even though we are not exactly ready in that the baby clothes have not been washed nor put in drawers, I do not have a birth plan or a packed bag, we have no idea what to call him, we haven’t really made any plans as to what to do with Tristan and Simon should I ever in fact go into labour, and I’m still loosely in denial that there will in fact be a baby who arrives at the end of all this.

I’ve developed a new fascination with the signs of early labour. With Tristan and Simon, I didn’t have (or, at least, didn’t recognize) any pre-term contractions. Only when I was hooked up to a monitor when I was at a past-due checkup for Simon and the nurse said, “That’s a nice healthy contraction” did I realize that what I had been assuming was the baby stretching was actually a Braxtion Hicks type contraction. So now that I know what they are, I’ve noticed them coming and going in waves — but of course, that’s all that happens. (Ha, look, there’s one now!)

The boys were both late. Labour started two days after my EDD with Tristan (and he was born 27 hours later) and I was induced 10 days after my EDD with Simon (and he was born 23 hours later.) I see this as foreshadowing — they’re reluctant to leave the womb at birth, and I’ll probably never be able to kick them out of the house as adults!! I also see this as confirmation that I have a mighty comfy uterus, and no expectation of seeing this baby any time before his official due date of February 1.

But, you also know I’m an irrepressible optimist. (I’m just not sure if hoping for an early delivery is optimism or insanity!) So, bearing (snicker) that in mind, tell me your stories. I need straws at which to grasp, bloggy peeps! Did you deliver early? Late? On your due date? And what was your first sign that labour was really under way?

Another mystery solved

Never mind how they get the creamy caramel into the Caramilk bar. Here’s my great mystery: how the hell does the Downy Ball know when to open up and spew the fabric softener into the rinse cycle?

Thanks to one of my new favourite sites, Home Ec 101, I now know the answer.

Being the anti-domestic goddess that I am, you might be surprised that this is one of my new favourite sites. But from it I’ve not only cracked the mysteries of the Downy Ball, I’ve learned how to make a damn tasty crockpot beef stew and collected a whole series of cookie recipes. I was playing in the archives of the “laundry lovin’” category when I found the Downy Ball revelation. (And did you know fabric softener makes towels less absorbent? Who knew?)

Anyway, now that I will be a stay-at-home mom again for the next year or so, I’m hoping this site will help me maintain the illusion that I have even the slightest clue about domestica.

What sites do you frequent that are outside of your regular interests and hobbies? Broaden our horizons!

Saying goodbye to Sassy

My dad is taking his dog to be put down today, and my heart aches for both of them.

Sassy is a gorgeous malamute, the kind of dog that other people stop you on the street to tell you how beautiful she is. She was also dumb as a bag of hammers, and stubborn as the day is long, but it was all a part of her charm. (I’m drifting between present and past tense, I know. It’s hard to think of her in the past tense, but her hours are numbered as I type this.)

My parents adopted Sassy from the Humane Society not long after they moved to Ottawa five years ago. At the time, they figured she was youngish – more than a pup, but barely. Over the years, though, they came to believe she was older than they first thought, and now they suspect she’s in the range of 10 years old. Just before Christmas, she developed some sort of tumor in her nose and in just a few short weeks, it has grown enough to obstruct both her nostrils and distort her snout. It’s obvious she’s in pain now, and can no longer breath through her nose. It’s time to let her go.

My parents have a knack for picking out good dogs from the Humane Society. When they moved up here, having just recently had to put down their previous dog, my dad was still recovering from liver transplant surgery in 2001 and his health was sketchy. Sassy, good natured though she was, also turned out to be a needy creature who craved long walks every day. Before long, my dad was walking her several kilometers a day, in all sorts of weather. All that walking reaped some impressive health benefits, and before long the chronic mystery pain he had been suffering for years had abated and then disappeared entirely. There’s little doubt that his daily walk with Sassy was the contributing factor to the disappearance of what had been a debilitating pain.

When I was Tristan’s age, we had a Shepherd-mix mutt named Happy, and my folks had to put Happy down at the insistence of a neighbour when Happy nipped a little girl. I clearly remember the entire incident, and the dog had acted only in playfulness – a playfulness that got out of hand, yes, but even at that age I knew the difference between aggression and accident. I was in my twenties when I found out that Happy hadn’t in fact run away, but had been put down. I thought about this last night as I debated whether to be completely honest with the boys about Sassy, or to cop out with a story about Sassy going to live with another family or some other fiction.

I’ll be honest with them, I think. Death is an inevitability, and losing a pet is the price we pay for loving them and letting them into our hearts. But if it moves me to tears at my age, with my capability to rationalize, it breaks my heart to think of how they’ll feel. And I’m breathless with grief for my dad today, bringing his companion in for this final act of compassion.

Goodbye, Sassy, and thank you for being a part of all of our lives. You were loved, and you will be missed.

Best and worst of words, 2008 edition

The most annoying thing about this time of year is the endless recaps, reviews and predictions for the new year. Yawn.

The best thing about this time of year is the linguistic analyses of word trends in the past year. I am such a word geek!

For instance, we have from the New York Times, this capricious and completely subjective list of some of the best slang of 2007. From LOLCATS to astronaut diapers, I’m feeling mighty hip to have at least a passing familiarity with these and about half a dozen other terms on the list. There’s plenty here for us online obsessives, quelle surprise. I liked these ones:

Life-streaming: “to make a thorough, continuous digital record of your life in video, sound, pictures and print.” (But, erm, isn’t this already called “blogging”?)

E-mail bankruptcy: “what you’re declaring when you choose to delete or ignore a very large number of e-mail messages after falling behind in reading and responding to them.” (Ha! I’d been doing this, rather surreptitiously and with great guilt. Somehow I feel more justified in doing it knowing it’s enough of an epidemic to have an official term for it!)

Bacn: “impersonal e-mail messages that are nearly as annoying as spam but that you have chosen to receive: alerts, newsletters, automated reminders and the like.”

Kinnear: “to take a candid photograph surreptitiously, especially by holding the camera low and out of the line of sight. Coined in August by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee of the Yarn Harlot blog when she attempted to take a photograph during an encounter with the actor Greg Kinnear at an airport.” (I favour this one because I love the idea of a blogger coining a word that makes an NYT year-end list, especially one as clever and likeable – and Canadian! – as the Yarn Harlot!)

So now that you can talk the hip talk of 2008, make sure you don’t make the faux pas of using one of the Banished Words of 2008, as compiled annually by Lake Superior State University (I love this list and blogged about it in 2007 and 2006 too!)

This one pains me, because my speech is peppered with some of these terms. Heck, “back in the day” is the title of my archives; I’ve been known to utter an appreciative “Sweeeeet!” or two; and, “Webinar” is a huge part of what I’m doing at work right now. But I’m happy to bid a permanent adieu to “emotional”, “under the bus” and especially “random” – that last one has always grated on my nerves.

The comments have always been fun on this post. What words or phrases would YOU banish this year?

Car seats and winter coats

Glen from the Ottawa Start blog raised an issue earlier this month that has always bugged me.

Did you know that car seats are not safe when your child is wearing a bulky winter coat? Seriously.

I had just started poking around to find out if there has been any improvement in the safety ratings of those “cuddle bags” for the infant carriers (I used one for Simon and loved it) when Glen posted his experience. He e-mailed Dorel, the manufacturer of his daughter’s Safety First car seat, asking what they recommend and they suggested that the coat be removed before his daugter is strapped into her car seat.

Yah, right. I’m going to spend an hour getting my kids INTO their coats and whatnot, step out into the minus 20 degree wind, walk a dozen steps, and then strip the coat back off again so I can strap them into their car seats. And they will sit placidly with their coats covering them like blankets so they don’t freeze to death while the car warms up. And then we’ll do it all again in reverse when we get wherever it is we are going. Seriously?

CBC picked up on the story as well, and ran this article where Transport Canada confirms that bulky winter gear interferes with the safety specifications of the restraint belts.

I remember reading about this and agonizing over it when Tristan was a toddler, and I simply can’t believe there hasn’t been some sort of improvement to the design of the restraint system since then. It’s bad enough trying to adjust the harness belts during those transitional months when you switch from winter coat to rain gear and back again, but to actually have your car seat deemed unsafe for almost half the year?

Add this to the list of things that will be fixed when I’m elected Queen of the Universe. How do you deal with car seats and winter gear? (And for those of you who don’t have freezing temperatures, you don’t need to speak up today. With another 15 cm of snow in the forecast in an already record-breaking year, I don’t want to hear about places where you don’t need to wear a bulky winter coat!!)

2007 – The Year in Review

I did this meme last year, and thought it was a neat way to take a look back at the year. These are the first sentences of the first posts of each month in 2007:

  1. I’m fond of odd-numbered years – they seem to be lucky for me.
  2. Considering how socially awkward I feel when I don’t have my computer to mediate my conversations, I’m becoming addicted to these blogger meet-ups!
  3. Sorry, I still don’t have much for you today.
  4. I’m so good to you.
  5. Parents of preschoolers, consider yourself warned: Thomas the Tank Engine’s popular “Day Out With Thomas” is coming to Ottawa this summer!
  6. First of all, thank you all for your sweet words of congratulations.
  7. Four states, two provinces, six days, 1850 kms, 546 photographs… and we’re back!
  8. As I mentioned, we spent an extended summer weekend with my brother’s family at his in-laws’ cottage.
  9. We’re freshly back from our weekend getaway to Smugglers’ Notch Resort in Vermont.
  10. Tristan has been thinking a lot lately about how things will be when he grows up.
  11. Yay, it’s November!
  12. I can’t tell you what a relief it was to be done NaBloPoMo on Friday (yay! I made it!) and not have to worry about throwing together a blog post on the weekend, not because we lacked bloggable fun but because we were so darn busy I hardly had time to sit down let alone blog about it.

I love how so many of the year’s important events – finding out I was pregnant, three great trips, even a year of bloggy socializing – fall into this list, and how prescient the first line turned out!

(Feel free to play along, and leave me a note in the comment box if you do so I can come and check out yours.)

Christmas 2007

And so it came to pass that she spent almost 48 hours without attaching herself to the computer. And lo, to her great surprise, it was good.

And while she was not clacking madly on the keyboard, she found that she had opportunities to play with her children, and read new books, and converse with her family, and eat – and eat – and eat. And lo, it was good.

And she did not read her Bloglines account, and she did not fret over the great numbers of unread posts piling up. And lo, it was good.

And she bathed in the warm glow of her baby niece’s smile, and laughed at the noisy antics of her boys and their adoring cousins, while trying only half successfully to have grownup conversations around their happy exhuberance. And lo, it was good.

And there were gifts, and there was family, and there was food, and there was love.

Christmas 2007

And lo, it was very, very good.