Costumes!

All gone!

Halloweiners

Here is the cannibal pumpkin and its terrified victim:

Of course, shortly after this picture was taken, Victim Pumpkin fell out face first on the table. I think we should have secured him in there with something.

And here are this year's cupcakes - I was REALLY worn out last night, so they're simple. I still think they worked out nicely, anyhow. These are for The Boy's class:

And these are for The Girl's class:
Simple and eerie.

I also dyed The Girl's hair last night - she now sports a head of vivid, cartoon-character red hair, to her INTENSE delight. I strongly suspect that come her teen years, we can bid her natural hair colour adieu... anyhow, we had experimented with spray-on temporary colours in previous years, but they were sticky and ran and just were NASTY. So now she's going to have stop sign red hair for 8 to 10 hair washes, which should be a fun couple of weeks. On another note: what is with her and red haired Halloween costumes? She has been Pippi Longstockings, Atomic Betty, and this year she is Ruby Gloom, wearing a black velvet dress, striped tights and elaborate makeup, her hair teased up like a crimson-haired Robert Smith. Her dad sculpted perfect little heart-and-crossbone buckles out of silcone and then made poured-metal copies - and last night he replaced the buckles on her Mary Janes with them.

The Boy is going as this - his dad made the WHOLE costume. My husband REALLY loves Halloween because it gives him a chance to use a whole range of his talents that don't normally come up on a day to day basis - while I just find it a whole lot of slogging around town in the cold and the dark, with my children begging to go "Just one more block, mom!". One year I really livened things up by suddenly coming down with the flu and throwing up dramatically in the ditch while The Boy stood behind me aghast and lecturing that "IT IS RUDE TO THROW UP ON STRANGER'S LAWNS, MAMA!". It certainly is.

And The Baby's costume is the princess dress that has shown up in photos several times over the past month - so basically, she's going in her everyday clothes. I haven't written about how she's been liking her morning of daycare: she loves it. Of course, whether the other children love having her THERE is perhaps a bit in question, because she's a little bit "assertive." "In your face." "Tiny pit bull-esque." The daycare teachers hand her back to me with a dazed "Boy, she's BUSY, isn't she?". Yes indeedy, like a little throughly unamused Queen Victoria who will not take ANY crap from any one. And my other two kids are so gentle...

I will be going as a tired mother with dark circles under my eyes.

And I am posting AGAIN!

Okay, so much for my intention to just do a short post today - obviously, if I don't do a normal post every day, I have this constant spill-over. But anyhow...
If you have school-aged kids (and I'm pretty serious about this - my five year old was scared but my eight year old was delighted), here's a really fun online game for tonight. It's a point-and-click scavanger hunt and there ARE online walkthroughs, should you be a family of CHEATERS!b

Stalling on that whole "Housework" thing.

Look what I made the big pumpkin do:

The Baby is STRONGLY opposed. True genius is never appreciated.

The Day Before Halloween

Our Jack-O-Lanterns are very terrifying! Especially the guy on the left, who is already rotten.

So today is going to be really busy: I have to plot out the cupcakes for the kids' classes tomorrow, make sure all of the Halloween costumes are set out and that there are warm things to wear underneath, find the trick-or-treating bags, send shopping lists to my husband at work AND clean up the house, because it's a total mess.

Which means that I'll see you tomorrow, hopefully with fun new cupcake photos!

It's Monday

and I was feeling poor this weekend. But I'm not anymore. You can read all about it at The Kitchen Party (and also find a VERY EXCELLENT recipe for gingerbread.). See you there!

Oh, the things we think before we have kids! I spent some time amusing myself by coming up with big lists of my pre-child beliefs that time has proven OH SO WRONG:

1. Only wooden toys can fully express the total soulfulness of my children.
2. Homeschooling - the thing for us!
3. No team sports. Team sports foster competitiveness and my wee darlings might be HURT.
4. No board games, in fact. That whole competitiveness thing. We will play only non-competitive games wherein we gather apples together and bring them to the sleeping giant and then join hands and sing Kumbaya.
5. The Family Bed: what a grand thing.
6. Television is the root of all evil. My children will instead spend their time studying Latin flashcards and playing the harp.
7. I will have easy, uncomplicated pregnancies. My children will be born exactly at 40 weeks after a painless and drug-free two hour labour. Breastfeeding will come easily and there will be no problems, since problems only occur in women who aren't committed enough.
8. Post-partum depression is for sissies.
9. People will universally think that my decision to be a stay-at-home mom is AWESOME.
10. Spending all day with a small baby is really relaxing.

This is not to say that any of these things might not be true for your family - each family is unique - but what has ended up working out and being true for US was totally different. Mostly what I realize is what a callow, self-centered girl I was before having my children, how I thought parenting would be all about ME, when it's really about raising up and nurturing my replacements, these clarion-voiced people who grow taller every day. And there's no real shortcut to that knowledge, I guess - you only get there by travelling there and no one can tell you any different. For me, the first hint that my ideals might not have any real use in my new life happened almost as soon as they placed that red-faced, squalling newborn into my arms and now I feel like any idealism I ever had about parenting has been tumbled off me, like a water-smoothed stone.

But you don't know any of this before you have kids - how could you? So all I can do is wish prospective parents well and try not to snicker TOO much.

************
Okay, here's the diet info - I'm using this free diet-and-exercise tracking website. You tell it how much you weigh, some health information and how much you'd like to weigh and (if the goal weight is reasonable and you have a sane time frame) the website figures out how many calories you need to eat everyday and how much and what sort of exercise you should be doing. I've found it very gentle and doable.

The Little Engine That Could

So guess what I've been doing for the past couple of weeks?
I've been on a DIET. Isn't that awful?

When I had my first child, my weight settled in at about 132 pounds, which HORRIFIED ME. Oh, I was so fat, I decided, despite my being on the modestly tall side. I'd spent my entire life looking like a stick bug and suddenly I was a curvaceous woman and it freaked me out. For the first year of my daughter's life, I dressed in frumpy, oversized clothing, unsure of what a mother should look like and what my new body meant. Matters were NOT made better when I went for a tour of a women's health club and being told by the bird-sized, balding female instructor that I should lose "30 pounds." Um, really? I like being slender as much as the next person, but even I recognize that 102 pounds is a BIT on the way too freaking skinny side for a woman who is 5'7". At the time, though, I just stood there, feeling like a bloated, hideous freak.

So then I had The Boy and added on another ten pounds.
Then I had The Baby. Add 10 more. Then I had a rough winter last year and my weight went all the way up to (I'm flinching as I write this) 160 pounds. Not morbidly obese at my height - hardly heavy, in fact - but a bit too much. I spent a lot of time ranting in my head about this society's narrow standard of beauty, how I had better things to do than exercise, how much I love baking and cooking and so on but finally I just had it with myself. I didn't feel good. I didn't look good in clothes. And I realized, with a horrible, startling clarity that if I kept eating and gaining the way I was, I would one day BE obese. Hence, the diet.

I've lost nine pounds so far - just by counting calories and making myself go for a daily walk or jog or riding the exercise bike or whatever - and it hasn't actually been miserable, aside from that first day when I used up all of my allotted calories by lunchtime and went to bed starving and weepy. Der. And so now I have only 21 pounds left to go, I think, to get to the point where I feel happy with my appearance again and stop feeling that shock of miserable surprise whenever I walk by the mirror. Here's hoping....

Oh, my heart.

This morning I was on the usual frantic pant search for The Boy (and yes, I do know that I should lay his clothing out the night before. I am disorganized.), finding only pants with holes in the knees. Finally, I gave up and gave him a holey pair, apologizing while I did.

"That's okay, mama," The Boy said. "I know that you are doing your best."

I was unmanned for quite a few minutes.

Here is the same sour cream waffle recipe as the one I use. To make them gluten free, I substituted 3/4 cup sweet rice flour and 1/4 cup potato flour, with a 1/2 tsp of xanthum gum. They tasted like REAL waffles, which was EXCELLENT! And waffles are easy, by the way - I MUCH prefer making them to pancakes, which I nearly always scorch. And The Girl would like me to tell everyone that she made herself a really good sandwich for lunch - garlicy hummus and alfalfa sprouts on 12 grain bread. And did I mention that she politely passed on the chocolate chocolate chip cookies? I have no words, really.

And so I'm off to order new pants for The Boy, who is an excellent guy even though he is rather hard on his clothes, and legwarmers for my girls, who have chilly legs and need the awesome warmth that only legwarmers can provide, feeling much happier after a rather Lonely Joe week.

I have been a gluten-free cooking MACHINE today - this morning I made The Baby sour cream waffles and they turned out perfectly:

Those are some normal looking waffles, all right.

The other two kids had those awful toaster waffles which they inexplicably prefer. The Baby and I felt pretty darn smug about our superior tasting waffles, let me tell you. And this afternoon, we made gingerbread men together which was lots of fun, because what's more fun than baking with a toddler who gets into everything? Oh, not much. They ALSO turned out perfectly, too.

"And why did you not pipe wee icing details on those nude gingerbread men?" you may be thinking. Because it is FREAKING OCTOBER. I only frost cookies for special occasions, thank you. The waisin-application - thanks to The Baby - was pretty spiffy, though.

I'm pretty exhausted right now - it's been a busy week - so I'll be back tomorrow with a more exciting post. Well, it would have to be, right?

The Baby is reclining back in her little foam chair, watching television and chewing, thoughtfully, on some macaroni. She has a toddler's taste in food - hot dogs! macaroni and cheese! cookies! (that one is shared with her mother) - and she also has a severe autoimmune disorder that affects every single thing she can possibly ever eat.

I don't remember, until the moment she was diagnosed, ever giving children with severe food issues much of a thought. We knew some children with peanut allergies, and I have minor food allergies but there wasn't any real reason for me to spend much time thinking about it. And then I had The Baby and she just did not do well, spending her whole first year unwell and skinny and failing to thrive, poor girl. She got to her first birthday and didn't weigh 15 pounds - her birth weight was over 7 pounds so she was doing very poorly - and I've written about the endless medical appointments and testing that then followed.

We knew we were going to hear some sort of news the day she was diagnosed. I dressed her with a sort of desperate care and stared at her all of the long trip to her pediatrician's, desperate not to lose sight of this child who might soon vanish from my sight altogether. I carried her into the office, leaving my husband waiting, white-faced, with The Boy. And then everything was suddenly okay. She just had Celiac Disease and nothing worse.

So this is why her weight is such a huge deal - gaining weight means that the early damage is healing and that her body is now able to absorb nutrients the way it should.

Right now, I'm looking up cookie recipes for Christmas, gingerbread men in particular. Oh, how she longs for gingerbread men with, she tells me firmly, waisin eyes. We may try this recipe this week, just to make sure that it works and is appropriately gingerbread mannish, and if not, well. There are 62 days until Christmas to find the perfect gingerbread man recipe for a little tiny girl who is running as fast as she can.

My Kitchen Party Post is Up!

In it, I touch briefly upon the annual Sisyphean torment that is making caramel apples (Will I ever learn? Likely not.) and am full of quickly resolved angst. Find it here!

On The Rutabaga

A rutabaga is:
- a Swede, if you are in Europe (apparently).
- a yellow turnip, if you are Canadian.
It's a large, purplish root vegetable with an unique, bitter taste. I've normally eaten them mashed with butter and brown sugar and I've only ever eaten them at my parent's house, although I do have one sitting squattly on my dishwasher right now. I may or may not cook it.

Apparently - according to the Wikipedia article I linked to - they were the ancient symbol for a damned soul, which might go some way towards explaining the taste. We might carve ours up with the pumpkins next week and hang it on the porch with a tea light inside, maybe. It would beat EATING it, certainly. And my dad was boiling up a big cauldron of wax so he could dip each rutabaga - once waxed, they'll keep all winter in the cold cellar. His invitation to me and The Baby was a joking one, since I burn myself on our reasonably safe stove just CONSTANTLY and a two year old does NOT make the best wax boiling assistant, believe it or not.

My older two kids - wow, do I ever feel like I have a lot of children when I put it like that - spent the night away from home. The Boy had a sleepover at his grandparents (and did they feed him rutabagas? I don't know.) and phoned home from the spare bedroom (AKA MY OLD ROOM) at bedtime to tell me that there was "nothing as cozy as talking on the phone in bed." The Girl is at her First Sleepover At A Friend's House, and since we didn't have any middle of the night phonecalls to go and retrieve her, I'm assuming she's fine. We're due to pick her up in half an hour, so I guess we'll see then. I'm expecting her to be crabby. And The Baby is really enjoying having her parents to herself - right now, she's forcing her father to read her vast stacks of loathsome board books.

So that's our Sunday - throw in some church, some caramel apples, tidying the house and making Sunday supper, and I'm nicely recharged and happy again after a long week that's now over. Hope your Sunday is good to you, too.

Krafting And Kooking

If you're looking for a Halloween craft to do with a young preschooler, The Baby and I have a suggestion:
Construction paper pumpkins! Just cut a pumpkin out of orange construction paper and arm your young artiste with a black crayon or marker or black paint and let them get to it.

There are lots of variants on this craft: a white ghost, a black cat... and you can also use some stickers, should you have them, or glitter glue or whatever you like. Our pumpkins got taped up in the kitchen, where they look VERY festive. And now we are out of orange construction paper until the weekend.

And speaking of this weekend - we're going to go on a walk and gather up fallen acorns, which we're going to paint orange and then draw wee little jack-o-lantern faces on with a black sharpie. This idea comes straight from Family Fun magazine, which is just the only parenting magazine I can even be bothered with. We're also going to be making homemade caramel apples, which I'll probably be writing about at the Kitchen Party, unless it's such a miserable experience that I refuse to ever speak of it again. The odds of that are pretty much 50/50. The odds of me burning myself on homemade caramel AGAIN? Pretty much 100%.

And here's another fascinating offer: my dad is offering to let me help him wax rutabagas. Um, what?

Story Time With The Girl

The Girl was so enchanted with the reception her stories have had before on my blog that she's spent the past week working on the following for all of you (this time with cleaned-up spelling):

Foo-Foo And Coo-Coo
Once there were two lovely princesses - not.
They lived in a huge hedge.
They ate with their feet.
They went up a tree.
A porcupine poked them. Then lightening hit the tree and Foo-Foo and Coo-Coo fell into the river.
When they got out they said "We need to have a bath." So they jumped in a mountain of poo.
Whey they got home, Coo-Coo said "I am tired of being called Coo-Coo. Rememwber what our names actually are? Mine is Ezabela and yours, Foo-Foo, is Siafea. I am going to move back into the castle and take regular baths and be a regular princess."
And so she did.
The end.

Hee hee, I think she's so cute. I'm a little bit worried about where Poo Mountain came from in her story, but perhaps she'll go into its history in a future story. I literally cannot wait.

BULLETIN BULLETIN BULLETIN

Big news: At her doctor's visit this afternoon, it was discovered that THE BABY IS NOW A REASONABLE WEIGHT AND HEIGHT!
That's right: She's soared up from under the bottom percentile and is now pushing everyone around at the 25% mark. So look out for her and her hard-won 25 pounds! She's not even that puny anymore - she's still shortish but she's GROWING!
I am SO happy. (and my headache feels pretty much better, thanks.)

These Are A Few Of My Favorite Things

Is there anything more fun than getting a present in the mail?

Look what Lisa Leonard sent me:

Pretty! I really liked a lot of her other designs, too - this one and this one in particular. I think there's something almost magical about handmade jewelry - handmade anything, really. I always have big plans to make my own Christmas gifts before remembering that I basically have big paddles for hands and that I'm not exactly talented in the crafting department (unless you want me to make you something out of construction paper. I am the Queen of Construction Paper.). I have to rely on other people's cleverness and talent if I want to give people soulful gifts...

I also have a wickedly awful headache today. I'm going to go take something and maybe couch out for a while. See ya.

The Elegant Life

So this morning I was lounging about the house, talking on the phone to my husband and casually standing around sans pants and idly looking through a basket of clean laundry, deciding what I should wear that day when I looked up and realized that a car had just pulled into my driveway.

"Oh, swearword*!" I gasped and dropped the phone on the floor while immediately pulling on my discarded pajama pants and I actually managed to be fully dressed (if somewhat slatternly) by the time by friend knocked on the door. And the moral of this story is DO NOT GET DRESSED IN YOUR LIVING ROOM, but I already KNEW that. The Baby was cheerfully painting and I didn't want to leave her unsupervised - so I don't know what the moral actually ends up being. SLEEP IN YOUR CLOTHES, maybe, or GET DRESSED AT A DECENT HOUR. I don't know.

This probably happened to Grace Kelly ALL the time.

Hey, my Uncle Ron and Aunt Lori are blogging now! He's an amazing nature photographer - you've probably seen his work many times - and they go on incredible adventures together. They haven't yet blogged about how awesome it is to be related to me, but they're probably saving that for a special occasion. You should check out their blogs and say hey.

* Not actually what I said. My vocabulary is astonishingly colourful at times. This is one of the big differences between Real Me and Blog Me, who is a bit prim.

It's Monday and I'm fat!

Go check out the Kitchen Party and you'll find out why.

The ol' onion belt thing - I was quoting Grandpa Simpson. What I meant was "I am boringly rambling on about nothing!". We stopped watching the Simpsons right around the time we had The Girl, so it's funny that lines from the show have stuck in my head for so long. It takes the place in my head which otherwise would hold the whereabouts of my keys and my bankcard, unfortunately.

And now I'm off to do houseworky sort of things. Bleh.

A Few Mysteries - SOLVED!

1. My grandma is on the mend. Thanks for all of the prayers and good thoughts.
2. A flour bin is an olde fashioned kitchen thing where there's a drawer that looks like a cupboard but is instead a deep bin to keep bags of flour in. I also keep my aprons, dishtowels and tablecloths in the abyss, as well as white, wheat, cake and pastry and self-rising flours.
3. The gluten-free flours are kept in another cupboard. In case you were curious.
4. "Meat, Macaroni and Cheese Loaf" is DISGUSTING - and apparently Canadian only! It's a sandwich meat - made of pork and beef bits, I believe - with little chunks of processed cheese and macaroni in it. Then there's Olive Loaf, which has little bits of olive in it, along with the cheese and macaroni. I took my camera to the grocery store to get a picture of these epicurean delights but my kids were being really, really annoying, which preempted any picture-taking plans.
5. My baby brother is safely in Winnipeg! I am a big panicky freak!
6. I just tried out the new Nina Ricci perfume and now I am seriously WANTING it - my gosh, it smells BEAUTIFUL. But instead of dropping $75 on a coveted bottle of perfume, I bought some new foundation. And then I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time.
Have a good Saturday!

While writing the grocery list

Oh boy! "Meat, Macaroni and Cheese Loaf" is only 97 cents a package!
I feel sick even looking at it...

... enough procrastinating....

Oh, the shame.

I'm feeling a little bit disgruntled and misunderstood this morning: look, we're not running some sort of stern, Victorian children's prison camp over here. (I felt so bad that I asked the kids if I was mean this morning. "Yeah," said The Boy. "Mean like BUTTER.") The Girl had DELIBERATELY AND WITH MALICE clubbed her younger sibling in the head with a hardbound book - it was an awful thing to do and I had no issue telling her that. She's normally a gentle kid, but she'd lost her temper and it was just lucky that he was not badly hurt. It was a shameful thing for her to do, and she needed to have it pointed out to her in no uncertain terms that it was NOT all right and that she should feel just terrible about it. (this also happened MONTHS ago! MONTHS! It feels weird to be writing about it, since it's such dusty old history. But anyhow.)

If your children are significantly younger than mine, you might not yet have first-hand knowledge of your child's capacity for cruelty - The Baby walked up to me cheerfully the other day and chomped my hand, just playing. Her eyes widened with horror when I shrieked, shocked with the knowledge that she'd hurt me because she has not yet figured quite out that her actions can hurt other people. "Ouch, that HURT!" I said, when I had stopped whimpering and running my hand under cold water. Making her feel BAD about it was beside the point, because she already felt bad and there hadn't been the intention to hurt, not really. But The Girl knows well that other people can be hurt and also knows that she should not hurt other people, so for her to cross that boundary is a different thing altogether. She IS still a little girl, but she is not a baby and so the moral weight of her actions has changed.

One of the icky things about - well, I almost said "modern" but I think it's been going on for a hundred or so years - parenting these days is the way that experts have taken over common sense. To me, it just makes sense that a child with their ego and self-image artificially inflated by too much parental praise is a ruined child, an unbearable, preening self-centered menace, but my son's classroom is still packed full of books from the Nellie Olsen High Self Esteem Library ("I AM SPECIAL!" Really? Why?). And another odd thing is the modern rejection of shame, the idea that we should feel bad when we do something that harms another person. If I rob a convience store - which is unlikely - I don't need to discuss my feeeeelings, I need to go to jail where I will hopefully feel remorseful and sin no more. If my older children slug each other, they need to be removed from the family action (obviously, to the Staircase of Punishment) and to feel bad about what they did.

And then they can be restored to the Consoling Maternal Bosom and all that. Maybe we'll even talk about their feeeeeelings a bit. They ARE just little kids, after all.

Hey...

So my baby brother - just 22! a baby! - is going on a LOOOONG car trip today (to Winnipeg! that's LONG!). If you would, could you keep him in your prayers for a safe trip? Thanks!

Bad Mother

"Shame on you!" I said to The Girl the other day when she had done something deliberately cruel and hurtful, and then sent her off to sit on The Stairs for a while. A certain Baby Boomer relative was in attendance, and was shocked that I had used such loaded language with my child: surely we were beyond wanting to shame our children into good behaviour! Surely I should much rather have talked with my child about Her Feelings!

As it happens, no, I did not want to talk with my child about her feelings. I knew quite well why she had done what she did and furthermore, I'm not all that concerned on a day-to-day basis about all of the little nuances of my children's feelings - I'm concerned about their BEHAVIOUR. The civilizing process demands that we learn to behave appropriately regardless of however much we may feel like smacking our younger brother in the head with a book for singing too loudly (just to use a "random" example.). Shame might not be a popular emotion, but it's a necessary one and the appropriate response for letting our feelings overwhelm us and spill over into hurting another person.

Middle-aged French author Corinne Maier is having her 15 minutes of notoriety right now for her book "No Kid", written, she said, after a particularly distressing day at the museum:

"And on the way back, the two of us thought that it would be nice to see an
exhibition on Belgian surrealists. Once inside the museum, the children began to
be awful." Laure said that the exhibition was "bullshit." Cecil began to scream,
so Yves took him outside. "And I started yelling at him for this: 'Why aren't
you more strong with him?' And we began to argue. We didn't see anything. And at
that point, I thought, 'I really regret it, I regret having children.' "

And how old are these two children? Are they 5 and 2? No, her delightful children are TEN AND THIRTEEN. Has anyone suggested to Mrs. Maier that she is a terrible mother and that her children are unbelievably spoiled brats and that motherhood is MUCH more enjoyable when some effort has been made to train up one's overindulged little monsters? Mais non - the fault lies within parenthood itself, apparently:

"Children are born to disappoint you," she says. "Because we dream about
wonderful children, but there are no wonderful children. They are people like me
and you, and they fail, they do things you don't expect, they dream of things
you don't even imagine, things that are pointless for you but not for them. So
of course they have to disappoint you. Most children are difficult."

My children, for the record, are wonderful children. They are delightful and smart and fun and loving and even with the occasional sibling spat they are absolutely charming company. I could cheerfully bring them, for example, to a museum exhibition with the full knowledge that they would behave to the very best of their abilities because I've raised them with love and boundaries and they do not want to disappoint me -and they also do not want the public embarrassment of behaving like HER children. Not one of them is difficult - but then, I am fully comfortable being the adult in the household and don't expect my children to meet MY emotional needs, unlike Corinne Maier, who apparently thought that she was going to have perfect versions of herself and then wrote this scathingly abusive diatribe when she found out that she had, in fact, little humans living in her house.

Yes, abusive. The journalist uses congratulatory language for Maier, lauding her for her "honesty" when her book is nothing more than a written tantrum by a spoiled, self-centered over-affluent woman, sulking that she can't spend as much time with her friends and that "A child will kill the fond memories of your childhood." "I thought it would be easier," she said. Oh boo freaking hoo, you big baby: parenthood is hard, children are flawed people and childbirth hurts. What a revolutionary revelation. And meanwhile, her poor children disappoint her again:

For the record, she has given copies of her book to both her children. Neither
has picked it up, or paid it any attention. "All they want to do is read Harry
Potter," she sighs.

Let's be frank: every mother has the occasional dark moment of wanting her life, her body back, wanting a certain kind of wild freedom that motherhood DOES put a full end to, and yet few of us go so far as to drown them in the lake, like Susan Smith, or to write a book urging other women never to have children because her own have just been so profoundly not worth it. I can well imagine what her kids are feeling right now, while their mother becomes famous for wishing away their very existence, the nihilistic and utter despair that must be causing those poor, neglected children - something which their mother despite all of her careful attention to her OWN feelings seems not to have considered at all. Shame on you, Corinne Maier.

All Memes, All The Time

For Susanne:
Ten Things I Love About My Kitchen
Oh, this one is hard because I do NOT love my kitchen - it's small! (12x12) it has only a very few cupboards and they are made out of plywood! the stove is right beside the SINK! AND WE CANNOT AFFORD TO RENOVATE!
But okay, ten things.
1) We have a magical white box in our kitchen that keeps food COLD. IT'S TRUE.
2) The kitchen is where the cookies live. And I love cookies.
3) I like my tea drawer, which makes me feel super well-organized whenever I open it up.
4) It's a very cheerful shade of yellow, and I DO love yellow kitchens.
5) Teeny little brown birds built a teeny little woven nest in the tree that touches the kitchen window and I could see the little speck-sized babies whenever I stood at the sink this summer.
6) My fridge is absolutely covered in pictures - drawings my kids have made, photographs of my children and my friends' children, an ultrasound of The Baby, her hand up and waving.
7) I have a wall of bookshelves and they hold my MANY, MANY cookbooks. I love cookbooks.
8) There's an old pull-out flour drawer that's pretty interesting, I guess.
9) Years ago, we taped up a little yellow construction paper gnome that The Girl had made and he still smiles away at me from his nook.
10) I have tons of vintage aprons stuffed in the flour drawer, and they're a pleasure to wear - I feel so housewifey and so retro!

For Alyssa Goodnight:
Total number of books?
Uh... I don't know. It's in the hundreds, at least. Possibly the thousands. We have many books

Last Book read?
I reread How To Eat by Nigella Lawson last night. Does that count?

Last Book Bought?
I didn't BUY it, but my dad dropped off a copy of his most recent book, which is actually a CD! It's beautiful, too.

Five meaningful Books?
I hate it when I sit down to write a list that should be very easy and instead my head utterly vacates.
1) If You Want To Write - Brenda Ueland. A hugely consoling book for the shy would-be writer struggling to find their voice.
2) Festivals, Family and Food - I opened it up and found all the answers to having the kind of family that I knew I wanted to have.
3)Little Saint by Hannah Green. I read this book with a feverish intensity and even thinking about it now makes me feel like I have gold running down my spine.
4) Mere Christianity - CS Lewis.
5) The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett. As a child I read this over and over again and it was a great consolation.

For Kyla!

1. Who is your man?

Mr. Beck



2. How long have you been together?

17 years, minus 1991 until 1996.



3. How long did you date?

About a year and a half the first time around and then another year and a half the second time around - the first time ending in a break-up and the second with a marriage.



4. How old is your man?

37



5. Who eats more?

Oh, I'm going to say him. Just to sound dainty and stuff.



6. Who said "I love you" first?

He did. After we'd been dating for three days. Apparently I am just very lovable.



7. Who is taller?

He is.



8. Who sings better?

Me. This is not saying much.



9. Who is smarter?

He could build a robot out of steel wool and old computer parts. I'm better at playing Jeopardy. Your call.



10. Whose temper is worse?

He's harder to provoke but he boils at a higher temperature when actually mad.



11. Who does the laundry?

Oh, ha ha. Me. He does the laundry ALL WRONG and is thus forbidden.



12. Who takes out the garbage?

Him and only him. The place where we keep our garbage outside is too scary at night for me to even think about taking the garbage out - eeek! Also, garbage is disgusting, thereby making it Men's Work.



13. Who sleeps on the right side of the bed?

Me, although it's disconcerting. I slept on the left side for our whole marriage and then we traded rooms with the kids and now I sleep on the WRONG SIDE OF THE BED.



14. Who pays the bills?

He does. But I get to pick out the laundry detergent, so it all works out.



15. Who is better with the computer?

Hahahahaha. Him.



16. Who mows the lawn?

What is this "mow the lawn" thing you speak of?
My husband just walked by and said "Hey, we mow the lawn a few times a year whether it needs it or not!". You don't want us for neighbours - our lawn looks AWFUL!



17. Who cooks dinner?

Me, most of the time. If I'm tired or sick or just plain don't feel like it, he does an admirable job.



18. Who drives when you are together?

I don't drive at ALL, so if it's not him....



19. Who pays when you go out?

What? Generally me, since he's wrangling the monsters out to the car - although if he's taking me out to dinner, he makes a big show of paying since we're on a DATE and all.



20. Who is most stubborn?

We're both freakishly stubborn. It's like our superpower. Let's not talk about it.



21. Who is the first to admit when they are wrong?

This has never happened.

He's objecting to this and says that he is frequently wrong. Oh honey. Everyone knows that.



22. Whose parents do you see the most?

Mine, by a wide, wide margin.



23. Who kissed who first?

Oh, I kissed him. And we bashed our teeth together. Thereby nearly ending our promising young relationship RIGHT THERE.



24. Who asked who out?

Uh.... we're not sure.



25. Who proposed?

I don't think anyone proposed, honestly. I have no idea how we ended up married.



26. Who is more sensitive?

We are both dainty sensitive flowers.



27. Who has more friends?

Oh, I do. He's just bitter.



28. Who has more siblings?

He has one brother and I have two. I win!



29. Who wears the pants in the family?

Uh, I have no idea. I'm pretty bossy but he seems to get his way a lot. It probably works out to full pants equality, but I'm not really keeping track.

The Baby has very generously shared her cold with me, with the result that I feel like I'm walking around inside a foggy headache bubble. One of the things about life with small kids that is NOT that great is how they catch every little thing that's going around and then I catch it from them, with the disheartening result that someone in our house is always at least a little bit sick.

Most of life with small kids IS pretty swell, though - I particularly like the exhausted, bemused look my husband and I share EVERY SINGLE NIGHT after the kids are finally in bed. As a teenager, I used to make long lists of names of my future children (Annabella, Isadora, Christabella, Sebastian, et al), these Baroque and lengthy odes to my future fecundity. Even with those rather over-romantic names, though, I wasn't far off from what life in a household of small children would FEEL like - busy, tiring, amusing. Pregnancy and childbirth was a bit of a shock, mind you, but it's funny how quickly you get over that.

It's almost the end of fall here - the best of it is done. Soon, we're going to be in the bare branches of October and then it's Halloween and then it's pretty much winter. This is what it looks like right now:

Very yellow.

And that's all for today: it's time to go and clean up a long weekend's worth of ruin in the house and coddle my cold. If you haven't read this week's Kitchen Party post, it's up, and I hope you had a good Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving dinner AGAIN!

If you want to do the Ten Fictional Men meme, let me know in these comments. I'm too lazy to tag anyone today, but I can retroactively tag people.

It's Kitchen Party day, so go on over there and say hi, puh-leez. And have a great Thanksgiving, fellow Canadians, and for my international friends, uh... happy Monday.

A Big Turkey

It's Thanksgiving weekend here in Canada, which means that we're having The Running Of The Relatives - tonight my mother is having ALL of my in-laws over and tomorrow my mother-in-law is having ALL of my family over and they're all going to hold hands and sing Kumbaya while I lock myself in the bathroom with a bottle of wine and sob hysterically. And also think about Veronica Mitchell's incredibly fun new meme whilst hiding:

Ten Literary Characters I Would Totally Make Out With If I Were Single and
They Were Real But I’m Not, Single I Mean, I Am Real, But I’m Also Happily
Married and Want to Stay That Way So Maybe We Should Forget This.

(as tagged by Bub&Pie AND Veronica herself by email after I
complained in her comments that she didn't tag me in the FIRST place.)
1. Laurie from Little Women. Jo was a FREAKING MORON.

2. Gilbert Blythe. Come ON. Gilbert is AWESOME. He is possibly the best fictional husband ever. I would totally have eight babies with Gilbert. (I'd also totally have eight babies with Mr. Beck too, if the mere mention of it didn't make him start looking yearningly at the freight cars going through town..)
3. Aragorn:

True confession: I have not read any of Tolkien's novels. Not one.
Never will. Multiple pages written in Elvish? Pass! He is pretty hunky though. And manly. And brooding and yearning without descending into Heathcliff-levels of jerkdom.

4. Philip Marlowe. In reality, I like my men sober, cheery
and Ned Flanders-esque but in my imagination, I have a hankering for boozy hardboiled secret romantics. And he would look JUST LIKE Humphrey Bogart, too.

5. Mr. Rochester. He's not NICE, but he's sexy. For a little while, until I got fed up and lit his bed on fire.

6. Henry from The Time Traveller's Wife

7. Atticus Finch. Righteous AND a good father? Be still my heart.

8. Colonel Brandon.

9. Severus Snape. Probably because of the whole Alan Rickman thing.

10. And Detective Chief Inspector Endeavour Morse.

He's as shocked as I am.

What the heck did I do to my html?

Anyhow, I have a few other memes that I'll take care of tomorrow AND I have my Kitchen Party post! See you then. (and my grandma is still in the hospital but is feeling MUCH better. Thanks so much for all of the prayers and good wishes.)

Sleepless in Beckville

Last night, 66.6% of the underaged population of Beckville did NOT sleep well, with the result that 100% of the adult population did not sleep at all. The Boy decided to crawl into bed with us around midnight and so I was hovering on the edge of the bed, trying to keep him from absolutely hogging the coveted middle of the bed real estate when I realized that my husband had gone to sleep downstairs and I'd been hovering for NOTHING. So I shoved The Boy - who didn't wake up - onto my husband's side of the bed and got a solid TEN MINUTES of sleep before The Baby decided that it was four in the morning and TIME TO GET UP NOW. The Boy sleepily chatted with her in MY BED until I finally yelled for my husband to come and try tucking her back in, with the unintentional result of having pretty much everyone up and watching cartoons by 5 in the morning.

Ho hum. Hearing about people not sleeping is boring.

I'm pretty cheerful anyhow, though - I had this awful migraine yesterday and wonderfully enough The Baby had her first afternoon nap in a MONTH at the same time, so I was able to just suffer quietly on the couch. When my husband got home, I staggered to the front door and said "I go bed now." Which I did. And now I have the happy sensation of waking up feeling Just Like Myself, which is quite nice, comparatively. And I'm not - ahem - moody anymore either, which nice.

What the heck has happened to everyone? I don't think I ever decided to crawl into bed with my parents in the middle of the night as a five year old, and yet my children think that this is Their Right. And I don't remember my mother and her contemporaries ever sitting around and grumbling about PMS, although perhaps I was too busy being itchy in polyester bell bottoms to notice what anyone was saying. Probably.

Oh. If you are the praying sort, can you keep my grandmother in your prayers today? She was hospitalized last night and we're all very worried about her. Thank you.

A visit

The Baby and I went to visit the daycare this morning. She clutched tightly to my hand as we walked down the hallway, chattering to me about lockers and shoes and posters and then we were in the room, a handful of little children sitting in a half circle around a cheerful woman reading a book.
"HELWO EVERYBODY!" bellowed The Baby.
"Oh hi!" the teacher said, turning around and smiling. "This must be The Baby! Come sit with us."

The Baby stood frozen for half a heartbeat and wrenched herself free from my hand and dashed over to the circle, sitting between to other toddler girls and grinning widely. The little girls chattered to each other and the teacher asked The Baby if she knew what month it was. Undaunted by her utter lack of any clue, The Baby announced that it was "SHOE MONTH! CHALK MONTH! CAR MONTH!".

We finished up our business and I told The Baby to say goodbye to her new friends ("GOODBYE NEW FWENDS!" she bellowed.), and was told by the daycare instructor that she was just the cutest little thing, which she really, really is. We walked home together and she talked the whole way about how much fun "school" was going to be and going over her new friends names over and over again.

I could end this with a wistful paragraph about how letting go of our kids starts so early, but I don't feel like it - I'm too amused by her inheritance of my father's jovial extroversion and her utter self-assurance out in the big world when she's such a teeny little munchkin (a head and a half smaller than her contemporaries, which I honestly never think about unless I see her in a group like that...). I'm not even a bit wistful - she's going to have a lot of fun, and the other kids will enjoy having me around more and it will make a nice distraction in my often repetitive weeks. It's one of those magical rare decisions that meets everyone's needs at once.

Yesterday, The Baby and I were playing outside and she kept insisting that her ball was an egg and that it was going to hatch. She pressed her ear against it and said that she could hear the baby moving inside, getting ready.
Was it a bird baby? I asked.
No, she said, chuckling that I didn't know. It was a dinosaur.
And then she went back to pressing her head against her "egg" again, certain that something amazing was just about to happen.

I just signed The Baby up for a morning of daycare a week. The older kids want me in their classrooms, and the school won't let you volunteer with a toddler at your heels, so this is the solution I've thought of - an hour in each of their classrooms, a third hour to do whatever else - I'm hoping to be assigned to the school library - and then home for lunch with The Baby.

I'm not worried about her - like her sister before her, she's SUPER SOCIAL and has no qualms about being away from me. I'm worried about me - already I feel sick at heart, thinking about being away from my BABY for a whole three hours a week and oh, how will I bear it? Yeah, I'm a little bit overdramatic.

She'll have fun. The other kids will have the Joy of Having Their Mother In Their Class. And I will have issues.

The Girl took a day off yesterday - she woke up pale and vaguely fevered and looked sort of ghastly, so when she asked to stay home I let her, thinking that I was saving myself the inevitable trip to the school to pick her up when it progressed to a full-fledged sick later on in the morning. Of course, the second her brother cheerfully tootled off to school, she made a full and miraculous recovery and spent the whole day reading and playing with her sister and making fudge and checking out geography games on the computer. She had a lovely day and asked me, wistfully, if maybe she could still be homeschooled. Poor Girl. So to help her feel more at home, I'll be sure to wear my pajamas when I'm volunteering in her classroom - it's the least I can do.

Hey, I've seen a lot of delurking requests around the blogosphere (is that not the ugliest pseudo-word you've ever seen?) today, and if you're lurking, today would be a good day to say hi and let me know you're reading...

Things I Just Do Not Get

1) Nuts in Food
There is nothing worse than eating a nice salad - or a nice brownie - and then coming upon some freaking hidden walnut. Yuck. Nuts have their place and it is NOT ON MY PLATE.

2) Game Shows
Bleh! I like Jeopardy because a) I'm good at it and b) I'm better at it than my dad, who I normally watch it with. Other than that, though, the allure of game shows escapes me, these assembled congregations of the half-witted and the panicking. No THANKS.

3) Sleeping Naked.
What the heck is wrong with you, naked sleepers? What if there is a HOUSE FIRE and you have to run from your house and then all of your neighbours see your nudity? What if your child wakes up vomiting and then has the additional horror of seeing their mother run nudely into their room? What if IT GETS COLD?
Yuck. Put some clothes on. Preferably a nice pair of flannel pajamas.

4) Danger-courting sports
My recreational activities are all DEATH-AVOIDING. Riding a motorcycle while poking hungry sharks with sticks? No thank you. Sleeping in some flimsy nylon tent in the woods while hungry bears and ticks stomp around outside? Again, no. A nice game of Scrabble and some vintage mysteries? By golly, I believe I will. Likely while wearing flannel pajamas.*

5) Really expensive purses
I was in a chi-chi store recently and saw a purse that was AWFULLY cute until I saw the price tag - $950! Once I recovered from my swoon, I had to explain to the pocket-sized tanorexic owner that I actually wasn't interested in a purse that cost several months worth of mortgage payments.

6) The Baby's Television Watching Habits


* I am not actually 75 years old.

Guess What Happens

... when you attempt to do an elaborate baking project with the kids while feeling EXTREMELY IRRITABLE and more than a little under the weather? Go on, guess.

Sigh.

My rather wistful post is up at the Kitchen Party today. Go say hi.