Catchin' Up With The Memes.

Now in reverse chronological order!

Ten Things I Like About Me - from Omaha Mama

Uh.... this is hard. Stupid modesty.

1. I'm clever.

2. I have good taste in husbands.

3. I'm funny. Now, this is actually a quality I'm ambivalent about because it developed as a survival mechanism to being an unpopular, unhappy kid, so there's a sort of nasty element when I'm making people laugh that I'm the plain best friend again, the comedic relief in story. But I AM funny.

4. I actually think that I'm an attractive adult woman. Not that I'm skinny, mind you - I was such a stick bug growing up that I never fail to be utterly shocked by the sight of my new, more generous shape - but I'm cute enough, anyhow. Skinny isn't everything.

5. I'm a fun mom.

6. I won this!

Cinnamon Gurl nominated me for my post, Blood. Thank you. That post was sort of a terrible one to write, but looking back on it now I'm proud of it and happy with the way things worked out. And should I ever be in scenario where I need people to write glowing speeches in my honour, I AM PICKING CIN.

7. I'm a good cook. No, REALLY? I've surely never mentioned this before. But yes: I like to cook, I'm inventive and like trying new ingredients and am not daunted by much, culinary-wise. While I'm writing this, I'm also keeping an eye on the time because the kids and I have a batch of oatmeal/white chocolate chip cookies in the oven.

8. I know the song lyrics to pretty much every song ever written and so I'm a LOT of fun on car trips.

9. I am running out of steam here! Uh.... I'm cheerful, warm and friendly.

10. Seriously, SO out of steam now! Okay, I'm a good writer. Tens of blog readers cannot be wrong/just humouring me. Or they could. But this is MY meme and so I'm going with Wildly Talented.

The Literary Meme - From Veronica Mitchell

1. If you could host a party with 7 literary characters, who would they be and why?
Captain Wentworth, Dunstan Ramsey, King Friday XIII, and I'll add four more as I think of them. I realize that this is so far an all men (and puppet) + me affair, so my four other guests will likely be female. We'll see.

2. Who is your literary role model? Tottie Plantagenet.

3. Which literary house would you like most to live in?

4. Which literary couple would you like most for parents?
Could any parents be better than Frances the Badger's? I doubt it.

5. Pick 3 literary characters you would like to have as siblings.
I always wanted to have the Melendys for siblings - but only Rush, Miranda and Mona, leaving drippy little Oliver out. So full of fun and BIG PLANS and adventure! How I loved them.

6. Who is your favorite literary villain?
I struggled with this one a bit and realized that I do NOT like villains - I don't like them in real life and I don't like them in books. But Merricat from We Have Always Lived In The Castle is both sympathetic and likable and thoroughly unhinged.

7. Name a character that most people dislike, but that you do not. Why do you like them?
Fanny Price. Poor little Fanny. Most people find her too passive and too weak, but I think that in her own quiet, shy way, she's as brave as any character in literature. Also, I LIKE shy people.

8. Which minor character deserves a book all to themselves, in your opinion?
Veronica's suggestion of Bunter cannot be improved upon.

9. Which character do you identify most with in literature?
Molly Cobbler. Or Mary Musgrove (thanks for that, Mad! Now I'll never shake it.) on bad days.

10. If you could go into a novel, which one would it be and why?

11. Name 3 - 7 books that you rarely see on people’s favorite book lists, that are high on your own.
1. A Doll's House - by Rumer Godden. This was the first truly tragic book I ever read and it's stayed in my top ten since childhood, and yet I seem to be alone in my admiration. Tottie at number 2# is the heroine, and mine as well.

2. World Of Wonder - Robertson Davies. The circus! Evil! Magicians! Evil magicians! I love this book to the bottom of my gaudy soul.

3. The Debt to Pleasure - John Lanchester. Just a swell little portrait of evil and unjustly unread.

4. We Have Always Lived In The Castle - Shirley Jackson. Oh, just read it.

12. Which is your least favorite book of those that are considered “classics”?
The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton. Mmm! A 900 page treatise on depression written in the 1600s! Good times! An elderly friend of mine once confided that he kept a copy of this at all times on his bedside table to ward off even the threat of insomnia.

Five Things I Love About Jesus - From Carol

Boy, I STRUGGLED with this meme, primarily because of my grim-lipped Methodist ancestors, and also because items one through five ended up being the same answer, which is as follows:
He saved my life. Literally. I would have killed myself in my early 20s if it wasn't for the idea, fragile at first, that doing so would hurt Jesus in some way that I couldn't yet explain.

And now, of course, my life feels like "He brought me out into a spacious place; he rescued me because he delighted in me." (Psalm 18:19) To respond with less then love would be churlish.

I'm not tagging anyone because those were HARD! But if you feel like doing one or all three, let me know. EDITED TO ADD: I didn't write this all in one sitting - I've been pecking away at this over a week, just in case you thought I had a herculean burst of writing or something...

The Best News Ever!

Dairy Queen Ice Cream Cakes can be made gluten-free! Yay! Hold on while I order one RIGHT NOW.

That's so great. The Baby has been having a rough time lately (we strongly suspect that the fibre in vegetables is bothering her), and we really want to find ways to make her diet fun for her. Her Celiac Disease is not the biggest deal in the world, and most days I barely think about it. But some days are really hard - when the older kids get something and she comes running in, shrieking "For me? Me too?" and I have to give her something that SHE KNOWS is not as good. That makes my heart hurt.

So I made her marshmallows this morning and they're currently drying in big yellow strips on parchment paper in the kitchen. I'm not intimidated by much, cooking-wise, but I DID swear a bit when I realized that I was going to have to cook the sugar to the much-dreaded "soft ball" stage. I hate candy-making. Anyhow, I did it, and dumped the gooey sugar glop into the bowl of gelatin glop and started beating it together and suddenly, magically, it TURNED INTO MARSHMALLOWS. It WORKED! Like a magic trick! I stood there for a few seconds, stunned by my own cleverness and then set to work piping the marshmallow goo. I used a star shaped nozzle because I'd dyed the marshmallows yellow, but they mostly just look like globs. They TASTE like marshmallows, though, and they should do the trick.

On an unrelated note: we're all going to the dentist's tomorrow! It feels like we spend an awful lot of time there. I wonder why.

My husband and I were at a wedding recently, along with our kids, of course. A number of other small children were in attendance, including one other Baby-aged toddler. At one point during the ceremony, The Baby started to get rowdy - but that wasn't a big deal because we'd deliberately picked a pew near the door, and so my husband just took her outside for the rest of the ceremony. (if it had been HIS side of the family, I would have been the one to leave with The Baby. Hey, I can't help it if my relatives get married more often!)

The OTHER toddler ALSO got rowdy at some point during the ceremony, and her parents attempted ineffectively to shush her, but they did not take her out of the church. They just smiled apologetically and sat there.

Both of our toddlers were equally rowdy, so I don't think that we can claim to be better parents then the other couple, but I do think that we reacted appropriately and the other parents did not. And here is where I think a lot of the North American distaste for children comes from - parents who do not remove their children in situations when their children are being annoying. I mean, SERIOUSLY. I adore my children and most people find them quite cute, but I don't expect them to regard my children yelling loudly in a restaurant as free entertainment.

There are times: on a plane, in a doctor's office - when obviously the child is stuck there and there isn't much the parents can do beyond being prepared in the first place to entertain the kid for a long period of time. And in those cases for adults to complain about a small child - under three, maybe - complaining or being unhappy means that those adults are just stone cold jerks. But in restaurants, movie theaters, church services, and those sorts of things, if a child starts disrupting other people, they should be instantly taken out of the room by a parent. And yet parents do not.

There are two types of bad parents, I find - one knows that their children should not be behaving like that and is beyond frustrated and humiliated but lacks the authority to get up with the kid and leave. And the other type just has this huge sense of entitlement: of COURSE their toddler should be allowed to run around the restaurant and how dare anyone suggest otherwise? Why, their kid is just expressing their feelings! How rude of anyone to suggest that the middle of a wedding ceremony might not be the best place for this! These parents have the smug, self-centered feeling that all public spaces are theirs and that other people's enjoyment being disrupted by their bratty kids really doesn't matter.

And I am not, let me add right now, talking about some desperate young mom grocery shopping with a bunch of little kids on her own and one of them is throwing a tantrum and she just DOES NOT KNOW what to do. That young mom needs help and those little sympathetic half-smiles and not anyone passing judgement on her. More then once, I've found myself holding some stranger's baby in the grocery store while she attempted to calm down her wailing toddler and hey, I'm happy to do it. The poor little mamas.

Anyhow. I'm ranty this week.

As for the Lucky Charm marshmallow problem, this is what I'm going to do: I'm going to make this marshmallow recipe this afternoon and pipe them into bitty pink heart shapes. Ta da! My poor children may spend much of their childhoods sitting in parking lots with daddy, but they WILL get marshmallows in their cereal if I have anything to say about it.

A Very Important Question

Do you know the multicoloured, shaped little marshmallow doohickeys in Lucky Charms? Oh, how The Baby yearns for them and she cannot have them.
Yes, yes. Very sad. Anyhow. Does anyone know where I could get colourful marshmallow shapes like that? They can't have any gluten in them, obviously, but if I found them, I could toss a handful into her cereal in the morning and her wee heart would be content. Presumably.

In other news, our inflatable whale pool with the sprinkler in his tail collapsed last night. It was very sad. I'd noticed that he was listing over on Friday but didn't think he was actually that far gone. Goodbye, Noble Sprinkler Whale Pool. We will miss you.

That "quote" in yesterday's post? All me, baby.

I just made The Baby some gluten-free chocolate chip cookies (using a very standard chocolate chip cookie recipe) and they are DELICIOUS. I used a blend of rice flour, tapioca flour and sorghum flour, and they have a delicious taste. They ARE very delicate (I skipped the xanthum gum because I was too lazy to dig it out of the cupboard) , but baking them very small would help. And even though they're for The Baby, I've still eaten about a dozen of them, for research purposes.

When The Baby was diagnosed with Celiac Disease, we were relieved. Extremely relieved. Her other option was Cystic Fibrosis and thank you, we will take gluten intolerance ANY DAY over that. So I walked around for a year completely happy with her new annoying diet and inability to eat in restaurants and all of a sudden I've hit an emotional wall and now I am suddenly very, very sad. VERY sad. We have a family wedding down south (meaning in Toronto. That's very south of me.) this August and we can't go, mostly because feeding The Baby is almost impossible away from home.

She's not old enough yet to understand WHY she doesn't get to eat the same things as everyone else. Of course we pack her along treats, but getting one measly cupcake is NOT the same as getting a slice of wedding cake. And so she sits there and she cries, and I feel like crying, too. At home, her meals LOOK THE SAME - we have spaghetti, she has spaghetti. We have sandwiches, she has sandwiches. We have spaghetti AGAIN (please, someone, make my children like eating something else), she has spaghetti AGAIN. But away from home, we can't do that, and we can't insure quite enough that what she is eating is safe for her - and it makes me SO sad.

She's growing - she is SO much bigger than the summer started already! - and gaining weight and chatty and cheerful (well, generally not. She's generally sort of bad-tempered. But this is her natural, healthy state) and doing well - so long as we always, always stay at home. My husband and I recently realized that we can no longer relax at family dinners - both sets of grandparents have kindly offered to make sure that there is always something she can eat, but we want her to be able to eat EVERYTHING and demanding that our families suddenly learn how to cook with the markedly annoying gluten-free ingredients is a bit much. So there goes being our parent's children on the holidays.


So there are lots of little sad things about this, these little nicks that happen again just when I think I've toughened up. And yet if I think back to last summer, I can remember all at once how terrified we were, The Baby sleeping between her parents in bed and us awake on either side, looking at each other and both thinking no to this awful thing that did not, in the end, happen.
The day we got her test results, I was SO elated, walking into the waiting room where my husband sat white-faced with the other kids, and he knew by my face that everything was okay. And everything WILL be okay, so long as we stay on this tight rope for the rest of her childhood, the little sadnesses of her condition being overwhelemed, always by the constant knowledge that we are lucky, lucky, lucky to have her, our surly, messy-haired little creep, my baby who kisses me awake in the mornings. Lucky.

Of books and faith

I was reading a book last night - and I won't name it, out of kindness - and it was dreadful. Terribly plotted, self-indulgent, long-winded (I sound like I'm describing myself), poorly written - and then suddenly I realized that it was a Christian novel, which explained it. Isn't that sad? I do occasionally read Christian fiction, and I'm almost always struck by how dreadful it is.

In part, it's because it's so didactic - something I find no more attractive in a book meant for me then in The Berenstain Bears Learn About Junk Food. And there are Christians Who Are Wonderful Writers: Madeleine L'Engle (Doh! I had Ursula Le Guin here. but she is, as a commentor wrote, NOT a Christian. I had meant Madeline L'Engle, and since I always confuse the two, the obvious happened.), Marilynne Robinson, Graham Greene, even J.K. Rowling come to mind - but mention Christian literature and those aren't the types of books that I think of. No, I think of stuff like this:

"I love you Annabelle," Josh said, nervously.
"Oh Josh! Annabelle said. "I love you too."
They held hands and looked at each other rapturously.
"You know what we should do now?" Josh said, excitedly.
"Yes I do, said Annabelle. "We should pray."
And they prayed together all night long, over and over again.

Pretty bad, eh? I understand that these books are written for a pre-existing audience - people of faith who want to read something safe - but they're just nice fairytales for the easily offended. The Terrible Christian Novel isn't a new thing, but I don't think they do North American Christianity any good. Sappy goody-goodys, ackward hipsters ("Christianity is TOTALLY RAD!"), yucky hippie hymns from the 1970s... bleh. I think it's partly the juvenile nature of modern Christian culture which makes the recent crop of Evangelical atheists seem like mental giants in comparison. If Christian art - schmaltzy, sugary, unrealistic books, the paintings of Thomas Kinkade - is THIS bad, what sensible person would want to align themselves with that culture? No, better to hang out with grumpy scientists - at least they seem like adults.

I remember picking up Gilead and just being so pathetically grateful that someone had written such a good book about someone Christian - an actual ADULT CHARACTER who lives in our beautiful, evil, dangerous, sad world and has to deal with actual human flaws and failings and make decisions with actual moral consequences and attempts to live his faith. A real book! And it found a huge audience and won prizes and critical acclaim, and more importantly was a book that I could actually loan my non-Christian friends without cringing and have them return it to me with shining eyes, saying "Oh, that was SO good." Or maybe not like it at all, but whatever - an actual book, ART.

Jesus said "If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me." That's not a comforting message. Faith should not be used as a cozy buffer between us and the world, and Christian art shouldn't be brain-dead. I want more real books about faith and the consequences of belief and what it feels like to be a smart, doubt-filled Christian in this scary new world. I want more books about the cost of being a humane, loving, engaged person, the very work of adulthood. The universal burden of humanity is a heavy one, and real art can helps us carry it, engage us and maybe - maybe - help us find a way that makes the burden a little bit easier to bear.

And we can share each other's burdens, too - Slurping Life is having a HUGE fundraiser for Parker, a medically fragile, beloved child. Regardless of our faith - or lack thereof - we all love our kids and I think each of us can imagine with terrible clarity what his parent's might be feeling. Now add to that an insurance company that denies coverage for Parker's most basic medical needs and the terrible financial stress that his family is under. They need our help.

A Whole Bunch of Stuff

First off: happy anniversary to me! Marrying my husband was a very, very good idea. I will now pat myself on the back. Good work, self! So that would be nine years of wedded bliss (more or less) with a baby every three years, three moves, three job changes, and probably some other things that don't come in threes. We're going out for dinner tonight without the kids, and ha ha on them.

Here is a photo of a corner of the kids' room:
That's The Boy's racecar bed - a work in progress, obviously - that his dad is making him. Apparently The Boy decided to remove all of his pillowcases. And we haven't done anything with the floor yet and there's no art up at all, and the paint colour didn't photograph accurately - it's not anything like that yellow-y pea green colour. SO there you go.

The closet reading nook isn't done yet, although it's already in use, but there's a little upholstered chair tucked into the large closet and a bookshelf, and soon we're going to be replacing the chair with a beanbag chair and adding a battery lamp. I like the nook in the Wondertime article a lot.

I was watching a show last night on budget renovating and just laughed hysterically through the whole thing. The proposed budget for renovating a child's room and a bathroom was - are you ready to save some money? - $20,000.

TWENTY GRAND.

Yeah, that's just chump change at my house, too. I certainly would make a show about Budget Renovating and then have the gall to throw around tens of thousands of dollars. Geeeeeez. It just goes to show how completely out of touch with reality the affluent makers of these shows actually are.

We're spending under a thousand bucks on our kids room - counting the paint for the walls, the upcoming flooring, some new bedding, a light fixture and some curtains and art - and even THAT amount is taking enough of a bite out of our budget that we've had to cancel our long-planned summer trip to Toronto (extremely sad emoticon). And we make a fairly standard amount of money for a Canadian household, so what exactly is a show that suggests spending so MUCH more on a child's room thinking? Who is that show aimed at, if not at a reasonably middle class family with actual renovating to do?

I think that my kids have a cute room - large, airy, lots of space for playing, art and reading. It represents the best of their parent's efforts for them, things repurposed for their use (like the foofy sheer white curtains that my husband turned into a magical bed curtain for our oldest child:
The occupant was still using the bed when I snapped this photo, someplace under that mammoth huddle of blankets.), things made for them (like The Boy's bed), things bought as we can afford them (their FLOOR!).

It's not that I begrudge anyone spending that much on their kid's room - I don't precisely think it's wise, but not everyone in the world has to be as parsimonious as me. It's the subtle way such shows have of making me feel bad about our efforts - if $20 grand is the standard, certainly it's implying that the amount we're spending on renovating our children's room is not enough, that our children are not having good enough childhoods and that we're in a financial bracket so insignificant that a television show can suggest twenty thousand dollars - the cost of a university education - as a budget-friendly amount and no one thinks twice about it. Twenty thousand dollars is a lot of money, and there's something emotionally corrosive about anything that would suggest otherwise.

From some of my earlier posts, you might get the impression that I wistfully regret my children getting older, that my favorite time with them was when they were small babies.

Oh, ha. No.

I'm very GOOD with small babies - I'm laidback and comfortable spending a whole day doing nothing but rocking and nursing some ungrateful little twelve pound human being - but I always felt a sense of monumental and guilt-stricken relief when they turned one. Babies are HARD. And then there was the miserable post-partum depression that I had in varying intensities EVERY SINGLE TIME, which wasn't much fun. I love my older kids - my eight-year-old daughter, in particular, is such a fun, sensible girl, full of innocent big plans and so kind-hearted and reserved and book-loving that I could not be more pleased with her. I didn't go into child-raising to make better versions of myself, but if I had, I would be feeling pretty smug right now.

So would I wish her smaller again? Kind of. I'd like a do-over - obviously, however we've been raising her is working out very well, but I'd like to go back and hold her on the first day of her life again, full of the love that I have now for her. I would like to go back through her childhood again, and this time be conscious that time was fleeting. I spent so much of her very early years in a sulk, just trying to get through those endless molasses-timed days that I did not really notice that, as the old ladies were constantly warning me, this time would be gone before I noticed.

We used to live in a small city with a nice waterfront and friendly fat ducks that liked to be fed, so one day The toddler Girl and I went down with a bag of stale bread crumbs and threw them onto the water, silver in the sunshine. She was so happy, and I thought to myself that it was such a fun thing to do with her that I should really bring her back more often. And then we never went back again. If I had known that would be the one time we would ever have thrown bread to the ducks, I would have frozen that day in my heart, frozen the image of her toddler hand generously full of bread for the fat swimming ducks, the sound of her laughter. As it is, all I have is the vague memory of pleasure, this fleeting thing that happened one time and then never happened again.

I spent the weekend fully unpacking the kids' new bedroom. It's pretty cute now - the cheerful light bright green that we apparently have decided screams "youthful hijinks", lots of space, and a closet reading nook. Emboldened by my success, I decide to tackle the cheerfully-coloured quagmire that is their playroom and after a full day of that I threw myself down upon a floorful of poky stupid toys, wailing "O death where is thy sting?". Eventually my husband took serious pity on me and helped me tidy things up a bit, but we're in total agreement that our children have an obscene amount of toys.

And today I am toiling away, shuffling all of our impressive collection of children's books upstairs and reclaiming the downstairs shelves for my books (I was going to write "adult books", which sounded unintentionally lurid). Then I'm going to turn a small shelf unit in the office into a craft center which sounds so perky and fun until you realize that it's built upon BACK BREAKING LABOUR.

Anyhow. That's why posting has been a bit light the past couple of days. I'll be back tomorrow!

Aaaaaaaaaaaah!

Ack! I just spend AN HOUR writing this post about packing up outgrown baby clothing and what a big sentimental freak I am and blogger ate it. Now I am disgruntled and there is NO way that I am spending another hour rewriting it, so to sum up: outgrown baby clothing is both cute and sad. The end. The expanded version was WAY better. You're missing out.

On another, serious note, this is Parker:

Isn't he a cute little guy? Parker has extreme medical challenges and his family needs some help. Slurping Life is holding a fund-raising raffle to raise some money to help cover some of Parker's expenses. I can't imagine how terrifying it must be to have a child with serious medical needs, and Parker's family has to deal with crippling financial expenses as well. If you want, you can click on Parker's sweet little face and find out more.

I found it!

For some mysterious reason, tonight's post decided to go way under the candy post. What?! Anyhow, I fixed the date and here it is:

I spent tonight sorting out the kids' clothing and putting outgrown clothes aside for The Baby to grow into, into garbage bags to donate or into a large bin that exists only for sentimental purposes, should I ever want to clutch little bitty sleepers to myself and sing "Sunrise, Sunset." It's also been well documented scientifically that the second you clear the baby clothes out, you get pregnant again and then the poor baby has to wear dishtowels.

Newborn clothes are so TINY! Little wee! I've been known to coo over how cute little miniature bottles of shampoo are, so you can well imagine the depths of fatuity I descended into as I folded and sorted baby clothing that my children once wore. Well, The Boy never did, since he sensibly decided to skip being a newborn and came out weeks late, plump and hefty and the size of the other two at three months old. He just moved straight into Infant Leisure Clothing, little velour lounge suits. But the two girls - The Baby, especially - fit these impossibly tiny outfits, and since The Baby didn't grow much, she wore these little doll-sized clothes for ages. I wanted to pose The Baby with a tiny, tiny little t-shirt, but she quite sensibly shrieked "NO WAY!" and ran to her father, yelping "Help! Help! Mama scare me!".

There is something scary about this odd, maternal nostalgia, this urge backwards. A healthy child wants to get bigger, to eventually leave childhood behind, and who wants to think about their mother sobbing over little knitted sweaters that they once fit? It's odd how we can at once feel such pride in our lanky, suddenly-tall children and the startling underwater changes in their faces, and at the same time feel such grief for the absence of these babies, for the little toddler who wore fairy wings everywhere and called her favorite doll "Oval-Headed Baby," pragmatically enough. But mostly, I think, it is anticipatory grief, this sure knowledge of where the trajectory of all this growing will lead - away from us, and their constant love for us with them.

I cut her bangs tonight

"MAMA BROKE MY HAIR!" she announced loudly to my mom this evening. Oh hush. It looks great.

My husband and I talk about Canadian chocolate bars

Hey, if people are going to be uncivil in my comments, I'm just going to delete my posts. None of the incivility was aimed at me, but I don't like it when people aren't nice to each other. And to replace my two missing posts, here are my opinions on Canadian candy, NOW with my husband chirping in the background!

The Aero Bar - These are all right. The ads go on about the bubbles in them, but whatever.
My Husband says that these used to be his favorite when he was a kid.

Aero Caramel - I am unaware of these.
My husband: "Aero Caramel bar? What?"

Big Turk - My absolute favorite chocolate bar of ALL time. These are AWESOME. Gooey red stuff! Chocolate! Sometimes dusty packages!
My husband:"These are good too, if I can eat them before you do."

Bounty - These are, apparently, coconut wrapped in chocolate. I won't even go near the packages because I am allergic to coconut and choose life and all that.
My husband: "The fabric softener? They're coconutalicious."

Caramilk - Ick! These are The Boy's very favorite, and Canadian television had a long running series of ads, demanding to know the secret of how they got the caramel in the Caramilk bars. They're REALLY sweet.
My husband: "They do nothing for me."

Cherry Blossom - My dad used to get one of these in his Christmas stocking. The packaging - a little square box - has NOT changed one whit since the 70s. I've never eaten them.
My husband: "I think I had one of those once."

Coffee Crisp - I avoid these. I'm not a big coffee fan.
My husband: "It has the word coffee in it, so it has to be good. "

Crispy Crunch - These are vaguely vile.
My husband: "I seem to remember my father actually liking those." Important information: my husband's parents do not like chocolate.

Crunchie - These are disconcerting - it's yellow sponge toffee stuff covered in chocolate and you bite into it and it goes all over the place.
My husband: "Who? What?" Apparently, he is a drummer now.

Eat-More - Um, they're chewy?
My husband: "I like the hillbilly commercial. There used to be a hillbilly commercial and he puts on the gramophone and they're sitting around eating Eat-more Chocolate bars. Yeah. Good."

Fruit & Nut - This is the sort of chocolate bar that my mom likes, something with enough virtue in it to take the edge off the fun of eating candy. (I keeed, mom! I keeeeed!)
My husband: "Is that for squirrels?"

Glosette - Another big favorite of my mom's - raisins with dusty chocolate on them! Oh, the deliciousness!
My husband - "It's more fun then raisins without chocolate on them."

Jersey Milk - Apparently Jersey Cows are now milking out DELICIOUS CHOCOLATE, and God bless them for it. These are delicious, especially in little bitty Halloween bar size, where you don't suddenly want to die from eating a solid bar of chocolate.
My husband: "A classic." I bug him about saying this. "It's just chocolate, what do you want?"

KitKat Chunky - These might be the best thing in the world. I was addicted to these while I was pregnant with The Boy and gained 60 pounds. 60 pounds of chocolate.
My husband: "The chocolate bar that tells the future!"

Mackintosh's Toffee - This is really great if you're feeling like you have way too many teeth.
My husband: "I don't know."

Maltesers - The greatest food of all time. If they'd throw in some vitamins, I would live off them.
My husband: "They're good. I ate a bag of those once."

Pep - These are great if you like dusty chocolate and incredibly cloying mint, which apparently gives you pep. I'm notably lacking in anything like pep, so I don't eat them.
My husband: "I've never actually bought one."

Smarties - THEY HAVE GLUTEN IN THEM! WHY?!! They are like M&Ms but WAY better and cheerfully pastel.
My husband: "Over-hyped." I AM GETTING A DIVORCE!

Smarties! Mmm!
Sweet Marie - I haven't eaten one of these, but my husband just told me that they're like O Henry bars. With cookie in them. That doesn't sound appealling to me, so you can eat my share.
My husband: "These are too weird to eat for personal reasons."

Wunderbar - I don't think I've ever eaten one of these, but back in the 70s they had these great ads with vikings in them. And my dad used to like them. There is my store of knowledge of Wunderbars.
My husband: "It's like the superhero of chocolate bars that I don't eat."

I've been having trouble posting daily since the summer started - something about having three early rising kids home and needing constant amusement and fight referring has really sapped my muse, which apparently needs refreshing right now. Poor tired out muse. It needs a nap and possibly something stiff to drink.

My kids normally have a stern bedtime routine: if it's 7:30 and I've given birth to you, you had better be in bed, generally. But summer has BROKEN OUR PERFECT SCHEDULE. They've been staying up to previously unheard-of times - 8. NINE, EVEN. It's really been throwing me off - and The Girl has also wanted to hang out with me in the evenings and read poetry and novels aloud to each other, which is of course wistfully lovely and I'm happy to do it, but there goes the little bit of time that I had to myself in the day. I don't think anything needs fixing right now, but it is wearing me out, lacking those few hours that I normally get to myself.

Speaking of myself - geeeeeez. Whenever I post a picture of myself, I always feel like I should post the most distressingly unflattering picture I can find the next day, just to even things out. I won't, though, and if anyone who reads my blog ever meets me, will you EVER be disappointed.

The Boy had a distressing experience yesterday - we were in a gallery and he turned around quickly and sent a display of oars flying, which was VERY loud. Nothing was hurt, and the gallery owner said to him that she'd seen that it was a total accident and that she'd done the same thing herself that morning and that she needed to find another place to keep the oars, but he was mortified, standing with his back to the room and quietly sobbing. It was one of those moments that makes my heart just stop, my poor horrified child all alone and this whole room between us. I went to him and he could barely get out that it was an accident and that he was sorry and the poor gallery owner was nearly in tears, telling him that the only thing that upset her was how sad he was over the whole thing and that no harm was done, but he was just so sad. And then he got distracted by a display of giant glass balls and then he started fighting with The Girl over who should get to make stupid faces in the full-length mirror (answer: me), and by the time we left the store he'd forgotten all about it.

Of course, I haven't forgotten all about it, and will probably be stuck with the image of him mortified and inconsolable and across the room from me for the rest of my life, which is the annoying thing about mothers, I guess, that they remember every embarrassing little thing, long after you've moved on and have left that particular room, the wooden oars still on the floor but forgotten.

There and Back

It was a lovely wedding - a second wedding for my widowed 50-something first cousin, held in a tiny stone church on a rural dirt road, wildflowers growing high in the ditches, lushly pretty in the way that only five days of straight rain can bring. The Girl was deliriously happy to discover that she had a new Best Friend Forever in her second cousin once removed, her equally blond, clever, and pointy-elbowed double, and the two danced and danced and danced until we had to carry her off, weeping and disappointed. The Baby was a creep and a pill and was the cause of the premature end to our festivities, in the way of toddlers, but the dinner was great, the bridal couple was sweetly touching AND there was a free bar. A free bar! It was a good time.
Here's me, all dressed up:

I wore the brown wrap-front dress and it looked very nice, but no, I'm not going to post a full-length picture of myself, mainly because I didn't think to have anyone take one. It's a very cute dress, though, and one elderly, one-eyed, extremely drunk man thought I looked PRETTY cute. Lucky me! His wife pulled him away, telling him that he could come back and keep talking to the girl after she went home, but sadly, my admirer never returned. Perhaps he passed out.

Today I'm feeling a mite delicate, despite my admirable self-restraint at the free bar and relatively early night. Special family events are always so oddly poignant, this reminder that we are separated permanently from the daily lives of those we love but who choose so foolishly to move away from here. Even more poignant is the sudden realization that a whole decade has gone by since I've seen some of my cousins, people who live LESS THAN AN HOUR from me, cousins with sweet children the same age as mine and that time can't be brought back, and eventually family becomes people you see at weddings and funerals, the removes getting greater and greater until at some point your child will meet a complete stranger who looks like them, this mysterious and unknown family face.

Gone, gone, gone.

A cousin of mine is getting married today (hence the need for a dress!), so we're off to her wedding and also away for the weekend. I've been busy with the endless preparations for the past couple of days and now I have to make sure that everyone in my house is presentable.
I'll be back tomorrow, possibly with pictures.

Come eat at my house. Please.

I obsessively plan out our menus for the week, right down to what we're having for breakfast. There are some practical reasons for this - we're on a tight budget AND I have a child with Celiac Disease, so planning helps with that, but mostly I'm just a control freak. Oh, and I love thinking about food and there's nothing more fun for me than sitting down with a big stack of cookbooks and food magazines and making big plans for the week. Let's go through this week's plan, shall we?

On Sunday we had: Ranch Pasta Salad, Salsa Sloppy Joes (with ground turkey) and Strawberry Spritzers.
Reaction: This is one of the kids' favorite meals, hands down. Golly. My husband, however, kept throwing me suffering looks, because I was making him eat a PASTA SALAD and it had RANCH DRESSING. Oh, the pain.

On Monday we had: Sweet and Savoury Ribs from the crockpot, garlic mashed potatoes, steamed broccoli, and feta veggie salad.
Reaction: The children were uniformly repulsed. In fact, The Boy sobbed all through supper and at one point wailed out "Why do we always have to eat such disgusting food?". Why, indeed.

On Tuesday we had: Manicotti with Spicy Sausage, which is not what I'd planned but after the big hit the day before I wanted to make a supper that the kids would eat. They all had thirds, so that worked out.

On Wednesday we had: Lime Herb Chicken, Colourful Lentil Salad and Rice.
Reaction: The kids ate the rice.

In conclusion: my kids are brats. I'm doing another crockpot thing today - some Greek Chicken with Garlic, and I'm also going to be making quinoa, steamed asparagus, and some sliced raw tomatoes. My guess is that the kids will eat the asparagus and leave everything else pristine and untouched.

I'm feeling a little bit discouraged - I've been told by impartial parties that I'm a good cook (in fact, I have a drawer stuffed full of baking prize ribbons), so I don't think it's that the food here actually IS disgusting. Some of my friends have just shruggingly resigned themselves to making frozen french fries and chicken fingers for the rest of their children's childhoods but I cannot do that. It's too disgusting (for reals) and too nutritionally vile. I spent part of yesterday at the doctor's office talking with her about The Girl's height and weight issues (she's teeny. She got asked THREE TIMES yesterday if she's going into grade one this year and she's EIGHT.), and we both agree that her problem is that she DOES NOT EAT. If one takes the week I just mentioned as fairly standard, you can see that my kids eat supper every other night which isn't great. So we're cutting her milk consumption radically and I don't know what else. But there's what my husband and I like to eat and what the kids will eat and the two are at serious odds and I don't know what to do.

Yesterday

At some point yesterday - after I'd written the ambitious summer fun list - I was stricken down by a severe migraine by the Cruel Gods of Hubris and had to phone and beg my parents to take my children far, far away for the afternoon while I passed out on the couch. They very obligingly did, and my children had a whirlwind tour of all the fun that Little Town has to offer - a trip to the hardware store! a visit to the library, where they put on a puppet show! a snack at the restaurant! They were gone for several hours and I slept heavily the whole time they were gone.

I had the awful migraine all day, although it calmed down a bit after my nap. Once the kids got home, we put together a huge tray of stuffed manicotti (and a small tray of gluten-free stuffed manicotti, too, this constant twin supper that I have to make now) and then played several rounds of Old Maid, with my head throbbing and me convinced that I was going to die at any second. Outside, the sky was getting dark and a high, ominous wind was roaring around the house.

Later that evening, a friend dropped by with a dress for me to try on, in case I don't like any of the dresses that I ordered, and then we sat on my porch, eating the gluten-free graham crackers that I'd made (tasty!) and watching the storm roll in, lightening strobing across the sky. She went home and the kids were floating around downstairs getting ready for bed and I was writing an email (still with the headache! Still!) when there was a sudden burst of noise in the kitchen and there was my friend and her 8 year old son and a shoebox full of baby rabbits that he had taken away from their dog, poor shivering wet baby things. The kids pet them (disease! rabbit disease!) and we talked, desperately, about what she could possibly feed them. I found her a medicine dropper and we decided on Carnation Milk, which kept my premature grandmother alive at the very turn of the century and so is probably what baby rabbits need, and then they ran back out into the storm with their fragile, doomed cargo and I washed my kids' hands.

It was all of 8 o clock and my husband suggested that I take my headache to bed and go to sleep, so I did. I woke up in the middle of the night and the storm was over and so was my migraine, just a calm night with streetlights shining up and down the wet street.

Edited to add: I ordered these two dresses. They're cheap! They're pretty! I can wear them to lots of things, assuming that they don't make me look like a hearty farmhand:

Keeping The Monsters Happy

I sort of truly hate it when I assume the mantel of Knowledgeable Motherhood, since I'm somewhat gormless in real life and right now my kids are keeping busy by watching Rolie Polie Olie. But whatever: here's a list of things to do with kids during the summer, especially older toddler-preschool aged kids, since I've always found that keeping them happy during summer days can be a bit trickier. So here you go - my big list of ideas:
1. Cut out paper dolls.
2. If it's raining outside, have the kids really quickly scribble with some watercolours on paper and then dash the paper outside to be rained on. Afterwards, you can see what the rain did to your paintings.
3. Make homemade popsicles.
4. Very little kids can be amused for ages with a sheet of dollar store stickers and a piece of construction paper.
5. Make potato prints - very, very fun.
6. Save your grocery store fliers and let the kids cut out the food pictures to make collages. "Healthy food" is a big one at our house; slightly older kids can do four food group collages.
7. Fingerpainting is lots of fun outside and making your own fingerpaint will make you feel like a genius.
8. Make a little puddle of paint on a big piece of paper and let your little guy drive his little cars through the paint to make attractive car-tire paintings.
9. Line a shoebox with a piece of paper and dip some marbles in paint. Plunk them in the box, put the lid on and twirl everything around.
10. Make an on-going little car city from well-rinsed out milk cartons (covered in construction paper and decorated) and boxes.
11. Read Blueberries for Sal and make blueberry muffins.
12. String Cheerios or Froot Loops on string licorice to make lovely, lovely jewelry.
13. Make blanket forts. You can also make them outside on the clothesline.
14. Make fairy houses.
15. Make a batch of cupcakes. When they're cool, give the kids several bowls of icing in different colours and some tubes of icing for piping, and lots of different bowls of candy for decorating. We do this about once a summer and it's always a huge hit, as you may imagine.
16. Fill the old baby tub with water and see what floats and what sinks.
17. Make ice blocks (old diaper wipe boxes are great molds). Add food colouring and small plastic toys and coins. You can put the ice blocks in the wading pool or if you make enough of them, they can build with them.
18. Fill up the old baby tub (again!) and bath all the dolls. Wash their clothes and hang them on the porch to dry.
19. Or have a little car wash.
20. Give the kids a bucket of water and clean house painting brushes and let them paint the car, the house or the fence.
21. Get a giant fridge box and let it hang out inside for a while. The kids can haul pillows and books inside for a lovely playhouse (especially if you cut out doors and windows) or you can get energetic and make it into a spaceship. My husband crafted one into a pirate ship once, but he's extra crafty.
22. Make paper plate masks.
23. Teach them how to make paper fans and then have them fan you while you loll about.
24. Make a bracelet from a loop of construction paper and put double sided tape on the outside. Then when you go for a walk, you and your child can look for treasures to decorate their bracelet.
25. Make a tricycle obstacle course.
26. A bunch of playdough, some cookie cutters, a plastic rolling pin and some paper lunch bags = their very own bakery.
27. Get some felt and make attractive doll (or stuffed animal or action figure) clothing. Vests are always stylish, and there's nothing more timeless than a kicky poncho.

What do YOU do to keep little kids busy in the summer?

The Munchkin Health News

The Girl has low iron - as I suspected - and some of her test results are a bit odd because of a suspected untreated strep infection that she had at some point that's still affecting her immune system. And there is nothing worse then that going on.

Phew.

It was scary making that phone call. Not that I expected anything more serious than the results we have, but the possibility was scary. I spent the weekend trying very, very hard not to picture worst case scenarios and always ended up making myself sob hysterically because I am LIKE THAT. One of my friends mentioned off-hand the other day that she was not a worrier, and I was like "REALLY. HUH. Because that is what I am GOOD AT." That and decorating cupcakes and thinking up ways to keep babies busy (put pieces of tape on the ends of their fingers! It doesn't keep them HAPPY but it does keep them occupied.) and making supper and remembering the lyrics to pretty much any song I've ever heard.

So The Girl is drifting languidly around right now, with her Interesting Test Results to think about and big plans for the afternoon and I have the happy knowledge that although things aren't perfect right now, a little bit of time and some iron tablets will fix them right up. All that worrying for nothing - you'd think there might be some lesson hidden within this story someplace but I don't see it because I am dumb and stubborn and worrying is my ancestral love language, the way that generations of women in my family have shown that they loved, love that manifests itself as warm sweaters and thermoses of soup and lectures, the kind of love that a child must outgrow and step away from to become an adult, to have their own life.

Sometimes I realize with a bit of a start that I have three kids, which is sort of a funny thing to realize since you'd think that I'd know that ALL the time, but knowing and understanding are different things, and there's this all at once feeling of intense maternal pride in my little staircase line of children following behind me, like ducklings. Crabby, crabby little ducklings. But the price of this fierce joy is the constant undercurrent of fear, this fretful new heartbeat that exists as our compass in this new world.

Help Me, Interwebs!

I have a wedding (and here's how out of it I am - it didn't even occur to me that I should mention that it's a more casual outdoor wedding, as is the other wedding later in the summer) I have to go to next Saturday and nothing to wear so I have to order a dress TODAY. So here's the Sears page with all the dresses and I have NO CLUE - I'm buxom (which means no to spaghetti straps or halter dresses), carrying a bit of extra weight right now (mostly around my waist. HOTT.) and don't want to look frumpy but also don't want to look like I'm trolling for groomsmen. So help me out! Suggest away!

(and as for test results for The Girl - probably not until Monday afternoon. I'm not terribly worried, really.)

Go check out

Bonnie's crazy Lego cake! She always makes the BEST birthday cakes for her kids.

Hey, so my big Girl had her hair all cut off today.

I liked her long, wild blond tangle of hair - she looked full beautiful, a faery's child - but she was tired of her long hair, tired of it constantly needing brushing, tired of it getting snarled in bubblegum, tired of it catching on tree branches, and she wanted it gone.

She donated her entire long braid to Locks of Love, entirely of her own volition. The women at the hairdresser's were fussing over her, telling her what a kind-hearted girl she is, and The Girl just had this gently exasperated look on her face, like this really didn't need saying. She just met her own grey-green eyes gravely and calmly in the mirror, resolved and certain.

I sat in the uncomfortable waiting chairs at the hairdressers and occasionally sounded out like a dramatic chorus ("It's not too late to change your mind, you know.") and now she looks like Christopher Robin or a little Parisian girl in 1921. She is sitting lankily on the couch, writing a story, fully as stubborn as her mother and her hair civilized and utterly her own.

Things That Worry Me About Some Popular Children's Shows

(Edited to add: AAAAH! Check out this post of Ali's! I am such a plagarist!)
1. Okay, so it's been claimed that it was Emily Elizabeth's love that made Clifford grow so big that the Howards had to leave their home. Really? Her LOVE? Has no one looked into the medical causes of his gigantism any further? Perhaps they should check and see if there was a leaky nuclear plant next door.
2. On Timothy Goes To School, the girls wear dresses and the boys wear shirts. And occasionally jackets. Has no one introduced them to the concept of pants?
3. Is the living toilet on Rolie Polie Olie truly happy?
4. If so, is it really the sort of thing one would want around one's children?
5. Little Bear is a child and lives with his wonderful parents (seriously, Mother Bear is my role-model as a mother). His friends appear to be children and live... completely alone. Are they orphans? Or are they adults and Little Bear's parents are cool with their kid playing with weird adults who live in the bush?
6. It's been asked before but WHERE ARE MAX AND RUBY'S PARENTS?
7. Dear Wonder Pets: Ming Ming The Ducking needs speech therapy. Also, I don't think an all-celery diet is adequate for ducklings, guinea pigs or turtles.
8. Are Babar and Celeste related? They look an awful lot alike.
9. I recognize some of the animal-characters on Backyardigans: Pablo is a penguin, Austin is a kangaroo, Tasha is a hippo and Tyrone is a moose. BUT WHAT THE HECK IS UNIQUA?
10. Do Dora's parents secretly not like her very much or do they drink? I mean, what sort of parents allows their children to go by bubbling volcanoes, grumpy trolls and hungry alligators all by themselves and ON A DAILY BASIS?
11. And how healthy is it for Dora to be hanging out with a monkey all the time, anyhow?
12. What happens to the animate machines on Bob The Builder when they wear out?
13. Is it just me or is there a whole lot of tension between Bob and Wendy?
14. Why did they replace the crush-tastic Steve on Blue's Clues with the cloddish eunuch Joe?

The Girl has her BFF over and they have taken over the living room, building an elaborate blanket fort with The Boy's help. The Baby is helping too, in that she keeps taking the blanket roof down. They are playing an elaborate game of pretend - BFF is The Mom, The Boy is the five-year old son, The Baby is the two-year-old daughter and The Girl is, at her own suggestion, the slave who sells things at the market. Things like eggs and toys. The dad, they announced, died.

They could play happy games. Their lives are, for the most part, remorselessly happy and untouched yet by anything dark and yet they persist in playing such gloomy games, the dopes. They don't bear The Adult's Burden, the scary stuff that we're expected to stagger around with - and yet who actually is happy as a child? They lack proportion - this morning, The Boy was ousted from the computer and sat distraught on the floor, wailing "THIS IS THE WORST DAY IN MY LIFE!". Maybe it was.

It was a nice sunny day until a few minutes ago when the skies dramatically darkened and thunder started rolling in and all outdoor play was cancelled, the kids scattering back into the house in their sunhats and bright t-shirts and if this was a novel, it might be a dramatic warning of possible danger to come but this is life and what it means is that they're playing Junior Scrabble and squabbling.

The Girl had her blood tests done yesterday. It was heart-rending - she cried through all of it - but it was over quickly and honestly, I'm not horribly worried right now. I like to think that if something was truly wrong with one of my kids, I WOULD be worried and there would be signs, like a sky suddenly darkening out of nowhere on a bright summer day. Actually, what I really like to think is that my children are safe, immune from danger, and that the only suffering they'll know is the pretend kind, the kind you can walk away from, your best friend at your side.

Blood

This morning has been a busy one already, this suddenly hectic day. Later this morning - in about an hour - I am taking The Girl to visit the doctor where she will have some blood drawn to test, I mention casually, her white blood cell count.

Yeah, nothing scary there.

Most likely she has allergies. Or she's anemic - she certainly doesn't EAT and I'm prone to anemia, too. But there's that other scary thing that they're testing for and let us not even name it right now.

In one of Alice Munro's stories, which I can't think of offhand, the narrator is bringing her four-year-old daughter by bus to the hospital to test for the very same thing that I'm pretending that my child is not getting checked for this morning. The narrator mentions that she's pulling away from her daughter as a protective mechanism, just in case, and even as a childless woman I remember a shock of horror reading that story, and now as a mother who has had one serious health scare with one of her children (which I am not counting as this, which is just a routine precaution and Likely Nothing) I can tell you that using me as the standard of normalcy for motherhood (and why not?) that story has no emotional truth. Not a word.

Another thing that I read about Alice Munro - in something that one of her daughters wrote, I think - is that she deliberately maintained a severe emotional distance from her children so that they would not interrupt her writing. Her babies, the article said, were only picked up to be fed and changed so that they would not disturb her sacred creative process. Huh, I thought. Alice Munro was a crappy mother.

I don't self-identify much as a writer. I've had a few things published in very minor ways, pre-motherhood, but having children has derailed whatever creative process I might possess (and lest this seem unfair, it's disrupted my husband's creativity, too. They're equal opportunity disrupters.). I can't write - not REALLY - while I'm parenting small children full-time. I just can't - they have supplanted the part of me where the words are kept right now, and so what? There's lots of time when they're not so small and even if there isn't - even if this is all the time I get - the truly sacred part of my life is in the living room right now, eating Rice Krispies and watching cartoons and laughing, and there are lots of books, lots of clever writers and the world can live without any books from me, ever, but I cannot do without that girl, her life written throughout her in blood.

Back home and tired.

I watched the fireworks through a bedroom window last night, two towns worth cracking distantly over the lake. The bedroom I was in was just a frame of a bedroom, set in just the frame of a house at my in-laws' camp and it was coldcoldcold all night, sleeping with sweatshirts and huddled together and still waking up stiff and half-frozen and stumbling out into the 5 in the morning sunlight, the memory of last night's fireworks far away and half remembered.


I made my oldest daughter a crown of daisies yesterday and she wore it running around with her step-cousins, laughing with sun and flowers in her hair. It's the time of year when there's too much beauty everywhere, too much to take in and certainly too much to appreciate. Daisies, trefoil, wild roses, sturdy unknown yellow flowers upright and brazen and most beautiful of all, the blue chicory that lines the highway, the prettiest colour in the world. When I was a child, I used to yearn to eat the pretty blue flowers, to taste that blue on my tongue, not knowing that they would taste, bitterly, of coffee and dust.

Travelling with a bunch of small kids is not very relaxing (I read that sentence to my husband and he laughed, wearily). The first thing I did after arriving home today was to fall asleep on the couch for three hours and I woke up fretful, wanting bologna sandwiches and hot milk after the weekend's reminders that everyone we love is getting old, old, making me retreat to childhood's lying comfort of permanence and safety.

Feral kittens live in a box in my grandma's garage, pretty dirty blue-eyed things that hissed when I came near, knowing already that the world means them harm. They were lovely little things, though, and if only they hadn't been quite so scratchy, we'd likely have brought one home where it could have had a cossetted, spoiled long life, peeing on the dirty towels on occasion and getting lugged around by small well-meaning children. But character is destiny and so they'll live out their days in my grandma's garage until they don't anymore.

We haven't seen fireworks in years, not really - our kids are too small and too crabby to keep up until ten and we tend to spend Canada Day in very small towns that have nowhere near the budget for fireworks and anyhow, all the guys in these towns are too old to safely light them. But it was nice to head home again, back to our house with walls AND windows and our own fat friendly cats who had very nicely arranged a chewed-up mouse for our arrival home.

Not home yet but getting there.