Category: Rants and rambles

Random bullets of Mother’s Day

In lieu of a coherent blog post, which I promise you is forthcoming one of these days (ahem, weeks) here’s a few random bullets of Mother’s Day.

  • It started early as Simon woke me up at 5:25, clutching the Mother’s Day present he brought home from school on Friday anxiously as he stage whispered in a near shout, “Mom! Are you still sleeping yet?” Um, not anymore I’m not!
  • Barely a couple of minutes later, Lucas was awake as well. We’re early risers, but for the entire family to be awake and downstairs before 6 am on a Sunday is not only mostly unprecedented but bodes for a very long day. (On days when I’m not working, usually Tristan and I are up a good hour or more before everyone else, giving me precious time to have a coffee or three and peruse the morning paper before the rest of them tumble out of bed in all their needy and noisy glory.)
  • The coffee was still percolating as I opened the Mother’s Day gifts the boys brought home from school on Friday. Simon had asked several times over the weekend if I could please open my Mother’s Day gifts NOW, please please please, and each time I gently put him off and said I wanted to save the surprise for Sunday morning. Imagine the guilt I felt when I opened the beautifully-decorated brown-paper-bag he’d been clutching to find a small planter of annuals — inside a sealed ziploc baggie. Poor things were traumatized yellow by the weekend without air, but they perked up a bit with some water. We’ll see if they survive to be transplanted into the garden.
  • Tristan’s gift was instructions for a foot massage and a little bottle of lotion he’d decorated himself, and a cookbook of his classmates’ favourite recipes. Tristan’s pizza recipe:

    1/2 cup of pineapple
    5 pieces of pepperoni
    a bag of cheese
    some sauce
    one piece of wheat bread

    Put sauce on bread, add cheese, place pepperoni and pineapple and bake for 8 minutes at 20 degrees.

    (How cute is that?)

  • The day was already feeling a little long when I stepped out of the shower and in the midst of towel-drying my hair felt an unbearable wrenching pull in my back, just off my shoulder blade. It was so painful I could barely draw a deep breath. I’m not sure if this is what people mean when they say, “I put my back out,” but holy god in heaven does it ever hurt. Even 24 hours later, I’m holding myself stiffly to avoid the wrenching spasm that shoots across the upper right quadrant of my back if I move the wrong way. (The wrong way being just about any extension of my arms, turning of my head to the side, or looking down in the slightest bit.)
  • It’s still painful enough that I’d debated a bit about the merits of coming to work versus staying home, but with a houseful of kids and nanny, I thought work might be the more peaceful option. After just about a half an hour of typing and mouse-clicking, though, I’m beginning to think it was a bad choice.
  • Any insight into whether this merits medical attention or a wait-it-out approach is appreciated, as is your anecdotal experience with back pain. This is a new one for me.
  • The good news is that Beloved was a darling throughout the day, and the pull in my back forced me to pretty much take it easy the whole of Mother’s Day, something I might not have done otherwise. I didn’t change a single diaper all day, and read the last half of a photography book that was due back at the library this week. Of course, I also emptied the dishwasher, picked up some clutter and did a few loads of laundry — because I think I’m now physically and mentally incapable of actually doing nothing for a day.
  • After Lucas’s nap, Beloved took the whole family on a trip to Henry’s camera shop where he let me pick out my Mother’s Day gift. I waffled for a bit between a set of reflectors, a Gorillapod, and a neutral density filter, but finally settled on a circular polarizing filter. A polarizing filter is cool to have because it balances the brightness of the sky against a landscape while bringing out details and colour saturation, and cuts down on reflectivity of water and glass. A fun new toy to play with!
  • To finish off the day, we had Granny and Papa Lou over for takeout fajitas from Lone Star, and they brought cheesecake from Costco for dessert. Five-star seal of approval on that meal!

Aside from the wrenched muscles and the fact that it was grey and just about subzero all day, it was a lovely Mother’s Day. You?

Failure is no longer an option

I wish I had a lot more time today to write about this subject, because it really fascinates me. There was an article in yesterday’s Citizen about how secondary school students in Ontario are no longer being failed for transgressions as serious as plagarizing. (When I was in university, it seems to me that was grounds for explusion, let alone failing an assignment.) The article notes:

Teachers are saying they are increasingly pressured to make sure students pass. If a student fails to hand in assignments on time, cheats, plagiarizes or doesn’t show up for tests, they can “rescue” their endangered credit. If the student fails, he or she can re-do the assignments they bombed and “recover” a wayward credit. Teachers are, as a result, concerned about “credit integrity” — whether a final mark awarded to a student who procrastinates, plagiarizes and bombs tests should be worth the same as the mark awarded to a student who earned a credit by the books the first time around.

This drives me crazy! It’s all linked to the Ontario Ministry of Education’s new and noble drive to increase graduation rates and decrease dropout rates. As the article notes, “While 68 per cent of students graduated from high school within five years in 2003-2004, the province aims to increase the graduation rate to 85 per cent by 2010-2011. Last year, 13,500 more students graduated from Ontario high schools than in the previous year.”

Well yes, they graduated, but can they write a paragraph? What will they do when they go off to university and have to actually do the work to pass, with thousands of dollars of tuition on the line? And what happens when they head out into the real world and they have a boss who isn’t interested in offering “rescue” or “recovery” options the first time they miss a deadline for an important project?

Call me a hardass on this one, but I think this is yet another way in which we’re coddling kids today and it’s really got to stop! In another article today that I couldn’t immediately find online, Ontario Education Minister Kathleen Wynne said, “What we know for now from education research is that failing kids doesn’t motivate [them].” Well, passing them for shoddy work certainly isn’t going to do it, either!

I feel very strongly about this, in case you didn’t notice, but I also feel like the old fart waving her cane at the passing hooligans from her porch rocker. But seriously, I cannot imagine how frustrating it must be to be a teacher working in these times. Johnny failed the test because he was playing his Xbox all night instead of studying for the exam, but he’s sorry now and he’d like the chance to recover his credit, so Ms Teacher can you please redesign another test to give Johnny a second chance? Oh, and make sure it’s equally challenging, make special arrangements for a quiet time and place for him to write it, take extra time to mark it, and then help Johnny catch up on all the stuff he missed while he was taking his second test? Oh, he failed again? Oh well. Go ahead and start making up that third test for him.

I also see this as horrendously unfair to the kids who do try their best and who are going to learn in a righteous hurry that there is absolutely no reason for them to work hard or indeed work at all if the kid sitting next to them committing academic fraud and showing up only when it’s convenient ends up with the same damn diploma at the end of it all.

Am I reading this wrong? Have I got my knickers in a twist over nothing? (Can’t say that’s ever happened before.) Do you think the province is on the right track by mollycoddling kids through high school?

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!

Worthy words and banished words

Okay, so retro is cool, right? And retro is basically recycling old stuff and making it new again, often by those who missed it the first time around, right? Grand, so I’m totally retro in finally remembering on St Patty’s Day that I forgot to put up my annual posts in January about the word of the year and the banished word of the year. I’m so kewl it hurts.

Right then. Word of the year for 2008 from our friends at the American Dialect Society is “bailout”. Excellent choice, IMHO.

In its 19th annual words of the year vote, the American Dialect Society voted “bailout” as the word of the year. In the specific sense used most frequently in 2008, bailout refers to the rescue by the government of companies on the brink of failure, including large players in the banking industry.

The winner was selected by popular vote, following nominations from the public. Subcategories include Most Useful (Barack Obama)(!), Most Unnecessary (moofing), Most Euphemistic (scooping technician), Most and Least Likely to Succeed (shovel-ready and PUMA, respectively), and Most Creative:

WINNER: recombobulation area: An area at Mitchell International Airport in Milwaukee in which passengers that have just passed through security screening can get their clothes and belongings back in order.

long photo: A video of 90 seconds or less. Used by the photo-sharing web site Flickr.

skadoosh: A nonsense interjection popularized by Jack Black in the movie Kung Fu Panda.

rofflenui: A blended New Zealand English-Maori word that means “rolling on the floor laughing a lot.”

Ironically — or perhaps not so much — “bailout” was also on the list of words nominated for banishment by Lake Superior State University’s “34th annual List of Words to Be Banished from the Queen’s English for Mis-use, Over-use and General Uselessness.”

Bailout was defeated, however, and the banishment crown went to “the ubiquitous ‘Green’ and all of its variables, such as ‘going green,’ ‘building green,’ ‘greening,’ ‘green technology,’ ‘green solutions’ and more.”

Not a bad choice, even if I do support the movement in principle. What should really be banished is the use of “green” as a marketing term. THAT would make me happy!

If I were to banish any one word from the English language, it would be “utilize.” I can’t tell you how much it makes me cringe to see this word “utilized” when good old “used” would do just fine. Maybe that’s because it’s usually “utilized” by officious users who never pass over a five dollar word when a nickel word would do, and by people who think turning any prose from active to passive voice is a stroke of creative genius. ( /rant)

What say ye, bloggy peeps? What words or phrases would you banish, should you suddenly find yourself King or Queen of the Language?

(And, can I just add one more quick coda to say how proud — and, honestly, a little surprised — I was yesterday when Tristan correctly used the subjunctive tense in the phrase “if I were allowed to” as opposed to “if I was allowed to”. Yay for internalizing obscure grammar rules!!!)

A few stolen moments

The boys are playing happily behind me, the big boys stacking a dozen or so Webkinz into piles for the baby to crawl over. So rare is the opportunity to be online with everyone in the same room, I must take advantage of it even if I have nothing to say!

It’s been a rough couple of days. The stomach flu that had Simon down late last week took the weekend to work it’s way through the rest of the family. Tristan was sick last night and so I kept him home today, but he’s full of piss and vinegar this afternoon. I think we did, no joke, a dozen or more loads of laundry since Thursday night. Anybody want to come over for a folding party?

Lucas had it Saturday night, too, but seemed to be okay yesterday. This morning, he was particularly fussy and pulling at his ears, and since I’m getting good at this after three kids, I suspected an ear infection. We were lucky to get an afternoon appointment with the ped, and it turns out his ears are clear. He does, however, have a “very mucusy” throat and his ear is full of fluid. If you’re keeping count, that’s back to back stomach virus and respiratory infections the first week of January and again this week. Plus his two top teeth broke through this weekend. No wonder he (and, by extension, I) haven’t slept more than 3 hours in a row for a hundred years a couple of weeks.

Despite the sickness, though, and the fact that today marks the start of my last week of maternity leave (ever! *nostalgic sigh*) I’m feeling pretty chipper. Hey, if everybody in the house has been sick in the past five days, that gives me at least a four-day window before the next virus can set in, right? And right now, a barf-free week sounds like winning the lottery!

Ah, but the mood behind me has turned. The baby has lost interest in the Webkinz mountain, and the boys have started to bicker. (Little wonder, they’ve been cooped up together for days on end by now!) Only four more hours until Beloved gets home from work… not that I’m watching the clock.

Now I know

What could possibly make me long for the last couple of nights, when the baby woke up between three and seven times a night, where I was rocking him to sleep two or three times in a row, only to end up jiggling him to sleep on my arm when I give up in frustration? What could make me think that those were the nights when I had it good?

How about six solid hours of an almost-five year old barfing every 20 minutes? Yep, that would do it.

Of course, the baby slept through the whole thing. Dust molecules moving over the Mojave Desert disturb him, but six hours of relentless dry heaves in the next room don’t merit so much as ripple his slumber.

Sigh. At least the five year old seems better this morning. Wanna lay bets on what’s in store for the almost seven-year old or his beleaguered parents? I really, really don’t want this virus.

(This is not the sleep deprivation post. This is the “Hey we just finished a barfy virus three weeks ago, it’s not our turn again already!” post. Once I finish sanitizing five loads of laundry, I might get back around to the sleep-dep post. Consider yourself whined warned.)

On public service, partisanship and social media

Let’s say I have a hypothetical friend. She’s a lot like me, but let me stress this — she’s not me. We have a lot in common, though. We both view our jobs with the public service as something of a noble calling and a privilege to serve Canadians. She is such an amazing boss and mentor that she recently won a national award of excellence for people management. She is a little more senior than me in the management tree, a little more politically conservative, a lot more sophisticated about politics. We both have a blog. She and I have both called Stephen Harper an idiot on our blogs, me mostly over childcare issues and her over the recent economic statement fiasco.

As it turns out, she has recently applied for and been offered a new job in a new department. As this is the 21st century and she’s plenty savvy about social media, she wasn’t surprised when she went to meet the new team and found out that they’d googled her, and found her blog. She was surprised — and that’s a bit of an understatement — when the senior manager at the new department contacted her old senior manager and said that the political entries on her blog are contrary to the Public Service Code of Values and Ethics. (!!) They told her that not only did she have to agree to not ever blog about politics again, but to take down the existing political posts. Not posts critical about the department or the work environment or anything sensitive, mind you. Just the sort of observational rant that any citizen might make over drinks or the backyard fence. They said that this was a “dealbreaker.”

I am – hypothetically, of course – outraged over this. We’re talking about someone who blogs in a manner very similar to me, maybe 30 percent personal, 65 percent pop culture, 5 percent political. I’ve read the posts in question, and they’re no different than what you’d see in the average Letter to the Editor, if not a hell of a lot better written and a lot less vitriolic.

What do you think? Should an ordinary public servant be allowed the same freedoms as any citizen, to air their opinions – political or otherwise – on a private blog written on private time? And if it were you, would you dig in your heels and stick up for your rights or acquiesce for the sake of making nice with your new peeps?

Memo to McDonalds: Are you kidding me?

So we’re in McDonalds the other day. (Granny came with us to skating lessons and offered to take us all out to lunch at McDonalds as a special treat for the boys.) While there is room in my Plan B diet for a rare treat of hamburgers and fries, I’d rather they be really tasty home-made ones than the crap that passes for food at McDonalds. Besides, I’m not even particularly hungry, so I decide to order a salad. I know they have salads at McDonalds, because I’ve ordered one before. They suck, but at least they’re guilt-free.

I’m looking at the menu boards above the cash registers, but after carefully perusing each of the half-dozen or so menu blocks, I can find no mention anywhere of salads. They have giant pictures of the burger combos, and a placard for the Monopoly game. There’s not even a board with the kids’ meals on it. That sign standing by itself, propped in a corner.

Remember the good old days when the menu boards in fast-food restaurants used to actually show you all the items that were on the menu? This has been a gripe of mine for a while. I first noticed it outside at the drive-through. I figured maybe they don’t put all the items on display out there because of a lack of space or something, or because the menu boards have to be further away thus limiting the text they use. But here I am standing inside the restaurant, and I still can’t find any mention of foods that I know should be available. I actually step out of line and go read the microprint on the nutritional information poster near the condiment stand to find out whether they still carry salads.

We eat our lunch, but it’s still bugging me, so I go up to the counter and ask someone who seems to be in a position of authority. All of about fourteen years old, from the look of him, but he’s so quick with an answer that I can tell he’s either been practicing or has answered this one a few times before.

“Oh yes, we still carry salads,” he says. “But head office knows they aren’t very good, so we don’t promote them.” I’m too gobsmacked by all that is wrong with this answer to even begin to reply, so he continues. “They’ll be some fantastic new salads unveiled soon, though!” he says with evangelical zeal. “You’ll love them, and we’ll have lots of new signs then.”

Uh huh. So the takehome message for me is this:

(1) McDonalds has salads, but they’re too embarrassed by the quality of them to admit it publicly.

(2) I’m only allowed to order a salad if I know to ask for one. And I’m not allowed to know the price in advance, either.

(3) Instead of providing patrons with a list of actual food items available in its restaurants, McDonalds would rather display ginormous pictures of their most popular but least healthy items.

(4) McDonalds would rather you just forget about the whole salad thing entirely and have a supersized Big Mac and fries instead. (That’s 1090 calories, more than three-quarters of my entire daily calorie consumption.)

Nice, McDonalds. Very nice.

Strollers on buses – my letter to the editor

Every couple of years, I get my knickers in enough of a twist to fire off a letter to the editor of our local paper. I’ve got a pretty good record of getting them published. I’ve got another one published this morning.

The back story has to do with a mother of a two-year old and a baby who was trying on the weekend to get onto an OCTranspo (city) bus at a stop with another mom pushing a stroller also waiting. The driver got into a spat and ended up denying access to the two moms and strollers. Except, the two-year old daughter of one of the mothers had already boarded the bus. He drove a short distance away, and then stopped when the other passengers either (a) screamed in horror or (b) informed him that the two-year old was on the bus, depending on whose version of the story you believe.

Regardless, the ensuing shitstorm has been all over the media, and has brought the anti-stroller lobby out of the woodwork. It was to these kind souls, who think that mothers with strollers have no place on public transit, that my letter was addressed.

Stay off buses?
The Ottawa Citizen
Published: Thursday, October 09, 2008

Re: Strollers are headache for drivers, passengers, Oct. 8.

I read with interest Doloros Swallow’s letter and union leader André Cornellier’s comments in Kelly Egan’s column (“Try sitting in the bus driver’s seat”) about strollers on OC Transpo buses.

As a mother of three boys under seven and a regular user of OC Transpo, I’d like to ask these people: what else should mothers of babies do? Do you recommend they leave the strollers at home and carry their babies and toddlers everywhere? That’s not so easy with a 30-pound napping toddler.

Perhaps they should stay off the buses altogether? Isn’t one of the main tenets of public transportation supposed to be that it should be accessible to those who don’t have other means of transportation?

You might argue that there are smaller strollers available on the market. Even if you overlook the fact that umbrella-type folding strollers are not appropriate for very young babies, you should try pushing one through even the thinnest sheen of slush on Ottawa’s winter sidewalks, let alone in more than a couple of centimetres of fresh snow. I’m lucky enough to be able to afford more than one stroller — one for foul weather and one for small spaces. Many other parents are not so fortunate.

Yes, it’s difficult to manoeuvre around one or more strollers at the front of an OC Transpo bus. Yes, mothers (and other caregivers) should do what they can to take up as small a space as possible.

But I think we all have enough things to worry about right now without castigating people who are simply trying to do the very same thing you are — to get from one place to another with as little hassle and inconvenience as possible.

© The Ottawa Citizen 2008

Ha, now that I think about it, my last published letter to the editor was about public transit as well!

Beloved visits Dr Zap

Poor Beloved. Not bad enough I have no shame in blogging about my life, but now I’m blogging about his most personal bits. Good thing we’ve got a lot of family freebies out of blog over the years to compensate for my appalling lack of respect for his private parts.

He’s going today for his first consult with the vasectomy doctor. Could it be any more ironic? Seven years ago when I was pregnant with Tristan, the poor man went under the knife to have his bits repaired (he had a varicocele, which is basically a varicose vein in the scrotum, and it can cause pain and infertility) and three boys later he’s going back under the knife (well, laser) to turn off the faucet. From infertile to abundantly fertile and back to infertile in one decade.

I’m extremely grateful that he’s willing to undergo this procedure so I don’t have to undergo the much more invasive and risky tubal ligation, and birth control pills are not an option for me as they make me horribly sick.

There’s no doubt (well, very little doubt) (no, really, no doubt) (almost 99.9% doubt-free) that we’re done with this baby-making thing, and yet I still can’t help but feel sad and a little bit anxious about taking such irrevocable action. We just couldn’t afford the daycare or the education of four kids, and our house is already bursting at the seams with love and stinky running shoes. And if we won the lottery tomorrow? Tough call. My first thought is that I’d consider it again, but then I’m 39 now and the last pregnancy was hard on me. Not sure how well I’d handle another, let alone the possibility of losing another one. And the idea of going back to “trying” again? Ugh. That’s one chapter of my life I’m quite happy to leave behind, thank you.

It’s been such a huge relief knowing that Lucas is the last baby. I’ve been savouring each stage, each moment, each milestone, knowing that we won’t go down this road again. And I’ve been ditching my baby and maternity stuff like a madwoman. So really, we’re done. It’s taken me two paragraphs to reconvince myself after the finality of seeing it all in print in front of me, but really, we’re done.

You know what really gobsmacked me, though? When Beloved went to our GP and asked for the referral to Dr Zap (they cauterize the vas deferens. Eep.) she asked him if he had discussed the idea of the vasectomy with me and if I was in agreement.

Can you believe it? Can you imagine the hue and cry if a woman needed a man’s approval or agreement (tacit or otherwise) to get her tubes tied or an abortion? Now, I absolutely agree that a husband and wife should be in complete agreement when such drastic action is taken, but this just seems wrong to me. They’re his bits, and much as I claim ownership over the rest of him, in the end it’s his choice to end his fertile years — short and blissful though they have been.

And on a not-quite-completely unrelated topic, I must tip my bloggy hat to Kate, who has come up with what I think is by far the most pithy and succinct commentary on Sarah Palin, a saga I have been watching with amazed disbelief: “Why is it that women should be trusted with the Vice Presidency, but not with their own reproductive decisions?”