Tristan’s fashion sense

I told the boys yesterday morning over breakfast that we would be going to get some family pictures done that day. I told the boys I had laid out some clothes for them on the couch and asked them to get dressed and put their jammies in the hamper in their room.

As I was putting the cereal bowls into the dishwasher, Tristan came into the kitchen saying he had picked out his own clothes for the portraits.

That’s a white turtleneck under a white button-down shirt (two sizes too small) and track pants. He would have had to get a chair to get the shirt off the hanger in his closet. Oh, and the Winnie the Pooh tie I bought for him four years ago when he was the ring-bearer at JoJo and Jaimie’s wedding. Where he found that, I have no idea. Isn’t he adorable? So much for his father’s latent metrosexual side.

Much as I loved the look he put together, I had to insist that he change before we left. He seemed mollified by the idea that I wanted to capture them in their “everyday” clothes.

The portrait sitting went reasonably well, I think. I’ll get the results later today and share them later.

A fifth of meme

Filched from Raising WEG, a meme of fives:

What were you doing five years ago?

We had just found out that I was pregnant with Simon, and were getting ready to move into this house. I had only been back at work after my maternity leave with Tristan for about five months, and had come back to an entirely new job, my first real “communications” job. I was in way over my head in trying to manage some aspects of our departmental communications about SARS — and trying not to be freaked out about it. It really was a transitional point in our lives, one of those hinges that divides everything into “before” and “after”.

What are five things on your to-do list for today?
(Five? Only five? I could probably give you fifty.)

  • laundry. and more laundry. then some laundry. and some more laundry.
  • scour the kitchen to try to combat the ant infestation and look into some baby and pet friendly chemical solutions.
  • get out to Home Depot to get a new hose and an extender-thingee to get our faucet to a more convenient and reachable location that is not buried deep in behind the shrubberies.
  • hang the baby swing for Lucas I picked up on UsedOttawa.com for $5.
  • do some online research about our multi-generational family trip to Lake Placid next month.

(Sigh, I don’t think I’ll get to all five.)

What are five snacks you enjoy?

  • BBQ chips – just like Geddy Lee on BNL’s Snacktime CD!
  • Oatmeal choco-chip cookies that have been nuked to make the chips melty.
  • Tostitos ‘hint of jalapeno’ bite-sized rounds with Jack’s Garden salsa.
  • Fundips.
  • Oriental rice crackers.

What five things would you do if you were a billionaire?

  • How about I just say “everything” and be done with it?

What are five of your bad habits?

  • Eating out of boredom or stress.
  • Dropping things wherever I lose interest in them, instead of taking ten seconds to actually put things away.
  • Reading e-mail and then forgetting to reply.
  • Procrastinating.
  • Stopping by the Tim’s drive-thru for coffee every time I have an errand to run.

What are five places where you have lived?

I’ve only lived in two cities (London, ON and Ottawa), but here are five different living arrangements I’ve had:

  • Renting a room in a house, which I lost when they kicked me out because a friend had lost her apartment and needed a place to live.
  • My own tiny apartment in a sixplex in old Ottawa South.
  • Renting a room in a seven-bedrooom student slum, even though I was a full-time worker and only going to school part-time.
  • Renting a couple of rooms with a friend in the attic of a mansion in Sandy Hill, from a man we later found out was under observation by CSIS for suspicion of running guns to Iraq.
  • Sharing ownership of a triplex in the Glebe with my ex-husband, his parents, his aunt and uncle, and his cousin. Yes, all SEVEN of us were on the deed.

What are five jobs you’ve had?

  • communications advisor
  • video store clerk
  • assessing and correcting income tax returns
  • ice-cream scooper
  • computer systems tester

I’m supposed to tag five people. (I hate tagging people. I want to tag everyone, because I love to be tagged, but then I forget to do the meme and I feel guilty and I don’t want to add to anyone’s stress levels. I know, I just have to get over myself sometimes.) Um, okay, I know Theresa has a new blog, so she might like to be tagged. And Alison and Miche are always up for a meme, right? And Chantal might like to play along. And I’ll leave the fifth space open for anybody else who wants to give it a go.

Duck and cover

One of my favourite Tragically Hip songs contains the lyric: “Like boots or hearts, oh when they start to fall apart, they really fall apart.” Yeah. We’re falling apart over here.

  • Lucas had his four-month vaccine yesterday, and like two months ago, he’s reacting to them. Poor guy is clingy and noticably off, and woke with a high-ish fever. Sigh.
  • I have a migraine.
  • We’re on day 175 of a humidity-dense heatwave. Ordinarily, this wouldn’t bother me too much, but with a migraine and a clingy, feverish baby who wants to be held all day, even the AC isn’t enough to keep the edge off my temper.
  • At 2 am, Beloved poked me awake and said, “There’s an alarm going off downstairs.” I called the non-emergency number for the fire department in between pushing the button to silence the howling carbon-monoxide detector every three minutes and he talked me through taking it off the wall and searching for an expiry date. When we couldn’t find one, just to be safe they sent out some firefighters (on a ladder truck!) with a CO detector. It was, thankfully, a false alarm. We have bad luck with false alarms, you might remember. This was apparently the carbon monoxide detector in its death throes. It took at least two hours for the adrenaline in my system to subside enough to get back to sleep.
  • While we were waiting for the fire department to arrive, I noticed that we seem to have an infestation of tiny ants coming in from the patio door in the kitchen. Given how bug-phobic I am, ants are not the worst possible invasion, but I am still not impressed. Ugh.

Bugs. Illnesses. Malfunctioning electronics. Weather. What’s the next plague, flood? No, don’t even think about it…

Smuggler’s Notch special deal just for you

You know I love you, right? And as my mother taught me, “if you love me, buy me things.” Well, I haven’t exactly bought something for you, but I do have some freebies and a great deal to offer, too.

First, the great deal. Remember when I told you earlier about how my friends at Smugglers’ Notch gave me my first writing credit for their resort magazine? Well, at the same time we worked out a special deal for any of you who might have been inspired enough by my most excellent and unbiased travel reporting to plan a family vacation at Smuggs for yourself.

Book any FamilyFest Summer Vacation Package at Smugglers’ Notch for this summer (June 13 – September 1, 2008) and tell them you want the “Postcards from the Mothership” deal, and you’ll get a 20% discount! In addition to the fun I blogged about last summer (remember the segways, the excellent day camp for kids, the waterslides and pools and mini-golf, not to mention the endless canoe trip?) this year they’ve got some cool new stuff like chocolate tasting and bike-boards (three-wheeled scooters) and adventures in kayaking and rock-climbing, plus a whole lot more.

If you go, let me know! I’d love to hear about it. And, as a self-appointed bloggy ambassador to Smuggs, I’d be happy to answer any questions about our trip. For more information and to make a reservation, visit the Smuggs website. Don’t forget to tell them you want the “Postcards from the Mothership” deal!

And now the freebies: the nice folks over at Hachette publishing sent out Mothers Day book packages to a handful of bloggers recently, and I’d like to share mine with you. These are the books they sent (minus a few I’ve already given away):

1. Your Best Life Now For Moms by Joel Osteen
2. How Not to Look Old: Fast and Effortless Ways to Look 10 Years Younger by Charla Krupp
3. Bobbi Brown Living Beauty by Bobbi Brown
4. Sew U Home Stretch: The Built by Wendy Guide to Sewing Knit Fabrics by Wendy Mullin & Eviana Hartman
5. Jewels: 50 Phenomenal Black Women Over 50 by Michael Cunningham & Connie Briscoe
6. On Becoming Fearless: …in Love, Work, and Life by Arianna Huffington
7. Days: From the Heart of the Home by Susan Branch
8. Starting Your Day Right: Devotions for Each Morning of the Year by Joyce Meyer
9. Ending Your Day Right: Devotions for Every Evening of the Year by Joyce Meyer
10. Send Yourself Roses: Thoughts on My Life, Love, and Leading Roles by Gloria Feldt and Kathleen Turner

If you’d like to win one, leave a comment… but not just any comment! Leave me a comment recommending a book that you have loved, or think I must read. Also, if you have a particular preference for one of the books listed, be sure to let me know.

I’ll leave this open for comments until June 15.

You should have seen the look on her face

Lesson learned: three things you should never say in the fitting room of a clothing store:

  1. Are you looking at me? Do you see me? (and, in a really, really bad Robert De Niro) Are YOU lookin’ at ME?
  2. Lookit those cheeks, you chubby thing!
  3. Peeky-peeky-peeky, I see you!!

I’m sure the woman in the next cubby has never been more relieved to see a woman emerge from a fitting room chattering at her baby.

Survivor, baby!

Was it just me, or was that one of the best seasons – and most satisfying finales – of Survivor in a long, long time? And wouldn’t you just LOVE to see Ozzy and Amanda do the Amazing Race together just like Rob and Amber did?

I usually find the first hour and a half of the Survivor finale rather tedious. They tend to recap and rehash just a little bit too much; even with my shoddy memory, I can remember what happened eight weeks ago. Mostly. But I really enjoyed watching it last night, mostly because it was like replaying our lives with Lucas so far.

You might remember that my water broke the morning of the season debut, but Lucas held off arriving until the next day just so we could watch Survivor that night. Seeing Jonny Fairplay and Mary again reminded me of how I’d missed a lot of the details of those earliest episodes as I paced in and out of the room with a wailing babe against my shoulder, trying anything to get him to settle down. By the time Jonathan Penner had to leave the game, we were giving Lucas his extra bottle at night, and he was starting to settle in to a workable routine. By the time Jason found the fake immunity idol, my little angel was sleeping rather reliably (shhhh!) through the night. And by last night’s finale, I could no longer remember what it was like to not have Lucas in our lives. Once again, Survivor and my life as a mother are inextricably intertwined — so it seems plenty appropriate that the Fans versus Faves series ended on Mother’s Day.

Is it just me, or is Jeff Probst getting hotter by the season?

***

Speaking of celebrity crushes, I’ve finally figured out why I find American Idol’s David Cook so compelling. I said before that I had a crush on him, but even then I knew “crush” was the wrong word. In watching the dual performances last week, I realized why I like David Cook so much: looking at him, I can imagine what my grown-up Tristan might be like. I don’t know what it is, but there is something in his face, his build, and even his demeanor that is so evocative of Tristan that once I noticed it I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

graygreenblue.jpgWatching for the ferryIt might be the eye colour. Like Tristan, David’s eyes seem to shift from gray to green to blue. I stole this photo from a fan site. And David is tall and broad-shouldered, like Tristan will be. And he has reddish brown hair that doesn’t really behave. Tristan is genetically predisposed to all these things, thanks to Beloved and I. My father was a professional musician when I was a kid, and Beloved’s cousin was the lead singer of the moderately popular Canadian band, The Tea Party, so he definitely has the potential for some musical chops. The more I think about it, the more similarities there are.

That’s not too weird, is it?

Good thing the nice weather is here. I think I need to get away from the TV…

Happy Birthday Mom!

It’s my Mom’s birthday today. I had wanted to write a long and lovely post telling you about all the things that are wonderful about her (and to capture them all, it would be a long post indeed!) but the whole newborn-in-the-house thing coupled with the I’m-brain-dead-from-sleep-deprivation thing, with a heaping helping of mothers-of-newborns-aren’t-supposed-to-get-sick, is playing havoc with my muse. The great thing is, she’d be completely sympathetic to this and just tell me to not worry about it. It’s the thought that counts. And she’d really believe it, too.

If you’ve been reading the blog for any length of time, you know my Mom and I are quite close. It’s wonderful to be at a stage in my life when she can be both my mother and friend. And it’s somewhere between funny and scary how much of a mother she can still be to me, her 38-year-old baby, and how often she comes through for me when I need her for things both large and small. She has been an ideal role model as a mother, and the best of what I am as a mother is directly attributable to her. (The worst, I take responsibility for myself. Either that, or you can blame my Dad!)

A few of the many things I learned from my mother:

  • Bullshit baffles brains.
  • There is nothing you can’t do. But, you don’t have to do it all.
  • Treat everyone with kindness and respect, but pay special attention to the support people in an organization. Make friends with the secretaries, the clerks and the janitors, and your life will be much easier.
  • If you love me, buy me things.
  • There is no higher law than a mother’s word.
  • Corollary: don’t mess with Mom.
  • Be easy on yourself. If you are doing the best you can, it’s the best you can do. Don’t expect more from yourself than you would from others.
  • If you’ve got it, flaunt it!

I’ve been pecking away at this post in stolen moments all day, and it’s not coming out anything like the tribute I’d like to pay to the most wonderful woman I know. I was thinking about her when I was nursing Lucas just now, and realized that perhaps the most telling thing about my mother and my relationship with her is this: I can’t recall a single time in my life, as a child or a teenager or an adult, when I wished someone else were my mother. No matter whether we were butting heads (and luckily for me, we didn’t do that often) or whether I was misbehaving outright (and because of her, I really don’t think I did that too often either), I always knew – I always know – that my mother loves me dearly and deeply.

My mother is a strong, smart, funny and immensely likeable woman, and I’m fiercely proud to be her daughter. The highest compliment I can pay her is that I hope I do as good a job raising my boys as she (and my Dad) did in raising Sean and me. Looking back, there is nothing I could hope to do to improve my relationship with my mother, and nothing I would ever want her to change about herself. And I hope to be as good of a friend to my boys when they are grown and with families of their own as my mother is to me today.

One of the very best things about my relationship with my mother now, aside from the fact that she is one of my very best friends and confidants and co-conspirators, is watching the boys loving her. I had a great relationship with my grandparents, and hardly a day goes by that I am not grateful that five years ago this month my folks made the decision to move across the province from London to Ottawa to be closer to us. She spoils the boys silly, of course, but she’s earned that right. It’s truly lovely to see her firmly ensconced as the matriarch of a family of the five grandchildren who have appeared over the last six years, a gift that my brother and I have been happy to share.

Happy birthday, Mom! We all love you, more every day.

Error messages – sorry!

Sigh. I don’t know what happened, but please ignore the extraneous error messages and wonky formatting.

I did an SQL db backup last night, but everything was fine later in the evening. According to Google, I’m getting the funky messages because of a disk size problem at my host’s end. I’ve raised a ticket, so hopefully I can get it fixed today… although I really don’t have any time to be puddling around with it this week!

Argh!!!

Anyway, the blog functionality seems to be working, and you should be able to comment and click through as usual.

Anybody recommend a good hosting service? I’m losing patience quickly here.

Chills

My mom and I were chatting about images from the Internet and pregnancy, and how some of the coolest images you see are actually photoshopped and fake. Somehow, that made me think of the image I’d seen a long time ago, one that I knew was real, of a surgeon performing in utero surgery on a fetus.

I went looking for it to show my mom what I meant, and found this image of Baby Samuel.

Baby Samuel was 21 weeks old when surgery was performed to correct something arising from spinal bifida. According to TruthorFiction.com, ” In this particular surgery, the baby’s hand poked out of the incision in its mother’s womb and Dr. Bruner says he instinctively offered his finger for the baby to hold.”

My baby is 21 weeks old right now. I can’t stop looking at that image… and smiling.

Computer versus TV

The good news is, the boys aren’t watching a lot of TV these days.  I’d say the daily consumption has dropped to less than an hour, and I won’t embarrass myself by letting on exactly how many hours they were consuming before.  Some days when I was on vacation, the TV stayed off all day.

The bad news is, they have a new addiction of choice.  You see, my three year old and my five year old are now bona fide computer game junkies.

Sigh.

Their drug of choice is Star Wars Lego, and I must admit that it baffles me just a little bit that a Star Wars Lego video game even exists.  The boys love it, though, and would play it for hours at a time if I let them.  They also play a few other games, like Pixar’s Cars, and the Lego Island and Curious George paint games I got at the grocery store, and Simon especially likes the games on Nick.com.

So on the one hand, I’m okay with the reduced consumption of TV because at least with the video games, they’re engaged and doing something.  They’re forced to share and to take turns, but they still play collaboratively.  They’re problem solving, thinking, and developing at least some cognitive skills.  Not to mention memory:  Simon, who doesn’t yet clearly identify the letters of the alphabet let alone read, can click through six or seven layers of menu screens based solely on having seen it done a few times.  It’s actually kind of amazing to watch.

It’s also hilarious to hear them integrate the language of the video game into their regular play.  "Let’s play another level," said while leaping forth with lightsaber in hand, means "Let’s keep playing."

And yet, I have to admit that I am not completely at ease with this newfound addiction to video games.  First, at least when the TV is on the boys drift in and out of the room, playing with their toys and each other while the tube drones on.  With the computer, they stand fixed in front of the monitor, fingers thumping on the keyboard, for as long as we’ll leave them to it.  And I’m already becoming rather tired of hearing "But Moooooom, just let me finish this level!" whined at me each time I tell them to move along to something else.

I’m thinking of getting a timer and limiting them, maybe to 20 minutes each per day.  But, true confession time:  it’s so easy to let them play.  They’re engaged, they’re content, and most importantly, they aren’t pestering me or each other.  Computer time is free time for me, and at this stage in my life, I’m willing to trade dilligence for indulgence.  Call me lazy.

What do you think?  Are computer games better than TV?  Is there room for video games in a balanced day, even for a preschooler?  How much is too much?

And most importantly, how on earth can I justify limiting their computer time when I spend countless hours glued to the monitor myself?  Hypocrite, thy name is blogging mother…