Month: August 2006

Sorry, kiddies, I’ve got nothing for you today. It’s almost painful because I’m in one of those stretches when I have about six or seven ideas for posts clogging up my brain, and the words are just coursing out of my fingertips every time I sit down at the keyboard – but I’m smack out of time.

I could have written something up last night, but I spent two and a half hours discovering iTunes. Are you completely nauseauted by my obsession with my iPod yet? Just wait, I still owe you a post or three about (warning: gratuitous product placement ahead) my new, free Nokia 6682 but I haven’t yet had the time (see the motif here?) to figure out how to make it give me back the pictures I took with it.

All that to say, while I’ve got nothing up my sleeve, I thought we could try one of those comment games again. We tried it a while ago, and it was a little ugly, but still fun. Let’s try again, since you’ve already gone to the bother of showing up when I wasnt’ ready for company.

Here’s how it goes. I’ll propose a movie, and you post an actor/actress who is in that movie. The next person posts a different movie that said actor is in, and the person after that posts a different actor in that movie… and so on, until the end of time. Got it? So, if I say “Star Wars” you say “Harrison Ford” and the next guy says “Six Days and Seven Nights” (or whatever that movie is called) and the next person says “Anne Heche” and the person after that goes to imdb to see if Anne Heche ever made another movie. And if two people post at the same time, the next person has the choice between the two answers to follow.

Fun, eh? Well, at least you won’t be me, stumbling through yet another interminable French class, having forgotten during your brief but lovely vacation every verb you ever conjugated.

So I’ll start you off with: The Godfather. Go!

There’s nothing like a summer road trip, with the windows open, wind whipping your hair, and the Wiggles blaring on the stereo.

Ugh. Man, do I miss the days when I controlled the CD player in the car. And it’s not just the preschoolers – Beloved, who used to have at least a semblance of taste in music, now rips Wiggles and Dora and Thomas the Tank Engine compilations for the boys, and has even threatened to burn the David Hasselhoff Pingu rap onto a CD for the car. And I thought it was bad when he was simply a fan of Duran Duran.

There was a time I would never dream of leaving the house without a decent collection of mixed tapes or CDs with me. (Now that I’m a big girl and have an iPod, you know the car kit is on my Christmas wish list!) And I was very particular about my road music, too. Nothing too new or unfamiliar, nothing too soft, nothing too sappy.

Road music is energy music, as confirmed by national polling results announced yesterday that found Canada’s favourite driving song is Bryan Adams’ anthemic Summer of ’69. I adored this song when it came out in the mid-1980s, partly because of my earth-shaking crush on Bryan Adams and partly because my idol was actually singing a song about the time when I was born (and ironically, a time when he would have been about five years old, if I do the math right.) I figured it meant we were destined to be together, in the manner only a lovesick 15 year old can reason.

According to the poll results, Canada’s top seven favourite road songs are:

Summer of ’69 — Bryan Adams;
Bohemian Rhapsody — Queen;
Born to be Wild — Steppenwolf;
It’s Only Rock ‘n Roll (But I Like It) — The Rolling Stones;
Drive My Car — The Beatles;
Free Fallin’ — Tom Petty;
Radar Love — Golden Earring.

Eh, not a bad list. I could do better, and I know you could do better. Oh, the agony of choosing! Hmmm, let’s see. In no particular order, my top driving songs would be:

New Orleans is Sinking – The Tragically Hip
(That one’s for you, UberGeek and Fryman!)

It’s the End of the World as We Know It – REM

Home for a Rest – Spirit of the West
(also appears on my soon-to-be-announced best drinking songs list!)

Baba O’Reilly – The Who

Radar Love – Golden Earring

Spirit of Radio – Rush

Bat Out of Hell – Meatloaf

… and just about anything by Queen, especially from the Highlander sountrack.

Your turn!

A while back, Andrea Gordon had a fun post talking about near misses and parenting calamaties, in the wake of all the Britney baby disasters. I didn’t contribute anything to her post that day – although I could have. I might have written about the more than once that Tristan barrel-rolled down the stairs, or the time at nine months old he fell off a bench in a mall and landed on his head on the granite floor – remember that panicked phone call, Jojo?

I was grateful that I’m not a celebrity and didn’t have an audience to broadcast my parenting foibles the other day – and yet, here I am, about to broadcast them to you. Because yesterday’s utter panic is today’s good blog fodder, right?

It was one of those blazingly hot days, and Simon had been completely resistant to the idea of a nap. I finally gave up and tossed both boys into the car and we went off to do a few errands which involved driving over a large part of the city. They managed to stay awake for the first leg of the trip, but by the time I arrived at my second destination, both were soundly asleep in the back seat.

I only had to run in and out. It was a tiny little shop and they were actually holding what I needed behind the counter – I would be five minutes at most. For the first time ever, I contemplated leaving the boys in the car, weighing the danger factor (practically none) and the panic factor should one of them wake up and find me not there (marginal, as both were snoring) versus the annoyance factor of waking both up, carting two sweaty, cranky preschoolers in with me for my one- minute errand, and facing the rest of the day with their slumber-interrupted crankiness.

I found a spot in the shade, debated for a long minute, and made the wrong choice. I figured I’d leave them in the car, and leave the car running so the air conditioning would stay on, but lock the doors and take my electronic remote key fob with me.

I ran in, concluded my transaction, and ran out again. The whole thing took maybe 180 seconds. I felt a little guilty, because I know better than to do something dumb like that, but it was a calculated risk and I told myself I would never do it again as I pushed the button to unlock the doors.

And nothing happened.

I pressed the button again, and a few more times for good measure. I tried the door, in case it miraculously unlocked itself in my absence, and tried to lift the back hatch. With desperation, I tried to use the remote on the back hatch, closing my eyes and wishing with all my heart to hear the familiar thunk of the trunk release when I pushed the button. Silence.

Did you see it coming? Did you know that if the engine is running, your electronic remote key fob doesn’t work? Great safety feature, isn’t it? Unless, of course, you have locked your sleeping preschoolers in the running car, that is.

All the air evaporated out of my lungs as I realized what I had done. I stood blinking stupidly at the boys in the back seat, imagining the phone conversation – oh god, look, there’s the phone right there on the front seat where I left it – that I would have with Beloved, trying to explain this. I pictured police with slim jims called to unlock the doors and liberate my now-awake and terrified children. I envisioned child protective services becoming involved, and the media, too, because you always see the story about the person who leaves their dog in the mall parking lot in 30C heat, so surely to god they’re going to run with the story of the dumb-ass mother who locks her babies in her car in 32C heat.

After a full minute of standing rooted in full-out panic, I realized I had another option. Tristan knows how to open the door. I tapped gently on the window near his lolling head, stage-whispering his name. Nothing. I thunked the glass, whapped the glass, pounded on the glass with all my might and bellowed his name, and he slept blissfully on. I finally – FINALLY! – managed to get his eyelids to flutter open, and he regarded me with unfocused confusion through the glass (I can only laugh to picture what my face must have looked like!) before trying to drift back to sleep. I thumped the window a few more times, and finally roused him enough to convince him to unlock his door.

My legs were rubbery by the time I dropped into the driver’s seat and pulled out of the parking lot. A few deep breaths later, I could almost see the potential humour in the situation, but mostly I was grateful that outing my stupidity would be my choice, and not foisted upon me.

So, I’ve showed you mine. ‘Fess up – what parenting misadventure made you grateful that the paparazzi weren’t lurking in the bushes ready to broadcast the whole thing on Entertainment Tonight?

(fanfare, dramatic pause)

… Escape Pod! (balloons and confetti fall from the rafters)

Our big winner is tricky ‘Trixie’ who suggested the winning name under a pseudonym, which I only realized when I went to send her a congratulatory e-mail and realized she is one of my favourite colleagues in disguise. Hey, at least this way I don’t have to pay the postage on her candy prize package!

Thanks ‘Trixie’ for the suggesting the winning name, and thanks to Kris for making the extra effort to vote via the comments and finally breaking the deadlocked tie late this afternoon. The excitement, the suspense, the drama of it all – this is better than prime time!

And, as promised, the ‘thanks for playing’ extra prize package goes to (more fanfare) Renee of Froggie Mom! Woo hoo! I hope I can find something interesting to send her that they don’t have down there in Louisiana.

Thanks to all who played – this was a fun little distraction. We should have contests around here more often!

Edited to add: If you are curious, here’s the final standings:

iBob 5 votes
Tunes-eh? 1 vote
Escape Pod 9 votes
Cherie 1 vote
Sally 2 votes
Dopi 2 votes
DaNiPod 8 votes
DaniCasting 1 vote
Mother’s Little Helper 3 votes
iPollo 2 votes

It’s a civic holiday here, and I had assumed my gym would be open as usual, but it opened an hour later than usual, about 45 minutes after I arrived. Not wanting to miss my opportunity, I decided to go for a run instead (I’m really not so fond of running) and thought that since I was already in the car, I’d choose some new scenery to pound and sweat through.

There’s a little conservation area just a few clicks from my house, and with its winding paths and boardwalks through the marshes, it seemed like a lovely choice. What I had forgotten was the little canoe dock that appends one end of the path. It’s small, just five by ten or so, and just out of the way enough that you might overlook it if you weren’t paying attention.

I went for my hobbling, ungraceful run – why is it that other runners always look so lithe and athletic when they run and I look like a herd of lumbering three-legged cattle? – and stopped to stretch and catch my breath on the peaceful little dock.

It was probably the 30 most peaceful moments of my whole summer vacation. The Rideau is a busy river, but only two boats rippled the tranquil surface while I was there. I watched an elderly gentleman quietly fishing off his own dock a half mile or so down and across the river, but other than that, even the animals and insects were at rest. The breeze was gently soothing, and in the early haze of a day that promises to swelter, the air was pregnant with possibility. Nothing has yet been committed this early, and the day had not yet coalesced into the vivid colours and harsh shadows that will define the midmorning and afternoon.

I have a serious case of dock envy. I realized that when I was riding about in the little aluminum fishing boat of my father- and mother-in-law last weekend. Sure, it would be nice to have a cottage on a lake somewhere, but I don’t need that much. All I really want is a dock, somewhere I can plant my chair and sip my coffee in the morning, or my frosty, sweating beer in the lazy heat of a summer afternoon, and hear the waves gently patting the moorings.

It hasn’t been the best summer vacation ever this year. Too much drama, too much anxiety, too much barf and poop, thanks to the stomach virus that Simon has been battling for the past seven days (it was so bad on Friday that I was afraid we’d have to bring him in to the ER for dehydration, but he’s better now.) That’s not to say there haven’t been high points, and fun days, and lots of things that I enjoyed – but emotionally, the past two weeks have been too erratic for me to look back at them with any collective fondness.

But on this little dock, with the breeze tickling errant strands of hair across my cheeks, it seemed I could get my feet solidly under me again. I tried to inhale the calm, to charge up my heart, my brain, my cells with the sweetness of promise, of possibility, of hazy blue calm and scudding clouds and lapping waves. I tried to remember that each day starts with this quiet promise, this possiblity, this gentle calm – sometimes you just have to move yourself off your beaten path to find it.

I used to love my bike. It was one of the first things I bought to treat myself when I was freshly divorced and my money was my own again. Ottawa is a great city for bike paths, and when we lived in the Glebe and Old Ottawa South I would love to spend a Saturday afternoon riding around, maybe up to Mooney’s Bay or just up to the store and back.

Then I got pregnant with Tristan, and never could decide whether I thought a trailer or a seat was safer – and then I was pregnant with Simon and the bike sat neglected and cobwebby in the garage for a couple of years. Since Tristan started riding his bike last year, I have been idly looking for a seat or trailer for Simon, and I finally found a second-hand trailer earlier this summer for a stellar $25 – and another $30 to get my bike back into ridable shape again.

There’s an old expression that intimates you never forget how to ride a bicycle. Well, let me tell you, after five years, your ass sure forgets what a bike seat feels like, and spends a lot of time complaining after the first time you ride a bike in five years. I’m just sayin’.

And riding around negotiating traffic downtown is a hell of a lot easier than riding through my suburban neighbourhood at preschooler speed. Have you ever tried to ride your bike for an hour slowly – at say, half of walking speed? It’s like spinning class from hell – speed up, slow down, speed up, dead lurching stop to avoid a preschooler who stopped to pick a dandilion and make a wish. Especially fun with 40 lbs of Simon inertia rolling along behind me!

For you, I will now share pictures of my ass with the Internet. (If that doesn’t class up the quality of google traffic around here, I don’t know what will.)

And, because you were so sweet with your wishes and comments this week, a gratuituous birthday cake picture, because it was on the memory card, too.

Time to move on to the voting phase of the Name that iPod Summer Contest!

I tried valiantly to enter the code for the poll into this post, but Blogger would have none of it, so you’ll find the poll in the sidebar to the right.

I limited the choices to ten capriciously chosen nominations simply because I couldn’t figure out a way to force the poll code to give me more than ten options. However, I feel badly enough about this that I’m entering everyone who proposed a nomination into a second draw for a consolation candy prize draw, too. That’s how much I love you guys!

I’ll leave the poll up through the weekend, and confirm the winning nomination and the random candy prize winner sometime on Monday morning… the last day of my summer vacation!

What are you waiting for? Vote already!

About four months ago, I was walking through a mall downtown and they were having a book sale in the atrium. I was on my way to a meeting, and didn’t have a lot of time to browse, but I saw a paperback copy of Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, re-issued with a section of glossy pictures from the movie in the centre of the book.

It was only $2.99, and so I picked it up. I clearly remember reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, when I was somewhere between seven and nine years old. I had borrowed it from the school library. I remember lying on the black vinyl couch, and on the orange shag carpet, trying to imagine what it would be like to make a single chocolate bar last a whole year. The idea of Charlie’s father, Mr Bucket, working in a factory screwing on toothpaste-tube caps stayed with me my whole life, for some reason.

I thought Tristan would be a little bit too young for it, but around the same time Marla had been talking about reading Charlotte’s Web to Josephine, and Josie’s quite a bit younger than Tristan, so I thought I’d give it a try. One afternoon we read a few pages, but he squirmed and wriggled and asked non-sequiter questions as I was reading, and I figured we’d save ourselves the stress and pick it up in a few years.

A couple of weeks ago, Beloved – who is usually in charge of Tristan’s bedtime reading – was teaching late and I was putting Tristan to bed. I saw that they had started reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and were a few chapters in, and I was delighted to continue.

At first, I thought he wasn’t paying attention. He was looking around the room, lifting his legs up the side of the wall and playing with the covers. There isn’t an illustration on every page, and I suppose a page full of text that he can’t yet read isn’t much of a focal point. But every time I turned a fresh page he would to tell me the number of the chapter on that page, so he is watching, and when I asked him about what was happening, it was clear he was following the story.

I’m so excited to have entered a new world of books that we can share. Beloved has been great about finding interesting picture books from the library, and I’ve loved reading a lot of them. But now that we can start reading simple chapter books, I have a whole childhood of memories pressed carefully between dusty pages of an old novel that I just can’t wait to share. Charlotte’s Web, Stuart Little, Beezus and Ramona, Superfudge… I’m excited just thinking about these old friends.

Beloved said last night that once they finish the book, he’d like to rent the Johnny Depp version of the movie for Tristan to watch, but I disagreed. He’s just barely discovered the joy of a book that can be savoured over the course of a couple of weeks, versus one consumed in a single sitting, and I’m reluctant to replace the pictures in his head with the ones conjured up by the Hollywood special-effects crews. Beloved thinks I’m a little weird on this point.

So now that we’re standing on the threshold of a brave new world of chapter books, I need ideas. Which books do you remember from your childhood, and which ones have your kids loved?

(Whoops! Edited to add: this post was partly inspired by a writing prompt over at Crazy Hip Blog Mamas. I’ve been a member of the ring since I started blogging a year and a half ago, but lately they’ve really been doing a lot of work to build a nice blogging mama community. Check them out!)