Frog And Toad Are Still Friends

I Started A New Blog

2011-10-13T12:18:00.000-04:00

TWELVE!

2011-05-06T10:57:00.002-04:00

My oldest - the child of the last of my bumbling youth, my firstborn - turned 12 today.

And twelve is a big deal. Twelve feels very much like the end of childhood, like the very last of it and then it's onto Teenagerland and the vast plains of adulthood and this is not precisely a sad thing unless you really romanticize being a kid, but it's poignant, at least.

"You're not going to be a bad teenager, are you?" I asked her this morning, and she gave me a funny, scrunchy look.

"How would I know?" she said. "I can say right now that I have no plans to be bad, but apparently hormones give you brain damage, so I can't PROMISE you anything."

I was sort of a late bloomer and by "sort of" I mean "I was the dictionary definition of a late bloomer and entered high school as a short little breastless child" and I floundered my way through adolescence and it's really, REALLY shocking to me that I came out of it with a lovely husband and a life that had worked out more or less exactly the way I wanted it, since the path there was so hard and meandering. I want things easier for my kids, want them to have a life without needless pain. The horrible part? Me WANTING that doesn't make it happen - my kids are going to go through what they go through and all I can hope is that what we have given them in the breathtaking short years of childhood has been enough.

I still dream about being a child all the time, as though childhood was this place that feeds everything else in my life, as though childhood is this other room with the door always slightly open. And my oldest child - my firstborn, the child of the end of my bumbling youth - is standing in the doorway of that room, standing in the threshold and what I hope for her is that her childhood will always be this magical place for her, a place full of sunlight and days at the farm and fairy houses and St. Nicholas Day and her parents' flawed, human love, that her childhood is a radiant place and that the rest of her days are human and golden and happy.

And Now We Are Six

2011-04-21T07:35:00.003-04:00

Six feels big, doesn't it? Like the entryway to Big Kidland, like the door closing forever on the soft, endless days of babyhood. And here we are, with my youngest child suddenly and all at once six years old.

WELL.

She's a great kid - you'd probably think so too if you knew her, unless you are really no fun - lippy and hilarious and affectionate and full of Clever Schemes. For example: she recently lost her first tooth and was very pleased to find FIVE DOLLARS from the Tooth Fairy the next morning.

"As soon as I find the hammer, I'm going to be RICH!" she announced cheerfully to her big sister.

"How's that?" asked her big sister, in the barely-interested manner that only nearly-12-year olds can pull off.

"That's between me and the Tooth Fairy," she said, airily.

She wears outfits of outstanding, eye-searing colourfulness. She hates injustice and stands up fearlessly to anyone she thinks is pushing someone smaller around, even though she's impossibly tiny herself. Nightmares send her dashing to my bed, clinging to me in her sleep like a tree frog (She told me once "I thought if my dream scared me THAT bad, I'd better go check mom out. You're more easily frightened."). She is at once shockingly clever and heartbreakingly vulnerable, spoiled beyond telling and yet generous to a fault, able to throw herself into anything with wholehearted uninhibited zeal and such a good, good little girl. You would love her if you met her. And today she is six. Six!

Toys

2011-03-21T11:40:00.002-04:00

We spent the last Saturday of March Break in The Big City because The Baby had some medical tests scheduled and we thought nothing would be more fun than bringing our easily bored nearly-12-year-old and nine year old along with us. What a great idea! Eventually, though, the endless morning of tests (for The Baby) and endless whining (for the other two) was over and we took them to the toy store, because The Baby gets a treat whenever she has to put up with all of the medical nonsense she has to put up with and it only seemed fair that we buy something for the other two while we were at it.

In The Big City, there is a new giant toy store - a revelation to my children, who are normally content with the toy selection at the hardware store (two aisles near the cleaning products) and who sometimes get to go to small toy stores filled with the kind of toys that affluent thoughtful parents want their children to like. But this toy store had multiple aisles devoted to Barbie and an area the size of our house full of video games and my younger two kids were ENCHANTED. Pick one inexpensive thing! we told them and The Baby knew right away what she wanted - a stuffed peacock, thank you very much - and The Boy took his time and The Girl wandered around with this strange forlorn look on her face.

What's the matter? I asked her.

I don't want anything, she said. How can I not find anything I want in this whole huge store?

Sometimes endings in childhood are gradual - things slip away when we're not paying attention and we don't even notice for ages that they're gone - and sometimes they come abruptly. A few months ago - a few weeks ago, even - there still would have been many things that would have delighted her but all at once she was too old for it and that was that, it was over.

I remember being nearly her age. I'd had this doll family - I called them the Middle Sized Doll Family, because they were all largeish dolls but not THAT big - and for years I'd unselfconsciously played torrid soap operas with them until one day I picked one of them up and it was just a doll, just a plastic thing and whatever magic toys had was all at once gone, like it had washed away during the night and left only me.

We went to a bookstore, the Girl and me, and wandered around for a while and finally she picked out something she wanted - a bookstore chocolate bar - and was quiet on the drive home, mulling over the loss of something she could not put into words. This is the way most things end, I wanted to tell her, but did not.

Am I dead? Is this heaven?

2011-02-15T10:21:00.002-05:00

No and no.

I did get to have surgery, though - and do you know how sick you get before they decide that cutting you open and taking parts of you out is the best possible solution? PRETTY DARN SICK - and my youngest brother very helpfully suggested that they also take out all the other parts that I'm no longer using or can do without out to save me any future surgeries, but I chose to ignore his AMAZINGLY BRILLIANT advice and keep my ovaries, appendix and tonsils for future good times.

I'm pretty much better now AND I have some gross new scars! Win!

So I've decided that the best way to judge the quality of one's mate is to go through a long painful illness around them and if I didn't think my husband was a fine, fine fellow BEFORE now, I certainly would at this point. He has spent months and months buying groceries and making meals and caring for our monstrous children and keeping stuff WAY cleaner than it usually is and doing all the rest of the stuff he already does WITHOUT COMPLAINING ONCE. NOT ONCE. I married a freaking PRINCE, I tell you. A prince who should probably not decide to test my mettle in the same sort of way, frankly. He gets old/sickly/gross looking? I AM OUTTA HERE.

All right. So here's your assignment: tell me what I should write about in my next post because I am BORED of talking about this dumb illness. Ready? GO.

Hey Look It's Me!

2010-12-03T10:12:00.002-05:00

And how am I? I am okay. This fall really was vile, though. VILE! And I don't want to write about it!

For one thing, whenever I tell people about what happened, they're like "I KNOW SOMEONE WHOSE GALLLBLADDER EXPLODED AND THEY DIED!" or "Yeah, that happened to me. I didn't whine nearly anywhere near as much as you are." Frankly, both schools of comments make me feel sort of bitter and crabby.

Doo doo doo, what else? I AM SO SKINNY NOW! Dude. You have no idea. I was a chubby regular mom sort before The Great Gallbladder Storm of '10, but now I'm freaking GAUNT, which has led to me being startled whenever I walk in front of a mirror in my underwear, which I happen to do really frequently now. I don't recommend my weight-loss technique, however, no matter how amusing it is to be able to count my ribs again.

Funnily enough, because I got sick at the beginning of October/end of September, I still feel like I'm frozen there - know what I mean? - and instead it's almost Christmas and I am so not ready. It's St. Nicholas Day on Monday and we are NOT prepared, and Santa doesn't know what he's bringing for Christmas. And by "Santa" I mean "Bill", since he's the lucky guy who has picked up all of the slack around here AND spent every other minute comforting me while I whimpered that I was really, really TIRED of all of this crap. He is such a good husband and has totally been here for me all through this boring, discouraging business.

Without dwelling too much on it, I will say that I spent a very grim week when my ultrasound and blood test results came back with very worrisome questions, and I was gripped with sheer terror for that week - needlessly, of course - terror that my life was going to go on without me, that I was becoming the skinny fading ghost of myself and vanishing. And instead it is almost Christmas, and although I don't feel it yet, I will.

The Healing Power of Oprah

2010-11-19T15:16:00.009-05:00

I was languishing miserably last week - surgery-free, thanks, and I'll write more about THAT when I'm actually feeling all the way better - when suddenly a thought occurred to me from out of the blue.

THE OPRAH HOLIDAY GIFT LIST WAS COMING OUT SOON! I MUST RECOVER AT ONCE!

So, in my much-thinner (good gracious) hands, I am now holding the December issue of O Magazine and once again I am having my annual realization that Oprah and I are very, very different people. For one, I am sarcastic and unlikely to tell you how to live a life full of miraculous miracles, and for another, I am unlikely to gift you with a $350 tray with a painting of your dog on it (so very sorry). Does this mean that I think expensive dog art is therefore NEVER a suitable gift? No, the wealthy and childless dog lovers of this world are entitled to their kicks, too.

And oh, it is a childless list. There are nearly as many presents for obsessive pet lovers as there are for children, which is the sort of thing that makes me think that Oprah and I wouldn't really get along.

Off I go!

This year's list has a slightly different set-up - Oprah's stable of spin-off people all have their own lists, each with a different feel and each with a little introductory blurb about what they value in gift-giving (Suze Orman, for example, likes to give non-cluttery consumable gifts while Gayle King points out that a good gift is chosen specifically for one person only.). We begin with Oprah herself:

1) A hand-painted tray with a picture of your dog, cat or other animal on it. It's $350 and Oprah suggests I give this to "a friend" when frankly, my friends are lucky if I drop off a cheap bottle of wine at Christmas. So this is not going to happen, but it's quite pretty as an object. Do you know someone who is over-attached to their pet and do you also have vast piles of money? Then here you go, Scrooge McDuck.

2. An old-fashioned Amish popcorn pot with... a bottle of truffle oil and a jar of truffle salt. Of, of course. It's $79, but I've found the Amish popcorn makers for around $30 and it might be a nice gift for one of those earnest outdoorsy sort of families. Not mine, though. We are unearnest and make our popcorn in a cheap-o air popper and then I do not eat it because popcorn is vile.

3. The Microdelivery In-Home Vitamin C/Peptide Peel set, which costs $70. Now, this is just me here, but if someone gave me two small, very expensive bottles of face fixer, I wouldn't think "How luxurious!" but rather "I am old and haggard and desperate measures are being taken to fix my Cryptkeeper-esque face." I do think that this is the sort of thing that you should either buy for yourself or only if specifically requested as a gift.

4. A rather lovely pair of owl-print pajamas that I would totally yearn for if they were not $68 (for Oprah magazine readers and $84.95 for the rest of you), which is just more than I spend of pajamas, no matter how owly. If that strikes you as a fine price, they ARE very cute.

5. Custom-designed notepads - five of them - with your very own beloved dog drawn upon them for $298.00. Holy heck! How much do you like that freaking dog? Now, maybe you are an affluent sort of person who values high-quality objects and I'm not trying to ruin your fun. I am, however, trying to ask for money.

6. Citrusy lotion and body wash. How nice! Less nice is that they cost $85 and $75 EACH. EACH! Does my enjoyment of my lotion and body wash increase exponentially with every ten dollars I spend? I am boggled.

7. A miniature easel with a "luscious four-ply card stock" calendar. $125. There are many things in this world I do not get - hard maths, the popularity of Celine Dion - and right up there with those would be expensive paper products. I just do not understand.

8. Tubes of handmade gingersnaps, which is pretty nice. I could hector on in my annual Cookies-Are-Not-Hard-To-Make-Luxury-Objects fashion as usual, but I'm tired this year and frankly a tube of gingersnaps sounds like a sensible, lovely thing after a $125 calendar and a $85 bottle of lotion.

9. Sweet potato butter. $9. Well, sure. This is fine.

10. The LIFE documentary.$39. A family member gives us documentaries every year, which we never watch because we are a frivolous people and undeserving of such intellectual splendor. I'm betting we get this one.

11. High-gloss wooden jewelry boxes. $185. These actually look much nicer on the shop's site than they do in the magazine, which features the avocado green and orange versions. Do not give me an avocado green jewelry box.

12. The O magazine AP for one's iPad. I don't want this, either, but someplace, some childless self-actualized dog lover is just delirious with joy. Good for them, I say. And also: Don't hang out with me!

13. An iPad. $499. They cost $499? Where was I when all the money was being handed out? GEEZ. Why am I such a freaking Luddite pauper?

14. An iPad cover that looks like an antique book. If I had an iPad and $70 more, I would so want this.

Onto Dr. Oz! I was somewhat startled to see that I liked his list the best, having felt no particular kinship with him in the past. Apparently, though, he is my Oprah-land soulmate. How startling.

1. Single Origin Chocolate Bars. $7. YES. See, this is the sort of thing I might actually give to a friend for Christmas or use as a stocking stuffer for my husband. The packaging on these is beautiful.

2. Saucony ProGrid Kinvara sneakers. $90. I'm just going to give up on my mission to stop having athletic shoes be an acceptable gift. GO AHEAD. I AM TOO SICK TO CARE ANYMORE.

3. Nigella Lawson's ceramic measuring cups. $26. If you ignore Dr. Oz's suggestion that these are great for portion control - seriously, do not give people the Gift Of Portion Control for Christmas- these are a lovely, covetable object.

4. Nike Sport Band. $59. I can think of lots of hearty, athletic acquaintances of mine who would love this. Why do we hang out, hearty athletic acquaintances? What do we possibly have in common?

5. Middle Colors Ultrasonic Small Humidifier, $120. This is a fair chunk of change, but it's so appealing - like a Barbapappa! - and I keep humidifiers running all winter, so I'm going to come out and say that I like it.

6. Monogrammed Yoga Mat - $28. This is good for someone who is not me, and comes in many pretty colours.

7. Belle De Nuit Silk Sleep Mask. $30. My oldest loves those sleep masks one can buy at the tween accessory stores because she is an elegant lady. I would like this one and while I'm at it, I'd like someone to keep my loud, loud children busy on Saturday mornings.

Suze Orman time!

1. Little red Chinese money envelopes- $2 for 40. One of my aunts sends my kids money gifts in those little red envelopes and they are THRILLED.

2. Suze Orman's book "Thoughts That Can Change Your Life." Well, if I was writing a gift list and had also written a book (possible title: "Many Things Irritate Me"), I most certainly would include it. Do you know someone who reads O magazine earnestly? If so, here's a book for them.

3. Great Expectations Double Discovery Gift - $48. It's one of those nicely packaged boxes of gift foods- baklava, nuts, cheeses, smoked sausage and chocolates - and while I can't quite imagine getting one, I certainly wouldn't complain. It's the gift of SAUSAGE.

4. A set of three extra-virgin olive oils. $85. Sigh.

5. Silver Elephants note cards,12 for $75, I am not kidding. They are hand-edged-and-stamped in silver, and yet still. These would be great if you correspond with The Queen on a monthly basis.

6. Black and Decker Studio Shredder. $40. My mother-in-law has a paper shredder and faithfully shreds all mail, while we were given one and it sat in its box until we gave it away. Your call.

7. The Ultimate Bath And Shower Mini Oil Collection, which is a pricey $68 and yet I would still like. It will go nicely with my new silk eye mask/lady of leisure shtick.

Nate Berkus time.

1. The Nook book reader- $149. I guess this is the sort of thing that people who like this sort of thing will want. I would like one, thank you.

2. A purple Christmas tree ball that Nate Berkus designed and that costs $20. Profits go to a children's hospital, which makes buying a solitary $20 tree ball a lot less scalding.

3. Ray-Ban Metal Glide Aviator glasses - $140. I buy all my sunglasses at truck stops, because I just WRECK 'em. You may possibly be more careful than me. It would be hard to be less.

4. V-Neck Crewneck Cashmere Sweaters. - $145. I would like mine in orchid, but this is not going to happen, because I don't run in $145 gift sweater circles. Poor sweet cashmereless me.

5. Two decks of Tiffany playing cards - $30. These belong to a different life than mine - something affluent and suburban and American and set in 1952 and the husband and wife are playing cards in the living room with the neighours they're having affairs with. I think John Cheever wrote it.

6. Nate Berkus for HSN Ikat Bowl - $30. "Don't shy away from giving gifts for the home," writes Nate. "A decorative bowl works for everything from fruit to keys and mail." Oh yeah? We gave friends a perfectly nice decorative bowl, which decorated their laundry room bath for a while. Decorative objects are a tricky thing to give. I strongly recommend against giving decorative objects.

7. Fish-eye-lens camera $50. This is hilarious! I could easily see giving this to my husband for Christmas.

I'm not even in the homestretch yet. Good grief. Why did I ever start doing these posts? But courage, self! Onto Gayle King's list.

1. A Southern-Style Pound Cake topped with fresh flowers inside a satin hat-box. $104. As an object, it's quite lovely. Cake! Flowers! A pretty puffy satin box! I like all of these things. But $104 is a lot of clams for a cake.

2. Spring Bouquet Floral Leather Clogs - $68. I like these. I can't quite imagine giving people shoes as a gift, though - can you? Sweaters, yes but shoes just seem sort of.... weird.

3. Harlem Toile De Jouy Limited Edition Plates - 6 for $69. Oh, these are pretty.

4. Exercise videos. Jari Love's Get Extremely Ripped 1000 - $12.The Hayes Way - $12 and Turbo Jam $60 for 5 disc set. I'm getting the Get Extremely Ripped one for my grandma and the Turbo Jam set for my great-aunt who is a retired minister, because what I'd really like my Christmas gifts to them to say is "Please be buffer."

5. Renato Collezioni Women's Beauty Chronograph Watch - $319. This is, apparently, a bargain, and yet I am still unlikely to wear something on my wrist that is worth MORE THAN MY HAND.

6. Pratesi Signature 3 LinesTerry Robe - $700. Um, I got a robe for Christmas last year. It's blue and fluffy and good to wear when I'm feeling delicate/hungover/too lazy to even put on pajamas. I love my robe. It cost, I believe, $45. I understand that there are more luxurious versions of robes and so forth, but $700 for a terry robe? Really? And I'm supposed to buy TWO of them? There is no one I like enough on this planet that I would spend $700 on a ROBE for them.

7. Milk chocolate African- American Santa - $8. Hey, he's cute! Here's a nice stocking stuffer.

Dr. Phil's list, which is sort of endearingly out-of-it.

1. A collection of four French cheeses and a bottle of wine - $80. I would like this. Dr. Phil could give this to me and it would only be slightly creepy.

2. Cowshed Bath and Massage Oil - $27. Whenever someone says "massage", I say "Sensual MAY- sahggh" like Austin Powers, which proves two things: 1. I am immature and 2. I need to watch more recent movies. Do you like to give sensual may-saahghs? Here you go. I do not suggest giving it to your boss.

3. Lammes Candies Longhorns - $22. A box of candy makes a fine gift, I guess, but nut allergies being common these days, I would check first.

4. Ancestry.com Family Tree Maker - $32. I would like this, but I find that people are radically divided when it comes to family trees - half of the world seems to find it an interesting, compelling hobby while the other half finds it a grave-stirring waste of time. It's probably best to know which one your givee is before giving this.

5. MinoHD 1Hr. flip movie cameras - $180. These are nice, I guess.

6. Williams-Sonoma Cashmere Throw - $198. This is fine as an object, but I really am feeling resentful that I wasn't born into the $198 cashmere throw segment of society. All I get are Grandma-knitted afghans.

7. Pulse Seven-Inch Frame - $130 We got three of those digital photo frames for Christmas last year, all of which are still sitting in immaculate unopened condition. So your gift givee probably got one last year OR is your grandmother and will just find this confusing.

Valerie Monroe. Who is she? I do not know.

1. Maison Francis Kurkdjian Les Bulles d'Agathe - $18. PERFUME SCENTED BUBBLES! This is the sort of magical little thing that my husband - who is the best husband ever - gives me for Christmas.

2. Stainless Steel Carafe - $229. Oh, for Pete's sake. Is spending $229 on a stainless steel water pitcher really going to make you happy?

3. Faces of the World Chocolates - $12. For the chocolate jaded palate, apparently, although if I ever get jaded enough to start considering "tahini" a legitimate chocolate option, I should probably take up a challenging hobby.They're kind of spiffy looking, though.

4. E.L.F. Cosmetics 100-Piece Eyeshadow Palette - $10. I used to consider those million-shades-of-whatever sets a big ol' waste of money and then I suddenly had an 11 year old daughter who wants to experiment with eyeshadow at sleepovers and now I am like I AM GOING TO BUY HER THIS SO SHE WILL STAY OUT OF MY MAKEUP.

5. Four Expesso Cups with Silver Spoons - $140. POINTLESS EXTRAVAGANCE.

6. Clinique Click and Be Happy - $28. This, however, is fun - three mix-and-match perfume wands/lip gloss sticks - and a decent price, too.

7. Limited Edition Creme de Corps by Jeff Koons - $70. Profits go to charity. And meanwhile, you've just spent $70 on a bottle of lotion. You, my wealthy friend, are so very different than me.

Adam Glassman
1. Turkish Cotton Bath Towels - $55 each. We got some nice bath towels last year - to replace the last ones we got, which were wedding gifts 12 years ago. So I am all for nice bath towels, but if you spend $55 on them, I'm hardly going to use it to dry my family with, AM I.

2. Claude Dozorme Cutlery Steak Knives in rainbow - $160 for six. Here's science for you: if you give someone knives - and are you really going to give someone a $160 set of steak knives? - you have to give them some money with it, which they then give BACK to you, thus buying the knives in superstition land and preventing the severing of your friendship.

3. Joan Boyce for HSN ASpen Shadow Misses - $50. These are sparkly fuchsia boots. Perhaps you know someone who would like sparkly fuchsia boots.

4. Protocol Tiger Jet with Gyro- $39. HEY IT'S A PRESENT FOR A KID I FEEL KIND OF WOOZY! My kids would love one of these flying helicopters. However, my in depth knowledge of my children lets me know with utter certainty that they would spend most of their time trying to fly the helicopter right into each other's heads. I certainly hope your children are better behaved.

5. 48 bite-sized latkes - $32. Someone buy me this. I am feeling delicate and would like to eat latkes, thank you.

6. Printed tissue-weight cashmere wraps - $122. There is pointless extravagance and then there's point-ful extravagance, a rare category of magical and lovely spendy things. How I would love a tissue-weight cashmere wrap.

7. Kyle MacLachlan's red wine - $52. My dad makes wine. If you're really nice to me, I'll give you a bottle of the piquant red wine he makes from beets. It tastes amusingly of beets.

Martha Beck. I do not know who she is, but her last name is oddly familiar to me.

1. Aluminum wallet - $39. "Conspiracy theorists will love this!" writes Beck, who is not me. What I mostly want for the conspiracy theorists of my acquaintance is for them to stop bothering me with their FREAKING THEORIES. Merry Christmas to me!

2. Glass ornaments set with feathers in them - $58 - These will, Beck writes, "scatter good feng shui." Oh, certainly - but having grown up country, feathers don't remind me so much of "ethereal beauty" as "dead plucked birds hanging up in the porch." Doesn't that take all the romance out of them?

3. Personalized 80-piece youth art set - $20. Well, this is nice, especially if you know an artsy kid.

4. The Gift Of Nothing by Patrick McDonnell $14 - The characters of the Mutts comic strip star in a slim children's book. I haven't seen it, but I guess it would be fine.

5. "Adopting" an elephant. From $50. This is nice, although I tend to favour human-based charities over the animal variety. That's a personal thing, but it's worth noting that it's also one that many people share.

6. Every National Geographic since1888. $56 This strikes me as a fantastic sort of thing, and I'm actually mulling over getting it for my husband, who would likely never use it - but it has its own wild romance, doesn't it?

7. Ethical Bean Coffee - $12. Back before my husband swore off The Demon Coffee, this is the sort of thing I would put in his stocking. Now that he is free of vice, I'm not putting ANYthing in it. Serves him right.

It's not an ulcer...

2010-11-06T12:57:00.000-04:00

It's my gallbladder and it's coming out this week. So prayers and good wishes for a safe surgery and uneventful test results, please.

Hey!

2010-11-01T10:06:00.002-04:00

I was sick! So very very sick!
I went to the hospital! I had TESTS!
And I lost a bunch of weight. Whoa, Nelly. If you'd told me at the beginning of October that I'd be at my goal weight by the end of the month, I'd have said "That sounds unlikely". Except with swearing in it, because that's how I roll in real life. BUT I AM, thanks to it HURTING TO EAT. (this is being dealt with and I'm able to eat now, albeit only horrible, horrible foods. So that's kind of a win-lose.)

They think I have an ulcer, which I always thought happened to stressed-out business-types. Apparently, however, my life is too high stress for me and this fills me with fear, since my life is pretty low-stress. I mean, I don't WORK. All of my kids are in SCHOOL - and thank GOODNESS for that, because I spent the past three weeks pretty much totally out of commission - and so I don't know what's filling me with The Stress - is it the pressures of reading ALL OF THE INTERNET? Is it the napping?

So help me waste away my convalescence - tell me something funny/cheery/mildly amusing to help me in my malingering and help me while away the dull, couch-filled hours. xo

Halloween 1#

2010-10-12T09:23:00.003-04:00

Fairly Odd

Daphne was probably the least popular kid in the school. It wasn't just that she was weird looking - although she was, with big jug ears and bug eyes and a too-small nose and giant teeth - but she also dressed like a mutant and never brushed her teeth and laughed too loud and smelled pretty bad and picked her nose in the middle of class and was pretty dumb. The kids didn't like her and the teachers rolled their eyes at her and tried not to touch her very much. Some kid stole her bike and some kid would follow her home and yell names at her and and some kid would steal her pencils off her desk and leave her looking around, wondering where her pencils had got to.

"That poor kid doesn't have a chance," my mom said to my dad as they watched Daphne bike - on her brother's too-big bike, now hers was gone - up and down the street all by herself. Her mom was gone - taken off with some old guy because she'd decided that she was "an artist" now - and her dad drank and my mom called Daphne "one of life's victims" to my dad when she didn't think I was listening. But I am always listening.

Keep Away Daphne, all the kids called her. She ate by herself and ran around the schoolyard by herself and even the teachers didn't like her and that was the way it had always been. Then I got chicken pox and was home scratching for two weeks.

My mom brought me in mid-morning, after listening to me whine that I was just fine, moooom, and we stopped at the main office while she explained that my scabs were healed over and to call her if I couldn't stick it out and then she walked me to my room - mom! - and I noticed, just out of the corner of my eye, that the big Student Of The Week spot on the bulletin board was Daphne. That never happens, I thought.

And then I walked into my classroom and everything was different.

All of the girls were sitting in a big cluster around Daphne, who was sitting right in the primo middle of the room spot, and Daphne had a big smile on her face... and her face looked changed, somehow. Prettier and cleaner, definitely, but after I looked at her for a second, I could still see the old Daphne underneath, like the prettiness and the cleanness was just a mask. She looked at me and smiled but the Daphne underneath - the real Daphne - did not.

Sit with me at lunch, Daphne! said Emma, the most popular girl in class.
Want to play Four Square with us? the boys in the corner called to her.
Oh, Daphne! said the teacher. Your test was perfect! And she knelt down and gave smelly old Daphne a hug, just like she never did before.
Rutger, the big kid who was always really mean to Daphne, was just gone. His running shoes were still underneath his desk and his books were still open on it. Where'd Rutger go? I asked Melinda, my best friend, and she wrinkled her face up and said Who? and went back to smiling at Daphne.

There was a pink pencil and a green pencil on her desk.

I walked home after school - by myself, because my friends were walking home in a huge mob around Daphne - and went out onto the patio to think. My house is a few houses away from Daphne's and I can see into her yard, if I wanted to - and her mom came walking out of their patio door and shook out a rug. Her mom, the one who had left her whole family to paint naked ladies and live far away.

Daphne walked into her backyard. Hi baby! said her mom. How is my favorite girl? I made you cookies!

There was a pink squirrel and a green squirrel with Daphne. One of them - the pink one- pulled on Daphne's pant leg and pointed at me and Daphne stopped hugging her mom and looked across the yards right at me and I went into my house pretty quickly.

I wasn't that bad to her, I think.

Sure, her bike is my shed.

Sure, I used to follow her home and say some mean things. But a lot of kids did that.

Sure, I would take her pencils.

But I wasn't as mean as Rutger. A lot of kids were as mean as me, and they're still here.

Maybe I'll wake up in the morning and I'll forget all this and Daphne will be the prettiest girl in the world and Queen of the Playground and who knows what else. Maybe. I hope.

Maybe I will just be gone.

I'm writing this down just in case.

And wishing - oh, wishing - that I had grabbed that pink pencil and that green pencil off her desk as I walked by this morning.

Run Off

2010-09-27T11:05:00.005-04:00

Whenever people tell me that they've seen a ghost, I tend to put on my cautious face. Who goes around claiming to see ghosts? Iffy people, that's who.

I know, for example, DOZENS of ghost stories.

It was very early springtime, and the run-off from the melting snow coursed down my parents driveway and created an impromptu river across it and the surrounding fields. A sudden cold snap resulted in the newly formed "river" freezing overnight, and so my dad announced that he was going to wade through it in his rubber boots and break all the ice. I'm not sure WHY he had to do this - maybe this was a terribly important task. I'm not sure. (I asked - he was cleaning out the culvert.)

My youngest brother - 13 years younger than me and still just a child in this story - was my dad's normal assistant for important "work" like breaking ice, but he was sick on the couch with a fever and episodes of Ninja Turtles. My other brother was a teenager and a friend dropped in with a truck and a brand-new driver's license and the two boys went for a drive through the farmland and the bush surrounding my parents' house.

I announced at the outset that this was a ghost story, so you know that something is going to pop up someplace, that someone will be the center of the story - will it be the sick child, dreaming in feverish innocence of what is to come? will it be my dad, stomping through the ice in the field all alone? will it be my other brother, suddenly old enough for wild, seeming freedom?

My oldest brother returned later, and was concerned. Wasn't our little brother too sick to have been outside breaking ice all afternoon? Our little brother, the one who had spent the afternoon napping feverishly on the couch - but both teenage boys had seen a small child following close behind dad as they drove by a couple of times, a small child carefully walking in the big rubber-booted footprints dad was leaving in the broken ice. And my dad had a shivery, not-alone feeling as he broke the ice, all by himself in the big white field, water running and things thawing, unseen, under the white and the ice.

I'm not in this story. I've been told this story so many times - the sick sleeping child in the house, the boys in the truck, the silent ghost child walking right behind my dad - that I can picture it in my mind, but I was already grown up and gone. My childhood books were still on the shelves, my outgrown shoes still waited by the front door but I was someplace else, I was unseen.

My kids decided to rake up the front yard this weekend - well, someone has to - and I could hear them outside as they squabbled and worked and bossed each other around. Then their dad went outside to take them for a walk and their voices were high in the air for a moment and then they rounded the corner and were gone from my sight. And I shivered in the bright autumn light, shivered in the suddenly silent air as this empty promising ghost passed by, this shivering specter of childhood's inevitable end.

It's COLD out!

2010-09-14T08:49:00.003-04:00

I can't even remember a few short weeks ago when it was so hot that simply leaving the house would cause my brain to melt.

Susanne tagged me! I haven't done a tag in AGES, but look!

1. Nimm das nächste Buch in deiner Nähe mit mindestens 123 Seiten. Take the book that’s next to you that has at least 123 pages.
2. Schlage Seite 123 auf. Open page 123.
3. Suche den fünften Satz auf der Seite. Look for the fifth sentence on that page.
4. Poste die nächsten drei Sätze. Post the next three sentences.
5. Wirf das Stöckchen an fünf Blogger weiter. Tag five more bloggers.

All right. Let's see what's on the top of my to-read pile... "Five Mile House" by Karen Novak.

She uncovered her eyes and straightened her posture, trying to check her wavering, translucent reflection in the plastic. She couldn't focus. The heat took on a sudden density like a vital energy coalescing about her, hemming her in.

Hm. That's a lot of dense, thick adjectives. I may have lost interest. I signed the book out of the library because I tend to switch my reading diet to All Ghost Stories at this time of year, it being ghost story season and all. Just as a sad story is best for winter, a story that's all about unsettled spirits is best for fall.

I see ghosts - of a sort - all the time. There will be a kid running down the street and I'll think, with a start, that it's Justin from grade 10 math or Tracy from grade nine phys ed and then the kid will get closer and I'll realize that it's the child of Justin or Tracy (or whoever) and that Justin or Tracy have now lost their known face, are turning into something different and unrecognizable. There are people I know, of course, who have kept their faces their whole lives, but it's hard to tell who you get to be, if your child running down the street now has the family face and you have a borrowed, softening mask.

I still have my own face - I think, although I ran into a highschool acquaintance the other day and she absolutely did not recognize me - but not one of my children will ever be mistaken for me, being either too blond or too male and not one of them looking terribly like me in the first place. But what used to haunt me was the idea that someday they would be unknown to me, that their minds might be mysterious places, back when they were small and so easily known. And of course, this day has happened - my oldest child is now someone who is both known to me and who is utterly unknown, her own thoughts happening and kept away. And meanwhile, her sunny countenance smiles out from my picture of her on my shelf, a relic from a known time, a little ghost that whispers at me.

It is September. It is growing cold outside, it is growing cold within.

Look at me, posting all over the place

2010-09-09T17:04:00.001-04:00

I wrote a melancholy piece on the end of childhood AND summer over here.
And there are new posts up at the lunch box blog!
We all have colds. Krep!
xo

Back to School!

2010-09-07T11:36:00.005-04:00

Today is the first day of school! My oldest headed off none-too-enthusiastically in the middle of a thunderstorm AND in her new glasses and I headed... in.. to the schoolroom none-too-enthusiastically, but it was a lovely morning. I hope my Girl's day is going well too, poor thing.

Here's the schoolroom right now!

Remember the weird doorway to nowhere? My husband put BOOKSHELVES IN IT:

They can quickly come out in case we need to use the Door To Nowhere for some strange reason. My desk is STILL a big mess, since a) that is My Way and b) the schoolroom computer is out of commission. My mother-in-law MADE the little mini couch from a weird half-bathtub store display, and The Baby keeps her books on the shelf right above.

The schoolroom shelves:
I took these pictures at the beginning of last week and now the fan picture makes me laugh bitterly. It was WARM last week! This week, we have the woodstove lit.

My favorite part of the homeschool room

All of the books in the window are for our Middle Ages history this year.

I'm part of a new group blog! It's all about the trials and tribulations of packing school lunches, and my first post is up. If it was a group blog about homeschool lunches, it would just be page after page of pictures of grilled cheese sandwiches.

Thanks!

2010-09-02T17:55:00.002-04:00

What a lot of nice birthday wishes! It was a great day.

I wrote about back-to-school and what changes and what does not at 5 Minutes for Parenting today. And now I am going to go make supper, which never changes.

The Middle

2010-08-31T08:53:00.008-04:00

It's my birthday! Again!

I was talking to my middle brother last night and he said that he barely notices his birthdays anymore. TO HECK WITH THAT, I say. Any day that gets me presents and cake and extra attention is MY SORT OF DAY.

My husband got me up at FIVE THIRTY to give me my present, which was a red camera. I will try my best not to break this one, unlike our past two cameras, which I dropped over and over again. Nicely done, self.

I'm 38 today!
Note my spiffy new glasses and that I am a bit sunburned.

I got some other nice presents, too - my parents gave me a big stack of cookbooks and some mixing bowls, the Girl gave me some non-latex kitchen gloves (God bless her practical little soul) and a beautiful card and The Boy built me what he describes as "a steampunk pirate ship" from Lego, with instructions that I am to give it back when he needs the pieces. The Baby gave me nothing. "You get to spend all your time with me," she crabbed. "Isn't that ENOUGH?"

HA HA! That kid.

Whatever gross black misery dog was haunting me all spring/summer seems to have passed by my house. My birthday finds me happy and content again, which is a nice present itself, which is enough. Here I am in the middle - God willing and the creeks don't rise - of my life. It feels surprisingly prefect. It feels surprisingly like where I should be.

I Am Going To Post Again One Of These Days

2010-08-27T08:45:00.003-04:00

... but I just wanted to draw your attention to two reviews I've done this week:
1. I reviewed one of those cracker/chip hybrids
and
2. I reviewed a children's book store AND I'm giving away a $25 gift certificate!
xo

Big Old Yarn Ball

2010-08-24T16:51:00.002-04:00

One of the big problems about not really posting for ages is that I have too much to write about and then when I do sit down to write - which I have done, several times - I find myself staring blankly at the screen, unsure of where to even possibly start.

So I'll start here.

Hey, I got glasses last week! It's been kind of funky. I wasn't AWARE that I needed glasses - I mean, I'd noticed that my remembrances of what things used to look like were sharper and finer, but I'd just credited that to The Cruel Wages Of Time. Then I went to see the optometrist for the first time in YEARS and she kind of freaked out. Glasses ahoy!

What else is new? Well.

A dear friend's son was nightmarishly injured last week, the poor kid. The Baby is wearing a holter monitor for the next couple of days, horribly enough. She had a scheduled appointment with her pediatrician and then a little unscheduled appointment with the holter monitor lady and welcome to Hell, me!

We also went to a family reunion on the weekend, a reunion of my mother-in-law's mother's people. It was held at a lodge that some of my mother-in-law's cousins have owned since the 1940s, and we were given a cabin for the weekend. The Boy and The Baby came with me but The Girl was left behind with my parents because she suddenly got very sick, and so we get there and OF COURSE there was another sole 11 year old girl cousin. That's the way these things work.

The property was gorgeous and rambling and full of winding streams and weeping willows and beds of shale and I was so totally disoriented, thanks to my new glasses. A few months ago, I'd looked through an old stereoscope and was baffled - what were they trying to accomplish with everything all lined up like that? - and now I realize that I've been seeing the world oddly flat for YEARS. So now I suddenly have to carefully pick my way through this bizarrely 3-D environment, with the ground looming up menacingly at me.

I managed not to break my neck.

The Boy showed me his new rock skipping skills and then we discovered that practically everyone of my husband's first cousins once removed had very thoughtfully ALSO had eight year old sons, so he took off in an enormous pack of young cousins, much like lions.

The next day, the Boy and the Baby and I walked out to a very miniature peninsula, this small thread of land stretching out into the massive lake, and everything was vividly in front of me, the trees and the fish silver in the water and everything suddenly so shockingly, dizzyingly clear. I could barely make my way and meanwhile the kids ran up ahead, ran over the bridges and past the spot where the woolen mill once stood and were gone from sight.

The Winner Of The Nursing Top Is....

2010-08-16T10:16:00.002-04:00

Julie - who JUST had her brand new baby boy, so why not go congratulate her! - from And They Never Slept Again. Thanks again to BumbleWee Nursing Wear!

This Is A Post About Homeschool Curriculum

2010-08-14T12:26:00.002-04:00

... and I cannot believe I am writing it. But several people have asked me to, unfathomably enough, and so HERE I AM.

My homeschooled kids are in grade three and senior kindergarten this year. My other kid is in grade six, but her edu-ma-cation is the responsibility of the public school system and not me (and they are doing a fine job, too). Here's what we're doing for the other two, but nothing I say should be taken as an endorsement - we haven't USED this stuff yet, for the most part:

Language Arts:
The Baby and I are halfway through Teach Your Child To Read in 100 Easy Lessons. I'm not wildly in love with the book, but it's working: The Baby IS reading. She's going to move into the Pathway Readers grade one book, since nothing says rockin' good times like an Amish reader with no blasphemous illustrations of human beings. But the kids LOVE the books and their low-key stories (WILL Levi tell his dad he left the calf barn gate open?). The Boy uses them too, and we're also doing some novel studies - I believe we're going to do the Chronicles of Narnia before Christmas, and we'll see what happens from there.

I don't use spelling programs. I think that spelling is largely a skill picked up from writing and reading. I DO have the Boy put any misspelled words in a little homemade dictionary, but that's it - and he's a fairly solid speller. We also use the Explode the Code books and they focus on how words are put together. The poor kid will also be using a workbook called Funny Fairy Tale Grammar, and we're going to be reading a big pile of funny books about punctuation. We're starting using the WriteShop books this year, having HATED HATED HATED the big homeschool writing program last year (flimsy! boring!). And we use the Handwriting Without Tears books - The Baby is in the grade one printing and The Boy is starting cursive. Moving on.

Math
We like the American edition of the Singapore Math books - first, because they're logically structured (one subject moves briskly to the next) and secondly because topics are introduced without much review - this probably wouldn't work well for most kids, but they were highly recommended to us as being the ideal curriculum for kids who are gifted in math. I was scandalized when experienced teachers of my acquaintance told me that I could SKIP WHOLE SECTIONS of the math books as soon as he mastered the ideas - but the wisdom of the idea soon became apparent to me - instead of being complacent/bored, he's constantly being challenged. Because the editions we use are American, we skip the bits on measurement and money and substitute appropriate worksheets.

We also play store a lot. My husband is actually building a five-year-old-sized shop counter in the schoolroom today, and it's going to hold her cash register and toy food and such. We frequently play store in french quite a bit, which is funny.

And my kids really love to play math games on the computer - they're big fans of Cool Math and we use the Nelson math site a lot (Nelson math is the math curriculum the Girl's school uses.).

French/Other Languages
We're using the Rosetta Stone software. We also play bingo in french, sing french songs and as mentioned, play store in French. We also print little books off Enchanted Learning as required.
My kids like languages a lot, so we have other other language materials around for their use and we're starting Song School Latin this year.

Geography
I think that geography is really poorly taught by the school system and what is actually a very interesting topic has all the fun and interest sucked out of it. This year, we're using a combination of Hands-On Geography, Learning Geography Through Art and Eat Your Way Around The World, as well as storybooks from various countries and using the atlas, globe and working their way through simple, but effective, Canadian map workbooks.

History
I LOVE OUR HISTORY PROGRAM SO MUCH. We're working through Pandia Press's History Odyssey - this year, they're in Level One/The Middle Ages, and they are REALLY excited about it. We're using a ton of stuff with it and I can't even list it all.

"But what about your belief in the importance of Canadian history for Canadian kids?" my imaginary reader asks. Well.
1) It does have a month-long focus on the peoples of North America during the Middle Ages so we're good, thanks.
and
2) As part of what we're doing in Geography, we're going to be reading Canadian-based books throughout the year.

Science
I also love our science program so much - and again, it's from Pandia Press. This year, we're using R.E.A.L. Science Odyssey Earth And Space. I like this science program very, very much - not only is it a scientifically-sound, experiment-based program, but it's FUN to do.

We're also going to be working our way through Simple Machines before Christmas and a book of plant experiments after, and we'll be going on nature walks - oh GOODY - several times a week. The Boy also has a bridge kit that he'll be playing with and I also read the kids piles of science books because they like them. And The Boy has a table set up in the basement where he is allowed to take electronics apart and make his weird little experiments.

Art And Music
I cobble together my own art program, but they do a LOT of art projects during the rest of the school day as well - their history program focuses a lot on historically-based crafts and looking at art and obviously their geography program is very art-focused, too. Beyond that, we're going to be using Drawing With Children and some of the zillions of art project and art books we have laying around the house. I love Deep Space Sparkle Art - there are such GREAT GREAT art projects on that site. Oh, and our kiln will be up and running! There's nothing tidier than working with clay with kids.

As far as music goes: we're going to be listening to medieval music, naturally enough. I also really, REALLY love the Classics For Kids website - what a great site! - and The Boy is going to learn how to play the recorder this year, which will probably lead to me getting a lot of headaches and feeling sorry for myself. And we sing a lot.

That's not all that we're going to do, but it's the main chunk of it. And now I am tired.

I wrote a post yesterday!

2010-08-13T06:28:00.003-04:00

It is - warning! - about spiders. And spooky woods.

If you're a breastfeeding mom, I'm having a nice clothing giveaway.

It's EARLY! I am never awake this early! It's all foggy early morning outside. Weirdness. I'm going to go drink my coffee on the porch all by myself.

I Interrupt Me Moping Around

2010-08-12T08:38:00.002-04:00

...to give away a nice nursing top. So if you're nursing, hurry on over to enter.

EPIC EPIC EPIC

2010-08-11T16:34:00.005-04:00

I was weeding a box of books that my mom dropped off - leftovers from my teenage days - and lo and behold: there was my favorite book of quotations from my late teens! Complete with circling, underlining and margin notes! Yes, it was like I was given a MAGICAL ticket back to the most PRETENTIOUS TIME IN MY LIFE!

For example:

Some rainy winter Sundays when there's a little boredom, you should always carry a gun. Not to shoot yourself, but to know exactly that you're always making a choice.
Lina Wertmuller

HAHAHAHAH. Picture me underlining this. I am seventeen. I am really, really thin. I wear mostly black turtlenecks and a lot of dark eye makeup. I am NO FUN AT ALL.

The flesh is weary, alas, and I've read all the books.
Stephane Mallarme

The HECK I HAD. And also "the flesh is weary"? I was 17. My "flesh" was the OPPOSITE of "weary."

But when I don't smoke I scarcely feel as if I'm living. I don't feel as if I'm living unless I'm killing myself.
Russell Hoban, the guy who wrote the Frances books

I am so, so glad that Twitter wasn't around in 1989. I'd have had an account - no doubt with a gloomy, Edward Scissorhands-ish avatar - from which I'd do nothing but repeat depressing quotes all day. And also: I HAVE NEVER SMOKED, NOT EVEN CASUALLY. What the HECK, olden-days self?

It used to be a good hotel, but this proves nothing - I used to be a good boy.
Mark Twain

HAHAHAH! STILL funny! World-weary cynicism now makes me roll my eyes, things that I used to think where SUPER deep now strike me as goofy - but smart-assery? Age cannot wither it nor custom stale.

Today, I got to sit in our gazebo in the backyard all by myself and read a detective book in the cheerful midday while my kids all had fun elsewhere and I felt quite contented, even in the midst of a rough time. And tonight I have the cheering knowledge that I am not THAT girl anymore, that I am wry and relaxed and if not quite happy at the moment, I know that I am working my way back there. End quote.

Social Disease

2010-08-10T12:20:00.005-04:00

So I watched The Bachelor Pad last night, where THE WORST PEOPLE IN THE WORLD - like Machiavelli, but with bikinis and endless booze and apparently really severe head injuries - all crowded together into a house to win luv/a pile of money. And now my eyes have herpes*, which serves me right for letting my boredom and lethargy lull me into watching such z-grade Bread and Circus crap.

*Okay, no they don't. I was EXAGGERATING for COMIC EFFECT.

"Hey Beck," you might be asking (you're not, but let's pretend), "You're not writing much these days. What's up? Have you wearied of the glamour of blogging?" And no, no I have not. But I am kind of really depressed these days, which is less fun than it sounds and also not worth writing about. My feeeeeelings! It's being dealt with, but it would be totally self-indulgent to write about it (all grim, heavy adjectives) and then I'd want to kick my own butt when I get feeling better.

This means I'm not writing a lot these days. But what with all the not writing and everything, I have a lot of new time for other low-key, depressed person hobbies, like genealogy. I'm mostly trying to track down my father's German-American grandmother - with no luck - because she's the only dead-end I have, and my father is unenthusiastic about the whole thing since she was a dour, unlikeable, hard-luck woman, so much so that my grandfather ran away at 13 and joined the actual, literal circus.

Character is a funny thing, isn't it? My lost German-American great-great-grandmother had a lot of kids, was rural poor and lost her husband young (he was HIT BY A TRAIN) and was nasty-tempered and sour. My mother's great-grandmother ALSO had a lot of kids, was rural poor, lost her husband young - and was a lovely, high-spirited, funny woman who is still missed now, half a century later. And that haunts me, the idea that similar experiences can end in such different people, the idea that the world breaks some people and not others. And now, of course, we can watch fame-hungry dimbulbs break themselves for our entertainment. I'd feel sympathy, but I'm all lazy and stuff, so I'm just going to point and laugh. Haw haw!

If You Don't Like Conversations You Might Want To Skip This Chapter

2010-08-04T09:02:00.003-04:00

Understood Betsy is one of those slightly forgotten childrens' books - forgotten not because it's dated or unreadable but simply because it's in a slightly crowded literary area. It concerns the adventures of a young orphan girl who goes to live with relatives on a farm and if this sounds familiar to you, it's probably because of a certain red-haired orphan who I like but honestly not quite as much as I like ol' Elizabeth Ann.

So anyhow. At the beginning of the book, Elizabeth Ann is living with her maiden aunts in a small city and her Aunt Frances is HILARIOUSLY fussy and over-protective and fear-coddling and as a result, Elizabeth Ann is small and pale and neurotic and terrified. Aunt Frances has learned from parenting books that Talking About Feelings Is Good and so Elizabeth Ann is now a master of talking about her feelings in great, excruciating detail, and Aunt Frances thinks this is proof that she has done a dandy job raising the young fussbudget.

Here I pause to laugh hysterically. I LOVE this book.

Mild disaster ensues, and Elizabeth Ann ends up being shipped to Vermont to live with the dreaded Putney cousins who live on a farm and make children WORK. The Putney cousins promptly rechristen her Betsy, give her a kitten, send her to a one-room schoolhouse and through wholesome activity and gentle work and independence and learning her own strengths, Betsy stops being such a neurotic mess and instead becomes a self-reliant, brave and loving girl. It's a wonderful book and also a bracing tonic to certain parenting ideas.

I have to fight what I privately call "Aunt Frances Tendencies" in myself ALL the time. Yes, I am a loving, imaginative mother, but I am also an overcautious, overprotective mother, too. And while I live in an area where children are given a TERRIFYING amount of freedom - seriously, it's shocking for me to live here with my ideas of what's appropriate and to see what kids are allowed to do - I constantly have to remind myself that wrapping my kids in bubblewrap won't exactly result in the desired adults, EITHER.

The Girl is in 4H this year. 4H is a rural youth group (in case you don't know) that has classes (so far, The Girl has taken Cooking With Chocolate, Weaving and my personal favorite, Tractor Safety) and also teaches the kids how to handle livestock. The Girl has been assigned her own personal calf - appointed to her shortly after birth and now several months old and FEISTY - and she is going to show her calf at the end of the month and be JUDGED on her animal handling abilities.

We dropped her off at a calf day on a local farm this past weekend and when we came to get her that night, her arm was covered in lurid bruises. "The dumb calf kicked me!" she said, outraged, and I felt sick. I had put my child in harm's way. But she did not want to go home - she had WORK to do - and leapt - all 55 pounds of her - into the calf pen full of running calves and made her way to the back where her own grumpy calf was dashing around. And I stood there squeaking and making Aunt Frances noises ("Look out! Maybe you'd better get out of there!") until I realized that I wasn't HELPING and went OUT, leaving my child.

Being a parent can be very hard.

I read - and rolled my eyes at - someone today who wrote, outraged, about big families making their kids "co-parent" their siblings and help with housework. Yeah, God forbid our kids feel like they have some responsibility within their families, that part of being a family means WORKING within that family (although let me limit that with saying that I don't think children should RAISE their siblings.). I've met one too many kids raised up to feel that the world owes them stuff, that other people are just here for their use and their pleasure. The ultimate job as parents is to raise kids who will one day be good at being adults, and part of adulthood is being able to work, to balance our desires with our responsibilities and to know which risks are worth taking. Helping a small sibling get ready for church is not an unbearable burden. Leaping back into the calf pen was - oh, I HOPED - a worthwhile risk.

My own Girl triumphantly led her calf out of the calf barn, having caught it, harnessed it and marched it out WITHOUT help. She led it around the path, and she was COVERED in mud but her head was high and her back was straight and the calf sulked behind her and she patted its grumpy head with her bruised arm and it nuzzled against her, trusting her. She stood, small for 11, a person who could take something hard and scary and master it and I was proud of her, searingly proud - and proud of myself, too, proud that I had walked out of that barn, that I had let her have this moment.

Betsy ends her book happy. My Girl ended her day happy, too, the bruises fading to nothingness on her arm, her muddy boots hosed off on the porch and she fell asleep with her lamp on and her calf's harness next to her bed. I stood and felt like waking her up to talk over her feelings about the day, Aunt Frances-style, and instead I pulled her blanket up and turned off her light and walked down the hallway, happy myself.

Hey!

2010-07-22T16:16:00.001-04:00

I had a post I wanted to write on Monday, on Tuesday and AGAIN yesterday but my cussed computer wouldn't cussing work.

Cuss!

But we did have some adventures. We went to a magic show yesterday and gosh, was it mediocre. Are magic shows EVER good?

I wrote this today - guess who is turning ONE in a few days?
And I also posted a review of some Crayola products.

I hope I can post more soon. This not-writing thing is depressing.

Weaving Stories

2010-07-15T20:45:00.001-04:00

I wrote about the Girl's new hobby today at 5 Minutes For Parenting. Hope to see you there!

Golden

2010-07-14T08:57:00.003-04:00

So there I was on Sunday night and I had that sort of anxious catch inside of me, that feeling that SOMETIME later that evening my very-missed Boy would be home but no time soon so in the meanwhile it was tv and fretting when suddenly there was a clatter in the kitchen and there he was, home hours earlier than I'd expected.

You know that feeling, when your child's been gone and suddenly they're back and it feels like your eyes can't even SEE them enough? Oh, I was pretty happy.

He had fun, too - his grandmother took him cherry picking and to a play and to visit his great-grandfather, who built a ship model with him and took him fishing AND to the dump to see the bears. Great-Grandpa is a fairly amazing fellow and The Boy had a grand old time.

In all my ranting about Eat Pray Love the other day, I forgot probably my most important reason that I think that it's a harmful book - the sacred isn't away from you, isn't someplace else and hard to get at. You don't need a special room in your house, don't need a trip to India. The sacred is here all the time, is in a pie made for you by your grandmother of cherries you picked that morning, is in the dock you stand on with your 90 year old great-grandfather in the early morning mist as the loons fly calling overhead, is in the (rather terrible) haircut your great-aunt gives you, and is DEFINITELY in the sudden dash you make to the kitchen when you hear your child's voice.

Rant Rant Rant

2010-07-08T19:30:00.002-04:00

Man, I'd have such a hopping blog if I did nothing but rant all the time.
Sad fact is, I'm just not that angry. Most things? Meh.

Today's post, for example, is more "sad" then "angry." That is because I am complex and cycle from mad to sad and back to mad again, or something.

For whatever reason....

2010-07-06T10:27:00.000-04:00

I'm not seeing any new comments on yesterday's post. I'm getting email notification for them, but anything after the 27th comment isn't showing up. HOPEFULLY they will pop back up later!

In the meantime - I'm going to email technical support and I'm not deleting anyone's comment, so please don't think THAT.

I HATED That Book: The Movie!

2010-07-04T16:55:00.004-04:00

(We were so sick! We're all better now, but there is QUITE the bug going around.)

I have only rarely deleted posts but my favorite one that I ever deleted was a truly demented rant about how much I HATED HATED HATED "Eat Pray Love." And even now just thinking about that book makes me dry-retch into the wastebasket.

So anyhoo. I deleted that post because I decided, after calm reflection, that I sounded like a nut. But before I deleted it, I did get some of my more amusing hate mail ("Your a jealous little bitch!" wrote some deeply wounded person. Yes I is.) and the thought of all of it kept me warm through many a winter's night. And I know that while I'm not alone in my hatred of the freaking thing, I'm certainly in a minority ("How can anyone hate that book?" asked a wounded acquaintance. How indeed.), since it apparently spoke to many, many women including, of course, Oprah. Of course!

And now it's going to be a movie! I was walking into Toy Story 3 and there, right in front of me, was Julia Roberts bathed in golden light, Eat-Pray-Loveing someplace. "Gwyneth Paltrow was ROBBED," I gasped to my husband. "That was the role she was BORN to play."

"OH NO," groaned my husband.

In point form, here is why Eat Pray Love is a bad, bad book and why it will almost certainly be a bad, bad movie:

1) "You'd like me if you met me."

She writes this - or says this, since she has one of those cheerful chatty writing styles - in the first chunk of the book. We'd like her if we met her, she is pretty sure, since she is SUPER good at the type of short-term pleasant pseudo-intimate relationships that The Travel People are good at. ("The Travel People" is a friend's term for a certain type of person: not someone who travels to GO specific places but someone who views travel itself in a desperately mystical light. They are invariably affluent, unsettled and white, and tend to be both condescending to people who haven't traveled as much as they have - which is pretty much everyone, most of us lacking both the time and the money to spend our lives on constant vacation - and lacking in actual knowledge of the places they've been to. "Venice was a spiritual high for me," A Travel Person told my friend. "France is such a special place.")

But WHO says this? Who thinks that everyone is going to like them?

I certainly don't. I think I'm all right - well, I would - but I have a reasonably clear view of myself and my flaws. I'm both argumentative AND thin-skinned! I can be rather dismissive of opinions that I think are goofy and am rather scathing, too. I'm lazy AND I also tend to expect my friends to do the heavy emotional lifting in relationships. I am - in short - a flawed human being. So I certainly do not think that everyone will like me immediately upon contact and also I do not think that I am the Universal Friend.

There are people who have a lot of personal charisma, who are charming and friendly and who do seem - however briefly - like the Universal Friend - but it seems narcissistic to claim to be one of their number. It seems like she is stating right off the bat that she is not merely the narrator of the book but the heroine, the very center. She deserves the good fortune that is certain to come, but do not worry! She deserves it because we would, she assures us, like her if we met her.

2) Eat
This was my least-hated part of the book. Who DOESN'T think it sounds like fun to go to Italy for four months to learn Italian and eat? That sounds like a great time. I am not against books about happiness, about happy people - they strike me as a necessary tonic to the overwhelming despair of our age.

But do books about affluent people enjoying affluent pleasures spread more happiness or more dissatisfaction? And why did I phrase what was obvious a foregone conclusion in the form of a question?

3) Pray
ARGH! ARGH!

The ashram she goes to in India has, she assures us, a lot of celebrity clients. It's really exclusive! And expensive! And my head fell off with rage because that's the way we describe a restaurant or a nightclub and really NOT a good sign about a place that's supposed to be taking care of your IMMORTAL SOUL.

You are not going to reach enlightenment in four months. You are not going to spend your way to spiritual - and I hate the word "spiritual" so much, primarily because of people like Elizabeth Gilbert - fulfillment. That's not how it works.

The book, wrote Maureen Callahan in a hilariously scathing review in the NYPost, "is the worst in Western fetishization of Eastern thought and culture, assured in its answers to existential dilemmas that have confounded intellects greater than hers. You may be a well-off white woman, but if you are depressed, the answer can be found in the East, where the poor brown people are sages. Gilbert's nearly toothless, elderly medicine man often didn't recognize her, and her medicine woman nearly hustled her out of $18,000, but these are inconvenient details her worshipful fans similarly disregard."

Remember that part? Remember when the guy she traveled ALL THE WAY AROUND THE WORLD TO BE WITH DID NOT REMEMBER HER? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

(And this is part of the whole Travel People thing: mistaking brief, casual acquaintances for actual relationships, for people who actually LIKE you.)

Religion - not the kind we package up and sell to the unsatisfied rich - is about the questions in life: why do we live, how should we live, why do we die, why do we suffer, are we alone. It is also about our relationship with the world, our responsibilities. And there is deep, deep joy in faith, and the feeling of being loved and forgiven has helped me through many a bad night, but it's not, at the end of the day, about me being happy. Happiness is not the point. It might happen, it might not. So?

4) Love
A lot of women love this book, Oprah prominently among them. And who doesn't want pleasure, fulfillment, and love?

There are ways to have inner peace, certainly - prayer, meditation, faith, or even just being grateful and centered - but for the most part, I think that inner peace is the providence of people prone to that sort of thing. My inner self is jittery and chatty and even if I traveled all the way to India, I would still be hauling my jittery, chatty self with me.

The big change in my life - and I did have one - came from nearly dying, from the realization that my time with my kids might be limited and that I was wasting this finite time with my unhappiness and my moping. But I can't package that up for you, I can't sell it to you with a big bow on top.

But the Oprah-style of happiness comes at a creepy cost: Leave your family! Quit your job! Spend a whole lot of money! What we have, we are assured, isn't making us happy, but someplace out there is a stranger we can pay to tell us how to be happy forever, to tell us how our lives should be, now that we are free of our encumbrances. We will be taken care of, like a cheerful smiling pretty baby, safe in the hands of hired strangers who know better than we do about what we need, what we want, what our futures hold.

But you can't buy happiness and you certainly can't keep it. Happiness just comes when it comes, and then sneaks away again. Anyone trying to sell you happiness is selling you a mirage, snake oil, a handful of dust.

Bits and Pieces

2010-06-30T09:31:00.006-04:00

We're all sick here. The Boy is mostly on the mend and The Baby is just argumentative and crabby - so her regular self - and The Girl cheerfully skipped over the worst of it - but I have an ominous rattle in my chest and feel rather O Death Where Is Thy Sting-ish, so I'm being cautious with my delicate self. And we all got sick on Our Big Trip this weekend, of course, which meant an emergency detour to my in-laws camp which - are you ready for horror? - DOES NOT HAVE PLUMBING.

So there we were - sick kids, outhouse, rain - and we went to Great-Grandpa's Canada Day picnic and the kids fished and fished and FISHED in the Magical Fishing Pond (25 cents got you a giant squirt gun and a box of markers) until we dragged them away, lecturing them that there were other kids who wanted to fish, too.

"Where?" they asked, innocently. But them cottagers showed up with kids in tow and the great-grandchildren of other very old people came and once again great-grandpa's tiny village rang with the voices of children. They had ice cream cones and hot dogs and rode on floats in the parade and at the end of the day all of the children packed up the squirt guns and the bags of soldiers and the little dolls with combs and left the village to the very old and the rain.

There were these HUGE nests all over the place, made out of stark sticks and perched on top of really high hydro poles. The Boy and I shrieked Stop The Car! Stop The Car! and tried to take pictures of the craning birds, the rugged nests and the above picture was the best of an unimpressive lot. The giant birds flew over the water and over the trees, complaining, while people stopped their trucks and gawked up at this amazing thing just over their head.

Midsummer's Day

2010-06-24T17:03:00.001-04:00

How did the fairy houses go over?
Here, let me tell you.

Midsummer's Eve

2010-06-23T12:16:00.003-04:00

I woke up unfevered this morning. I got up, tentatively, thinking "And how do we feel this morning?" like my own brisk nurse and realized with a start that the answer was - finally - much better. I actually left the house today! It was disturbingly thrilling.

I used to think of myself as a poet, since that's what I wrote and all. I thought of myself as a writer before I had a blog and I think of myself as a writer, still. But. I used to like hugging the secret of writing to me and now there's nothing secret at all: I'm just one of many.

We change. We do not always like what we change into.

When I realized this morning that I was no longer sick, that the fever had gone, I carefully made my way to the mirror to see how I looked after several days of sickness. And the answer was, of course, "pretty gross." But a quick shower fixed that and now I look like my regular self again - a little tired, maybe, a little pale - but my own self, in my own skin.

We are going to spend tonight building a fairy house outside - if the thunderstorm that's coming doesn't - and tonight the fairies will descend upon their new houses, filling them up with glass animals and wooden beads and then we'll be in the feverish haze of summer for weeks and weeks, flowers and travels and berries clutched in little juice-stained hands and then things will change again.

A post all about bears

2010-06-17T14:20:00.000-04:00

... actually, it's not that much about bears, really. But it IS a post.
Here it is!

Random Post

2010-06-14T21:21:00.000-04:00

The boy wanted a DSi for ages and we did NOT want him to have one. Oh, we certainly let him play enough computer games and we have a well-used Wii, but getting a DSi seemed like another thing altogether.

He could get one, we said, if he saved up the money for it. And then we sat back, smug and certain that our house would never have a DSi it.

It came in the mail today, to his immense delight. “Write your post on it!” he told me and so I am typing out this post on the tiny little keyboard, to his elaborate amusement.

Final Homeschooling Report Card

2010-06-11T09:00:00.003-04:00

We're done for the year! The Boy finished up all of his work! Except for a little bit of math, which he is working diligently on and The Baby finished all of HER work ages ago, so I thought I'd try and write some big Summary Of Our Homeschooling Year post. In no particular order:

1) I have a new appreciation for what schools bring to kids.
I really do.

For one thing, they provide a structured, safe environment where kids can GO all day long. And for some kids, like my oldest, this is the very best thing for them, the place where they can thrive. I am REALLY grateful for schools right now. My oldest kid is happy and thriving and I am relieved and pleased.

Schools also provide something else: they let kids know, swiftly and brutally, what other people will not tolerate. And this is, I think, a good thing for the most part - but it becomes a bad thing when the mores of the school are NOT the mores of the parents or of broader society as a whole and the child gets caught in the middle. See: small rural northern town; limited expectations for young boys.

2) There are lots of totally crappy homeschooling supplies out there.
I AM NOT KIDDING.

I'm also not going to link to any one product in particular, because most of these astonishingly crappy things are made by individuals. But I have more than a few completely useless books/programs/curriculum lining my shelves now and I worry about the quality of education that some kids are getting.

Also: if you want to be really, really disturbed, go read any big homeschooling forum for a while. OH MY GOSH. I read this one woman and her large brood of children had never had any exposure to art or music and I think the oldest was about 14. Did the rest of the forum think that was okay?

*weeps*

(This is from my mom, who taught for 30+ years: art and music are EASY to incorporate. Here's one way: Once a week, play a classical cd (borrowed from the library) for the kids. Tell them who wrote it and when. Give them a different kind of art supply - one week crayons, the next watercolours, the next playdough - and ask them to make art that matches the mood of what they're hearing. Voila. Recorders are cheap and easy to teach, most libraries have cheerful art history books for kids and dollar stores are full of art supplies. There's not a big excuse for skimping something that kids find so meaningful, even if you're not artistically inclined at all.)

AND what is WITH pre-packaged curriculums? I get lots of catalogs from various companies offering a whole year of school nicely boxed up for exorbitant prices. One popular company, for example, will send me a curriculum for The Boy and The Baby for around $1500 and that is WITHOUT math, science, art, music or languages. Good grief. AND this company - which is EXTREMELY popular - is also extremely American, so a Canadian child educated through them will learn history with an American slant AND without knowing ANYthing about their own history. My Canadian kids are going to know about voyageurs and Terry Fox and John A. MacDonald and Loyalists and Tommy Douglas and Confederation and Laura Secord and Habitants, thanks, and any Canadian kid being raised to think that some other country's history is more important than their own is being FREAKING SHORT-CHANGED. Canadian kids need to learn Canadian history and have spelling books with Her Majesty's U's left in them.

There are lots of cheerful homeschooling books out there, assurring people that "any mother can homeschool" but that is NOT true. You have to really be cheerfully willing to give up pretty much all of your time to homeschool (note my lack of blogging this past year. I HAVE NO TIME ANYMORE.) AND you have to be able to organize your time (digression: I thought I would have a HUGE issue with that, but it turned out not to be a problem. I AMAZED myself!) AND you have to be honest to yourself about your own biases and shortcomings AND you have to actually LOVE spending all day, every day with your kids. It's unfair to homeschool them otherwise.

3) People Have Been Quite Supportive.

Homeschooling is a fairly mainstream option in some places, but here, it's still relatively uncommon. We've yet to run into any negative opinions, though (well, sort of. A relative of my mother's - an educational superintendent of some sort - said to me "Homeschooling? Oh God, those kids never turn out well. At least you're reasonably smart. Maybe your kids will have a chance." So very positive! But my brother has some formerly homeschooled kids in his class, and he reports that they're all lovely, well-mannered, smart and popular. So my mom's relative MIGHT just be bitter.). Most people we know think it's a fine idea, though, which is nice.

My Brother The Teacher has really been amazingly supportive - he's an inventive, fun teacher and he's shared a lot of ideas with me that The Boy has really enjoyed. His writing ideas have been SO much better than any purchased curriculum I've found.... actually, he should write a book. PHONING HIM RIGHT NOW.

My mom has also been a lot of help - when I was overwhelmed, she would actually TAKE THEM AND THEIR WORKBOOKS AWAY FOR THE DAY - so obviously, I've been very, very lucky.

4) My Boy Is Happy Again

Last year at this time, he was a miserable first grader and we were VERY VERY worried about him. I still remember going to bed feeling just sick every night and then forcing him off to school in the morning and now he is HAPPY when he wakes up.

"I feel like I was in jail and you got me out," he told me.

*SOBS*

5) When Homeschooling Supplies Are Good, They Are Really Good

REALLY REALLY GOOD.

I have LOVED all of the curriculum we've ordered from Pandia Press - their science programs are solid, interesting, and experiment-based and their history program is WONDERFUL.

Both of the programs were VERY time-intensive, but I love history and The Boy loves science, so it was a great fit. We did lots of fun, quirky projects and experiments - we built a ziggurat! And we experimented with exothermic explosions! - and it was a really great basis for our year.

Did I like anything else that we used? Uhh... we used Singapore Math, which I know a lot of people are divided on, but it was a perfect fit for The Boy who is FIENDISHLY gifted at math and who only needed the briefest of introductions to ideas to get them. He's going right into Teaching Textbooks grade 4 level next year - I think - but we're going to stick with Singapore Math for The Baby, I think. Maybe.

6) You Should See How Well The Boy And The Baby Get Along Now!
They're like a brother and a sister in a freaking STORYBOOK! It's MAGIC! The Girl feels somewhat left out, so much of my non-homeschooling time is spend having Quality Time with her, but hey. She's a good kid.

So. In conclusion, this is what I've thought about homeschooling so far: It's eaten up all my time (and most of my money), I sometimes buy Acclaimed Homeschooling Supplies and then toss them in a rage across the room because THEY ARE KREP and my kids - all three of them, including the one who is NOT homeschooled - are happy. The end.

Hiya!

2010-06-03T12:32:00.002-04:00

Today's post is right here. It's me trying to work out how I feel about the Baby's food issues and my hard hard life and the fact that crazy people sometimes send me trollish emails.

Other than that? Things are good but a bit hectic. The Boy is trying to finish up ALL of his remaining work before summer starts in THREE WEEKS, so that's been eating up vast chunks of my time. Maybe in three weeks I will become a BLOGGING MACHINE again. Maybe my Caps Lock key will fall right off my computer and I will NEVER BE ABLE TO WRITE AGAIN. Who knows?

Decorating On A Really Tight Budget: Rich People Edition

2010-05-28T13:10:00.003-04:00

What A Great Weekend That Was

2010-05-25T18:40:00.003-04:00

It was the Victoria Day long weekend and so my husband and a good chunk of the men I'm related to went on an arduous, multi-day long canoe/portage trip. And I was left here ALONE with my three increasingly miserable - more on that later - children and my non-driving in our emptied out town for DAYS AND DAYS.

I knew it was going to be awful. How could it not be? My kids had plans which - one by one - fell through and as the weekend went on they became increasingly discouraged and dismayed. And meanwhile, my husband caught a giant pike that came out of the water with searing red gouges on its side. Overhead, an angry ~~hawk~~ EAGLE angrily circled, and the marks showed themselves to be where the mortally wounded pike had wrestled its huge body away from the ~~hawk~~ EAGLE (my husband read this and told me it was an eagle and that there's a big difference between the two. ALL RIGHT.) in the sky, falling to the water where it was caught and wondered at as it gasped and died.

"Becky will put this on her blog!" my dad announced.

My kids started off the weekend sleeping in the schoolroom, and then each night found them closer and closer to my bedroom, until the final night which found my daughters crammed into my bed, radiating waves of heat, and my son sleeping right outside my bedroom door. Everything fell into quiet chaos - meals became disarrayed, unordered, bathtimes fell by the wayside, people fell asleep at random times. And this was not a positive thing, a liberating throwing-off of oppressive shackles, but a first misstep by me that was impossible to correct, a giving-in.

My husband and his fellow insane canoe-ers saw a rotten moose floating in the river, unharnessed from the winter ice. They took pictures - of COURSE they did - and even in the pictures, you can see what drove the moose onto the thin ice, onto its doom. Wolves chased it and it fell and for now it floats in the water, unpleasant to look at and even, I was informed, far more unpleasant to smell.

The kids and I watched the most recent Jackie Chan movie. All in all, it was probably the highlight of my weekend.

"And here's when we camped on Ant Island!" my husband said, showing me all of the pictures of gross dead things and horrifying manly sights when he finally, finally came back. "It looked like a great place to camp and then there they were: ant hills as big as a man. Good thing for us they were friendly." And then he chortled - sunburnt, exhausted - and I laughed, tentatively, like some startled mole brought unexpectedly to light.

I survived!

2010-05-20T16:42:00.001-04:00

Hooray for me! We're having another thunderstorm right now, because I guess the weather has decided that come 3-5 o'clock, it's time to break out the BIG OL' STORMS right around my house.

In further storm-related news: today's post!

And now I am going to hide under my bed because THUNDER IS SCARY.

We're Just Lucky

2010-05-19T13:29:00.002-04:00

Crayola sent us a TON of art kits to review, and I just did over at my review blog.

In other news: ARGH! There is a thunderstorm outside and I'm supposed to be walking to meet the kid! Goodbye cruel world!

The End Of Spring

2010-05-18T14:00:00.002-04:00

It's a funny thing - last week we were in the middle of rainy, SNOWy spring and suddenly this week has surprised us with radiant almost-summer, the trees heavy with blossom - my yard alone is lush in yellow and white and heavy pink flowers, sending waves of perfume and bees - and light green leaves everywhere and flowers in every old corner. And everytime I go outside I stand breathless for a moment, caught with delighted surprise by the sudden lush beauty, the sudden golden loveliness that is my dumb old yard.

But the days will wear on and someday soon I doubtlessly will go outside and walk right by the staunch daffodils and the old, old crabapple tree heavy with blossoms (still) and the tall, tall tree with a bird's nest right at the top and I will barely notice it, will walk through this short-lived miracle and hold it as commonplace.

My kids and I spent much of the afternoon outside today, it being a lovely day - still and warm - and they dug around in the bush, looking for old loot and finding pieces of cracked china and small glass bottles and I sat in a yard chair in the shade of a flowering tree and read a book. And there you have as nearly as I will ever come to complete and total happiness, fragile and passing.

The Baby ran past me as we walked outside, dashing behind the wall of young trees and in between them I could see flashes of her and her pink dress, her too-thin white legs swinging out like a pendulum that only moves forward, like a clock that is counting down the days until her fine-tuned heart, her little glowing self, is just a daily occurrence to me. The days are turning, the world spins round, the flowers come up every year again without fail. There is happiness that catches you suddenly in its grip, unearned, running by as fast as a child whipping through the trees.

We Are Having Technical Difficulties

2010-05-13T13:57:00.003-04:00

BULLETIN BULLETIN BULLETIN
Here is today's post!

My computer is barely working! And I have a bad cold so I feel like asking to borrow a friend/the library's computer would be just RUDE. But I haven't been absent for any DIRE reasons - we haven't heard ANYthing about The Baby's EKG, so I'm assuming that everything is fine.

My post for today is going to be up at 5 Minutes For Parenting. I'll link to it directly when it's done and up.

I've reviewed a bunch of things recently - dishwasher cleaner, laundry soap and cookies - so if you're interested, those are up at my review blog. And if you're a wine company wondering if I would be interested in reviewing your products: YES I WOULD.

Mother's Day

2010-05-10T12:46:00.002-04:00

This morning I took my five year old daughter to get an EKG.

She's small for her age, wearing a Kai-Lan hat from the dollar store and her tough-guy jeans and her face was white with terror because no matter how many times people have reassured her that this test is no big deal she still has had too many tests in her short little life and doesn't believe them now. Poor baby. Poor little girl.

It went well enough, I guess. We had it done at the local hospital, where the friendly lab tech tickled the Baby as she placed the stickers on her narrow chest. The Baby was scared even after the test painlessly started, and so I distracted her by reminding her of the McDonald's french fries and Barbie toy she was getting as soon as the test was over and now the lab tech probably thinks that we have the worst diet in the world, but The Baby finally relaxed and the test was over. When it was done, the lab tech winced as she gently tried to take the stickers off The Baby - yeouch - and recommended a hot bubble bath at home, filling her hands up with real stickers - Winnie The Pooh and Minnie Mouse and cheerful fish - and it was over.

And now I hope I never have to take another child of mine for an EKG again.

Happy Birthday.

2010-05-06T08:22:00.003-04:00

Here is a sign that you are growing up - you got a giant gift bag of cute clothes from your grandma for your birthday and instead of tossing it all carelessly on the floor (like a certain male child in the house would do), you inspected each piece with quiet delight and ran and changed your outfit. CLOTHES are now a good gift for you.

Eleven!

Should this be a melancholy post? I don't feel melancholy. I'm wildly proud of you, my pretty, stubborn kid. I had a phonecall from your frustrated math teacher last week - smarten up, kid! - and the teacher huffed that she "just didn't get you." And while you should stop driving your math teacher nuts - I'm not kidding! cut it out! - there are probably worse fates than being a mysterious, cool blond. Although - and I am NOT MAKING THIS UP - you WILL need math later, no matter how elusive and cool and Grace Kelly-ish you are.

When my babies were first here, I loved them as my babies, as these tender, helpless people with my grandmother's eyes and their relentless need. But as they get older, as they take on their final, adult forms, they take on their human flaws and their human goodness and I love them as people, as their individual selves. I love you both with the permanence and the depth of a new mother for her sleeping baby, and with this new thing, this bemused, human love.

Two stories:

When you were in first grade, you could not jump rope. Your minor muscular issues make you uncoordinated enough that it was endlessly hard for you and my heart did a swift, aching break to think of this cruel needless hurt. If you were me, you would have spent the rest of the spring sullenly on the edges of the other girls, watching them play what you could not - but you are brave and resourceful in ways I will never be. Instead, you cheerfully brought one of your brother's Tonka trucks from home and cheerfully joined the boys pushing their trucks around in the sandbox, while I watched from the edge of the schoolyard, startled and proud.

When you were even younger - three or four, I think - they worried that you had massive hearing loss, and you had to go through the hearing test that involved you sitting by yourself in a dark room with toy musical animals in the corners. CLANG CLANG CLANG went the monkey with the cymbals - and I braced myself for this to terrify you and instead you laughed, your eyes wide with delight.

You are brave in a way that it never occurred to me someone could be, plucky and resourceful. You are stubborn in ways that shock me, laughing and reserved and tough and tender.
You are the child of my youth, this slender young arrow, this child at the very last of childhood, this laughing girl dashing off into her blue sky birthday, into this very day that is waiting for you.

The End Of Love

2010-05-03T20:18:00.006-04:00

My husband - and you totally already know this if you follow me much on Twitter and/or are my Facebook friend - found a picture of the two of us taken the weekend we met TWENTY YEARS AGO.

TWENTY!

And it's quite the picture. For one thing, we're both wearing "vintage" clothing - he's wearing his grandfather's sweater and I'm wearing a blazer from the 40s - and for another, I still had my BAD BAD HILLBILLY TEETH, and I'd totally forgotten how awful my teeth were until my very early 30s. Whoa. And boy oh boy, do we ever look infatuated.

That part of romance is easy. I don't idealize the early days of relationships - nerves! - but it's pretty simple when the other person is mostly made up of our idealized idea of what we'd like in someone else and wondering when that first kiss is going to happen and the heady rush of new sexual attraction - all fun stuff, but nothing I want to spend the rest of my life going through over and over and OVER again. It turns out that I much prefer being married.

We weren't married for all of those 20 years between that picture and now, of course. The first eight years were stupidly dramatic and alternately ecstatic and miserable and the next 12 were spent having baby after baby after baby and being grindingly tired and at first being desperately, terrifyingly poor and then merely just never having quite enough money. And, of course, my severe illness and hospitalization and the Baby's ongoing health adventures and when you add it all up, it doesn't sound like a happy marriage but it - oddly enough - is. What we think will make us happy turns out to be a shockingly unreliable predictor of actual happiness.

It's been even worse on my husband, since while I'm home with the kids and can occasionally nap, he's worked long, long hours AND still been kept up by wailing babies and furnaces that quit in the middle of the night and he also handles ALL of our finances and is generally the household grown-up. And I often worry about how fulfilling he finds his life, and so I was startled and moved to learn that he always tells his friends to have their kids now, to not wait for the "perfect" time, to throw themselves into the mess of domesticity and that happiness will likely be found someplace in there.

Eleven years ago today, I knew that I would be having a baby the very next day. We knew she was a girl, knew she was breech and knew I would be having a c-section. My mother kept complimenting me on my calmness, which amused me - I was a very thin veneer of calm in an attempt to keep the vast oceans of panic and terror from surfacing - but I don't remember much more of that day. It was, I could write, the last day before motherhood started in earnest, but I'm not sure how much of that statement is true. We had already needed to make some serious, parent-type decisions, already named her, already knew that time of her arrival and all that was wanting was her, was our little dark-haired baby who is now - almost unbelieveably - very nearly 11.

Time flies, they say. Childhood flies even faster, fleets away, leaves you suddenly bereft when you realize that it's been eleven years since the day before you saw your first child for the first time, twenty years since the day you met the boy who would one day be her father. We thought we were adults, thought that we were ready for love, but we've actually grown up alongside our children, have outgrown our youth, have earned our love for each other over and over again.

Time changes things, changes babies into shrugging tweens who dash out of the house with their bookbags swinging, changes me into the mother of a houseful of school-aged children, changes my lover into my husband, into the father of a houseful of loud, bad kids, into the responsible man who kisses me goodbye while I'm still asleep and drives to work in the dark.

There is an elderly couple at our church - improbably ancient, a shrunken old lady and her still-handsome, still straight-backed husband - and they would walk into church every Sunday holding hands. Their love has survived time, survived children, survived the messes of health and domesticity and at the end, the very end, they have their gentleness for each other. It is the end of love, this finish line, that I want, decades and decades more, worn and perfected, a water-smooth rock, something final and lasting in whatever forever there is.

Stuff Not To Do

2010-04-29T14:06:00.002-04:00

1) Do NOT write several posts in which you refer mysteriously to your youngest child's upcoming heart tests and then NOT POST FOR A WEEK. That's really jerky AND gets you lot of "IS EVERYTHING OKAY?!!!" emails from UNDERSTANDABLY WORRIED PEOPLE.

EVERYTHING IS FINE!

She hasn't gone for her tests yet. They're coming up. We went away for the weekend - reason 1# for the blog silence - and then I've spent the past couple of days riding the migraine bus, which is a fairly solid reason 2#. That's all.

Hey look! I wrote a post today. It is not terribly great, but it's about me trying to find ways to deal with my emotions appropriately around my kids. Go say hi and stuff, puh-leez.

Happy birthday, beautiful girl.

2010-04-21T07:58:00.007-04:00

The face pictures of The Baby yesterday? Baby pictures.

This is what she looks like right now:

That face!

I have seen better-looking faces lots of times. I think she looks - if I am being totally honest - a bit like a pasty monkey (a cute one, but still a monkey.). She's short and skinny and sickly and mouthy. But like Shakespeare's mistress,

... by heaven, I think my love as rare

As any she belied with false compare.

In my earlier days, I was not a sappy person. I never cried during romantic movies, love songs made me roll my eyes and I generally presumed that L-U-V was actually spelled S-E-X.

And then I (not too surprisingly) had kids. And every saccharine love song in the world became suddenly, piercingly, about the love that had overwhelmed me, that had shuddered away my cynicism and my defences and turned my heart into a black velvet painting of a Precious Moments figurine holding a big-eyed puppy. And so:

She Looks So Beautiful (To Me)

She's The First, The Last, The Everything

She Lights Up My Life

Nothing Compares 2 Her

.... and so on. (and do not even think of playing the song "Little Green" by Joni Mitchell around me unless you want to see me Ugly Cry.) Songs that would have made me gag slightly, pre-kid, now make me go misty-eyed as I imagine it being the soundtrack for a slow-motion photo montage of baby pictures. Maybe I hit my head really hard when I had my first kid. Maybe something broken within me was fixed forever.

"You're so little for five!" an old lady said to her this morning.

"Little and PERFECT," The Baby said, calmly.

I don't think - really, I don't - that there is anything terribly wrong with her. I'm not looking forward to the testing (understatement), but if they find what they're looking for, it's most likely one of those outgrowable/easily fixable deals. And while it's frightening - and it IS frightening, because this is my fragile little child they are talking about and not some stranger - it is not what is dwelling in my mind all the time. Next week, when the testing starts? I will deal with it then. But for today, I woke up to her leaping into bed with me, nestling close and whispering "Happy birthday to me, Mama! The living room is a beautiful jungle!".

Five does not last forever. Five melts away quickly, turns into the rambunctiousness of six, this sudden turning into a Big Kid. I trust that anything broken can be fixed, that bad things will become nothing but funny stories, that she can grow up and still be my beautiful little child, my enchanted, enchanting girl.

this morning, getting her nails done

A Hard Post And Five Years

2010-04-19T09:18:00.005-04:00

When I started this blog - nearly four years ago, impossibly enough - it was because I had no way of saying in my real life how I felt about my own MUCH TOO CLOSE brush with death that March and your then-undiagnosed and harrowing health problems.

I had been certain, going into my third pregnancy, that my third child would be a total cakewalk. I knew what I was doing, I had successfully breastfed my second child for nearly two years, I had made it through post-partum depression with my first child and I couldn't think of many things that would slow me down with you.

Oh, HA! I think, somewhat bitterly. I am such a dope.

My heart was broken by this, by my sweet, grumpy baby having such a hard time.

My heart was broken when you had to go for extensive testing when you were only 14 months old.

My heart was broken when you had to go on a restrictive diet for the rest of your life.

My heart was broken - again - when you collapsed in front of me this fall.

My metaphorical heart, of course, by which I mean that I was distressed and terrified and worried and sorry.

It turns out that your own heart might have quietly been broken all this time, too. Your actual, literal heart.

I don't want to write about all of the testing you have coming up yet again. I am nearly wordless with dread.

Instead: you will be, impossibly enough, five years old in two days. Five years old! And I want only sweet things for you, my baby, my little girl, my joy.

Ghosts and Flowers

2010-04-15T11:12:00.002-04:00

This is today's post, which is about the title of THIS post.

On the poverty project: It is TOTALLY still a go. There are tons of behind the scenes things going on right now.

I'm going to have a bunch of reviews up at my review site tomorrow AND I'm hoping to get a TON posted on my recipe site this weekend, so stay tuned! And in the meantime, my husband's art blog is a busy, busy place. His coworker asked him yesterday if the two of us are having a blog competition, which made me feel - BRIEFLY - very very competitive. But it faded, as these things do.

Let's Craft With The 1970's!

2010-04-13T11:22:00.011-04:00

There have been good eras in which to be a child, eras of freckle-faced innocence and bikes and lemonade stands and polio (a not-so-good part) and then there was the 1970's, which was a time of polyester hitchhiker-murdering fleshy nastiness. I was 7 when the 1970s ended, so most of my memories of it involve the smell of marijuana smoke, dolls with genitals and itchy bellbottom pantsuits, but my husband was 11 and he remembers hard-core pornographic magazines and coke lines left out in the open at friends' houses, of TEACHERS AT SCHOOL casually talking in the hallway to each other about "swinging".

Lovely!

And as a charming souvenir, we have his gianormous set of 1970s Kids' Activity Books. The recommended "activities" are somewhat dubious. Observe:

Tigertooth Necklace

1) Save the bones from
a cooked turkey neck. Clean as much meat off the bones as you can.

2) Boil the bones until there is no meat left on them at all. Then
soak them overnight in some water and bleach.

AND BLEACH! No safety warnings, no measurements: JUST SOAK SOME BONES IN BLEACH.
But the finished product is exquisite:
That would look PERFECT with a tube top, polyester shorts and a faux-leather fringed purse, all being worn by some 8 year old. PERFECT.

There are, of course, a lot of macrame projects.

There was nothing SPECIFICALLY wrong with macrame - yes, it's ugly, but so are most crafts, really.

But do you remember macrame? DO you remember seeing macrame on the wall at your friend's houses - made by their mother, generally, in between going to primal screen classes and having affairs - and it would always be coated in STRINGS of dust because you CANNOT CLEAN MACRAME?

Gross.

I was just told that macrame is coming BACK INTO FASHION. This is a BAD IDEA.

This fish doesn't know what it did to deserve the fate of being cooked by paraffin on top of a piece of hacked-up garbage by an unsupervised child.

It just does not know.

But it certainly doesn't look happy about it.

That's from the volume entitled "Foraging." Because when I think of what I want my children to do for fun, "rifling through garbage" is RIGHT at the top of the list.

Of course, not everything is vile and loathsome, but a LOT of it is. Ever wanted your child to make a candle by pouring (unsupervised, of course!) boiling hot wax into a bucket of sand? OF COURSE YOU HAVE!

I remember those squatty little sand candles from the 70s. People actually BOUGHT THEM.

This salute to the Native People of North America was made from a meat tray. A meat tray on which the turkey that you used to make the neckbone necklace possibly came from. THE CIRCLE OF LIFE!

My kids, I should add, just LOVE these books.And my husband - the original owner of these breathtaking volumes - actually DID grow up to be an artist. (here's his blog - see?)

And the 1970s, with their casual Keep-On-Truckin' laid back grossness DID encourage creativity. Creativity and herpes and dudes with nose reconstructions thanks to snorting just MASSIVE amounts of coke. But mostly now? They just encourage me to feel kind of queasy. Art!

The Baby's Latest Art Exhibition

2010-04-08T08:50:00.002-04:00

The Baby has had a previous art exhibit and I thought it was high time that I scanned in some of her more recent work that is EVERYWHERE IN MY HOUSE.

First up, we have a religious piece that was drawn in Sunday School. This piece came to the curator's attention when the Sunday School teacher called her downstairs to admire the artist's work while laughing hysterically.

An unconventional approach to the story of Mary washing Jesus' feet makes this piece raise many theological questions: Why is Jesus laying on the ground? Why are His hands so big? Is He supposed to look like Kermit?

"This is Mary washing Jesus' feet. I drew it with pencils." said The Artist. "I drew it because I had to."

This next piece was the subject of some controversy in The Artist's home, when it was mistaken for both a goat and a unicorn and also some sort of unicorn-goat hybrid.

"I drawed this one with a pen," said The Artist. "It is a dog and not any of those other stupid things. It has a little tiny pointy tail and it has a fuzzy chin."

We will let The Artist speak for herself with the next piece:

"This is a cat in pajamas and it hates the music. This is marker on purple construction paper. I picked purple construction paper because I couldn't find white paper, of course."

"I think," she added, "That the cat is listening to music that Papa picked out."

The final piece is haunting in both its execution and its subject matter. The Curator thinks that it represents The Artist's fears over the destruction of the environment and its resulting impact on animal life.

"This is a red robin," said The Artist. "It has a sad look on its face. That is because it is sad."

Stay tuned for such future exhibits as Spontaneous Interpretive Dance In Hardware Store and A Bunch Of Cut-Up Paper Is ART, Mom.

Sally, Edna

2010-04-04T18:23:00.003-04:00

My mother-in-law gave each of the kids a giant gift bag for Easter yesterday.

When I was first a mother, this bothered me - I don't come from a Big Gifts At Easter family, and I felt like Easter was going to become nothing but a second-rate Christmas if I went along.

"Making your mother-in-law cry at Easter proves you're an awesome Christian, all right," said a good friend. And I realized ALL AT ONCE that I was being a jerk and so now my kids get giant gift bags from my in-laws and not from their parents and they are, strangely enough, cool about it. And one of the many, many treats in The Baby's gift bag was a cunning miniature wire rabbit hutch, with two perfect chocolate rabbits inside.

It is obvious if you read my posts from this time last year that something had gone terribly wrong in my life. And here is what it is.

Here is the list of people I love in this world, in numerical order:
1. My children, en masse.
2. My husband, but this is a close second.
3. This next person.
4. Everyone else.

And it is the person in my third-place spot, this person who is neither husband nor child but who is well-loved by me, who is irreplaceable in my life, who all at once had a terrible psychotic break and we could not get this person help - it seemed that everything was conspiring against this person's well-being, and this person was in dreadful, unreachable danger for months and months. It was - and I do not use this word lightly - agonizing. I would cry myself to sleep and finally, finally, fall into restless, nightmare-plagued sleep only to wake up to the crushing knowledge of what was happening. Over and over and over and over again, month after month after month, with no hope, just things getting worse day after day.

The phone would ring and I would stand frozen with terror - had they wandered off and could not be found? Had they collapsed and died (like many mentally ill people, my person was horrifyingly unwell physically)? And I remember Good Friday coming last year and that feeling as the final candle was blown out, that feeling that candles were going out one after another everywhere and soon everything would be dark forever. I remember sitting by myself in the darkness of my office late on Good Friday and listening to Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here and sobbing wretchedly, hopeless. What had I done, what had they done, to deserve this blight?

The Boy came with me to Good Friday service this weekend, blinking in the sudden brightness of the still-light evening as we left the darkened church. And I laughed and rubbed off the tears that I had cried during service and returning home feeling gloomy but with the consoling knowledge that Easter was just ahead. And The Baby was given a miniature wire hutch with two chocolate rabbits inside, who she promptly named Sally (of course) and Edna. Edna!

My person is better now. Not all the way better, nor is this likely to even happen, but better, a million times better. The grieving dread has passed away and now there is my life back, returned to me almost intact.

Today is Easter. The minister spoke of the women coming to the cave to prepare Jesus' body for burial and the rock in the door had been moved aside and I cried, again. Life is not perfect and life is full of just awful things and there are terrible things coming up, but that rock gets moved again and again and I find myself over and over again blinking and suddenly blinded by the brightness of the sunlight around me, startled over and over again by the way happiness returns after pain. What have I done to deserve this joy?

"Oh Sally! Oh Edna!" The Baby said to the chocolate rabbits, tenderly petting each of them. "I am going to eat your ears!" And then she did.

I have a new post up!

2010-04-02T09:09:00.002-04:00

It's about how yesterday was April Fool's Day.
I might get a Good Friday post up today - depends on how my day goes.
xo

The Internet in 1850

2010-03-29T12:44:00.007-04:00

TheDailyNewsForLadiesofQuality.com
Since such worrisome business is likely to disturb gentlewomen and cause hysteria of the womb, this site is proud to bring you instead the finest in embroidery patterns and euphemistically-phrased gossip about your neighbours. Updated weekly!

angelinthehouse.blogspot.com
I know he's only supposed to be a teenager and all that, but I think David Copperfield is SO hot. I nailed a daguerreotype of him to the front of the icebox, which caused my dh to make fun of me for most of the evening.

"Ha, Permilia!" he said, laughing and smoking his pipe. "I don't think David Copperfield is much interested in a 28 year old with six children and chronic fistula!" I don't think he'd laugh quite so much if he knew the quantities of rat poison I have stored in the pantry. JK!

PassablyAttractiveWomenOfLooseMoralsInPantaloons.com

YeOldeFark.com SCARY A new reform corset from Madame Caplin adjusts to the body, not the dress.

TheScarletLoafer:
I'd hit it.
LibbyMiller'sBloomers:
She has sharp knees.

Dear Madame Blogger,
We at Dr. Cyril Crumb's Sanative Liver Tonic know that you and your readers are modern, on-the-go women interested in knowing the most up-to-date medical advances. No more for you your mother's leeches!

Food As Solace; Food As Hope - A Guest Post

2010-03-26T08:16:00.003-04:00

The astonishingly talented and formidable Mad wrote today's post.

I was born on a family farm. We were agrarian poor but we made do. I still remember drinking whole milk taken by the jug-full from the pasteurizing machine. It was warm, delicious. We had a small garden plot that we supplemented with produce from some of the cash crop farms in the neighbourhood. There were beef and pig farms nearby too. Food bartering was part of life in my rural community, because the products of hard work were readily abundant but cash was always scarce.

I sometimes tell my very attached child that my parents never played with me when I was a girl because they always had too much work to do. She’s dumbfounded at the notion until I tell her that I had lots of brothers and sisters to keep me company. I tell her that we had free reign at the farm until we got old enough to do chores. She focuses on what it was like to play hide and seek in a hay loft. I muse on the lingering effects of a feral upbringing. Life back then was not easy but it was good.

When I was 4 years old, my father was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. We sold the farm, built a house on the corner lot and waited out his treatment and eventual death. I was seven when he died. My mother, whose only skill (and a considerable one it was) had been Farm Wife, was no longer marketable. That’s when our family made the shift from being agrarian poor to just plain poor.

Imagine, would you?

Imagine having six children and a terminally ill husband. Now imagine having six children, no husband and a grief almost too big to bear. Now imagine having all of that and no income whatsoever, outside of a Federal mothers’ allowance cheque. Now try very hard to imagine this as a life-long sentence and not just a five second hypothetical request.

How would you make do? Really, how would you make do?

Now imagine you have to do all the housework, all the chores without a helpmeet. Imagine that you have, as my mother did, a wringer washing machine and no dryer (or just imagine having to take all the laundry for a large family to the Laundromat instead). Imagine getting that many kids out of bed and fed and off to catch an 8 am school bus. Imagine you and your kids shovelling your long driveway all winter long without a man about the house. Imagine car or appliance fixes taking up your entire grocery bill for two weeks. Imagine no vacations ever for you or your kids. Imagine not being able to buy new clothes for your children. Imagine a life of hand-me-downs and kindly hand-outs from neighbours who used to be your peers. Imagine burning your garbage because you can’t afford the dump fees. Imagine working all day long, cooking and cleaning and just trying to cope with the hand that you’ve been dealt. Imagine never getting any thanks and collapsing into bed at night, every. single. night without someone to tell you, “It’s ok. You’re doing a great job. It’s going to be fine.”

Now imagine being one of the kids in this family.

Here’s what it’s like, nutritionally to grow up poor. My version is an isolated, rural version but poverty no matter where it happens is analogous in a lot of ways.

In the fall we would buy 200lbs of potatoes, 50 lbs of onions, turnips and cabbage, and countless bushels of apples to keep in the root cellar all winter long. These were the main ingredients in everything we ate. By December the food was so limp that boiling it into submission was the only way to make it palatable. Boiled potatoes one night would be followed by fried leftover boiled potatoes with onion the next night. My mother stored away extra pennies all year long so that we could afford these fall purchases; otherwise we would have precious little winter produce whatsoever.

The closest grocery store was a teeny one in the nearby town, five miles away. Their produce options were limited and packaged food in general was small in size and very expensive. If Mom drove 20-25 minutes to the bigger town, she had more options but she rarely had an extra hour in the week to justify the drive. Besides, to leave home for that long, she had to take the younger kids with her because a thirteen year old really cannot manage too many younger siblings on her own. Taking kids to the grocery store on a limited budget, however, is nothing more than an exercise in despair. Too many times I remember Mom caving-in to our demands for squeeze cheese, potato chips or Mr. Christie’s cookies. I’m sure she only did it because she wanted us to have a treat--she loved us, and she was too brow-beaten to see beyond the immediate moment. Besides, there really wasn’t a “beyond” to see.

For meat, we ate discounted stewing beef and hamburger, boiled bones in soups, fried bologna steaks, cheap Salisbury steak tv dinners, boiled corned beef, beef pot pies, and canned ham. My school lunches were always bologna or mac’n’cheese loaf sandwiches on the white bread that we kids demanded. I developed a life-long addiction to sodium. Hamburger Helper was cheap and made the same-old, same-old more interesting, and, so, we kids demanded it too. It turns out that the crappier we ate the hungrier we felt and the more demanding we got. My mother was already broken. It wasn’t long before she chose giving in as a means of coping.

When I was about nine, someone—an Uncle perhaps—gave Mom money for a deep fryer. From that day forward those limp, eye-ridden potatoes were served up as French fries. Usually, a hot plate of fries was waiting for us when we got off the school bus. Every day. Potatoes were cheap but cooking oil was expensive. This meant that the fry grease got changed about once a month.

By the time I was eleven, I was an expert at making French fries myself. Somewhere along the line, though, the handle of the deep fryer broke and I would have to wedge a fork into the boiling grease to lift the basket of fries out. One day it slipped and boiling grease splashed in my face. To this day, I have no freckles where the grease scarred my face.

And where was my mother when this happened you might ask? Well, she got a job as a Nurse’s Aide at a chronic care nursing home where she worked shift work: 1 week, 8-4, the next week 4-midnight and the final week midnight ‘til 8am. Repeat, repeat, repeat. She had a job like this in her late 40s with no child care at home. If she wasn’t working, she was usually trying to sleep. I spent many hours as a child rubbing her varicose veins, trying to ease the constant pain she lived with. My older sister who was now a teenager made most of our meals. From the time she was 13 until she left home after high school, she did a goodly part of the child rearing too. Both she and I eventually became quite good cooks out of necessity.

Ah, but when left on our own, we made brown sugar sandwiches for lunch if we were feeling sweet, mustard sandwiches if we were feeling savoury. We ate whatever we could find so much so that my grandmother’s favourite refrain was “You kids are going to eat your mother out of house and home!”

A few times during the course of my childhood, Mom, who had become considerably overweight, tried to diet. It never worked, though because she could only afford healthy food for herself, not for us, and we would always get into it. You might wonder why she tried to diet for herself when she knew she couldn’t feed us well in the first place. The answer to that is simple: she wanted to lose weight so that maybe someone would marry her and ease our collective family burden. What other hope did she have, saddled as she was with all these kids, a grade 11 education and a house in the middle of nowhere?

In summer we gardened and, oh, the sweet taste of fresh tomatoes, lettuce and cucumber. We gorged on produce as long as we were able to. In August, a kind neighbour always left a 50lb sack of sweet corn anonymously on our back porch. We ate 8-10 cobs at a time and had the trots for the better part of a month, but it was oh-so worth it. And then winter would come again...

________________

You may think that it’s easy to eat well and cheaply. If you haven’t worn the psychological chains of poverty, of course you would think that way. My childhood was an exceptional one but, really, what keeps any of us from the experience I just recounted? What if you lose your job, your spouse, your home, your physical or mental health? What happens if the social safety net doesn’t catch you?

Wowza.

2010-03-25T10:32:00.003-04:00

Okay! So a LOT of you would love to write, which is awesome. And I haven't replied back to anyone, which is not awesome, but give me a little time to sort everything out, okay? You WILL hear back from me.

WE HAVE A NAME! I'm gonna save it for a surprise, but it's something someone suggested yesterday, and I think it's pretty cool. We're REGISTERING THE DOMAIN today, which makes me feel pretty important.

Here is, broken down a bit more, what we're going to focusing on:

1) The practical how-tos of surviving poverty.
I'd like a wide variety of voices here, and yes, lots of food posts. I'd like to eventually have a really good, searchable recipe section. Other posts on surviving poverty - budgeting, gardening, second-hand shopping - will be here, too.

2) Poverty experiences.
If you have grown up poor, experienced poverty in other countries, or if you are poor NOW, and would like to write about that. This can also be a place to write about misconceptions you have had about the poor, or experiences working with charities.

3) More academic stuff.
Perceptions of poverty in the media, how poverty effects health and weight, explorations of social policies... all things that I'm not qualified to write, so if you are EMAIL ME!

What we are not interested in is poverty tourism, or poverty as some ennobling force. Being poor sucks and I don't want to hear about how interesting it is to be poor or how you voluntarily opted for poverty because you just luv shabby chic furniture.

I have SUCH a cool guest post coming up tomorrow, so stay tuned for that.

And in the meantime, here is my 5 Minutes for Parenting post for today, which is still talking about weight issues but this time the ones that affect my kids. See you there, I hope!

It's a GO!

2010-03-24T08:34:00.002-04:00

Okay, it's actually happening! A friend of my husband's is building the website and my husband is doing all of the graphics and visual stuff.

Here's where I need your help:

1) If you're interested in writing and haven't commented or emailed me yet, do so. It would be helpful if you could state what your particular area of expertise is (cooking for people with allergies, vegetarian cooking, budgeting, gardening, handling mental illness and eating healthily or anything else that you feel might be applicable.). Also say (if you can) how often you could commit to posting - one time only? Once a month? More often?

We don't want this to just be another how-to website. We'd also like to explore some of the perceptions behind ideas of poverty and food, and so if you'd like to contribute that way, we'd be delighted.

2) What technical features should the website have? What would you like to see on it? How should it look?

3) NAMES, PEOPLE! THIS THING NEEDS A NAME!

4) Any other ideas you might have.

Here's An Idea

2010-03-23T10:39:00.003-04:00

My husband was really inspired by this week's Fat Post discussion, and would like to set up a big professional-type website on eating (and living!) on a tight budget.

So. Do you have experience living and eating nutritiously on a tiny budget? Are you interested in posting regularly? Contact me - either comment here or email me - and we're going to get something going. And the more the merrier - he would like a big, vivid community of writers, so don't be shy.

Fat Rant

2010-03-21T09:43:00.004-04:00

Did you know that many of the really effective medications for severe mental illnesses have the side effect of making the user gain lots of weight? Like, LOTS. Several people I know puff up and down depending on what medications they're on at the moment. They don't have any choices, unless you consider opting for terrifying hallucinations 24 hours a day a "choice".

So when people talk about weight like it's a simple matter of people just being too freaking lazy to get their heads out of the Big Mac trough, I get irritated. Yes, personal irresponsibility can play a big role in weight, but there are enough OTHER factors - poverty, depression, mental illness, the medications used to TREAT mental illness, the genetic tendency towards gaining weight easily, medical conditions - that I feel rather intensely that sweeping statements about how fat people are that way because they are big lazy weak slobs are, you know, WRONG and founded on a sturdy platform of unshakable entitlement.

Yes, most people would probably be healthier AND slimmer if they gave up eating like a bunch of deranged Roman emperors, but eating healthily right now requires a whole bunch of things - the time required to prepare nutritious foods (and I don't care what anyone says, it takes a LOT of time to eat healthily. A LOT. We make a lot of things right from scratch and it takes up MUCH of my day.), enough money to buy a varied amount of vegetables and fruits and whole grains and Omega-3 eggs and skim milk and free-range meats and do not TELL me that these things are inexpensive. They are not. We do not buy junk or prepared foods, we do the VAST amount of our eating having home-made, from-scratch meals, and do you KNOW what we spend on groceries every week for the five of us? READY?

$250.

All right, we have to buy a LOT of gluten-free stuff, and that's made - apparently - of solid gold and prepared in factories by teams of elite elves, to judge the cost of stuff. But still. That is the cost, pretty much, of a week of healthy, varied eating, and it is a HIGH cost. If you think that $1000 a month is within the reach of anyone... geez, I wish I was you. You must be RICH. And meanwhile, I know families who have one meal a day and it's generally canned stew with a bunch of bread to eek it out and that is not enough and they have fat kids, despite the fact that the children are literally half-starved. So go on, lecture them about how their kids should be eating organic vegetables and less saturated fats. Go ahead and be smug about how easy it is to feed a family healthily on "a budget."

edited to say: Okay, a few people are saying that it is possible to feed children healthily on a tight budget, and of course it is IF you have access to grocery stores that have low-priced, varied produce AND if you have the ability to do some creative meal-planning. One of my friends lives on my monthly grocery budget and she and her kids have a great diet. HOWEVER - go a few towns over and there's a town full of people on social assistance, no cars and NO grocery store in town, just a convenience store that sells high-priced canned foods, white bread, fried chicken and few fruits or vegetables. Go up north a few hours and everything is flown in, milk costs $15 a bag and there isn't any produce all winter. Being poor and eating healthily in either of those places becomes impossible. Do not presume that your easy access to things is universal.

Then there is also the fact that food does not take place in some magical vacuum. I know a lot of women who would eat much healthier if it was just them, but they're married and the man they're married to expects big chunks of meat and big mounds of potatoes at every meal and would cause them a lot of actual grief if they made some healthy vegetarian meal for dinner. Maybe, like me, you're married to a sensitive modern guy and you can't imagine what "a lot of grief" might look like. We are privileged.

So the discussion around weight, let me state calmly, is tainted all the way around by class issues and a lack of compassion towards other people's suffering. If you cannot imagine what it's like to be cripplingly mentally ill, if you cannot imagine what it's like to have crying hungry children and only enough money to feed them high calorie, high fat foods, if you cannot imagine illnesses that make your body betray you and gain weight despite your best efforts, then perhaps you should avoid publicly writing about weight and food issues, since what you think you know is tainted by privilege and by being utterly sheltered and what you say and write causes already vulnerable people more pain.

That Darn Leprechaun

2010-03-17T08:12:00.002-04:00

It triggered the leprechaun trap - a figure four trap that the Girl whittled with her grandfather yesterday - threw the bananas around the kitchen, and scattered some gold coins and left a wee snarky note (signed, I am amused to note, "Ralphie O' Hedge."). The leprechaun MIGHT have done more havoc, but a certain pair of BFFs were having a sleepover and kept the leprechaun up QUITE late.

Yes, we have our fun.

But the downside to being a Fun Mom is, of course, that I am not always a terribly great mother. I mean, I'm kind and always ready to lend a listening ear but I also expect my kids to listen just because I'm fun and nice. I mean, that stands to reason, right? Right.

Anyhow. It is March Break right now and I am being a Fun Mom for pretty much 24 solid hours a day, with the result that I barely ever come within blogging distance of the computer, BUT HERE I AM RIGHT NOW. And now I am gone again. Spooky!

The Domestic Grind

2010-03-11T14:33:00.001-05:00

I wrote about it today, and also bragged about cleaning my fridge. A sensible person wouldn't have let it get so disgusting in the first place, and then the task of cleaning it wouldn't have eaten up MOST OF MY DAY, but I never said I was sensible, so there you have it. And here you have my post, so there you go.

Sunday

2010-03-08T12:12:00.003-05:00

We drove several hours last night over deserted rural roads, the occasional house flickering by, golden lamps in the darkness. The Girl sat behind us - her younger brother and sister left for the day with my parents where they, amongst other things, went to a church bean supper - and so The Girl was returned, however briefly, to her original state as our baby, as our first and only child.

Earlier that day, she had handed over homemade cards and cheerfully given out hugs (and you would have to know her to know how startling that was, because she is not a hugger), hugging her great-grandfather frail and toothless and laughing and hooked up to a heart monitor and an oxygen monitor and she hugged his daughter, looking shattered beside her 90 year old father who had just had a heart attack the morning before. His room filled up with people - far more than the ordered two the sign on the wall commanded - and so I took The Girl for a walk, first around the tiny rural hospital (the nurses waved at her, calling "Hello pretty girl! Are you Theo's great-granddaughter?") and then when we'd whiled away two minutes checking the hospital out, we went outside and walked around the hospital that way, her hand guilelessly in mine, my first child.

It was a gorgeous day, the snow melting away and the sun shining whole-heartedly on us, small birds flying around the hospital's trees and singing and singing. And inside was great-grandpa cheerfully heading towards death, himself still - although not today, not tomorrow, maybe not for weeks and months, if we're lucky - and I felt the sun shining on me like it loved me and heard the birds singing and realized that I can bear this, can bear the losses that are hurtling towards me. There were winter-ruined plants around the hospital, their branches snapped and their spines crushed, but most things had made it through the winter just fine.

Inside, my husband's aunt told him that great-grandpa had laid awake all night knowing that he was having a heart attack and only when it became too much pain for him to bear did he drive himself over to his daughter's house and asked to be taken to the hospital.

"If he ever does that again, I'm going to kick his butt," she said.
"Better shine up your boots, kid!" Great-Grandpa chortled.

And his room was full of people who had heard he'd had a heart attack and rushed to see him, which is something to be hoped for at 90, I guess. We didn't stay for long so we drove down the road to see my grandmother and stayed for dinner, and my grandmother told us that when she was a young mother, she would go to visit her grandmother and after dinner she would ask how she could help and her grandmother would dismiss her, telling her that the best thing she could do would be to take all those kids home.

"Although not you, dear," she said to The Girl. "You're no trouble at all." And she certainly isn't now, being much like a very small and amiable adult who we can take anywhere in the world without hassle. For a moment, I could picture her, my own grandmother's grandmother, this laughing woman who was frightened of snakes and was irritated and bemused by her grandchild's large family and then she vanished again, this woman gone for 50 years now.

It is nice, The Girl told me on the drive home, to have so many old people she loves, and I winced on the inside when she said it, driving by house after house of these gentle old people with more of the lights off every year. She does not know, yet, what she will have to live through.
And I did not know when I had her what life was, thinking that it was love and sex and the urge to have small soft babies when it seems to be more of just bearing one awful thing after another, of remaining strong through God knows how many winters. Some of the houses shone in the darkness and some of the houses were dark and I thought of how very very sorry I was, that I am sorry, my baby, my little girl.

Imaginary Friends

2010-03-05T07:31:00.004-05:00

There are, I've recently noticed, any number of sites for people who want to laugh at the stupid Facebook updates of other people's friends. The gist of it is, I guess, that many people have self-centered, clueless morons for friends and no compunctions about holding them up for public embarrassment.

My friends - my actual real-life friends - are on my Facebook page, although we don't use it to communicate, since we're real-life friends and we SEE each other. Facebook is mainly where I keep in touch with online acquaintances or far-away relatives or friends from high school and the like, although "keep in touch" is a wee bit optimistic for my sporadic and unreliable appearances. I am slightly too old - and more than a bit too reclusive - for the Hey It's Everyone I've Ever Met Facebook pages of some younger people I know, people with hundreds and HUNDREDS of "friends" on their Facebook pages. Hundreds. And these people are certainly not all friends or anything even approaching that and so what happens is the mean-spirited aforementioned pages where one can hold other people's witless Facebook prattlings up for perhaps not-undeserved mockery.

Of course, a lot of people are dopey. And a lot of people live in bubbles of deluded entitlement or have never grasped even the basic principals of what constitutes appropriate revelations or are just so freaking upset by every little thing in their disappointing lives that they behave accordingly in their Facebook statuses, too. And some people LIKE gross, whining dramatics but most of us don't.

If you have 500 people on your Facebook friends list, I guess you can be fairly cavalier with a few of them, but it still seems fairly nasty to call yourself someone's friend - even in the off-hand, I Don't Really Mean It sort of way of Facebook - and then hold them up for public mockery. And a lot of these sites revolve around the idea that people get more annoying after major life events, like getting married or having kids and yes, there's nothing quite as self-centered as the person who has just married or who is pregnant with their first child. So what? I was self-centered and obnoxious when I was newly married, when I had my first child and I now cut the newlywed, the first-time parents a lot of slack. Big changes are HARD.

But it also goes to show how totally flimsy modern friendship is, that we are now mainly only friends with people we have a bunch of superficial stuff in common with, and that our primary obligation is to maintain an interest in as many of our pre-marriage, pre-child superficial interests as possible. This is what now constitutes being "interesting." And also "interesting" is the idea of a society where we each must be on our guard against our hundreds of friends, a world where relationships are now made out of something less than paper and which can end without our knowing, where any of our hundreds of "friends" can be held up for the amusement of strangers.

It's suddenly SUNNY out there!

2010-03-04T15:05:00.002-05:00

After five months of nothing but grey gloominess, it's suddenly SHOCKING to wake up to sunny days and almost warmth. SHOCKING. So shocking that I wrote about it at 5 Minutes For Parenting. Now THAT is shocking!

Life Amongst The Savages

2010-03-02T18:08:00.005-05:00

(According, In Part, To My Fragmented Reports On Twitter)

1. I send my oldest child off to school. This is always FRAUGHT with tension. FRAUGHT.
2. My mom comes over for a visit AND to fold clothing from my dryer. Hi mom! A pleasant coffee-drinking interval.
3. Time fer schoolin'. I can't find The Boy. Where did he GO? Resigned, I work on numbers with The Baby. 54, 55, 56, 57!
4. Oh, THERE he is, cleaning his sisters' room. It feels a bit churlish to be crabby with him.
5. Time for division.
6. Done with the part of the day that involves numbers and Hard Thinking! Onwards. WE are now painting gigantic fish.
7. This art project involves acrylic paint AND black pastels. Am I a total MORON? Everyone is FILTHY.
8. Everyone changes their clothes.
9. The Boy reads The Baby The Cat In The Hat. I reflect again that I do not enjoy Dr. Seuss.
10. The Baby insists that we read about Mrs. MacCave and her 23 sons named Dave. Oliver Boliver Butt!
11. Hilarity reigns.
12. The Boy starts working on his Periodic Table scrapbook. I realize we are out of glue. I make paste, which he cheerfully uses. Am I a total MORON? Everyone is FILTHY.
13. I give up on cleanliness.
14. Lunchtime! We watch Daily Planet and eat sandwiches.
15. Time for SCIENCE: We make meringues today which has something to do with nitrogen, I forget what.
16. While they're baking, we go for a walk and play in the yard and everyone gets SOAKED. I no longer care.
17. We return to delicious meringues which have tragically stuck to the wax paper. DO NOT BAKE MERINGUES ON WAX PAPER. The Boy looks up whether or not wax paper is toxic to eat.
18. It's not! Hooray!
19. Just now: "Mama, I love you, but you are a sap." - The Baby, speaking the truth.
20. I make gluten-free playdough to The Baby's extravagant delight.
21. We go through our homemade French flashcards, and once again I am forced to admit that "pupitre" is a funny word. This is how you can tell I am only a pretend teacher.
22. The Boy writes a list of funny words. Prominently featured: banana, Tootsie Roll, buttocks.
23. I attempt to read the kids a book about ponds. No.
24. On history: "We are reading about Aged China now," The Baby told me. "It is like now except everyone is all dead and lived very far away."
25. The educational portion of the day is now over, unless you count the part where my brother comes over and I show him pictures of a turtle made out of bacon.

It's Always Monday

2010-03-01T15:28:00.002-05:00

The dread illness that swept through my house is still sweeping - now its victim is my poor long-suffering husband, who phoned me from work not too long ago with The Croak Of The Damned. Curse you, Olympic Fever!

I'm glad the Olympics are over. I enjoyed them while they were on and I practically had an aneurysm screaming at the tv during the men's hockey game, although I apparently didn't scream as loud as my dad, who credits himself with winning Canada the gold metal. That's some good yelling there, Lou. But now I get my tv back, hooray! And I can stop getting Mini Crushes on male athletes, since that's just never going to work out fellas, I'm sorry. For one thing, I don't speak Norwegian and for another, I can't curl. And for another, I'm sworn to be faithful to My One True Love, ol' sickly up there in the first paragraph. (Although I did have the brilliant idea, during the Canada/Norwegian curling game and immediately expressed upon Twitter that I should rewrite Twilight, but instead of dead teenage boys who don't have sex? Norwegian curlers. It was the pants, I suspect.)

Hey, want a pretty dress? I'm giving away a gift certificate to a store that sells all sorts of pretty dresses on my review blog.

So how is homeschooling going? Fine. We're reading about ancient China right now, and the Boy is working on division and The Baby is working on her yelling. Good times. We made some bread for St. David's day and I can say with some assurance that if St. David wants as much mainstream popularity as ST. Patrick, he's going to have to get a better bread. Also, we roasted marshmallows to observe carbon in action. SCIENCE. And then we went for a walk and I was so out of shape that I DIED.

Now I have to make soup for My Poor Sick Husband.

Fridaaaaaay!

2010-02-26T08:59:00.002-05:00

My favorite! Do you have any fun plans for the weekend? I'm going to the LIBRARY tomorrow! Hooray!

In the meantime: here is my last Canadian Family post. Look at the picture of that guy on my post - he has a PELT on his wrists! Brrrr. And don't forget to enter my magazine subscription giveaway if you haven't yet - it's open to everyone.

You know what?

2010-02-25T11:21:00.001-05:00

I've had a bit of a malaise about writing lately but I shook it off this morning and wrote something that pleased me very much. I'd love to have you read it.

Here it is: Trees.

2010-02-24T15:31:00.002-05:00

I have a second post up at Canadian Family magazine's blog and I'd love to have you comment on it. Thanks!

(also, don't forget to enter my giveaway for a subscription to Canadian Family! The giveaway is open to everyone.)

This post is not about anything ABOUT SOMETHING

2010-02-23T12:05:00.003-05:00

One of the funny - not in the "ha ha" sense, really - side effects of having been SO sick for the last two weeks is that not eating for basically two weeks really makes the weight just fall off. And my appetite hasn't returned either, so I'm either going to melt down and be all svelte-like OR I'll die. Or, more likely than either of those, my appetite will return JUST fine and I can stop being so dramatic about it.

ALSO I am totally out of shape. I just took the kids to the grocery store and then played outside with them - nothing strenuous - and now I am sitting here puffing away like I just ran a marathon. PATHETIC.

I've been thinking about ghost stories lately because
a) I have been sad
and
b) I read a lot of ghost stories while I was sick
and one of the things about ghost stories is how DISAPPOINTING they so often are. A few people have done them very well, but no one very recent, I don't think. And don't suggest I write them because I am too totally craven and all I'd get to was "Beck was alone in her office when suddenly she heard heavy footsteps in her basement" and then I'd be crying on the phone to my husband. But if you wrote that, I'd scoff.

But. I have been thinking about ghost stories, as I said, and thinking about why they DID work and don't work anymore (or are their modern ghost story writers I don't know about?), and what MAKES them work. What strikes you as spooky, as haunting? What would make a ghost story work for you?

Hey, look at me!

2010-02-22T15:10:00.003-05:00

I'm all writing at Canadian Family's website and stuff this week! My post is about our decision to keep the Girl home from a school trip this past week and its unexpected aftermath. I really hope to see you there.

I also have five subscriptions to Canadian Family magazine to give away - if you'd like, you can enter over on my review blog.

In other news, I have hardly been so sick before in my whole life. It's FINALLY going away, but that was QUITE the week, and that is apparently what I get for sitting in a snowbank last week, so SERVES ME RIGHT.

Anyhow, go comment on my post! And maybe they'll hire me on as a full-time columnist and then I'll be INSUFFERABLE. AWESOME!

Today's post

2010-02-18T18:10:00.001-05:00

... is called The End. Isn't that ominous? But no, it's nothing of the sort.
See you there!

Argh

2010-02-16T17:17:00.008-05:00

So it's been a solid month of being sick for my household. A MONTH. Not all at once - thank goodness - but it's been a magical merry-go-round of sickness. First The Girl! Then The Boy! Then The Baby! And now back to The Girl again, huzzah! And I don't know about YOU, but my creative muse does not feed on constant sickness and worrying about whether or not I have enough Tylenol for whoever has the fever tonight.

Anyhow. Yesterday, my friend-the-photographer came over and we headed outside to take some pictures for a project that I have coming up in a little while. And again, I don't know about you, but having been sick for a whole month does NOT make me feel particularily fetching, so I was rather hesitant about this whole photography thing. She took about 100 pictures and some of them were pretty nice, which was cheering:

She's a MAGICIAN! Of course, I probably caught double pneumonia from sitting in the snowbank. Hooray!

Today's post...

2010-02-11T13:24:00.001-05:00

... is partly about a cake I'm planning on making and partly also about a few other things, maybe.
It's here.

Luv

2010-02-09T17:02:00.006-05:00

My recent "cardiac"* excitement has made me a bit bemused about hearts in general. Who decided that love resided in the heart, anyhow? The early stages of infatuation for me were indistinguishable from a severe head injury. And my Brooding Misery while separated from my now-husband for FIVE FREAKING YEARS seemed to involve a lot of not eating, so... digestive? All I know is that love made me really thin. The more in love I was, the more I looked like I was about to die from cholera, or some other romantic, diarrhea-based illness. But that was romantic love, which for me was a selfish, selfish thing.

*not cardiac at all, but thanks, local medical people! That made for an exciting day.

I still remember the first time I totally loved someone else.

The Girl was eight months old and she was fussy and it was the morning and so I was holding her and walking up and down the vile, vile shag-carpeted hallway of our Grim Apartment, and all of a sudden she laughed and I looked at her and it was just like a religious experience, this sudden wash of golden love shooting through me, through the pain of my still-infected Cesarean scar, and all the way through to my bitter, damaged heart, to my secret thought that I could never love anyone.

(and before that? I had felt a miserable sense of driven obligation. I couldn't stand to let her out of my sight, woke up twenty times a night to check that she was still alive, could barely stand to let anyone else touch her. It was an awful, murky sort of feeling.)

And in that moment, all of the misery and the darkness was washed away. I was simply a mother holding her laughing baby in the sunlit-dazzled hallway and in that second, I loved her for the rest of my life, simple and uncomplicated.

When I was so sick four years ago, my husband drove the kids to the parking lot of the hospital and had then march to my window and The Girl stood there with her mane of uncombed blond hair and her giant smile and waved and waved at me and I thought it was going to be the last time I ever saw her. I've written about this before, but it was such a searing feeling and it has stuck with me, my child lit up like a firefly at the sight of me at a window.

It's easy to forget these things in the everydayness of life. But I have never forgotten those two things, what it felt like to look at my child and understand what it meant to love her as her mother, and what it felt like to look at my child when I thought that I would never see her again, to fix that smile on my heart forever.

My heart, which I'd thought in my immature angst was so bitter, so damaged.

Important Caveat

2010-02-08T07:25:00.003-05:00

As I wrote yesterday, Robert B. Parker wrote tough guy detective fiction. If you like the genre, you might like his books. If you're interested, I would start at the beginning, with The Gudwulf Manuscript (his character changes remarkably in later books, but it's a good place to start.). Looking For Rachel Wallace and Early Autumn are good entries as well. There are 20+ books in the series, so that oughta keep you busy for a while.

And if you're not already a fan of tough guy detective fiction, I'm probably not going to be able to convert you. I like it, though. (and if you like that sort of book, too, you'll probably also like Ross MacDonald, Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammet.

A Writer I Really Like Died

2010-02-07T09:42:00.004-05:00

One of my very favorite authors died not too long ago. I am referring, of course, to Robert B. Parker, author of the Spencer For Hire novels. I LOVED those.

There is no way I was referring to J. D. Salinger, of course, creator of that prize preppy suck Holden Caulfield, author of several more books of people Too Delicate For This Mean World, and famed recluse. We read Catcher In The Rye in high school which caused several of the more Literary And Susceptible Girls to swoon over Holden as a sensitive, desirable boy.

But he wasn't.

Look: he had some obvious emotional revelations ("Teenage hookers are sad.""It is sad that my brother died."), but otherwise, his sensitivity only applied to himself - how poorly he thought of other people, how sad, how sensitive he was - and never extended to empathy or actual compassion towards others OR towards moderating his behaviour so he didn't cause unnecessary pain to other people. These are not good qualities in even IMAGINARY boyfriends. But OH he had lots of feelings. Deep feelings. And I am deeply suspicious of anyone who claims to have deep reservoirs of feeeeeeelings, even book people.

1. Pretty much everyone has lots of feelings. Most people just try not to make a huge deal out of it.
2. Having lots of Big Huge Feelings spilling all over the place, therefore, does not make you extra-sensitive and special - it means that you don't handle life well. This is not something to write lots of books about.
3. Children are not some sort of gold standard for how people should be. We don't start out innocent and perfect and gradually become corrupted by This Awful World - we start out completely self-centered and gradually learn that OTHER PEOPLE MATTER TOO. And I think that any adult who holds up children over and over again as our emotional superiors is a bit... off. I don't know about you, but I truly APPRECIATE other people's ability to censor what they're thinking, to not express every flickering emotion that they have, to be, in Holden's language, phony.
4. Have you read Joyce Maynard's book about her relationship with J.D. Salinger when she was a very, very young looking 18 year old and he was FIFTY-THREE? Ewwwwwwwww.
5. Now read number 3 again and prepare to feel a bit icky.
6. Being a recluse doesn't make you interesting or deep - it just makes you weird.
7. There are things I care a lot about in this world. The emotional illnesses of spoiled neurotic rich kids doesn't really make it very high on this list.

And yes, Salinger was a literary-writer and Parker wrote mass market fiction, but I find Salinger's books very dated now, very much a product of the 1950s and nearly unreadable. (also in this group: John Cheever.) This isn't his fault - literary fashions change rapidly - but I much prefer Parker's wise-cracking, soft-hearted tough guys to anything that J.D. Salinger wrote. They live in a morally complex world, they have to make hard decisions, and when people hit them, THEY HIT BACK. Pow.

And Parker had this to say about writing:

I had achieved the most important things in my life when I married Joan and had
the sons. Given the choice between Joan and the boys, and being a writer, I
would give up being a writer without a blink.

I like a writer who would say that. I like writing. I like to think that someday I will write my own novels - we'll see, but I wouldn't be surprised if they had wise-cracking tough guys in them - but the important things in my life are my husband and my kids. I could stop here and be content forever, and I like knowing that he felt the same way. Was he a great writer? Oh, probably not, but his books were deftly written and fun and I always felt braver and tougher when I put them down.

I am sick!

2010-02-04T15:11:00.003-05:00

I wrote a little bit about it in this week's 5 Minutes post.
I am feeling - phew! - MUCH better today. I'm still rather wiped out, but nothing like I was.
So. Back to my couch.

So tired.

2010-02-01T14:09:00.004-05:00

"Hey Papa! Are you going to help us build a shaduf*?" The Boy asked his grandfather last night. And my father gave me a bit of a look, but not as much of one as you might think, since I've always been into doing kooky things. For example: earlier today, I helped make a paper model of the Parthenon, which was either HIGHLY educational or a big waste of time, I am not sure. But it's fun.

*We're going to build a life-size model of a shaduf when the snow melts. Irrigation here we come!

And then we made St. Brigid's bread. I had each of the kids make their own loaves - The Baby's was made of teff and rice flours, mainly, and The Boy used whole wheat flour and oatmeal for his. And they both were DELICIOUS and then we made St. Brigid's crosses and The Baby said "I am weaving a St. Brigid's cross. It is also a Thunderbird*." and I laughed until I hurt my stomach. And then I felt theologically guilty.

*in the Haida sense. We were making totem poles last week.

So life is good. Funny, even.

There is also something just heart-breakingly awful going on in the lives of people that I love very much right now, and it's... heart-breaking. And awful. And yet life still goes on and is good, and how can I reconcile this? The answer is, I guess, the same way everyone else does, which is to say as best I can. But it's hard some days.

Good morning!

2010-01-29T08:21:00.002-05:00

Here's my 5 Minute post. I wrote it REALLY late last night (actually, I think I wrote it at about 8 p.m., but I was tired enough that it felt like midnight.). I felt melancholy AND I'd spent the day reading the Greek legend of Demeter and Persephone to my kids and it all came together kind of oddly at the end of the day.

I also heard this song yesterday by Kate McGarrigle - she recorded it right before Christmas and then she died last week and when I heard this song I cried so hard my eyes practically fell out:

And then I played it for my mom and she cried so hard her eyes practically fell out. So I come by this naturally, I think.

My post! I'll see you there, I hope.

And What Do I Think?

2010-01-27T21:21:00.002-05:00

About this post that I wrote on - Good grief! - Monday.

I think a bunch of things, I guess. I think that as a generation, we ARE whiny parents. This isn't a scathing dismissal of our parenting, though - parenting is harder now. Someone I know talks about standing on the hump in the backseat and happily looking into the oncoming highway as his dad drank a beer with one hand and smoked a cigarette with another and steered with his knee. Imagine parenting in THOSE halcyon days of limited parental responsibility! I'm telling you, we missed out.

As Happygeek said:

We are bombarded with parenting advice and feel the need to have our kids reading, writing and composing small operas before Kindergarten, plus we can't yell, spank, use negative language, helicopter parent, and we have to protect them, build their self-esteem, but not too much, feed them organic, well balanced meals, play with them, but not too much, and so on and so forth.Our
parents just told us to go outside.

So yes, we might whine a bit more. BUT THERE ARE REASONS.

And also The Baby Boomers! That taciturn, uncomplaining generation. HAHAHAHAHA!

Things I Heard On The Weekend

2010-01-25T11:40:00.006-05:00

I had lunch in a restaurant this weekend - that NEVER happens! - and the owner of the restaurant saw a friend from high school and came running over to chat at the table that was right behind me, which was probably NOT a good idea on her part.

So I eavesdropped on the following conversation between High School Friend And Her Husband and The Owner of the Restaurant. All parties were nicely dressed and groomed people in their early 50s:

Restaurant Lady: My kids are all in their late 20s and early 30s now. I even have a few grandkids!

Friend: Me too! Don't you find that our children don't handle parenthood as well as we did?

Restaurant Lady: YES! My kids are always calling me and complaining about how hard parenthood is, and they only have one kid each! There's something WRONG with that generation.

Friend: I KNOW. I worked a full-time job from home, took classes, did crafts, refinished my house AND raised my three kids and you never would heard ME whining the way my children whine.

Restaurant Lady: I babysat three other children while my own were small, did all the bookkeeping, taught fitness classes three times a week and stayed up all night working on the restaurant - and my kid acts like having one three year old kid who is in daycare all the time is somehow the hardest thing ever.

Friend: Suck it up, buttercup! (middle aged laughter)

And I had an aneurysm from repressed speech and said a few fierce whispered asides to my husband. But rather than ranting for several more paragraphs (I tried that and it turned into a massive diatribe), I'm curious to hear what YOU think of that little overheard conversation: is their assessment of the current generations of parents fair? Who is to BLAME for the Baby Boomers' children being such a bunch of neurotic overwhelmed whiners (if we are, that is.)? And WERE they better parents then their own children are turning out to be?

Off to try and douse the smoke coming out of my ears.

Shucks, Thanks!

2010-01-21T16:11:00.002-05:00

The Boy was deeply pleased to have all of your birthday wishes, and I was flattered that so many people think that my good-looking fella looks like me. He does and he doesn't, of course - he's better looking - but he DOES have The Family Face, and I thought about this for a while yesterday and it led to today's post.

In other news: BEHOLD MY MARIO CAKE:

Someone complimented the lovely mushroom, which IS very cute, and which I purchased chock full of candy. I DID sculpt the Venus Flytrap at the back of the cake out of Froot Roll-Ups, which is my sculpting material of choice.

This picture could be called This Is Why My Husband Generally Makes Birthday Cakes:

What a mess! But he was busy and The Boy was DEElighted.

Here he is last night at the candlelit restaurant of his choice drinking a GIGANTIC mug of hot chocolate:

I think he's a sweetie pie.

So - today's post, all about what lives on in our kids, I guess. See you there!

Happy birthday, sweetie.

2010-01-20T09:11:00.004-05:00

You are the kindest, bravest, funniest, most tender-hearted person I have ever known.

The past 8 years have been delightful, exasperating and fun.

I am looking forward to the next 8 years and to seeing where the rest of your childhood will bring you.

I am not looking forward to making your Mario cake this afternoon, but you are well worth the effort.

Lots of love, forever and ever,
Mommy.

The Day Before

2010-01-19T08:05:00.002-05:00

I compose blog posts in my head as I fall asleep at night, and they are EXCELLENT blog posts - pithy and sharp-tongued, amusing and insightful - and then I fall asleep and the posts gently drift away. And possibly I should dash up and write everything down while the words are so fresh and ripe in my head but I like sleeping better, honestly.

My 7 year old son will be 8 years old tomorrow. Writing that down gives my heart a funny sting, which amuses me - time moves on, kids get older and seven is kind of a miserable age, really, and 8 is much nicer. And yet.

Eight years ago today, I was in labour right at this time, and I did not yet know that I was going to be in labour for another 21 hours, which is the sort of knowledge that you are glad, in retrospect, that you did not have. And then he was born and there was this sudden ecstatic calm in the middle of all of the blood and pain and I held him for the first time and his dark eyes met mine and I instantly loved him.

(Which I told everyone. "I LOVE HIM!" I announced loudly to the whole room. "Hold still," said the poor doctor who was trying to sew everything below my waist back together again.)

We were pushed on a stretcher back to our hospital room, and he craned his head in my arms, staring in fascination at the light fixtures hanging overhead. I know you, I thought.

I had known love before, of course - from the seemingly-hopeless misery of my love for my not-yet-husband, to the hard-earned love for my oldest child - but this was the first effortless love in my whole life, the first person that I ever loved at very first glance. And even now, I don't love him more (I can say with complete honesty that I love my kids equally, that thing your mother always said and that always seemed impossible) but I love him easier, my son, my handsome brown-eyed boy.

Time has passed, as it does.

He is goofing around in the office behind me, making decorations for his birthday tomorrow. He noticed me looking at him and our eyes met for a moment, his dark eyes smiling at me. Time has passed. That original shock of love, that feeling that I knew him, knew him forever, remains. And he's seven for just a few more hours, and soon he will be eight.

Guess why I took a little break?

2010-01-14T10:30:00.005-05:00

Important Update!
I airly mentioned in today's post that I'd read something somewhere, but misplaced where it was and now I know - it was THIS POST by Bea.

Hint: rhymes with "ick." Starts with the letter S.

I'm feeling better now. I made some date bread last night because I had a sudden yearning for date bread and I can say conclusively that this was the best idea I ever had. I remember how GROSS I thought date bread was when I was a kid and now I love it, which is obviously proof that I am old, old, old.

Look at my cute new header! Jeni at Peace and Carrots made it for me. THANK YOU!

Hey! I wrote a post! I kind of love it, too. See you there.

(and it's also Delurking Day! If you're reading, say hi. I'd love to hear from you.)

On Homeschooling

2010-01-10T13:22:00.003-05:00

So. A lot of you - A LOT - have asked me how homeschooling is going.

It's fine.

A friend of mine is ALSO homeschooling her son and we were talking about just this very thing on Friday and she said "It's great, except for that feeling of it never being finished and realizing at the end of the week that you haven't left the house for five days." Which sums it up, I guess.

BUT. My kid was getting more unhappy every year in school - and he is only SEVEN - and now he is happy again. I have my happy son back. And he's also memorized the Periodic Table ("Let's talk about Boron!" he said to me the other day. OH LET'S.), taught himself division in a day, and can tell you all about the Phoenicians, so educationally he's having quite the grand old time. Did I mention that I have a clever son? Why yes I do.

The social stuff worries me. But I was worried about the social stuff while he was in school. I've met several... maladjusted homeschoolers recently, and so now I'm at maybe Code Yellow or possibly Code Orange, worry-wise, BUT IT IS CERTAINLY NOT LIKE I NEVER MET ANY MALADJUSTED PEOPLE IN SCHOOL, EITHER. (I sat behind a young man in grade nine math who pierced his own ear with a compass. During math class. BLOOD ALL OVER MY DESK. Awesome.) And I don't think he was ever going to be the big social hit of our rural, hockey-lovin' school, come to that, so I don't know, precisely, what I'm worried about. I do worry, though. He gets to see his friends occasionally and he's in activities and stuff, so it's not THAT bad. Still.

There you go. I'm very busy, but pleasantly so. He's a sweet, smart kid and he's so HAPPY to be home that it's heartrending, really, so I guess we're in it for at least another year. Some days I love it and it's like HOMESCHOOLING IS THE GREATEST THING EVER. Other days? Not as much. Overall? It's fine.

I am tired of Henry VIII.

2010-01-08T09:18:00.004-05:00

I understand that he had a dramatic life and a refreshingly modern attitude towards personal relationships but I feel like we've explored ol' homicidal Henry enough and it's time to move on to other British royals. And I don't mean "onto Elizabeth I and/or Queen Victoria" since I am also bored of them.

So in the interests of public betterment and for the use by any creative types out there who desperately want to write the next big Royal Novel, let me present:

OTHER INTERESTING KINGS AND QUEENS OF ENGLAND

Richard II - Not entirely unnoticed by literature, but an interesting, conflicted and possibly insane King with an intriguingly mysterious personal life. His reign was turbulent and towards the end there was a whole lot of rebellious drama and he was imprisoned in the Tower Of London and (it is thought) deliberately starved to death.

See? Don't you feel like writing an 800 page novel about him? You really should.

Queen Anne - Was sent to France as a young child to treat a severe eye infection. Made the controversial decision to marry Prince George of Denmark-Norway and had one of the few truly happy Royal marriages. She was a Protestant and her father, the King, was a Catholic (and remember, this is post Henry VIII, so there was A Lot Of Drama About All Of It.) She was pregnant at LEAST 18 times, had 13 miscarriages or stillbirths and of her five surviving children, four died before reaching two years of age. Her only child to survive infancy died at 11 - not only a terrible personal loss but also creating a huge drama about succession. Oh, and her reign was marked by The War Of Spanish Succession. Her reign was unpopular, her beloved husband died, there was a huge betrayal by her trusted best friend, and she died of gout. GOUT.

Lots of meaty stuff there for you Historical Fiction Writers. LOTS.

Ethelred the Unready - Was 10 when his half-brother Edward II was murdered (and murdered, possibly, in exceedingly gruesome fashion. UGH.) AT HIS HOUSE (possibly arranged by Ethelred's mother, so that her son might become king), and has gone down in history as a bumbling goof, although that is possibly unfair. What is certainly true is that he was a very young king and was surrounded by terrible advisers, and by the time Ethelred was 14, his reign was marked as being the reign where Vikings were attacking ALL THE TIME. Vikings! Ethelred ordered the massacre of all Danish settlers in England on St. Brice's Day, and the sister of Sweyn Forkbeard, King of Denmark was killed. Then, to sum up quickly, there was a huge Viking invasion in retribution etc.

Go. Write a meaty novel about him, full of sex, murder and VIKINGS. Because I am so, so sick of Henry VIII. I look forward to your endeavours.

Other Possible Fates

2010-01-06T07:42:00.002-05:00

There is always, of course, this lingering and somewhat wistful feeling that there are other paths that one's life could have taken, another person we could have been if only we had made some different choice at some crucial moment. It is a bittersweet sort of feeling, really. And so, let me present: Different Possible Careers I Might Have Had.

Sarcastic High School English Teacher
"Oh really, Mr. Jones," I said. "I am so interested in hearing more about how Lord of the Flies is crap. Please come up to the front of the class and explain it to everyone."

I stand cross-armed and skeletal - sarcastic high school English teachers are a thin breed, harrowed out, perhaps, by their contempt for the thousands of jocks who should be rightfully sweeping the high school hallways and not going on to cushy post-University jobs.

"Soon, Rebecca! SOON," I whisper to myself. "Class is almost over and then there is vodka and Jude the Obscure to numb the pain."

Plucky Girl Detective
My handgun sank to the bottom of the lake as did the safe full of clues and the body of the greasy hitman sent to stop me from getting to the police. But I was alive, having escaped the burning car plummeting over the ravine into the icy lake in a hailstorm of bullets.

Suddenly an arm reached down into the water - a strong, sexy arm - and pulled me to safety.
I lay, gasping, and gradually my rescuer came into view. It was Juan, my Brazilian-American third ex-husband and former partner. Even half-drowned, half-frozen and with a bullet in my arm, I was painfully aware of the still-crackling sexual tension between us.

"What took you so long, baby?" I said. And then I passed out.

The World's Most Talented Ballerina
I am the world's most famous ballerina and I also look really excellent with all of my hair pulled back. Tonight is my most important performance. I dance the lead roles in Coppelia, Sleeping Beauty AND The Nutcracker and everyone agrees that I am the greatest ballerina ever. The crowd goes wild, standing and cheering. Everyone from my grade 2 class is there. They all feel really bad that they didn't realize how cool I was back in grade 2.

"If only we had all pretended to be brave WWII nursing dogs that one time like she wanted!" they weep.

Sensible Mother With Three Children In School
"So long!" I said, waving to them from the front porch. "Have a good day! See you later!"

They all march off, grumbling. I chortle merrily to myself and head back into the child-free warmth of my house where I am working on my masterwork, tenatively entitled "Me And Magnum Driving Around In A Dune Buggy."

Goodbye Crummy Old Year!

2009-12-31T12:25:00.002-05:00

My post today - a personal Best Of list for 2009 - is up at Five Minutes For Parenting, and here is my favorite photo from 2009, while I'm at it.

See you over there, and a Happy New Year to you. Thank you very much for reading me - it's mattered more than you can know.

Got A Little Kid?

2009-12-30T10:10:00.001-05:00

I'm reviewing and giving away a Webkinz Jr. over at my review blog! See you there.

Holly AND Jolly

2009-12-29T13:40:00.005-05:00

I had lots of big blog plans for my Christmas holidays - I was going to update my recipe blog, I was going to post challenging, multi-layered posts, I was going to really make a big effort to visit everyone's blogs and make meaningful, heartfelt comments.

And instead I lay around on my couch and ate candy. Actually, that's too past-tense-y. I am LAYING around on my couch and I am EATING candy. I also opened many, many presents. I love getting presents. I got many, many pleasant things. My children got every toy in the world. We now have them all. Next Christmas, they are getting underpants and socks. I spent some quality time lolling in a friend's hot tub, held my Wee Baby Niece - not, I am hastening to add, while in the hot tub, and had the altogether delightful feeling of a) this crummy freaking year nearly being over and b) everyone being where they should be.

Earlier this year, I read the following poem from A. E. Housman with a shudder of recognition:

Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.

And I thought at the time that this would be me, looking for the rest of my life at everything before this year as an unwitting land of unappreciated joy. I thought, over this past year, that my husband and I were going to lose all three of our grandparents, that a beloved relative would be lost forever within mental illness, that our financial problems were unfixable, that a much-longed for family baby would not make it safely to birth, and that - even writing this makes my heart chill over - my own child was dying in front of me. I spent much of this year in feeling hunched over with terror and misery, sharp-tongued and bitter-hearted.

None of these things happened.

I spent Christmas morning holding my perfectly delightful niece while my child exclaimed loudly over her presents beside me, and opened gifts from my beloved and nearly fully-recovered relative and spent the rest of the holiday season wishing beloved grandparents Merry Christmas and feeling delighted that this harrowing year is dwindling away. It was - and I say this bemused at the deficiency of words - a bad year, but the land of content, of happiness, stretches languidly before me again and this year is fading away in colourful wrapping paper and ribbons and pretty things, a year as bright and hopeful as a shiny new penny just around the corner. It's almost over, I think, elated, and within me my heart beats as well as ever, and everything is in the right place, shining.

My Grandma's Peanut Butter Squares!

2009-12-22T14:09:00.004-05:00

This is one of those very simple recipes that is WAY more than the sum of their ingredients. I will seriously eat a LOT of these, given the chance. Here it is, straight from my grandma to you:

half cup brown sugar
half cup corn syrup. (me -I tried it with honey one time and it worked, so you can substitute if you'd prefer not to use corn syrup.)
1 cup peanut butter
Heat this but don't ever boil it - it'll go hard if you do.
Crush 1 cup of corn flakes, add.
Add 2 cups uncrushed corn flakes. Mix all together and put in a greased 9x14 pan.

Frosting:
1 1/2 CUPS of icing sugar (powdered sugar/aka whatever you use to make frosting)
4-5 tbsps peanut butter
a little bit of butter
mix with a little milk.

And spread on top. This is VERY VERY good. You cut it into little squares for serving, and there you go.

I won! I WOOOOON!

2009-12-21T11:35:00.003-05:00

Guess who won Best Canadian Blog Post Series? And is writing this post? And has a houseful of kids who won't stop fighting?

That's right. This guy.

Disturbingly enough, I was also voted Third Funniest Blogger in Canada. Good grief. That's shockingly high, considering I don't try to be funny. YOU ARE ALL JUST LAUGHING AT MY PAIN.

I'm kidding. I totally try.

Thanks for voting for me! I am dee-lighted, of course.

Okay. How did the caroling go? you may be asking.

It was lovely! Perfect! Festive! My heart grew ten sizes bigger much like the Grinch, and then JUST LIKE THE GRINCH, I ran around Whooville returning all of the crap I'd stolen. Actually, I just supervised a fair number of tweenaged girls AND the Boy, The Baby and two buddies and they sang their hearts out. And they made nearly $100 for the local food bank, which is fairly impressive, I think.

Here's another question: Are you ready for Christmas? I was asked that maybe 200 times yesterday and each time it was like WHAT THE HECK. Is Christmas not coming on the same day this year? No? Then I think I'm all right. I had to make an emergency phone call to a toy store in North Bay this morning - Santa found out he's rather short of stocking stuffers for the girls and a relative is passing through North Bay, SO - and a totally patient sales clerk spent AGES helping me Santa pick out a bag of stocking stuffers, which I thought was pretty nice. So let me totally recommend Creative Learning in North Bay for all of your toy needs.

I can't find my Christmas stocking. It's red, has Raggedy Ann and Andy on it and my name embroidered at the top ("Becky." People call me Becky, really. They do.) and I've had it all my life AND I CANNOT FIND IT. CHRISTMAS IS RUINED!

*** IMPORTANT IMPORTANT IMPORTANT ****
I found it! It was IN THE FREEZER.
What was it doing THERE?
But it seems fine. Christmas is saved!

How are YOU doing?

Now Bring Us Some Figgy Pudding

2009-12-19T16:45:00.003-05:00

We are going carolling tonight. With a bunch of ten year old girls. In the COLD.

This is probably much worse than whatever you are doing tonight, and that knowledge should light a festive candle in your heart. Fa la la!

Perhaps I'll fall in a snowbank and die.

The nice thing, though, is that as soon as I'm home, I will be 365 days away from the next time I have to go carolling out in the cold with a large group of preteen girls. And THAT will make me merry.

A brief recap of today so far

2009-12-18T13:17:00.004-05:00

- Woke up at about 7 with a strange feeling. What WAS I hearing?

- Got out of bed in my usual morning fog. Staggered around for a few minutes, trying to locate source of Mystery Sound.

- Realize that what I was hearing was a) quite loud b) in the ceiling and c) electric. I called my parents.

- Got the kids up (The Boy had slept at his grandparents). The Girl instantly heard that insane sound. "IS IT A RABID RACCOON?" she shrieked, horrified. Um, no. I don't know WHAT it is, but it's not THAT.

- The Girl was instantly in her coat and boots and outside waiting for her grandfather, who was zipping into town to see what was up.

- The Baby, however, was screaming hysterically and running around in circles. "WE ARE GONNA BURN TO DEAAATH!" she screeched. I calmed her down and got her into her winter things.

- My dad arrives. We toured my grim beeping house. He agreed that the little girls should be removed and takes them home.

- I GO INTO MY ALREADY CREEPY BASEMENT AND TURN OFF THE FUSES. BY MYSELF. IN THE BASEMENT.

- I survive! Sadly, the house is still making The Mystery Noise. My husband is summoned home from work.

- While he crawls around in the attic, I nervously frost some cupcakes for the bake sale at The Girl's school this morning. They look AWESOME - red velvet cupcakes with cream cheese frosting and wee gingerbread man sprinkles. At least THAT is a success.

- "Something is smoking up here!" - my husband. WHAT? WE ARE ON THE VERGE OF A HOUSEFIRE. I AM NOT KIDDING.

- I report this incredibly shocking information to Twitter. Twitter is AGHAST. Me too!

- My mother returns with The Girl in tow. The Girl looks pale. Off we go to school!

- The Girl announces at school that she feels like throwing up. Back she goes home!

- I bring in the cupcakes. I get to the school kitchen and then unceremoniously trip and drop them all icing-side down on the floor. TA DA!

- My husband takes the living room ceiling off. My living room now looks like this: - It's the junction box! It was all messed up and stuff. It's fixed now.

- AWESOME INCREDIBLY GOOD NEWS - our ugly old ceiling fan/western 80s light fixture will not be returning to its old home, since I kicked it while I was wearing my snow boots and I broke it. Whoopsie!

- My husband hangs around. We eat meatball subs. Pleasant and anticlimactic.

- "Baby, someday I'm gonna buy you a drywall ceiling like all those rich people have." - My husband on his way to work.

- I am now wrapping gifts with The Girl who has perked up somewhat. And that, I HOPE, is all for today.

Hey look!

2009-12-17T14:48:00.003-05:00

It's my post for today - all about me being harried and tired because it's Christmas and That Is How Mothers Are Supposed To Feel, or something.
In other news, there are two voting days left! C'mon! Vote for me!

My Christmas Special

2009-12-16T15:12:00.002-05:00

EVERYONE gets their own Christmas special, with singing and corny scripts and tons of costumes and I WANT ONE TOO. It's only fair. I mean, I'm neither photogenic nor talented, but I am full of the festive spirit and my show would be AWESOME. Proof:

Opening Scene:
A long opening shot as the cameraman slogs through waist-deep snow to get to my house, then tumbles down my front steps which I have once again forgotten to salt. Luckily, half a dozen children's sleds - which have fortunately not been put away - break his fall. Half-blinded by the glare of all of the lights on the porch, the cameraman manages to stagger into my house.

Me: (startled and in my pajamas) OH CRAP. IS THE CHRISTMAS SPECIAL TODAY?

I quickly shove the cameraman towards my kids who are making cookies cheerfully at the schoolroom table, and by "cheerfully" I mean that only one of them is crying. The Baby sings The Chipmunks' Christmas song and then forgets the lyrics halfway through and so does a medley of songs from the Chipmunks' Movie. By this time, I am back and looking gorgeous in a red and white square-dancing dress. Then I sing O Holy Night and sound just like Ella Fitzgerald.

Me: And now for my first special guest of the evening - Magnum PI!

Magnum comes out, looking slightly chilled in his shorts. I have changed into a beautiful hot pink velour evening gown. We sing My Grown-Up Christmas Wish. I sound remarkably like Barbra Streisand. My children - dressed up as bottles of tequila - dance in the background and only get into a fight once.

Me: Thank you, Magnum! That was awesome -
Magnum: Actually, I'm Tom Sellec-
Me: And now, I will sing a solo song all by myself. And I will sound just like Judy Garland.

I am now dressed like a giant piece of holly, which is more slimming than you might think. I sing Christmas Memories so beautifully that I make myself cry hysterically and mascara runs all down my face. It's surprisingly flattering.

My children now come out dressed as Christmas elves. They sing I Ain't Getting Nothin' for Christmas while I laugh myself sick in the background. The Girl, if you watch closely, is only half-heartedly mouthing the words.

Through the magic of television, we are now at the arena. I am wearing a giant hot pink fur trapper hat and matching coat and skates, ominously enough.

Me: And now a figure skating musical number with Scott Hamilton, that hot guy from Supernatural and Willie Nelson!

We sing Hard Rock Candy Christmas and I sound just like Dolly Parton. Sadly, I have forgotten in my hubris that I can't skate and fall down and cut my head open. It's a very festive number.

FINAL SCENE: BACK AT MY HOUSE.
I am back in my pajamas, except now they're a devastating Nora Charles-esque peignoir with a feather trim. I am also wearing a big Christmas bandage on my head. All of my special guests are here. We sing Rocking Around The Christmas Tree and I sound just like Rosemary Clooney.

Me: Merry Christmas, everyone! Now get out of my house!
(camera fades.)