Haaaapppy biiiirtthdaaaay toooo meeeeee!

I am 37 today.

My Baby asked me yesterday how old I was going to be and when I told her, she burst into noisy sobs.
"You are SO OLD!" she wailed. "AND SOON YOU WILL DIE!"

37 does feel oldish although it does not feel THAT old, thank you very much. I also feel like my birthday should be declared a mandatory holiday for everyone I know, since hanging around the house with the kids doesn't feel quite so festive. The Boy helped that along by giving me a wooden car model for my birthday. "We're gonna do it this morning!" he said. My favorite! Model cars! So before I had breakfast or coffee or even woke up, frankly, I found myself gluing a wooden car together while my son kept a critical eye on the proceedings. Welcome to 37!

The Baby gave me some wooden grapes "to decorate your ugly, ugly kitchen, Mama."

And then The Girl gave me some slippers and my favorite chocolate bar ("Big Turk.") and a card proclaiming her love for me, which I will keep to hold to my chest and sob when she's all adolescent and hating me and stuff (this afternoon.).

My grandma is going in for surgery today. If you could keep her in your prayers and thoughts, that would be a lovely birthday present.

Here's Yer Red Hot Post

Freshly cooked and everything. It's all about my Girl and her mysterious moods and how big loud me can often miss them.

I haven't been posting a lot this summer. I wonder if I'll get back to writing every day when autumn comes? I dunno.

Fashion

I read Vogue this weekend for the first time in likely 15 years.

Once upon a time, I read fashion magazines religiously, getting ready for my big leap out of Northern Ontario. Leaving is what smart young people do here and the smartest go very very far away: to Toronto, to New York City, to London, to Paris. And so I read fashion magazines to give me some sort of clue about what my future life would hold, what I would need to know.

At some point in my early 20s I stopped reading them. I don't remember any drama around it, just a gradual ebbing of interest in hollow faced society matrons and their thousand dollar purses. But this weekend, a copy lay temptingly at hand and so I casually picked it up and flipped through and my ancestral voices, as it were, made an outraged chorus in my mind: the radical communist unionist voice (that would be my paternal grandfather) screaming about the immorality of such outrageously expensive clothing in the middle of a severe recession, the Calvinist voice (that would be my maternal grandparents) huffing about the inevitable moral outcome when beauty is held up as a virtue. Only one ancestral voice - that of my unsettled, beauty-yearning paternal grandmother - was silent and admiring.

And then I went to the mall.

My children think that nothing in the world is more glamorous, more exciting then the food court in a big city mall. They were dazzled by the many culinary choices - pizza! Chinese food! mall sushi! tacos! - and exclaimed over the beauty of the skylights in the ceiling, while I looked around amused. There was no Vogue-style beauty to be had, anywhere - no fey, slim designing couples who spend their time flying between Paris and Rome making "challenging" blouses, no frozen-faced middle aged women in suits that cost more than the down-payment on my house - just provincial people in a small-city mall out for lunch on a Saturday, harried moms and their shrieking kids, elderly people on an outing. The world of Vogue was as extinct and as gone as ancient Rome, as imaginary and brittle as a crystal gift-shop unicorn.

And then I saw her.

She was taking orders in a french fry shop, and she was as lovely as a carefully packaged summer day, her hair an expensive gold, her face serenely beautiful and vacant. She was skeletally thin - maybe 80 pounds, her face a series of beautiful bones, and she rested her arm - her elbow the most prominent part - against the counter and closed her eyes in exhaustion and sagged for a moment while taking our order. She belonged in the Vogue world, where they could extoll her gorgeous bones and the angles of her face that a camera would surely love but instead she spends her days selling french fries. And soon, her tired, starved young heart will probably quit and she will belong even more to that beautiful, imaginary world, her perfect face as ephemeral as a magazine's pages.

Meanwhile. Overhead, elegant people fly around in their challenging blouses, heading from Toronto to Rome to Paris to London and they do not stop here.

First A Drought...

... and then 2 posts in one day.
Post 1#: I guest-posted at 5 Minutes For Special Needs today, where I wrote about my feelings about the Baby's Celiac Disease diagnosis.
Post 2#: My regular Thursday post at 5 Minutes for Parenting, where I wrote about gratitude following the end of entitlement.
Hope to see you there!

The House(school rooom) of Usher

And where have I been? Well, I've been busy. Mostly busy setting up Our Brand New Homeschool Room, and hey look, there's pictures!

This one would have been less fuzzy if the batteries didn't tragically die right after I took it:

The cabinet-y thing is a much abused... cabinet-y thing. We took the doors off and now it's holding the kids' daily books and work on the bottom and art and school supplies up top. I still haven't finished hauling and sorting all of the kids' books onto the New Bookshelves, but you get the general idea. And you can see a bit of their work table.

This picture makes me feel blessed and lucky:

It also makes me feel like possibly we should start spending more money on furniture. Just maybe.

I have mentioned before that my poor, poor house was the victim of a lot of previous terribly thought-out renovations. You may have thought I was exaggerating a bit, to which I submit THIS PICTURE:

Nice door placement, eh? It opens up into the middle of a stairwell. I am not kidding. But it's not in use - one of SEVERAL mystery doors to nowhere in my house. The computer is on that desk now. Also note the camouflaged book shelves - we love that shade of blue and are apparently not content with painting every other room that colour. No, now we're blue-ing INNOCENT FURNITURE. (my husband has put more shelves in that bookcase since I took that picture.)

Anyhow, that's what I've been doing - setting up the homeschool room and taking not-terribly attractive pictures of what is actually quite a pretty room. We actually hadn't USED that room for six years, and I found dusty remnants of my oldest child's fourth birthday party crepe paper still tacked up on the walls, which was strange. It was impossible to heat during the winter and badly insulated and so gradually we drifted out of there and my husband's giant computer monsters (like THE COMMERCIAL LAMINATOR) and table saw drifted in and it became the room where we sorted recycling and that was it. So it's been interesting to reclaim it as part of our house again, and now we have to buy a woodstove.

Back to sorting books. PHEW.

DROOP

This summer is totally kicking my butt. For example: supper is in half an hour. What are we having? I DO NOT KNOW.

I managed to scrape enough of a brain together to write today's post, which is about the funny things we remember after childhood. And now I will go melt in a supperless puddle.

So yesterday I had a migraine. This is nothing new, and my blessed, blessed mother came and took the loud people away and I fell asleep for much of the afternoon and woke up to a world of hazy halos. There was nothing to do, I decided, but to hang out on Twitter and talk about Myers-Briggs tests.

Do you know your type? I am an ENFP, which means that I'm friendly and kind of a goof. My husband is an INTJ, which is pretty much my ideal match. His kindly robotic nature helps keep me on an even keel or something like that.

The Baby spent the last few days having a cold, and she's pretty much the worst sick person ever. OH MY GOSH I HAVE A FEVER I NEED TO SLEEP IN YOUR BED MAMA AND BY "SLEEP" I MEAN JUMP AROUND AND TALK ENDLESSLY ABOUT HOW I FEEL. I don't know what her type is - ENsomethingsomething? Whatever combination is bossiest. But now she's all better and singing happy little songs while playing on the other computer and you'd never guess that she'd spent the past several days being The SickBed Dictator.

Now my kids are all up and squabbling. No more writing for me.

All About Chipmunks

Today's post at 5 Minutes for Parenting is all about chipmunks. Almost. Maybe it's about other stuff. MAYBE.
Now I'm off to get my Baby some "caulipepper." What?

Notification Of Intent

Today, I mail off the official Homeschooling Our Kids letter to the school board, which has my nerves TWANGING. Let's not talk about it.

My living room looks like I'm holding a yard sale, a yard sale at which I am only selling books. My husband has been cleaning out the To-Be-Homeschool Room and it's mostly been used to hold a) giant pieces of computer-type equipment (like our COMMERCIAL LAMINATOR. I am going to LAMINATE MY HEAD.) and b) books I grew weary of. Oh and c) every piece of art that My Darling First-Born Child has ever done. So I get to go through all of that today, yippee.

Some highly amusing things have popped up, like
a) A Christmas card that my brother gave me when we were both children, declaring me to be his "favorite sister ever." Guess how many sisters my brothers' have?
b) The Sears 1972 Summer Catalog. My grandmother gave it to me a little while back, and I tucked it away and forgot about it, but I had a jolly time last night seeing what people were wearing the summer I was born. (answer: horrible, horrible clothing. Perhaps I'll scan some of it in.)
c) A complete Harley-Davidson outfit that one of my husband's aunts gave our son when he was born. See, my father-in-law collects Harley-Davidson motorcycles and so BY EXTENSION, my son should wear little mini leather jackets declaring the same, despite us being his parents and all. We posed him in the outfit and mailed pictures off to his aunt and then at some point packed it up. Perhaps my new cousin needs a tough guy outfit.

So. In between all of our Cleaning Hi-Jinxs, my son decided to play on the exercise bike WHICH HE IS TOTALLY NOT ALLOWED TO DO, whilst barefoot WHICH HE HAS BEEN WARNED AGAINST and guess what? GUESS WHAT HAPPENED? That's right: he nearly broke his toe off. So we packed him off to the hospital, where he was promptly:
1) IMMEDIATELY assessed by a nurse. "Oh!" she said, looking at his medical chart. "You've had an exciting summer! Let me check your oxygen stats while you're here." (he was good.)
2) Put into a room in the ER, where I read him a chapter of The House With A Clock In Its Walls by John Bellairs. Spooky!
3) Then in came the young doctor, who carefully checked him over, and who then called in a nurse to bandage his toes up. "I'm going to listen to your lungs while I have you here," he said, and pronounced him fit as a fiddle. A fiddle with a sore foot.
4) We went home. One hour had passed. Thank you, Canadian healthcare system!

And now all of my kids are up. Hope you're having a fun summer!