GEEEEEEEEZ

I had - and am still having - QUITE the weekend. Nothing BAD has happened to any of us, but everything has been rather unexpected. It's all been an adventure and you know how I - and The Baby - feel about adventures. I'll probably right more about it later, but for now, here's my Kitchen Party post and it's about pancakes (and some other things, but mostly about panckes). You can comment without registering again, so I'd love to hear from you.

Of Course That Was The After Picture!

My favorite comments from yesterday - after the whole "bagged milk" thing (who KNEW that the western half of Canada has walked so sadly away from our Canadian heritage? Tsk.) - are the comments about my astonishingly organized fridge.

Mmmm hmmm.

I did say in the comments, I think, that it took my fridge TWO HOURS to get to that state of spartan cleanliness, which suggests a rather dire state of previous affairs. One ABSOLUTELY DISGUSTING bag of garbage later and a whole lot of scrubbing and VOILA*! A nice clean fridge.

The Boy kept opening the door and peering in, happily, which made me ask him what he was doing.
"I'm just trying to make sure I remember what it looks like, that's all," he said. "For later." Aaaah, happy childhood memories! "Remember that one time mom cleaned the fridge?".

There is no "before" picture. No.

* I've frequently seen bloggers use "Wah-lah!" in their posts, which BAFFLED me for ages, until I realized that it was an attempt to spell "voila" without having seen it written down. So there you go. (and that was edited because WHOA, that was inadvertently kind of snotty. So says the president of the "Spell Voila Correctly" society.)

Some of the peonies are blooming in my yard. back on a steep hill covered in brush and poison ivy, unseen. I thought this was a waste, so I climbed up yesterday to pick them while my kids shrieked at me that I was WALKING THROUGH POISON IVY IN A SKIRT AND SANDALS! But poison ivy doesn't bother me, for whatever reason. And now I have some lovely peonies and some mock orange blossoms rather fragrantly sitting in a vase on my dining room table. I like this time of year - it's so flowery.

I'm always torturing my husband by making him listen to my "funny" ideas for new hymns for my church, like "All Right, Today Is Potluck Lunch! (I Hope Joanne Brought That Potato Thing)" and "Shall We Hold Hands Into The Rainbow?". Oh, hardy har! Liberal Protestant hymns = humorous good times! Sometimes, my husband looks like he cannot bear one moment more of his great good fortune in being married to his funny, funny wife. He's just lucky.

Ladies and Gentlemen, My Fridge

With notes.
We see, on the top shelf, item 1) Grapes. They are up there to hide from The Baby.
We also see 2) Leftovers, which consist of A) brown rice, B) black bean and corn salad and C) black bean hummus. Our leftovers are leaning HEAVILY on the black beans this week, apparently.
On the next shelf, we see several varieties of 3) Cheese. This needs no further comment, I believe.
The next item, marked *, needs a special explanation. Our fridge, being an emergency purchase, is, to put it delicately, a big piece of junk. While I was cleaning it, the fridge door shelves FELL APART, thus necessitating the transfer of the asterisked condiments to another section of the fridge.
In the bottom right drawer, we see 4) Milk, in bags, As Is Correct (and some lemons, snoopy.). You can also see a carton of buttermilk because I bake like a fiend. A baking fiend.
And finally, we see the bottom right drawer, which contains 5) Vegetables. Mostly of the green and fungal variety, because I am a mean, mean mother.

And thus concludes your tour of my fridge. Now close the door - you're letting all the cold out.
(Wow, who knew that milk was so mysterious? All of your questions about Canada's mysterious bagged milk can be answered by scrolling to the bottom of this post at The Reluctant Housewife, who does a lovely pictorial explanation.)

I wrote a post earlier and Blogger ate it. RUDE! It wasn't very good - I was mostly whining about how the kids were just unbearable this morning, on the very last day of school. But now the irritation has worn off and I'm mostly just bracing myself to go clean the fridge. Yuck.

So. That is what I'm doing today. I DID put on full makeup as a way of bracing myself for the horror to come, and I overdid the eye makeup a bit and now I look like I'm going to get a role in The Battleship Potemkin. A BIT HEAVY ON THE EYELINER, I THINK.

Meanwhile, I'm guest-posting over at Slouching Mom's while she lets her eyes recover. See you over there.

Far Away

There are some absolutely gorgeous photos from this weekend of my oldest daughter holding a box of chocolates and I wish I could happily post them, but I can't. So here's just a scrap:

Fancy chocolates are something that she thinks, rather hilariously, are just her due. That and handmade soaps and bright little jars of nail polish and gaudy shirts - her rococo developing sense of herself. She still doesn't brush her hair without significant nagging and her nails are always grubby, but she has the fancy, extraneous bits of femininity down pat.

That makes her sound sort of like Veruca Salt.

Ha. No.

"I got the raspberry one for you, mom!" she announced cheerfully, sharing her chocolate loot when she got back to the car. Her fancy turqoise nailpolish was used to give her sister a manicure on the porch.

Don't touch her soap, though.

My husband ran into one of The Boy's classmates, and told me later on that he had the shrillest, highest-pitched voice EVER. I started laughing and had to tell him that said classmate actually had a regular little boy voice and our Boy kind of has a freakishly low, gravelly voice. ("Stop letting that baby smoke so much!" - one of my brothers.) The Boy - and his freaky smoke-and-whiskey voice - is a real crowd favorite, gregarious and smiling. And his hair always stands straight up, no matter how recently it's been cut. He has a new scattering of scars around his eyes from his recent bout of chicken pox, little bits of mortality in his perfect little boy skin.

They're both off on a school trip right now, whisked away on big yellow buses, off to a nearby city. And I am mostly okay with it - they're going to have a LOT of fun.

And part of me, of course, feels like walking around and wringing my hands that my children are far away right now, that they are beyond my reach. At school, I can walk over, I can look in their classrooms (although I don't. How creepy would that be to always have your mom mooning at you from the classroom door?), and I know where they are, physically. But having them off and away feels wrenching, even knowing that they'll walk in the door at the same time they always do.

If you met them, I strongly suspect that you would think they were pretty regular kids, with their messy hair and their sulking and their loud little kid voices. The magic of motherhood, I guess, is that it transforms three pretty regular little kids into the whole contents of my heart, two kids off on a mild, carefully supervised school trip into me sitting here trying to write down words that capture this combination of happy and sad and wistful and worried and only telling you about a little boy with starry scars around his eyes and his sister who will spend all of her pocket money on her friends.

My post is up at the Kitchen Party - it's about getting that summertime feeling.

Speaking of feelings - I feel gross! Oh yes, I do. I'm better than yesterday, but I still feel maybe 2 out of 10. Possibly 3. So I'm going to take it easy today and catch up on laundry - which fell inexplicably weeks behind while I was sick yesterday - and I'll see you around. xo

Jiggity Jog

We've all been fractious and out-of-sorts since we got home - everyone is irritable and squabbling and the house has been loud with high, childish voices shrieking about some wrong-doing or another. I have that cramped feeling in the back of my neck, like the force of my irritation is squashing me from the head down.

The trip itself was short but nice enough - we walked down lovely streets full of closed stores this morning and stayed at my in-laws' teeny tiny camp last night and went to my grandmother's art show yesterday afternoon, to give you the full run-down of what we did. We also took a walk through the bush yesterday, and The Baby said to her dad "Is this an adventure? Are we having an adventure?"
Her dad answered that yes, we were indeed having an adventure.
"TAKE ME BACK NOW," said The Baby. "I HATE ADVENTURE."
And that is how you can tell she is my child.

The ride there was hilariously bad, with The Baby screaming "SOMEONE HELP ME! THEY ARE CHOKING ME WITH MY CARSEAT!" for a solid HOUR, but the ride home wasn't bad at all - she coloured quietly for a while and sang along with the car stereo and then she slept. And then we got home and we all were relieved - our home! our very own home! - and then five minutes later we were all so irritated that I wondered why we had ever done this. Why did we ever think it was a good idea to have all these kids? Who decided getting married was so smart?

Whenever we're anyplace we don't live, we play this game where we pick out what houses we'd live in and you know, they're always VERY MUCH like the house we DO live in, but they possess the irresistible allure of not being our actual house. And you know, if we lived in one of those similar houses, we would quickly make our lives exactly the way they are here, after the initial rush through the front door and the thrill of finding new places to put all of our crap. Those new streets that seem so endlessly interesting would just become the street that we lived on.

"That house looks like it has LOTS of bedrooms," said The Girl, wistfully. "I bet everyone could have one of their own. Even you, mom!"

There always is some pretty house on a nice tree-lined street that we'd like to buy, always, and I guess that's the problem with going anywhere - the inner voice that whispers to you that the choices you've made, these choices, aren't making you as happy as other choices that you might have made. "Imagine," says the mean inner voice, "You could stand at your bedroom window in the morning and watch the gulls flying over the lake. That could be YOUR children's tire swing."
No wonder we're so crabby.

Earlier today I stood outside some lovely small church - the EXACT denomination as the one I attend, thank you - and listened to the sound of the congregation singing a hymn I've sang dozens of times and felt a wistful yearning. Oh, for what, for what? To be sitting at this very desk with the afternoon light shining green through the leaves and gold through the windows, to be home.

A Bunch of Links About Tasha Tudor

To keep you busy while I'm gone. Have a fun weekend, everyone!
Her obituary at the New York Times
Semicolon
Empress of Dirt
Not Quite June Cleaver
Posted From Home
Laura's Miscellaneous Musings
Gracious Hospitality
Waltzing Matilda
A Distant Soil
Simple Gifts
School Library Journal
Allsorts
Little Men

More art and a bit of singing

I feel like I should do more posts on Tasha Tudor, since so many of you didn't know who she was, which made me need to lie down on my couch and fan myself. With a vintage fan.


The Baby got a haircut!

Her hair had been VERY VERY long - half way down her back, which was rather striking since so many of her contempoaries are still sporting the "I Can't Grow Bangs" look. But her hair was also a constantly snarled bird's nest and combing it was a misery to both of us, since she'd wail with pain and inevitably would also nail me in the face with her big rock head as she writhed around. So now her hair is just past shoulder length and rather cute - all curly and sweet, which is kind of funny on the little grump.

Look! She's drawing stuff!

And this is a painting by The Boy, called "Baby Dragon Just About to See You."

RUN!

The Girl also has some upcoming art from her current project, entitled "Who Gave That Kid A Pottery Wheel? There Is Clay On Everything In The House." I'm not allowed to post those pictures until everything has been painted, though.

I have TONS of things that I should be doing today - I need to get all of the laundry washed and folded and pack a suitcase and make sure the kids have things to do in the car and make sure that the Gravol is packed - argh - and that there are enough snacks to feed the littlest kid and instead I keep doing pretend work, like "My mp3 player needs new songs on it! I'm doing that." and "Today is the day that I should answer all these emails." My ability to find myself imaginary make-work projects is astonishing.

The Baby and I just sang a duet of Baby Beluga and her part, at least, was so eye-wateringly adorable that I could just weep. So maybe she'll release a CD someday, called "My Kid Sings A Few Lines From About A Hundred Children's Songs." It'll be great.

Stillwater

Growing up, I was only aware of what I did not want from life. I was not a happy kid for dozens of reasons, and adult life just seemed like an endless miserable extension of childhood, getting up and going to work in the dark and coming home drained and exhausted and watching dull sitcoms and then to bed, lather rinse repeat forever.

You could go and live in a city where it stunk and was full of people and busy and full of cars or you could live in the country and die of boredom and get eaten by a bear. You could be an astronaut - or so we were told by our optimistic young hippy teachers, although none of us believed them - you could be an astronaut and land on the moon, but you still couldn't escape it, although I didn't know what it was, could not articulate what this pressing horror was that made life seem so endless and unbearable.


I read a lot. A LOT. I read several books a week now and look back in astonishment over how much I read then in my attempts to find some shelter, something. I read The Secret Garden many times and each time would feel the same sort of sobbing bewilderment - what was it that I wanted? what moved me so much? I knew from personal experience even then that I HATED gardening and was rather indifferent to flowers, so it wasn't that.


And then this book happened into my hands:

It was as though a sudden radiant lightswitch was turned on, illuminating everything. She wrote about how they celebrated St. Nicholas's Day and made paper cornucopias full of homemade fudge for the tree and put on marionette shows and it occurred to me, all at once, that this was how I wanted my life to be, like a road sign suddenly appearing in the fog.

I could have a dollhouse in my kitchen, which thrilled me deeply when I was a child but which I've now recovered from, mostly. I could mark on my wall when I made my first pitcher of lemonade every year. I could have little girls in dresses and sturdy little boys, all getting into the cookie jar which would always, always be full of cookies. I could make cakes on Midsummer's Eve and float them lit with candles down the river on a raft, although I have yet to own a river. I could wear nothing but vintage dresses and aprons for the rest of my life, if I liked. I could live fully and radiantly within my faith. I could have geese that would flock picturesquely around me, if I didn't truly loathe geese not just as a species but as INDIVIDUALS. I could do WHAT I LIKED with my life, live how I wanted, and suddenly I had the map to where my happiness might be.

Now that I'm in my mid-30s, many of the women I know are beginning a type of quiet panic about the nearly daily loss of hotness that we're currently experiencing, the slow slide into middle age. Some of them are giving up already, retreating bitterly into elastic waist pants and sexless haircuts. Some of them are doing Pilates 24 hours a day and talking about getting their boobs lifted and their eyes done and spend hours every month making sure that their hair is completely ungrey and talking rather desperately about their desires to be desirable to their son's future teenaged friends. Which is just nasty, really.

I remember being a teenager and reading with deep fascination about Tasha Tudor in Victoria magazine - she was SO OLD! We rarely see very, very old people - well, unless you're in my family and then I had old people by the bushel, back then - but you rarely see very old people in magazines, and you never see them so proud, and so - I realized with a shock - beautiful. There was nothing to fear in the end of youth, nothing to be dreaded.

"It's wonderful to grow old," Tasha Tudor said in an interview. " You can get away with murder. Everyone takes great care of you. And they're afraid of offending you. You can say the most outrageous things and get away with it. I fully believe old age is one of the most delightful periods of my life."

And yesterday, at 92, Tasha Tudor died in her own bed, surrounded by her children and grand-children, having lived her life wholeheartedly and with great joy. I owe everything in my life to her.

(If you've never heard of Tasha Tudor before, she was a beloved children's book author and illustrator who lived a VERY unusual life. A Is For Annabelle and A Time To Keep are two lovely books to start with.)

Me Writing A Bunch of Stuff

I've been a little incommunicado lately, haven't I? I didn't post all weekend and I've been sort of quiet all week. Nothing is wrong, aside from a slight cold, but I felt all week like my brain was replaced by used kleenex and wasn't up to writing much. But begone dull care!

So I was reading some Erma Bombeck the other day - a paperback version of "I Lost Everything In the Post-Natal Depression" that I'd liberated from my parents' house. This is what I do: we go out to my parent's house so my husband can fix something on their computer and I go upstairs and steal their books.

I used to read a lot of Erma Bombeck, back when I was a kid. I was forever getting stuck someplace that my parents were visiting, bored out of my wits in a houseful of adults and the only book around to read would be by good ol' Erma, so I'd read that. Who WHERE these people? I wondered - these chubby, exhausted underappreciated housewifey mothers of three. And now I am older and rereading the book the other day, I thought: OH. Erma, c'est moi.

Humour doesn't stand up well to time. It ages and dies and than becomes at best the smiling ghost of what we used to find funny.* Sad things stay sad, though, because tragedy is durable and so I guess my big money advice for aspiring young authors who wish to still be read is to write things as depressingly as possible. Most aspiring young authors I've known have been big mopes, anyhow, and so this really shouldn't be hard.

The Winnie the Pooh books basically ruined Christopher Robin's - the real one - life. His classmate's made his life horrible and he never escaped the shadow of being captured as an exquisitely sensitive, perfect little boy who hung out with a teddy bear all the time. And that, as a person who writes a lot about her kids, gives me serious pause. To hurt my kids at what is little more than a hobby would be the height in self-centered selfishness.

Erma's kids, though, turned out fine. They didn't mind being written about one bit. So it seems to me that it's much, much better to write about your children as real people, flawed and bratty and well-loved, regardless, than to turn them into too-sensitive paragons, pretend children who overshadow the real ones forever. But Erma's kids turned out fine and they like being her children. Don't fictionalize your kids, I guess, and don't be mean about them - and THINK about what you're going to write about them first. (I remember reading a blog post where the mother wrote about wiping her 8 year old son's butt. Good GRIEF. Show some sense.) Also, try not to embarrass them too much, although that's sort of a losing battle - I well remember being 14 and finding everything about my parents embarrassing. Of course, my dad would come pick me up at HIGH SCHOOL in a giant fur hat and a 300 year old pick up truck with a dead animal in the back, so I probably know embarrassment more deeply than the rest of you. He's lucky I just steal his books now.

* I read this to my dad and he objected strenuously. "How about the Ransom of Red Chief?" he demanded. And indeed, The Ransom of Red Chief is STILL very, very funny. But it's an exception.

I've spent the last several hours housecleaning and sadly, have nothing much to say today. Maybe tonight?

**Today's Vegetable**

So yesterday was A for Asparagus and today is B for Broccoli - we happen to just LUV broccoli. There's my less-than-totally-healthy broccoli salad recipe and Vaguely Chinese Vegetables - which also has bok choy in it, another favorite B vegetable at Casa Beck. Or you could just steam the broccoli, which is good too. I was going to write a roasted beet recipe but demurred, since I don't think I can convince anyone who is not already a beet fan to give them a try. There's a Chocolate Beet Cake, though.

PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: do NOT feed beets to babies. Or spinach.

Beets and spinach have high concentrations of naturally-occurring nitrates which
can reduce the ability of the baby's hemoglobin to transport oxygen. Use these
foods in moderation or not at all until the baby reaches his or her first
birthday.

The Day After Father's Day

My yard is full of AWESOME places to take pictures. It is also full of poison ivy, so look out. And yes, she DOES wear those orange boots all the time.

I kept threatening my husband ALL DAY yesterday that I was going to write a really mushy Father's Day post about him, perhaps one that involved babyish pet names ("To My Poopsy-Wuggums, The Best Dada In The World."). Luckily for him - and your brains, too - I didn't write it, since I was busy lolling around feeling crappy. And then we had a barbecue and the kids gave him cards they made at school, one of which involved dyed macaroni, the end.

I did write my Kitchen Party post this morning, though - here it is! - and in it, I announce my new BIG PLANS! Well, medium-sized plans. Moderately-sized plans. Go have a look-see.

Hair, Hair, Glorious Hair

My son has freakishly fast growing hair. He came out of the womb (do you pronounce the B on the end? I rather obnoxiously do so: Whoooo-mmmbbbb. Which makes me a total idiot.) with long flowing hair that was actually all in his eyes and over his ears, so his dad gave him a little trim with some nail scissors once Baby Boy was all clean and stuff, and so his baby book says, in the spot for first haircut "about seven hours after he was born."

When he was just over three and I was expecting The Baby (in just a few days, although I did not know that), we took him to get his hair cut at the barber shop in town and someone asked us if it was his first haircut. Hardy har, we said. No. And since I had the camera with me - we'd brought it only because we'd gone to look at a bigger vehicle for ALL THOSE KIDS - I took a bunch of pictures of my moppet and the barber's intense focus on him, his hand resting gently on the side of the Boy's head as he used the clippers.

A few days later I had the Baby and shortly after that the town barber died very unexpectedly. They didn't have a recent photo, my dad told me, and that's when I remembered the pictures I had taken of my grinning child and a barber's gentle hands, so those were the pictures used at his funeral. And now we drive out of town to take The Boy to his monthly shearing, and I've never brought the camera again. I'll always remember, though, the way the barber spins the chair around at the end and presents me with my son, clean and tidy with the fine lines of his face suddenly revealed, his face suddenly new to my eyes.

Gardens at Night

We've been watching In The Night Garden before bedtime recently - our kids have baths in order, starting with The Baby and so there are always a few pajama-clad, damp haired kids to snuggle with in the evening, and The Night Garden strikes exactly the right, sleepy note for before bedtime. It's a sleepy, gentle, silly show and we're all rather fond of it.

Okay, it's aimed at toddlers. We have one of those and two older kids who are now old enough to watch the show through sentimental, jaded eyes. "I would have LOVED this show when I was young," one of them said to me the other night.

Some parents aren't as crazy about it, though. Let's see some of the comments!

There is no education value or enjoyment in watching this show.
Yes, because I only want my children watching strictly didactic television. How will they learn not to light fires and give themselves homemade tattoos unless they watch it on television? My children only watch shows like "The Berenstain Bears Learn That Killing Is Bad and Also That Papa Bear Is A Freaking Moron."

We need to have educational shows that will help teach numbers, letters, colours etc. to our children.
I HAVE NO WORDS. Okay, here are some - that's YOUR job. The tv is just a big magic light-up box.

You know, there are TONS of kids shows that I REALLY hate - hello, Sponge Bob, you big gross yellow thing! - and yet I don't start online petitions to get them removed from the air because I AM IN CHARGE of what my kids watch. It's not like my three year old knows how to work the remote. Who ARE these people?

I think the whole IDEA that television is there primarily as a way to educate and socialize my children is just endlessly hilarious - it's just there for fun. We want to burden everything poor little kids do with so much educational weight that we suck the joy from every bit of childhood - a teacher friend was bitterly complaining tonight that the emphasis on reading in schools is now a strictly functional one. Children are no longer expected to read for the joy, the fun of it, but because it is an important future job skill. Kids go to insane amounts of extra-curricular activities not for FUN, but because their parents desperately worry that they won't be well-rounded middle class participants. Television is not there for a few minutes of goofy, gentle fun at bedtime, but because there's some sort of educational value in having Dora screech at you, in watching zombified Bob The Builder and his freaky mutant machines build an "eco village".

"Do my hair up like a Tombliboo!" The Baby demanded this morning, which gave me a pause for a moment until I realized what she was talking about - oh, THOSE guys.

Voila, Tombliboo hair:

We want our kids to have a relaxed, gentle childhood and so far, so good. I want their heads filled with pretty things - storybooks that we read because they're pretty and amusing, songs that we listen to because they're old and sad, tv shows that we watch because there's something enchanting in the idea of toys playing in a forest at twilight, and because we know these pretty things won't last, that we'll blink and their books will be dusty on the shelves because they've grown-up and gone.

(Edited to add: yes, it IS by the British company that made Teletubbies! We were never Teletubby fans, but this show is like Teletubbies as written by an opium-addicted Romantic poet - soothing and melancholy and gentle. It would NOT be every family's cup of tea, but we certainly find it amusing.)

Subtext

There were those girls, the ones you had pegged as being likely to get married to someone they met in high school - and how I held them in scorn with their lockers covered in bridal dress pictures and their boring boyfriends that they'd dated since grade nine. I was going to have an exciting life, I decided, and marry someone I met someplace thrilling - maybe in Paris, maybe while working for Doctors Without Borders, and this would just be a place I was from, eventually.

Guess who married someone they met in high school. Go on. Guess. And not one of those girls married their high school boyfriends, as far as I know. Way to predict, young me!

If I read someone's blog, I generally walk away feeling like I know their children. Husbands are another matter - shadowy people who haunt the back of paragraphs. When I used to write about looking after my babies, those grueling, endless, long-gone days, I didn't know at first that I was writing about someone else as well, so much did my babies feel like this extension of me, these soft, dark-haired sleeping children. My daily writing - and I've always written every day, ever since I was pregnant with my first child - felt like my own history but was an unwitting map to my children's growing selves, this history I wrote of someone else without looking. But even in my private writing, I don't write that much about my husband. I wonder why?

I think it might be as simple as proximity - when I write, normally, it's mid-morning and the only person hanging out with me is The Baby. And then there's the constant physical presence of her, the mild, not-unpleasant clausterphobia - scampering up to sit on my shoulders while I read a book, crawling on my lap, her face constantly with me - so I write about her, stories about her spilling out of my fingers. Or it could be the same as when I wrote about her sleeping infant sister and thought I was writing about myself., those girls and their lockers full of wedding dresses and my locker which may as well have rained confetti on me for the way things worked out.

Today was a migrainey day. Bleh.

Anyhow. After my guest post about The Baby getting hurt, Karla went on to have something eerily similar happen to her. So if I ever guest post at YOUR site, be sure to request that I write about something GOOD, okay?

My head hurts too much to sit here for long, but I do have a favour: do you have website recommendations for:
1) a game-loving six year old boy with limited reading skills (because he is six). He's tired of all of our standards and really would like some new sites.
and
2) a 9 year old girl who mostly just plays Webkinz but who will be pretty sulky if I don't ask for recommendations for her SPECIFCICALLY too?

Off to go have my head hurt. See ya tomorrow.

I'm all over the place today!

Isn't this a gorgeous muffin? My Girl made them for breakfast yesterday morning ALL BY HERSELF. She's so handy.

So today, I'm posting in a couple of places - my friend Karla needed a guest poster, and I was happy to oblige, so you can read about The Baby AND The Boy getting hurt last night, and since it's Monday, you can go read my Kitchen Party post - and something that made me VERY happy for my Baby.

Ah, THAT'S where I keep my Smarties

In my smartypants! Get it? GET IT?
I've been nominated for Brainiest Blogger at the Bloggy Hoss Elections, which is pretty awesome. Also awesome would be getting you to go over and vote for me and all.
Off to rest my gigantic, brain-stuffed head.
(click on your vote and then click comment. See? BRAINY.)

Let A Smile Be Your Umbrella

That is a Snapping Turtle. You can click for a larger image and marvel over her dinosaury little body and carbunkely shell. They have been in existence in their present form unchanged since the time of the dinosaurs.

They frequently wander into the middle of roads around here and get themselves into trouble. Some people run over them for fun and sometimes they get run over by accident, but they are a large turtle used to getting their way just through the force of their personality alone and are not well adapted to fast roads and getting out of the way. My dad rescues them whenever he sees them, screeching the truck to a halt and hefting the turtle up carefully (and I cannot emphasize enough what a BAD IDEA this is. Do NOT do it.), moving it to the side of the road or taking it for a drive to a safer locale. When we were kids, he would put the rescued turtle on the floor of the backseat, telling me and my brother casually to "watch your feet because it'll bite your toe off in a second", which meant that many, many car rides were spent with my brother and I carefully keeping our feet as far on the seat as they could go, while a furious snapping turtle hissed and snapped and demanded to be let back out again just beneath us.

My parents found this turtle this morning, and made the following film, which is how they have their simple fun:

Make video montages at www.OneTrueMedia.com

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHCCCCCCKKKKKKKK

Then they made sure that the turtle was on its way and off the road and headed off again, toes intact.

Hey, Canadians with little kids!

Avent is giving away BPA-free sippy cups for babies and toddlers (mention how old your child is, because there are two types). The number to call is 1-866-624-1906.

That Fish Guy Is Looking At You

Hello and thank you for coming to The Baby's first art show.

In this first drawing, entitled "That Fish Guy Is Looking At You", you can see that the artist has experimented with perspective and conventional ideas of gender:

"Rabbits eat carrots," The Baby said enigmatically. "But I don't know who eats clams. Not me, though."

Her next piece is entitled "Mouse."

"That mouse is eating a blobby thing," said The Baby, forcing the viewer to confront their own visions of "a blobby thing." Is it cheese? Something gross from under the couch? A clam?

The third piece is called "Little Guy With Lots of Legs." The artist has changed the name of this piece, now calling it simply "Rabbit."

Is this mutant rabbit a comment on our enviromental fears? The artist isn't telling: "This game is stupid. Put on Wubbzy."

This piece is called "Sun." "He is angry," The Baby said. "Somebody yelled at him." After a moment's reflection, she added "He is sad too. Somebody scribbered on him."

Our final piece is the most striking, perhaps, of the collection, entitled "This Guy Is Not Happy."


"He has three chicken pox," the artist said.

And this concludes The Baby's first art show. We hope that you'll come to her upcoming exhibitions, tenatively entitled "Who Let That Kid Have A Permanent Marker?" and "My Little Pony Colouring Book And A Black Crayon."

Artsy Fartsy

Oh, ha. The Baby was painting with green tempera paint yesterday and she painted a 9 x 13" piece of paper entirely green.
"What's that a painting of?" I asked.
"The back of an alligator," said The Baby.

It's a rainy grey day today, a little bit cool but pleasant - a nice day for staying home and baking and reading stories out loud. The Baby is curled up on my lap, watching videos on this site while I type in a small box in the corner - a clever arrangement, if I do say so. We're watching Elliot Moose and his friends talk about painting, which goes rather nicely with my big plans for today, which is to figure out art projects for the kids for the summer.

I LOVE art education in the first couple of years of school - boxes filled with recycled materials for sculpting, easels always set up - but come grade one, art starts filling in smaller and smaller parts of their curriculum. It makes me sad, but I DO understand - our tiny rural school has problems with funding and classes full of kids who need help with just the basics of learning and art tends to take a backseat, just out of necessity. There was a lot of 60s romanticism about what art education could bring to kids, and I do know that I feel depressed when friends tell me that their children have never used play dough because their mothers hate the mess, that there kids aren't allowed to paint. (do it outside!) But for many of the kids locally, just obtaining the basics of literacy and math skills is going to be enough of a challenge, and the school must do the best it can for the actual children it has.

Writing that made me sad. Poor little kids.

The Baby rides in the back of the minivan, and she frequently will call up to us, asking "Can you hear me?", not happy until her parents call back that we DO hear her, that we know she's there. And her pragmatic, hilarious art gives her another voice - a way to show her world, full of cats and porcupines and alligators who were just leaving, thank you. My heart breaks for the kids who will always have art and books and music as an unneeded frill in their lives, their clarion voices stilled so early, with no one to hear them.

Treasure

My older kids have recently declared that they are both going to become archaeologists, and have been going on after-dinner digs in the bush behind our house. I wrote before about The Boy finding an old train stamp and they've also found ancient pop cans for a chocolate carbonated milk.

Barf.

So this evening, The Boy and The Baby went out with their dad to do more digging (The Girl stayed in with me, gleefully writing a list of all of the things we're going to need for our first aid kit this summer, which apparently is going to require a lot of bandages.) and found the following lovely thing:

Can you guess what it's from? It's 8 1/2 inches across and HEAVY and really puzzled us for a while.
Here's a closer detail - you can click on it for the huge image:

Look! They're still in business!

The past is a comfortable place, even when it's horrible - which it frequently was, of course. But it's finished, which is a nice feeling - unlike the future which looms ahead, this unknowable space. And in half an hour all of the kids will be in bed and this evening will become a memory, this time sliding backwards into the past, this golden evening.

What are we doing right now? We're relaxing and watching a Veggie Tales video:

Awesome.

One of my brothers calls my kids Rod and Todd Flanders (ha!), and they ARE very wholesome children, which is rather fine by me. Who wants prematurely jaded kids? On my daughter's birthday, all of her young guests were talking about Fergie's latest CD, which they all were extremely familiar with, and which my husband and I found extremely distasteful, these 8 and 9 year old girls singing "The scent of your skin lingers on me now." Um, yuck. Nice job, parents. But tonight, The Girl was singing "The Wraggle Taggle Gypsies-O" to herself while writing her list of band-aids and gauze and I smiled benignly upon her, history giving a rather bawdy song a free pass, apparently, and making it just freaking ADORABLE. Figure THAT one out.

The Saddest Pie In The World

*THE PIE TEMPERATURE IS 375.*

I made a pie today and that pie did not turn out. Go read my sad tale of failed pie making.


Other than that? Hot, mosquitoes, headache, kids back in school (THANKYOUGOD), Baby throwing one bit long tantrum. The end! See ya tomorrow.

(p.s. - Bethany has a list of AMAZING summer fun ideas up at her site, should you be wanting some good ones. I particularily like the idea of a tie-dye day. Smart!)

A favour, puh-leez.

If you have a few minutes or if you have a particular favorite, could you let me know which of my posts you think is the best, and the most, let's say, worthy of being reprinted in an actual book? That would be helpful. I'm having a heck of a time picking one out.
Here are some posts to choose from, maybe, although if you have one you like more, let me know:
They Live On Cherries, They Run Wild
Oh Boy
Fools
Hearts
Shriven
Haunted
Snow
The Day of The Dead
Summer's End
Something About Clothes
Blood
Fortune
Eight Years Ago Sunday
A Weekend Away
Wherein I Am Graceful Like A Flower Or Possibly A Gazelle