Thump

After falling down the stairs:
Daddy: What where you THINKING about, sweetie?
The Baby: I was thinking about the floor. Then I was thinking about the toilet.

Blushing!

Aw, thanks everyone! That was nice.

I am a) feeling very, very annoyed at my squabbling children right now who are STILL NOT IN SCHOOL and b) trying to make some plans for this summer because otherwise summer is going to be like these past two weeks, with my kids bored and argumentative and me losing my mind. I know they're only 9, 6 and 3, but I think they're ready to get summer jobs. Let's see if the chicken farm is hiring. Oh and c) I am starving. I don't know WHY, but I am suddenly the hungriest person ever. EVER. I might eat my loud, annoying children. Who knows?

My husband and I sketched out a few ideas for this summer, and here's our current list:
- make sure to attend Canada Day festivities in Great-Grandpa's tiny town - a three float parade and a picnic with a fishing pond? We are SO THERE.
- and visit MY Grandma on the same weekend. Hi, Grandma!
- Picnics. Many, many picnics. If there's not sand and/or bugs in our food, it just isn't summer.
- Hiking through the local parks, or as I like to call it "Going for a walk for no good reason."
- Checking out the back of the yard where The Boy found his train treasure with the metal detector. We're dorks!
- Go yard saling. Possibly hold a yard sale, if we can part with any of our precious, precious crap.
- Attend a family wedding- his side - in August, where we are to be the official photographers. Ruh-oh!
- Attend a family reunion - my side - in August.
- Maybe we'll go away for the first time overnight away from our kids, because this July is our 10th anniversary. Maybe. Or maybe we won't. Only time will tell.
- We're renovating our kitchen!
- We're refinishing our floors!
- We're painting our bedroom!
- Exclamation mark!
- A camping/fishing trip, or as I like to call it "Trying Not To Get Eaten By Bears/Ticks/Mosquitoes While Being Uncomfortable."
- A trip to our nearest city to see a movie AND stay in a hotel with a pool. Whoo!
- and we're FINALLY building a playhouse. FINALLY.

We've decided that The Girl is going to wait a summer to go to summer camp, and by "summer camp" I mean the kind run very inexpensively by a local church . Real summer camps - the kind with sailing and art lessons - are for rich kids, and as far away from my life as summering in the Hamptons or carrying little dogs in big purses. I would like her to be a bit more of a stronger swimmer and a bit less timid before I send her off for a week on her own, even if it IS with a group of girls that she mostly knows and led by a gentle couple who I totally would trust with her. The news did not exactly give her joy, joy, joy, joy down in her heart, but there you have it.

And so my job today is to figure out all of the in-between bits - crafts to keep them busy, activities and outings to fill long weekdays, things like that. I'm also making a list on things I want to work on with them over the summer - character and behavioural goals - and how we plan on getting there. And this is why I make the big SAHM money.

What are YOUR summer plans? DO you make plans or do you let the summer unfold at its own pace? And what should I do with ALL THESE KIDS this summer?

Happy Birthday, Little Bloggy

Today you are two. And by "you", I mean this, my goony blog.

I started blogging NOT on a whim. I'd been reading blogs for ages before I started mine, too shy to comment and much too shy to have a blog of my own where ACTUAL STRANGERS would read my writing. I kept my writing to myself, thank you, pre-blog, although I would occasionally make my husband listen to a poem I'd written. And then I'd throw it out or something, because I was mostly just interested in writing as a process, if that makes sense. It was good enough for ages and then suddenly it wasn't - I nearly died, The Baby had mysterious and scary health problems, my marriage was going through a rough patch, and I needed SOMETHING. This blog turned out to be it.


The Baby actually was a baby when I started writing this - not yet walking, a wee little breastfeeding mite -

- an ACTUAL BABY.

Two years changes things, especially when you're surrounded by small children growing faster than light, and everything is different - I'm healthy, The Baby is healthy, the rough patch is well over and people I do not know now read my writing without my face melting off or ANYTHING. So that is all good, and I've found to my surprise that I LIKE people reading me and I like writing with the knowledge that it will be read.

I still think my blog has a stupid name, though. But hey, two years! Happy birthday to you, favorite stupidly named blog of mine!

I DID write yesterday!

And yesterday's post is up at The Kitchen Party. I rather liked it, too.

Driving Till Daylight

Everyone is on the mend. Let me just get that out of the way right at the start so you're not reading with bated breath, waiting for me to announce that all three of the kids have been hospitalized for growing an extra head or that yet ANOTHER "routine childhood illness" has a dark side or something. They're good. Home still - we're waiting for them to get a bit scabbier, which is a funny, funny thing to write in a union town - but school is looming up in their near futures.

I try not to make this blog just a daily diary of what I do. For one thing, my daily doings are boring to write about ("I coloured with The Baby and then I made supper again. Tonight, I may go for a walk with a friend."), although being boring to write about does not mean that I find my life boring to live, generally. This past week was a doozy, though, and it's sort of notable how living in a state of emergency reduces my writing to mere reports on my kids, little worried words. I have to be content and bored and not achingly sleep deprived to write anything other than that. This isn't a revelation, but it's good to know.

The Baby's hair got really out of control over the past week - it's really long and curly and thick and started to mat in the back, this crazy snarl. Occasionally, I'd sit down and half-heartedly brush it for a minute while she howled, but for the most part, she was left alone to cheerfully let her hair go feral. So last night, her dad brought home detangling shampoo and a wide-toothed comb and a bribe from her grandmother (a fancy necklace) and the two of us grabbed our shrieking child and washed her hair - this is a two adult job, washing our three year old's hair - in the tub while she screamed and shook and tried to escape and then I worked conditioner all through her hair and combed it all out while she muttered and played with bath toys. And NOW she's eating an ice cream bar and her hair is in two rather hilarious braids - ha ha! The Baby's hair is braided! - and the whole ordeal is over AND she has a fancy necklace.

It's things like that, though -wrestling a screaming three year old who is terrified of having her hair washed - that you really just never even suspect will happen before you have kids. And you don't foresee spending the night with your near-delirious fevered child, either, your child stoic and suffering and you silently and utterly panicked, which is a good thing not to know. The knowledge would not help, the revelation that your entire beloved world is made of glass and could shatter irreparably not being a happy one. And now for resting and unlearning, for letting my world fall back into its regular dull, beloved shape, away from the stark clarity that comes with terror.

Weekend Of Crud

Hello! Greetings from my House Of Disease! My children are covered in some sort of medieval-style pox, and I have this deep, scary, damp cough. DO come in.

Everyone seems - and I write this cringing, fearing that it will inevitably set the cosmic unfairness scales spinning wildly again - seems, I say, to be feeling a bit better. The Girl no longer is starring in her own miniseries called "Where Not To Get Pox" and The Boy is cheerful and playing loudly with Legos - God bless you, Mr. Lego - for hours at a time. They look fairly startling though, especially The Girl, who has clammy white skin and big purple circles under her eyes and is utterly COVERED in pox and every time I look at her I think YIKES! MY BABY! I do think in italics, by the way. It is an ornate place, my head.

I was scared yesterday, scared all day. Yesterday was one of those days where the sudden sullen helpless realization comes to you that you had kids on PURPOSE and now they're suffering and it is ALL YOUR FAULT. (for one thing, you knew very well that they could get the chicken pox vaccination and you buffled around, letting their fear of needles sway you. Jerk.) The Girl was getting pox in her throat and in her nose and in her eyes and all I could think was that she was going to end up intubated in the hospital and it was very frightening. Today she sat around reading Archie comics - Archie Andrews! A skanky guy since 1941 - and then we listened to some olde time Archie radio shows on the computer and it was a substantially cheerier house, although we still have quite a way to go before she's well again. "Routine childhood illness," HA.

And if I write anymore I'll cry. So this is enough for one day.

Ugh

Good news! I checked and The Baby has HAD her chicken pox vaccination, so I can relax about one of my kids.
We didn't end up taking The Girl to the doctor - I'm still ambivalent about whether that was the right decision, but she got hysterical when it was brought up, and in the absence of infection or a high fever, I don't see what they could do for her. She's still very uncomfortable, but nothing seems to be getting worse. I have one of those clenched-stomach feelings when something is wrong with your kid and you're not sure what the right medical course of action is. Sigh.

Update: she appears to be feeling a lot better. She's pretty spotted, though.

My poor baby - The Girl. The Baby herself actually appears not to have the chicken pox, which makes me think I maybe should check her vaccination status - is having a horrible, horrible time with the chicken pox. She has them on the INSIDES OF HER EYELIDS. She has them in her throat. She is horrifyingly uncomfortable.

I'm calling her dad home from work. We're going to take her to the doctor.

Here's a punchline for ya - we were going to get the kids vaccinated against chicken pox at the end of the school year. The Baby missed the beginning of routine chicken pox vaccinations by a month or something, and was so doctor-phobic at the time that we never brought her back in.

I had a mild, mild case of chicken pox when I was six - a few spots and a fever for a day or so, and it looks like The Boy and The Baby are following my lead. My brothers, at 13 and 3, spent a miserable summer with the worst cases of chicken pox that I'd ever seen, thousands of spots EVERYWHERE and high disorienting fevers and misery. And my poor Girl is following THEIR lead, and I am regretting SO much not bringing them in months ago to get vaccinated against this because my child is suffering.

We're making do. My dad dropped by with vanilla ice cream and they're watching cartoons and reading Family Circus books. I read one yesterday - bleh! - and there was a cartoon where Dolly is telling one of her younger brothers that "Colouring Books are dead and you hafta bring them back to life by colouring them." FREAKING YIKES. And I have a bad cold, but I think I'm over the worst of it. It's hard, though.

We interrupt this illness....

My Kitchen Party post is up! And yes, I know it's not Monday, but the process of getting the new site up and running hasn't been hassle free. I hope you'll go have a look at my post, which is about dealing with being diagnosed with Celiac Disease. If you have experiences with that, or other extremely restrictive diets, I'd love to hear from you. (or hey, I'd love to hear from you, whatever you eat.)
xo
Very Sick Beck

A Pox On My House

So I got really sick yesterday - feverish and brainless and runny noseish - and was sort of looking forward to a lazy pajama-clad day on the couch, reading detective novels and whining. But my older two kids woke up feverish and I resigned myself instead to a day playing Florence Nightingale. Then The Girl showed me something on her back.

Oh great! 2/3 of my kids have the chicken pox. The Baby says to tell you that she is healthy and sassy and full of badness. The Girl has a book of personality tests and she keeps reading them to me: what is my style? am I honest? what kind of guy do I like? and her class starts EQAO testing this week and much of the hopes for a passing grade for her group were resting on her thin shoulders. Sorry, guys.

Update: all three of them have it now, and The Baby dropped a jar of jam on her foot. I give this day a D-.

Tuesday AT LAST

When I say that was a LONG weekend, I don't mean that in the good sense. Aside from my Wild Shopping Trip on Saturday, I've spent the past several days trapped in my house with my three squabbling children while it rained outside. My mom - also husbandless - would come over several times a day to relieve me, but every night I'd wake up in the middle of the night and know that I was it, that I was the lone adult on duty.

The guys were late late late getting back last night and I spent the afternoon with a worried knot in my stomach, feeding the kids and bathing the kids and eventually remorsefully tucking my disappointed kids in, sorry that I'd promised them that they'd see their dad that evening. And then at 8:30 the house was full of men, smelling of woodsmoke and sunburned and the kids came barrelling down the stairs, incredibly excited that their dad was back. He'd brought them back tons of military MREs, a gift from my cousin the soldier, and so this morning my kids delightedly brought military foil packs of stew off to school for lunch.

This weekend, The Boy found what looked like an old furniture caster in the bush behind our house, but he insisted that it was a stamp, and when I looked closer I found out that he was right. In faded, reversed letters, it says the old name of our town from its brief moment of importance at the turn of the last century, when trains used to stop here and be loaded up with lumber and passengers embarking and departing and now the trees have grown back up through our town full of closed buildings and The Boy found an old ticket stamp in the bush, thrilled and waiting for the moment when he could put this treasure in his dad's hands and watch his dad's eyes light up with the same recognition. And his dad, back from a weekend of canoeing through the improbable wilderness, held the stamp in his hand and told The Boy what he'd been waiting to hear all weekend, that he'd indeed found something WONDERFUL.

Mutton and lamb

It is May Long Weekend this very weekend. My husband is off on a camping trip, which caused me to walk around in a black, sulking funk all last week but it's actually been a surprisingly nice weekend and it's been raining and cold, which has caused me no end of smirking glee. That'll learn him.

My friend Bonnie and I abandoned our children - in my case, to the doting care of my mother - and went to the nearest city for a day of shopping for ourselves, which felt pretty wild. I bought some much-needed clothing - phew! nudity has been averted! - and Bon looked for a business suit which made me really wonder about how stay-at-home mom's dress these days. I mean, I just head straight to the casual clothing section and spend my life in jeans and t-shirts, essentially, while working women have grown-up clothing - suit jackets and tailored pants and shirts with buttons on them, clothing with a weighty gravitas. Not so long ago - only a few generations back - there was a clear line between how you dressed when you were a child and how you dressed as an adult and now I find it very hard to figure out what a 35 year old woman should wear, outside of the obvious boundaries of the working world .

Whatever you like, some might answer, although I don't think that's quite true. I saw a woman out shopping with her kids yesterday and she was skinny, skinny, skinny - quite thin enough to pull off the revealing Junior's department clothing she was wearing, but her face was deeply grooved with tanning booth wrinkles and the effect was jarring, this old face between her long bleached hair and her bright clothing. It was actually kind of pathetic, really, her obvious desperation to cling to youth and her youth obviously being long over. And at the same time, there's also something kind of pathetic in me spending my life slouching around in cords and hoodies, in this fashionless, sexless uniform. I feel like I'm five seconds away from getting a short, practical haircut and wearing pants with elastic waists and vests from Northern Reflections. So someplace between THOSE two extremes lies the answer, I think - but finding it makes for tricky shopping.

I remember reading something - Rebecca, I think, by Daphne du Maurier - and the young narrator, barely 20ish, wishes that she was a sophisticated woman in her 30s, with knowledge and a black satin dress. Of course, that was back in 1938, back when adults still existed, and it's hard imagining a contemporary young heroine wishing that she was in her mid-30s. We all want to be young girls forever now and everyone listens to music meant for 14 year olds and we watch stupid tv and run around in sneakers and striped t-shirts like a nation of toddlers, like we're all 15 years old and our parents are gone for the weekend.

This Post Is Pretty Much About Nothing.

I am dyeing my hair RIGHT NOW while I type and when I am done, my hair should be the reddish-brown colour of expensive furniture that middle-aged moms buy when their kids leave home, which is not really a colour ever seen in nature.



I was a bonehead for ALL of yesterday, and kind of a jerk to a variety of people. Being a nice person and being able to write nicely about certain things aren't always the same thing, you know, although I think that generally I'm nice enough and all that. But thanks for all of the luv - it actually did make me feel quite comforted as I held my Festival of Self-Loathing.



And with that, I am going to go to bed. I have some good posts in the works but this is NOT one of them. Good NIGHT.

I am still a bonehead and now I have a question:

What ARE these?

Those are my hands, to give them some scale, and they grow in a dark swampy part of my yard. (not my HANDS. The Flowers. My hands grow on the ends of my arms, in the regular fashion.)

Another shot of The Mystery Flower. I hope that it's not Creeping Rash Weed or Man, Your Hands Are Going To Puff Right Up Plant.

There's nothing BAD going on - everything's all right. I'm just quick to get my feelings hurt and too quick to respond, which is a less than charming trait. I don't know if I give off a falsely beatific, patient aura (maybe in WRITING I do), but I'm actually kind of a huffy person. And a big ol' bonehead. You're all very nice, though. If you lived closer, I'd make you guys cookies.

They live on cherries, they run wild

We have a huge old tree on our property, maybe hundreds of years old, and it bears the living scar from where a branch was removed decades ago. This scar forms a friendly whorl, full of moss and little shelves and my children decided several years ago that this was a secret fairy house, obviously, and much of their outdoor play is spent building furniture - flower chairs and petal blankets, little twig beds and polished stones for plates - for the fairies.

My Baby has a pragmatic soul. Where her older sister has always been like a flame or a ghost, a child of wind-hewn wildness, dark and brightness, The Baby is easily read and likes tea in pretty cups and sensible stories about turtles who need to learn to go to bed on time and told me this very morning "Mama, if you want a cozy kitchen, CLOSE THE FRONT DOOR." And yesterday she rummaged through The Fairy's Tree and finally said to me, despairingly, that she hadn't found ANY fairies at all.

When The Girl was six, she had this tremendously beautiful dress which looked odd and off-coloured on the hanger and then transformed into this beautiful shifting thing when she wore it, exactly the perfect thing for my fey, airy child:


I tucked the dress away and found it again yesterday when I was unpacking some hand-me-downs, shimmering oddly, and held it up for The Baby, who declared that it was ugly. She needs her own dress, the colour of sturdy trees that grow up, their roots firmly gripping the earth, the colour of her eyes that see so clearly, even when the truth is disappointing, her hands full of moss and not magic.

Some Questions For Internetland

I got an email from a dear friend this morning, and she mentioned a problem that she's having that I think is very common - how DO you make the most of evenings with your kids?

In her case, she's a divorced working mother with custody of her two young daughters (almost 7 and four years old), and her evenings are harried. She'd like to establish relaxing, meaningful bedtime rituals with her girls while she's still can, but is feeling frustrated.

So: how do we make evenings meaningful? how do we get supper ready, kids bathed and read to and tucked in by a decent time while getting the house cleaned up and ready for the next day? And what's your best advice for someone who's trying to do this on her own?

Oh, Wah Wah Wah

(warning! this is a prolonged rant. If you want to read something cheerier, go check out my Kitchen Party post!)

Western society despises children.

We hate everything to do with kids.

We hate the way that childbearing distorts our bodies from the barely post-pubescent model that is found sexually attractive.

We hate the noise and chaos that children bring to our public spaces.

We hate spending our money on other people's kids - just watch the discussion over daycare and school funding and health insurance.

We hate the way that children interrupt the big drunken amusement ride that is childless North American adulthood. We hate the way they curtail our beloved freedom, a certain kind of unencumbered peripatetic affluent life now being seen as the highest possible happiness.

And oh, how we do hate being parents, especially according to a new study showing that people with children are more depressed than the childless. And here's another study showing the same thing, with the contradictory punchline that we get to be happy again when the kids move out.

Here's a quote from Harvard University psychology professor Daniel Gilbert:

"Parents tell me all the time that: 'My child is my greatest source of
joy'," he said.
"My reply is that: 'Yes, when you have one source of joy, it's bound to be your greatest'.

Because parenthood "crowds out all other things in life", you see. Oh, and when we have kids, we worry about them a lot, to the extent where we're just never happy again. Don't worry, though - the amount we've invested in our kids means that we do some handy and mysterious self-rationalization which makes it feel worthwhile, a nifty trick which we've been pulling for thousands of years now.

What a load of crap.

Ignoring, for a moment, the whole idea that "happiness" is SCIENTIFICALLY MEASURABLE, who decided that things that make us happier are more worthwhile ANYHOW? I would rather, for example, sit on my porch and eat cookies than clean my bathroom. Does that mean that my lounging around is more worthwhile? That's just silly.

All right, onto happiness.

We value happiness much too much. This society has the emotional depth of a seven year old with a severe attachment disorder, and I blame the Baby Boomers, of course. They're fun to blame! But let's see how happy I am, according to studies:

1. My kids. So that would be -1. Or would that be -3? I'll say -1.
2. My faith. I'm a regular church-goer and belong to a mainstream Protestant denomination, which makes me very likely to be happy. +1
3. Uh oh! I'm a woman! -1.
4. I'm married. Meh. +0.5
5. Darn! I'm a homemaker! - 1.


Poor, poor sad me, I guess.

I have many, many great pleasures in my life - I spent this morning take pictures of flowers in the rain in my backyard, The Baby stomping alongside me with a toy camera, and then we went inside and made some oatmeal chocolate chip cookies and then I rocked her to sleep on my lap, her hair tangled and golden and curling along her still-babyish cheeks, my heart full of love and gentleness for her. There is no one in the world who could convince me that this is not actually a happy life, no study that could convince me in any way that these new and beloved people do not bring happiness with them.

Apparently, I Am Against Dancing Now

We went to the school talent show last night, which was organized and put on by the teachers of the school, and the intermediate girls (grades 4-8) put on a display of belly dancing. This struck me as INCREDIBLY inappropriate.

This isn't, let me be clear, in any way an anti-bellydancing thing -within its cultural context, bellydancing is considered a fun family dance and doesn't have the hoochie reputation that it rather unfairly has here - but even WITHIN its cultural context, it is considered wildly inappropriate for children to perform it in public. If the girls WERE interested in this dance form, a more folk dance approach to it could have been taken. If you want to see a whole roomful of adults go numb and quiet with discomfort, have a group of nine to 12 year old girls come out and shake their butts and grind their hips provocatively to a sexy song in a teacher-taught dance for a paid performance. I think this was an astonishing lapse in judgement by the school, to put it mildly, and my husband and I are furious about it.

So. What to do now? I mentioned to a teacher that there was some negative comments in the audience about it, and she was startled - apparently it had not occured to anyone on the staff that this might not have been something that parents would want to either see or have their children performing. Would you have found this inappropriate?

What I'll Be Doing When I'm Old

I'm glad to see that you like funny cookies, too. I was a bit worried that I would be all alone, cracking up at zany, zany cookies all by myself, which was a bit worrisome to think about. But now I have the gentle feeling of bonhomie that comes with knowing that some of you will be searching those cookies down and experiencing the wonder that is Furseal and Wildboar in person.

My older two are in a school thing tonight, a fundraising talent show. The Boy's class is doing - and this ALSO cracks me up - a barn dance. HA HA! He really is tremendously unenthusiastic about it, but we dutifully delivered him complaining and freshly scrubbed to the school, where he will likely be the most listless barn dancer ever. I used to wonder why teachers continued to force kids to square dance in the face of childish hostility and indifference and then the other day we were in a fast food restaurant and the MOST AWESOME PEOPLE EVER began filing in, old guys in western shirts and string ties and old ladies in gingham petticoat square dance dresses and beehive hair and my husband and I exchanged this total shared look of OH YEAH. Square dancing is the most awesome thing EVER, and seventy years from now The Boy will thank his teacher for introducing him to it. And tomorrow night I'm going to the NEXT show and I will laugh mightily at him. Ha!

Weird Cookie Blogging

Sherri, can you send me the email with the recipes again? I can't find it!

A friend phoned me this morning and casually asked me what I was doing.
"Taking pictures of animal crackers," I said.
It is a testament to my friend's easy-going nature that she only paused briefly before moving on to other, less dubious subjects.
But the animal crackers were AMAZING! My aunt Marta brought them up from Toronto on the weekend, and I dutifully have been stuffing them in lunchboxes, not thinking too much one way or another about them, until I received the following email from my husband:

Did you happen to have a look at those Party Animal Biscuits that Marta
brought for the kids? I grabbed a package this morning to check them
out. My favorites are RAT and the FURSEAL, although the DOG and the
RHINOCEROS are quite good. Fortunately each cookie has it's name
printed on it so you can tell what it is.

Intrigued, I opened up a bunch of packages this morning:

Mmm, what to eat first: the RACGOON, the FURSEAL, or the PORCUPINE? I've always wanted to eat a porcupine - there's just something so tempting about a big rodent covered in spikes. Oh, sweet, sweet TAPIR. Although WILDBOAR and PEAFOWL sound pretty good, too. I opened four bags and did NOT find a RAT, which was disappointing. But such is life: there's never a rat around when you want one.

Edited to add: Hey, my Aunt Marta commented! She wrote: "And since someone asked, I found them in the Chinese mall at 1st Markham Place (Hwy 7 and Woodbine) in a candy store. But I imagine you may be able to find them in a Chinese grocery store or other mall."

This is the packaging:

The Girl at Nine

A few years ago, I was at a church thing and overheard a group of young girls talking to each other. One of them told her friends, rolling her eyes mightily, that her mother had burst into tears that morning while brushing her daughter's hair because she suddenly realized that at nine, her daughter's time as her child at home was half over. This caused mighty amounts of pre-teen giggling and a sarcastic discussion on the general sappiness of mothers in general.

My Girl is nine years old today.

She is the beauty of my children, although each of my kids are - and I say this in total and utter modesty, obviously - incredibly good-looking. My husband and I often joke about how she managed to pick all of the most attractive bits of our genetics - my mother-in-law's delicate bones and finely built face, my mother's mobile, generous mouth, my father's expressive, long-lashed eyes combined with my grandmother's sea green eyes, the colour, her grandfather frequently tells her, of the North Sea. And from my husband's Dutch grandmother comes her wheat coloured hair. I thought she was such a funny-looking baby when she was born - a little hairy Winston Churchill - and all at once, she became this enchanting girl, like a princess in a fairy tale. And right now, she's all pre-tween and gawky and giant Chicklet teeth and still she walks into a room, reading a book and bumping into stuff and I'm filled with teary eyed wonder that I MADE her. Which is to say that the other mother, the sappy one in the first paragraph? She has NOTHING on me AND I have a blog.



Nine years. This time EXACTLY - shortly before eleven in the morning - nine years ago, she was placed briefly in my arms and I stared in utter panic into her greyish, unfocused eyes, and a few months before that, I have pictures of me pregnant and looking all of 12, although I was actually 26 and now I have a girl who will decorate cupcakes with me at 6:30 in the morning:

Yeah. So instead of snivelling about having - likely - only nine more years until she heads off to school, grown-up and beautiful and pragmatic and rolling her eyes only slightly at her hysterically sobbing mother, I'll write about what a great kid you are and how you are - despite your ethereal Princess And The Pea good looks - this resilient, smart, tough, kind-hearted, shy, brave, astonishing girl, halfway to grown up even with my bumbling, soppy-headed mothering.

Sometimes in the evenings, hours after your bedtime, your dad and I will be watching tv and chatting and suddenly I will be aware of a quietness in the kitchen, a floor board maybe creaking and there you'll be, wide-eyed with exhaustion and wanting a few moments with us, cuddling on the couch for a few minutes before heading back up to bed again. And even in those moments, I'm aware that they are rare and fleeting, a secret clock counting down your inevitable path away from us and into your own life. My big girl. I could not love you more.

Hellooooo there!

Urban Moms has a new site, and so today's Kitchen party post is up there. I haven't figured out how to use a little thing I like to call "the paragraph" yet, but I'm sure I will sooner or later.

I really liked reading everyone's money saving suggestions. If you have a recipe that's both cheap AND good, email it to me and I'll post it at my food site. Now go say hi.

Edited to add - hey, is everyone having trouble commenting at the new site?

We're all going to staaaaaaarve!

So hey. Heard anything about those food shortages and skyrocketing food prices? They SUCK. I thought that it might be fun - or fun-ish, anyhow, or possibly helpful - to start a post on how to save money on groceries right now while things are all nightmarishly expensive and stuff.

Here's my two cents:
- buy store brands. They're cheaper. If you're family gets all weepy about eating generic cereal, you're raising a family of babies and it will be a much needed character-building experience for them.
-eating by candlelight can make a spartan meal seem fancy. The same goes for making peanut butter sandwiches, eating them on a blanket in the yard and calling it a "picnic."
- prepackaged things for kids' lunches can get awfully expensive quickly. Making your own carrot sticks and cookies is cheaper and probably builds more of that "character" stuff.
- plan ahead of time what you're going to eat in the upcoming week and only shop once a week, list in hand. Make sure you check your cupboards and fridge so you don't buy even MORE carrots, like a certain person who is writing this RIGHT NOW.
- my husband just suggested "setting a budget." Ha ha! Funny husband!

That's all I can think of right at the moment. How do YOU save money on groceries?

I am endlessly blathering Friday

I was watching tv last night and the ad for Iron Man came on, which reminded me that the song Iron Man still scares me.

Da da DA DA DAAAA.

The Boy was downstairs and saw the ad too and his eyes just about jumped out of his head. We've kept things VERY g-rated - aside from the time his dad fast-forwarded to all of the Giant Robot Car bits in Transformers - and he just had NO CLUE that movies about guys in robot fighting suits existed. So I promised him that he could watch the movie on his tenth birthday, and in the meantime, I'm scrambling to think of movies that will keep him happy and yet not make him start thinking about becoming an Ultimate Fighting Champion. Suggestions?

My hands smell rather delicious right now (that just sounds wrong. But they do.). The Baby and I spent some time making gluten-free versions of these candies, to her glee. And to answer the question that someone emailed me: Yes, I did make her gluten-free poptarts.

They were small - about half the size of a regular poptart - but they worked just fine, except for the ones that ruptured at some point during the baking process. My husband ate those, however, and everyone was happy. I used a gluten-free pie crust mix and The Baby's favorite jam, and I expect you can figure the rest out if you're interested. It was really, really easy and made me feel very clever with very little effort, my favorite sort of feeling and why I will never be writ large on the list of people who Do Things. Because I don't.

*WARNING I AM GOING TO BRAG ABOUT MY KIDS WARNING*

There's nothing quite as edifying as the feeling that one's children are likable, bright and talented. We went to a school open house last night and The Boy read us several books and showed us his writing ("My dad and me builded a robot. It ate a guy.") - so very clever! - and then we went to The Girl's class, where the poor things are endlessly doing EQAO testing this year, and The Girl is calmly writing test after test PERFECTLY. As in: she is scoring 100% time after time on the provincial literacy test. WELL NOW. "She's bringing the class score up!" her teacher said, happily. How gratifying.

It's a funny thing, this feeling - the sensation that for the rest of my life, the things that my kids do will mean more to me than the things I do, the way my eyes suddenly stung last night when my little boy suddenly became someone who could read me dopey books about bears eating berries and write stories about the homicidal robot he has big plans to build and my clever big girl and her crackling quiet smartness. And there are things that I value more than intelligence - being kind-hearted, decent, moral people, of course - but MY KIDS ARE SMART! WHOOOO!

The First of May

... daffodils,

That come before the swallow dares and take

The winds of March with beauty....

March - or May, if you're here. We're not yet at the leaves+grass stage of spring, but the sky is blue and the trees are budding and the fields are black because they were set on fire. Dramatic!

So I herded my older kids off to school this morning and my dad and brother popped in, wanting to know if The Baby and I wanted to go on an adventure. No. I hate adventure. But they were heading way, way out past a neighbouring rural town to buy some whitefish, and apparently The Baby and I really needed to tag along. And like so many of my father's adventures, this turned out to be more adventurous than I'd initially signed up for, clinging to the backseat while we skidded around the NARROW, precariously twisting dirt roads in my dad's big ol' truck, looking for the elusive Fish Man for what felt like three hours, friendly rural dogs running alongside our truck with their big dumb doggy faces. When we finally found him, he was out of fish but promised to bring dad some tomorrow. Mission accomplished, I guess.

And what did we listen to on our ill-advised rural excursion?
The manly country music of Corb Lund?
The endless blathering of CBC radio?
OR FRANKIE VALLI AND THE FOUR SEASONS?

The Baby kept her hands clasped over her ears for most of the trip, a disapproving look on her face. Sorry kid - sometimes Mama gets sucked into Grandpa's schemes and then there goes our morning, off looking for fish far out in the bush at a house that may or may not be there. And I'm not even sure if I LIKE whitefish.