It's My Birthday!

I woke up half an hour ago, came downstairs and The Baby shrieked at me "HAAAPPPY BIRTHDAY!" So she and her daddy sang me happy birthday and The Boy was so excited, holding the present that he'd pooled his meager resources with The Baby to get - and I loved it. (a pretty yellow angel candleholder.) Then the Girl groggily sleep-walked downstairs and handed me her present, complete with homemade wrapping paper with unicorns on it. Another great present - vanilla hot chocolate and a fancy book mark dedicated to Her Mother. Love it.

And they had decorated the living room, at The Boy's insistence! And my husband is making me one of his CRAZY, OVER THE TOP birthday cakes! And there will be wine and a party and MORE PRESENTS! I LOVE my birthday. And I am 36 today, so I should - God willing and the creeks don't rise - have lots more of them. The day before my birthday always stings a bit, but the day of? Nothing but presents and wine and hugs from my kids and nothing to fear.

(Yes, my husband gave me a presents! He gave me a book on seasonal decorating - lovely! - and a big collection of Hitchcock movies - awesome!)

Ryhmes with Hysteria

I've been sick for the past week and NO, I do not have listeria, although you may be certain that the idea occurs to me roughly every three minutes, as in "I think I should call an ambulance just in case." Then I phone my husband and he reassures me that it is JUST A COLD.

Maybe.

For one thing, I don't have any of the symptoms, unless "runny nose and mild fever" have suddenly become indicitive of a severe intestinal illness. For another, I haven't eaten ANY of the recalled products. Still. Maybe.

It is my birthday on Sunday. I will be 36. And likely still hauling around this miserable cold. I got asked the other day what grade I'm going into, and yet when I look into the mirror, I see faint lines whispering around my eyes, white hairs circling my face. Also, I have three kids and I've been married for over a decade now, and whenever there's a disease in the media, I am UTTERLY CERTAIN that I have it. Even if it only infects heavy smokers and occurs in man parts. And I say things like "man parts" now, because I have become a complete and utter prude. OH, and the other day, I yelled at some kids to GET OFF MY LAWN. Young punks.

Okay, now it's later. I wore shoes with teeny tiny little baby heels on them to the bank and I was standing in line, I teetered and went crashing over. In front of everyone. I'm just lucky I didn't break my hip.

This Post Has An Awesome Title

My Five Minutes for Parenting post - after LOTS of technical difficulties - is finally up. (thanks, Steph!) It's a wistful post about my own missing family tree, complete with an antique family picture, so go read that, and I'm going to go try and recover from a bad summer cold. xo

Oh Whistle And I'll Come To You, Lad

I have a strict no scary stuff policy - no horror movies, no terrifying gore-filled books, no deadbody shows, no evening news beyond the local stuff. I'm like my own stern Victorian paterfamilias - I keep myself sweet by keeping myself dumb.

And yet. I still manage to have the most intense, most frequent nightmares of anyone I've ever known, the double-edged sword of being imaginative, I guess. Or perhaps I'm operating under one of those grim curses from several centuries back, when one of my loud-mouthed ancestors offended the town witch.

"Thou shalt have REALLY FRICKING TERRIFYING NIGHTMARES!" she cackled. "And so will your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great granddaughter, just to be really random."

So last night's feature was quite grippingly terrifying while I was having it - I was a university student and someone tried to convince me that something was going on at the campus, and indeed, I was getting creepy warning phonecalls and something was following me around the narrow, shadowy hallways. Then one night I leaned out my window and saw a dragon's tale disappearing under the water of the school's dark pool.

And then I woke up and laughed, because a dragon living under a university campus is more Harry Potter than High Horror.

Here's another dream, and this one really did make me wake up with my heart jackhammering and nearly breathless with terror, although sitting here writing about it in my cheerful, sunfilled living room with Curious George playing in the background rather takes away the horror by about 97%. But maybe it's dark while you're reading this. Maybe you're all alone in the house.

I was, in my dream, a young rural woman with a small boy playing at my feet and we were waiting outside for the kindergarten bus to pull up to the end of our long, long driveway. There were no houses around us - across the road, there was an old, unused barn, and then nothing but empty fields stretching away. Our house was small and slightly decrepit and it was early autumn. The little boy at my feet was pushing an old, beat-up Tonka truck while I noticed, with a sudden jolt of alertness, that there were two teenaged boys coming out of the barn across the road.

The two boys started to argue, too far away for me to hear their words. One of the boys - wearing a red hoody - had a rifle with him. The other boy said something and started walking towards the barn and the hooded boy lifted up the rifle and shot him in the back and he fell, screaming. And I screamed too, and the red hooded boy heard me, swivelling his head around sharply and starting to walk towards me, the rifle in his hand.

I grabbed my little boy up and ran towards the house, grabbing my cell phone out of my pocket and punching in 911 in terror. The school bus appeared on the horizon. The phone rang and rang. He walked closer, his eyes dark, like a shark.

"Send help, send the police!" I sobbed hysterically into the phone, now at the screen door, now trying to pull it open. Stuck. "He's coming with a gun. Don't let the bus drop off my baby. Send the police!"

There was a pause.

And then the operator started talking, her voice furious.

"It is just HORRIBLE what happened to that woman and her poor children," she said. "I don't know who you are or why you keep doing this, but we will find out who you are and you ARE going to be arrested."

And then she hung up.

And then the bus stopped and my child went running into the driveway, the hooded boy turning around to see her and I dropped my useless cell phone, knowing - maybe not for the first time - that I was trapped, that this would happen over and over again, maybe forever.

The end. Creepy, eh?

A Pot Pourri Of Stupid Stuff

My computer wasn't working yesterday. I would open a page and five minutes later, there it would be, if I was LUCKY. I managed to get my Kitchen Party post up and then agonizingly commented on a very few blogs before throwing in the towel - what? I threw a towel? - and just QUIT.

And yet the world continued without me. THE HECK, WORLD?

I woke up this morning and all of the bananas in the house had gone bad, all at once. In fact, they all had little switchblades and they all wanted to know if I was a Shark or a Jet. BAD. So I mashed them up and made them into the gf banana chocolate chip mini muffins, which I am now eating by the handful. Being small makes them healthy.

My kids are going back to school in seven days. Today, The Boy and The Girl are playing in the office - both of them have set up work desks and put up signs. The Boy is offering to build you anything you want, while the Girl is offering her snow shovelling services for one cent a day. And The Baby is colouring. Do I have to write that I'll miss them?

"Be CAREFUL, Grandma!" The Baby said, as her grandmother was leaving this morning.
Her grandmother reassured her that she would be careful.
"I don't want you to kill anyone with your CAR." The Baby said, frowning. Look out, world! My mom is coming for you IN HER CAR! HER CAR OF DOOOOOM!

Off to hire the Girl to shovel up all of that late August snow for me, if I can scrape up a penny.

Monday AGAIN

My Kitchen Party post is up - I'm making supper in a KICKY PURPLE DRESS. I need a NEW CUTTING BOARD. Go have a look!

And I'm really beat today - we've been running around for the past month and it's all caught up with me at once, so I'm going to take it easy. It's the last full week of summer...

Everything is okay

We ended up having to rush The Baby into the clinic - I phoned my husband home from work mid-morning - because there's a really sad family history of serious bowel obstructions and she had quite a few symptoms, and even though we were PRETTY sure that it was just the flu, we didn't want to just PRESUME, you know? So we brought her white and limp and silent across town and she merely glared at the nurse-practiononer while he checked out her stomach. It was, he said, the easiest time he'd ever, ever had with her.

I feel like writing a post about how the self-esteem movement was woefully misguided, but a) I feel kind of awful and Not Up To The Task and b) there will doubtlessly be someone who will think that I'm recommending some return to cruel Victorian child-raising techniques. Naaah. I just think that a modest, pleasant and honest self-regard is probably a better path to happiness and being bearable than all of those "I Am Special (Just Like Everyone Else!)" books that litter up my children's classrooms.

There's a quote that I often think about from The Incredibles:
Helen Parr (to her son): "Everyone's special, Dash."
Dash: "Which is another way of saying no one is."

But that is an argument for another day.

When the nurse-practitioner said that, my husband and I exchanged one of those brief, anguished looks with each other. Oh, our bad, bad little girl, so pale and quiet.

I've had not-yet parents tell me of their expectations for their future children: they want high achievers, children who do Big Things, people who will be effortlessly upper-middle-class. I also recently sat in on an unpleasant little conversation while two other mothers chortled over an absent third, whose only child was headed off to beautician's college. Oh, imagine, they said.

The Baby woke up bright and early this morning and shrieked from her bed that she wanted JUICE. And CHEESE. With PLASTIC WRAPPERS ON IT. And then we got her brother and sister ready for VBS and walked around town with Grandpa for a while - he bought her some chips - and then we got home and I caught her trying to lop some hair off with a pair of sharp scissors.

Maybe someday she'll parlay her love of cutting her own hair into a love of cutting other people's hair. And I will walk down the sidewalk and push open the glass door and walk across the cool white floor to her, with, I hope, the same soaring joy that I felt this morning as I ran up the stairs to get her. My bad little girl, standing ferociously in her grubby nightgown, all better again. My baby, the joy of my heart, whoever she ends up being.

The Baby is SICK

:(
She had a restless night last night and woke up at 7:30 this morning, shrieking something. I ran upstairs and she said, sourly "I had a drink of water from the bathroom tap last night and that is POO WATER" and then threw up all over me, the upstairs hallway and herself, poor bunny. She's still throwing up now, but I'm really hoping that whatever bug she has passes quickly. In the meantime, we're going to sit here and cuddle.

So while I'm doing that, you can go read my 5 Minutes For Parenting post, which is about the Seven Deadly Sins and me. See you there!

Green

Yesterday's post wasn't supposed to be about how great it is that I'm home with my kids - it was about my sudden attack of jealousy, this big interrupting force.

I think I might be a pretty jealous person. I have a friend who decorates her house SO beautifully that I'm often gripped by a muttering jealousy at my own inability to decorate my way out of a shoebox. I have another friend with WELL-MANNERED, TALENTED CHILDREN, which causes me to cast dark looks on my own shrieking lemurs. And I have yet ANOTHER friend who has a nice new stove and boy, I covet that. And it's not a nice or a cute emotion - I'm sitting there in your house and I'm smiling and pretending to be my usual, pleasant self and instead I'm some bitter squatting toad, wanting to have what you have, wanting to take it away from you.

And it has to do, I think, with the feeling that I might have been happier with other choices, that there were other paths that were BETTER. Would doing A instead of B have resulted in a happier me at this point? My life is cheerful and good, although I think I've been maybe idealizing things more than a bit if people think I live in a storybook. I don't. For one, I had a baloney sandwich for lunch, the most prosaic lunch ever. So there are things I wish that I could have as a do-over.

If I could go back in time, there are things I would do differently - at least, I think there are. At first, I thought "Oh, I wouldn't drop out of university. And then I would work for a few years, at least, at a career." And then I had the sudden chilling thought that I might be messing with the arrangement of my children, so I wouldn't do that. I would rather have them and my life exactly the way it is.

We should have stayed in small city, my husband and I frequently say to each other. We should not have moved six and a half years ago. But then, was having The Boy and The Baby dependent upon that move? Would our marriage have fractured irreparably there? Maybe this move was for the best.

I would like to have not gained 20 extra pounds. Um, sadly, I can't see any downside to that little time travelling expedition. Rats.

And so I'm left with the rather bittersweet regret that there are people who I did not love well enough while they were alive. What it would be like to walk into a room and see them again, hear their still familiar voices as my adult self? And so I'm jealous, achingly so, of my young self, of this small person who could run through her grandmother's house, run through her grandparents yard, past the steady Holstein cows and not know that all of this was going, fading away faster than summer's end, jealous of a time when I was innocent of the knowledge that all love will end with this.

Rainy Summer

I'm still laughing - my friend Bonnie just left a funny comment on yesterday's post ("What!! You don't have a Tuesday post up yet???"). It's funny, in that she just dropped me and The Baby off and then zipped home, having spent the whole morning driving around with our respective "babies" in a neighbouring town. And that is what you call an inside joke.

While we were out on our whirlwind errand-running expedition, we stopped at a small playground so the "babies" - hers is 2 and mine is 3 - could run around while we ate some salad. Oh boy! I love my mid-30s metabolism! The Baby ran like a fleet little pink thing, dashing up the small climber and then shooting down the turning slide, shrieking "TA DA!" at the bottom. And repeat. And repeat. And then some unchaperoned older boy - maybe 8 or 9 - took up position at the top of the slide, standing menacing and legs apart, blocking her way. The Baby stopped midway, confused. And I was over in a shot, angry and sharp tongued and the child scuttled out of the way, apologizing.

But I was not really very mad with him. He was only a little boy, after all, and nobody was with him to tell him any better.

Most of the time, I like my house very much. I like the broad bay windows flanked by the dark, floor length velvet curtains, I like the battered old Victorianish couch, the tall old piano, the high ceilings and even the spiderwebs and creakings of living in a very old house. It suits me quite well, this relaxed book-and-children-filled life and most of the time, I do not wish for any life other than my own.

On the weekend, though, I felt on several occasions a withering, devouring jealousy. My brother and sister-in-law live in a beautiful new house, ivory and pale blue and sunlit, living in an interesting small city with enough money not to worry over every little thing and suddenly my life felt dingy and second-hand and dull. My decision to be home rather than having a career ALL AT ONCE felt very much like a bad one, this decision that has now trapped us in a horrid rural backwater, surrounded by noisy, drunken hillbillies and kids who were going to grow up to marry their cousins.

I can tell you with words how it felt, but the actual feeling itself has slithered away, leaving only the ashes of words in its wake. The afternoon sun pours in through the tall old windows, my old yellow cat sleeps on an old velvet chair, my book resting face down beside him, my Baby - not a real baby anymore, but still - rests in my arms, and the streets outside my door are filled with friendly people. And the Baby is currently squeezing the life out of me, which has totally made me forget - maybe it was the oxygen deprivation - the moody ending to this, which was something about how someone will always have it better than you, and how easy it is to let dark feelings block your way, like some unwatched bully child at a playground.

My dad sent me a sad, sad poem this morning, about a friend of his who shot himself last night.

It's a simple song about love and loss
About life and death and hay
And how problems come and problems go
And the wind wipes us all away

I am happy, I am happy, I whisper to myself, saving the knowledge up like golden coins, like summer, for some day when things are harder, this dark, unspeakable day that I fear in my bones. Happy, I say, the word plump and round and unexpected, running fleetly across the summer grass.

The vacation is OVER.

We went away for the weekend and it was lovely and fun and now we're back at home and it is WORK. My whole house must be cleaned - MUST - and the older kids are in a full-day Vacation Bible School, which means that we're back to our regular school hours and The Baby is having a weeping meltdown because WHERE DID HER BELOVED SIBLINGS GO? WHO WILL SHE SHRIEK AT NOW?

And that is the way summer ends, I guess.

I wrote my Kitchen Party post very early this morning, and it's a happy one about scarcity and plenty - I guess that's what it's about. I don't tend to think these things through very far. So go check it out and say hey over there and I'll see you at your place sometime today, I hope.

Hello From Not At Home!

We're visiting my brother and sister-in-law who live in a small city and my children are REALLY REALLY EXCITED.

"LOOK!" screamed the Girl last night. "A SKYSCRAPER!"

The "skyscraper" was four stories tall. We are a simple people.

The ride here was pretty great, too. The Baby and The Boy sit side by side in the very back of the van and The Baby found many things that got her easily-gotten goat for the whole ride. The Boy removed his sandals and STUNK UP THE CAR! She was making shadow puppets and THE BOY STOLE HER SUNSHINE! The Boy was BREATHING ON HER! WAH! WAH! It was like sharing a car with a small, outraged goblin.

So this morning is a never ending ferris wheel of good times: breakfast made by NOT ME. A trip to stores that sell ONLY TOYS. A Man Outing to see the new Star Wars cartoon movie for the menfolk and a trip to the mall for the ladies. I could practically cry.

Off to have a shower and then out we go. Have a good weekend!

Thursday Sapfest.

A certain one of my children who is NOT ONE OF MY DAUGHTERS is driving me a bit crazy this summer. Not that the child in question is in any way a bad kid, but still. Nuts.

And so today at Five Minutes For Parents, I'm remembering how endlessly grateful I am to have my young irritant, my own sweet Boy. It's one of the first posts I ever wrote from my now vanished first blog, and I thought that it was timely to post it again. I'll see you there.

True and Not True.

No, it is not true. Hummingbirds do not hitch rides on Canada Geese, which would be awfully cute if it was true, but sadly, no. I wish it was true, and I considered just letting the story stand, but you know my motto: Science Before All.

(That is nowhere near my actual motto, which is much closer to Bring Me Candy.)

I had a MISERABLE night. I decided at one point in the evening to develop a piercing sinus headache and then my neighbours decided to loudly play crappy country music on their outdoor stereo until one in the morning and get into a screaming argument with another neighbour and I was standing in the dark at the bedroom window, glaring at them and wishing I had magical Laser Vision Eyes. Zap, stupid garage stereo! Zap, moronic yodelling adolescent males!

"Baby, what are you doing?" my husband mumbled from his bed.

"They're playing their FREAKING HORRIBLE MUSIC AGAIN," I said. Possibly I said this really intensely. "And my head hurts."

"Go take some Tylenol and come to bed," he suggested, COMPLETELY UNREASONABLY. Didn't he know I had some glaring to do? GEEZ. Eventually, I grew bored with my non-laser-eyed glaring and went to bed, and then I had nightmares for the rest of the night.

Here's the one I remember: The Boy and I were going to Vacation Bible School, which was being held in some huge modern complex and we followed Will Smith down a circular, modern staircase with no railings, The Boy dashing ahead of me and suddenly plunged off the stairwell, which had twisted in the opposite direction without warning. NOOO! IT IS ALL YOUR FAULT, WILL SMITH!

At six, my husband got up for work and brought me a Tylenol and a coffee and what do you know, my headache went away. Huh.

Hummingbird

Great Grandpa has a hummingbird feeder outside of his picture window, and a flock of hummingbirds attend to it constantly during the summer. Generally, you just see one hummingbird flitting by and it's like this sudden magic thing, but Great Grandpa has them by the dozens, the ruby throated ones driving the others away now that it's August.

They migrate in the feathers of the Canada Geese, he told me. The Canada Geese were all over the fields and water, warning that fall is coming, that this rainy summer is dwindling away.

Soon it will be September and the Canada Geese will fly away, hummingbirds maybe nestled against their wings. Calm, calm, the beat of their wings will say to the little fast-hearted birds still against them.

And Great Grandpa will take down his hummingbird feeder, tuck it away until next spring, 90 close upon his heels.

Home Again, Home Again

We're back from our weekend trip, and a more or less lovely time was had by all. I'll write more about it tomorrow, but today, I'm going to rest up and catch up on our laundry. You can read my somewhat wistful Kitchen Party post today, which is about our attempts to navigate sugar and overprocessed foods and my grumbling kids.

This Post Is Rambling

Well, now. I'm busy doing tons of laundry and PACKING today - this weekend! we're OUT OF HERE! - but if I wasn't so busy making sure that I didn't forget underpants* or toothbrushes or one of the kids, I'd have lots of great post ideas.

*Never, ever "panties." Is there seriously a more cringe-inducing word in the English language? I don't want to know.

How about these?
1) "Hey Mothers: If You Feel Guilty, There Is Probably A Good Reason For It."
I mean COME ON. Maybe you have free-floating causeless guilt, but I don't think this is a widespread medical condition. Me writing that SOME parents suck should not make you curl up weeping in a fetal position on the floor, unless you are a sucky parent. And if you are, how is that my fault?

2) "You Probably Are Doing A Good Enough Job, However."
I read this book fifty billion years ago and I don't even remember what it was called, but I do remember this: if you come from a background of severe abuse and mental illness and other types of horrifying things and you manage to keep your kids fed and housed and well-loved and don't repeat the abuse, then you have done a good enough job, a superhuman overcoming of the horrifying nightmare of your own childhood parenting language. And I think this is important to remember - we do not come to the parenting table with equal abilities. So what might be a C+ job for one parent might be an A+ job with a gold star for another, and YOUR kids will have a good foundation for raising your grandchildren. So that should be a comfort for many, many people.

And of course, if you can do a better job than that, then by all means DO SO.

3) "I DO Have Things That I Believe As A Parent That You Might Not Agree With, But It Probably Doesn't Matter."
Take yer pick:
- attachment parent
- stay-at-home mother
- extended breastfeeding (and its counterpart, PUBLIC breastfeeding)
- babywearing
- omnivore
- family bed
- hospital birthing with LOTS AND LOTS of drugs

... and so on. I'd be quite willing to argue about any of those things, but none of them are NECESSARY to have a happy, healthy child (with the big exception - unless you just can't or shouldn't - of breastfeeding. I'm quite stern on this point.) and so I don't make a point of harping on any of them. They're not worth fighting about - none of it helps anyone, and if you're doing things differently then me, there are probably perfectly good reasons for that.

I do think that it's pretty essential to enjoy your kids, to have fun with them. They shouldn't feel just like endless work, or this sapping drain on what you'd ACTUALLY rather be doing. And it's also essential to raise them up to be well-disciplined people with compassion and good values. So good luck with that and now I must go and pack the fruit of MY loin's suitcases. See ya!

So yesterday I had a migraine. Pretty exciting! I also had a Five Minutes For Parenting post due, which I wrote with a migraine, stopping occasionally to rest with my eyes closed against the keyboard, which resulted in long lines of text like this:

asdfojhweohnwqokjfoklknnlklnaoiwngoinw;n

I wrote my post with my migraine accompaniment, and then sent it off. And then I woke up, wide-eyed in the middle of the night with THE COMPLETE AND UTTER KNOWLEDGE THAT I HAD SENT IT OFF UNFINISHED.

Yeah, that was a happy middle-of-the-night realization. So it's up right now and I've been leaving long comments on my own post, trying to further explain what I was getting at, but phhhh, I don't quite remember, honestly, since I HAD A MIGRAINE. What was my point? I know that I had one, this pressing thing that needed to be said. Go read my post, see if you can figure it out and let me know what you think I intended to say.

Mysteries

"We stopped in to see some friends on our walk," The Baby told her dad, as she sat on a bike in her almost-built playhouse.
"Oh?" said her dad. "Which friends?"
"Um," said The Baby. "A big boy in an orange shirt."
"Uh huh? Who is the big boy's mommy?"
"Ummmmm... she has a white shirt and pretty oval roundish eyes?"
And that is how he knew which friends we went to visit yesterday on our walk.


When I was born, I had seven grandparents - my maternal grandparents, my paternal grandparents (my grandmother here, my grandfather in an underground house in the mountains of Arkansas. What? Long story.), my maternal grandmother's parents and my maternal grandfather's mother.

My paternal grandmother was very much part of my everyday life - a short, fat, querulous woman who loved children and taking offense and Red Rose Tea with Carnation Evaporated Milk - but for the most part, I grew up surrounded by my mother's family, endless amounts of maternal relatives, petite, polite, slim, restrained, fantastically long-lived people. I have pictures of my daughter with my GRANDMOTHER'S GREAT AUNT, for example.

My mother was the third of eight children and I was born when my grandparents were in their active 50s - vibrant, middle-aged people. My father's mother had him when she was in her mid-40s and her other two children from her first marriage were ADULTS, so by the time I was born, she was already an old crabby woman. And she had been born when her two siblings were almost adults themselves, my great-grandparents born fantastically long ago, dead for decades by the time I was born, my great-grandfather dead for decades by the time my FATHER was born. So my grandmother's siblings were even older than she was and she had grudges against them* and all of the relationships in that family were a bit odd because of the weird generational gaps, as you may well imagine. So I did know my dad's brother and sister and a handful of cousins, but other than that? No.

*Just writing this makes me nearly breathless with missing her. Oh, Grandma.

One thing that I have noticed as I get older is that I do not fit in well in my mother's family. I am well loved, do NOT get me wrong, but I am different - tall and dark eyed and prone to sudden fits of fatness and moody and intense and fond of ghosts and story telling and taking umbrage and intense types of faith - than my polite, short, slender maternal relatives, who went from the United Church of Canada to an urban sort of quiet liberal skepticism. And I love them and they love me but WHOA NELLY, I barely even seem RELATED to them.

So I went to a family reunion this weekend, a gathering of the relatives of the two people in the picture - my paternal grandmother's parents. I almost did not bother to go, because I already have lots of relatives and I pictured lots of awkward hanging around at the fringes of the room while people I did not know milled about. But I went, and walked into a room full of tall, generously built people and heard lots of stories about my long, long gone great-grandparents, these Edwardian people, my great-grandfather huge and mythic (you should HEAR the stories. Good grief.), my great-grandmother kind and ladylike.

On Sunday afternoon, we went to the final wrap-up, a memorial service that quickly led to a roomful of sobbing, heavyset, sentimental people telling each other long stories and then we sang Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee. And although they've been dead for over half a century, my great-grandparents were vividly present, even down to my red-eyed son who didn't know what anyone was talking about but who never lets anyone cry alone.

And then I knew for certain that I was sitting in a roomful of family and knew that my long, long gone great-grandparents could have walked into the room, my great-grandmother kind-hearted and child-loving and prone to taking offense and my great-grandfather with his pockets full of pennies for any children he met and they would have known us at a glance as their own, my character molded by their long-gone blood, my dark-eyed child following in their magnificent, long-gone bones..

It's a holiday!

... if you live in Canada, that is. And if not: have fun working, non-Canadians!

I've announced the winner over at my Kitchen Party post today. And while you dry your tears over not winning a spiffy new pressure cooker, you can share your weekday cooking tips with everyone. (and if you don't have any cooking advice, you can go say hi. I'm always glad to hear from you....)

Whoo, I am EXHAUSTED. I spent all weekend (did you notice I was gone? Probably not.) at a family reunion, which I'll write about tomorrow. In the meantime, I'm going to go spend this lovely, overcast day having a nap. Seize the day: that is my motto.

This post is dopey.

I've been working on my mammoth August and September notebooks recently, which has been taking up much of my time. All of these holidays do not just come out of nowhere, you know, and there are also other things - sensible things! - that must be scheduled and figured out.

Hannah, Canadians measure temperature (generally) in Celsius. So 25c is about 77 Fahrenheit, which is to say: a nice summer day but not so hot that your face will melt off. And speaking of Canadian - my youngest has recently rejected all other young children's shows except for the rather unsophisticated morning line-up on CBC. Hello, Gofrette. Oh, ha! The Baby just saw me looking at the Gofrette website and is now asking for me to play on it. Hold on a sec. Anyhow, how patriotic of her.

Here is a frequent conversation at my house.
My husband, who is barbecuing: Hey Beck, do you want me throw some wieners on?
Me: (snicker)
My husband: Oh, GROW UP! Do you want me to throw on some wieners or not?
Me: (snicker) You said "wiener."
My husband: (loud, pained sigh)

Here's another one:
Me: Do you want some soy sauce on your rice?
My husband: Yes, I would like some SOYA sauce on my rice.
Me: Here it is. SOY.
My husband: Soya. Says right on the label.
(who says SOYA sauce? Wrong people, that's who. THE A IS SILENT.)

And yet another:
My husband: We need to look into getting a new vehicle.
Me: I want to get a blimp. Or one of those motorized scooters. Or the Oscar Meyer WIENER MOBILE. They're all VEHICLES.
My husband: (loud, pained sigh)

Married life! It is AWESOME! Everyone should strive to be as married as possible.