Do you ever think back on names that you considered for your child while you were pregnant, and do those names now seem almost ludicrous in their wrongness? The name that ends up being a person's name ends up feeling magically right, that this was OF COURSE their name and the other names now seem strangely off. I AM Rebecca - the name sums me up tidily. Other friends seem to be utterly their names - one friend, so fragile and thin and easily harmed, has a fragile, thin name. Another friend, so sturdy and brave and no-nonsense, has a blunt, sensible name to suit her. How does this magic happen, I wonder?

So I have five zillion baby name books from all of my various pregnancies, and inside the front and back covers of each I wrote dozens of name possibilities, most of which now sound just WRONG. ALFRED? What was I THINKING? AIDEN? REALLY? AOIFE? EXCUSE ME? (and that's just the As!) Then there are the names that still sound tantalizingly possible, Jasper and Frances and Polly just waiting in the next room, these children that I can almost picture if I let my mind rest there for a second.

I don't think we're going to have more kids.

Three children are plenty, really - our house is full and busy and our kids are loud and needy and we're outnumbered as it is, and there's a scary tendency on both sides to have TWINS, which makes me whimper to even think about. But I'd always thought I'd have more kids than this, and I'm quietly furious at my body for not cooperating with me, for changing the plotted course of my life.

The water levels locally are higher than anyone can remember then ever being before, thanks to our tons of snow and quick thaw and the river has eaten up the beach and is lapping at the edges of the beach access road.

It's not a friendly river at the best of times - someone drowns in it almost every year and I very nearly drowned in it as a child. I can actually see the spot where I almost died in that picture. It's a familiar river, though, and stays politely within its boundaries, this dangerous thing we named and thought we knew, and now its eaten the beach and the trees and the spot where the swingset used to be, changing its path, changing our plans.

Overheard JUST NOW

The Boy was walking downstairs with The Baby, warning her about it being unwise to hop down our steep old stairs - yikes! - and telling her about one of the several times he's fallen down.
The Baby - all wide-eyed and breathless, gasped out "Like Jack? Did you TUMBLE?".
HAHAHAHA.

Oh Boy

A lot of men where I live are just incredibly awful. Really. I'm always kind of shocked that they find attractive! nice! wives and that their wives than go on to have children with their horrible crappy husbands. I mean, we're talking big fat mean monosyllabic jerks who sit sullenly in front of the tv all night drinking beer and only get animated when they're fixing snowmobiles with their big fat jerk friends on the weekends, men who hit their kids and swear at their wives and get into fights and smash their big stupid trucks into rockcuts because they've been drinking or because their brains are the size of shotglasses.

Not that I have an OPINION on them or anything. And not that I ever wonder why ANYONE would ever willingly mate with one of those men rather than choosing a life of celibacy or perhaps joining a nice quiet convent. But I like my men - or man, since I'm a modest lass - rather different than the Mean Caveman mold, as my cake decorating, baby sling wearing, wife doting husband should prove. He's a good guy.

It's funny then that me with my artistic, sweet tempered husband and my rather extreme distaste for the local Proto Men would feel that a) masculinity is not just a social construct and b) it's vitally important that we give our sons a vital, life-enhancing masculine culture, not to get all Iron John on you or anything. I DO think that a lot of what we consider "masculine" and "feminine" behaviour IS just socially ingrained stuff and I DO think that a lot of that stuff is just CRAP - 15 year old boys bragging about being "players" or whatever the kids nowadays are calling being promiscuous, 10 year old girls worrying about their weight - but I also think, pretty firmly, that the answer is not in androgyny, in a neutered idea of what childhood should be. Whatever we're doing with our boys these days is NOT working, as the school shootings and high Canadian rates of teenage male suicides and the generalized hopeless despair of the young guys I know tends to suggest - and I'm much more worried about what the future holds for my son than my daughters, worried that not only will he fall prey to the moronic risk-taking of teenage boys but also that he'll vanish into the gutteral world of Proto Men, become a man that I don't like.

My husband spends a lot of time making our Boy work - last night they were digging out the root bed of this horribly invasive weed that's eaten our flowerbeds, and I've written before about the two of them taking apart the photocopier and building little skittering robots. I also find that I spend a lot of time with my hand clasped over my mouth in horror, like earlier this week when the Boy decided to ride his bike down a steep pile of rocks, or last night when he climbed a rickety tree, snapping branches beneath his sneakers. And we have a GOOD boy - a sweet, enthusiastic, kind-hearted, lovable little guy - but he still spends his school days playing Ninja Hard Kickers of Justice with the other boys in his class, this ancient rythym of boyhood.

So last night, The Boy kept making excursions to the back of the yard, his hands cupped protectively around something and then he'd dash back to his dad's side, pick up his shovel and start hacking away again at the tangled roots. Curious, I went over and saw that they were occasionally digging up worms, blind and pathetic thumbs in the evening air, and the Boy was rescuing them, running them to the muddy hidden places in the yard before getting uncomplainingly back to work again, this men's work. And I don't know how to do this, how to balance the aggression and energy and dumb bravery with his sweetness and creativity, working underground blindly like some big dumb worm myself. Let me do right by him, I thought in the dusk last night.

You turn around for JUST ONE SECOND

... and your Baby suddenly becomes a big kid:

Where did my little monkey-faced baby go?

My Kitchen Party post is up with many, many birthday cake pictures, as promised, and a glimpse at our newest kitchen gadget - it's a fun one. I also posted the recipe for a ridiculous and ridiculously easy buttercream frosting at my food blog. So go have a read and say hi.

Hey There!

We're just about to have a birthday party for The Baby and I suddenly found myself with a few unexpectedly empty minutes, which I'm filling in an obvious fashion. You should SEE the cake my husband made! And you will, because I'm going to post pictures of it at the Kitchen Party tomorrow.

I have a post in the works about boys and masculinity and why I think it matters, inspired by a bunch of other posts I've read and a conversation I had with a friend. Of course, it's funny to write about how I think masculinity is important and my husband making birthday cakes within two short paragraphs of each other, but I think that a good man can handle that sort of dichotomy in a firm, manly and yet sensitive way. So that should be sometime later this week.

And how's your weekend?

Get out yer chequebooks

Does anyone still have chequebooks?

My friend Shalee wrote about this today and asked me to as well, and it's a terrific cause and I'm happy to do so. Malaria kills over 3000 children a day and there are some simple ways that we CAN save some of those babies - a TEN DOLLAR mosquito net will help save their lives. Ten bucks. Compassion International will give children mosquito nets and train them in how to use them. You have ten bucks, right?

Happy birthday, Shalee.
(edited to add: go let Shalee know if you decide to donate - she's having a giveaway!)

Who Has Two Thumbs, Speaks Limited French, And Hasn't Cried Once Today?

Also: Guess My Favorite TV Show! (answer: NOT LOST.)

I was mentioning in my mild, gentle way last night - during the ads - to my husband that I truly hate "Imagine" - you know, the John Lennon song - and he was like "I KNOW THIS ALREADY" because me hating Imagine is a big theme in my life. I just LOVE having some rich commie lecture me on how there should be no religion and no possessions. Mm hmm. Easy for you to say, buddy. Commies. Feh.

I don't much like Lost, either. I watched until Alex got shot last night and then I went to bed, which my husband could just not BELIEVE. I consistently feel like that show is screwing with me, which I resent. But everyone I know loves Lost so I'm all alone in my Just Don't Care camp, apparently.

I don't like ice cream. Not one bit. I don't like cold food as a general rule - although potato salad is okay if it's a barbecue and the middle of July - and I don't like mushy food either. Ice cream is both cold and mushy and is therefore yucky. I like ice cream STORES though, which are generally clean and shiny and tiled and nicely chilly on hot summer days, but I will pass on the ice cream, thank you.

I don't like hymns written after 1965. Say what you will about modern liberal Protestant theology, but it has NOT yielded a gold mine of inspiring music.

I don't like Birkenstock sandals. They are HIDEOUS and I'm really tired of seeing people wander around with big sweaty round hippy feet all summer. My husband disagrees with me, which means that things are tense in the footwear department at Casa Beck.

I don't like Little House on the Prairies, and believe that Ma and Pa were negligent parents for dragging their kids all over the freaking barren prairies. Pick a place and STAY THERE, bad pioneer parents.

I don't like apples, at least not in their raw, non-desserted state. I don't know WHY I don't, but I do know that I'd have to be pretty hungry before it would ever occur to me to eat one.

I don't like CBC radio. Not one little bit. Oh boy! 28 year olds from Toronto being all earnest at me!

I don't like the Chipmunks movie that the kids are currently watching because they have the day off from school. Sweet merciful heavens, it's TERRIBLE.

summer of the year

A friend asked me the other day what my summer plans were and I just about choked on my coffee. There was still SNOW ON THE GROUND, for Pete's sake! But now the snow is almost melted - except for hidden snow in the bush, which you can hear melting unnervingly all over town - and I've suddenly realized that summer is only six weeks away, at which point I will be saddled with three kids, no car and a small town with very little to do in it.

Eep.

Okay, so that's sort of a daunting thought. We're considering sending The Girl off to summer camp for a week, but the thought makes me get a sudden worried pain in my stomach and I don't feel ready to have her away from me like that. I may change my mind about this by mid-July but by then it will be Too Late. And I'm aware even as I write this that I'll likely regret not sending her but I'm not going to, which is the whole puzzle of motherhood, these conflicting pulls to let them go and clutch them tight.

Caillou is on and Caillou's parents are throwing a sedate grown-up nighttime party and STILL WEARING THE SAME SHAPELESS PRIMARY COLOURED GARMENTS THEY ALWAYS WEAR. I don't think the animators of this show have ever seen an actual adult gathering. Caillou's parents are goofy, patient people with their baggy children's clothing and brightly coloured furniture and they never seem exasperated with their whiny, bald-headed twerp of a kid, parents who act like patient nursery school teachers. Real parents, however, frequently find their own whiny children exasperating, wear grown-up clothes, have adult lives running alongside their children's childhoods.

And I don't know, sitting here, if the summer camp knot in my stomach is my adult motherbrain telling me that she's not ready to go or if it's my still childish urge to clutch her tight, to not let my pretty girl away from me, this secret feeling that someday the clock will start running backwards again and that I'll be young, untired, with all of life stretching in front of me again.

The Baby and I went for a walk yesterday, dragging our feet in the grubby sand alongside the railroad tracks in my husband's hometown. It was hot out, the fourth solid day of startling, unspringlike heat, and The Baby was not happy that we were outside, did not want to walk, did not want to be carried, but for a few minutes she was happy as she left long trails in the sand, her pink Dora sneakers carving out marks that said I am here.

It was her birthday. We visited Daddy at work and bought some t-shirts and sat in the white cinder block hospital waiting room and visited Daddy's Grandma and "I am having a crappy birthday, Mama," she told me. Poor bug.

Four Septembers ago, I found out that I was pregnant, clapping my hands over my mouth at the clinic with the delight of a baby, running all the way home to call my husband and tell him the rather unexpected news. I still remember that lightening elation, the delight in the very idea of a new baby. Yesterday, walking alongside The Baby, dragging her dirty shoes in the dirt and singing songs about elephants and spiderwebs and talking about dogs walking by, I felt the same sudden lift in my heart, the delight in this child, this big girl on her birthday.

Birthday Something Something

Whoa, it's been a long day! Very long! Long and With Walking! So here's the link to today's Kitchen Party post and I will post a long and doubtlessly sappy birthday post tomorrow.

The Last Day of Two

1. You are now fully toilet trained. Hooray for you!

2. We think you're cute:

3. You have never voluntarily gone into a pool, and should your misguided mother carry you into one, you cling ferociously to her, tree frog-style, and let it be known that your valuable person shall never touch pool water. Okely dokely, then.

4. Two years ago at this time, we were SO worried: we were told that you had unspecified leg deformities and that your EXTREMELY slow head growth was going to lead, potentially, to severe brain damage. But your leg is fine - hey, you - and your noggin suddenly had a growth spurt and now you're a bright, chatty, bratty kid and there's not even a trace of all of these terrible worries.

5. We let you pick out your own outfits, which leads to outfits of eye-searing beauty and your father making saracasic comments like "Has anyone seen The Baby? My eyes are in too much pain to look anymore."

6. You've gone right from having conversations that sound like this:
The Baby: waaaaah! Beee-beee! Kitty! What's that?
The Boy: It's playdough - here's some for you.
The Baby: Thank you. Waaaaaaah. Bad Boy. Bad Kitty.

(thanks, Kimberley!)

to

The Baby: All of my teeth are lose. Every one of them, so THERE, Boy. And I will be rich when the Toof Fairy comes.


7. Another quote: "Do you like my socks, Daddy? They are AWESOME."

8.
Goodbye, my two year old. And hello, three.

Another Pre-Birthday Post

"It looks like the flowers are springing up in her footsteps," my husband said last night while looking at this picture.

There was a big snowstorm when we brought her home from the hospital two days after her birth, my other children and my home an hour away. A few days later, I walked on the small hill you see in the picture and there were the flowers, rising up through the snow to greet her. She was such a HARD baby, with such storms that we had to weather and she seemed so frail and breakable, as though she would suddenly vanish like fairy's gold.

She was always stronger than we imagined, our Baby, and is now fearless and brave, running to the top of the play structure, yelling at Papa's dog to STOP LICKING HER FACE, telling everyone in town that her birthday is on Monday and that she's going to be one two three years old, our Baby, our flower, our sturdy Northern girl.

Happy Things

The Baby is going to be three on Monday.

Reading last year's birthday post, I'm struck my how worried I still was then, how many fears we still had for her health. And now she's just short. Her gluten-free diet is a big pain in the butt but we're coping and everything else has just fallen away - she's saucy and healthy and growing and smart and funny and bad, just the way we like her.

This year, when asked, she will now tell you that she is GOING to have a Barbie birthday party with a Barbie cake and only girls can come. Right now, while I write this, she is making a big mess with a tube of pink glitter glue, which "parkles", she just informed me. Soon it will be lunchtime and I'll make her the SAME lunch that she wants EVERY day - noodles and cheese and peas - and sit at the table while she chatters about everything on her mind, dogs and friends and the snow melting and her pennies in a jar.

We were so scared. And now we're not. Our Baby is fine. And she is very nearly three years old.

My Kitchen Party Post Is Up!

I just got an email from my husband that read:
"i has ur cake
and i eats it too!!!
NOM! NOM! NOM!"

Oh, LOLCats. What did we ever do before you?
I bet you can't guess what I baked last night. There may be a clue in this post... anyhow, go read about it.

Ah, spring...

The singing birds, the green boughs....

The pleasant drives out in the country to enjoy the blue skies and blossoming fields...
We took these around two in the afternoon yesterday. Wasn't it LOVELY outside?

Special, Or In Praise Of Humility

Ah. A LOT of people had problems with me snarking at parents who make their kids feel "special." I DO believe that parents should give their children unconditional love, that they should support their kids and take an interest in what they're doing. Of course. BUT parents aren't doing their kids - or anyone else - any favours if they encourage their children to think that they are better than other people, that they are entitled to special privileges, that other people are here just for their use.

For example, growing up I knew a girl who got into an argument with her bus driver and was quite rude to the driver. The bus company told her family that she could not use the bus again - a BIG deal for a rural family - until she apologized to the bus driver. Her family told her that she did not have to apologize to someone who was "just" a bus driver and that they would drive her to school every day. Her family saw this as backing her up, as standing behind her - and EVERYONE else in town saw them as a family of arrogant snots who put their children's "right" to mouth off ahead of other people's dignity.

Back then, they really stood out, but now I know LOTS of families who would drive their kids in every day rather than have then apologize for something. At my children's school, there are parents who come in yelling because their child was suspended for beating up a younger child, parents who get furious at the teacher when their child is doing badly in a class, parents who expect the rest of the world to treat their child like the very special, limitless snowflakes that they've raised them to think they are.

"You are my FAVOURITE boy in the whole world!" I often tell my son, and he is. He's a wonderful kid and I'm crazy about him - but not so crazy that I think that my love for him gives him some sort of kingly privilege over the rest of humanity. It is my burden as his doting mother to raise him as the sort of person who other people can stand to be around. Here's the thing: there's a lot of evidence out there right now that the whole high-self esteem movement is just utterly misguided. And while I certainly don't think that we should make our children feel BAD - good grief, no - I do think that a modest, pleasant view of ourselves is the surest way to actual happiness, while a bloated sense of self-entitlement can only lead to unhappiness for my child AND the people around him.

My favorite boy in the whole world knows full well that he is very much my favorite boy. He knows that he is loved and cherished and that we will stand up for him, should he ever be the victim of injustice - but we should also make sure that he apologizes when HE does wrong and that he grows up to be the sort of person who values other people, that he accepts the consequences for his actions with reasonably good grace, and that his idea of his own importance - his own specialness - never overshadows the need for him to act like a decent human being.

I forgot to title this post

I've been reading an interesting book recently - Under Pressure: Rescuing Childhood From The Culture of Hyper-Parenting, by Carl Honore - and it's made all the more interesting because I agree with pretty much everything the author wrote. We are making childhood miserable, he says, and the proof is in our medicated, neurotic, fat, unhappy children. Well, obviously.

This topic makes me a wee bit unhinged - I've started and deleted this post several times because of my rather unfortunate tendency to suddenly become a fiery eyed zealot, pointing my finger and shrieking "J'accuse!", which is awesome when I'm confronting actual injustice and evil and not so awesome when I'm confronting parents who are literally doing their best, even when "their best" is what I like to call "wrong." And these things ARE cyclical - for a while there (from the mid-80s onwards, I'd say offhand), there was this real push towards having the perfect little yuppie baby, who would then move seamlessly into being an upper middle class adult, someone who would have a challenging Wall Street Job and speak several languages and be able to order white wine in all of them. And now, of course, we're in the backswing of that movement and we all want to be slacker parents with relaxed children playing off in the woods, kids who will grow up to be bearded organic goat cheese artisans and we read books, shaking our heads, about the poor children of parents who still believe in flashcards and Suzuki violin lessons.

The main problem, though, is that we're raising up our children to believe things that are not true - that they are special, that they will always be happy, that they can achieve anything that they want. And what we get instead are egomaniacal little monsters, unhappy children who think the world owes them something it will never, ever give them, children who are terrified of leaving the safe, vacuum-sealed bubble of their parent's protection and approval.

It's been snowing all day and now we have freezing rain and -10 weather all weekend, which is TERRIBLY springlike, because nothing says "spr-freaking-ing" like freezing rain warnings and steel grey skies AGAIN. And I spent all day in this terrible weather fretting over this stupid post, without ever coming up with a good ending for it. How do we let our children have the freedom they need when the world seems so frightening? How do we relax as parents when the world is so hard? I don't know.

The littlest birds sing the prettiest songs

This morning was VERY annoying. I'd tell you about it but I don't come out totally well in this story - I come out rather like a screeching harridan, actually - and I'd prefer not to write about me pouring a glass of milk after a morning of the two older kids non-stop fighting and The Boy being in such a hurry to get it before his sister that he actually snatched it off the table while I was still pouring, causing a milk flood.

AGGGH.

Oh! OH! The Girl went knocking at her grandmother's classroom door yesterday, all pale and drawn, and told my poor mother that her mom had not packed her enough lunch and that she was VERY hungry. So my mom shared her lunch and told me about this after school, very concerned, and then today I was emptying The Girl's lunchbag (Which was HER job YESTERDAY, thank you.) and THERE WAS HER ENTIRE LUNCH. UNTOUCHED.

Annoying.

So after they went off to school and I'd finished hyperventilating and cursing under my breath, my dad popped in and suggested that we go for a walk, which seemed like a fine idea, marching The Baby out in the cool morning air.

We went to the hardware store to buy a dog collar for my parent's huge, moronic puppy and suddenly a desperate starling was flying in frantic circles around the store, flinging itself at the big glass window, the store employees running to the back to find a net, The Baby and I running out of the way before we got hit in the head by a pointy terrified bird and my dad throwing his handy hat on top of the bird and releasing it outside, where it flew away.

I know how you feel, stupid bird.

I have two birthdays that I need to get planning PRONTO - The Baby is turning 3 in (argh!) eleven days and The Girl is turning 9 in 29 days. The Baby wants a Barbie cake and what does The Girl want?

The Bratz Passion 4 Fashion Funky Fashion Makeover Head?

The Hannah Montana Girl Talk game?

Or a wooden loom?

What a great kid. Excuse me while I high-five myself. The Baby has told me sternly that she wants "Lots and LOTS of toys," because our playroom CERTAINLY doesn't look like THIS:

So yeah. Let me get right on that, you poor toyless little waif.

I woke up - well, sort of - this morning and heard my husband getting ready downstairs and thought in a very confused sort of way that he was getting his ratatouille ready for the ratatouille contest and that his eggplant was going to be roasted better than mine if I didn't get up RIGHT THEN, but then I decided that I could go back to sleep and make my Contest Ratatouille later. So I went back to sleep and woke up an hour later with this pressing, I-Have-Something-I-Must-Do feeling, which was quickly replaced with me lounging in bed and snickering at the idea of a Ratatouille Contest, which I would TOTALLY beat my husband at, by the way, if it existed.

Off to buy CLOTHES for The Baby for her birthday. Wah!

(p.s. - I'm just kidding. And don't worry about the dollhouse - it's WAY back on the shelf and it's also made of balsa wood so it would just lightly bounce off anyone's noggin.)

I forgot...

... hey Torontonians (or former Torontonians) - go check out my Uncle Ron's pictures of the old Canary restaurant. They're creepy/sad/atmospheric.

Robert Zimmerman and Bedtime Prayers

As we were getting the kids ready for bed last night, the sky suddenly darkened, as though all of the light had been sucked from it at once, leaving only an inky void. It stayed dark and motionless for half an hour and then a lightening storm lit up the sky, our whole yard illuminated in shocking flashes, every tree standing tall and black.

The Girl sat on her bed and watched the storm from the window, the wet street and the crackling sky, as we said bedtime prayers together. "... and thank You, God, for nature, Amen." I finished, rather inadequately, since I find thunderstorms rather terrifying, the sky suddenly bizarre and loud and tantrum-y. And today the sky is still a sullen grey, warning that it would be wise not to make any plans.

The kids say the same bedtime prayer every night, one you might remember from your own childhood:
Now I lay me down to sleep
I pray the Lord my soul to keep....

... and here we swerve away from the traditional version, which went:
if I die before I wake
I pray the Lord my soul to take.

Going with a much gentler, rather dumbed down:
Thy love guard me through the night
And wake me with the morning light.

Which sounds much NICER to my modern ear. Yes, let's remove all mention of nasty death from
my children's ears and mouths, filling them instead with love and light, this endless pleasant life stretching ahead of us. And yet we all will die, no matter how much I bowdlerize ancient children's prayers, and perhaps there is more actual comfort in the older, blunter words - but I still don't want my children saying them.

When I was midway through my pregnancy with The Boy - I've written about this before - I hemorrhaged heavily and was told at the hospital that my baby had died within me. I went home again, curled up miserably in a chair and listened to Forever Young, the old Bob Dylan song that goes:

May God bless and keep you always
May your wishes all come true...

which has always been one of my baby songs, the songs that I would sing to my little children. Obviously, he did NOT die, and was born safe and sound and very nearly ten pounds several months later after a rather unfun but necessary period of extended bedrest and I still love that song, the lyrics summing up all of my wishes for my children, my prayer for them:


May you grow up to be righteous,
May you grow up to be true,
May you always know the truth
And see the lights surrounding you.
May you always be courageous,
Stand upright and be strong,
May you stay forever young

Manic Monday

I've had that Bangles song stuck in my head for nearly two decades now, it being my brain's apparent default mode. My Monday is not at all manic, though - well, not now that I've successfully got the older munchkins off to school, anyhow - and I have a new Kitchen Party post up with pictures of last night's insanely delicious chocolate pie AND some thoughts on what food means as a mother. So go read that, okay?

My Favorite Person in the Whole World.

I was tagged twice today - by Daisyeyes with the Seven Weird Things About Me meme, and by Minnesota Mom with the Six Unimportant Things About Me meme. And ages ago, Planet Nomad tagged me with the All About Me meme.

I see a common theme here. But to be honest, I can't think of that many interesting things about myself, so I'm going to cheat because it's my blog and all. So here you go: memorable, unimportant and weird stuff that I've already written about:

1. I nearly died! This freaked me out for ages and ages and now I've just gotten over it because you can't live your whole life being really freaked out.
2. A frog once jumped on my foot in an idyllic setting. (does anyone know how to copy my old blog posts over to here? Email me if you have any ideas.)
3. Have you read this sad post about my Grandma?
4. I am a klutz with trick ankles.
5. A story about mice. Mice are my Kryptonite, which means I lose my ability to act like a sane human being around them.
6. ANOTHER STORY ABOUT MICE.
7. Another post with mice in it and my husband being the heroic man I married.

Taking Care of Business

I LOVE crafty people, mainly because I can't make ANYTHING. Well, I can make cupcakes, but those don't ship well. A few weeks ago, I mentioned making a directory of online shops and here it is - if I've left you off or you'd like to have your shop included, let me know!

Barb is FINALLY selling her beautiful flannel burp cloths!

Cinnamon Gurl has a shop where you can buy copies of her haunting photographs, with some of the proceeds going to the Stephen Lewis Foundation.

The Flip Flop Mama has a shop selling chai, lipbalm and greeting cards and I can personally vouch for her chai being - no lie - the best chai I have ever had, and the lipbalm she sent me is WONDERFUL.

Freshisle Fibers sells wool from the Manitoulin Island AND she is married to my cousin, which makes her MY cousin by default.

Heather has a shop for her beautiful watercolour art prints and merchandise.

Heather from Cool Zebras has a shop selling her lovely cards and Etsy banners.

Mary Beth has an online shop selling affordable classroom resources.

Michelle has a Discovery Toys shop!

Mika has a great shop with all sorts of things - boxer shorts, rice bags and more!

Pieces has the most beautiful little etsy shop with her enchanting crafts.

Randi has a gorgeous shop and I am TOTALLY buying one of her purses as soon as I can decide on which one. She also has beautiful children's aprons!

Sage has a shop selling her funky children's hats.

Scribbit has a great shop selling beautiful purses, jewelry and other magical things.

Steph has a wonderful jewelry shop.

Tracy has a shop selling her beautiful homemade soap, lotion bars and funky notebooks! (and I can vouch again for her soap and lotion bars, which are long lasting and beautifully scented.)

My weekly menu plan is up over at my food site - so if you want, go have a look. I'm sorry if I haven't been around as much as usual this week, but we've been running around town, enjoying the suddenly-gorgeous weather. I think I'll need a new picture for the top of my page!

We all have days when we feel like a crappy mom. Today, for example, my mom told me that The Boy was coming in soaked from the yard because he likes to play cars with his friends, kneeling in the melting snow and mud and I hadn't been sending his snowpants in with him. So I pouted and grabbed his snowpants and sent him out the door.

Then my dad came over and told me that the yard monitor came up to him and told him, with concern, that The Boy was getting wet at recess. So not ONLY has my poor child been sitting shivering and damp all afternoon BUT I got to hear about it from BOTH of my parents this morning. You know, just to bring it all home and all.

I forgot in my list of Bad Parenting Styles yesterday to list The Hover Parent, mainly because that one hits a bit too close to home and I can't bear to be criticized - although apparently I don't hover enough, as my poor wet kid should indicate. I can't even parent badly well.

I'm birthday present shopping (online) for both of my daughters this afternoon - one is going to be three and the other is going to be nine.

NINE.

So I guess I'd better start working on her 108th Month Newsletter, which will contain a lighthearted reflection on what a pleasing child she is - so kind hearted! so hard working! so amusing and full of interests and book loving and precisely the girl I would have picked out if I had walked into a room full of children to be my very own child.

Then I will segue gracefully into a heartrending realization that she is halfway through her time as our child at home, that 18 generally marks the age when people fly off into the world, and stay my own little child a while longer, please.

And then I'll tell you about the day I looked at her and just felt weak with love, my very own baby, and made the conscious decision that for her I would do the unthinkable: I would grow up. And as today's snowpant-related tantrum shows, it's something I'm still working on. So back to work I go, making lists and working all the time. Don't let them down, I tell myself, knowing at the same time that I'll have to live with the knowledge that I will.

Well, that was fun.

Yesterday's movie game was great. I made a few last guesses in the comments, so have at the quotes I missed.

I am eating a carrot-applesauce muffin. It's fine - a bit of spice (cinnamon and I want to say cumin but NO, THAT'S NOT IT. Another spice. One you put in chai.) and a nice heft to it, something that would have impressed me greatly back when I started baking and now is just something that I had to make in great haste because it turned out that the kids ate ALL OF THE LUNCHBOX FOOD yesterday for their afterschool snack. That's lovely, guys. Oh, and we were late getting up, so I was standing at the fridge in horror at 7:30, realizing that I was going to have to magically make lunch out of pretty much nothing.

That's a grand realization.

A teacher friend told me in just utter disgust that some of the kids in her class (she teaches grade four) have to get up by themselves, that they get dressed, make their lunches, eat a bowl of cereal and head off to school by themselves in the dark of a quiet house while their non-working, non-new baby mothers sleep heavily upstairs. That's NOT okay. You have a newborn? Fine. You have the flu? Fine. You spent all night chatting online AGAIN and are now too lazy to get up with your young child to see them off into the big hard world? You suck.

I read something about various forms of bad parenting once, that there were essentially four ways of being an awful parent:
1) The plain old abusive parent, the parent who is physically and emotionally abusive and who neglects their child's needs.
2) The parent who is very, very strict and in no way capable of emotionally connecting with their child - resulting in kids who only obey out of fear and who then go completely wild the second their parent's back is turned.
3) The parent who is their child's best friend, the one who wants their little muffin to never, ever suffer and who is incapable of setting even basic reasonable limits - so you end up with spoiled little creeps who fall asleep in front of the tv at midnight every night, and end up as unbearable adults, people with an overwhelming and unrealistic sense of entitlement.

And then we come to four, which is very, very common, I think - the parent who actively parents until their kid starts seeming independent and semi-adult and then just vanishes from their kid's life. So you have nine year olds who get themselves up in the morning and eleven year olds who arrive home to an empty house every evening and microwave their own supper and eat it by themselves in front of the television in their bedroom, the 14 year old who is allowed to have her boyfriend sleep over because her parents can't be bothered to even come up with reasons why he shouldn't.

When I first became a parent, I was often struck by how little my needs MATTERED - even when I was exhausted, the baby still needed to be fed, changed, held. Parenthood is HARD. I'm startled how worn out I am with parenting these days, how unfresh it often feels - and it DOES take effort to keep being present, to keep being the combination of cheerleader and Rottweiler and summer camp games coordinator and social secretary and yet this is what my kids need, with independence coming gradually and not all at once because I'm bored or depressed or just too freaking busy or because my own life is too disordered to still be a parent. The stakes are too high for me not to keep trying, keep showing up.

Because otherwise: 15 year olds with babies, 17 year olds with drug problems, 18 year olds who head off into the world and never phone home because they don't know that's what families do, since their family stopped really existing years ago, children grown up and gone and utter strangers.

So get up. Sit wearily at the kitchen table and remind your kids to brush their teeth and insist they they kiss you goodbye before they head out into the big hard world. Keep being a parent.

I Got Yer Red Hot Game Right Here

UPDATE: ONE LEFT, PEOPLE!
I saw this at Mad's house and thought it looked like fun, so I'm just copying. You know what, though - as I happily made a list of my favorite movies, I was filled with a rising tide of self-loathing. Who AM I? Why do I love such pretentious movies? I think I may actually have become unbearable.
So. I've decided to leave all of the German arthouse stuff off of my list - you're welcome. Only one movie identification per customer and/or leave me a quote from one of YOUR favorite movies, and we'll see if I can get it (I AM freakishly good at that, which is part of what makes me so loathsome), or if someone else can.
Have at it!

1. For a gallon of elderberry wine, I take one teaspoon full of arsenic, then add half a teaspoon full of strychnine, and then just a pinch of cyanide. Wow, you guys are FAST! Beth gets this one.

2. You've just ruined Rose's chance to get married, that's all...That was Warren Sheffield calling long-distance to propose. Cristan!


3. The French have said au revoir to the franc, the Germans have said auf wiedersehen to the mark, and the Portuguese have said... whatever to their thing.
Jill gets it! It's Millions!

4. Terry and I worship an unconventional deity. The power of another dimension. Now you are not going to read about this dimension in a book or a magazine because it exists nowhere... but in my own mind. Through our ceremonies and rituals we have witnessed the awesome and vibratory power... of color. Painted Maypole!


5. How dare you open a Space Ranger's helmet on an uncharted planet?! My eyeballs could've been sucked from their sockets! Right you are, His Girl!


6. Sometimes the things that may or may not be true are the things that a man needs to believe in the most: that people are basically good; that honor, courage, and virtue mean everything; that power and money, money and power mean nothing; that good always triumphs over evil; that love, true love, never dies... No matter if they're true or not, a man should believe in those things because those are the things worth believing in.
Hooray, Karen! I was so worried that I was the only fan of that movie!


7. Nothing ever possibly in the least ever happens here! Mother, how do you get smallpox? Steph! Good one! I thought this one was going to be nearly IMPOSSIBLE!


8. I strongly object to the Navy. It brings people of obscure birth into undue distinction and it cuts up a man's youth and vigor most horribly! Alyssa!

And you are SO totally right, Bea!
9. Oh, Nicky, I love you because you know such lovely people.
So very, very RIGHT, Mad!

Fools

Today - not yesterday, as I falsely claimed in my post - is April first, or April Fool's Day, as I have been reminded 800 times since my kids woke up. We had some blue milk for breakfast, thanks to a certain young prankster, and The Girl called out to me as she left "I KNOW that you're going to make something silly for supper!" Well, I always do.

"I'm going back to bed!" The Baby kept declaring this morning, heading back up stairs with a stern look on her face. And just now she came over to me and said, delightedly, "I gwossed Gwamma out!", pleased that her cup of blue milk had elicited a reaction from my very game mother. Last year at this time she was just a baby and now she's a kid, no longer someone who was just brought from place to place, someone who did not know how to play a funny, funny joke on her grandmother. And in another year and a half she'll be in school and she'll remember very, very little of these days that we spent together.

The Boy used to go on a nearly-daily walk with his grandpa - they would make the rounds, checking out the toys in the hardware store, admiring the rows of candy at the variety store and cadging lollipops off of the easygoing man who fixes chainsaws and lawnmowers. I would watch them head off, hand in hand, and then an hour later could hear them return by the steady and increasing sound of my son's endless talking. The Girl - when she was small and we lived someplace else - would feed the ducks at the waterfront, half-delighted and half-terrified as they snapped at the falling breadcrumbs, white on the silver water. And now my Baby is pushing together a train of dining room chairs, lining up her stuffed animals and announcing, sternly, that she is the dwiver. And as her siblings forgot everything - the daily candy, the quacking ducks - she will forget the chair train, our songs, every part of these days that feel so vivid and unforgettable.

Excuse me while I cry a bit.

Okay, here's the punchline though, and I think it's a good one: they won't remember these days. Maybe little bits and pieces here and there - making fairy houses underneath the big old trees, the chorus to Suddenly Seymour, jumping into a puddle when the spring thaw suddenly starts for real - but for the most part, these days will be a lost time for them, the time before the structure of school and words put their memories into functioning order. But I will remember. The light on The Girl's hair as she stood on the shore, The Boy's laugh as he headed off on another adventure, my surly, cuddly Baby and their searing, perishable beauty locked in my mind until the day I die. My babies.