ALL THOSE BABIES

My 5 Minutes Post is up, and it's a meditation ("meditation" - that makes me sound so THOUGHTFUL!) on all of those BABIES. See you there!

Are You There God? It's Me, Beck.

I took my kids to the playground this afternoon, which made me feel pretty smug. And then it made me feel bored.

So many things that make kids happy make me feel like I'm lapsing into a dense coma. Like going outside, mainly, even though I always put on a brave front and think "I can just read a book!". Yes, I can, and then I can find A WOLF SPIDER CRAWLING IN MY HAIR*. Sheesh, nature.

*true story! I leapt up, screamed the Eff Word and then thrashed around trying to ensure complete WOLF SPIDER REMOVAL. FROM MY HAIR.

It actually felt like summer today! Very mild summer, but the sun was out and it wasn't raining for once and I was actually able to wear a t-shirt instead of a long-sleeved shirt+sweater, so I was pretty pleased. And then I was bored because I was at the playground.

GNOMEschooling

Yes, we're going to gnomeschool the kids. How to wear a kicky red pointy hat, how to stand in a garden whilst looking simultaneously thoughtful AND jolly, beard-growing, how to push a wheelbarrow....

Successful Gnomeschool Graduate.

Yeah, we're homeschooling the kids.

We - my husband and I - always WANTED to (because we thought, wistfully, that it sounded like fun.), mainly, and we came really, really close last year and then didn't. But The Baby was going to be kept home for health* reasons for at least a year and when The Boy heard that, he decided that he would rather stay home and learn here, too. And when The Girl heard that, she decided that she would like to give it a try, and so here we are.

(*well, in part. It is also because she is My Baby.)

We do - for the most part - like the kids' school. It is small and friendly and cozy and both of them have done quite well in it, educationally and socially. And although I'm not going to go into the individual reasons why I think it's a good idea for this time being for my kids, I will say that one of our deciding factors was the Ontario Curriculum, which... yuck. The intentions behind it are good, and anything that keeps kids from having to learn about the Voyageurs THREE YEARS IN A ROW like I did during my dismally dull school years is a blessing, but STILL.

For example: did you know that there is now a strong emphasis upon non-fiction writing in Ontario schools? And while I personally enjoy non-fiction writing, I have a houseful of kids who write comic books and stories for fun and don't think that they're well-served by a curriculum which appears to have been designed with some bureaucrat's bourgeois idea of the Good Life in mind, a curriculum that would be best suited to a generation of kids who all want to be accountants when they grow up.

I've seen Ontario school books from the turn of the last century, and one surprising thing to me was how much poetry the kids memorized and what the poetry was - not odd, mass-produced doggerel to support specific cultural aims:

I love my country, I do not litter,

If you smoke, you should be a quitter.

Beware of perverts when on Twitter.

but real actual poetry. And one of the reasons they had kids do this was so that later on, regardless of what they did or became, they would have the comfort of poetry, a permanent moral ballast of words. Which is not to say that I would return to that school system, with beatings bestowed upon kids by teachers who were either frantically trying to maintain control and/or sadistic, but there is still something to be said for a system that values things because they are beautiful and not just because they are useful to The Workers of Tomorrow.

Snark aside, though: people must work. And probably the curriculum now is more sensible and The Kids of Today will be better prepared for their working adult lives, with suitable feelings on matters of public concern tucked safely away in their brains. And yet. I keep having this haunting feeling of all of these accountants staring bleakly out their office windows into the bleak Canadian February and there is this space inside of them where maybe something else could have been.

I'm being romantic, of course. The vast majority of people I know resent even the brief brush with art that they had in school and are quite cheerful to spend the rest of their lives without it. And I think that it's firmly established that no matter how cheap they are, the disadvantaged of this world will - by and large - not fill up their bookshelves with inexpensive copies of The Classics. So pick up your briefcases, kids, and off to school you go.

Listen to THIS!

I had QUITE the day yesterday. In chronological order, here it is!

1) Remember my aunt? The one who was widowed at 41 and then remarried and then rather startlingly was expecting her first baby at 45? Yeah, her.
Okay, so I woke up to the news that she was in labour - still - after 24 hours and that things were suddenly an emergency. SCARY.

2) I was talking on the phone to my brother - he of the very high-risk pregnant wife - when suddenly his wife needed him and he left abruptly. He did not phone me back, which made me wonder what was going on.

3) But I didn't have much time to wonder, since The Baby suddenly came in and very dramatically told me that she could not pee. One warm bath and some encouraging pep talks later, we were at the clinic again (and for those of you keeping track, that's about the 500th time this WEEK), and she was carefully checked out by a nurse-practitioner. The nurse-practitioner was very, very worried about her - although I did warn her that the child is completely capable of having severe bouts of Fakeitis - and so called in another, older nurse-practitioner, who took one look at Miss Drama and TRICKED HER into peeing. YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK!

4) We returned home to the news that my aunt had safely delivered a baby boy - 7 pounds, 15 ounces - and I had time to write a congratulatory email.

5) MY mother phoned, gray-voiced. My sister-in-law had been rushed to the hospital and was having an emergency cesarean to save her life at 34 weeks.

6) I waited for news whilst sobbing and twittering.

7) I made some pizza. Hey, people still need to be fed, even in the middle of RIDICULOUSLY DRAMATIC DAYS.

8) My niece was safely here! She has dark curly hair and is 5 pounds 4 ounces. My sister-in-law is doing much better now, too. Hooray!

9) I ordered some Saxon math books - which are on sale until the end of the month - and was sitting there startled at just having spent several hundred dollars on math (which is several hundred dollars more than I'd ever planned on spending, thank you) when my son, who had been sitting beside me, very excited about our Upcoming Homeschool Purchases, suddenly cried out and began having a startlingly heavy nosebleed.

10) Well, it's just a nosebleed, right? But it WOULD NOT STOP! So the next thing I knew, his father and I were crowded around the poor kid in the bathroom, with blood EVERYWHERE - seriously, it looked like a horror movie - holding ice against his nose. We were talking about bringing him to the er to get his nose cauterized ("What does THAT mean?" - my poor freaked-out son.) when - phew - it stopped.

11) The kids went to bed. I stomped around the house like a Japanese movie monster, looking for booze, but finding none, I decided to put a lid on the day and GO TO BED.

The End.

What magical events will today hold, I wonder? And while I am wondering that, I am cowering under my desk. No WONDER I'm so jumpy.

"Hamtrax"! Hahahahaha!

We're feeling much better. And my daughters aren't sick, which a kindly ER doctor told me yesterday was a very good sign that they're going to miss out on the fun. (and The Boy's name is not "manny" - that's just a family nickname for little boys.)

I have a post up at 5 Minutes For Parenting and it's all about yesterday's emergency hospital visit. See you there.

Well, That Was Fun

So. You'll notice that I've been gone for a week or so. And that is because I had the freaking SWINE FLU! Or "H1N1". So did the Boy, poor manny. We're better now, but that was just absolutely no fun at all and I totally do NOT recommend it.

Anyhow, I'm very worn out, so this is all I'm going to write, but I thought I'd check in.

The Title Makes Sense When You Read The Whole Post

I'm at 5 Minutes For Parenting today, and I'm writing about something that's been weighing heavily on my heart this summer.

10 Interesting Facts About Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper

1. His hair is actually a toupee made from the pages of Ayn Rand's novels.
2. He is a big AC-DC fan and is currently making a Constitutional Amendment to have Back In Black officially made the new Canadian anthem.
3. Efforts to humanize him by filming him walking his children to school during the most recent election failed when it started to rain and he rusted solid.
4. His children's names are Benjamin and Rachel.
5. No one in Canada knows what his wife's name is.
6. He is the first Canadian Prime Minister since Lester B. Pearson not to have gone to law school.
7. He's a Taurus and his turn-ons include bubble baths, asserting Canadian sovereignty over the Arctic, and long walks on the beach.
8. He is working on a book on the history of hockey. This is true, apparently.
9. He rarely makes lists of Sexiest Politicians in Canada.
10. I looked it up: his wife's name is Laureen.

What Would Jesus Weigh?

Thanks, Veronica!

Mr. Rogers, I once read, always carefully kept his weight at 143 pounds, symbolizing, to him, the words "I love you." This brings two things to my mind:
1) Mr. Rogers was a very nice man
and
2) I could have totally taken him in a fight.

A lot of people picture Jesus as being totally like Mr. Rogers - cardigan-clad, gentle, weighing exactly 143 pounds and wanting to be our neighbour. And the Christian book market has churned out dozens of Christian diet books, which brings many amusing thoughts to my mind:

1) We are NEVER TOLD what Jesus weighed. Movies tend to show him as a slender, intense man, but those are just movies. We don't KNOW, and the reason that we don't know is because Jesus' weight was irrelevant. It did not matter.

2) Our current obsession with weight is part of our confused modern Gnosticism - we have confused the state of our bodies with the state of our souls, or have utterly rejected the idea of souls altogether and now spend our time fretfully tending to the state of our decaying, deathbound bodies. Good luck with that.

3) Some religions DO have food laws, foods that you must avoid if you are to be a faithful, moral person. Christians do not - as a rule, although I can think of some exceptions - have food laws. What we eat - and by extension, what we WEIGH - has little bearing on whether or not we are, within the context of Christianity, faithful Christians.

Having written that, my mind has instantly started making complaints: there ARE social justice issues to think about, and is being a Christian compatible with eating, for example, bananas? 43% of the chocolate in the WORLD is harvested in places that use child slavery. Does my buying Fair Trade bananas make me a better Christian? (well, yes. Issues like this SHOULD be important to Christians.)

But there is the illusion of control, I think, this idea that we can be totally good by virtue of what we eat - I once got into a quite a heated argument with a vegan who told me that she was morally superior because she caused no animal suffering. As a farmer's daughter, however, I have walked over recently harvested fields and seen the ripped-up nests of small animals, their babies dead, the broken birds - but she refused to believe that her diet could possibly cause suffering, since she did not see the bodies.

But my not seeing something does not mean it's not there, and there is no way that we can eat (or heck, live) without causing suffering - we cannot, of our own accord, be good enough. This does not mean that Christians should ignore issues of social justice and of suffering - no, we are called, as Christians, to work for justice, to help the suffering - but let us not pretend that what we eat can make us good. We can never stop all suffering. We can never bring enough justice.

4) Many, many people use diet as a means of judging other people's worth. We all know how fat people are treated within this society - as less worthy, as walking symbols of lack of dietary control, as the suitable target for humour and mockery. A prominent vegan has written about homeschooling her child so that he doesn't have to spend his day surrounded by meat-eaters. And I saw an elderly woman happily bring out homemade cookies to her great-grandchildren, only to be told by their health-conscious, slim mother that the children were "not allowed to eat junk."

Of course, the elderly woman had spent that morning standing too long on her ruined legs making those cookies happily for her great-grandchildren and returned to the kitchen with tears in her eyes, but hey - their mother had protected their moral well-being from any contact with the one thing that their great-grandmother could still give them of her love.

And yet both women in the stories I wrote about call themselves Christians, and I've frequently heard my fellow Christians speak scathingly of people's weight. Do I think that Jesus would approve of using diet as a way to mock and belittle other people, as grounds to segregate from them, as a way of rejecting their offered love? Are we really going to buy our mindless cultural message that what we weigh says something profound about our moral worth, that Jesus was this slim, non-threatening Mr. Rogers and that we could eat our way to our own salvation?

I Am Out Of Ideas

Maybe I've blogged every thought I've ever had and that's it, now my head is empty.

Maybe it's just been a rough week and I'm feeling a bit blue.

Whatever the case: I can't think of anything to blog about.

So if you have any ideas for topics that you'd like to hear me ramble on about, lemme know.

Beck And The Tragic Tale Of The Dying Computer

My computer is on its last legs, much like a fatally wounded ant crawling around my office.
My husband has vowed that we are Getting A New Computer This Weekend and I, for one, CANNOT WAIT.
In the meantime! I have a post up at 5 Minutes For Parenting.

Things I Am Doing Instead of What I Should Be Doing

I have a long to-do list today. For one, I have to make strawberry jam since my fridge is FULL of strawberries from a berry-picking expedition on the weekend and they are NOT getting any fresher. And my kitchen floor needs to be washed. And there is, of course, laundry.

So instead of doing THAT, I've been making stupid lists in my head. Of course.

New Ideas for Blog Names For The "Baby", Who Is Four.
1. Ramona Quimby.
2. Sally, because it is her favorite name in the world.
3. Cindy Lou Who, because she still looks like this character from How the Grinch Stole Christmas:

Even though she acts more like this character from another classic work of children's literature:

5. Bratty McBrattypants
6. Mama's Darlin'

7. The Teacher's Terror

Other Sources People Could Use To Criticize My Blog, After Receiving A Comment On This Post In Which The Commenter Used The Poorly Regarded Webster's Third New International Dictionary (Unabridged) As A Cited Resource:
1. Actually, just writing that amused me enough. Har!


How Looking At Pictures This Morning Of My Oldest Child - The One Currently At Summer Camp - Made Me Feel
1. Gutted

2. Proud

3. Weepy

4. Verklempt

5. Sentimental

6. Like singing that annoying "Sunrise, Sunset" song from Fiddler On The Roof.

Some Delicious At-Home-With-Kids-On-A-Weekday Lunches I Have Yet To See On A Restaurant Menu
1. Beanie-weanies
2. Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches
3. Kraft Dinner with a can of drained tuna dumped in it
4. Last night's supper

How Expired All Of The Pectin Was In My Cupboard, In Reverse Chronological Order
1. August 2008
2. May 2006
3. October 2005
4. December 1998

Things I Would Call My As-Yet-Unwritten First Novel, Based Entirely On This Post
1. How Expired Was My Pectin
2. Fear And Loathing And Lunchtime
3. Crybaby: Tales Of A Sentimental Mother And Her Annoyed Children
4. Dictionary Snob: How I Became THAT Guy
5. My Youngest Kid Thinks She Could Beat Up Your Honour Student

RANTING. RANTING ABOUT CUPCAKES.

Edited to add: seriously! It's a cupcake book review for the ages!
I am on a prolonged rant today in my review blog over a cupcake recipe book that truly got on my nerves. See you there, I hope!

I had to call Poison Control the other day!

.... and then I wrote about it. Go. Learn from my parenting misadventures. And possibly identify your yard plants BEFORE your kids eat 'em.