Where to sit.

Hmmm. On the chair?
Nope. It's full. Better just sit.... IN THE EASEL!
What a maniac. You can see her sister anxiously hovering to the right, wisely worried that her parents should be taking the baby out of the precarious easel instead of taking photos of her. Oh hush! She was fine.

So I checked out my stats counter google search thingys (I believe that would be their technical name), fearful that I was getting creeps and perverts reading my posts. Here were my results:
1. "Cakes wow pirate cake".
2. "Backyardigans cake".
3. "Nick Jr. Mary Lue song"
4. "Voice of Caillou"
Note a theme? The theme is - I am boring. Onwards!
5. "Toad throwing up." What the heck is wrong with people? Why would anyone want to see a toad vomit? That's just abnormal.
6. "My friends hoy mom." Alas for the tragically subliterate matron-hunter: I already took down my photo.
7. "Greenstick fractures and going to school." This gave me a bit of pang. The answer, for us, was to send her to school but have them keep her in at recess.

I hadn't written about it, but I've been sick again this week. I have problems with my bladder and kidneys, and it's mostly very annoying. Bladder problems aren't ROMANTIC like, let's say, heart problems. There are all sorts of films about doomed and beautiful heart patients but none about someone who is REALLY prone to UTIs. Injustice! We deserve a romantic heroine too. I can see maybe Kate Winslet in the role, and in between meeting, losing and regaining the love interest, she has to run to the washroom every five seconds and take antibiotics all the time. Working Title: "Love In the Time of Cranberry Juice".... that's not very good. Sigh. So anyhow, I'm getting referred to a urologist, which amuses me - it'll be me and a bunch of old dudes, no doubt, hanging out with our crappy bladders.

Melting Plastic Stinks.

Just a little public service announcement up there, in case you didn't know. Apparently, a plastic container lid stuck damply to the bottom of my pan this morning, unbeknownst to me. I then cheerfully set my pan on the stove to boil some eggs and left the room to chase the baby. I came back into the kitchen a few minutes later and a horrid acrid stink filled the air. Yuck. AND! I get to go to the dentist this afternoon, where I'll get my twice-yearly lecture on flossing, followed by my twice-yearly lie that I'm going to take up flossing religiously as soon as I get home.

I'm currently running my dishwasher, washing machine and dryer and I'm in a state of anxious anticipation to see what will go wrong with those - will they blow up? Did I accidentally put all of my old Cure records into the dryer? Did I mix my darks and my lights? The perils of domesticity are many, as my collection of shrunken sweaters and melted records will attest.

This story is best acted out (unless you're my husband and have heard it perhaps a few too many times), but since you're all not here, you'll have to make do with words. When I was heavily pregnant with my first baby, I waddled into the kitchen to start supper. Being very slatternly, there was a stack of plates on the stove which I shifted aside and turned on the element to make something (likely hardboiled eggs. I live on those.). I then waddled to the fridge, where I found a bottle of water in the freezer which had exploded open. I put the broken frozen water bottle into the sink and then waddled around doing stuff - when I went back to the stove, I found that I had turned on the element UNDER THE STACK OF PLATES.

I called to my husband, who was talking on the phone in the living room to someone he didn't like. He thought I was just attempting to create an excuse for him to end his phone call, so he ignored me.

The plates were sizzling. I grabbed an oven mitt and tossed them into the sink - ON TOP OF THE FROZEN WATER BOTTLE.

Ka-BOOOOM.

AS I stood there, completely covered in millions of bits of glass, I heard my husband say calmly on the phone "I have to go now."

Anyhow, I was fine, the baby was fine, we bought new dishes. I am a klutz.

In which I have no topic whatsoever.

One of the things that make me the happiest about being married is that I don't have to date anymore THANKYOUTHANKYOUTHANKYOU. I have no idea how adults meet each other - I do have some single 30ish friends and they're all pretty content with it but I would be on Ovarian High Alert, being me. A lot of people I know have used internet personal ad sites with a lot of success, but I'd have no idea what to write. "OVARIAN HIGH ALERT" would make an excellent grabber line, I'm sure. Throw in something else about being my being moody, cat-loving, super fertile and not always brushing my hair and the men would just be LINING UP, I'm certain.


Thank God I'm married. How did THAT happen?

Hey look! It's me, blogging! Do note the still-unpainted office walls. We've decided on a colour - "rouge" by Benjamin Moore (although copied by Home Hardware, since we hate Ben Moore paints. How did they get such a great reputation?), and apparently deciding on a colour was enough to satisfy us, because we've moved on no further. But someday, we may get the office painted, which means my house is as follows:
- Living Room/Dining Room - Yellow
- Downstairs Bathroom - Green
- Playroom - Neon Green
- Office - Red
- Kitchen - Yellow, but we're thinking of repainting it a light lilacy colour.
- The Girls' Bedroom - Four Shades of Pink
- The Boy's Theoretical Bedroom - Who knows?
- Our Bedroom - Blue. But we're going to put up rose wallpaper!
- The upstairs bathroom - Bondo. That room is terrifying.
- The Laundry room - kitschy vintage wallpaper
- The studio - cornflowery purple blue.

OW, my EYES. It's like I'm living in a box of CRAYONS. A really BIG box of crayons.
I read this Martha Stewart interview where she was asked what she would do if her teenager wanted to paint her bedroom purple, and she said that she would paint the rest of her house in soft, tasteful shades of purple, too, so there wouldn't be anything jarring. She'd probably just throw right up if she came to my house. And this, THIS is why you shouldn't marry a visual artist because your eyes? They will melt.

Other Catergories I Should Have Been Nominated For

1. Best use of the word "skanky."
2. Best ranting.
3. Best bragging about husband's cake decorating skills.
4. Best fat cat.

Meow.
Can you see that Mr. Chubby is sitting on a chair with some sort of woven seat? What a brilliant chair for a house with clawed cats - every morning I wake up and have to sweep another giant pile of grass or whatever it is off the dining room floor. Stupid cats.
5. Most disgusting bout of the flu this week.
I don't think I mentioned it, but Thursday night was deeeee-lightful - The Baby first off insisted that she wasn't going to eat at her highchair and that she needed to go sit on the couch. Normally, we'd be like "tough luck, kid! Enjoy your stay in the highchair!" but she'd been sort of iffy all day, and so her dad took her out of her highchair and sat her on the couch with her dinner (we have one of those dining/living room combos), where she promptly did this:
Isn't that pathetic? So we tucked her into her wee trundle bed and all was well until about eleven when she started crying, so I picked her up and she promptly vomited all over me. I didn't mind so much the first time, but after the third time I was like, LOOK KID, THROW UP SOMEWHERE ELSE.
Everyone is better now.
6. Best blogging when I'm actually supposed to be getting ready for church. Gotta go!

I done been nominated!

Whoo hooooo! Go vote for me. I'll wait here.
My gigantic, obese cat is trying to make me stop typing and pet him - he's bunting my arm with his head and clawing at me ever so gently. I was going to post a photo of him - he's so fat! - but I can't find any recent ones. Lots of pictures of the kids - thousands from last year alone - but none of the cats, poor things. I was able to find several dozen photos of The Baby trying on clogs at her grandparents, though. My husband's parents have lots of wooden shoes at their house because great-grandma is from Holland and so apparently getting posed in clogs is my children's fate.

Dutch Great-Grandma is still around - she's small and needy and comes to birthdays and we see her not as often as we should. Shame on us. She lives half an hour away and we could go see her on weekends. We could. There are excuses I could make - we're busy, small kids exhaust old people, she's moody, blahblah, but in the end, we're not trying hard enough. I already feel grief over this, grief for the day when all that's left are a pair of scratchy wooden shoes.

My husband wants to throw a Superbowl Party tomorrow -we'll watch The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter, maybe play some D&D*, and assemble a robotics kit. Because we are hardcore nerds, yo.
*I keed! But we both played lots of D&D as young nerdy unpopular teenagers, and neither of us ever found ourselves wandering around all delusional with a sword.

World Of Danger!

(And I am editing this to say that I also felt bad that Jenn felt attacked and that I was trying to say in the paragraph below that I wasn't talking about parents of toddlers in my former post. But I don't think I expressed that well. Jenn, I think that your approach with your toddler is a good one, and certainly one that I use with my own toddler.)
Jenn wrote in the comments to Attached:

I did feel somewhat of an attack from most of the comments. I am surprised at how judgemental mothers are of each other. Shouldn't we supporting each other rather then putting each other down?

I removed this paragraph because, upon rereading it, it didn't say what I wanted it to say, which was that unless a parent is allowing her toddler to be a public nuisance or to hurt other kids, I really don't judge their parenting. I reserve the right to judge the parents of older kids, though.

My daughter has had the same best friend for the past four years. Best Friend has, um, "truthfulness issues". This past week alone, she told my daughter:
1) That someone shot a gun at her while she was playing in her backyard but luckily she ducked down JUST IN THE NICK OF TIME.
2) Robbers - with long blond hair and floral earrings - have been breaking into her house every night and only she knows it.
3) Someone invisible is following her around in her yard.
4) Someone is trying to kill her dog.
So my poor kid was all freaked out - her poor endangered friend, living in this terrifying World Of Crime! I phoned the little liar's house with The Girl sitting beside me and went through the List Of Danger with Best Friend's mother. Turns out that the last one IS true - someone told The Best Friend that he'll shoot her dog if it goes on his property again. Since that's such an appropriate thing to tell a seven year old and all. But The Girl isn't convinced that her friend is safe - we're all just ignorant adults and by the time we believe her, it will be Too Late. We find the Best Friend somewhat, um, exasperating, and are spending a lot of time encouraging her friendships with other girls who lead less danger-filled lives.

Attached.

Carol made a good point in my "Third verse" post - a lot of mothers DO become exclusively focused on their kids, to the point where they're frighteningly dull. I'm glad that they have SOMETHING to be passionate about, though.

My husband and I fell into "attachment" parenting. Our first baby wouldn't eat, wouldn't sleep and was obviously fading - so when a friend dropped off Bill and Martha Sears' "Baby Book", it was a blessing. We popped her into a sling, started sleeping with her in our bed, and voila, problem solved. She was never able to breastfeed, a problem that was mystifying and heartbreakingly guilt-inducing at the time, so the constant physical contact with her helped me feel better about the bonding she was missing from breastfeeding, and also helped me later when my postpartum depression finally lifted. I knew that even when I was bleakly unable to take care of myself, I had taken beautiful care of her, in a way that I might not have if she had been left more to the care of baby swings and cribs.

Our other two babies have been raised much the same way, minus the crippling depression and breastfeeding problems, thank God. We are doting, indulgent parents of babies, a veritable baby Paradise. But turn about 11 months old and the honeymoon is over, buddy. It's crib time! It's time to begin setting boundaries and hearing NO! Parenting begins in earnest in the toddler years, I think, the time when we begin to teach our children that they are not the centre of the world, that their desires do not take precedence over everything else, that there are limits to what they can do. Some parents start failing the job at this age (and I'm not saying I'm perfect here. Ha ha! So far from it.), and end up with three year olds who hit people, who run around restaurants yelling and disrupting people*, who are unbearable to be around.

Some children I used to babysit had loving, ineffectual parents who had unfortunately seized upon certain dangerous parenting philosophies - that it would harm their children to hear no, that it would hurt their developing sense of self to have limits placed upon them - and these kids were HORRIBLE. They broke VCRs in houses they were visiting, climbed ladders onto roofs, opened fridges without invitation to find snacks, fought viciously with each other, constantly interrupted their hosts to bother their parents. At four and six, they had been banned from every house in the neighbourhood, their parents told never to bring them over again. And now as young adults, the older child has turned out okay - but the younger one is in a juvenile detention center, and all, I think, due to his parents' inability to realize that teaching your children limits is one of the most important jobs.

It's tempting to sit here and list all of the Horrible Children I've ever known. That would be so much fun, really, a way to sit here and just stew in bitterness. Good times! Many of these children had parents who were abusively incompetent, parents who should not have been parents - but some of these kids had loving, well-attached, intelligent parents who decided for one reason or another that they would not or could not set limits, that they were too cool, too rebellious to apply the rules of society to their kid. But the rules of society will always have to be obeyed and in the end it is the kid who will end up paying for it.

*often this is more a failure on the part of the parents to recognize where it is appropriate to bring a child. If your kid can't sit at a table for the length of a meal, they can't go to restaurants yet. Strangers do not want your child's company at suppertime, sadly.

Thank goodness.

Nicole tagged me with this yesterday, which was a relief after all that ranting. So come back with me in time as I go through my archives.... yes, here are The Days Of My Lives.

*FUNNY*: Some names that we considered and then rejected for our kids.
*SERIOUS*: Well, I wrote a sad post about my Grandma. Sniff.
*UGLY*: My excellent chair, which we kept as is, by the way.
*ALL ABOUT YOU*: 13 Words which are not used often enough to describe me.
Go check 'em out! They're reasonably good.

Third Verse, Same as The First.

Someone (and I can't find who. Who were you, phantom story recommender?) mentioned to me yesterday, via comments (or somehow. Possibly email.), that they'd read an article that very morning by Leah McLaren on the very same subject that I wrote about yesterday. So I went and looked it up and found it. And here is the quote that made me rant for the rest of the evening:

"It would be nice for people to have kids and never even talk
about it," he told me over the phone this week. "Even when people ask me about
my kids, I say 'They're fine,' and change the topic. Because the truth is nobody
really cares. Kids are inherently boring. There's a way to be a grownup and a
good parent and not make a big deal out of that and also be a function member of
society. Shoot me if I ever start using my kids and pets as material."

A function member! Sign me up! So got that? Kids are boring. Oh, and they make their parents miserable.
I don't think, by the way, that there's anything heroic or even particularily commendable in doing what you are supposed to do. We are supposed to be good parents - we're supposed to discipline our kids, fuss over them on their birthdays, laugh at their cuteness, tuck them in at night, be a big dork if that means being responsible, bore people with our Amazing Child Anecdotes (and yes, this is an IMPORTANT part of the job. If your mother and father don't think you're great, who ever will?), make them supper and none of this makes us superheroes. This is what having children entails. This is the job, whether you knew you were signing up for that particular list of duties or not.

Children may be boring. Children may not make their parents happy. What of it? There is a fairly contemporary illusion that the pleasure in life can be maximized and pain can be kept to a minimum, that I can live my life pleasantly doing pleasant things with pleasant people and it can be pretty shocking to suddenly be saddled with a baby who screams all day and poops on your hands. Oh, but don't TELL anyone anything about your baby - don't talk about how cute or smart your baby is, because no one cares, unless you're telling the "gritty" truth that having children is hard, is not pleasurable. And if we dare suggest that having children is a pleasure, that they are funny, heart-warming, loving, that they bring you real joy with their very existence, then you're being boring. Talk about drugs or sex or music, the IMPORTANT stuff. Because at the end of the day, it's only who you pretend to be that matters.

Feeeeelings

I didn't post yesterday! All day long, I had this ominous "oh oh" feeling, like it was about to start hailing frogs. But nothing happened. I've been in a grim, end-of-the-world mood recently, but it might just be because it's January or because I watch the evening news. It's not the most fun mood I've ever had, let me tell you. Look! I'm talking about my FEELINGS! This post, obviously, is going to be solid gold.

A friend brought over some long disposable milking gloves yesterday so that The Girl could have a bath - they covered her cast very nicely. Also, I know people who can bring over disposable milking gloves at a moment's notice. Connections to the dairy industry: that's me.

All three kids are home today - everyone has a case of the creeping crud and I'm just as happy keeping my kids home right now, thanks. My daughter was telling me that one of her friends is playing kissing tag with a much older boy, a kid from grade five (and this is a seven year old). Another friend of hers apparently talks about nothing but boyfriends and luvvv all the time, and these are the GOOD KIDS in her class, the smart kids from good homes. I don't know if kids around here are so frankly trashy because we're country, or - and this is what I think the case may actually be - people have such abysmally low standards, and no idea of what's appropriate behaviour and this has spread everywhere. I know that friends of mine who teach in other places report that kid behaviour is just heading downhill at at an alarming pace. I don't know if this is because I'm getting older and therefore am more disapproving of youthful behaviour - a possibility - or if everything really is falling apart.

I read this interview yesterday with an author who has written a book of modern fatherhood, and he said (I'm summing up here) that the difference between this generation of parents and the one immidiately before is that the last generation was child-centered, with flashcards and Baby Mozart and this generation, while still child-centered, is focused on maintaining their pre-child identities. Of course, it's debatable whether flashcards and Baby Mozart are actually "child-focused" so much as focused on making an elite, Ivy League baby, and whether maintaining one's pre-child identity is necessarily a positive thing. Is being a Ramones-t-shirt clad hipster a defiant statement of selfhood, or is it non-parental self-indulgence, an endless adolescence where once again, the actual children are pretty much forgotten.

Happy birthday

Five years ago today, I did the hardest thing of my whole life. I went through 20 hours of labour - and pushed for three - and ended up with my very fine son. He weighed nearly ten pounds, had a full head of black hair and I was just ecstatically in love with him from the moment I saw him.

His pirate birthday party this afternoon - just over now! - was fun and over the top and ridiculously, over-elaborately decorated, and made him so very, very happy. The Girl ran around, fake tattoos all over her arms (except for the bit with the cast), The Baby sat disapprovingly on laps, avoiding being trampled. And we got to show The Boy just a little bit of how much we love him, in top secret parent code. Because throwing birthday parties is a big pain in the butt, and only love would ever make me pull my lazy act together enough to buy matching paper plates AND cups.

The cake kind of sucked this year - whoops! The whole thing was a ramshackle affair and started falling apart before my husband finished icing it. That's IT - how much does that man expect me to take? All I ask of him is that he financially support everyone, get up at night with the baby, listen to my endless (and completely correct) monologues on every possibly subject, do all the driving AND make birthday cakes and if he can't make one elaborate pirate cake, what good is he? You'll see in the comments that everyone else had the same experience with their pirate cakes. I choose not to learn from others' experiences.

ARRR! Our cake sucks!

Happy birthday, five-year-old boy. You've been the most fun boy ever.

And just like that....

.... there goes The Boy's attention.
It is HARD being the middle kid. The older one does things first; the younger one is cuter and gets away with more. The middle one, though, gets so much of his thunder stolen. (And what is he doing with thunder? NOTHING GOOD.) No wonder he's so loud.

The Girl is okay. I'm very stressed out by the whole situation. When she was hurt, I was contacted by her teacher who thought that she was okay and didn't need to see a doctor. Honestly, when I saw here I was sort of ambivalent about how badly hurt she actually was - she was cheerful but babying her arm. Her doctor's office was closing and I knew that going to the emergency room would mean hours and hours of waiting, so I chose to take her to her doctor the next day. She wasn't in unbearable pain, and is very cheerful about her new cast.

I phoned the school principal, who had yet to even speak with the child who hurt my daughter. I pointed out the section in the provincial school policy that any student who injures another child badly enough to need medical treatment will a) be immediately suspended pending expulsion hearings and b) have police visit his home. I don't WANT the other child involved expelled or arrested - he's not a wicked kid, just a big oaf who was shoving other kids during a game - but I do think that breaking someones arm is a grave offense and required IMMEDIATE adult attention.
Oh, I am VERY stressed out right now, one of the days when adulthood isn't all fun and cupcakes but instead requires me to make actuallly hard phonecalls. Sheesh.

And that is all for today - I have a little man at home who is on his last day of being four, so I'm off to spend the baby's naptime fashioning an attractive pirate centerpiece with him. Wish me luck.

We interrupt our regularily scheduled programming..

Update!
My poor baby!
A greenstick fracture is, for the record, a type of fracture where only one side of the bone is broken while the other is bent. It happens only to children, I believe, and is pretty minor. STILL.

My oldest child was shoved at school yesterday, and fell on her arm. At the time, no one thought she was hurt very badly but today it's suspected that she has a greenstick fracture. She's a very stoic, tough child, but she's sitting white-faced and quiet in the living room right now, watching cartoons, so keep her in your thoughts and prayers today.
(edited to add: Please and thank you.)

Five Days of the Boy, Plus One To Grow On: Part Four

The Boy has a confusing school schedule - it's every other day, skipping every other Friday, just one of the myriad oddities he must encounter now that he is a school boy.

We had always planned on homeschooling, since my husband and I had the sort of dire school experiences/boredom that often drive parents to being leery of putting their children into public school. But The Girl at four was highly, highly social AND we butted heads all the time, so I worried that A) she'd be lonely (there's no other homeschoolers around here) and B) Our relationship would grow strained and unhappy. Into school, very happily, she went. And where she goes, so must follow her brother so off he marched this year.
He's enjoyed himself so far - he's bright and well-behaved and gets along well with the other kids. His only flaw, schoolwise, is a tendancy to sit himself down in the Create center for hours, refusing to budge because he's sculpting. But that's been dealt with - he's made a deal with the teacher that he can spend some of his free time in Create, so long as he spends some of his free time with the other kids, and he's very cheerfully playing with the other kids, even the ones he describes, not unkindly, as "bad and dumb."

The Baby loves his school days, because for the first time in her whole life she gets Mama TO HERSELF, and we get to have adventures - playgroup, library storytimes, trips out for lunch - that don't happen when her siblings are home. The Boy gets a bigger world, a chance to test himself. And I get to miss my sweet, brown-eyed boy, to have a wistful preview of what time and change will do, eventually.

Five Days of the Boy (plus one to grow on), Part Three

This being the last day of school for The Boy before his actual birthday, you know what we had to send in with him, right?

Yep, that would be even more cupcakes. (edited to add: they were these cupcakes. I would not recommend making them, because the little hats made their heads too top heavy and they kept fainting. They enchanted The Boy, though.)

We love you, little boy.

Five Days of The Boy (and one to grow on), Part Deux

Writing about the kids feels like a tightrope act for me - there are lines I won't cross, things I won't write about. I try mostly to write about their relationships with me, what I feel and think about motherhood rather than their intimate selves, the part of them that I should shelter. The result, of course, is a somewhat bowdlerized version of their childhood, a version that is not quite true to the original.

It's funny to be writing this morning, because The Boy is driving me crazy. He's been into everything all morning, knocking over The Baby, pouring milk on the floor, and attempting to make gigantic Art Attacks in the living room. Even when he's bad - and he often is - he is so much himself: creative, generous (the spilled milk was for The Baby, who he decided needed a drink), fun.

Susanne tagged me this morning, and rather than use it on myself, I'm going to tell you Five Things You Don't Know About the Boy:
1. He has extremely brown eyes, the only one of my kids to share my eye colour. My friend has an extremely brown eyed toddler, and we have big plans to betroth our children and have very brown-eyed grandchildren some day.
2. His one attempt at thieving was when he filled up the cargo pockets on his jeans with all of the bottle caps from the craft area of the classroom. The clinking gave my little felon away. He was very contrite and still bursts into tears when it's mentioned, so I'm hoping that a life of crime has been averted.
3. He is currently nearly levitating, he's so excited about his birthday party. Today's party work - painting pictures of pirates for decorations.
4. He is the loudest person I have ever known. My ears often ring long after he's gone to bed. We're getting his hearing checked, but we think he's just loud.
5. He is charming - very, very charming. He has a cheerful, sunny dispostion, unlike his Russian wintery parents and his dramatic sisters.

My only memory of my fifth year is of very solemnly dyeing Easter eggs in class. Everything else is only a haze to me - and I know that most of what happens now will be forgotten by the Boy. I hope that who he is never changes, that when I'm old and tired, he'll come bursting into my front door too loud, too loving, too happy, this summery boy born right in the middle of winter.

Five Days of The Boy

.... and one to grow on, of course. My middle child will be five whole years old this week, so I'm going to try to blog about him everyday. I wrote this back in June, and thought it would be a good way to start the week off:



Back in 2001, I was five months pregnant with my second child. The pregnancy had been uneventful, except for severe morning sickness that had just faded. One morning, I was sleeping in bed with my then-2 year old daughter, and she innocently gave me a sharp kick in the stomach as she slept. I immidiately knew that something was wrong, stood up - and began bleeding heavily.

At the hosptial, my worst fears were confirmed - they could not detect the baby's heartbeat. The doctor and nurses at the hospital were very sympathetic - all of them were women, and nearly all of them had lost a pregnancy. The ultrasound tech at our small rural hospital had gone home sick, so they scheduled an ultrasound for the next morning in a town an hour away, and booked the next, terrible appointment after it. I was in a bleak, fathoms deep despair - this baby who had been so loved, so wanted, was gone.
The next morning, my mother, husband and toddler waited in the lobby while I went into the dark ultrasound room. I lay with my face to the wall, not wanting to see the sad, sad image, while the gentle, middle-aged technician quietly went about her work.
Suddenly, she made a sharp intake of breath. "What did they tell me happened?" she asked.

My baby had died, I said.

Look at the monitor, she said, her voice joyous. And I turned my head and saw my healthy, living baby moving gently, his heart beating. It was the single most radiantly happy moment of my whole life.

On the way home, my husband suddenly stopped the car, ran into a gift shop, and came out with a blue glass heart, which has hung ever since in my window. Many things may happen to me in my life, but everytime I look at that heart, I think about this undeserved grace, the blessing of that child.

(This seems sort of anti-climactic to post, but this is what had happened: I had severe undiagnosed placenta previa, and the placenta was positioned just in the right spot to prevent his heartbeat from being heard at that point. I often have thanked God for that experience, since it scared me enough to make me accept fully the need for total bedrest for the rest of the pregnancy, and my son was born hale and hearty that winter.)

We bought this. Yeah.

See this lovely, lovely bathroom? This used to be ours:

Note the enchanting former tub surround - the tub was blue, by the way.

And here we have the sink and toilet area of the washroom. Note the big greasy handprints on the wall around the toilet. Ew. What you're not seeing is the linoleum, which was so horrifyingly ugly that I used to save the bathroom for last on tours of our house, as a sort of reverse piece de resistance.

This photo of the light fixture does NOT do it justice - it was FILTHY, for one thing (fabric light fixtures in a bathroom! What a fantastic idea!). and for another, you don't really get a sense of how crude the raised blue embroidery on it truly was.

And this is how it looks now:
The photo above gives you a very clear idea of what the colours are in the bathroom. My husband did ALL of the work, by the way, aside from a lot of encouraging complaining that I did about how I was PREGNANT and I had to run upstairs to use the washroom and couldn't he finish the bathroom FASTER? I was a lot of help.

Okay, so three years later we STILL don't have the window or door frame up and we STILL haven't painting the chair rails and moldings but LOOK! IT IS NO LONGER DISGUSTING! So this is our only close to finished room in the whole house, and I keep threatening to do all of my entertaining in the washroom.

And here, for the record, is what is left to do in our house:

1. Make The Boy a room, carved out of the raw space that is currently our school gym-sized bedroom.

2. Replace the cupboards in the kitchen with non-plywood models with ACTUAL CLOSING DOORS.

3. Refinish ALL of the hardwood floors in the downstairs.

4. Put up moldings in the whole downstairs area.

5. Paint the office "rouge" and put up actual bookshelves (our next project, thankyouverymuch).

WHY, OH WHY did we decide to take on this much work at the same time that we were reproducing biannually? We are a tired, tired people.

Genius

This is my favorite picture of The Girl, perhaps. It is nearly five years old - taken when she was just three - and she doesn't look much like that anymore. It sums her up, though - smart, sassy, creative (note her rings), and her perculiar gravitas (note the solemn eyes). It sums her up almost utterly. This is my child, the little goof.

I have millions of more recent photos of her, pictures (and some of you can back me up here) that are almost startlingly beautiful. She is a lovely girl, and I would love to post a photo of her online so that I could bask in the compliments on the darling person that I created. But I can't, because the world is a bad place and I worry enough about having this blog, about the occasional photo of The Baby.

I went to a meeting last night about the problems in my town. It was a grim affair with tons of worried parents and grandparents, and tons of ideas were tossed about that are not going to work. The problem in our town is too much independence from parental supervision - five year old kids are dropped off at events and the parents drive away before they're safely in the door, eight year old kids are allowed to go skating by themselves at the rink, 12 year olds can stand outside the confectionary until late. And it's subtle, too - kids with televisions in their rooms, kids allowed to use the computer without adult supervision, a school that keeps problems secret from the community.

Parenting can be boring. By the time a kid is 8, they can seem pretty competent, pretty independent and you've been watching them like a hawk for the past eight years of your life, so I get the desire to just drop them off, to let them watch whatever, to let them bike away with a vague promise of when they'll be home. But this world isn't good and it's not 1950 - I don't think it ever was - and the vulnerable ignorance of childhood can vanish pretty damn quickly if parents aren't careful, leaving only an eleven year old half dead in a ditch on a November night, leaving you with some dead-eyed young teen who doesn't care what you think.

I'm normally pretty confident about my kids. They're smart and they're good - salt and light. But today it's not feeling like enough, that it doesn't matter how good they are if they're such a minority. Whenever I get unhappy about this, I start thinking LET US NOW HOMESCHOOL, which wouldn't work because I'm irritable, unorganized and lazy, but in my dreams I can see me - gracious, calm and gentle - discussing Jane Austen with the kids while we weave on our looms and classical music plays in the background. Note the "in my dreams" part, leaving out the reality of the kids running around in the pajamas, watching tv for 20 hours a day and me drinking in the bathroom, so I don't think that would work. (and I know quite a few of you homeschool: you rock. Would you like to teach my kids, too?)

A line from a poem by William Blake keeps running through my head:

My mother groan'd, my father wept

Into the dangerous world I leapt...

And that sums it up, I guess. They WILL leap into this stupid, dangerous world, and all I can do is hope that we've made them smart enough, good enough and brave enough. I feel wistfully unsure today, sad in my marrow.

Delurking Day

"Delurking"? One of the worst things about the internet is the leadfooted linguistics. Oh, and the moronic acronyms, the dank skeevy perverts around every corner, and the way everyone is very, very rude about their opinions. And the scary insight into people's personalities that you get from their hotmail addresses, like the nice older woman down the street emailing you from "sexxxyspankygirl." There are things that I would have been happier not knowing, thank you.

But it's delurking day, or week, or something, so if you're lurking, STOP IT! Say hi! I don't think that I have tons of secret readers, but if I do, hey, that would be a nice surprise. As an incentive, here is The Baby building a tower:

She's a genius! Except for this morning when she poured an entire bottle of vanilla extract down the front of her pajamas, and I'm not quite sure why she did that. We all find the smell of vanilla lovely, Baby, but vanilla costs a fair bit of money and Mama is on a diet, so you possibly may not want to run around smelling like a big cookie. I'm just saying.

Begone, Dull Care!

Edited to add: Go check out this amazing list of toddler books! Wow! And say HI! when you go over, please!

So stupid blogger was being a jerk yesterday. To everyone with blogger webpages: hello! I tried to stop by.

The dessert was Nigella Lawson's Gooey Chocolate Puddings, which are always yummmy. They were easy to adapt to being gluten-free - I mixed up a 35 g blend* of rice and chickpea flour, with 1/2 tsp of zanthum gum. The marshmallows were because of this gorgeous-looking dessert, which isn't worth making - very chewy, very blandly browniesque, but SO pretty! Any of my experiments with gluten-free brownies have been less than spectacular, but I've heard that there are excellent mixes available.

* A friend saw how I mix my flours and thought it was smart, so I'll pass it on - I put my flours into a ziplock bag, zip it and hand it to my toddler who then shakes the heck out of it. It wasn't my idea to begin with, but it's a good one!

As for good books for toddlers - it really depends on the AGE of your toddler, and what sort of kid they are. I'd read a different book to a wiggly 14 month old than to a solemn 24 month old, but here are some that mine have liked:
- Jamberry by Bruce Degen
- Caps For Sale by Esphyr Slobodkina. This one is especially fun for for acting out.
- The Baby's Catalogue by Janet and Alan Ahlberg. It's not in print, I suspect, but it's my favorite book to read to toddlers. The Ahlberg's have TONS of excellent books for toddlers - other beloved ones in our household are Peepo (or Peek-A-Boo, in the American edition) and Each Peach Pear Plum.
- Sandra Boynton's hilarious board books
Which toddler books do YOU recommend?

Today was a funeral day, which meant that I got to wear grown-up clothes and makeup and have an actual hairstyle. Within seconds of getting home, I had changed back into fuzzy pajama pants and one of my husband's sweatshirts, my hairstyle vanished into the ever-present maternal ponytail. It was like the effort of wearing actual clothing sucked the life out of me, or possibly I got a chill from crying so much during the service.

It was a good funeral, for a kind, well-mourned old man. There are many, many sadder things in the world. Still, it was a funeral and I always cry my eyes out at funerals. My seven-year-old daughter sat on my lap the whole time and watched me with bemused interest, because it WAS silly. I should hire myself out as a professional mourner. I am good at crying. There weren't bagpipes, thank God, or I'd have really embarrased myself because bagpipes are the direct blaring route to my tear ducts.

My dad's sister and brother-in-law were there. My uncle is a tall, lanky handsome man of nearly 80, with a cowboy's weathered good looks and faded blue eyes and I always think whenever I see him that he is the handsomest man I've ever known. It is only in childhood that we can blithely take love, take these people for granted - then there comes the period of adolescent self-absorption, of distancing from loved people and then as an adult the sudden realization of oh, I love these people, always coinciding with the loved people suddenly becoming old overnight, of our sudden knowledge of how breakable everything is. I told my aunt that I always though my uncle was the handsomest man in the world, almost, and she said that I hadn't done too badly in the marriage department myself.

It's true. My husband is a lovely man, truly the best man I've ever known, and the family that we've made is a lovely family. Our children will replace us in time, and their children will replace them and eventually, all we'll be is a name, an eye colour, a tendancy to cry at anyone's funeral. In the meantime, though, there's always dessert:

Mmm! Gluten-free goodness! So life, I guess, goes on always.

Pinkeyes and nothingness

I can't think of anything to write today, which must be just the most horrifying opening lines ever. Mindless blather ahoy!
Today was supposed to be the first day back at school for my older two kids, and it's a lovely snowy day for it, too - properly winter, unlike Christmas which felt disconcertingly like March. But my oldest daughter has had a minor eye infection since a few days before Christmas and she woke up this moning with it no better, so she's still home and we're off to the doctors AGAIN, FOR THE THIRD TIME. Frickin' pink eye. It's been going around her school and I'm so frustrated that I'm going to send her to school with a jumbo bottle of Purell.

Okay, I'm back from the clinic. It is no longer pinkeye - now it is an allergic reaction to the pinkeye medication. Sigh.

I had a long post all ready in my head about Richard Dawkins but now I'm feeling too tired and too played out to write it. But I'll sum it up: That's not a coherent arguement - THAT'S JUST RANTING! That'll show him, I'm sure.

The Baby Hath Murdered Sleep

So, my baby normally sleeps like a pro but recently she's been waking up at around three in the morning, cheerfully wanting to chat with Mama. My night was like this:
Baby (calling happily from her crib) - Mama! Maaaaaaaaama! Hi! Mooooommmmmmy! Hi!
Me (groggily) - I am sleeping. Shh.
Baby - Hi Mama! Hi! Hi!
My husband (with the voice of the exhausted) - Do you want me to get up with her?
Me - No (yes.), I'll get up with her (you do it).
So the Baby and I go downstairs.
Baby - Kitty! Kitty! Hi, Kitty!
Me - The kitty is tired. Let's go to sleep.
Baby - No! No Sleep! Mama PLAY! Kitty PLAY! BABY PLAY! Hi!
Repeat until my husband comes down in the morning and takes the loud person away. I am currently so tired that I keep falling asleep while standing up.

Biff Spiffy has tagged me with a meme about blogging, and here we go:
1. Do you like the look and the contents of your blog?
I liked my old blog's look better. This one is okay. I DO like my new header with Toad throwing a fit.

2-Does your family know about your blog?
Yep. When I had some problems back in October I blogged a bit about them and received within the HOUR several worried emails from family members. My dad also mentioned something about reading my blog this morning. Hi dad!

3-Can you tell your friends about your blog?
I just presume they're not interested, really. I've mentioned it once or twice to most of them but since they get to have the daily joy of knowing me and all that, I assume most don't read it. My husband doesn't, unless I choose to read him choice bits. But if you do: hello, friends and wellwishers!

4-Do you just read the blogs of those who comment on your blog?
I have 100 blogs in my bloglines so no.

5-Did your blog positively affect your mind?
My mind? Um, I guess? It's fun and it's stretching my writing skills.

6-What does the number of visitors to your blog mean?
It's nice having more readers, but I try not to judge the worth of my writing by that. I know some blogs that are WONDERFUL and have not many commentors for whatever reason and then there are some big time blogs that are just krep. So who knows?

7-Do you imagine what other bloggers look like?
Yes, but I always imagine them clothed.

8-Do you think blogging has any real benefit?
That question is sort of baffling. I think that it depends on the blogger and the blog, of course.

9-Do you think that the blogosphere is a stand alone community separated from the real world?
Like one of those gated communities of identical houses? Whaaaaat?

10-Do some political blogs scare you? Do you avoid them?
Some political blogs are terrifiying. Some people are nuts. I try to keep politics OUT of my blog, basically because my political beliefs are so all over the place that I could alienate everyone in under ten minutes.

11-Do you think that criticizing your blog is useful?
Nope. One of the things that I truly loathe about the internet is the way that so many people feel liberated from basic civility. Decent people don't go around criticizing unsuspecting individuals, even when that individual has put a lot of their life on display in blogform.
Having said that, criticisim CAN be useful - if I've written something and want you to help me figure out how to fix it, for example. And if I've written something that's inadvertently offensive, I would want to know.

12-Have you ever thought about what would happen to your blog in case you died?
I just asked my husband to put a post on here in the event of my death, and he said "okay," and then gave me the stop-being-so-morbid look. If I stop posting for a long time, though, don't assume I'm dead - assume I've forgotten my password. It's MUCH more likely.

13-Which blogger had the greatest impression on you?
No fair! I can't answer that! I read a lot of AMAZING blogs. If you want to read a beautiful story, go read The Flying Mum's recent entries, starting on December 13th.

14-Which blogger do you think is the most similar to you?
I see bits of myself in a lot of bloggers, which is sort of disconcerting because I always thought I was such an individual - turns out I could make a rather substantial club out of women JUST LIKE ME. It's both cheering and odd.

15-Name a song you want to listen to?
A song? That I want to listen to? Right now, I'm listening to "Sally Brown" by Teddy Thompson, from "Rogue's Gallery."

Edited to add: I am tagging Cinnamon Gurl, Pastormac's Ann and Nicole. Have fun! It's hard!

The last day of Christmas

An elderly cousin* of mine died yesterday at 86, well-loved, and - despite several years of obviously failing health, in his home until the very end. He was a fixture at church potlucks, did all the handyman work for the church in his town, and knew tons of hilarious stories about my paternal grandmother. He was a good old guy and I'll miss him. At the local Legion, there's a fading black and white photograph of my cousin in his WWII uniform, young and strapping and cocky, but the last several years had been sad one for him, years of failing memory, confusion and illness.

I don't write about my religious beliefs on my blog - not because I'm in any way a don't ask-don't tell kind of person on that front, but because I feel inadequate to the task. And also, my blog - like my life - has people with a wide spectrum of beliefs, and I don't want my clumsiness expressing my faith to inadvertently drive people away. Today, though, I will say that my greatest hope is that my cousin is where the faith of his whole life promised him, that the strength and vigor of youth is not just a fleeting thing.

It snowed here last night, erasing in one evening the frightening pretend spring. Good old men die and are mourned; children play and fight and grow an inch taller since Christmas. Today - on Epiphany, the very last day of the Christmas season - we will make a cake, wear some crowns and remember a good old man in our prayers at bedtime.

*Seriously! My grandmother was 12 years younger than her sister, who married and had children young. My dad was born when my grandmother was in her mid-40s, so my dad is nearly forty years younger than his first cousins. My cousin was my first-cousin-once-removed, for those of you who are perhaps not living around literally dozens of your relatives.

More birthday

I wanted to correct a false impression that I'd inadvertently made yesterday - The Boy has lots of friends. He has friends EVERYWHERE he goes, and is quite a sunshiney, popular fellow. He could probably throw a party just for his senior friends alone.... he also has kids that he likes quite a bit in JK. The problem - and it's not really a problem - is that he prefers a lot of the girls in his class to the boys, mainly because the boys in his class are sort of lumpen and dull. But kids start self-segregating by gender in the next year or so and I don't want him to not have anyone to play with, eventually. And I don't think this is okay, and I wish that this wouldn't happen - but parenthood often makes my ideals (Wal-Mart is bad!) clash with my kids' needs (many, many pairs of tights and diapers), with my ideals generally ending up in the big metaphorical garbage can. Poor ideals.

So the solution, I guess, is that I'm going to invite his many, many female friends, and then invite the boys that he thinks are okay. As Sheryl just commented, it often does take boys longer to make friends than girls, and I think that my little guy might need help making friends with anyone who's not a super-effusive little girl. Super-effusive little guys, like mine, seem to be thin on the ground but it might just be where I live, where little boys have any enthusiasm backhanded out of them by their gruff* fathers.

Throwing great birthday parties is pretty easy. You just need a good theme - something age-appropriate and something that fits in well with your child and their group of friends. For example, last year my daughter wanted a Victorian tea party, so we had lacy tablecloths, tons of floral tea cups and dainty plates, finger sandwiches and chocolate dipped strawberries. The girls had lots of fun decorating sunhats and so on, but I realized that the majority of girls in the group were big loud hoydens**, so this year we're going to rent a karoke machine and have a rock star party.

And now, I am going to brag by showing some fantastic birthday cakes that my husband has made. Really, I won the marriage olympics - he's nice AND can decorate cakes! O, lucky me!

Last year's monkey cake, for The Boy's Monkey Party.


Not only was this train gorgeous, but the cake - which I made, thankyouverymuch - was just freakishly delicious and all of the mother's descended upon it afterwards. BUT I HAVE NEVER FOUND THE RECIPE FOR IT AGAIN. Curses.


The Girl's Fifth Birthday Cake. Isn't that unbelievable? The top towere was knocked a little bit askew before the photo was taken by a certain eager younger brother, but you can still see how lovely it was.

*My husband is the opposite of gruff. I'm gruffer than he is and I am the opposite of gruff.

** Not MY daughter. She's dainty and Grace Kelly-esque (in appearance. In personality, she is more like Queen Victoria), which really adds weight to my switched-at-birth theory.

A Pirate's Birthday

Someone in my house will be five years old in sixteen days. Said person wants a pirate party, which is easy enough to do - arrrrrrgula salad for all! Seriously, I could throw a kid's birthday party with one hand tied behind my back (although normally I want both hands - crowd control) and pirates are an easy, easy theme - a game of walk the plank, a cake that looks like a pirate ship (thanks to my husband, The Amazing Cake Decorator), and the kids are pleased.

My worry is the guest list - my son has yet to make any bosum chums in Pre-Kindergarten, which doesn't worry him and so it doesn't worry me, generally, but it does make throwing a party a bit hard. My daughter's parties were always a breeze - her class has five girls (seriously! It's like the schoolhouse on Little House on the Prarie except with drugs and skanky shirts. On the other hand, nobody is likely to die of Smallpox.), and so all of her school-aged birthday parties has been attended by all of her female classmates, even the ones she doesn't like and has to get The Speech* before she's cheerful about it. I'll figure something out.

Also: decorating the livingroom like a pirate ship. I believe I'll make that one his father's problem.

*wherein we are nice to Unpopular Kids, for one's mother was once upon a time an unpopular kid and it is the Right Thing To Do.

Today's check-up

So earlier today I read this rather whiny article about how having kids doesn't - oh, HERE'S a shocker - make people happy, and that women, in fact, preferred adult company to that of their own wee cherubs. Golly. Do you mean that my preference for companions who don't have to be reminded to get their hands out of their pants every five seconds is normal?

My favorite part was how people "never" tell the truth about how hard having a small baby is, because that would make them look like a bad person. I apparently have no qualms about appearing wicked, since when friends would ask me how I was doing, I would be pretty blunt - "Awful! The baby won't sleep and nurses 24 hours a day!". I think for a lot of people, parenting is the first very hard thing they've ever done, the first thing that doesn't come with a lot of immediate gratification and the first thing that isn't all about them. There's no sleep. Everything hurts. Nursing is hard. So yeah, the initial foray into parenting doesn't often make people very happy.

A friend of mine told me about her dad, who was a miner and already dying of cancer. He'd get home in the evening, after the kids had their supper and his hands and face would still be stained black even after washing.
"I smiled all the way home, just thinking about you guys," he told them everynight before bed, already knowing that his time with them had run out.

So today the baby went to the clinic for her monthly annoy-the-baby checkup - and her nurse-practioner told me with a grin that the Baby has gained a pound and grown an inch since her last appointment in early December. She is now a normal size for her age - small, but normal.
I smiled all the way home.

For Mimi - A Meme

I was tagged with the turn-to-page-123-of-my-book-closest-to-me-and-write-out-lines-6-through-8-meme by Mimi, so here we go:
Given the memorial capacities of architecture, it cannot be coincidental that in many of the world's cultures, the earliest and most signifigant works have been funerary. Some 4,000 years ago, on a hillside in western Pembrokeshire, a group of our Neolihic ancestors lifted up a series of gigantic stones with their bare hands and covered then with earth to mark the spot where one of their kinsmen lay buried. The chamber has been lost to time, as have the body and even the identity of the man whose name once have been spoken with awe in the communities along this damp edge of the British Isles.
The Architecture of Happiness, Alain de Botton - a Christmas present from my very, very nice husband. And should you want a book review, here you go: it's a lovely book, with very nice pictures and he is a pleasant writer - the whole thing gave me the stirring feeling that I was VERY deep in thought and learning many new things, which is a nice feeling if not quite accurate. But it was a very charming book and I recommend it for people like me who are lazy and like to feel like they're thinking without much effort.

I need some good magazine recommendations for my seven-year-old daughter - everything I can find is either nature-themed (and nature is great, but she's not interested in reading about animals, really - that's why Chickadee flopped with her. We LOVE Chirp for younger kids, though.) or too mature. She likes crafting, art and writing, and reads well- so something that might appeal to a little girl along some of those lines would be great. Any ideas?

TWO THOUSAND AND SEVEN!

Whoo hoo! 2007! That year sounds so far in the future! CRAZY! Where is my rocket car? Where is my robot maid? (ignoring the fact that I don't drive and I don't own a microwave...)

When I was a kid, views of the future were divided - we either were going to be living in nuked-out rubble and running around in mutant bear skins, acting out scenes from Clan of The Cave Bear OR we were going to be living in super hygienic cities made of large white plastic bubbles, wearing androgynous silver jumpsuits and living on food pills. Neither of these seemed very acceptable to me. But look - the future is much the same as the rest of my life, except everyone has cell phones and is suddenly very into gourmet food. The world is still scary and horrible, but I'm getting used to that.

I cut the baby's bangs the other day (and this seems like a wild swerve in topic, but don't worry) and ever since then, whenever she gets her hands on a pair of scissors - which is disressingly often - she tries to lop off some of the rest of her hair. My other daughter attempted to stay up until midnight last night, but collapsed against her father's shoulder at 10:30. My son is attempting to eat all of the remains of the gingerbread house. These things feel timeless - not like 2007, or 1976 or 1874, just things that any mother would have noticed about her children, been amused and heartsore by their constant flight to their always uncertain futures, where they'll tell her of their annoying, beloved children's antics by means that she maybe can't imagine now.