Month: April 2007

Easter weekend in pictures

We spent Easter weekend with Beloved’s family north of Huntsville. But first, we decorated some eggs.

Mimi and Pipi (a French coloquiallism for Grandmaman and Grandpapa) live on the other side of a gorgeous four and a half hour drive through Algonquin Provincial Park. The boys were so good that I now have no residual concerns about doing this for two days in a row to get to Bar Harbour.

The menfolk agreed that Mimi makes a specacular trifle for dessert.

And slept well on a full belly.

The next day, we tried to make it to an Easter Egg and candy hunt in a neighbouring town. We hadn’t anticipated the snow that fell during our visit, and we were underdressed for the unexpectedly outdoor egg hunt. To add insult to injury, we were maybe 10 minutes late in arriving, and by the time we wandered the arena field, trudging with chattering teeth and woefully underdressed for the 10 cm of fresh snow, we couldn’t find a single piece of candy. The boys were surprisingly good-natured about it, placated by my promise of more candy later in the weekend and anxious simply to get back into the still-warm car.

Cranky, cold and muttering unpleasantries under my breath, we loaded the boys into the car. My mother-in-law had entered their names into a draw, and as I stepped over to the draw table to keep her company, two young girls – maybe eight or nine years old – came up to the car and asked if they could give the boys some candy. They had lots, they said, and noticed that the boys had none. And when one of the girls’ names was drawn, she selected a small prize of a magnetic drawing board (dollar store variety) and brought it directly to Tristan in the car. And then Simon’s name was drawn and I scooped up a Wiggles story book for him.

I was so moved by the kindness of these young girls that I blinked away tears of gratitude as we drove away.

And while a snowy day is not the best for an outdoor Easter Egg hunt when you are dressed for spring rain, it’s great for maple syrup – so we made our next stop a pancake (and sausage and egg and homefries) breakfast at the local sugar shack.


Lest you think I exaggerated the bit about the snow, this is Mimi’s “Easter Tree” dusted in the 15 cm (6″) of snow that fell during the weekend. We had a green Christmas this year and a snowy Easter. Go figure.

Ironically, while we were heading east across the province, my brother and his family made a comparable, but more southerly, drive from Toronto to spend the weekend in Ottawa for Easter. Luckily, we came home in time to spend a day with them.

Simon with his four-month old cousin, Brooke:

Tristan, Simon and Noah playing Cars, doing laps around my mother’s patio table:

So while I’m officially sick of my relatives and turkey (had turkey dinner with Mimi and Pipi on Friday, turkey sandwiches for dinner on Saturday and another full turkey dinner with the rest of my family on Sunday)I couldn’t imagine a more lovely weekend. Well, 15 degrees warmer and a winning lottery ticket would have been nice, but why quibble?

Friday miscellany

APL always manages to find these funky little things!

You Are a Chimera

You are very outgoing and well connected to many people.

Incredibly devoted to your family and friends, you find purpose in nurturing others.

You are rarely alone, and you do best in the company of others.

You are incredibly expressive, and people are sometimes overwhelmed by your strong emotions.

It’s all quite true, isn’t it? Mythologically, the Chimera was part lion (I’m a Leo, after all!), part goat (stubborn as the day is long) and part dragon (especially after the spicy Thai for lunch!)

From the same site:

You Will Be a Cool Parent

You seem to naturally know a lot about parenting, and you know what kids need.

You can tell when it’s time to let kids off the hook, and when it’s time to lay down the law.

While your parenting is modern and hip, it’s not over the top.

You know that there’s nothing cool about a parent who acts like a teenager… or a drill sergeant!

Well, thank goodness I have this confirmed in writing. Note to self: print off and keep multiple copies for future use with disbelieving children.

***

Have you seen the Alanis Morisette cover of My Humps? Props to Kerry for finding it. I was reading somewhere that Alanis hasn’t yet said what her intent was, whether it’s a parody or an April Fools Joke or a criticism or what. I hope it was intended to demonstrate how truly inane and stupid the song’s lyrics are, despite the catchy beat. I have to say, I like it!

***

For a truly disturbing YouTube experience, make sure the kiddies aren’t looking over your shoulder and then watch Kermit on Crank, where Kermit the Frog covers the NIN song hurt while rather graphically shooting up. I’m not sure I needed to see this one.

***

Yesterday, after I posted the interview questions and answers it occured to me that it would have been a fun time to play the cocktail party comment game and have y’all interview each other. Since it’s a long weekend, let’s do it now. It’s a cocktail party, and you all have to make small talk. Pay attention, cuz if you play there’s TWO parts to each comment. Each person who comments will answer the question in the comment directly above theirs, and then pose a question of their own for the next person. Got it? Each comment has the answer to the previous question, and the question for the next person.

The questions can be on whatever topic you like, and you can take as long or as little to answer as you like. The questions should be about personal preferences, attitudes and opinions, along the lines of the ones you see in those e-mail memes: what’s the last book you read? What’s your favourite movie? What’s under your bed? Vanilla or chocolate? What’s the best vacation you ever took? What are your pets’ names and why? (Yes, I know, these are lame questions. But I trust that you can do oh so much better.)

Okay, so my question for the first commenter is: What superhero did you want to be when you were a kid?

The interview meme

I think the success of any interview gives much more weight to the questions than the answers. That’s why I jumped on the chance to play along with the interview meme that’s sweeping through the Momosphere right now when Bub and Pie asked if anyone wanted to be an interviewee. She’s always thoughtful and clever and I was curious to see what questions she’d come up with for me. I wasn’t disappointed – they’re great questions. Now let’s see if I can do them justice with my answers! (And don’t forget to go back and read B&P’s answers to the questions posed to her by Mouse.)

1. You’re very open on your blog – it’s one of the things that draws readers in, makes us feel we know you. Experiencing your pregnancy alongside you and then the tragedy of your miscarriage was an intense experience for me as a reader. Do you ever regret the permanent record you’ve left here of your pregnancy in posts that now have a different meaning in light of your miscarriage?

There’s one post in particular I wrote maybe a week before the miscarriage when I was around 15 weeks or so, talking about how I thought maybe I could feel the baby moving. In retrospect, that was pretty unlikely, as given what we found out, the baby had likely died by that point. I called it “The Quickening” and I still get a lot of google traffic on that word (sigh, probably more now that I’ve highlighted it again. Darn spider-bots.) and it always made me cringe. I almost took it down, just because I was feeling a little bit bitter about it showing up in the referral logs, but I never did. That’s as close as I come to regret over any of it.

All of that stuff I wrote while I was pregnant was true as it was happening, and was a completely honest representation of what I was going through at the time, so no, I don’t regret any of it. It’s still hard for me to go back and read some of it, but I can’t say that I wish I didn’t write it, or that I wish I had thought differently at the time. I’ve always believed in sharing my joy while it lasts, which is why I could never wait to announce a pregnancy. Sad times may come, so live your moments of joy with enthusiastic abandon while you can.

2. Like me, you were married unhappily once, and are married much more happily now. Do you feel that your first experience in marriage helped shape your second?

Funny, my answer to this question after thinking about it was not my knee-jerk, first-blush response. I don’t write a lot about my ex because he’s not around to defend himself, and frankly, I’m done giving him any power over me, even all these years later. Suffice to say, he didn’t always treat me as well as he should have. He cheated on me, for one. Told his best friend that the best way to ‘train’ his new wife was to keep putting her down until she stopped fighting back, for another (and he practiced what he preached). And he was, in the most clinical sense of the definition, a pathological liar. He would lie even when the truth was a perfectly acceptable answer. He would lie for the sake of lying, even when there was no doubt whatsoever he’d get caught in his lie. And he lied to me about a lot of stuff – everything from “I took the movies back to the video store today” when he didn’t, to “I didn’t take your bank card out of your wallet and use it to take money out of your account” when he did, to “I didn’t sleep with her” when he did.

So yes, living with that for my most formative years (started ‘steady’ dating when I was 16, got married when I was 20, got divorced at 24) definitely affected the relationships that followed. When Beloved and I had been living together for a couple of years but not yet married, I went to see a psychologist for a while, and we worked through a lot of the crap I was still carrying around with me. She helped me understand that it was not okay for him to force sex through guilt and withholding of affection, which he did too often, and that I was not at ‘fault’ for his lies, his adultery, his difficulty in holding a job, and so many other things. Truly, the dozen or so sessions I had with that psychologist were one of the best things I’ve ever done for myself.

All this to say that I was carrying a lot of emotional baggage by the time Beloved and I moved in together – but not in the ways I might have expected. I’ve never had trust issues with Beloved, for example. I trust him blindly, with my whole heart, and always have. It’s a kind of triumph of naivety and love over experience. But I do have residual control issues. For example, because I could never trust my ex to pay the bills, I must be in charge of the family finances now – I can’t cede control of that over to Beloved.

I was ready to answer this question with the many ways that the practice marriage has affected my marriage with Beloved, but I’m pleased to see that in the analysis, maybe I overestimated them. I’m sure there are a thousand other ways, large and small, that have left a residual imprint, but it’s surprisingly difficult to analyze what comes as a result of the ‘practice’ marriage and what was inherently me in the first place.

3. Who do you consider to be the sexiest Canadian politician?

I have three answers for this question, with varying degrees of qualifiers. To answer the question straight up, the sexiest current politician is Nova Scotia MP Scott Brison, which I conveniently happened to decide not that long ago when I saw him on the Rick Mercer Report.

Now, if we can expand the parameters a bit, as he hasn’t yet run for his seat in Papineau, but when he officially becomes a politician, I’m going to have to switch my allegiance to Justin Trudeau as the sexiest politician. I’ve had a crush on him since long before the moving eulogy he delivered for his father.

And if we can extend the definition of politics to include speechwriters and communicators for national leaders, my vote goes to former Liberal campaign blogger Scott Feschuk. I have a wicked literary crush on him.

4. Severus Snape: friend or foe?

Ugh. I don’t know!! I’ve been re-reading the books to refresh my memory of the details of the stories in anticipation of the July arrival of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. As I read, I’ve been trying to glean any little bit of meaning or insight to this very question in all the scenes where Snape appears.

WARNING: SPOILER ALERT!! If you have not yet read to the end of Half Blood Prince, STOP READING and skip to the next question!

I’ve been pondering for two years now whether Snape was simply fulfilling his destiny, or some sort of obligation to Dumbledore, or whether he was truly evil all along, or whether he was possessed by Voldemort. I don’t know! I’m too Pollyanna to think that Snape is a truly evil character who willfully killed Dumbledore, and Rowling is after all writing what are in essence children’s books.

My bet is that he was under some sort of spell or obligation. I’m itching to read the next book, though. Conveniently, it arrives the first day of my two-week summer vacation. Coincidence or excellent planning on my part? I’ll be torn the whole way through, racing to the end to find out once and for all what happens, but slowing myself down because there won’t be another helping of Harry Potter after this one is consumed. Peanut gallery, what say you?

5. How do you think birth order affects the personalities of your children?

Another good question! I can definitely see that my boys seem to fit into their birth-order personality stereotypes, for lack of a better word.

Tristan, the first born, is a people-pleaser, and a little high strung. He’s keen and tends to be serious more often than not, and plays happily by himself. Simon, on the other hand, is mellower. He’s much more social and outgoing, and much more flexible.

This has been great fun to answer. If you’d like me to interview you, let me know in the comments. I don’t promise to be as prompt, let alone as insightful, as Bub and Pie was in sending her questions off to me, but I’ll do my best.

My 15 minutes in Chatelaine

Thanks to my colleague Rebecca, who was the first to realize that the Chatelaine article I mentioned is already posted online! No more skulking around the magazine racks at every grocery store and news stand in town, waiting for the paper copy to arrive. Er, not that I was doing that, of course.

Anyway, it’s with great pleasure and excitement (and a certain lack of subtlety) that I happily point you toward the article in the online May edition of Chatelaine magazine, In vitro we trust – coming soon to a paper edition near you! In my humble opinion, even past the bits that feature me, it’s a well balanced and informative article about the state of reproductive technologies in Canada. It’s quite long, though – nine screens’ worth – so grab a cup of your beverage of choice before you settle in if you want to read the whole thing.

There’s nothing about our story that you haven’t already read here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here (shameless, aren’t I?) but it still tickles me to see it all laid out like that in somebody else’s words. I was pleased to see that the article manages to shout out both boys and blog by name (sadly, without a direct link. Oh well.)

Even though we knew it was coming and discussed it in advance, I still cringed just a bit when I saw the bit outing Beloved’s low sperm count. We’ve come a long way from the days immediately after our diagnosis, when we could barely discuss it between ourselves. By now, of course, he has become rather acclimatized to me discussing our most intimate moments with the widest possible audience – in blog, on national TV (not once, but twice!) and now in a national magazine as well. He took it in stride, and in fact insists I correct the record by clarifying that it’s not so much that his sperm are not copious, but that (in his words, not mine) they are “stupid”. The fertility doctors used the slightly more clinical term, “of impaired morphology”, but you get the point.

All this to say, in my usual belaboured and roundabout way, that I’m terribly proud to be featured in the article. In case you hadn’t gleaned that from my oh-so-understated neon billboard of a post about it.

Dancing with Beloved

Beloved and I were watching Dancing with the Stars the other night. I didn’t actually mean to watch it, I just haven’t yet gotten out of the habit of tuning in to CTV on Mondays at 8:00 to watch Corner Gas. It’s not exactly groundbreaking, quality television, but there are worse ways to spend an hour than seeing that (relatively) famous people are almost as clumsy and awkward as I am. Almost.

Watching it reminded me that I don’t think I’ve ever told you the story of the time Beloved and I took ballroom dancing lessons. I need to back up a little bit and explain to you that Beloved is a wonderful dancer. He’s got a great sense of rhythm, and he’s graceful. He loves to dance. Me, not so much. I like dancing in theory, don’t mind going out and gyrating with the crowd to an uptempo beat, but I’m a bit stiff when it comes to actually dancing with someone, as opposed to simply dancing near them. Dancing near someone, it doesn’t really matter if you flail madly and thrust randomly. Dancing with someone is a skill I’ve never acquired.

Anyway, I got it into my head that we (ahem, I) needed to take ballroom dancing lessons for our wedding. Now, if one were inclined to make an observation, one might note at this point that our wedding reception was a barbeque, a picnic in a park, and there was not a lot of dancing planned. None, in fact, save for the traditional ‘first dance’. But that didn’t really factor in to our my epiphany that we needed to take ballroom dancing lessons. And Beloved really is an agreeable sort of fellow. He was game for it, and so we signed up for lessons at our local community centre.

Now, I have to interrupt this story one more time for one more point of clarification. To truly appreciate this story, you have to understand the rather unique dynamics of the relationship between Beloved and me. He is, as I said, an agreeable sort of fellow, which is quite a perfect match for my inherent bossiness. I like to be in charge, he tolerates my enthusiastic if not occassionally misguided leadership. Most of the time.

So, ballroom dancing. We were on our third, maybe fourth lesson. We had covered the jive, and the tango, and a bit of salsa. We were working on the waltz, which is perhaps one of the most basic of all the ballroom dances. After 45 annoying and fruitless minutes of stepping on each others’ toes, banging foreheads into chins, and general klutziness, Beloved finally threw down his arms in frustration.

“Do you want me to go into the bathroom and yank it off so you can wear it for a while, or is it MY turn to lead now?” he asked. There was no doubt in my mind what ‘it’ was.

Poor Beloved. It’s not always easy being married to me. And I still couldn’t waltz to save my soul.

10-pages-in book review: The Calligrapher

I haven’t been writing a lot of 10-pages-in book reviews lately simply because I haven’t been reading any books worth talking about. In fact, it’s been about a month now that in my prime book-reading time (on the bus going home) I’ve been reading magazines. Or just staring out the window. It’s been a horrible drought.

Thank goodness, the drought has been quenched (that seems a little hyberbolic, but I’ve written myself into a corner barely five sentences in – that can’t be good) with this latest book. I received it as a gift from the commenter otherwise known as Trixie, who really needs her own blog. (And again, I’m off track. FOCUS, woman.)

Ahem. So, this book – it’s amazing. It’s delicious. I can’t remember the last time I savoured a book like this – the story, the language, the turns of phrase. It’s exquisite and delightful, intelligent and wryly funny. It’s called The Calligrapher, and it’s a first novel by a British chap named Edward Docx.

The Calligrapher is the story of 29 year old Jasper Jackson of London, told in cheeky and clever first-person narrative. He’s a raffish sort of fellow, a sophisticated and self-aware womanizer and serial heartbreaker; a younger, hipper Hugh Grant sort of character. He’s a scamp and a scalliwag, just the sort of fellow whom I would find absolutely irresistible in real life – and as a literary creation.

He describes, for example, his preparations for the perfect aprés-amour breakfast when his latest conquest requests strawberries :

Even here, there is danger. The talented amateur, for example, will stride merrily out to the shops on the eve of the assignation and buy everything his forthright imagination can conceive of Рmuesli, muffins, marmalade, a range of mushrooms, perhaps even some maple syrup. Thus laden, he will return to stuff his shelves, fill his fridge and generally clutter his kitchen with produce. But this will not do. Not only will his unwieldy efforts be noticed by even the most blas̩ of guests Рas he offers first one menu, then another Рbut, worse, the elegance and effect of seeming to have exactly what she wants is utterly lost, drowned out in a deluge of petits d̩jeuners.

No, the professional must take a very different approach. He will, of course, have all the same victuals as the amateur, but – and here’s the rub – he will have hidden them. All eventualities will have been provided for, and yet it will appear as though he has made provisions for none. Except – magically – the right one.

Anyway, thank fuck I got the strawberries.

Jasper is also a formally trained calligrapher, and he is working on his largest commission to date, transcribing 30 songs and sonnets by the poet John Donne for an American buyer. Each chapter opens with a few lines of the Donne poem Jasper is currently transcribing, which happens to reflect the changing state of Jasper’s life.

I must admit to an ignomious lack of awareness about poetry. Poetry is one of those things that I’ve tried valiantly to ‘get’, mostly unsuccessfully. About all I know of Donne is that he was a contemporary of Shakespeare, and that he wrote both holy sonnets and erotic love sonnets. In this book, I adore how the narrator uses the little bits of verse to explore how he feels, and also gives a little Poetry 101 lesson by walking the reader through Donne’s verse. Donne’s poetry is so cleanly woven into the fabric of the story and such a perfect foil for the unfolding storyline that I’m curious as to how the author constructed the novel. Did the author choose the sonnets and then build the story around them?

At just shy of 100 pages into the book, I’ve just come to a critical point in the story. Jasper, recently caught in flagrante delicto with another woman and turfed by his girlfriend, has become mesmerized by a mysterious woman who appears in the garden courtyard outside his home studio. In his own words, he falls apart as he tries to discern who this perfect beauty is and whether she is available.

I’ve long been a fan of ‘lad lit’, and this book seems a particularly worthy example of that genre. In one of the reviews of The Calligrapher I read, I think it was in the NYT, called author Edward Docx the little brother of Nick Horby. I can see that. Docx writes with the same delicious dry wit, but with an extra attention to language and turn of phrase that makes me positively salivate. I also enjoy how each phrase drips with what I can only describe as inherent Britishness – you can’t read this prose without hearing the clipped wry British voice in it.

While I’m curious as to the outcome of the story, far from racing to the conclusion I’m content to savour each page as I read it. True, like a lot of first-time novels this one seems to succumb to its own bravado at times. Like Jasper, the book is perhaps a little too aware of its own cleverness on occasion, and the language comes dangerously close to excessive embellishment. But these are minor quibbles, and the literary excesses are actually a large part of this book’s charm.

A book is a lovely gift at the best of times, but giving fiction – especially fiction you haven’t yet read yourself, as Trixie admitted she hadn’t – can be tricky. There are simply so many bad books out there, and so many more that are simply mediocre, that it takes an extraordinary amount of luck to have one so exquisitely enjoyable as this one simply be gifted upon you.

A bad boy who has a way with words. I never stood a chance.

(Potty) Mouths of Babes

I’m so good to you. I mean, I could fill an entire blog with the cute (and sometimes scandalous) things my kids are saying these days. Heck, if it’s good enough for a bad TV show with Bill Cosby, it’s good enough for you! But rather than draw out the torture, I’ve been saving up a few nuggets to share with you in one indulgent helping.

Some things they say are unintentionally hilarious, such as when the boys were playing with Woody and Buzz from Toy Story and Simon got a little too rough. Tristan said, “Hey, be careful with my big Woody!”

***

The boys have a new game, along the lines of Marco Polo. Tristan calls out in a pinched faux-British voice “Hello!” and either Simon or Beloved respond with “Moto!” and a bad imitation of the cell ring tone’s bad electro-funk dance music. It’s especially funny to see Simon do his Hello Moto dance with his elbows tucked tight to his side and his index fingers thrusting upward in time to the beat he is mangling.

***

Tristan has recently begun to chafe under the rules of the house. Whether he is being told to shut down the computer or to eat his dinner, the result is a theatrical eye roll and lament about how he can’t wait until he is a grownup and done with rules. (Hah!) The best one, though, was this past weekend as he was being subject to the injustice of having his toenails cut after a bath.

“Someday I’m going to be a grown-up,” he began in a philosophical tone, “I’m going to have a house, and be a daddy and have kids of my own.” While Beloved and I beamed, he continued, “And my kids will always be allowed to have long toenails.”

***

And then of course there are those moments when you know you have noone to blame but yourself.

Overheard while Simon and Tristan were wrangling over who knows what, Simon: “It’s my freakin’ turn!”

***

We were at the dinner table when Tristan was recounting his day. “And then I was in a time out while the other kids were playing, and it was for a really long time, and it was pissing me off!” His tone and inflection were perfect. He’s obviously got that phrase down to a science.

***

Simon is going through a particularly affectionate stage right now, which is a good self-preservationist counter-balance to the particularly stubborn phase he is also going through right now. The other day he came barrelling up to me and threw his arms around me in a pint-sized bear hug, then released me and patted me fondly on the stomach. “I love your big, fat belly, Mommy!” he told me with oblivious affection.