Month: April 2009

Project 365: The arrival of the Nifty Fifty

I got a new toy this week! A 50mm f1.8 lens, so well loved in the photography community that they call it the “nifty fifty.” I totally love it!

As with far too many things in my life, however, the circuitous route by which it came to me makes for both a cautionary tale and excellent blog fodder.

I’d been eyeballing it for weeks, and knew I could buy it on Amazon.com for about $135US. I also happened to have $40 in Amazon.com gift certificates, for my last couple of blog tours. When I got a $100 paypal payment in $US, I figured it was meant to be. I have $140US to spend, the lens I covet costs $135. Hook me up!

Problem: Amazon.com doesn’t ship lenses to Canada. (And Amazon.ca doesn’t accept Amazon.com gift certificates.)
Solution: Find benevolent American friend willing to re-ship lens to me.

Problem: Amazon.com doesn’t accept paypal. If I cash it out, I lose both ways on the exchange.
Solution: Use $$ in paypal account to bid on $100 Amazon gift card on eBay. Brilliant! (Beloved thought of this one. He’s so clever!)

Problem: I’m 80c (yes, eighty CENTS) short when I go to check out of the Amazon store. Friggin’ taxes!
Solution: use dregs of paypal account to buy a $5 gift card.

Problem: Lens finally arrives with $56.90 payment outstanding to UPS. Nanny doesn’t have the cash on hand to cover it. (I thought the $56.90 was the delivery charge, but my American friend had already paid nearly $20 for that. It was GST and duty. *choke*)
Solution: Must wait overnight and leave cheque for UPS.

Total cost to buy new lens from Amazon: $258.42 Cnd.
What it would have cost me to buy it from the Henry’s around the corner: $182.45. Sigh.

Oh well, my out-of-pocket is still only about $70. Not bad for a lens that I am completely and utterly in love with!

It took me a while to get used to the manual focus again (the 50mm f1.8 doesn’t autofocus with the D40) and of using my feet to do the zooming, but this lens is so sharp and takes the most lovely pictures. The f1.8 means that it has a particularly wide aperture, much wider than the f3.5 or so I can get with my kit lens. I’ve always liked playing with depth of field, and this lens is just amazing for that. (Depth of field refers to the amount of the photo that is in focus. In a wide depth of field, using say f20, all the details would be in focus. In a short depth of field, you can highlight what you want to be in focus and throw the foreground and background out of focus. /photography lesson)

You can see how much fun I’ve had with DoF in this week’s photos:

81:365 Colouring eggs for Easter

82:365 Easter candy

87:365 Pizza night

85:365 Tristan in motion

(In this case, the out-of-focus areas are from motion. This is a technique called ‘panning’ where you move your camera to follow a moving subject (theoretically) keeping your subject in focus while the background is blurred. I just love the expression on Tristan’s face!)

86c:365 First wildflowers (3 of 3)

86b:365 First wildflowers (2 of 3)

86:365 First wildflowers (1 of 3)

(I’m playing fast and loose with the definition of “this week’s photos”. You’ve already seen the peanut butter jar picture and the picture of Tristan and Lucas, so I slipped in a few extras of the pretty flowers. I found them growing wild by the side of the road near the Experimental Farm and didn’t figure you’d mind! Sometimes it’s hard to choose just one picture for the day, and sometimes it’s hell coming up with something, ANYTHING that will do for the day! Also, those flowers represent what I truly love about my 365 project: I never would have stopped and got out of my car to photograph or admire those flowers before — and I spent a lovely and restorative 20 or 30 minutes creeping around and even lying sprawled on my belly taking pictures of them. That in and of itself was a gift!)

And here’s one last thought for this week, a photo that I didn’t take that speaks for itself:

87b:365 Unphotographable

(With props – and apologies? – to Michael David Murphy of Unphotographable, and to Kate , who first exposed me to his work.)

The photographer’s equivalent of the one that got away, I guess!

The not-yet-toddling menace

I am finding this particular stage of Lucas’s development exhausting. No, really? EXHAUSTING. Also exasperating, challenging, and frustrating. (And, to be fair, delightful and charming and wonderful.) But mostly, exhausting.

He stubbornly refuses to walk on his own, even though he can stand with no problem, has walked across the room unaided, and can perch himself precariously on a peanut butter jar, presumably to get the jam hidden on a higher shelf in the pantry.

But he can climb up and down an entire flight of stairs, make his way on and off the sofa, and simply cannot resist an opportunity to clamber onto something… chairs, end tables, diaper crates and toy boxes (not to mention, as I said, peanut butter jars.) The good thing is that he really is getting pretty good at getting himself back down again, so if I’m nearby I can at least supervise and let him climb up and down to his heart’s content. This assumes that I am at liberty to stand benevolently nearby for the 16 hours per day he would prefer to engage in his furniture-scaling adventures.

When he isn’t trying to climb every elevated surface within two feet of the floor, he’s dumping stuff. Emptying cupboards of their pots, drawers of their tea-towels, and bookshelves of their books is *almost* as much fun as climbing into the cupboard and drawers and onto the now-empty bookshelves.

In the 10 minutes it takes to make sandwiches for lunch, he can create a mess that takes me 20 minutes to clean up. I pick up the books, he dumps the plastic plates and cups from the cupboard. I pick up the plastic plates and cups, he ransacks the shoe closet. I rearrange the shoes, he dumps the books off the book shelf. I found the TV remote in the dog’s food bowl yesterday and he unfolded an entire basket of folded laundry in the time it took me to answer a telephone call.

Did I mention exhausting?

At the end of a long day, I look at Tristan and Simon and think, “They survived — and I survived them. Surely this phase doesn’t last forever.” It just seems particularly taxing, not to mention early, to be struggling with this at only 14 months. It’s a good thing he’s so darn adorable, I tell him frequently. Only the cutest babies get away with that kind of ongoing mischief without finding themselves packed up and shipped off to Granny’s house!

84:365 Brothers

It’s hard not to indulge this kind of cuteness. But please tell me that this phase is a short one! The toddler years are not yet upon us and I’m already running out of reserve energy!!

Caution, there be whines ahead

Ugh.

Yep, that’s about all I’ve got to contribute today. Go about your business. Nothing to see here.

What, you’re still reading? Foolish you. Okay, then, if you’re willing to put up with it, I’m going to whine. Poor, poor me. Whimper.

I’ve been sick for days. Started, I dunno, back on Friday or Saturday maybe? Actually, it started three weeks ago after the March break with this damn cough that will not go away. Then on the weekend, a wicked raw sore throat that I was so sure was strep I headed to the walk-in clinic on Monday. I was taking Tylenol every four hours just to deal with it, despite the fact that once upon a time when I was delivering Simon, the anesthesiologist observed that I have a remarkably high tolerance for pain. For some dumbass reason, it takes 48 hours for them to finish the strep test, so I’m waiting for the lab results today. In the meanwhile, yesterday the cough came back worse than ever, and I woke up in the middle of the night with my eyes practically sealed shut with goop. Good times, I tell ya.

I have more stuff to whine about, if you’re still silly enough to be reading. As soon as I’m done here (hiding upstairs with the laptop while the nanny — also sick with a cold — takes care of Lucas) I have to call the tax department and argue with them for a while because they applied my 2008 payment to my 2009 payroll account and then assessed me interest and a penalty for not paying my bill. Fun. And then I have to call my HR rep and get them to uncancel my health insurance, which they canceled in error while I was on maternity leave. When I called them last week to have them fix it, they reinstated it the next day — effective April 2009 and not April 2008, thus causing my $700 benefit claim comprising all of last year to be rejected for a second time. Gah.

There is good news, though. My dad had his operation late last week (for a subdural hematoma they suspect came from a fall down the stairs back in November) and he came home from the hospital on Monday feeling better than he has in a year. Yay!

And the sun is shining. That’s always nice. And lookit here, I have a whole blog post written and I don’t have to worry about feeling like I’m neglecting you all any more. If anyone would care to stop by and do 17 loads of laundry and clean my floors, I’d be downright perky!

I am so farked

This third child will be the one that does all the frightful things that the first two never did, won’t he? Now that poor old mom is too worn down to properly fight back.

83:365 Mischief in the pantry

Standing on the peanut butter jar (!) so he can reach deeper into the pantry. He’s all of 14 months old and can’t even WALK yet, for goodness sake!!

Project 365: Moody moments and nature week

Well, after the excitement of getting my first picture featured by Flickr in Explore, I finally relaxed and got back to the business of taking photos for myself instead of for everybody else this week.

I think that sentiment is best encapsulated in this picture I took on Sunday. I adore this wooden cradle. It has cradled all three of my boys as newborns, and Lucas grew too large for it at least a couple of months ago. Before I put it away for good, though, I wanted to take this one last image. I wanted it to be a moody, dark shot, though, because I also wanted to pay a tribute to those years of doubt and sadness back before Tristan was born, when we weren’t sure if we’d ever be able to have the kids we wanted so badly. The darkness of those years of infertility will always be a part of us, I think. And then, of course, there were the three babies lost: the first one at 13 weeks, in 2000; the second one, Tristan’s twin, lost at 9 1/2 weeks in 2001; and the baby we lost in 2006 at 16 weeks. So this picture is a tribute to them, and to Frostie, too. An acknowledgment of what never was, and of the joy with which we have been blessed.

76:365 Empty cradle

(That’s a really long explanation for a picture I should maybe have just let speak for itself.)

None of the other pictures this week are nearly so laden with meaning or melancholy. In fact, most of them are either shots for a new scavenger hunt game I’m playing (thank goodness, because it provides me with ideas and inspirations I desperately need right now) or pictures inspired by the changing (often hourly!) seasons.

74:365 Spring sun

77:365 Beach in a bottle

78:365 Winter's last blast?

79:365 Orthodox

80:365 Selfie in granite

(No, that last one is not me in a blizzard. It’s me reflected in a giant 8×10 sheet of granite outside a local granite and concrete shop on a beautiful day around lunchtime. Neat effect though, eh?)

Rerun week continues with Notes from a Therapy Session

I’m guest-blogging over at Canadian Family magazine’s Family Jewels blog this week, and dredging up some of my favourite posts from the archives to keep you company over here. This one is from the summer of 2006.

***

Tristan: And did I tell you about that time when I was four, when my mother tried to kill me twice in the same month?

Therapist: Hmmm, I don’t think so. There was the episode where she locked you and your brother in a running car while you were sleeping…

Tristan: Right, and then less than two weeks later, she yanked me off some playground equipment and I dropped like a stone from eight feet in the air.

Therapist: Surely she didn’t mean to…

Tristan: It was one of those things where you dangle off a handle and zoom across a beam from one platform to another. She called it a zip line, but I insisted on calling it a zip code, which was pretty funny because we don’t even have zip codes in Canada. Anyway, I had just barely mastered holding my own body weight up but I loved that zip code. We went to a new park one evening on our bikes, and I was so proud to be able to actually reach the zip code from the raised platform, and all I did all night long was zip back and forth.

Therapist: And what did your mother do?

Tristan: Well, she was watching and cheering for me at first, but then she said it would be easier if I used my feet to push off the platform at the far end. The big kids could hurl themselves across really fast and bounce half way back on one push, but I kind of had to wiggle and squirm to make it all the way across and back. Remember, I was a big kid for my age, but I was only four years old.

Therapist: Mmmm hmmm…

Tristan: And so my mother said, ‘Here, let me show you. Just use your feet to push off the platform…’ and she grabbed me by the ankles to demonstrate, but she pulled me off balance and I lost my grip on the handle. I fell face first in the sand, and because she was still holding my ankles I landed with my whole body perfectly horizontal, basically doing a giant belly flop into the sand.

Therapist (cringes): Ouch! That must have hurt!

Tristan: Yah, it knocked the wind right out of me. There was a long minute where I just lay on the sand and tried to figure out if I was still alive or not, and my mother later said the entire city of Ottawa fell silent and every pair of eyes at that very busy playground turned to me to see what would happen next.

Therapist: Were you okay?

Tristan: After I cried for a couple of minutes and got over being pissed off about all the sand in my mouth I was okay. My mother said she had nightmares for days about how close my head came to hitting the platform on the way down. I mean, I got over it pretty quickly and once my mom finished wiping the tears off my face and the sand out of my mouth with the corner of her t-shirt, I went right back to playing on the zip code for the rest of the evening. Funny, though – when we got home my mother had a whole bunch of new grey hairs I had never noticed before…

***

Bonus conversation!

We were playing in the driveway last night, and there’s a little plastic toy that was supposed to have gone in the garbage. I’m not sure how it migrated back out into the driveway, but I ended up running over it when I backed the car out of the driveway to give the kids more room to play.

Tristan picked it up and ran over to me excitedly. “Look mummy! You sure broke the hell out of this thing, didn’t you?”

More reruns: The Sweater Story

I’m blogging over at Family Jewels again today, and it’s a topic both dear to my heart and important for you to read, so get on over there and read it, okay?

But if you still can’t get enough of me today (frankly, I’m a little sick of me these days!) here’s a golden oldie from my way-back archives, The Sweater Story.

I’ve been back at work for about three weeks now, and I think I’m finally into the rhythm of the office again. I’ve been working on some pretty high-profile stuff around here, so I get lots of face time with senior management, which is nice for a new employee although some days I really feel like I’m in over my head.

Today was an especially busy day. We had our usual all-staff morning meeting, where I gave an update on my project to the group, and I had a couple of drop-by-my-cube meetings with colleagues. I also spent about 30 minutes on a conference call in my director’s office, sitting across the desk from her while we talked to some of the folks down in Southern Ontario region.

It was about 10:30 by the time I finally made it to the bathroom. I was washing my hands when I caught sight of myself in the mirror and noticed it. IT. In that moment, I became truly cognizant of the definition of mortified. On my sweater sleeve – my creamy white cotton knit sleeve, no less – smeared from mid-bicep to near my wrist, was a painfully obvious, incredibly nasty two inch wide smear of baby shit. Suddenly I flashed back to the pre-dawn gloaming of Tristan’s room, where I rushed in to grab a little cuddle before running for the bus. I picked him up out of his crib and slung him onto my hip to deliver him to Beloved, blissfully unaware of the toxic ooze seeping out of his Pampers and ingratiating itself with my arm.

As I gazed at my sullied reflection in the mirror, I tried to console myself: “They won’t notice. It’s not that obvious.” It WAS that obvious. THEY NOTICED! You would have to make a Herculean effort of avoidance to miss it, and I just knew my colleagues weren’t up to the task.

I tried to at least mitigate the damage. First, I tried to rub it off. Have you ever tried to rub dried baby shit off cotton ribbed knit? Then thought maybe a little water might do it. Which worked, inasmuch as it diluted the stain by about 20 per cent and spread it over an area about 300 per cent of the original stain. So I rolled up the sleeve as much as I could, which did a great job of drawing attention to the goodly part of the stain still visible, left the other sleeve down, and tried valiantly not to make eye contact with anyone in my office for three months.

Rerun week continues with A Love Letter to My Daughter, Who Will Never Be

(I’m guest-blogging this week over at Canadian Family magazine’s blog, Family Jewels, so it’s nothing but re-runs back here. Since I’m writing today about why sons are better than daughters, I thought it would be a good day to share this one from my archives, originally posted in September 2007.)

To my darling daughter, who will never be:

It may seem odd to begin a letter with a farewell, and perhaps even moreso a farewell to someone who never was, someone who never will be. But I needed to find a way to say goodbye to you, my daughter, because even though we never had the chance to say hello, you’ve always been a part of me. You’ve been with me – the idea of you – my whole life. As far back as I can remember, I expected you. I spent my life preparing for the act of mothering you. I carried the potential of you, my daughter, close to my heart, and in quiet moments I have loved to savour the imagining of you. But now, through the vagaries of fate and nature, it seems you are simply not to be.

It’s a wonder of the human heart that it can be filled with boundless joy at the idea of a son, and yet haunted by regretful longing on losing the idea of a daughter.

I am sad to have lost the opportunity to know you. I feel an empty hollow in the place I’ve always reserved for you. After a lifetime of expecting you, I’m struggling to let go of the idea of you, and with that, the idea of us as mother and daughter. Having felt you so keenly in my life, have expected you so fully, the reality of life without you still perplexes me slightly. “What do you mean I’ll never have a daughter?” It’s like trying to imagine a world without the colour red. Red has always been there; red belongs in the colour scheme of life.

I like to imagine that you would have been like me, but better. The best of me and of your father distilled, and improved upon by that which would have been uniquely you. You would have been precocious, and willful, and you would have kept your doting brothers wrapped around your little finger. You would have grown into a strong and capable woman, and you would have become, with the passage of the years, my friend as well as my daughter. We would have shared things that only a mother and daughter can share, and I would have treasured our unique relationship as much as I treasure the relationship I have with my own mother – a relationship I could only hope to replicate, as it would be impossible to improve upon it.

It may seem to be a little strange to say goodbye to someone who never existed; who never will exist. But to me, you were as real as the sunrise, as real as the stars that shine at night. I can’t touch those things either, but that hasn’t stopped me from believing in them. But now, after a lifetime of anticipating you, I relinquish you to the stars and banish the idea of you to the speculation of long, dark nights. What might have been, what will not be. In the darkest of those nights, I think of three lost souls, three babies miscarried, and even poor Frostie, and I wonder. I wonder if you were there, if you tried to arrive, if there was some great ironic twist of biology that prevented me from gestating a girl. I’ll never know.

While I may have spent my life expecting a girl, I’ve been delighted by the inherent joy of mothering my boys. My boys; those odd and adorable creatures whom I love beyond reason. I truly had no idea how wonderful it is to be the mother of boys. And though I can’t imagine life without them, the arrival of each boy somehow only deepened my certainty in your eventual arrival.

But now, finally, it’s time to say goodbye to you, my daughter, as I embrace with my whole heart the idea of spending my life being the princess, the diva, the queen among my coterie of men. I’ll miss you, my girl. I’ll miss holding a place for you in my life, and I’ll miss what might have been. I’ll have to adjust my sense of self, too, my sense of how my life will unfold from here. But my heart is full, and I have more blessings in my life than I ever dared hope for.

Goodbye, my beautiful daughter.

Explored!

Remember way back on Friday, when I wrote that post talking about how I’d finally given my head a shake and stopped worrying about having Flickr acknowledge the merits of my photographs with it’s “Explore” feature?

Snicker.

About 22 hours after I wrote that post, I snapped this photograph:

75:365 Rainy bokeh

And guess what? It got Explored! That means Flickr recognized it as one of the 500 most interesting photographs posted on April 5. Since Flickr gets about 6500 new photos every minute, I’m pretty excited. Lookit, here’s my souvenir poster!

My first Explore!

As I noted on the photograph’s page, some times you spend hours setting up a shot and taking 150 microscopically different versions, spend more hours tweaking and fixing and adjusting in photoshop, and you still have a very ordinary photograph. And some days, you plunk the tripod on the porch and balance the baby on your hip to snap a couple of images with one hand while trying to keep all three of you (you, the baby and the camera) out of the rain, and it’s a work of art. Go figure!