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I Don’t Like Mondays

2012-01-09T08:48:00.001-06:00

It's 9:04 a.m.

I am at work, sitting in my office in comfortably low light, looking at a photo of my beautiful daughter taken back in the summer. I have just finished a bowl of oatmeal, garnished with blueberries, dried cranberries, and coconut.

So far, this has been one of those days that I will think about later on when I'm wrestling with the work/life balance question. When I look back at "that January when Nora was 16 months old."

Nora has been sick lately. She caught a cold right after Christmas and this manifestation came with a croupy cough and morning stuffiness. I feel for her, because I have been fighting it as well. The cough is now going away (two weeks later) but she still coughs for a bit after waking up – understandable, as all that snot from her nose has likely run down there through the night. Last night, she woke up screeching at 1 a.m. and could.not.be.consoled, until I realized that the whole front of her sleeper was soaked in pee – another diaper breach, which is happening more and more lately. She doesn't like it. After struggling to change a hysterical twisting Nora in the dark, and hubby getting her a nice little bottle of water (I know, counterintuitive but she loves it), she settled back down. Half an hour, all told, which isn't too too bad.

I hauled my butt out of bed four and a half hours later, after hitting snooze a couple of times. Had my shower, and then went to the basement to get the second half of my outfit, which was still in the dryer. I saw a red blob at the bottom of the stairs and was concerned, since I knew it had something to do with the cat (the dog can't get down to the basement), and she's diabetic with recently questionable health. By the time I got all the way to the bottom of the stairs, I realized it was a barfed-up half-digested mouse. I know this, because I found its face, staring up at me whiskers and all. I pulled my clothes out of the dryer while suppressing my own barf, and tiptoed back upstairs carefully avoiding the pile of yuck.

Next I prepared a bottle – a bit larger than normal, maybe 1.5 oz more than she usually gets in the morning - and went up to Nora, who was still sleeping in full jellybean mode (on her tummy, hands tucked under, bum in the air – it is the cutest thing and getting her out of it breaks my heart). I pulled her out of bed and gave her her bottle, which she took eagerly. Her stomach was making hungry groans and her slurping was noisy, mostly because her nose was stuffy. She finished the bottle fairly quickly, and sat up, still sleepy. She does this cute thing where she sits up, rubs her eyes, then puts her arms around me and her head on my chest. It melts my heart. So I held her for a delicious minute, smelling her hair, then picked her up and took her downstairs to change her diaper and get her dressed. I always lay out her clothes the night before, so I have the time to wrestle her into them, which lately takes a good 15 minutes all told.

I put her down on the change mat and got her diaper off, wiped her bottom, and she coughed. Just a small cough, nothing crazy, but it caused a bit of spit up to come out the side of her mouth. Understandable, ok, I go to wipe it up with the arm of the pyjamas I was taking off. I was halfway to her mouth when a bit more came out. Uh oh. Then BLAAAAAAAAGGGGHHH the stream issued forth, out of her mouth, her nose, and possibly even her ears, I can't be sure. Barf has now sprayed all over the mat, her hair, the books that were lying nearby, a couple of toys, and the adorable clean outfit I'd prepared. Curdled milk all over everything, puddling on my nice wool rug. I'm pretty sure the entire bottle ended up outside of her body.

So she is very (understandably) upset, I'm flipping her over trying to clear her airways while also selfishly trying to keep her barf off of my own clean work outfit. She is giving me a horrible "mama help me!" face and I make her sit there, miserable, naked, while I run for some clean washcloths to wipe up the mess but I don't really take the time to make the water hot, so I had to wipe her with a cool washcloth, which I imagine feels miserable at 6:45 on a January morning. The poor little bean. I wiped off her books and propped them up to dry. I managed to diaper her and put her undershirt on and thankfully Daddy woke up at that point and came down to be with her while I went up to pick out new clothes. I bundled all of the barfousness (change mat, pyjamas, cute fresh outfit, two washcloths, 6 oz of barfed up milk), and headed back down to the basement, around the mouse face, and tossed everything into the washing machine, set to wash. Back upstairs, upstairs again to get clean clothes, and finally dressd Nora who protested – as usual – and would only put her pants on when I convinced her that she can't go outside and visit Frosty (our snowman) without pants.

I bundle us both up and am heading out the door when hubby yells that we have no water. No water. No freaking water. Here is the sum total of the water used so far today: I flushed the toilet once. I had a 7-minute shower. I soaked two washcloths, and started a load of laundry. It's my feeling that our well ought to have enough water in it to handle these small tasks. What this means is A) we have a plumbing issue somewhere or worse, B) we need a new well/our well drilled deeper, as well as C) the load of barf laundry is sitting there with only a drizzle of water on it, for the entire day. In the mouse-facey basement. This also means that hubby has to go over to my parents' place to shower, since he has not cleaned himself since Saturday afternoon.

Anyway, I dropped a pretty-cheerful Nora off at Oma's, then encountered a huge asshole driver on the road to wakefield, where I met my girlfriend in pretty good time. We got in slightly late, but the roads were a bit greasy and traffic was bad. I had my oatmeal, and got an email from a friend with some nice news. I am almost ready to greet my day.

My hand still smells a bit like barf, so I am off to the washroom. I do not like Mondays.

Cleansing vs. Cleaning

2012-01-01T15:25:00.013-06:00

I have a number of facebook friends who, on this New Year's Day of 2012, are proposing cleanses, lifestyle changes, resolutions and the like. I applaud them! I really do, I really hope they can make positive changes in their lives if that is what they are inclined to do. And if I were a different, more motivated kind of person, I too might take this opportunity to make some kind
of statement of intention to make positive changes in my own life. Only I know myself too well.

I once did the stereotypical join-a-gym-in-the-new-year thing. I signed up, bought running shoes and loaded up my mp3 player, and gamely went to work with a gym bag of dopey clothes and good intentions. I think I lasted 3 weeks. My problem wasn't that I didn't enjoy it (ok I found it boring as shit to tell you the truth, I think there's nothing at all interesting about staying in one
place trying to move constantly), but that I hated my gym clothes and felt phony. Every time I put them on I thought "I have the ugliest old gym clothes in this place" but I was unwilling to invest any more money in the venture, and I felt like a fraud in anything more jazzy/lululemony. I am not an athletic person and I do not feel comfortable dressing like one.

So I found various reasons to quit. I'm not sure what my exact justification was.

And I often come across lists (because I like to make lists, and I have books of them) of foods that I at one time or another pledged to eat or not to eat FROM NOW ON. None of these lists were adhered to. I have similarly found lists of budgets that I should stick to, books I should read, and activities I should take up. Once I came upon a list I'd made of things to do before I die, where I'd written numbers 1 through 50 down the left-hand column, but only came up with about five or so activities. I aim low.

So I resolve once again to make no resolutions this New Years. Phew it feels so good to be let off the hook by myself so early in the game. Oh sure, I vaguely pledged to worry less, be nicer to my husband, and keep my house cleaner but we all know that none of that is likely to change overnight. I yam what I yam: a messy paranoid meanie.

However, I did kick off the new year by doing one onerous cleaning task: I sorted out my kitchen cupboard. It's the cupboard (actually two doors, covering three shelves) over my main prep area, where I keep basically all of my smaller ingredients, spices, baking stuff, etc. For years I have just piled things on top of other things and let them accumulate, wedging miscellaneous spices and crap into the front one inch of shelf space as it came along. See? A mess. So the other day I was irritated by it and I tackled it.

In addition to discovering that many of my herbs and spices no longer had any recognizable scent besides "dust" and that I was storing a few empty jars in the cupboard, I found the following ridiculousness:

- two near-full bags of shredded coconut
- 4 bags of dried thyme
- 3 bags of icing sugar
- 3 bags of rock-hard raisins
- 2 full cartons of molasses
- a HUGE jar of 'ground amchur' (mango powder?) that I bought once for
an Indian recipe that required, like, a teaspoon of it. I have had
approximately six pounds of mango powder hanging around for 11 years.
- 2 full jars of instant coffee (we do not drink instant coffee)
- a big jar of green flakes that I at first suspected might be someone's
stash of marijuana, but turns out to be a pile of real green loose-leaf tea
- no less than 5 jars of honey. For this I blame the Austrians and the Germans - every time they come and leave whatever place they have rented/occupied, they bring us their unused food, and they like honey. We always get the leftover honey (and pasta, pounds and pounds of it). Same with pesto - I must have 7 jars of pesto in my fridge.

I also found about four half-bags of rice so old that it had yellowed, about 7 different kinds of lentils, various jars of mystery powder (don't get excited, most came from the bulk barn), and two unopened boxes of salt that are hard like bricks. There were a lot of 'what the hell is this?' moments, where I sniffed a jar or a bag and set it aside.

Here is a shot of my cupboard, taken AFTER the great cleanse. Hubby says "this still looks like a 'before' shot." har har. Note: shelves are still sagging, though they are propped up behind that middle bar. Don't worry, my lentils are safe.

I realized a few things during this process: 1. I am a food pack rat, and 2. I have weird friends. How many friends do you have who have gifted you with strange bundles of herbs for asian soups and packets of agar agar powder? A giant bag of loose green tea from China? Three different friends. Lumps of cane sugar? Part of Christmas gift 2006 from friend #2, may have come with the agar agar powder. I feel like some kind of minor deity, with all these food offerings. I guess my friends also know that I am a food pack rat. I was just given several lovely foil-wrapped packets of Korean tea and from this paragraph you may surmise that I am into tea, but actually I am not. Sorry friends. I drink really mundane coffee from a crappy percolator, hate to disappoint.

As I write this I am plowing through a baggie of Christmas-issue jelly belly jellybeans. Just ate one that tasted suspiciously of barf.

So I am not making any resolutions, just taking this break as an opportunity to start fresh with certain things, get some chores done, try not to disgust myself anymore with my gross food hoarding. I may make a minor promise to get through the 7 jars of pesto and 18 kilos of pasta, to prepare all of those lentils somehow and to stop buying things in bulk and forgetting
to label them.

Here's to 2012. I promise to follow all of your exploits in self-betterment with mild fascination from my spot on the couch. Cheers to you all.

Gennyland's Modest Financial Tidbits

2011-10-28T14:44:00.002-05:00

I have been thinking about money more than usual lately. Partially because I returned to work, with all of its attendant costs, and tried desperately to figure out if we could ‘make it work’ on one salary, and partially because we made the sudden decision to buy a new, not-so-cheap car, but mostly because the financial news these days is all doom and gloom. Between the business in Europe and the Occupy this-and-that movement, hubby and I have been thinking and talking about money quite a bit.

The other night he admitted to me that he was a bit worried, that he was afraid of the future. It’s the first time he’s told me this, and the first time I’ve kind of had to talk him down from financial worry. And here’s a bit of background info on the financial life of gennyland and Mr. gennyland: money is something we never, ever, EVER fight about. We see 99% eye-to-eye on all things financial, even though we may fight like cats and dogs at times about how the household recycling is managed. When we set out on this shared life together, hubby wasn’t doing so hot financially (bad student loans, terrible credit, had never had a credit card, wasn’t really 100% employed) but I was ok. I had a safety net, whereas he never had, and I had a job that paid me a decent amount for my lifestyle – living at home driving a crappy old car.

As soon as he got some solidity in his life, things really turned around for Mr. gennyland. He surprised me by becoming the better of us at saving money, at managing debt, and at figuring out how to work the system to our advantage. Add to that the windfall that we got when his aunt passed away, and I have to say (and remind him) that financially we are doing sort of ok.

In talking him down from the ledge the other day, I really started to think about what it is that we do to keep ourselves afloat. I am always fascinated when I am able to talk with people about how they manage their finances, especially couples, and what systems people put in place to make sure things are equitable and the bills get paid. Turns out, everyone does it differently. Everyone has a different balance of financial responsibility within their relationships and what works for one couple may not work for another. People are often surprised when they find out that Mr. gennyland and I keep all of our expenses separate. We have always done so; when we moved in together, he was less gainfully employed than I was, had some rotten debt that I wanted no part of, and our relationship was relatively new. He had just returned from six months in Thailand and we moved in together (partially) out of practicality, so we wanted to ensure that we didn’t become too complicatedly entangled in case things went funny. So every two weeks, I recorded our expenses and listed our purchases (keeping receipts is essential to our system) and balanced them against one another. Since I was the better of us two at remembering stuff and figured out internet banking faster than he did, I paid the bills, so usually what ended up happening is I’d balance all of our receipts and bills against each other and he’d have to pay me whatever I was owed.

Thirteen years, a house, an inheritance, five cars and a baby later, we still operate on the same system. Sometimes I go “are you sure you want to keep going this way?” because it is admittedly a lot to manage and sometimes we slip up, but the answer is always yes. I think we believe that since we make quite different salaries, someone would feel slighted if we shared an account. Bad blood might arise, and this system we’ve got going now works and keeps things neutral.

Anyway, onto the point of this overlong post, which is to share my modest financial wisdom with those of you who might be looking for alternative ideas, or starting out in a new co-habitation situation, or on the brink of a large purchase or life change. Humour me. This is more about recording my ideas for my own future reference than for educating the masses, because I am hardly a banking wizard or a millionaire:

1. Live within your means. I mean duh, right? In stating the obvious here, I am thinking of those people who stretch themselves to live in a certain kind of house or drive a certain kind of car. I bought my house when I was 26. Would I have rather had a larger house with radiant floor heating and three bedrooms? Yes. Would I rather have had a large kitchen with a breakfast bar, a window seat and butcher block countertops? Yes. But we didn’t have the money for it, so we bought a house built in 1976 that cost us $112,000 and had a kitchen I like to refer to as “pirate-chic”. We capitalized on timing, meaning that the real estate market in our area boomed just after we bought (18 new houses have gone up on our road in the 9 years since we moved in) so we were able to get in while the getting was good. Also some bad experience to draw from: we drove crappy second-hand cars for years believing that they were cheaper overall. What we learned (and continue to learn) is that you really do get what you pay for with cars, and while they are initially cheaper, it’s not worth the stress and ongoing expense of constantly repairing a shitty old car. It’s just not worth it, so unless you are a mechanic, and have that kind of money and energy, it’s not within your means to buy an old jalopy. A good compromise is to buy a used car from a reputable dealer, as they’ve been vetted already. Our 2005 Vibe has so far given us zero hassle, apart from regular maintenance.

2. Keep an emergency fund. When we bought our house, hubby and I agreed that we’d keep the two-party financial system going BUT that we would get ourselves a savings account that is shared. That way we both have online access to it, and we set up an automatic deposit system so that on each of our paydays, an agreed-upon amount went automatically into the emergency account. And it racks up. This money was to be used for all things house-related, major purchases, emergency expenses and such. We also use it as a bounce-over account for when hubby pays me his balance owing every two weeks – he transfers it in and I transfer it to my account.

3. Double-pay where and when possible In 2008 when the markets crashed and the banks yanked the interest rates down, we were able to capitalize on our variable rate mortgage. Since our day-to-day salaries and expenses didn’t change, yet our mortgage went down to like 2%, we decided to start paying it as aggressively as possible, to get a leg up for the future. We approached the bank and asked if, in addition to making our payments bi-weekly, we could increase the amount paid. Turns out we couldn’t just bump up the amount BUT there was a little-used rule that said we could double-pay, meaning that each payment is mirrored every two weeks. It’s an easy way to do it because if the rates go up again, we don’t have to negotiate a lower payment amount, we just cancel the doubling. Our mortgage is so low (see the aforementioned note about the $112k house) that after two or three years of this double-paying, we are set to have it paid off within the next two years – 11 years after buying the house. Sometimes I feel badly for capitalizing on a bad situation (the collapse of the global financial markets) but personally, it has worked out fine so far, enabling us to pay a 25-year mortgage in 11 years.

4. Balance your savings against your debt This would also seem to be a no-brainer, but somehow I have a problem with it. Like, I have a Tax-Free Savings account racking up a not-very-impressive 2% interest, yet I keep spending on my line of credit which sits at 4% and WORSE, my credit card which is like 19%. There’s a mental leap to be made in using your savings to pay off your debts, but it makes zero (maybe less than) sense to keep paying 19% interest when you’re only making 2% on your savings. Better to be at zero overall I say. Zero savings, zero debt. Then avoid the credit for awhile so you can rack up your savings again.

5. Tuck money away into hidey holes. To amuse nobody but myself, I opened a savings account with a separate internet-based bank, and have been ferreting money away into it whenever I have a bit extra. (This works best in our two-party financial system, as it could otherwise raise trust issues). I don’t use it much, and I often forget I have it. I never check it, but sometimes I will delight myself by remembering it’s there and then looking and being surprised that hey, I have a couple of thou saved up and I didn’t even feel it. I buy Canada savings bonds through work and don’t feel that either, but they’re there, which I always forget until I get a statement in the mail. Now it’s a bad idea to REALLY forget these things, as they’re all a part of your overall portfolio and personal worth, but it’s good to have some places to hide money from yourself.

6. Maximize free opportunities to save Hubby’s work has this great system where they don’t have a pension plan per se, but they have a great really terrific (as in, how do I get a piece of that action?) group investment plan. They make crazy interest. It comes off of his paycheque in agreed-upon amounts, and all contributions (up to a certain amount) are matched by the company. So it’s relatively painful, doubles your original investment, and gets an awesome rate of return. His investments through this company in the ten years he’s been there have climbed just about as high or higher than my RRSP has, and I’ve had it at least 3 years longer, much of that time in a quote-unquote “aggressive” portfolio (read: they make more money off of me for some reason) through the VERY USELESS Investor’s Group. (I do not recommend Investor’s Group. Go with a bank, they’re much more reliable). As well, he has signed up for a cash-back Visa, which gives him 2% cash back on specific purchases. It carries a monthly (or annual?) fee, so he ensures that he A) pays his balance off right away, and B) spends enough on it that the cash he gets back more than covers the annual fee. So he’s winning and the credit card company’s losing, because he makes sure to pay it just in time to never pay interest. This is the relationship you want with your credit card, though you do have to be on top of it. I am not that good, I am sloppy with my card, racking up interest and then paying it off in bulk when I can.

7. Compartmentalize this is more of a mental trick than a financial tip. Hubby gets easily overwhelmed and will sometimes indicate that we can’t, for example, order a pizza for dinner because we just paid $700 for firewood or some kind of thing like that. I like to compartmentalize my spending into everyday small cash-type amounts and large purchases. As long as one doesn’t completely overshadow the other, I feel pretty comfortable ordering that pizza. It keeps me from feeling cheated.

8. Minimize bad investments Examples of bad investments include cars (though see above, sometimes you have to bite the bullet. Just know that it’s never a moneymaking venture), technology, RVs, and things like gardens and other ephemera which you might think raises your property value but in fact unless you’re selling your house, are just an expense. Not to say that you shouldn’t have one, just don’t go into it thinking you’re making an investment, because a crappy badly-maintained garden has less curb appeal that flat grass in my books. This is obviously a sore spot with me lately. Examples of good investments include bathroom renovations (for the same reason, only not), land, your house, and anything that will make you comfy in the future. I would say art for obvious reasons but so few people are aware of ins and outs of the re-sale market that the chances you will actually re-sell it someday on anywhere but ebay, or through some shuckster auctioneer, are slim unless you are a professional collector or very rich person.

9. Want to donate money, but you’re not that flush? Try Kiva (www.kiva.com). These are microloans, so while you might be out of pocket for a bit and you don’t get a tax receipt, the money is repaid in installments and you get to feel great knowing that you’ve helped, say, some poor Nicaraguan single mother put a new roof on her house. It also helps very much to put things in your own life into perspective.

10. Speaking of perspective, a friend of mine posted this link to his facebook page last week, in light of the recent “Occupy Wall Street” and copycat protest movements. It’s sobering. http://www.globalrichlist.com/

So there, I babbled for four pages about money and now I feel so cleansed that I’m gonna go out and treat myself and a good friend of mine to a fancy lunch. Food is never a bad investment. See? Compartmentalize!

Feeling kind of itchy.

2011-10-05T11:05:00.003-05:00

Every morning that I send her to daycare, I feel like I'm throwing Nora into a cesspool.

Don't get me wrong; Sue's place is relatively clean (as clean as any place which is overrun by toddlers every day) and Sue runs a fairly tight ship, making sure dishes are washed and anything that goes into mouths is scrubbed regularly. I've seen her confiscate soothers and I've seen the pile of toys sitting by the sink waiting to be cleaned. There are no untoward smells and Sue is very keen to change Nora's clothes at the first sign of a mess. Often she undergoes two wardrobe changes in a day, which is two more than I would give her at home barring a catastrophic event (i.e. barfing, shitsplosions, etc).

But the very nature of a daycare ensures that the children will get sick. And oh they get sick. Since starting daycare a mere 5.5 weeks ago, Nora's had a stomach thing, a terrible cold, and now she's got a mysterious nighttime cough.

Not only do they get sick, but there are also the unexpected (by me) side consequences of all this wonderful socialization; today Sue told me that the older sibling of one of the toddlers came home with nits. Lice. Head lice. And Sue said that she has to make sure to check all the little ones. Since we are in a relatively small community – which has definite benefits – the threat comes from three sides: Nora's in daycare with this little gal's baby brother (who is so far nit-free) but the poor little one with lice (J) is also in the same class as two of the other little girls who go to Sue's on Mondays and Fridays (V +E). One of those little girls (V) has a baby sister (C) who is with Nora at Sue's every day. And then we move up a generation: the little gal's (J's) father drives in with us some mornings, us being myself and the mother of the two sisters who go to Sue's (V +C).

So this is how it happens. This is the community illness effect. I never realized it until I had kids, but someone said to me "oh yeah, one person sends their kid to daycare sick, and hundreds of people end up catching it" and it's true, it's really true. Take a cold, for instance. You send your kid to daycare sick but maybe you didn't know it yet, maybe it was only a little sniffle when you dropped her off in the morning, but by 5 pm it's a torrent of green snot. That means that even if you keep her home the next few days, the rest of the kids could have already caught it, passed it to their siblings, their parents, classmates, the daycare provider, etc. Meanwhile you're thinking "I'm not sick yet, I can leave her with someone else and go to work" but then oh – by 5 pm you are a wreck, your skin hurts, your head is stuffed up and you have to squint to see clearly. Even if YOU take the next day off, you've likely given it to all of your close coworkers and smeared it all over the phones and keyboards, so there it is. Hundreds of people are sick. It's even worse in diseases with long, contagious incubation periods, like chickenpox.

Argh. It takes a village, but sometimes that village is beseiged by illness and needs to batten down the hatches.

That brings me back around to head lice. I hope to god my Nora doesn't get lice on her sweet little beautiful-smelling head, in her golden silky hair. My (bald) coworker told me I could always just shave off her hair but oh that thought nearly made me cry and cry. No way. Nuh-uh. If I have to buy a gold-plated lice comb and take a week off of work so I can comb her hair 12 hours a day, I will do it, but I will not shave her head. Nor will I dump pesticides all over it. I would rather quarantine her for five years than treat a baby for head lice, so I'm really not too sure what to do at this juncture. I am going to try adding a few drops of tea tree oil to her shampoo and see if that prevents them but that's not really a proven scientific method, I don't think.

My mom tells me neither my brother nor I ever had head lice. I see this as a positive by-product of being kind of a loner – maybe I never got close enough to other kids' heads to catch anything from them. And since my brother and I are 6 years apart, we didn't really stick our heads together much either. Small blessings.

I have to go now. Writing about this is making my head itchy. Tonight I am going to wash and boil everything our heads come into contact with, just in case, and spray my house down with tea tree oil.

Mama’s got a new ride.

2011-09-16T13:44:00.002-05:00

I used to be the kind of momma who drove a pickup truck. I'm not sure what that means exactly, but I just know that it felt kind of cool to hoist the baby into the carseat and take off in our powerful truck, maybe with a bed full of cargo in back for some project or trip or something like that. It felt kind of rough and tumble, safe, powerful and kooky at the same time. Not your average baby-mobile.

Last week a mechanic told me not to invest more money into repairing my truck. This news came at a particularly bad time, as I have recently (as you know) re-entered the work force and started commuting to the city with my girlfriend. We share the driving – two weeks on, two weeks off – and we were just coming on my weeks when the truck noises led me to the mechanic's door.

There followed approximately a day and a half of research, comparison shopping, asking around and scoping out every car on the streets. Hubby and I came up with a list of vehicular requirements which included:

Safety

Cargo space

Freedom from worry (i.e. a new model)

All-wheel or four-wheel drive

Power

Towing capacity (for the fishing boat etc)

Fuel efficiency

And after filtering out all of the too big, too expensive, too weak, too small, and too ugly options, we came up with the idea that we'd go for a Hyundai Tucson.

When we got to the dealership a couple of things happened. Firstly, we looked at the Tucson and realized that the 2012 model is quite a lot like a large Pontiac Vibe, which is what we already drive. The car had been subtly redesigned so that the back end is less boxy, which means the 2012 has a hatchback that is more rounded than straight up-and-down, which means that the upper area of the cargo space is limited. There is no way we'd fit coolers, backpacks, fishing equipment, Nora's porta-crib, bedding and potentially our dog in that back space. If we ever decided to have a second child and the back seat space became occupied, we'd have a pretty hard time fitting our 80-lb Labrador in there let alone all of the necessities for a quick weekend at the cottage.

In the end, we allowed ourselves to be up-sold a bit. Coming in at just a hair over the price of the 2012 AWD Tucson was a 2011 AWD Santa Fe, which had all the cargo space we'd ever need in the interior of a vehicle. They just happened to have one on the lot that they wanted to get rid of (yeah right, I believe nothing) so we were able to negotiate the inclusion of a nifty cargo mat, a gas card, a tow package, four winter tires on rims, and 10 free oil changes.

I picked it up three days ago. It's black. It has bum-warmers in the front seats, and I can control my radio on my steering wheel (which I strangely find much more distracting than doing it the old-fashioned way). If my cellphone has its Bluetooth activated, I will be able to make phone calls simply by speaking loudly into the car. I have a remote lock on my keychain that goes "Woop woop!" so I no longer have to pretend by actually yelling "woop woop!" when I approach my car in parking garages. The seats are comfy and the engine purrs softly. It is AWD and has a v6 engine so it's nice and perky to drive – indeed, this car wants to go fast. Sorry officer! Not my fault. My car wants to go fast.

Now I am a mom with an SUV. I have a ginormous top-of-the-line carseat in the back seat – rear facing, natch – and when I blow-dry my hair and wear my pressed work clothes, and drop my toddler off at daycare with her little lunch baggie of wholesome breakfast food and overpriced bottles, I no longer recognize myself. At some point in the last year I became a full-fledged yuppie without even realizing it, but oh well, I see how it happens. My urge, when choosing a car in which to drive my baby around (and everything else to do with baby, of course), was to get the biggest protective bubble I could possibly find.

Today I wore my black converse sneakers as compensation. I may have to go out and get an edgy haircut and some funky sunglasses to disguise my newfound yuppiedom. I am avoiding Starbucks at all costs.

But I am now a momma with a hot new ride, no doubt about it.

Week Two.

2011-09-06T09:31:00.000-05:00

Back at it, week 2.

This morning I dropped a very-unhappy little Nora off at daycare. She was fine as I unstrapped her carseat - she was even ‘whistling’ at the birds she saw on the power lines (going ‘ooo ooo ooo’ with pursed lips it’s the cutest thing) – and even as we entered Sue’s house. She started giving Sue the stink eye a minute later, and when I handed her over I got the baby chimpanzee clutch and the earfull of protest. When I waved bye-bye and left, I closed the door behind me and listened for screaming, and it was all I could do to keep putting one foot in front of the other and keep walking towards the car.

I just called just now (9:39) and apparently after I left, she sat down and barfed up her breakfast yoghurt, and then was fine. Hm. This is the second time Nora’s been to daycare, and the second time she’s barfed on Sue’s rug. Methinks she’s going to get herself a wee reputation. So not only is she no longer in the totally adorable outfit I put her in this morning (brand new t-shirt, new purple stretchy pants), she’s been changed into the emergency outfit I brought along – the shirt that’s covered in tomato stains that I noticed too late and pink pants that don’t totally fit anymore. Then she spilled water on herself in the highchair and Sue mistook it for a leaking diaper, so she changed her pants into daycare-issue hand-me-downs. My little urchin is now playing happily, dressed like shit, and this seems to be all I can focus on.

Let it go momma, let it go. She’s happy and playing with the other kids. So she doesn’t eat so well three mornings out of the week; she’ll make up for it at lunch and again at dinner, and then eat her fill at Oma’s on Mondays and Fridays. I don’t like the barfing but I’m not surprised; neither of her parents can stuff our bellies immediately after waking up, so why should she? I have to figure out this breakfast thing though. It’s not her favorite meal at the best of times, when we leisurely cruise in for breakfast at 9 a.m., so to expect her to wolf it down at 6:45 is asking a bit much.

What I really can’t take about this whole back to work routine is the mistrust. She now looks at me with a look of mistrust that breaks my heart. It’s a look that says “are you staying with me today, or are you leaving again? Where are you leaving me today?” and I can’t dwell on it as much as I do because it renders me non-functional.

Last week during my many moments of desperation I did all of the circular thinking around this change; I calculated how much it costs me annually to go to work ($12,000, including food, gas, parking, and a wee clothing allowance to be realistic) and figured out that it’s not financially worth quitting. I read a very interesting article about how Dutch women are doing exactly what they want to do, which usually includes working part time and spending the rest of their time being with their families or friends, and the ridiculous feminist hand-wrenching around the issue. I thought about our expenses and our revenues, and whether or not we could make it work on one salary and delay our dream of building a cottage until a time when Nora goes to school and I can re-enter work life with a more clear conscience, but that’s not quite do-able or right either. I considered whether or not my own job could be done from home or part-time (obviously it could, here I am writing this blog entry) but it would never fly with my boss or HR department. While my workplace is friendly, they are remarkably inflexible when it comes to arrangements like that. I thought about having a second child, so I can take another year off and spend it with Nora (and whassisname too, obviously). What my thinking exercise came up with is this: I am going to grow out my hair, so that I can just clip it up every day, and spend my blow-drying time in bed with Nora. There it is: I gained an extra 5 minutes a day and will look 8% crappier. And! I will save money on haircuts.

Which doesn’t solve my main problems, which are thus:

1. I miss Nora. I miss her so powerful much that it’s almost a physical response, like my guts are missing or something really dramatic like that.

2. It feels wrong to drop a one-year-old baby off at someone’s house for the day, as though all three of us are off to our respective locations every day. Like it’s her baby job. I drag her out of bed before she’s really ready and she’s all like “what the hell man?”

3. I have a hard time with the idea that for three days a week, Nora is on someone else’s routine, and ours is out the window. I have worked so hard to set a routine that works, and now it feels all loosey goosey and wrong. I worry about her food intake and her nap timing, and I worry about these things all day long. I try to impress upon Sue the importance of my routine and of jamming food into Nora, but all this barfing is leaving her unconvinced I’m sure.

4. Regarding said routine, I have a really hard time figuring out what to do about breakfast.

What I have to remember is what the Doctor tells me: she’s no longer a tiny baby. I no longer have to count millilitres of formula and tablespoons of food, I have to let her regulate what she wants and trust that she will get enough. I have to let go and realize that she’s big enough to make her own way in the universe a little bit, to hang out with other kids and develop socially in a way that she just doesn’t get by hanging out with me and the dog all day. I don’t want her barking before she can talk, after all. On Thursday she spent the day at daycare with 5 other little ones and on Friday, at Oma’s, she decided to try to walk all day. I also have to think that we avoid a lot of anguish when it comes time to start school, as she’ll already be used to a morning get-up-and-go-somewhere-else routine.

Deep breaths, deep breaths. When I had the baby, it was the most difficult thing I’d ever done in my life. As it turns out, leaving her is a hundred times harder.

Rationalization Exercise

2011-08-31T09:22:00.001-05:00

Benefits of returning to work:

- I can wear nice clothes again. I mean, I could’ve worn my nice clothes while on mat leave, but why bother cleaning barf and dog hair off of them unecessarily?

- I can go to the washroom all by myself again, and take my time. No longer do I have to watch that the baby doesn’t fall headfirst into the bathtub while I’m on the toilet (if you saw me, I’d be sitting there leaning over holding onto the back of her pants), or listen for sickening thuds from the other room.

- Today I wrote a note with a pen and nobody was grabbing it while I was writing. Also, all the keys on this computer are intact because nobody has flicked them off with their little fingers. Yet.

- I ate a portobello sandwich with goat’s cheese on a ciabatta bun for lunch, and someone else made it for me. Disadvantage: it was $8.

- I get to ride with one of my oldest friends. Today we talked about pig slaughtering!

- If I need to buy something, I don’t have to dress two people, carry one out the door while she’ s grabbing my sunglasses off of my head and sticking them into my eyes, buckle her into the carseat, and do the same thing in reverse on the way home. I just grab my wallet and step out of my office for a minute.

- Grown-up talk.

- My mom/daycare lady gets the morning poop.

- Nora eats really well at Oma daycare so I worry a lot less about her intake on these days.

- I don’t have the dog whining at me all the damn time.

- There are some pretty fun people working here. Part of me looks forward to the office craziness and missed all of the gossip.

- They give me a substantial amount of money to be here.

Disadvantages of returning to work:

- 5:30 a.m. wake-up.

- I am expected not to smell badly.

- Public washrooms.

- There will be days when I have to work late, or even travel for short periods. I am not looking forward to those days.

- I feel like I’m handing the parenting of my child over to someone else.

- I am worried that Nora will not be happy at daycare. When I left her there last week she cried and cried, until she fell asleep.

- I have to stay awake all day long, and interacting with humans all day is exhausting. Last night I fell asleep on the couch before 9:00.

- Some colleagues are still annoying after all this time.

- Nora is tired by the time I get home, so I don’t get her at her best. She falls asleep at 7:30 so I really only see her for two and a half hours a day.

- Dear god I miss that child.

Happy Birthday to Us

2011-08-23T11:44:00.002-05:00

Yesterday my little muffin turned one year old.

I can’t explain to you exactly why that had me feeling maudlin all week. Part of me is excited that she’s a big girl now and is becoming more and more self-sufficient, but the rest of me is worried that I’m losing the baby bit by bit. Also, the one-year mark means that all the fun is over in terms of time spent at home with Nora – in a week I have to hit the pavement and get back to work. I feel like it’s the end of it all, even though I know evenings and weekends will be just as fun as they are now, and that we’ll still have plenty of snuggles and playtime.

Another thing about the one-year birthday is that back when I had a tiny baby, like when Nora was four and five months old, it felt like one year was a million miles away. I really thought that by the time she is a year old my worries about feeding, weight gain, all of that would be solved, and I could just sit back and enjoy the fruits of my labours. Not so. Just when I think we’ve got it all figured out, something happens (gastro, teething, general malaise) and we get set back again – like walking in snow: two steps forward, one step back. She still only weighs barely 19 pounds, which I think is just fine but according to the numbers game, she’s on the small side. She has a delicate frame. It is however true that I can now feed her almost anything. The other night, at her birthday party, she kept helping herself to the basket of baguette slices on the coffee table and I think she put back half a loaf without my noticing. She was standing at the table wearing a Hawaiian lei (would not remove it) with hunks of bread hanging out of her mouth, playing her new casio keyboard. She is a funny one, my kid. On her actual birthday hubby and I took her out for lunch and ordered off the kids’ menu for the first time ever – a pita pizza with mozza and sauce, which she liked quite a lot (she ate about 1/5 of it. The dog helped herself to the remains later on).

Anyway, all to say, I guess when you’re a parent you’re never out of the woods. My new thing is making sure she doesn’t fall and hit her head too much. The other day I made a call to the emergency health line (a fabulous service if you are a parent) which went something like this:

“Hi, I’m calling about my one-year old daughter. She fell off of a cooler and hit the back of her head on the electric baseboard heater and I’m wondering if I should be worried about head injuries.”

“Okay, well, is she bleeding?”

“Well, not from her head. You see, about two hours later she was sitting in my knitting basket and as she made to get out, she smacked her face against the leg of my ironing board and bled everywhere. Now she has a fat lip and I think her gum may be cut.”

“Alright (the nurse said slowly while typing, undoubtedly a quick e-mail to Child Protective Services), does she have any bumps or bruises?”

“ Weeeelll (sigh) not from that fall. She also fell while standing at the edge of the sofa, looking at the dog. She just fell over randomly, and hit the corner of the footstool on her temple. So there is a bit of a blue bump there, yeah.”

And on and on. That was one day. Turns out, after four days of carefully watching her, that she likely doesn’t have any brain damage. My intrepid baby is a bit too fast for her slow-witted mommy, and often I will watch helplessly, slowly, as she falls and injures herself right in front of me. The cooler incident happened as I ran upstairs to get a t-shirt. I was gone thirty seconds, and had left her in the back room (the play room, full of her toys) while I bounded upstairs to change. I heard a horrible BANG and then screaming and there was the scene laid out before me: the cooler on its side, Nora laying across the hallway with her arms out to her sides and her head up against the heater, bawling. Man alive. And she doesn’t yet learn from these mistakes, because while she may not climb that particular cooler again, she climbs everything else within range. I am beginning to see some real advantages to having wall-to-wall plush carpeting in one’s home. Hardwood and laminate are not forgiving. The biggest hazard is footie pyjamas – if they don’t have rubber dots on the bottoms of the feet, they are dangerous. Forget the flame retardants in kids’ clothes, just make sure they have rubberized feet.

Nora has a few new quirks. She has decided to be a stylish lady now, and she motors around the house in her sun hat and random necklaces. Yesterday she put on one of my necklaces and draped it around the back of her neck, so hubby did it up, and she wore it all day. We went out for lunch and I didn’t realize why people were kind of giving us the side-eye. I assumed they thought me negligent for ordering my tiny baby a cheese pizza, but really I’m sure it was the large splashy beaded necklace that got their attention. The other night she was wandering around in her pjs, wearing her orange sun hat and her pink heart-shaped glasses. This was really really cute, but not as cute as when she picked up my camera and made as though she was looking through it and taking pictures (upside down). She looked like a damn tourist. Like a crazy lady tourist. I love it. The real irony of it, however, is that I bought the sunhat to use as an actual sun hat, and while she loves wearing it around, she refuses to wear it outside.

Another quirk: if Nora decides she doesn’t want to eat something, she makes like she’s dramatically barfing, then hands it to me quietly. It’s quite funny. She’ll fake-retch, then gingerly pick up the offending item (either off of her t-shirt or the tray of her highchair) and hold it out for me, as if I should now eat it. Then she will not eat another one of its kind in that meal. When Nora is finished eating, she will mechanically hand each bit of food to the dog, which waits eagerly beside the chair. They are perfect for each other because Rosie is very gentle with baby fingers in her big mouth, and Nora finds it hilarious to jam her hand down Rosie’s toothy gullet.

She got a baby dolly for her birthday. I recommended it as a gift idea to my sister-in-law and she came through with the perfect one, though it had this horrible noisemaker inside that sounded like Chewbacca and scared the crap out of Nora. It actually sounded like a baby screaming and then choking to death. So babydoll had its first surgery after Nora went to bed last night. It has a soother attached to its neck, though, which confuses Nora as she’s never had a soother of her own. She tries to suck the doll’s, which is tiny, and the resulting look on her face is like “what the hell?” Yesterday (day 2 with the dolly) she decided dolly was hungry and fed it a bottle. Sometimes via its mouth and sometimes via its eye, but still – genius right?! She likes to hug the dolly and try to wear the doll’s clothes on her own body, like the doll sock that ended up on her toe. It’s watching her do things like that that makes me realize that while she doesn’t yet talk, she is picking up on everything and understands more than we think.

Speaking of talking, we’ve had some successes in this department but also some regression. There was a time when I swore she said “asha” for the cat and “tick” for stick, but now she is focused on making O sounds. She will pucker her face dramatically and go “OOOOOOOOowwwwww” over and over. She said “atcha” again at the cat this morning (the cat’s name is Sasha) so that’s good, but right now she mostly points – points at everything. And is very very good at making herself understood by pointing. She’ll point at the patio door to go outside, so we go out, then she points at the hanging tomato basket, so we walk over to the tomatoes, then she wants to pick all the green ones. I don’t let her and the she screams. Every day. I let her pick the red ones, which she holds tightly in her hand until her grip gets so tight that she pops the tomato, and then she eats it, seeds and juice dripping everywhere.

Anyway, one year old. Fastest year on record. I have enjoyed most of it and the rest of it made me stronger. I am a different person now – more grey hair, sharper reflexes, etc. I am mother to the cutest little monkey around and I could not be more in love.

All Growed Up

2011-08-07T22:19:00.001-05:00

Recently we passed a couple of minor emotional milestones in Nora's continuing progression from baby to toddler. We went to visit Sue, Nora's new daycare provider, to check out the scene and get the ball rolling on paperwork. Sue is a very nice lady from the area whose three girls I used to babysit (they are now aged 26, 29 and 33 – I didn't really babysit that last one per se, she just wasn't old enough to do it herself), and Nora seemed to enjoy being there. Sue's got some fun toys that we don't have, so now I'm off the hook a bit where that's concerned. The other kids were all pretty sweet, though man boys are rough, and I feel pretty good about bringing Nora there three days a week. She will spend Mondays with Oma and Grandpa, Tuesdays to Thursdays with Sue and the gang, and then Fridays with Oma and Grandpa again. She seemed so tiny when I brought her in there to play with the other kids but she keeps up in her way, and found her footing pretty quickly. Sue didn't foresee any problems. I will bring her one more time before heading back to work, and I'll leave her for a few hours to see how it goes. Fingers crossed.

Later on that same afternoon, my good friend came over to take some of our baby things off our hands. She is due in November and we offered up all of Nora's old equipment (the Bumbo, the carseat, the beloved Jolly Jumper, the excersaucer) for the new little guy, with the agreement that if Nora ever gets a baby brother or sister, or cousin even, we will take it back. She also took a good pile of baby clothes, and the process of going through every piece was bittersweet. It felt like so long ago that we used them, yet so recent as well. Some of them are unbelievably tiny, but others look like they still could work today (I know they won't – I bought some new sleepers last week which are already tight in the toes). My friend said she'd write my name in them all but I told her I will remember them, and I will. I will remember every single piece, fondly.

Also in the past week Nora started misbehaving. Up to now she has been a perfect sweet angel. She has a bit of a temper but it passes quickly, and she's usually fairly compliant and reasonable. Lately, however, she has decided she does not want her cereal at breakfast, and spits it out at me. I am not impressed. I reprimand her and let her know it's not acceptable behaviour but I think she thinks she is all hilarious. I hope it's not a trend. Her other misbehaviour is more of a developmental inevitability – she now climbs everything, and is FURIOUS when you pull her off. She can climb her wee chair (she has stood up on it, not a great idea) and the Rubbermaid in the kitchen, and is working on climbing the bread maker and the sofa. She is unstoppable in her determination. It would all be fine, except for the fact that she doesn't know how to get down, and is indignant when you try to teach her to go down backwards. Someday, under closed conditions (i.e. a short distance, pillows on the floor), I'm just going to let her fall to see what happens. Maybe then she'll decide for herself that going down on her tummy is a better idea.

Before supper tonight, I had a headache and lay down for 20 minutes in the hope it would pass without Tylenol. While I was upstairs, apparently Nora and her dad were in the kitchen, where her forehead just reaches the lower sill of the open window. She was hollering nonsense out the window, in the baby version of 'HEY YOU THERE! GET OFF MY LAWN!' - to nobody in particular. Hubby said all the neighbours likely heard it - wee Nora telling them what's what, loudly. Who knows, maybe she was yelling at the cat? Birds? Passing cars? She has found her voice for sure – once she learns to speak English, I'm sure I'm in for an earful. She kind of talks constantly, to me, to Rosie, to the cat, to herself…she's trying it all out for sure.

As of tomorrow I am no longer on maternity leave; I am on vacation. Technically I should be returning to work, because I took a bit of extra time at the beginning of my leave, but I just could not bear to go back just yet. I know it's only another three weeks, but every one of those days is important to me – I need to adjust the daily routine quite a lot before I can subject myself, and Nora, to the new reality. I had to take a bite out of my vacation stockpile, if only to get the landmark first birthday out of the way. Emotionally I am not prepared – either for going back to work OR for my baby to be one year old already.

Anyway, I don't want this post to become maudlin. Before I go back to work, I still look forward to time at the lake, hubby's two-week vacation, a roller derby, a party with some of my favourite people, a wee birthday party for Nora, a possible trip to Montreal with my sister-in-law, a new deck outside of my bedroom, and quality time with my babe.

I am going to wring everything out of this three weeks that I possibly can, before we all have to grow up and get moving.

50 Days

2011-07-12T12:37:00.001-05:00

That's the amount of time I've got left at home with Nora. I am awaiting this deadline with dread, because not only does it mean that I will have to separate from her for the majority of our days, but it means that I have to get my head back into work. It seems unfathomable to me that I am choosing to spend 47.5 hours a week away from her (including travel time), when currently I find it difficult to steal even 5. It seems unbelievable also that I will be expected to jump into work mode, as though this past year never happened. The people with whom I will be interacting won't have a clue what a magical year I just had, and I will resent them for it. It might be immature but mea culpa. Nora is the most important thing in my world, bar none.

I know some mothers who have suggested that in order to maintain sanity it is essential to take breaks from motherhood, to leave the baby with someone once in a while and have some time to yourself. My doctor insists upon it, and other people seem to enjoy it too. I don't. Once in a while I'll do something with my husband that Nora wouldn't appreciate, like downhill skiing or a Soundgarden concert, but during those times I'm picturing her tiny face and her wee clapping hands. I can't wait to see her again. And I have had to go to appointments and left her with my mom throughout this past year, which has been ok. When I'm without her, I walk down the street all preoccupied thinking "I am a mom. I have a baby. I have a baby daughter at home. I am her mom" over and over in my head, as though I have to remind myself that nothing is the same as it used to be. I enjoyed Soundgarden, but we're buying baby earmuffs and bringing Nora to Jane's Addiction.

And I know that it will all be fine, that Baby Nora won't be a wee baby forever and that daycare will be good for her. I know that. She's social and she's going to a trusted place, in the care of a very kindly woman I've known for years, spending her days with the children of my good friend. Parents I trust rave about this daycare and I'm really lucky to have won a spot, even though we're only using three out of five days of it. Nora will have two days with Oma (grandma) and then weekends, holidays and (cough cough) sick days with us. She will learn things by leaps and bounds. She will come home at night with new words and new illnesses and new skills. She will have her own set of friends and her own life, independent from us. She will grow and change from a baby into a little kid, and I will just have to be very observant during the two or three hours a day I will spend with her so I can catch her Nora-ness whenever I can.

I miss her already.

She's become such a little monkey. New skills include: eating (certain foods) by herself without choking, clapping her hands, cruising along the furniture, and dancing. She loves to smack the dog lightly on the nose and giggle and play with her CD player and eat anything she finds on the floor, including dead bumblebees and unidentified plant matter (the bumblebee never made it down the hatch). She has lovely soft golden curls and a very mod short little hairdo. She's long and slim with perfectly-shaped ballerina legs and slender piano fingers. Last week we survived our first serious illness – she went from a cough to a spotty viral rash to high fever for three days to a possible double ear infection to an all-over body and face rash and still the cough. It was a rough ride for about a week there, but now she has emerged unscathed and unmedicated. The bottle of amoxicillin sits unopened in the fridge – my week-long insurance policy. Nothing heavier than Tylenol was required. I'm sure this is all just practice for when she starts daycare and gets every single thing that flies around.

There are certain aspects of going back to work that I am looking forward to. I like my co-workers. I anticipate some fun lunch dates and gossip. I can't wait to go out for lunch – the luxury of being able to choose a different kind of cuisine every day will blow my mind for the first little while, as I've been surviving on lunches of crackers and baby food for the past several months. I look forward to dressing like a grown-up again, and I want to go on a wee shopping spree before my return and pick up some basics, because my wardrobe is a bit played out and I am (ahem) a little bit bigger 'round the midriff. Throughout the process of preparing for these renos, I have accumulated two truckloads of stuff to bring to Value Village – and I am being brutal, so I hope to have a sharp pared-down wardrobe when I hang it all back in my new closet.

I have to keep thinking of the silver linings. And the paycheque, always the paycheque.

This Year’s Loot

2011-06-02T13:14:00.001-05:00

Well Great Glebe Garage Sale, once again you did not disappoint. Hubby and I left Nora with Oma and off we went, without our child, into the wild yonder on a semi-rainy day. We had been worried that the rainy weather (it was sort of drizzly, to be fair) would keep people and sellers away and cast a gloom on the whole adventure but oh no, it was as much of a zoo as every other year.

Over the years we seem to have developed a strategy, which I will generously share with you here: we park the car at the north end of the Glebe, where the quieter more well-heeled houses seem to be, and we work our way in from there. Since it's a bit quieter, the crowds are sparser, parking's a bit easier, and we get at the really interesting finds before the hordes make it over. There are much fewer students in this part of the neighbourhood as well, so the stuff is of a higher calibre. Each year we seem to find our most memorable treasures in this quadrant and since we've just gotten there, the cash flows more readily as well. We're not yet overburdened or fatigued from looking at too much junk. We are fresh and raring to buy. It's so far been a great strategy.

Herewith is a list of this year's finds:

A petite brass antique fire extinguisher. We realized when we got home that it's still full of carbon tetrachloride – a nasty chemical that now needs to be properly disposed of.
A wrought iron triangle and accompanying iron stick – a 'come and git it' bell for the cottage. "Clangalangalang! Dinner's ready!"
An old duck decoy for my brother-in-law.
A game of 'Clue' for my brother-in-law.
A fully-equipped Spirograph set. The pens are dried up but otherwise it's perfect.
A very old Milton Bradley cribbage board.
Very old chicken-and-chicks salt and pepper set.
Very old 'asian couple' salt and pepper set (every year I buy some kitschy old ceramics. I love them).
A wooden-bead-on-curly-wires toy for Nora, overpriced. It's not old – it's from Ikea.
A bag of magnetic letters and numbers for the fridge.
Four very cute little board books for Nora.
Some wonderful wooden pull toys for Nora – a snail and a snake, articulated, and they wiggle when they are pulled. Made in Thailand and very very colourful.
A plum tree.
Chives.
Two little bowls from a chinese food restaurant.
An old (1959) Tintin 'Journal des jeunes'.
A red and black mid-century modern-looking enamel squirrel brooch.
A great little turquoise wooden lamp for Nora's new bedroom (I have a problem – I cannot stop buying lamps).
This neat set of make-your-own paper toys, from Germany. It appeared unused but on closer inspection, I discovered that one of the toys had been made. But there are about 6 or 7 left and they are cool.
A book called "Vivre en fôret" which I bought because of a funny illustration of a man fighting a lynx in his lean-to. It was a quarter.
Hubby bought a jigging rod for ice fishing and a gang troll for lake trout fishing.
Two horrible cookies sold to me by two adorable little girls. Hucksters.
A very old U.S. postal scale. Not sure what we will use it for but it's pretty cute. The crazy lady who sold it to us told us it had crossed two oceans so we spent some time trying to figure that out as we walked away. Did she move to Japan and come back the other way?
A game called "Carrom" (sp?) which we spotted from the truck on the way out.
Hubby bought a fridge magnet that says "Let's Eat Out!" from a church lady.
An old creel.
Two hot dogs from the Boy Scouts (one for each of us).

While garage saling, there are some categories of items that I rarely if ever buy: clothes (it'd have to be something really special), kids' stuff (broke my rule this year for obvious reasons), CDs and cassettes, novels, and appliances. I generally go for the old esoteric things, things that I think have a story behind them, things that would go well in a cottage or in my garden. I usually look at the plants, though it makes me laugh to see the ladies in tilley hats out there trying to foist their invasive perennials on people. I saw so much lily-of-the-valley for sale yesterday it was hilarious; I guess if I could turn a profit from ripping out my weeds I'd do it too.

Every year there's also a category of items that stick out in our minds – the things we almost bought but left behind. This year that list includes a cute set of square teak or teak veneer nesting tables, a crazy-looking houseplant that I've never seen before, a gas-fueled space heater that looked like a space ship, an old framed picture of a saluting boy scout, an offensive sculpture of a very curvy African-american woman with her thong hanging out, from Cuba (hubby wanted this – I used my veto on it), an old gumball machine (it was overpriced at $55), a ceramic vase of a woman's head complete with real dangly earrings, a neat old wall-mounted shelving unit that had a subset of tiny cubbies, a book of pervy obscure symbolist art (Felicien Rops – look him up it's crazy stuff). I am still haunted by things we didn't buy in past years, like the church pews one guy had stuffed into his garage. But that is the glory of the Great Glebe Garage Sale – some other wacko will come up behind you and snap up that stuff, because in a crowd like that there's bound to be someone else with your taste. You have to make fast decisions.

The people-watching at this event is top-notch. Everyone is in a great mood. You overhear hilarious conversations, like the one hubby caught the tail end of "….that's really cool – oh wait, is that blood on it?" and the father I heard warning his children "walk straight ahead. Don't touch ANY ceramics." A guy picked up and tried to buy hubby's travel mug, coffee included. Last year my husband bought a mannequin leg and was the talk of the town, but this year every single person asked him if he was going fishing (raincoat – check. Creel – check. Jigging rod – check). I took one picture – of a guy walking around with a basket on his head, a lady's apron on backwards, carrying a blue baseball bat (I can't figure out how to get it off my phone). I could have taken more. I was nearly run over by a man on a bike carrying cross-country skis and poles.

So Great Glebe Garage Sale, even though it was drizzy weather, you did not disappoint. The people of the Glebe put on a great show and we are sated until next year. À la prochaine.

Spring is in the Air

2011-03-27T22:37:00.001-05:00

Do I write a post with that title every year?

Well it's currently about minus 40, but there is something about the light out there that tells me that true spring is right around the corner. The weight is lifting in all respects: I see a little patch of grass showing through the snow on my lawn and it is green. The light is rich and warm, no longer the harsh blue light of winter. The birds seem happier. And it looks like 1982 at the end of our laneway, as my husband has agreed to discard a number of things from our basement in our first movement towards spring cleaning.

Big plans are, as always, afoot; I was slowed by the baby for a little while but I'm back in fighting form. The only difference is that I am now using my poor husband as my arms and legs where the heavy lifting is concerned.

I have just completed a mini-renovation of my back office. For years it was the zone that everyone had to walk through to get to the bathroom so it received heavy traffic, yet was the one horribly untouched area of our house. We painted one wall and re-did the floors, but left the nasty barnboard siding on the other wall, threw our big ugly desktop computer back there, stacked up a bunch of junk and never really thought about it again. A few years ago I ripped the barnboard off of most of the wall and realized too late that the nails holding it on were 4" long and tore the crap out of the dark-purple drywall underneath. It was a mess. Spider webs covered the ceiling, the baseboards were long gone, there were holes all through the plaster, and we'd for years just stuck thumbtacks all over it indiscriminately.

So over the past month I tore the remaining barnboard off of the arch, patched the holes, painted the ceiling, bought the craziest light fixture off of ebay, painted the wall a lovely deep plum/chocolate colour, bought, painted and installed new baseboards, painted the light fixture pumpkin orange, bought and installed some shelves from Ikea, and bought a bunch of new officey storage containers in bright colours to hide my junk. It looks marvellous if I do say so myself. Makes me want to sit at the desk and play office.

Next up, we are re-doing our basement, switching the bedroom (currently holding my project-type stuff and baby things from other people) and the main room (currently hubby's fishing room). Hubby will install his stuff in the bedroom so the door can be closed to contain the spread of fishing stuff throughout our basement, and the main room will become a kind of rec room where we can do crafts when Nora gets older and hang out when it's too hot outside. As well, it can be used as a spare room when and if people ever visit us again, since there's an adjacent bathroom. We'll see how this goes.

Before all that happens, this week I am converting the space in our kitchen where our wall oven used to be into a proper pantry with six shelves. I can hardly wait. I've bought shelving material, new doors and hardware, but the first step – hopefully completed tomorrow – will be the demolition. I am taking away the cupboards above and below the oven hole and making it a full-height pantry, so we'll see how it goes. Oh I am so excited by the prospect of new storage space you have no idea.

About two weeks ago, Nora and I planted this year's crop of veggie seeds, and now we have a little garden going on in the grow-op – two varieties of tomatoes, hot yellow wax peppers and basil are up. Thai basil didn't happen this year, and I haven't started the squash etc. yet. Before all of this goes into the ground, I am going to till the entire veggie garden – scraggly perennial plants be damned – and add in some compost and peat moss. I do the compost/peat moss thing every couple of years or so and it seems to make zero difference; my soil is still hard clumping clay. I don't know where it all goes.

And then onto the big kahuna of projects. When Nora was born, I laboured under the impression that her crib would stay in our room for the first 6 months, and then she'd move to her room downstairs on the main level. We decorated it and moved the t.v. out and have been hanging out back there all day every day since. However. The reality is, I'd like her to be in our room for a year or so. I still reach over and check her about 4 times a night. After that year is up, I have discovered that I'm just not comfortable having her on a different floor, for a number of reasons: fire, intruders, I can't hear her down there, and it's just too darn far for night terrors, potty training and other after-dark needs. So. We are considering turning our large master bedroom and two large walk-in closets into a smaller master bedroom, small nursery-style bedroom, and powder room, all on the upstairs level. We would have to live with a normal closet (shared! The horror!) along one wall of our room, and we'd lose some circulation and furniture space, but I have been dithering about it for a few weeks and I just don't see another way around it without breaking the bank completely and changing the structure of our house. If we weren't planning on building a cottage next year, we'd probably sell and buy a larger house, but that's not currently in the books as we wouldn't be able to do both financially. Funny thing is, my childhood home is for sale and it would be close to perfect. Its pros include having four bedrooms, two bathrooms, an office, a dining room, a large sunken living room and a separate garage, not to mention the comedic value of buying my childhood home. Its cons include the Vietnamese-run grow-op in the condemned house next door, a crazy woman who I would rather avoid living down the street, and the house possibly being haunted. Hm Hm. I think we're going to just go ahead and live with a smaller bedroom.

Also on the books this spring: mapping out the placement of our cottage and starting to cut down trees, probably fixing up our trailer a little bit, doing a bit of work around the brother-in-law's cottage (planting wildflowers, rescuing his errant dock), pruning the apple trees in front of our house, and getting rid of the old Saturn in our yard. Holy mac we are busy. The advantage is: I am home full-time, so I can manage the gardening and act as project manager for the upstairs reno. People yet-to-be-hired will do the work upstairs. Hubby can do the cottage stuff on the weekends and between fishing trips. Nora is going to learn that her mummy and daddy are active, and there's always some kind of project on the go.

I have one more big project in the wings, but I'm saving that post for another day. Suffice to say, it is a very busy spring for all of us, but now that the grind of winter is over, everything seems doable.

Bad Momma

2011-03-20T22:06:00.003-05:00

The other day I was working on some financial stuff when I looked up to find Nora on her stomach victoriously clenching Rosie's disgusting stuffed soccer ball in both hands. This is one of Rosie's most repulsive toys – it's crusted in dog slobber, the stuffing is slowly being ripped out of about three different holes, and it's been dragged outside, downstairs, upstairs and all through all manner of dirt. I suspect Nora may have had it in her mouth two seconds earlier.

Nora's seven months old now, and she's become pretty mobile. She can't crawl forward yet, but she does a kind of rolling/pivoting/backwards crawling hybrid that manages to get her around the room, including underneath furniture and towards the dog and her gross playthings. I realize that I need to keep a much closer eye on her, even if I think there's nothing around she can get into – I can always be foiled by the dog. It was one more incident that made me give myself a sidelong glance and ask "am I a good momma?"

I know that I am good at a bunch of things that make me a good momma: I give Nora a lot of love. I hold her. I respond to her cries at night – not so quickly that she learns to yank my chain, but quickly enough that she doesn't feel alone. I have thereby managed to get her to sleep from 9 p.m. through to 6:30 a.m. or so. I play with her and talk to her constantly. I am happy to let her roll around on the floor by herself but I step in if she's struggling too hard or falls over – I'm never too far away. Hopefully she knows all of this.

But there are a few things that I need to improve upon. They include:

- I let the dog babysit. I know they say "never leave a baby alone with a dog under any circumstances" but this is Rosie we're talking about. Most of the time she lays on the couch sleepily observing Nora at play, and once in a while she'll come close and lie beside her sort of protectively. The most she's ever done is lick Nora on the face. Nora, on the other hand, is intent on harassing the dog – she screams at her, grabs her paws (the other day I walked in and she had the pad of Rosie's paw in her mouth – they were being watched by their father at that particular moment), pulls chunks of her fur, grabbles at her ears, sticks her wee fingers into her gums and nostrils and other atrocities. She genuinely loves Rosie, and I think Rosie knows it, because the most she ever does is move away or give me a pleading look. I wouldn't ever leave the house or even have a shower with Nora under Rosie's supervision, but I am relatively comfortable leaving the room for a few minutes.

- I am too eager to introduce new foods. Last week, poor Nora had an all-over body rash, probably attributable to the peaches I fed her for the first time two days before. However, when I called the public health line, I admittedly was unable to narrow it down to which new food it could be, because in the past three days I'd given her peaches, blueberries, garlic (to jazz up some boring green beans) and a little bit of my oatmeal (laced with a bit of milk) for the first time. I didn't fess up to the garlic or the oatmeal (who's allergic to oatmeal? Ok milk maybe…), and the nurse said it's unlikely to be the blueberries, so I blame the peaches. Really, I blame myself. I am too excited to feed her new things – I need to reign it in a bit until she's at least 8 months or so. And then hoooo baby watch out. Thai food here we come.

-Nora has received a rather varied musical education, including rap, rock, etc. etc. I had great intentions of playing classical music for her, but the house is gloomy during the day while we're here alone, and I feel like we are a couple of girls who need dance parties. She really does prefer Bob Marley and Lady Gaga, I swear.

-Nora knows the theme music for the Ellen DeGeneres Show, and cranes her head around to the television whenever she hears it. I feel horrible about this but after a long day of singing the itsy-bitsy spider and propping her up so she can play with her toys, and feeding her endlessly, by 6 p.m. we need some outside entertainment. Ellen is family-friendly. I try to read her books during the show but all she wants to do is smack them and rip the pages out, so for now anyway, television it is.

-I let her take naps in my arms. Bad practice, I know. For all my bragging about her night-time sleep, I am horrible at regimenting her daytime sleep. She falls asleep in my arms while I'm feeding her and I have a tendency to just leave her there, because as soon as I put her down in a bed she wakes up and stays up. I use the time to read books or send emails, quietly typing with one hand. I recognize that I have to get her to sleep in a bed for her naps, I do, it's just tempting to snuggle her warm little body while she's not squirming and wrenching herself away from me.

- I put her to sleep with a quilt in her bed. I know I know, but it's tucked tightly at the bottom of the crib and she can't get it loose. If she ever squirms down far enough for it to be a problem, she'll encounter the end of the crib before her head is covered, and it's stiff enough that it will form a little cave with a decent opening. Amazingly though, she squirms upwards every night, so that in the mornings I find her way above her quilt, on her stomach, in her sleep-sack. I added the quilt because there's no heat in our room, and she was waking up a bit chilly. I used to swaddle her but that stopped working around 4 ½ months, so now she has a tight quilt and a light sleep-sack. I also used to worry about her sleeping on her stomach but she flips herself over and seems to be good at it, and also seems most restful that way, so I let her be and I just wake up every 20 minutes from 5 a.m. onward to check on her breathing. Ha ha.

There are other things: I never remember to use a bib so most of her shirts are stained with sweet potato or squash, I stick her in her exersaucer for short periods so I can do housework (even though I swore up and down I'd never have an exersaucer in my house), I let her drink my club soda a couple of times because the resulting face she pulled was hilarious, yet she actually seemed to like it, the little weirdo. I still swear quite a lot. We have taught her to stick out her tongue, blow raspberries and shake her head but she to date can't get the hang of waving hello or goodbye. She kind of waves randomly throughout the day. I don't allow her to explore/play with her food, even though some say it helps them learn to eat. Blech. I rarely put mittens on her because she hates them so much – I prefer to just bundle her up with blankets and hope that the hands stay in there. Once, I forgot to buckle up her car seat (I was horrified to tears when I discovered it, trust me). She has been scratched by the cat – once; the cat was justifiably punished and now avoids the baby. The other day I was standing her up against something and in a moment of distraction, her legs buckled and her head hit the floor ever so slightly, and (drumroll) I let her stay up until 9 or 10 p.m. every night, just because she's fun. Oh my god I'm a monster. Please do not call Child Protective Services on me.

All this being said, she's our kid, the product of the two of us, and we are raising her to be part of our family. Truth be told, we are the kinds of people who eat a lot of different things, watch t.v., swear occasionally (especially her father – hi Mr. Gennyland!), stay up late, have dance parties from time to time, think it's funny to blow raspberries, and have a dog that's a complete undisciplined pain in the butt, but sweet and trustworthy. I make it sound like I am negligent and cavalier about these things but in reality, I am not. I am constantly aware that at all times I am likely screwing something up. However, she remains the sun around which I revolve. We have tiny adventures every day and I believe these are good for her – she will hopefully have a great sense of humour, be confident in the knowledge that we are here for her and love her, be comfortable with and kind to animals, appreciate all kinds of music, and have a well-developed palate. Hopefully she will be the type of kid to roll with the punches. And hopefully I will be the kind of momma to roll with the punches too.

Goodbye Auntie Medela, Farewell Uncle Domperidone

2011-01-23T21:49:00.001-06:00

My darling baby girl is five months old, and I have decided that she will not perish if I feed her formula.

After much arduous back-and-forthing about the guilt, the routine, the difficulty in juggling tiny amounts of milk, the advantage of this over that and blah blah blah and kvetching to everyone I know, I'm finally weaning Nora off of breast milk. Veeeeerrrrrry sloooooowwwwly. As of this writing her diet is still mostly breast milk – I would say 56% if I had to assign a number to it – and the rest is the most easily-tolerated formula with the best probiotics and omegas and junk in it that I could find. She doesn't seem to care. Also, a decent part of her diet is now solid food: rice cereal, banana, squash, avocado, pear, apple, sweet potato and carrot have gone down the chute so far. I jumped the gun a month ago when the public health nurse said "you could start her on purees at 5 months" I took it to mean "start NOW!" so she's been practicing the spoon for a few weeks now. No harm no foul. My doctor said I can experiment and even jump to chicken and other meats if I want, and I do, because feeding her is a lot of fun. I can't wait to share the world of food with Nora.

When I started with our breast milk routine, I diligently pumped 8 times a day under the advice of a lactation consultant and the constant gnawing fear that my milk supply wouldn't come up. Around October I allowed myself to drop one pumping session, usually late at night, so I went to 7 times a day. That fell to 6 in November and before Christmas I was doing it 5 times a day. Now I have bumped down to three, partially for my own comfort. I continued to take Domperidone, not because I believed I had to keep my supply up, but mostly because I paid for the bottle and I will damn well get my money's worth. Today I took my last pill. Three times a day is pretty do-able – I pump in the morning with my coffee while Nora is playing in her crib, around 4 or 5 in the afternoon, and then before bed at 11 p.m. or so. That one's the kicker, because I am spoiled now and I just want to hit the sack. Nora has been sleeping through the night (fingers crossed) so when I crash at 11:45, I'm down until 6:30.

Nora grows a bit slowly. Nothing that I do seems to change this fact. She gains weight equally slowly on breast milk as on formula, though I have to say that since upping the formula amounts, I believe she has started to visibly fill out a bit and her cheeks are much rosier. Her development is not affected by this slow growth in any way, and I actually attribute the snail's pace to the fact that she is, as Dr. Spock describes it, "a wiry, energetic baby." She never. Stops. Moving. When you hold her on your lap she needs to be standing, or wriggles her body around to face whatever noise or action is going on in the house at the time. If I lay her flat on the floor, she can very quickly rotate herself around like a clock or flip over. She grabs everything in sight, including my hair, which she will take hold of and use it to pull my face towards hers, manically going after my nose with her mouth (I call them baby attacks). Her feet are going, her mouth is going, her hands are scratching at everything within reach, and she's chatty to boot. She is a little dickens already, at five months, but little she is – she is not yet as heavy as my cat, who well exceeds Nora's 14 lbs. - though she is tall for a baby, at 26 inches.

I worry about this a lot. The public health nurse who gave her her last shots told me that a baby her age should be drinking between 30 and 32 ounces a day, but I literally can't pour any more than 28 down her throat without resorting to a feeding tube, which I feel is a bit extreme. She's got chubby cheeks and a perfect little body, and she's sharp as a tack, and if I moved around as much as she does I would weigh a lot less as well. Quebec's CLSC system is pretty handy and relatively efficient but they really have to stop measuring all babies according to one standard. I have learned that babies are as different as the adults they become.

So I have decided that since she is a super-healthy baby with no medical issues as yet, she will be as healthy on formula as on breast milk, and perhaps might even pack on a bit more weight so as to shut up the public health nurses. I will not renew my prescription for Domperidone. I will wash my pump parts and sterilize everything and carefully pack them all away into my cute/handy black tote bag, and store them in the basement in case I have another kid or someone else close to me is crazy enough to use it. I will put away my femmebot bra (the black one with the holes cut into it for the pump horns), my copy of "Making More Milk" that I never really read, the extremely optimistic breast milk freezer storage bags I bought the day my doctor first prescribed Domperidone and never once used, and I will once again start wearing nice bras. Ones without clips on them. I will expand my wardrobe to include shirts with difficult buttons, put this whole weird and wacky chapter behind me and not look back. I never want to live with that sickening Medela yellow again.

I have all new equipment now – a can of formula, a thermos of pre-boiled water with a cute "Nora" sticker on it, ice cube trays full of fruit and veggie purees, a box of rice cereal, some tiny wacky Japanese bowls I bought in San Francisco when Nora was the size of a grain of rice, and some delicate little spoons that were used to feed me 35 years ago. Tonight Nora sat in a high chair beside me at dinner, and ate some of my carrots all mashed up. She loved it, and so did I.

Onwards!

On Love

2010-12-26T22:01:00.002-06:00

I have loved a lot of things, and I have loved a few people along the way as well.

I love my mother, because she's my mother, and we are the best of friends.

I love my father, because he's my dad and he's wacky and we're quite a lot alike, and I appreciate his curious mind and the fact that he's usually willing to drop everything to help me out with whatever stupid problem I've got, as long as it's not too mushy in nature.

I love my brother, because I've only got the one sibling and he's a pretty neat guy. He's become a man I'm proud to know.

I love my grandmother, because she's awesome, quite simply. I have a pretty great family all around.

I of course love my husband, because I picked him. He is really quite loveable. We are on this trip together and he's my right-hand man.

And I love Rosie and Sasha, the dog and the cat. There was a time not long ago when Rosie was the baby of the family, and we showered her with it and spoiled her rotten. I loved Loki a whole lot too, as noted in the pages of this blog and on the tattoo on my arm. Loki was sort of my first-born, the first being I was ever solely responsible for.

Not to diminish the love I feel for any of the above people, who are all very important and all in my top ten, but I never really knew what 'love' meant until Nora came along.

Every day I go to bed thinking "well, I loved her more today than I did yesterday." I didn't think it possible but every day there's more. Often I look at her and think "whoops, there I go again" and I'm in deeper and deeper. I never knew what it was to love someone so much that you want to envelope them, to put them in your mouth and carry them around or something. She's like a part of my body, only cuter and I love her more. The intensity of my feelings makes me incredibly vulnerable, as now everything's got way heavier consequences. The pressure to do the best I can by her is immense. Everyone and everything else is getting the shaft because of the love I feel for this 13-pound little girl.

Sometimes she gives me the gears - today for example, she wanted to eat every two hours. It's exhausting but it makes her grow so I do it cheerfully. Over the Christmas celebrations of the past few days she was cranky as all get out, and wailed all evening long for a couple of nights there, including my big Christmas eve dinner. But I don't hold it against her - instead I worry about her wellbeing, and the dinner party can go to hell. I find most babies look kind of repellent when they cry but not Nora, I even find her beautiful when she's bawling. Today she scratched me up in the face with her sharp little talons but I didn't care, I just cheerfully clipped them next time I got a chance. My fault.

She has tiny feet that I love. I put them in my mouth whenever I can. I kiss the back of her neck just because it's warm in there and I can feel her whispy newborn hair tickle my nose. When I change her diaper, I always give her a kiss on the belly, because when her umbilical cord fell off on day seven, the most perfect little bellybutton formed under there. When I carry her to the bathtub I like to stop and take a look at her little butt in the mirror - it is so tiny it fits in my hand. She's the only person alive whose bare ass I like to put in my hand. It is the cutest ever. When she cries, I like to kiss her tears away, because they are warm and salty and they make me sad when they're on her face.

So there it is. I am raw. Sorry for the sentimental post but I am feeling the warm fuzzies tonight.

Now I will go to bed, and tomorrow I will love her even more.

Santa's Sweatshop 2010

2010-12-16T11:58:00.006-06:00

This year I told myself that I would take it easy for Christmas. After all, I have the perfect excuse to rest on my laurels; a four-month-old baby makes it hard to do any heavy-duty crafting or cooking.

However, I am not one to rest on my laurels, and the ambition-creep happened again. I started out with the fact that my husband's family are joining us this Christmas - four older German people - and so that means that Christmas Eve Fun-due is expanded to now accommodate 8. I think it's cheaty to eat store-boughten desserts at Christmas if you have the skills, so right now I've got a pot of blackberry/cassis sauce bubbling on the stove, to top off a plain cheesecake.

Then onto the gifts. I thought I might make my brother-in-law a pair of Christmassy socks, since I had the wool kicking around. Well I had most of the wool kicking around, because I had to have my grandmother send me an emergency stash towards the end of the second sock, which was a production on her end because she had to unwind the ball of yarn to fit it into the mailing envelope. Phew. Then I decided that if he gets a pair of socks, I ought to make my sister-in-law something as well, so I randomly picked a wacky felted hat, since she is kind of wacky (in the best possible way). I have, however, never felted before, so I made it all up as I went along. It ended up being way too big, so my mom had to come over and perform emergency surgery on it. It turned out beautifully and I think she will love it, but phew.

Thank god for the internet and my new laptop, because this year, the UPS man brought my Christmas gifts (he is a smart UPS man, who keeps dog cookies in his pockets). Christmas 2010 is brought to you by Land's End, LL Bean, Amazon, and Lee Valley Tools. I bought maybe five small things in actual bricks-and-mortar stores, mostly Loblaws. I did a little bit of local shopping but I feel that I did badly by the local economy this year. I promise to do better in 2011. Maybe next year I will vow to ONLY shop locally and make things for Christmas.

So now, my gifts are all made, bought, and wrapped, and I've made three kinds of cookies: maple shortbread cookies, sticky toffee bars, and hazlenut lace cookies. I still want to make lemon poppyseed cookies and that may happen tomorrow. Maybe. I have also made a batch of dog cookies, for Rosie to give to her brother. The broth and blackberry sauce are made for Christmas Eve, and I still want to pre-make the crust for the cheesecake, the dipping sauces, and pre-grate the cheese for the appetizer cheese fondue. I also want to whip up a batch of cashew/coconut brittle for my neighbor who can't eat dairy, which must be mucho depressing at Christmas. I made some piney country-style decorations for our entrance this week, and yesterday I went and bought a 10-foot tree which will be erected (hee hee) and decorated this weekend, about which I am very excited. Nora has never seen our giant Christmas tree, and we've set up the jolly jumper nearby so she can bounce away and fill her wee eyeballs with sparkly things.

Why all this psychotic Christmas spirit? Well, for a couple of reasons: number one, it is Nora's first Christmas, and while I am quite certain she will remember none of it, I will and I will tell her about it. Also, I haven't got a lot else going on to fill up my days, so I can focus on/obsess over it. I have also been listening to Christmas music pretty much 24/7 for the past two weeks which really does help. I continue to listen just because I want to hear Band-Aid's Do They Know it's Christmas, which is one of my all-time favorite songs period. I hear it about once every two days - a teaser - but I forget that I actually have it on CD somewhere and so I continue to wade through all the crappy Taylor Swift and the Christmas shoes. It all distracts me from the fact that my truck is very sick and needs many dollars' worth of repairs, I am getting very little sleep, I am still hooked up to the milking machine, and there's something still not-quite-right with my body somehow. But yay! Christmas music!

We have a family cocktail party this coming Sunday and I am on deck to make my famous (not actually mine, The Food Whore's) cheesy artichoke/jalapeno hot dip, and a crudite platter. Then it's on to Christmas Eve. Food food food! Fun-due Christmas eve, then the next morning we go to my mom and dad's for gifties and breakfast, then back there in the evening for turkey dinner. On the 27th we wake up nice and early and drive five hours to my Oma's place for Rietveld family Christmas, which is just the best. Several of my relatives have not yet met Nora so I am excited to make those introductions. I am planning all of her little Christmas outfits like a crazy person. She looks good in red so she's got lots to choose from.

Phew. Once this is over, we will have a few days to spend with the still-visiting Germans, then we settle in for the loooong rest of the winter. We've already bought our ski passes, and we intend to have a once-weekly date night on the slopes (thanks to my mom for babysitting)! I didn't get to ski at all last year so I am really excited, especially since we've already got almost a foot of snow on the ground. Nice fluffy stuff, and it keeps falling and falling. I have to focus on the skiing and not on the fact that Nora hates her snowsuit, so going for walks is no longer fun and hence Rosie spends her days mooning around the house waiting for daddy to come home. Either that or I have to endure the screaming and go for a wintery walk every day.

So Merry Christmas to you and yours, and I hope you are all being very moderate this year. I heard somewhere that people spend on average $600 a person on Christmas, and I wondered who the heck these people are? I think I've spent that much in total, likely less. I like to remind myself that expensive gifts lose their appeal as quickly as cheap gifts, and if I over-spend, the hangover will be tough to deal with. Stay moderate people! I keep pushing for home-made Christmas but that's a lot to ask of the other folks in my clan. Anyway, enjoy yourselves, eat too much, drink your fill (if you're not driving), and tuck in for the rest of this snowy season. My very best to you.

Nora and I have to go watch Elf now.

A Tablespoon of Perspective

2010-11-19T05:04:00.001-06:00

Those of you who know me, well or even not so, probably know that I have spent the last twelve weeks and five days fretting and kvetching about new-parenthood. I can't breastfeed. My baby's not gaining enough weight. I don't do tummy time with her often enough (she hates it). I hate pumping seven times a day – should I go to formula or not, what to do what to do? It has literally been a twelve-weeks and five-days worryfest.

Then the other day I received a dose of perspective; a friend came to visit by surprise, and brought along two other friends, one of whom had with her her fresh eleven-day-old baby. This baby was born at 37 weeks, so technically, it should still have been in the womb. She weighed 5 lbs 14 oz, and was so tiny I didn't even ask to get a clear view of her, let alone hold her. Nora looked like an absolute bruiser by comparison.

I recognized in Amy the look of the brand-new mother. Slightly pale, groggy, a look of absolute shaky disbelief on her face. This trip was her first big outing. She openly said that breastfeeding was difficult, she didn't know what she was doing, she felt uneasy about everything, etc, etc, exactly what I've been harping on about for twelve and a half weeks! Except that this time, I was the experienced one in the room. Yes, breastfeeding didn't work, but I have a great book to recommend. Yes, I'm pumping, it's a shitty routine but whatever; if you need any information on pumping milk just ask. Oh yeah, my baby's 11 lbs, 10 oz now (she's actually hit 12 now). She spent her time smiling at everyone and charming them with her little voice. She was sitting up (assisted) and looking around the room and being a perfect little human. That other baby was so unbelievably tiny that it seemed like Nora should be in preschool by comparison. It felt really strange for me to have the older baby in the room, as I've spent the last three months nearly thinking that my baby's smaller than all the others, the smallest one around, still a fresh newborn. I've been acting as though I'm still in the bubble of new-motherhood when the truth is that I take her out most days, I can casually haul her in and out of the truck and I have no problems managing the feeding/diapering/napping/nighttime routines. The fact of the matter is: she isn't the youngest one in the room. She's no longer newborn – we even have a bin set aside for clothing that no longer fits. Today her new thing was trying to roll over, and she came pretty close, considering. She sucks on her fists all day, and has developed a sense of humour – she can absolutely tell when something is supposed to be funny, and reacts accordingly.

I still spend my day fretting about feeding her, but the issues are different. I'm no longer worried about her basic survival (except I do still listen for her breathing all night). She takes forever to finish her bottles, and sometimes I wonder if she doesn't prefer formula to my breast milk. I resent my pump and the fact that I have to put her down in order to use it. I hate juggling tiny quantities of milk all day and worrying about my pumping schedule. I sometimes wonder if the benefits of breast milk would be outweighed by having a mother who is able to spend four more hours a day paying undivided attention to the baby, rather than being hooked up to a pump or worrying about breast milk production. Having a mother who's a bit more relaxed couldn't hurt. If I do make the switch, I promise to read her more books and feed her the very best solid food when the time comes. I already have squash from my garden pureed and waiting in the freezer.

When they left I felt jubilant. I felt like I'd made it over the hump, and I have. Nora and I are falling in love and making it work and our days are quite pleasant, for the most part. I understand her cries (which are becoming more rare), her patterns, and she sleeps through the night without fail, so I am not suffering whatsoever from lack of sleep. I have learned that I have to stop comparing her to other babies- especially those many months older than her. She is her own little person with her own little quirks, and our relationship and feeding routine is ours alone. Every mother and baby couple is different. I take strength from talking to other mothers, but I can't compare their situations to my own anymore.

The long and short of it is: my baby is doing great and so am I.

Gennyland’s advice for new parents

2010-10-25T04:49:00.001-05:00

When I was pregnant everyone had advice for me. Some of it was great, some of it was pretty commonly-held wisdom, and some of it was completely useless to me, and half of the battle remains figuring out what advice is pertinent to me and my family and my particular situation.

There are some things that everyone will tell you when you're expecting. "Sleep when they sleep!", "Don't worry about your messy house!" they will say, and all of that is well and good but I have more advice now that I've been through nine weeks of parenthood (and am therefore an expert, ha ha). Instead of verbally annoying everyone I know who is expecting, I am getting my yayas out by putting it in my blog. So here goes:

Get a swing or some other kind of hands-free device where you can put your baby down and get some things done. In my case, I have to pump breastmilk after every feeding, and because of the configuration of my pump rig, I unfortunately can't hold the baby at the same time. So she has a little rocking swing at my feet and she falls or stays asleep in there, so that when I'm done pumping I can go clean things up, get something to eat, etc. without her freaking out. If she's awake, she's usually content to look at our bookshelves or at me making faces at her.

Sleep when they sleep but by this I mean: don't put the baby to bed and then stay up watching Saturday Night Live. Because an hour after the show ends, as you've just drifted into a deep sleep, she might be awake and needing your full attention. I learned this the hard way, um, a few times.

Tummy naps are the best Putting baby chest to chest, propping your head up, tucking a small blanket over her back and under your sides (nice and taut) and then rubbing her back until you are both asleep is the nicest thing ever. Just keep your hands on the baby's back to ensure that A) she doesn't roll off and B) she's breathing ok. Make sure her face is unobstructed.

Don't buy too many 0-3 month onesies Especially if your baby is born at the tail end of summer and all of your onesies are summery with short sleeves. You will therefore need to have pants, cardigans, and socks to go with everything. As well, onesies are the go-to gift for nearly everyone, so technically you won't have to buy any at all. Buy sleepers instead – lots of sleepers. Although I guess you'd use a lot of onesies if your baby's born in, say, May. Ignore this advice if your baby was born in spring or you live in a hot climate.

Think two feedings ahead This is particularly important if you are a non-traditional breastfeeder such as myself. I don't rest easy unless I've got her two next meals (or the better part thereof) socked away in the fridge. Also, breast milk can stay out at room temperature for four hours, so it's not a bad idea to finish a feeding and take the next one out of the fridge so it warms up at least a bit. If you are breastfeeding in the traditional sense, it pays to think of where you will be, what you are wearing, and the time it might take to feed so you can plan your day accordingly. Like, don't plan on being at the opera wearing a turtleneck when feeding time approaches, that kind of thing.

Keep your house as tidy as you can because no matter what they say, if you are anything like me, if the baby is fussy and the dog is hyperactive AND there are dust/pet hair tumbleweeds rolling down the hall and fruit flies everywhere from the three overripe apples on the counter, it can send one over the edge. I require some external order to feel any internal order. Tidy when you have the chance or get someone else to do it for you.

Always burp the baby It's tempting to go "oh well she's finished eating, now I can go and get X, Y and Z done" but no sooner do you put her down on her wee play mat when
blaaap out comes the liquid gold you just finished getting into her and then there are tears (yours) and the motherly guilt starts ("how could you DO THIS TO ME?" – I'm kidding) and you feel like oh my god, did the last feeding even count? So burp the baby. It takes a bit of time and effort sometimes but it's very satisfying to hear that wee little belch, and then you are free to go do X, Y and Z. NOTE: if the baby's fast asleep when you finish feeding her, a belch may not be required. Don't rock the boat.

Fix up a station for yourself Perhaps it's more of a nest than a station, but I have a corner of Nora's room set up with a platform rocker (electric blue pleather and wood – I got it from an old nunnery and it was the best $60 I ever spent), her little swing chair, and a small table. In this corner I also have the following essential items: my laptop, my breast pump, the collection of cleaned bottle parts required for feedings, a stash of healthy snacks (a tin of nuts and dried fruit - wheee), paperwork and bills that need to be dealt with, a glass of water, a book for lists, a journal, a portable phone, and my agenda. It's like a little lactation office set up in the baby's room. It makes everything feel very official, and also very contained.

Ask for help Many people offer help before you have a baby – take it. I am fortunate that my mom lives about 3 minutes away, so she's at my place every day helping me with various things: taking the dog out to pee, tidying the living room, holding the baby so I can have a shower, and in the early days she even fed me. If people offer help, think of specific things they could help with and take them up on it. Don't be shy; everybody likes to feel needed.

Spring for the nice bras I bought a stretchy relatively-cheap (but still not exactly free) nursing bra at Thyme maternity and after one washing the elastic of the chest strap was shot. Nursing bras are not real glamorous by nature, but there are nice ones out there, and it pays to have some good support and not feel like a droopy sack of poop all day. Plus, you get milk on them and the milk gets crusty, so you'll need a bunch. Invest in three or four good nursing bras or nursing tank tops and keep them laundered.

That's all the preaching from me this go-around. Maybe sometime soon I'll write about something unrelated to my kid, but for now, this is pretty much all I've got going on.

Stuff you can do in the middle of the night

2010-10-10T05:29:00.001-05:00

Nora is a pretty good sleeper for someone who's less than two months old. However, she still does need to get up a couple of times in the middle of the night to eat, which means, for me, that she eats her bottle (I don't breastfeed in the middle of the night, I am too exhausted and I'm a bit too full if you know what I mean), then I put her back to bed, come back downstairs, and pump for twenty minutes. Usually around 3 a.m., though it can be 2 a.m., 4 a.m., 5 a.m. and even 6 a.m., which I still consider to be the middle of the night. It's usually at 3 or 4 hour intervals, which is tolerable.

I have learned to love this quiet time by myself. I make the best of it. Herewith is a list of fun things you can do in the middle of the night while you're breastfeeding and/or pumping, and if you have a computer handy:

Shop. So far, since Nora was born, I have bought the following items online: this here laptop computer, wedding gifts for two separate cousins, a set of cordless phones (with integrated answering machine! I am so excited), a book, and I keep trying to buy crap on the new Gap Canada website but am having troubles with my password. Probably for the best.
Go on facebook and catch up with friends. All of a sudden I am a prolific commenter. All of my comments happen between 2 and 5 a.m.
Write this here blog. For those of you looking for something to do, write any blog! It's fun and keeps your brain sharp at 4 a.m. But maybe don't hit 'publish' until morning.
Pay your bills. If you don't already do this, sign up for online banking. It's fun to track your money in the middle of the night.
Read a book. Sure why not?
Catch up on celebrity gossip. Apparently Michael Douglas isn't doing so well and that makes me sad for some reason. Stay strong Jack Colton!
Eat. I keep snacks beside my feeding/pumping station and catch up on my eating in the middle of the night, because I often forget during the day. These are healthy snacks, mind you. I'm not scarfing Doritos at 4 a.m. like a big stoner.
Tidy up. Quietly. If you have a nifty hands-free pump like I do, you can fold laundry and put stuff away on tiptoe.
Write lists. You know me, I love lists. In fact, I just wrote 'write lists' on a list. How crazy is that? Anyway, I have written a list of Christmas gifts I'd like to get (we do this in our family), Christmas gifts I'd like to give, things Nora still needs wardrobe-wise, things to do, etc. etc. I have a little book for lists right beside me.
Knit (while pumping with a hands-free pump only).
Get addicted to computer games. For awhile I enjoyed a free trial of 'Bejewelled,' and when I crawled back into bed after all was done I had visions of tiny jewels falling in my brain. Thank god my free trial ended. Now I'm all into computer Mahjong.
Compose lengthy emails that you will either send in the morning, or not.
Catch up on your hand-written correspondence. If you have recently had a baby, you will likely have thank-you cards to write, so this is a good time to get that done.

Anyway the options are almost limitless in this age of computers and other portable electronics. One can get into a lot of trouble at 4 a.m. when left alone in the peace and quiet.

Progress Report

2010-10-07T06:09:00.002-05:00

This week I can say that Nora transitioned from being a tiny scary fragile baby I have to take care of to being my daughter. I can't really describe why or how this happened, but she's six and a half weeks old, her eyes are more open, and she smiles when smiled at. She tracks us when we move from side to side and she reacts when we make funny faces and talk to her in a goofy voice. Her personality is starting to emerge and I hate to say it, but I think she's got more in common with me than with her father. She is a piquant baby, and I think it'll be hard to trick her. She's sharp for someone less than two months old.

One of the things that I have learned in the last few weeks is that the best thing to do when you are taking care of a new baby is to get out of the house. With the baby, I mean. Ha ha. I started walking with a neighbour who has a baby only two months older than Nora, and I have gone out for lunch with friends, and even gone to a breastfeeding clinic in the city, all by my lonesome (with Nora, I mean). It's essential to really own this motherhood thing, without making too big a deal of it. I have had to adopt an attitude of 'yep this is my kid, so what' when I go out. Even while I'm trying to un-wedge the stroller from the back seat of my pickup truck in the pouring rain, I have to just act like everything is perfectly normal. This is my life now. When I go places, I wrestle with a stroller – it's just the way it is. At least my stroller is a pleasure to wrestle.

At said breastfeeding clinic, I learned that I likely don`t have any supply issues with my milk, that maybe I just have to have more stick-to-it-iveness about this whole breastfeeding thing. I have to reduce bottle use (formula was phased out ages ago, these are bottles of breast milk) and ergo rely on the pump less, which would be nice because right now it's 3:49 a.m. and I'm pumping as I write this. Nora does breastfeed, and is rather surprisingly effective at it as well, so I`m going to have to learn to trust that she will tell me when she`s hungry and she`ll take what she needs. We`re going back to the clinic tomorrow just to check progress, latch and do a weigh-in, but things are looking up in terms of breastfeeding. I don`t think she takes vast quantities from me at any one time, but so what if I have to breastfeed her every two hours? This would be more pleasant in warmer weather but whatever, I`ve cranked up the heat. This is no time to conserve.

I had my six-week check up with my doctor today. It was pretty relaxed; my doctor is something of a hippie and generally tries to be extra laid-back with me because she knows that I am something of a hypochondriac (who me?). She wanted to discuss sex and contraception, which I found hilarious, since hello, I had a baby six weeks ago. Six weeks is nothing people! Also I reminded her that it took us four years to conceive this one so perhaps contraception would be wasted on me. She seemed to think I was being foolish but we`ll see. Nora told me she wants a baby brother but at this pace, her dad and I are running more of a military operation than a romantic one.

My doctor was concerned about the baby blues, but in talking to her I realized that this is no longer a concern in my case. The fog lifted at around four weeks and since then, I've just been feeling the regular ol' frustration regarding feeding, lack of sleep, a messy house, and paranoia. No more depression. I'm glad that my case was textbook, that it lifted at four weeks like all of the folks online said it might. I was feeling kind of guilty about it. And recently I have been celebrating the fact that I am so blessed. Several people around me have suffered misfortunes; one girlfriend recently had a third failed IVF and are now talking adoption, a male friend and his wife had to terminate a failing pregnancy, another girlfriend gave birth to her baby by surprise at 28 weeks (both are doing well, but oy vey the baby was 2.7lbs), and a friend of a friend gave birth to a child with a rare genetic disorder who passed away at two months old. I am so blessed, so anytime I feel the baby blues, I have to give my head a shake and realize that my baby is perfect. She might not feed so well from my breast all the time and she's sort of cranky some days, but she's perfect. She doesn't even poop, so she's pretty low-maintenance (she goes about once a week, sometimes twice, which the doctors have assured me is fine). She is utter perfection.

So tomorrow we return to the breastfeeding clinic, and I have started taking a drug to boost my milk supply because I'd really love to be able to stockpile it for times when other people take care of Nora, for mixing with her food after we start on solids, or just for peace of mind. I've seen through the haze enough to get excited about skiing this upcoming winter so we're going to get our passes and try to go one evening per week like we used to, since I missed last year altogether. I've even bought new ski pants. We are so fortunate that my mom and dad live at the bottom of the ski hill, so that it will be easy to drop Nora off and go.

So here's a recent picture of my daughter. She's nearly seven weeks old, and she is my whole life.

Gadgetry

2010-09-26T18:34:00.001-05:00

The other day I received my new laptop in the mail. I have been at home for awhile now – two months to be precise – and I have learned about the powers and dangers of online shopping. A week or so ago, my cousin (also on maternity leave) emailed me to ask would I like to Skype with her that afternoon? Why yes, I would like to Skype. However, I did not have Skype, nor did I have a camera on my old dinosaur of a desktop.

So I promptly went online and bought myself a laptop. This may seem to have been a rash decision at first glance but in fact I'd been thinking of it for some time – my desktop didn't have enough memory to play a game that I'd downloaded, and I wanted to be more mobile and connected in my maternity leave, so I'd been thinking of making the switch a long time ago.

I have since experienced a few frustrations with this new machine that I foolishly hadn't foreseen. For one, my internet connection is dependent on cell phone reception – I have a wireless key – but cell phone reception is no great shakes at my place. Turns out that the best place to get internet reception is actually in the same place as my old desktop so duh, not as mobile as I'd thought. The other frustration is that the old dinosaur came from a 95-year-old man's house, and he'd already installed Microsoft Office etc. So I had Word, Excel, all the other stuff I use regularly, and this one only has a 60-day free trial version. Expect a lot of blog entries for the next 60 days. What my computer does have are a bunch of weird and useless programs that I haven't yet figured out. There are apparently games on here too but I haven't had time to play them yet.

I have a feeling that the next bit of technology to enter our house will be a new t.v. I realized today, as I watched DVD episodes of Flight of the Conchords on my laptop, that our television screen is so blurry that I almost didn't recognize Brett and Jemaine in their crystal-clarity. The computer puts the t.v. to shame. Also tonight I noticed that the lower right-hand corner of our t.v. monitor is green – as in, everything on the screen in that corner goes green. I think the television is almost as old as my little brother so I have no problem replacing it, it's just that we have to amortize all of this technology a bit.

More technology: yesterday I went to town and broke down and bought the super-duper breast pump, as it seems my little gal is a lazy sucker and doesn't really breastfeed (just for snacks), so I pump and feed her breast milk with a bottle. We are still committed to feeding her breast milk, which makes it compliqué for me. Also, this way I know how much she's getting and can obsess over it daily (ok hourly – I have to restrain myself from creating an Excel spreadsheet for it all). I have hopes that this will change someday, but in the meantime, I needed an effective milk-removal system that isn't $80 a month to rent, as who knows how long I'll need to use it? This one is called the Medela Freestyle pump and it claims hands-free mobility. The instructions boast that I will be able to do such activities as read a book, write emails, talk on the phone and other simple tasks and indeed, I am pumping this very minute (does that make you feel weird?) but I would suggest other helpful things I can do while pumping: go to the bathroom, sweep the floor, fold the laundry, and tend to my baby when she barfs all over herself. Thing is, their idea of hands-free isn't exactly simple. I look like I'm wearing a giant rubber rack on my chest, there are so many separate and interlocking parts that assembling and disassembling it each time is a chore. The pump itself sounds like large animals having sex. I need to hide it somewhere or wrap it in a towel or something. The whole thing comes in a "cute tote bag" as the company calls it, which is handy, though the tote bag is black, which is not so cute. I mean, it's handy, so they should call it a "handy tote bag" you know? It's just a black bag. Anyway, I have my own milker. The resale on these things is crazy so I'm not worried about having bought it, and hubby brought up the point that we could always get a goat someday. In the meantime, I may go as Lady Gaga for Halloween or something. Or a dairy cow.

So right now I am wired, on my new laptop, wearing the milking harness of insanity, listening to this pump groaning away and the baby gurgling in her crib. The crappy side of pumping is that I can't hold the baby while I'm doing it, but at least I keep her in close range. She and I are working it out but we are reliant on technology and gadgetry – the pump, the baby swing seat, the crib. We went out yesterday, to the doctor and shopping, and she was a perfect angel but for a not-quite-ten-pound baby, she sure takes up a lot of space. She goes in the carseat, which is mounted onto the stroller (my beloved BOB), with the diaper bag tucked underneath her. It's like a whole caravan, and she kind of disappears in it. When we go for walks, we're either in the carseat-stroller combo or today (because hubby took the stroller to work with him by mistake) she was in the baby carrier, which I also wear around the house. I wear her while cooking dinner, while wandering around the yard, or for 'rock and roll time', where I put on music and sing and dance in the living room (I think it's important for all babies to have rock and roll time). Anyway to my chagrin my house is filling up with baby gear and I'm starting to feel a bit squeezed out, or like I'm cheating somehow. I used to come from the whole "let them play with cardboard boxes and tin cans" school of thought when it came to baby gear but like it was with our dog, it's a slippery slope to just doing whatever you can to avoid rocking the boat. Before we know it Nora will be eating table scraps and sleeping in the bed.

The End Result

2010-09-10T17:42:00.003-05:00

As I write this, I have the most perfectly adorable, cherubic baby sleeping in the next room. Her name is Nora. She’s not named after anyone, although we gave her my mom’s name as her middle name – we both just liked the name ‘Nora.’ It suits her in a weird way, since she popped out of me looking like a wee Irish lass for some reason. She has beautiful smooth white skin, and reddish-blonde hair. Her eyes are of a yet-undetermined colour but I have a strange feeling she’s transitioning into hazel, at 2.5 weeks old. Sometimes they’re blue, sometimes they’re just grey, but today I was struck with hazel so we shall see. And that adorable little round head we saw on the ultrasound weeks and weeks ago? Still adorable and round, and covered in hair. Like, she was born with a mullet. I can’t believe how much hair she’s got – she almost needs a trim already.

The birth was not the smoothest. One goes into such things with a vision of how things are supposed to go, or how one would ideally like things to go, but sometimes shit happens and things go awry and before you know it you’ve ended up with every intervention in the book. Like I was thinking I could manage natural labour. I was wrong. I was expecting labour pains to be like bad menstrual cramps but turns out I had back labour and I do not mess around with my back. The pain started in my tailbone and wrapped its evil tentacles around my torso and turned into a kind of bad menstrual pain, but a menstrual pain that burns in the back, if you can picture that happening every two minutes. I did it from 8 p.m. to 5 a.m. before they said “we want to give you oxytocin because you’re stalled” and I said “give me the epidural first” so here I am at 5:30 a.m. with the monitor strapped to my body, getting an epidural, oxytocin, and then oxygen because my blood pressure dropped quite a bit. I started pushing around 10 a.m. but wee Nora had other ideas; she was cranked to the side and had her head tilted up, and refused to budge. The doctor kept reaching in on every push and trying to turn her but she’d swivel back, so at around 2 p.m., they said “your options are: foreceps or a c-section.” I have already had one abdominal surgery and they are not fun so after a bit of conversation, hubby and I decided on the foreceps. I warned them they’d better not mess up her face, and we proceeded to the operating room, since they intended to move quickly to a c-section if the foreceps didn’t work. They cranked up my epidural, I pushed into nothingness, passed out, and gave birth to my daughter at 2:34 without realizing what had happened. Literally, I’d been dreaming of a medieval village. When I awoke to the operating room and its hysterics, I had no idea where I was or what was going on, just that I had to push and that something was a success. Nora was lying on the warming table, and I had to ask several times how much she weighed (7 lbs, 11oz) and how long she was (21”), and what her APGARs were (8 and 9). They never showed her to me or put her on my chest, just wheeled her to the nursery for tests (she had a wheeze in her chest – hubby accompanied her). I will never ever forgive them for that, in all of my life.

It took them an hour to stitch me back up. Nuff said about that. Then I was onto intravenous antibiotics, due to the nature of my injuries.

Nora survived the foreceps in style. She had a bruised ear, which went away within 3 days. She’s a beauty, and I still marvel at the fact that I produced a blonde (even though hubby is blonde – I am so dark that I thought it impossible that I’d create anything but black-haired spawn).

I spent the next 48 hours in the hospital, being prodded by a cabal of nurses, each of whom had a slightly different technique for forcing my daughter to my breast. By the second night, they were starting to supplement her with formula – I think they caught me at a weak moment. Apparently I did not produce enough colostrum for their liking, and Nora wasn’t latching, so in went the tube with formula. Another unwanted intervention. Because hers was a foreceps delivery, they labeled her a ‘trauma birth’ and so she was forced to feed every 3 hours, whether or not she was sleeping peacefully, whether or not she was hungry. We were both thoroughly rattled by the end of our 48 hours and only barely got discharged, since she’d lost 9 ounces within 48 hours.

Things haven’t been super ducky ever since. There are lots of things that people don’t tell you about having a baby, probably because if they did, fewer people would have them. My own experience is not universal, but from where I stand, there are a number of things that I would have liked to have heard about before going into this. They include:

- For awhile after giving birth, you smell real bad. Like, not to put too fine a point on it, but I sort of smell like fart. I don’t know where it comes from or what, or if it’s hormonal, but I can take a lavender-scented bath and one hour later I once again smell like fart. I blame the baby a lot.

- Sometimes, it’s way too much effort to get dressed. Right now it’s 7:55 p.m. and I’m still in my pyjama pants from last night. Today I have decided not to fight it.

- You get the sweats. As soon as the nurses started making me breastfeed, I would break out in a fierce sweat, and this continued for about a week. Every time the baby cried, I started to sweat. Every time I tried to feed her, I started to sweat. Sweat more than I have ever sweated in my life. Rivers pouring out form under my boobs – that kind of sweat.

- If you breastfeed, or try to breastfeed, you, your child, your furniture and all of your clothes will be covered in breastmilk for awhile. And it’s sticky.

- Some level of depression is apparently unavoidable. If it’s gonna happen, it’s gonna happen. This does not, apparently, make you a terrible mother. But it makes it hard to get anything done.

- Breastfeeding could possibly be the hardest thing you will ever do in your life. For those of you who are into numbers, goals and targets, everyone’s got numbers for you to follow, or else your baby is close to death, apparently: meconium elimination starts within 24 hours (no problem here, she pooped within a few hours of finally being presented to me, and got rid of it all within 36 hours), then 6-8 wet diapers a day (we’ve got that one licked, Nora pisses like nobody’s business), 4 poops per day (this one is an issue for us – Nora likes to keep it to herself), 8 to 12 feedings per day of at least 80 ml per feeding, no longer than 3 hours between feedings (which can be a challenge if you have a sleepy baby), weight gain of 1 oz. a day on average, and your baby must exhibit a nice range of temperaments. Man alive. I thought my regular job was hard. We’ve got most of these ones licked except for the pooping one.

- Not everyone breastfeeds instantly. I have done an informal poll of my mother-friends, and approximately 9 out of 10 of them had some kind of issue to overcome within the first two months, sometimes longer. One friend, who I had assumed had no troubles whatsoever, admitted to me yesterday during the first 9 weeks of her first daughter’s life, she actually had two other friends breastfeed her baby on occasion, just to make sure she was getting something to eat. More people supplement with formula than would let on. I do. Apparently I don’t produce enough milk to feed my child, which makes me personally feel like a failure but that’s another story, and so here I am hooked up to a milker 8 times a day, supplementing with formula, and breaking my balls to feed my child the requisite 80 ml 8x per day so that she will grow the requisite 1 oz per day (she’s now averaging 1.5 to 2 oz per day, the little porker). It’s rough. The temptation is to give in and just give her formula, but I am not ready to do that yet. As long as I’m producing something (and I am producing at least 2/3 of her diet from my boobs) I will give it to her, even if it means pumping it out and feeding her with bottles for the next six months. Maybe. We’ll see – hubby and I are trying to work on our own plan for total breastfeeding domination but we’ll see how it goes. Meantime he keeps pumping me with this terrible fenugreek tea and making me think ‘milky thoughts,’ whatever that means.

- Sleep is precious, but you can be remarkably alert at 4 a.m. when the baby cries. I instantly wake up, pick her up, go downstairs and begin the feeding ritual – within 2 seconds of her first squawk. Then I can go back to bed 45 minutes later and be asleep again within seconds. Also, napping with your baby on your chest is super nice for both of you. I get no more than 3 hours sleep at any given time and aside from a bit of blurred vision (in the hospital I was convinced I was going blind – I could no longer read), I am pretty functional. Relatively speaking.

- Before I gave birth, nobody told me about the squeeze bottle, which every new mother insists became their ‘best friend’. I don’t know if I would have done this if I’d known that a squeeze bottle of warm water would be necessary every time I go to the bathroom.

- You will have a lot of medical professionals breathing down your neck. If you thought you had a lot of appointments before giving birth, wait until you have a baby. Everyone has opinions, everyone has concerns, and everyone wants you to do something new and different. Everyone wants your baby to poop 4 times a day, I have learned. I often find myself wondering how people manage to give birth and successfully raise children in remote parts of the world, away from the purview of doctors and public health nurses wearing too much perfume. Like Hutterites. How do they do it? I’m sure they have all kinds of olde timey wisdom that would come in super handy.

Anyway, that’s enough of a list for now. I’m sure I’ll think of more horrible things to complain about in the days and weeks to come. In the meantime, here is a picture of what makes it all worthwhile, what makes it impossible to quit this job or take shortcuts just because it’s real hard and my body hurts and I’m sad a lot and I can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel on some days. This is why I bounce out of bed at 4 a.m., if not exactly perky, then at least willing. This is my baby daughter Nora.

384 Days

2010-08-09T21:27:00.000-05:00

Well it’s finally here; I’m officially on maternity leave. I’ve been off for about a week and a half already – the first couple of days were sick leave, because I honestly couldn’t function at work on as little sleep as I have been getting, and last week was technically vacation time, so as not to eat into my two-week freebie time from work. Today is my first official day of mommy-hooky. It’s funny how easy it was to unplug. I think it’s because I haven’t really been plugged in for a while now, but the day I walked out of the office I never even really looked back or thought about it too hard. Sorry work, I’ve got bigger things on my plate.

So far it’s been a busy week and a half. I started out with not-so-lofty goals: day one, I was going to go and get a library card. That didn’t pan out. And each following day had a little goal in it, which was either met or exceeded. In the last week and a half I have: been up to the land three times and slept overnight twice, sorted the cupboard under the sink, baked pizza crusts and cookies, had a dinner party for Austrians (who ended up not making it until way after dinner, so it was a BBQ for my brother and his fiancée), built a support for my cucumbers, been shopping, been to the doctor, sorted out my books and separated some for donation to the aforementioned local library, done about 18 loads of laundry, read a book (The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett, a good epic read - I am preparing for the miniseries), started knitting myself a sweater, walked the dog a bunch of times, picked about 4 lbs of wild blackberries (with hubby), and taken about 1.5 naps per day.

I am feeling ok so far. Or rather, I was feeling ok until today, when I started to feel just a bit weird. I can’t describe it, I just feel weird. Super exhausted (easily explained, as I normally wake up at 4 a.m. with killer hip pain and can’t get back to sleep), and I think I have started to have some kind of weird contraction activity. Painless tightening of my tummy, which now feels off and on, as hubby put it, ‘like a turtle shell’. It doesn’t hurt yet so I’m not rushing to the hospital, but it’s a bit of a welcome distraction. I was beginning to think she was altogether too comfy in there.

A couple of weeks ago a wacky doctor thought I was measuring small for my dates, so they ordered a biophysical profile, which is a neat bonus late-term ultrasound where you get to see your baby completely developed. They measure the amniotic fluid, the size of the head and torso, the length of the femur, and a bunch of other stuff, and determine whether you are in fact still being a good hostess for the growing baby. It’s kind of scary – the ultrasound can see through the baby’s skin, so I saw her teeth under her gums – she looked like a scary skull face. I can’t tell you whether or not she’s cute (but she is, I’m pretty sure of it). The profile is scored out of 8, and my gal got an 8. Turns out she’s a decent size – probably over 7 lbs now, at 39 weeks 2 days. She can come out anytime, ‘cause I don’t need a baby bigger than that. When I went to the doctor last time she said I was well on my way dilation/effacement-wise, and that everything looks good for a regular ol’ vaginal birth, so I’m getting rather excited. I am also getting rather huge. This ball I have strapped to my stomach is becoming a load to bear. Where it was once cute, now it’s kind of absurd, as it sticks out at least six inches further than my boobs do. I’ve gained about 18-20 lbs so far, which pleases me as I haven’t been very careful in the last little bit. In fact I’ve been trying to eat lots of dairy fat (ice cream! Cheese!) to fatten up the baby and prepare for breastfeeding, so I hope it’s going to her ass and not mine.

Rosie and I have been spending lots of bonding time together. Today our shared objective was to nap. Neither of us wanted to walk in the heat, so we took a short jaunt down the road until she decided she’d had enough and turned around to come home. She’d been playing hard with her Austrian cousin Dakota for three days straight and I think she intends to sleep for the next three days straight because she’s sure wiped out. We snuggled in the back room, we snuggled in the living room, we snuggled up in the bedroom – we have a real love affair going on. It’s nice that she and I have this time alone together to be cozy, because who knows what will happen in the next few days and weeks. As I write this she’s doing her best impression of a bear skin rug on the living room floor.

So, 384 more days off. Not that I’m counting. My job for the next 384 days is to have a healthy baby, take care to keep her clean, fed, and loved, and to sort out what it means to be a mom. I still find it completely surreal. In case I don’t write again until after the little lady arrives, wish me luck.

Coming Into the Home Stretch

2010-07-14T11:45:00.001-05:00

Today is exactly one month until my projected due date. I'm trusting you all with this information in the knowledge that you know how these things go, and you won't be calling me the evening of August 14 to see what's happening. I've done this to people (sorry Peg) and I'm sure it's really irritating.

Now that I'm a month out, I can see how pregnant ladies get sick of being pregnant. I was enjoying it immensely up until about a week ago, when the weather turned hot and nasty and I had to have an emergency air conditioner installed (thanks mom and dad). I'm pretty sure it saved my life. My next move was going to be spending nights at the office.

I feel large. Stretched. Shocked that there's still a month of growing left in me. When I walk, my lower belly feels uncomfortable, as the 8-or-so pounds of baby business bounces on top of my internal organs. My belly skin is tight like a drum, and I have to remember to moisturize moisturize moisturize because I already have one stretch mark and I don't want more. When the baby moves now, I feel it under my ribs AND on my bladder at the same time. This morning I lay on my back and could clearly feel her head (down, which is good), her curved back, and her bum. She's still pretty tiny (it's all relative) but if she decided to be born right now, I don't know that they'd do much to stop her.

There are some distinct advantages to being very pregnant, however, and as someone who looks for the silver lining in every situation (ha!) I will say that these advantages are:

People open doors for you.
Nobody expects much. Some people are shocked to see me still at work.
You always have an excuse if you don't want to go anywhere or socialize.
You get to have as many naps as you want.
People carry things for you.
Nobody says anything when you eat 3 delicious scones in a row. With jam. Or 5 cupcakes at your baby shower.
There's only a month or so left until you can have a celebratory glass of wine. ONE, people, don't look at me like that. 9 months is a long time.
There are only 10 days left of work (in my case, as of today). After which I can be officially unavailable for comment. Stretchy pants here I come!

Some things from the first trimester have returned: I am really tired. I need to eat often, like, every 3 hours or I feel I may pass out. Heartburn makes me avoid certain foods. But enough with the complaining, in a month or so I'll be a mum and will forget about all of these trivial things, much like I've already forgotten the nasty processes it took to get me into this situation. Pregnancy is pretty fun overall – I highly recommend it. However, ask me again in a month…

The Dog Days

2010-07-05T15:37:00.002-05:00

Have I mentioned lately how much I am in love with my dog?

I took a week off work last week, and while yes, I did have some projects that needed tending to (a craft project I'd been putting off, weeding my garden, baking perfect chocolate chunk cookies to share with small children), mostly I just wanted to spend some quality time with my pooch before the craziness really starts.

Whenever I take a vacation, Rosie is a bit confused for a couple of days. Dad goes off to work but mom's still in her pajamas? Confusing but I'll take it! I realized exactly what Rosie does all day long while we're at work: sleep. Sleep deeply, like, she sleeps the sleep of the dead. We wonder how it is that Rosie has so much energy when we get home at night but man oh man if I slept that deeply for that long, I'd have a fresh pile of energy built up too. She's actually a bit boring during the day. By day 3 or 4 she'd gotten into the routine of having me there, but having me there during the day meant she slept less or more lightly, and so in the evenings she was all floppy and would crawl into the back room for some alone time. That dog can sure sleep.

I was lazy about walking her. It was kind of hot and in the middle of the day the butterflies are out in full force and that makes for a crazy Rosie. She bolts after every one, and if I'm not ready for it, she could easily pull me along with her. It's not so safe and I curse those butterflies, especially after she charged one one day at the end of May and I ended up on all fours at the side of the road, having what I was pretty sure was my first Braxton Hicks contraction. Not good. So I walked her at weird times. She didn't get walked as much but she spent much more time outside and more active time in general so I don't feel bad. Also, it's summer, so last Saturday and this past weekend we were up at the lake, where she runs free and swims all day so her exercise needs are being more than met.

Speaking of the lake, for some reason (and I'm trying to think positively on this one, and not let my brain go to its worst conclusion) we have a bit of a glass problem at our beach. As in, there is several broken bottles' worth of glass shards in the shallow water and washed up on shore. Now, where our beach is located gets all the waves from the lake, but I wouldn't expect shards of glass would travel too far in the water. I'm not sure how long these things have been there, but I'm not impressed. On Saturday afternoon I noticed poor Rosie licking the back of her paw and then saw the blood clouding the water, and saw that the carpal pad of her front left paw was sliced right open. She's lucky it wasn't sliced right off. She bled like a stuck pig, and so I rushed her up the hill (which is fun when you're 8.5 months pregnant) to the trailer, where I brought out my never-used first aid kit and attempted to stem the blood flow and administer first aid. She really didn't like that very much, preferring to lick it herself, so I just tried to keep her quiet until help (hubby) was told what had happened and came to provide back-up. We restrained her and put a bandage around her paw but she didn't like it one bit. The bandage only lasted a couple of hours, after which we were forced to remove it, and she bled all over again.

If we ever find out that someone's been partying at our land, smashing bottles on our beach, or even worse, dumping them there on purpose for some twisted reason, heads are gonna knock, I will tell you. It will not be pretty. Currently there are two adorable small children living up there for the summer and if their feet get cut, after what happened to Rosie, we're going to have to take some action, carefully raking the lake bottom or installing cameras in the trees or something. We combed it with our eyes and found the jagged broken bottom of a bottle, and about 10 decent-sized shards of different bottles, all within child-and-dog wading distance from shore. Nothing is sacred. I feel like we're constantly surrounded by assholes, no matter how peaceful the surroundings may seem. Humans suck.

Anyway, this entry was not supposed to become a treatise on how disgusting humans can be, but rather a love letter to my dog, who is presently laying low in the back room of our house. She went to the vet this morning and came back with a bunch of antibiotics (cream and pills and a shot) and a cone collar to stop her from licking, but frankly she's too tired to lick so the collar is not yet in use. I hate those things, I wish they could just bandage it up.

Pair that with the fireworks that our Austrian friends bought on Saturday and Rosie did not have a stellar day. Fireworks freak her out even if she hears them from a distance. I put her in the trailer before the show began but still, when we came back up afterward, she was laying way under the bed and panting heavily – she panted for about 2 hours before finally falling asleep. Granted, after our relatively small fireworks display the neighbors enjoyed their own, and so the booming went on for about an hour in total, poor thing.

Anyway, the moral of the story is, Rosie is the best dog ever. On Canada Day those wee Austrian kids came over for dinner and were all over Rosie. One would be tugging on her collar to come and play and the other would have her cheeks in his hands making faces at her, and all she did was give me the eyes. The "Mom make it stop" eyes. We'd taken her into Wakefield for the daytime Canada Day activities (no fireworks), so she'd already spent a few hours being freaked out by the parade (in our town, the parade starts with kids on bikes and ends with the big trucks – the garbage truck, fire truck, and a bunch of dump trucks – and they like to blow their air horns down the main drag. Not to mention that the parade also included a motley marching band, some dressed-up goats, a team of sled dogs, a bunch of horses, and other things that make Rosie crazy), the steam train at close range, meeting lots of other dogs, being petted by lots of strangers and small children, eating hamburger remnants and the bottoms of ice cream cones, and just crowds in general. By the time the kids came over she was already bagged and probably at the end of her rope, but she took it all like a pro. She slept for an entire day after that.

Next up we will see how Rosie reacts to having a newborn in the house. In my ideal scenario, she has been staying a couple of days at my brother's with her brother Tonka, and comes home before we do. She has already smelled the baby via a blanket that we somehow send home. When we arrive, we give her a brand new toy (already packed) to distract her and she ignores the baby – maybe she will be freaked out by her crying for a day or two, and curious enough to lick her, but hubby will give her loads of affection and walks and hopefully she won't experience too much disruption. After that, my hope is that she'll get a bit of maternal instinct going and start following us around, protecting the baby, sleeping near the crib, etc. I can see Rosie doing this. She has good instincts and a kind heart so I am not at all worried.

Man, I love my dog.

Bits and bites

2010-06-23T13:48:00.002-05:00

Every conversation I have these days:

"Hey you! How are you doing? When are you due?"

"August."

"Wow, that's coming up. Do you know if it's a boy or a girl?"

"A girl. Hopefully, 'cause you know, otherwise he'll be wearing lots of girlie stuff."

"Wow, great. Any names picked yet?"

"Well, we have a shortlist. Haven't made the final decision."

"What's on the shortlist?"

"There are a bunch, and they keep changing."

"What are some of them?"

"If you ask me again I'm going to shoot you in the knees." (Ok I made up that last part but you get the drift.)

It's getting a bit repetitive. I understand that people are fascinated or feel compelled to discuss life-changing events, but just once I wish someone would ask me something interesting like "what are your strange ailments this week?" or "what crazy nesting things have you done recently?"

So let's talk about something else. We're at a lovely point right now where the bulk of our major summer projects are done. The house is all blue now, the garden is in though kind of completely neglected, brother-in-law's cottage is safely in the hands of Georg the Austrian carpenter and is looking mighty fine, and we have a dock. We haven't really used it much yet, and you can't yet walk onto it from land (we need to build one more little section, but that can wait) but the dock itself is pretty spectacular if I do say so myself. It took us two full weekends to build. The first weekend the weather was crap: we packed the truck to the tits and stacked a ton of wood into our motorboat, on its trailer, and pulled the lot of it up to the lake. We did two loads in the motorboat, from the boat launch to our beach (much easier than walking everything down the hill to the waterfront on our own piece of land). It drizzled most of the day and was windy, but it kept the bugs off of us as we worked. The second day we managed to get one dock almost done (without decking) and the outline of the second piece done. There it sat for a whole week. The following Saturday, we were joined by my mom and dad, and we finished it all off, hooked it together, and just tied it to a tree. The weather was glorious and much fun was had by all. On Sunday, hubby and I went up and transported the weights across the lake in the boat, put the dock into position, anchored it and chained it into place. Then we dove off of it. Apparently pregnant ladies aren't supposed to dive but I took the chance and I think everything's ok – baby still kicks and rolls with the best of 'em so I'm not too worried. I burnt my belly. Here's our dock as it floats today:

This weekend, we will likely attach our temporary ramp, dock ladder, and boat cleats to complete the picture (for now). THEN I will wait on pins and needles until my latest acquisition comes in the mail, which is one of these:

To REALLY complete the picture. Too bad I can't paint a margarita into the frame.

Once that's all done it's all about enjoying it. I have next week off work (I know, decadent eh? To take a week off one month before leaving on a year's mat leave?) so I will probably grab the dog a couple of times and go up there to swim and hang out with Georg and Mrs. Georg and the little Georges, who arrive Monday. Then there are a few weekends in July that we can spend up at the trailer, before the insanity begins.

Speaking of insanity, the writing of this post was just interrupted by a 5.5 magnitude earthquake. Freaky. Time to go!

Fluffing the Nest

2010-06-04T09:16:00.001-05:00

There's a phenomenon in late pregnancy called 'nesting', wherein the mother prepares and fluffs her nest in preparation for the arrival of her little one. Often, this results in psychotic cleaning episodes where a 41-weeks-pregnant woman can be found on a ladder cleaning the upper corners of her bathroom with a toothbrush, or on her hands and knees at the back of a closet, insisting that every piece of dog hair and every single cobweb must be removed from the house before the baby arrives or else everything will be ruined.

I have heard of these psychotic episodes. I am looking forward to them. I enjoy anything that increases my productivity and results in a clean house, so I'm counting on this last-minute spurt of energy to get things done.

However, I didn't really expect that the nesting instinct would kick in as early as it has. I have a low-grade nesting reflex going on right now, wherein I feel like all of my time is being squished through a funnel, or a cone, ending in mid-August when the baby's due to pop. I have counted down my work days (I think I'm at 33 left) and I am acutely aware that I have only 10 weekends until my due date. TEN, people. That is not enough weekends.

It started with the dock. I feel such panic about getting this dock into the water that I lose sleep and right now I have heartburn (may have been the pastry I had for breakfast, but I'll blame the dock). I have planned and re-planned this dock so many times. I have made lists of equipment needed, lists of steps to take, lists of things to pack into the truck. I am over the edge with this dock – just ask dear hubby. Once it's in, I will feel great relief, not only because it'll be done but because finally I'll be able to achieve my vision of sitting in a lounge chair at the END of said dock, soaking up the rays, drinking a cold non-alcoholic beer (Beck's 0.0% - kind of crappy but still) and hopefully relaxing the panic and heartburn that I will inevitably feel when I realize that at that point, there will likely only be EIGHT weekends left. Argh.

Just now I caught myself making another list. This is one of my great skills – my superpower, if you will. I make a mean list and consider them to be something of a hobby. Lists are like my drug – I can't stop myself from making them, and they always make me feel better. This list had the bold title: THINGS TO GET RID OF AND HOW because I truly fear that the house is being sunk by junk, that we have no more room to maneuver, and everywhere I look there's something that I want gone from my sight. I find it incredibly overwhelming – I can't even think about it. I want to hire someone to come in and do a clean sweep jobbie on the place while I'm at work or something, or sitting in a comfy chair barking orders.

I happily completed this list, which I broke down into things that can be thrown out or recycled, things to be tossed during Household Hazardous Waste Day – about which I am disproportionately excited (June 18! Whee!) – things to be donated to the SallyAnn, things that can be placed at the end of the driveway with a 'free to a good home' sign, things to be moved to my brother-in-law's cottage and things to be burned. Next, I flipped over the page and started a new list: CLEAN AND SORT. This fascinating list includes such things as "sort sock drawer again", "hall closet", "iron everything", "cupboard under the phone" and "sort kitchen cupboards."

It was only once I'd completed this list that I realized: holy cow, I am nesting. This is crazy even for me, and I am pretty crazy at the best of times (every weekend starts with a list). I still have two months to go and already I'm hot to sort out my sock drawer – imagine what things will be like come mid-August? Crack out the toothbrushes and stock up on cleanser, because I am well on my way.

One thing's for sure; where I was on the fence about keeping my cleaning ladies (there have been issues, already, two cleanings in. I just think that anyone who cleans the house should scrub our one toilet and dust something, y'know? Not too much to ask), I now believe that I can just dump them. I am going to be productive enough over the next two months that their once-biweekly floor washing will be/has become redundant. I don't need to pay someone to do the stuff that I am likely to re-do at 11 p.m. on a Tuesday night anyway, and with summer's open doors and muddy paws, their effort really makes zero difference.

So, I may have to call in my troops (mom, hubby, misc. friends) to give me a hand at certain points. Someone will have to help me by A) entertaining my need to sort things out, and B) calming me when I get overwhelmed or irrational. Hubby may have to adopt an extra regular chore here and there, and help me pack stuff up and haul stuff to the curb when I need it to be gone. I have only 10 weeks left people! After that, I suspect I will be out of commission.

Which I find terrifying. Ten weeks! (pant pant pant)

Rock Out With Your Dock Out

2010-06-02T16:46:00.002-05:00

After a long day of walking the Glebe, hubby going fishing, swimming in the river with my dog and our new Austrian friend Georg, and partaking of a very loud disco/funk show at the local music hall, Sunday was finally the time to unwrap the bundle of wood that's been sitting in our driveway for a month and get down to business on the dock.

Our plan all along has been to mock-build the dock in our driveway at home, where it's flat and we have electricity, so that once we get it hauled up to the land all we have to do is transport it to the beach and knock it together. I say that so casually. We have a careful plan, which is like the 14^th version of the plan, and have thought out most of the bugs that we could encounter along the way. It's to be two docks actually, two 8 x 12' sections hinged together for two reasons: to provide greater flex in ice breakup and waves, and because finding, handling and transporting 24' boards would be next to impossible.

We set out a bit late on Sunday, so I was cranky as all hell. Seriously, I have adopted the persona of 'cranky pregnant lady' lately. I can't help it. I am pissed off at everyone, it would seem. People who call me on the phone, people who walk in front of me on the sidewalk, people on the elevators. No surprise then that I should be cranky when confronted with a stressful project like this dock. We had visions of getting both sections pre-cut, pre-drilled, hardware pre-installed in one day, but only got one half done, which rankled me. Last night we nearly completed the other half, so I'm doing a bit better.

But holy mackerel is a dock a money pit! I thought we were mostly done with the really expensive stuff, until I added up how many bolts of various types we will need to actually put it together. 64 carriage bolts, 64 lag bolts, miscellaneous other hardware and a whole lotta rope or chain is going to add another $200 to the bill, I'm sure. And then I remembered that we want a ladder too. Not a wooden one , 'cause they always get slimy, but a basic metal dock ladder. Add on another $150.

Anyway, the plan is to finish the bits in the laneway this week, load up the truck (precariously I'm sure) Friday night, and set out early Saturday morning for the lake, stopping for breakfast along the way. We will drive the truck to the lot first, where hubby will collect the tin boat and hook up the motor, then drive it to the boat launch, where I will be waiting with the truck. We will load the wood onto the boat, probably in three loads, strap it down, and drive it (slowly, carefully) to the beach. This will be much simpler than walking everything down the hill, especially considering that I am not so good at walking things down hills anymore.

Once there, we will attempt to 'knock it together'. There are other factors that have to be dealt with (factors like anchors, which I will be making out of two old tires, bent rebar, and cement) and I'm sure other horrible things will pop up, mistakes will be made, swearing will happen, we will fight like cats and dogs (or a cat and a dog, though my cat and dog actually get along very well) and one of us (probably me) will give up at some point and go sit by herself for awhile to blow off steam. Hopefully we will be able to swim. I suspect this could take us up to two full weekends to 'knock together' but we'll see – depends on how much help we've got, and where the energy level's at.

I'll be sure to take pictures. I promise this time.

Oh and as for the Great Glebe Garage Sale? Hubby bought a mannequin leg. He was the talk of the town.

It’s that time of year again.

2010-05-28T16:43:00.001-05:00

The Great Glebe Garage Sale is tomorrow and for some reason, I'm not as excited as I have been in previous years. Maybe it's because I'm nervous about walking for 5 hours straight, or finding myself without access to a bathroom, or because I feel like our house is already on the verge of becoming one of the places featured on that show Hoarders, but I am approaching this GGGS cautiously.

Every year, I have wandered the streets of the Glebe on the last Saturday in May thinking "man, if I was expecting a baby, this place would be mecca." However. I have since changed my tune. Already I'm feeling like the basement is filling up with other peoples' baby stuff, which I've politely been accepting but secretly feel like I really just want to buy all my own stuff new. No offense to any of my generous friends. That's part of the fun of having a baby, after all – buying baby stuff – and finally I'm allowed to. Also, lots of people have given me cute boy things and while I'm open to putting a girl in boys' clothes, there are limits, so I've picked through and found the gender-neutralest ones. Not to mention that I had a baby shower, with one more to come, and people have been so generous buying and making us stuff throughout so we're in really good shape stuff-wise. My kid already dresses better than I do and she's not even born yet.

The list of baby things I might want from the GGGS has now been whittled down, and includes: a cool old (but safe, don't freak out) high chair, infant lifejacket if I see one, interesting kids' books (as always), and maybe some toys like blocks or something classic, for later. As for the rest of the list, I am always looking for things for the garden (interesting pots, bits of kooky metal that I can stick here and there as decoration, etc), things for the future cottage, things to use up at the lake, and plants. Always plants. I'm thinking of planting a whack of different ferns and other large shade plants near the staircase leading into our yard, and sometimes there are interesting ferns to be had at the GGGS. If I see a neat large Persian rug I will also consider it. As well as baskets – I like baskets - and a badminton net and backgammon set.

I may also buy some old stuffed toys for Rosie, so she can toss them around and chew them up and there won't be any tragic loss, and maybe so that I can have a stash for when stuffed toys start coming in for the baby. So far, every stuffed toy that enters the house is highly coveted by Rosie, so that I have to hide them all. She goes mental, as though I'm holding a live partridge or something. Now, when she wants to go for a baby stuffy, I will instead produce a Rosie stuffy and try to teach her the difference between the two. Ha.

Another thing I'm nervous about is carrying stuff around. I guess I'll just bring a backpack and make hubby carry most of the load, since I'm already CARRYING HIS CHILD.

Speaking of said child, she is getting to the size now where her once-adorable little flutters have turned into sharp jabs in the bladder. Yesterday I felt her head through my gut, so now I can give her a solid poke if she hurts me. I'm kidding, I'm not about corporal punishment. But I'd like to figure out how to convince her to shift a bit because right now (at 29 weeks) she's breech. I guess there's lots of time for her to flip still, but my tummy's a bit lopsided as a result. Her wee shoulder blade appears to sit squarely under my bellybutton, which feels hella weird. I also lost two pounds in the past two weeks, which they say is fine since it's been +1,200 degrees outside and I've just sweated it all out, and don't feel like eating when it's so hot. Also I've been really active, gardening, going up to the land, etc. so no surprise, really. I've still gained 15 lbs overall, so all's well.

The garden is another story. Every year I go into it thinking I've got a nice plan, everything will be planted in careful tidy rows, I will employ companion planting to maximize space and harvest, and I will only grow things that we can feasibly eat. And every year that plan gets messed up. I go into the garden in late May with good intentions to turn the soil, work in more earth and compost, take out all the weeds, build up nice straight rows (and mounds for the squash). Then I look around and realize that well, one corner is dominated by rhubarb, the other has two blueberry plants in it that I stuck there last year, the back row's taken up with the garlic I planted in fall, the cilantro's already started occupying the entire central area of the garden, the strawberries have all migrated into the pathways, one whole side has been reclaimed by the lawn, the leeks that I planted about 4 years ago are up again and are STILL not big enough to make one decent soup, and there's mint coming up all over the damn place. And I'm seven months pregnant. I end up not turning the soil for fear of disturbing the things that are perennial to the garden, so I just sort of gamely work in bits of compost here and there where the precious annual plants go (tomatoes, peppers, squash). I try to do it all in one evening because I am impatient, and once I'm in there, the bugs are so bad that I don't bother weeding, I just sort of use the hand-rake to muck up the cracked, hardscrabble earth, yank out some quack grass, and drop a bunch of seeds in a relatively straight row. I pat the rows closed, smack a few mosquitos, and move on to the next seed packet in a frenzied rush to move faster than the blackflies.

I had 23 tomato seedlings in the grow-op. I put them in the garden, and two days later I have 11. My squash seedlings are up, and I put in four jalapeno peppers that I bought (so they have a fighting chance). I did some emergency work on the tomatoes last night so they should make it. I also was pleasantly surprised to find that the broccoli seeds I half-heartedly stuck in around the garlic have all come up and are now healthy-looking three-inch seedlings. Last night I planted cucumbers in and around the cilantro, and zucchini in and around the leeks. I have four basil plants – three regular and one thai – adjacent to the tomatoes, and marigolds throughout. I'll take some photos once things start coming up because frankly, the garden looks like crap right now. This weekend I need to find a rich sunny spot for some watermelon seeds…. Hm hm hm. They may be relegated to a large pot of somesort.

It's been unseasonably warm, so we're tricked into thinking everything's GOT TO GO IN OR ELSE, but really, it's only late May. My pots are all done up on the deck (though the plants are still wee) and most of the garden's in, so I'm in good shape. All I have to do now is weed the perennial garden, plant the ferns and shade plants I'm getting tomorrow at the GGGS, and do some tidying, and then I can just sit back and drink iced tea and gestate.

May Two-Four

2010-05-20T10:49:00.001-05:00

This weekend is the famed May 2-4 long weekend. And boy oh boy am I excited about it. Not for any great particular reason, just that I took Tuesday off so I have a four-day stretch of home-stuff ahead of me.

Saturday we have our day-long prenatal class. Jury's out on how useful this will be, but I want them to tell me A) at what point I'll need to go to the hospital, and B) how to make it hurt a bit less. The rest of the info I've been getting out of the doctors, who have been really helpful. I have a nice hospital, a nice team of doctors (so far, I've only met ¼ of them) and I'm really vocal (haha), so I don't have thousands of questions left.

After that we are picking up an Austrian carpenter at the airport. His name is George and he's being sent here to finish off brother-in-law's cottage, build the kitchen, the stairs, etc. I look forward to meeting him and seeing his work. We'll feed him and then Sunday we'll bring him up there and leave him to it. Perhaps we will get started on our dock while we're up there, and we'll finally bring Rosie up and let her swim to her heart's content – first time this year.

Monday hubby would like to fish, which will be fine as I'm sure I'll appreciate a day to myself by then as well. My plan is to garden: I'm gonna buy all my annuals, fill my pots with soil, and plant plant plant. This weekend everything will go in – the tomatoes (which I will have to harden off in the next couple of days), the squash seeds, bean seeds, nasturtiums, maybe some bok choy, and I might buy some pepper plants too just 'cause I'm stubborn and cannot accept a pepper-free lifestyle. I've already planted some basil (had to buy it – mine never came up) and broccoli, which is tiny but THERE, and the spinach and cilantro are about an inch-and-a-half high. The garden's overrun by mint, and rhubarb, and the garlic seems to be ok as well though I don't know that my second batch is really up yet. Oh, I will plant the potatoes this weekend too. What the heck, the weather's been really warm lately, and we need to get a move on.

Then I have Tuesday. Both days promise to be hot and sunny so who knows what the day will hold for me? There's some stuff in the baby's room that could be finished off, and I'm sure some cleaning to be done (more on this later) but I think I may do arts and crafts that day. Or at least the hottest part of that day. I may also build a little twig fence to hopefully keep the dog out of the perennial garden because she's trampled some of my irises and alliums, and I am not happy about this.

Back to the cleaning; did I mention that I have a cleaning lady now? Two cleaning ladies actually, a mother-daughter team. They came last Thursday for the first time and spent 3 hours moving furniture and cleaning corners of my house that have never been touched by human hands (at least not my human hands). Their rate is reasonable, and they claim they can do the dusting, pet hair removal, bathroom, kitchen and floors in an hour every second week. We still have some boundary issues to work out (for example, they don't have to take out our recycling because hubby is very particular about that, and they don't have to go upstairs) but all in all I am pleased and excited, and it relieves a lot of pressure, arguments and strain on my growing body.

So woooo May 2-4. I hope you all have a cold beer for me.

Working for a Living

2010-05-03T09:08:00.001-05:00

Like many of you out there, I have to work for a living. I wasn't born into ridiculous wealth and I didn't marry dear hubby for his money (just for his looks ha ha. Hi honey!), so unfortunately I have to wake up every morning, get dressed, and haul my sleepy bones to work in order to pay the bills and buy dog food.

Not everyone works. I know some people who are work-averse and other friends who don't need to work, and other friends who are stay-at-home moms who work hard every day but are independent contractors, as it were. I know at least one person for whom work is a luxury, a personal decision, but that is not something that I like to think about. I know a person who claims not to be able to work and is on long-term disability, flying under the radar for years now, healthily enjoying life, milking the system, but that person is not considered a friend of mine.

My job is fairly easy overall. I don't save lives, I don't work in a factory, I'm not an aid worker in a ravaged war-torn country, I don't have to haul dead bodies out of rivers, and I'm not an astronaut. I have a largely administrative job and they pay me well to do it. I sit at a desk all day and type away on a computer that is so slow I want to throw it out the window, but that's a minor frustration really. I complain that my desk chair is uncomfortable or that my desk is messy (jam on the keyboard is lovely, and insidious), but I try to keep it all in check. My phone rings too much, and sometimes I feel like I should have a psychology degree under my belt before I can answer it, but truth be told I rarely pick it up so out of sight out of mind. All this to say, I have complaints, but they are relatively minor.

My colleagues are mostly great. But you don't get to hand-pick your colleagues, so there are some strange ones in the bunch. There are over 200 people working at my office, and it's impossible to expect to be in love with every single one of them. There are some who I avoid like the plague, some who I have never spoken to once in six years, some who I speak to but I don't know why (pleasantries in the bathroom, etc), and some who I am genuinely fond of. Herewith is a list of some types of colleagues in my office, and please, feel free to let me know if you have these types in your office as well:

Stinky Food Man. Every day he opens a can of salmon or tuna and does something to it that makes the entire floor smell like fish. My office is next to the kitchen, and this is unbearable. It's almost as bad as his cohort, Delicious Pastry Man. This is the person who insists on putting waffles or cinnamon buns in the toaster oven to warm them up. I can't decide who's worse. I can't blame either one because food is delicious, and essential, but every day? Really?
The Never-Worker. Where I sit, I see all of the traffic going in and out of the main doors to our floor. It's a constant parade of comings and goings, which is distracting as holy heck, but also kind of informative. I have learned that there are about 3 people on our floor who seem to perpetually be out for coffee or cigarettes. Seriously, over the past week I've been keeping track, and there's one guy who must have a condition wherein he is only be able to sit down for 10 minutes at a time because he's constantly walking to the elevators and back. Coincidentally, most of these folks are nearing retirement.
The VIP. The opposite of the never-worker. This person is always in more of a hurry than you, always busier than you are, always working late, always working weekends, never really friendly, and is always plowing around head-down clacking away on her blackberry. They generally eat lunch after 2 pm. I doubt this person. The days are long and if you're smart, you can organize your workday so that you don't have to come in on Sundays, but hey then you don't get paid time and a half so who's the dummy here? We do the same kind of work. I should practice looking busier. Maybe come in on the weekend to water my plants and surf the web or something.
The Over-Emoter. I'm sure everyone has these. They're generally female, unfortunately, which I feel gives us a bad name as a gender. These are the people who come into your office uninvited, close the door behind them and proceed to get upset about some perceived slight, ending up in tears, expecting your sympathy. Personally, I try to project an air of "you've come to the wrong office sister", but this doesn't always work with the Over-Emoter, who is generally lacking in self-awareness. The Over-Emoter is six times more irritating if they are also The VIP.
Gregarious IT guy. They come to your office to fix your computer and you end up getting into lengthy discussions about your cats, and then all of a sudden they're friending you on facebook.
The Athlete. They come into the office in their bike shorts, sweaty, helmets in hand, recounting tales of great feats performed over the weekend. They have boundless energy and are always planning something very exciting. They wear those little clickity clacky bike shoes (I even have one colleague who wore cross-country ski boots all day this past spring) and are sometimes carrying a wheel, or a snowboard, or some obscure clip for some sport that I have never tried. They generally make me feel bad about myself, without intending to of course.
The Compulsive Emailer. You probably have these in your office and in your family, or in your circle of friends. These are the people who forward you everything. How many times have I seen the same slideshow of baby animals, or animals doing funny things, or animals with inspirational slogans attributed to them? It's funny because I receive so many dirty jokes, yet my brain is a sieve when it comes to re-telling them. You'd think I'd have an encyclopedic repertoire of off-colour jokes by now but alas, they've all gone to waste on me.
The Medicine Cabinet. I know that when I have a headache, there are two people I can go to for relief. When they open up their overhead cabinets, it looks like a pharmacy threw up in it. They have everything from aspirin to allergy pills to pepto-bismol to hand cream to visine to antacids to strange teas to extra-strength prescription painkillers that you could try if you wanted to… I try to be this person, within reason. I keep Tums in my drawer but I end up eating them when things get desperate. I have a lint roller and a stain remover somewhere back there as well, because I have two sheddy pets, and a knack for squirting mustard or coffee all over every white shirt I wear. However, I am nothing compared to the medicine cabinet.
The Loudmouth. This is the person who unfailingly speaks up at meetings, like Horshack from Welcome Back Kotter. They cannot help themselves. You can hear them talking on the phone through the walls, and they often like to stand in the hallway right outside your office engaged in some lively debate about something or other, loudly. Their voice is a couple of decibels higher than anyone else's, causing you to wonder if they are ignorant, hard of hearing, or both. Sometimes they are discussing the hockey game, sometimes they are actually talking about work, but always you want to tell them to shut their trap, because the person on the other end of your phone call can hear every word.
The Compadre. It helps to have a Compadre at work. This is the person you rant to when something goes awry, the person who's usually up for a lunch date or some shopping adventure, the person with whom you share bug-eyes at meetings. The person with whom you can speculate on whether or not your other colleague might be in a cult, or is just losing their marbles. Some people have an opposite-sex Compadre which can also be termed the "work-husband" or "work-wife", but my current Compadre is a gay man. We both like to eat, a lot, and knit, and plan our gardens. The Compadre makes one's work more enjoyable, in general.

These are just some of the 10 types that I have encountered during my short career. I am being relatively diplomatic of course, because there are also the psychos, the jerks, the bullies and the incompetents, but we have those in every walk of life. I wish I could go into detail about the really harmlessly crazy ones at my office, but what if they read this blog one day? They'd definitely know who they are.

Being as it is now May, I will only enjoy the companionship of these folks for another three months. Minus three days. I won't miss them at all (except maybe my Compadres) but that's because I really look forward to stepping back and out of office life for a year. My brain totally checked out about a month ago, I'm sad to report, so I'm counting the days (62) until I say farewell to Stinky Food Man, the Neverworker, the VIP, the OverEmoter, my IT guy, my Medicine Cabinet, the E-mailer (though presumably this one could still get through to me), the Athlete, the Loudmouth and my Compadre, who doesn't have a car so won't be able to come and regale me in person with tales of crazy coworkers and injustices. No, I won't miss these people – I know they or someone like them will be there when I return. I probably won't visit either, as people sometimes do when they have a baby, parading them up and down the hallways. The office is no place for an infant. She'll have plenty of exposure to these wacky people in her own career, I'm sure.

Being Pregnant is Fun

2010-04-20T12:34:00.004-05:00

I know from experience that reading blogs written by pregnant ladies is really tedious. Occasionally you find a good one but most of them are saccharine and a bit self-involved, and usually involve a lot of exclamation marks. So bear with me here, because truthfully, beyond the many many projects that hubby and I have on the go (which I've already gone on about ad nauseum), being pregnant is really the major task I'm doing right now, and I am rather self-involved to begin with.

Gestating a human is an interesting thing. For those of you who have not done it, it takes awhile to get used to the idea that there's someone living inside your stomach. Someone who has hair. Speaking as a person who for years thought that she might never have a person living inside her stomach, who kind of convinced herself that it is OTHER people who get to do all the gestating, it is a totally alien experience. You already know all the major parts from the movies – morning sickness can be a bitch (but not for everyone!), you gain weight, your ankles get swollen, your boobs get big, etc etc., but there are other things that happen to your body that, wisely, nobody really mentions until you're in the middle of it.

Herewith, I am going to list all of the little observances that I've made over the last five-and-a-half months, so that all of you who are newly pregnant or thinking of doing it are forewarned. Those of you who are not interested – this is a long one so you may want to just skip it.

You smell. Nobody told me, nor did I read it in any of my pink-and-blue baby books, that when you are pregnant you smell like a farm animal. Honestly, I get up, take a shower, put on deodorant, get dressed, drive to work, take off my coat, and already my armpits smell like the inside of a bellybutton. Also I sweat a lot, even in mid-winter. Consequently I spend a lot of time at work sneaking sniffs of my armpits to make sure I'm not offensive.
Your feet hurt. I guess this is a relatively common complaint, but I just thought it would happen much later on in pregnancy. Not so. Even wearing my comfortable sensible nun-shoes, the bottoms of my feet feel all prickly at the end of the day and I've acquired a limp. I blame it on the extra 10 lbs I'm carrying around. My dogs can start barking after a day of sitting.
People want to touch you. I hereby apologize to every pregnant woman whose belly I've ever touched without invitation. This is a natural yet off-putting reflex, and it's not until it happened to me that I realized how weird it is. It happened early on, so my belly wasn't even sticking out, and I thought to myself "under no other circumstance would a colleague that I hardly know put her hand on my stomach. " Ok, maybe in an emergency CPR-type situation, but still – weird. Why is this considered weird you ask? Well, because your stomach is awfully close to your lady business, frankly, and your boobs, which already feel large. It's where I breathe, and where my bowels live. It's alive. Call me an introvert or whatever but please, unless you're a friend or family, get your hands away from my body in general. It's nobody's body but mine (and maybe my husband's, and definitely my baby's).
You aren't infinitely hungry, just immediately hungry. When they recently aired (and re-aired) the episode of "The Office" where Pam and Jim had their baby, one element of it struck me as wrong. Pam and Kevin are shown sharing large meals together in the lunch room – Kevin is excited that finally someone wants to eat as much as he does, so he prepares all these elaborate meals for the two of them. Pam is about to give birth any minute. This felt wrong to me, as I am finding that I can't actually eat large portions of food*, and I imagine this will become truer as time passes and my stomach gets compressed. The stereotype of the pregnant woman who wants to eat everything under the sun just doesn't apply to me. I want to eat certain things*, in moderation*, or a sequence of lots of little things. The thing that I notice most is: when I'm hungry, I don't get hunger pangs. I need to eat IMMEDIATELY OR I MIGHT DIE. There's no grey zone between not-hungry and starving. Consequently, I find dinnertime difficult, because I get home hungry, have to eat a little something, then I'm satisfied for the time being and not really into cooking or eating a big meal. *Except poutine, in which they do not make a large enough size.
Sometimes you are blocked up, and sometimes you are not. And I don't mean your nose. Drink lots of water, but also, be prepared if things start to go a bit too fast. Anything can happen, really.
Your brain shuts off. I have described before how dumb I was for a week or so earlier in my pregnancy. They say that 'mommy brain' is a myth, but frankly, I find it's challenging me. After some analysis (highly scientific of course) I've deduced that I'm just distracted all the time. I have a lot to think about. Perhaps my brain has just switched gears rather than shut off altogether. For example, this morning I found myself thinking about my future moody pre-teen daughter – where will we put her desk? What if she wants to hang up posters of teenaged celebrities who I don't find poster-worthy? What if she becomes a Justin Bieber fan (or whatever construct the 2020 version of Justin Bieber will be?) What IS a Justin Bieber and how do I keep it out of my house? You see, there are lots of things to think about. Work is kind of on the back burner – sorry work, I'm still doing my job, but I'm foggy in the head a lot, as I obviously have larger issues looming (see Bieber, Justin). As a side note: Sorry mom and dad. You were so very patient between the years of, say, 1988 and 1998. I owe you big time.
Sleep is an issue. They say it prepares you for becoming a new parent, but frankly, when I'm a new parent I won't have to go to work early in the morning all fresh and groomed and thinky. Trying to concentrate when you're up, flip-flopping around, from 3 a.m. to 6 a.m. (because I fall asleep 20 minutes before the alarm goes off), is a bit rough. Seeming enthusiastic at meetings becomes an impossibility. For about a month there, I would have given my right arm to sleep through the night. I understand that this will get worse, but like I said, while on mat leave I intend to wander around the house all day in sweatpants and watch a lot of daytime television. The issue is that I discovered I am actually a back-sleeper, and they (the books, doctors, etc) advise you not only to NOT sleep on your back, but to actually try to sleep on your left side. For me, this means facing my back-sleeping snoring husband, who doesn't always have a great sense of where in the bed he is positioned while asleep (sorry hubby – it's natural, but true). Also, have you ever tried maintaining one certain position through the night? It's near impossible unless you're in traction or something. I bought a long body pillow, which now lives in the middle of the bed where I can put it between my knees and prop it under my belly, and it seems to have helped. Either that or I'm just getting used to the sleeplessness. Not sure. I often wake up with it on top of me so the jury's out on the body pillow.
Everyone who has ever had a child has advice for you. How many times in the past 5 months have I had a conversation that went something like this:
"hey! Wow! So how are you feeling?"
"well, I feel pretty great. I wish I could sleep through the night, but otherwise, pretty great."
"oooh hoho hooo just you wait."
Then the person proceeds to rattle off all of the parts of parenthood that I will hate, then makes suggestions for where my baby should sleep, how I should/will treat my dog once the baby arrives, what exercises I should be doing, where I should shop, what I should buy, what I shouldn't bother buying, and what I should do once I go back to work. A lot of advice is appreciated and/or solicited – as in, I ask my experienced friends lots of annoying questions – but a lot of it is just strangers talkin' smack about my kid, you know?
I also find it funny when people tell me how wonderful my hair looks, since my hair looks wonderful because (a) it's a weekday – readers here have all seen my weekend hair, (b) I just had it cut, and (c) I don't put any crap in it, from dye to gel. Honestly, it feels no thicker and looks no shinier than it did before, but everyone tells me "oh your hair looks so wonderful! Just you wait…It will aaalll fall out." These are not compliments people!
Maternity clothes are either ugly, expensive, hard to come by, or all three. Awhile ago I found myself at Thyme Maternity buying a pair of black pants of such terrible quality that I would never have even touched them before becoming pregnant. Being between a rock and a hard place (i.e. I have to go to work every day, and pantslessness is not yet an option) I shelled out $69 for these cheap pieces of crap. I washed them once (cold water, hung to dry) and now they are charcoal grey pants. The overwhelming majority of maternity tops are made of stretchy polyester which, if you read point #1 above, you will deduce is not really something I want to wear. Also, a lot of maternity tops are just plain hideous – it's like they were made of leftover fabric from last season that nobody wanted for anything else. The styles are not exactly cutting edge either – awhile ago I was shopping with my pregnant friend Anne when she said "why are these clothes all designed to make me look virginal? I am very obviously not a virgin." I have been fortunate that my mom is a sewing wizard and has made me a lot of nice stuff, and also that the style these days leans towards long stretchy tops, so I've gotten away with looking decent so far, but man, those maternity stores have you by the cahones. There are 0 maternity stores at the mall downtown in my city. I made the mistake the other day of buying a new bra at Thyme, which cost $45, but then got home and realized WAIT A MINUTE THIS IS JUST A NORMAL BRA IN A LARGER SIZE. So the bra will be going back to the store, and I will be shopping for larger sizes at Winners, because Gennyland pays no more than 20 smackers for lingerie. I'm practical!
You don't have a period, which is awesome, but you are also incontinent. Hee hee. I went to the doctor last week concerned that I was leaking amniotic fluid because there was a lot of liquid in my nether regions, but was told that nope, nothing to worry about, I was just sitting in my office peeing myself all day. You win some, you lose some.
Your stomach can take quite a lot of abuse. Last night I was laying on the couch with my feet up when Rosie decided to grab a log out of the firewood pile, hop up on top of me, and chew it to pieces. I shifted a bit, because it was actually kind of uncomfortable (her elbow was in a rather personal area), and then realized that the little thump thump thump I was feeling was the baby kicking Rosie to get off. Literally, my fetus was kicking my dog, THROUGH my stomach.
My dad once got mad at me because I was poking my belly, trying to make it kick, but I had to remind him that the baby's tucked behind: my skin, close to an inch of fat (let's not kid ourselves here, may be more than an inch), my uterine muscle (which, by the time I give birth, will itself weigh 2 lbs), the wall of the amniotic sac, a bunch of amniotic fluid.

So my gentle pokes don't bother her. But having a 67 lb Labrador retriever plop on top of her, chewing a log, really pisses her off.

12. The internet is evil My friend Dawn has suggested that perhaps I need to put a child protection-style filter on my google, because every single thing you look up on the internet while pregnant immediately leads to a miscarriage, preterm labour, or birth defects. At the same time there is a lack of useful information on there – for example, the other day I was curious as to where my organs have relocated themselves now that my uterus is in charge. I image-googled "pregnant diagram torso" and "diagram pregnancy organs" and "anatomy pregnant woman" and what I came up with looked like it was drawn sometime in the 12^th century, by monks. I learned that my bowels are now somewhere at my sides and behind my uterus, and that my once-proud bladder is quickly becoming a pathetic little pancake (see point number 10), but it took some figuring out to come up with that information. Also, that it will all lead to a miscarriage, of course. Just yesterday, after a particularly bad day of back pain that kind of radiated down the backs of my legs (an obvious mechanical issue), I learned that someone had that once and a week later went into premature labour caused, obviously, by her sore tailbone "so u bettr get that checked right away by ur dr!!!!". Or that my tailbone's broken or infected. Or that I might need back surgery. Nobody told me that if I just went home and put my feet up and slept in a different position it would get better in two days.

Phew. I've been complaining for 4 pages now. I say all this because the reality of being pregnant is somewhat different that I'd imagined it to be, all of those years. All of these things distract from the real craziness going on inside. Once in a while, I will still lean over to my hubby with my eyes bugged out and go "Holy shit. Holy shit Mr. Gennyland, I've got a person in me! I've got a tiny person with eyeballs and hair! I'm, like, NEVER ALONE" and I don't think that will go away. I have often, over the course of the last 5 months, imagined what it will be like when I meet that little person, touch her hair and kiss her eyes and count her fingers and be able to say "look what I made in my stomach!" There I go with the exclamation marks.

Progress Report: Spring 2010

2010-04-16T15:36:00.003-05:00

Although I'v e been relatively quiet lately, progress has been made on our many spring projects. I know you are burning with curiosity to know, for example, whether or not we have yet built a dock, and how my seedlings are coming along.

Way back when, on Easter weekend, it got really hot. We headed up to the land on the Friday to see what the damage to our trailer was after the winter, since we'd meant to build a little shelter over it but never got around to it. When I opened the door, it smelled no different than if we'd been there the weekend before, though it was filled with kayaks and a bunch of mouse poo. Not an excessive amount, but I can see that one or two mice had used it as their private apartment for the winter. There is one area, below a window frame, that sustained some water damage and probably began to mold, but I think it's an easy repair job, if we even bother doing it at all. I think we may just plug the hole and call it a day.

We also plotted out a spot for our dock. It won't sit right smack in front of our cottage, because right smack in front of our cottage (future cottage) is our beach, and we don't want to lose beach space, especially not with a toddler or two in our future. Also the water is quite shallow there. So, the dock will be way off to the right of our cottage view, and we may not even catch a clear glimpse of it through the trees. In its future spot, the water drops down a bit more steeply, so we will actually have something to dive into without fear of whacking our heads on the bottom of the lake.

Speaking of the dock, hey docks aren't cheap are they? I thought we were being clever building it ourselves, but by the time we purchased the floats ($1600), the hardware ($500) and the wood ($1000) this is not an inexpensive enterprise. We're not screwing around with it though – we bought the right stuff for all, because this is a major investment and we don't want to be doing repairs constantly or jerry-rigging things. It will be built using real black plastic dock floats, proper galvanized gigantic heavy-duty hardware, and cedar (western red and local white). Because our spot is so shallow, and because we want the dock to be a place where groups of people can hang out and have a good time, it's not a tiny dock either – it will be two 8x12-foot sections, hinged together (because who can maneuver an 8x24 dock into place?), plus an 8-foot long ramp (2 of those feet are on land). This dock will be 8 feet wide, and about 30 feet long, all-in. No wonder it is so costly. Anyway, soon we'll have the wood at our place and we're going to lay it all out according to our plan, mark it all up, pre-drill what we can, and figure out all the possible glitches before we get on-site, where the terrain is steep and there's no power save for what our tiny generator can produce (one tool at a time).

Also of note, and also using our 'money cannon' as my hubby likes to call it (as in "ok whatever. Load up the money cannon and fire.") We recently had new eavestrough and sofit installed on the house and I must be getting old because I was inordinately excited by it. And it actually came in under budget for once – I was thrilled. Next, our trusty handyman Stuart is coming to FINISH the siding on our house. I never want to see another piece of blue siding again. The three walls to be done are all high up, and I can no longer negotiate a ladder, so Stuart will do us the honours next week. I am also excited for this, probably way too excited. I can't wait until the damn house is finished. I'm tired of describing it as "mostly blue, but with some green walls, and the windows are mostly red but some are still white…"

Aside from all this, we moved the living room furniture around in anticipation of the baby's arrival and the moving of the t.v. from the back bedroom into the living room. Of course this will necessitate bringing in an electrician to fiddle with some wiring and install a new plug, so there's light over our couch, but whatever. The money cannon's getting a good workout this year, and things will finally be done for awhile.

The seedlings must be coming up by now, because I planted them like two weeks ago and they've been on timers ever since. I will check them tonight. I planted three varieties of tomatoes and hot cayenne peppers, so this weekend I'll put in a bunch of basil. I am a bit pissed off because my garlic started to sprout in the garden, but I have only about 5 heads – I think something ate it over the winter or in the fall. I think I may try to stick some more in while the weather's still chilly, for a bit of a later crop. I have to source some sweet potato seedlings/seed potatoes (however they grow) because I want to plant them up at the land, where on Easter weekend I cleared a spot (with a BBQ fork – I was unprepared) and planted a whole whack of onions. I have high hopes for my cottage garden.

Everything else in the garden is coming up gangbusters. It's been an early spring (probably everywhere) so things shot up early, and then stalled a bit when the weather cooled. But still, the apple trees are in bud, and the pear tree that got knocked over by Mr. Plow this winter (root ball and all, and stuck under a snowbank, so nothing even got bent) is happily replanted and growing, I believe.

We had a baby shower thrown in our honour last weekend. It was early (I was only 22 weeks) but still, it was really lovely to be spoiled rotten by our friends. We are lucky. Baby equipment is well in-hand – in fact I am off after this writing to pick up an infant car seat from my good friend Anne, who bought it last August for her baby, who was large and grew out of it quickly. The crib has been ordered and is on its way, and soon we will go and get that stroller that I've been eyeing. I officially need no more baby onesies in 0-3 month size, since I went mad and bought everything tiny that was cute and caught my eye. Our baby will be pantsless, but decked out in consistently adorable onesies. Ah well, she'll be born in August. She won't need pants for a month or two. I set up a baby registry at Babies R Us but I think I stuck a bunch of onesies on there as well because I lack control, apparently.

The belly's grown too. I'm not enormous – I am not a large pregnant woman, as it turns out. I am showing but people still give me a confused look when they see me, in certain outfits. I haven't gained all that much weight (maybe 10 lbs so far?), I still have whatever waist I used to have (not much of one to start with) and thanks to my mom, I've been dressing well. I haven't gotten sloppy yet, though I guess there's lots of time for that this summer, when the weather turns hot. I had glimpses of that on Easter weekend, when I had to dig out some horrible old shorts that were largish and fasten them with a hair elastic around the top button. It was humbling, to say the least. Mama's gotta take a trip to find some maternity shorts, and probably maternity yoga pants too, because soon my old yoga pants will no longer cut it. Here is anonymous photographic evidence:

This is long, so I will end it here. I will write again and post pictures as I promised ages ago.

Things I'm Going to Do This Weekend

2010-04-01T15:16:00.003-05:00

The following is a list of things I am going to do this lovely four-day weekend:

Go up to the land. Vacuum out/clean the trailer, and de-mouse it as necessary.
Bring up all trailer supplies, including the chemical toilet.
Meet with the fellow from the local hardware store, to discuss dock hardware.
Lay in the sun.
Check out brother-in-law's glamorous new cottage.
Await delivery of our dock floats. Stuff them into the newly-cleaned trailer once they arrive.
Plot out the dock position.
Rake the leaves and dead stuff out of my garden, and off of all my newly-sprung bulbs and perennials.
Say farewell to the last snowbank, on the north side of the house. Bye snow.
Walk the dog a bunch of times.
Fix the fence around my veggie garden, kind of.
Eat.
Perhaps shop for a stroller. Perhaps.
Move some preliminary stuff around in and out of my house.
Set up the deck: bring out the furniture and the BBQ baby! Hubby will mostly do this.
Not drink a cold beer on my deck.
Sunbathe my giant belly in a now-indecent bikini. Watch out neighbors!
Groom myself (see above). Think about a cheery red pedicure.
Nap. A lot.
Start my seeds.
Assess the wood needs for the remaining siding, which I am not doing myself. Yay.
Admire my brand new bargain-basement (and lovely) eavestrough and sofit. Watch the squirrels get all frustrated.
Open all the windows in my house. Put the screens back in first to deter frustrated squirrels.
Take the winter tires off of our car (hubby will do this). Consider an oil change.
Eat Easter dinner with my family. I'm voting for ham and scalloped potatoes (hi mom!) but I always vote for ham and scalloped potatoes.
Clean the house.
Call around and find a house cleaner.
Have coffee with my mom at least three times.
Find shorts among my collection which can be converted into maternity shorts by my wizard mother.
Sleep. Did I already say that?

I have great ambitions this weekend. It's only four days, but I think I'm up for it.

Le Grand Phew

2010-03-26T10:13:00.002-05:00

On Wednesday I was 19 weeks and 4 days pregnant, and we went in for our ultrasound.

Before I get to the results of said ultrasound, let me describe for you who have not had one what the process of getting a second trimester fetal ultrasound is like. When I booked the appointment, the woman told me to drink two litres of water starting two hours before my appointment. Maybe that was 1 litre of water 2 hours before, but I couldn't specifically remember, and went for the gusto just in case. I had two glasses before I left home – which is totally fine, I normally have a large glass in the morning – and then panicked on my way to town that I hadn't had enough and had sabotaged the entire process and so I had to stop and buy a bottle at a dépanneur. So that means two glasses of water, plus a bottle. Add to that my tea, which was too hot to drink so I sipped it slowly in the waiting room. I only made it through half a cup.

Well. By the time I was called in to get my hospital card the situation was already critical. I felt like perhaps my bladder was going to fall out of my body and land on the chair. I pictured it all swollen and pressing downward and I didn't think I would be able to make it from the waiting room to the ultrasound room. I made hubby hold my tea, because I didn't want to be reminded of the existence of liquid. I went in and begged them to let me pee, but the receptionist didn't speak English very well, and said "10 seconds". I took that to mean I would have my ultrasound in 10 seconds, but that was not the case. She meant I could pee for 10 seconds. Anyway once I sorted that out, I ran to the washroom and peed a bit. Turns out, once you've started peeing and you really have to go badly, it's quite hard to stop but stop I did, proudly. I went back into the office and they told me it would be another half an hour; I was irate. I sat in that waiting room and 10 seconds later the situation became gloomy once again. Hubby went to find the cafeteria to get something to eat, since he hadn't eaten breakfast and it was going on 11 am, and left me squirming in my chair. Finally I decided to take matters into my own hands. I angrily jogged to the bathroom, peed most of what I had, then marched out, dumped my tea into the water fountain, filled my cup with water, and started all over again. Man alive, it's torture to make someone drink all that water and then make them wait an additional 30 minutes. They should know that these things are timed very carefully….

The ultrasound technician was very nice, though language was still an issue. I could understand her, she just couldn't understand us completely. Anyway. She didn't have much of a sense of humour because when I asked her to please tell me that my baby's head wasn't too too big, she didn't get it. I think I even said "I don't want to pass a giant head" but nothing. Silence. I can't complain, as she was very sweet, patient when the baby wasn't cooperating, waited for the baby to get into a good position to see what sex it is even though it's not part of her required exam, and gave us four pictures to take home instead of the standard two.

All news was good news. This baby is freaking adorable, and so far perfectly healthy. We saw the heart pumping, the little empty stomach, the brain (a genius, of course), the little toes and fingers and nose and mouth and chin and everything. All in all I would estimate that all stretched out, baby is approximately 9 or 10 inches long (this includes legs, which don't usually get measured, as they're all folded up). By the end of it, I predictably had to pee like a racehorse once again. The moral of this story is that Gennyland only requires like one large glass of water before having a fetal ultrasound. Gennyland has a tiny bladder.

So here's the result: our beautiful baby girl. I have never seen anything so perfect in all my life.

Take that, snow.

2010-03-15T14:08:00.001-05:00

I was right – spring is on its way. These days the temperatures are normally over 8 degrees, often as high as 12, and the snow is hastily making its exit. 'Tis the season of dog poo and snow mould, but I'm not complaining – my dryer broke down at the right time, because I've been happily hanging the laundry outside for the past couple of weeks.

Hubby and I took Rosie and hiked up the hill the other day to check for fallen deer antlers. We found nothing, but it was nice to get out and stretch my legs a bit. I found myself scampering up icy rock faces (not crazy high, don't anybody worry) and thought Dang, being pregnant's not that bad just yet. I am still fairly mobile, and I do believe my energy is restoring itself. Enough that the spring air has made me cleaning/organizing/renovating crazy, much to hubby's chagrin. I shouldn't say that – he's been patient and cooperative, it's just that I feel like everywhere I look something needs to be fixed or thrown out or cleaned or re-arranged. Maybe it's spring or maybe it's nesting but pretty soon it's going to make him snap, I'm sure of it. Thank god fishing season is around the corner and he'll be able to get away from me and my lists. Hi hubby, glad to have you until April 22.

I've been knitting quite a bit – I made a really cute bunting bag with a hood and pompom, which still needs to be finished off (ends woven in, zipper installed), and am working on an adorable little cardigan the colour of a cooked egg yolk. Mom says it's a girlie colour, but I can butch it up if need be. We'll see. Other projects on my list include a colourful baby blanket, which I hope to work on this summer so that I have something to occupy me in case labour is a drawn out process, and perhaps some little wooly pants to go with the egg yolk sweater – colour to be determined following the ultrasound. I'm sure I'll find 17 more things to knit along the way, but that's the list so far. I had started a sweater for myself and bought yarn for another sweater for hubby, but sorry hubby, grown-up knitting is on the back burner for awhile. I'm sure you understand. My mom's also been knitting, so my baby will never go cold. So far she has made the most beautiful white little outfit for bébé to wear home from the hospital or to receive visitors. It's light, so it'll be ok in August. She's also working on an adorable aran cable sweater. Remember how I once posted about how amazing my mom is? You should see the maternity clothes she's made me. I never have to set foot in Thyme Maternity to buy their crappy $69 pants again. She's even figured out maternity dress pants with the stretchy panel in front. She's such a pro.

Next week is my ultrasound and I'll be almost halfway through. I'm a bit worried about the ultrasound, only because we didn't do any of the 11 – 14 week genetic testing, so this is the first glimpse we'll have of the wee one since he or she was 3.7mm long and had no face. I hope it all goes well and will report back on the results, perhaps even with photos. He or she has started to kick me around a bit, I occasionally feel a light flicking sensation in my belly that isn't gas (I know my gas, and this isn't it).

I'm trying hard to pay attention at work, but it's frankly an uphill battle. The internet makes concentrating hard. I'm ticking down the days, so by my calculations, I have 95 working days left until I'm off on mat leave. Not that I'm counting or anything. At first I was like "mentally check out of work? No! Not me!" but here I am, signing up for prenatal and CPR classes, looking up ultrasound pictures online, and searching for a daycare spot for August 2011. I make it sound worse than it is, but overall, concentrating is a challenge, and baby stuff is fun and necessary. Whereas a couple of months ago I felt that August was a lifetime away, and I had all the time in the world to figure things out, all of a sudden I'm down to 5 months and things are starting to ramp up. My daycare search began late, apparently, at 17 weeks pregnant, and I've missed the boat on a couple of prenatal classes already. Our first baby shower is April 10, and already we've lined up stuff like an infant car seat, a playpen, and other necessities. Things are really moving now.

I'm going to take pictures of all the things I've made in the last while, because it's been awhile, and I've been busy. Aside from the knitting, I've also taken a pottery class (another pottery class) and made us a set of 8 plates for the cottage. They're all different sizes and colours but I think that's perfect for the cottage. They're quite cheery.

That's it for me this week- work will be busy from now until late next week, but by then I hope to have pictures of a healthy baby to show off. Fingers crossed.

Springing

2010-03-04T12:45:00.001-06:00

There's something in the air these days, and it isn't freezing rain. There has been a shift in light and smell that makes me think that winter's finally on its way out, and spring is forcing its way in. The road is snow-less, and last night when I got home I found something in my bed that I haven't seen in about 5 months: mud. Apparently Rosie found the only mud she could roll in, and rolled in it.

This weekend I will be starting my seeds. I haven't yet made the final decision as to what I'm going to start, because every year I get tempted by things that I should know won't work out (red peppers, leeks, eggplants). This year I am going to focus on things we'll use, like tomatoes, several varieties of basil, squash, and maybe cucumbers. At the land, I intend to plant things like sweet potatoes and large squash, and just let 'em go crazy (it's all sand up there, with a nice layer of black earth on top) and hope to collect them sometime before or after I give birth in August. I already have garlic, rhubarb, blueberries and strawberries (for what it's worth) on the go in the garden, but they will all need a bit of TLC come spring. I will do normal potatoes in the bin once again, but I think I'll forget about onions this year – my soil was too heavy last year and it was so wet, and none of them got larger than a kumquat. I will once again have to dump in a load of topsoil, some peat moss, and some compost to mitigate the clay, which dominates by end of year.

So this weekend, I am going to start my tomatoes and basil. It's too early to do squash yet – they get pretty big pretty fast and it's almost better to just put them directly into the ground – but I need to do the tomatoes properly because every year they get all long and stringy. I want chubby fuzzy plants this year.

Speaking of chubby, in the best possible way, my cousin had her baby on Monday. She weighs 10 lbs 1oz so welcome to you, Azalea! Hope you like gardening with a name like that! Another sign of spring has been that babies and pregnant ladies are popping up all over the place. I myself have started to pop a wee bit – I no longer just look like I ate a big dinner. My tummy protrudes ever so slightly and it's as hard as a rock. Had a Doctor's appointment last week, and heard the wee lad/lady's heartbeat (135 bpm), so all is still well in womb-land. I am now nearing 17 weeks. I have an ultrasound March 24 and then on April 15 I get to start going to the OB-Gyn at the hospital where I will eventually give birth, instead of to my family doctor.

Another sign of spring: work's being done back at the homestead. I have reserved our lovely handyman Stuart for the week of April 18 to finally come and finish the siding on our house. He works super-fast and is cheerful and reasonably-priced so I am pretty excited. After that, we'll start moving the furniture around and getting ready for baby. Also happening in April, hubby's going to build us a dock up at our land, so I will have somewhere to lounge my beluga belly this summer. I look forward to rolling off of that dock when the sun gets too hot to handle. Too bad I can't drink beer. I wonder if I will fit into the bathroom of our trailer come late July…

An Ode to Winter Olympics

2010-02-19T11:19:00.001-06:00

Those of you who know me in person know that I am not an athletic person. I may have mentioned this once or twice before on these pages. I do not enjoy working out or training for anything, and my competitiveness is limited to board games. I was once recruited for the high school downhill ski team, but only because I was a girl who could ski, and I distinctly remember sitting out most if not all of my races. DNS was my middle name (I now realize this was really short-sighted, but at 15 I had none of that wisdom or selflessness). I don’t enjoy team sports - physical or intellectual – and I don’t like to join things like clubs, leagues or groups of any kind. I dislike watching sports on t.v.

Every four years though, every four years I go a bit nuts. It hit its peak in 2006 for the Torino Winter Games, where I remember I was on a trip for work and actually retired between events to my hotel room to watch the Olympics. I remember lying on my hotel bed, all dressed up, glued to the Mens’ Downhill. Every four years I will regale whoever is in the room with me with my in-depth (not really) knowledge of speed skaters, various world cup downhill runs, trivia about athletes from other countries, the origins of the Nordic biathlon, and our chances against the Swedish hockey team. I become a completely obnoxious sports lunatic.

The winter Olympics are far superior to the summer Olympics. Purists and ancient Greeks will argue that there’s no better competition than who can run faster, or who can throw that stick the furthest, but I will say that there’s no better challenge than doing all of that on ice with blades on your feet or with a gun. I’m pretty sure your chances of death are much reduced when participating in the summer Olympics, though some of those marathoners look pretty close to it most of the time. Summer Olympics are short-and-wiry-person friendly, whereas you need height and weight on your bones to get any speed going on a downhill run. I will grant you that there are some thrilling summer Olympic sports; velodrome biking, motocross, mens’ swimming, and triathlon are all kind of fun to watch. But nothing lights my fire like watching a sleek and enormous Dutchman fly around a shiny ice track in a skin-tight orange suit, thighs growing before my eyes. In my mind athletes of the winter Olympics are giant Nordic machines, built for icy climes, descending from the hills every four years to make use of the ice and snow around them. They go faster, higher, more super-propelled than any summer Olympian. They fall spectacularly, and get up and go down the hill again, like Anja Paerson of Sweden did just yesterday. People ask “how did she not break in half when she fell on that downhill run?” and the answer is “she does this all the time. She knows how to fall and is 99% muscle.” A couple of months ago 19 year-old US speedskater JR Celski sliced open his leg with his own skate blade, cutting 6 inches across and two inches down into his thigh. When he pulled out the blade, he saw his own femur. He went on to race a few months later and won a bronze medal. See? Winter Olympians are made of tough stuff.

Take Luge, for instance. I know everyone talks about Luge in hushed tones since the death of the Georgian luger the day of the opening ceremonies. That accident highlighted what is truly scary about the winter Olympics – they are unforgiving. Luge is like kiddie tobogganing, only on the craziest steepest iciest hill ever on a steerable toboggan with blades. Then there’s skeleton. The braver kids on the toboggan hill do their runs on their stomachs, holding onto their crazy carpets with their mittens instead of their boots. When those kids grow up they can go 140 km/h on the skeleton run – face first. I love downhill skiing, but I rarely even drive my car as fast as those male downhillers race down the icy mountain. We always think “oooh that hill looks icy and hard” but actually, for a true downhill run, they inject water into the hill to make it harder. It’s icy on purpose. Does anyone remember Brian Stemmle’s crash? Don’t look it up, it will make you toss your cookies. These guys are inherently insane, and that just makes for amazing television.

So consider me a Winter Olympics junkie. Watching these world-class athletes in peak physical condition compete at the highest level in their sport gives me a good excuse to lay on my couch and eat pizza, which is ironic but true. The house is a mess, the dog feels neglected, and I am getting by on very little sleep, but man, do I love these Olympics. I have to go. I think there’s a Mens’ Super G on right now.

One Down, Two to Go

2010-02-12T12:40:00.002-06:00

Tomorrow I will be 14 weeks pregnant, so I’m now starting my second trimester, and so far so good. I have to say, after all of this dramatic lead-up and thinking that pregnancy is this huge crazy thing and wondering what kind of pregnant lady I will be, this pregnancy has so far been a piece of cake.

My belly’s starting to expand a bit. Where I previously had a mushy sort of pot belly, it’s now firm and I can’t suck it in. I am tired a lot, but it’s usually due to something I ate or being in a social situation (parties wipe me out unless I take a nap first). I am having some troubles sleeping at night, because my sleep cycle seems to lighten at around 3 or 4 a.m. and I invariably wake up from hubby’s snoring. His snoring’s not terrible – the neighbors can’t hear it or anything – but when you’re wide awake in the dark at 3 a.m. it’s pretty tough to ignore. I guess I am a bit more emotional than usual but I can’t say that I am a wreck or anything, aside from a handful of really down days. I don’t have any weird food cravings, haven’t really had any nausea, don’t miss drinking booze at all, and I have only gained about 2-3 lbs so far.

Challenges have included: getting dressed in the mornings, as I previously mentioned. My options are limited daily – I never know in advance what’s going to fit unless I stick with maternity clothes. And if normal clothes fit in the morning they often feel terrible by 2 p.m. as I seem to expand throughout the day. The biggest challenge this week is that I’m finding breathing more difficult than normal. I am asthmatic, but it doesn’t really feel like asthma; it just feels like I can’t take in enough air. It’s made me a bit lazier if that is even possible.

I am really trying to eat right. All bread-type products I eat are whole wheat (well, 80% I would say), and I try to eat as many fruits and veggies as possible. As snacks, I indulge in the occasional chips or chocolate, but usually it’s yoghurt or fruit juice or something, or triscuits which are my new top cracker. I drink a lot of water. The other day I got to work and had to go pee 5 times before lunch, from one large cup of tea.

Pottery classes are helping me get through the weeks; I’m on week four of an 8-week course that my friend is teaching, and since it feels like those are passing me by quickly, it means that the weeks are falling away. I am working on a set of plates. I’ve made three so far, all different sizes with different edges, not on purpose. Oh well, I imagine they will hold food even if they are tough to stack. By the time I finish this pottery course I’m hoping I can throw all of my effort into trying to feel this baby move around. It’s apparently the size of a medium-large shrimp right now (they always compare them to food – usually fruit, so I guess it's a lime this week or something) so I wouldn’t feel the force of its kicks just yet. Those legs are too noodley still, but hopefully by nearly 18 weeks it’ll be knocking on my belly, saying howdy-doo.

I have started to indulge myself in researching baby equipment. We seem to have chosen a stroller that we like, and I am looking at car seats that fit it. Our stroller needs to be tough, with good wheels for dirt roads and other rough terrain, lightweight for hauling up and down deck stairs, and fold compactly into the back of our car for shopping trips etc. We like the BOB Revolution stroller, which is a pretty sweet ride – it turns on a dime. I like the orange and brown version and hope to find a sale on it somewhere. It fits different brands of infant carriers/carseats so we’ll have to pick one of those out too. I already know which crib I like and what the baby’s room is gonna look like so all we still need large-things-wise is a smallish change table for our bedroom, a crib mattress, and a new t.v. – a flat-screen, not large, so it can unobtrusively go in the living room.

Future time markers include: next doctor’s appointment Feb. 23rd. I will be in meetings solidly from March 18th to 23rd, and my next ultrasound is March 24th, with another doctor’s appointment sometime around there as well. My second trimester goes until mid-May. The Austrians arrive August 5th, the Germans August 14th (my due date – don’t worry nobody’s staying at our place) and hopefully the baby will arrive sometime in there as well. I’m sure more time markers will pop up in that span, which will help me get through this waiting game.

I made the mistake of watching childbirth videos the other day – they were eye-opening, to say the least, but I don’t think I’m scared. I don’t think. I had to rewind the part where the baby came out about 5 times to fully absorb what my eyes were seeing. The head struggled to come out, all messy and squished-like, and then BLUP the rest of the body sort of barfed out of her hoo-ha in one fell swoop. Like I said, eye-opening.

Waiting makes me write more in this here blog, so expect to hear more from me in the coming months I’m sure…

Mid-Forevuary

2010-02-10T10:49:00.002-06:00

My hubby long ago dubbed February ‘Forevuary’ and it stuck. This January-Forevuary is so far proving to be the longest-seeming one so far on record, and I’m frankly getting a bit tired of it.

There are reasons for the neverending winter this year: one, I am pregnant. I am thrilled to bits about this and really enjoying it, feeling great, etc. but I have to say, the only things that get me through winter are skiing and other pursuits like toboganning, drinking, etc., and I can’t do any of them. I can’t do anything that involves speed and I have to watch myself on the ice. Something about my increased rate of oxygen exchange added to my perennial asthma yadda yadda makes breathing kind of an issue these days, so even walking the dog is an effort. Also, winter = a nice fire + red wine and that last one’s off the table, so I’ve tackled this Forevuary stone sober and breathless.

Secondly, it’s been pretty darn cold. This week’s not so bad but a couple of weekends ago when it was minus 30 and windy, I felt like the winter might never end. Poor hubby went on a ski vacation that weekend and his skin is still peeling off of his face. Change is in the air, however – something about the light this past few days has indicated that spring might be on its way, the temperatures have gone a bit more moderate, and no new snow has fallen, which makes me hopeful that winter will go out with a whimper.

Thirdly, I’m pregnant. And early-type pregnant, like I’m now 13 ½ weeks, and every day is being counted. As prisoners and kids waiting for Christmas know, counting the days makes them go more slowly, like watching the proverbial pot of water come to a boil. So today I am 13weeks 4days pregnant, tomorrow I will be 13weeks 5days pregnant, etc. etc and man, February is only 28 days but that is long. I hope that time will go more quickly once I start to grow, and start feeling kicks and stuff. Once I allow myself to start shopping for this baby (furniture, stroller, car seat etc.) it will go a bit faster, make it seem a bit more real.

Fourthly, I love to knit, but I’m working on a never-ending knitting project that’s got the whole system slowed down. There are three or four projects on deck, but I can’t start them until this one’s completed. It’s the second half of a Christmas gift, so it’s already tardy (sorry Kelly!), and it’s just taking me ages to get through it. Once I move on to baby stuff (a hat for a newborn, little sweaters for fall, perhaps a cheery blanket) things will click along again and I’ll get my mojo back. Just no cables for awhile, ’kay? I’m all cabled out.

Fifthly, I am officially sick of my winter clothes. I bought some new maternity clothes to get me over this little hump (in reality, I don’t really need them, but dayum maternity pants are COMFY. Why didn’t I know this before?) but in general the wardrobe is pretty limited and drab. I look forward to wearing lots of dresses (with no pantyhose), sandals, nice t-shirts, and not having to top it all with an unflattering puffy coat that’s getting tight in the belly. I look forward to walking the dog in my hiking shoes that lace up and fit me correctly, instead of my giant clompy boots that are a size too large and make my socks shuffle down into the arches of my feet.

Sixthly, my skin is suffering. This may also be a symptom of pregnancy, but I’m kind of dry and itchy in patches, and my face has taken on a ghostly cast. Deathly white is my normal winter skin tone, but I really look forward to lazing around at the lake, tanning my big oiled-up belly, getting some rays on my face and looking healthy once again. I also look forward to floating around on my air mattress and being pulled up the hill by some kind of elaborate harness-and-pulley system that I haven’t yet dreamed up, but may require. Our land is kind of steep. Anyway, once the sun hits my skin I will come alive once again and I will stop scratching at my hips and the sides of my tummy.

Seventhly, winter food is dull, man. I went to the grocery store the other day and was trying to pick out fruits and veggies and was totally uninspired. Everything comes from Mexico or Peru or other warm and distant climes. I was handling a mango and realized that only one side is red, the rest is green, likely because that’s how they were packed when picked under-ripe and only the exposed side went red. That’s depressing. Also, I keep checking out the strawberries but they’re $5 a box and probably anemic looking/tasting. I kind of wish I was eating ice cream a lot of the time but who eats ice cream in the cold? In early winter I was all into squash and heavy pastas and carby deliciousness but lately I find it hard to get all the veggies into my system that it requires. I’ve been drinking lots of natural-type fruit juices to make up for it. I saw a picture of BBQ-grilled vegetables the other day in a magazine and it very nearly made me drool.

Eighthly, my house is cold. Enough said. I’m tired of wearing layers indoors. The other day found me all confused, wearing olive-green fleece leggings, a black-and grey striped long-sleeved t-shirt, a bright fuchsia fleece sweater, and those Ugg-type slipper boots. I was a vision. My kingdom to be able to wander around in a tank top. My next house is definitely going to have radiant floor heating, because all of the houses I’ve visited with that system are over-warm, and that sounds pretty good in Forevuary.

So boo-hoo hoo eh? I thought I might stop complaining, since life’s been pretty good these days, but it seems I can always find something to whine about. It’s not all doom and gloom though: pretty soon I will get the grow-op up and running once again, and start all the plants that will go in with good intentions in May and June and be completely wild and ignored by August, when my mind will be elsewhere. I promise to keep the veggie garden to a dull roar this year. The aforementioned outdoor light change will start to warm up the air, so that come March, I’ll hopefully be able to drag out some lawn chairs and sit in the wind-free area of my deck in the sun on a Saturday afternoon, reading a book or something, NOT drinking a glass of wine. Pretty soon my belly will pop out a bit, and I look forward to an ultrasound in late March which will show us our little one and turn up some fetal genitals of one sort or the other. Our new pick-up truck is up and running, having gone through the safety check process and come out the other side, (with us $1,700 poorer). I look forward to driving that sweet truck up to the land some weekend in late March and checking out my brother-in-law’s cottage, which has been worked-on steadily throughout this winter, and seeing if our trailer’s still standing under the snow. Several of my loved ones are expecting babies, so to Leslie, Peggy, Kris and all you other growing bellies, I can’t wait to meet your new little ones in the coming weeks and months. I will start shopping in March or April, getting my ducklings in line so that I won’t be waddling around the malls in August all large and resentful. All in all, life is good.

If only I could just put Forevuary behind me!

Lucky Number Three

2010-02-01T14:59:00.002-06:00

December 5th 2009 was the one-year anniversary of my dear Loki’s disappearance.

It was also the day that I found out that I am pregnant.

What a whirlwind. I’m only now able to talk about it, since I’m never sure who reads these things and I didn’t want work to know before everything was absolutely affirmative (i.e. nearish the end of the first trimester), but yeah, the third IUI worked. No need for the big nasty IVF.

I did a pee-on-a-stick test the morning of December 4th. You’d think I’d know better after four years but apparently old habits die hard, because I knew I was 13 or 14 days past ovulation, and I just happened to have a test kicking around. I groggily did the deed when I got up in the morning, before walking the dog and waking up hubby, and voilà – a faint pink line appeared for the first time in my life. My reaction was funny. I kind of went “huh, whaddya know” and went out to walk the dog. When hubby got up I said “hey check this out” and he was cautiously optimistic as well. Both sort of stunned, we went to work, I thought about it in moderation throughout the day, but was kind of in a daze. On the way home I went out and bought another test, a different high-quality brand.

The next morning (Saturday), I peed on it, and the line was darker. Glory be. Angels sang, and maybe there was a rainbow over my house or unicorns or something. My mom came over for coffee and could tell that I was mucho distracted, so I slapped the test down on the table between us (I had wiped all the pee off of it first, duh) and we were all a bit incredulous, teary-eyed, in disbelief.

Then Monday I was starting a week-long high-stakes meeting at work, but first, I had a blood test at the fertility clinic – a quick in and out. I got a call at lunchtime with good news: it was positive, the hcg levels were good, and I was set to come back Dec. 21st for an ultrasound and meeting with the doctor. Needless to say, it was tough to concentrate on the meeting for the rest of that afternoon – nay – that week.

We went to San Francisco in between. You can see why I wasn’t blown away by our trip, as I was sort of preoccupied, and was a bit tired and crabby and concerned throughout. Also I wasn’t able to drink which kind of sucked but really, I didn’t miss it. Flying made me nervous (nervous that my nervousness would affect things) but we got through it just fine.

December 21st we went in to the clinic, had an ultrasound, and saw the little bean and its nice, strong heartbeat. It was the size of a grain of rice – 3.7 mm. The doctor and ultrasound technician both said that we are ‘textbook,’ to enjoy my ‘good, strong pregnancy’ and to send him pictures after the big day. Doc then told me what not to eat and sent us packing – we graduated from the clinic, a day I had never really envisioned.

Christmas was a hoot. Again, it passed in a blur because I was so distracted, and on the 28th I started with the symptoms – feeling gross, super tired, and I couldn’t look at coffee. I had those for about 5 days, until I went back to work, and then they lessened a bit, which freaked me out completely. Word to the pregnant and wise: stay off the internet when you’re newly pregnant and paranoid by nature; my doctor calls it ‘googlitis’. I still am turned off of coffee, and am really into potatoes, oatmeal, rice, pita bread and other starchy things. Grapefruits are excellent, as are pomegranates, olives, pickles, and avocados. I drink tea in the mornings now, which is fine, and treat myself with yoghurt or milk chocolate – dark no longer appeals to me. I am tired a lot, and am having a hard time doing my job effectively. I have headaches, but I always had headaches so I can’t really tell if they’re pregnancy-related. Aside from these things I feel fine. Easy.

I read somewhere that some food aversions and nausea are caused by smells, because apparently pregnant ladies have an increased sense of smell. This doesn’t really apply to me, since my nose is always stuffy and I have a terrible sense of smell anyway, so perhaps it’s the reason for my lack of nausea so far.

By mid-January I needed to invest in some stretchy clothes with forgiving waistbands, because sitting all day in dress pants or pantyhose was killing me. It was kind of making me have indigestion. The pantyhose almost made me throw up and I had to cut a big slit down the front of them halfway through the day. I wore a lot of stretchy blousy things to work so for all of you who thought I was being kind of a slob, now you know why. If you were also wondering why I’ve adopted a bit of a waddle in the last couple of weeks, your questions have now been answered. Pregnancy seems to make my hip problem much much worse, so now when I get up from a seated position, I have to take a moment to adjust, and I limp a bit.

I have started planning what we’re going to do with the house. The t.v. will have to move to the living room (yuck) because the current t.v. room will be the kid’s room. For the first while, baby will live in our room upstairs, so I can get up in the middle of the night and not have to negotiate stairs. Guests are just going to have to put up with the nursery-like décor, because the guest room and baby room will be one and the same. Rosie’s going to have to learn some boundaries when it comes to toys and jumping on people, and she will perhaps have to be restrained by a seatbelt while riding in the back of the car.

Speaking of cars, we bought a truck, which will be my maternity-leave vehicle. It’s a 2001 Dodge Dakota king cab, so it has a full back seat (very comfy) and is nice and clean inside. Lots of room for baby and dog. It’s not too high and not too low, so I won’t have to lift the baby up or bend down to put it in the carseat; this truck is perfect for my height. I already have my eye on a nice red stroller/carseat combo, and have started to acquire gender-neutral baby gear as well. Friends have all been very generous so my baby-stuff Rubbermaid is filling up nicely. Pretty soon we’ll have to start moving furniture around and filling up dressers.

We spent so much of our time and energy thinking about conception that we never really allowed ourselves to consider it actually happening, and what comes next. It all feels very surreal.

Anyway, I am now sitting at just over 12 weeks pregnant. My boss knows and was amazing about it. My belly has started to pooch out a bit so soon everyone will guess. I heard the little watery bah-boom bah-boom bah-boom heartbeat last week, so everything is just clicking right along.

Phew.

My Telephone Allergy

2010-01-19T16:26:00.004-06:00

I am a person who hates the telephone. Back in the day, when I was a teenager, getting a phone call was a really exciting thing – an indicator of social importance, that someone was thinking of me, or someone needed me for something.

Nowadays, aside from phone calls from friends and family, I tend to avoid the telephone. I find it frustrating, like a sneak attack. At home, I let hubby get it. Telemarketers send me into a blind, seething rage. At work is much much worse. You never know what’s on the other end of the line, and if you’re like me and you don’t think quickly on your feet, it can be embarrassing and leave you feeling less-than-intelligent. I am an introvert, in case you didn’t know, and what that means (as I learned in a “Leadership Training Course” offered at work a few years back) is that I like to think for a bit before I speak up or answer any questions. I don’t pipe up in meetings a lot, and I don’t have quick retorts when I get into arguments. It’s not that I’m not thinking – often I will attend a meeting, think about things, and then discuss them with my supervisor one-on-one later on that day or something. I don’t like to be put into a position where I have to stammer an answer out immediately, just because someone decided to pick up the phone and demand it from me. I truly see it as an assault. I am the opposite of Blondie.

This is not to say that I am an unresponsive person. I am a great and warm-hearted lover of e-mail. Give me a keyboard over a headset anyday. With e-mail, I can read the message at my leisure – several times if that’s what it takes to absorb it all. Then, I can formulate a detailed response that is well-crafted, answers all the questions posed, and sounds halfway intelligent. I write very quickly, and it comes out sounding the way I sound to myself in my head. I can send links to appropriate forms, when necessary (try sending a link over the telephone). Most often, what I get in return is “well thank you so much for writing me back so quickly – that was very helpful”. So you see – it’s not my fault; it’s the medium. I see telephone calls as pointless. Do you really need to HEAR my nasal voice on the other end of the line, stammering and going “uh, wait a second while I find that information (paper shuffle paper shuffle paper shuffle) Oh! Here it is!”? It’s really not all that it’s cracked up to be. I am often congested (damn allergies) and so I sound a bit Minnie-Mouse-ish on the phone anyway; I sound like I’m six years old.

Also, as another blogger pointed out (can’t find the link): if any important information is relayed in a telephone call, you have to write it down anyway! Two steps, where one would suffice. Someone tells you their address on the phone? You’ll find an old receipt or something lying on the counter and scribble it down in a hurry, and probably forget to shove it in your pocket before you go, or if you’re like my hubby you might just mix up the address numbers and go to the wrong place (he’s kind of number-impaired. But still very, very intelligent - in case he's reading). If they send it to you in an email, and you are like me and don’t delete things quickly, you can log in anywhere and find it again whenever you’re stuck.

I admit that there are times when a phone call is a necessity. When you’re traveling and you need to know where to meet someone, you can call them and say “hey I’m at such-and-such spot – where should we meet?” or “I’m on my way”. But I like phone calls that last less than two minutes, in general. Any more than that and my ear gets sweaty and I get bored and start to fidget. Conversation devolves into “mmmhm. Uh huh. Wow.” My cellphone is never charged anyway – every time it rings I have an anxiety attack.

So if you need something from me, send me an email. If it’s cute, I’ll save it and come back to it often, read it, and smile. If you need information from me, this is the most effective way to get it, and to get it good. If you want surly, confused, bored and resentful - call me. *

* this in no way refers to close friends and family members, who can call me call me anytime.

Christmas in This Country

2009-12-23T12:37:00.001-06:00

We just got back from a week-long vacation in San Francisco.

The timing on that is kind of weird – leaving December 13 and returning December 19, but it was nice to get away all the same. Also, it was really very nice to come back, to realize that I am kind of behind on this whole Christmas thing. It’s now December 23 and I’m putting the finishing touches on some home-made gifts while living in squalor, my house is a filthy mess of wood chips, empty suitcases and dirty laundry.

San Francisco is a nice city. Saying that is like saying “I like weekends” or “chocolate is tasty.” Everyone knows San Francisco is nice. It has a big orange bridge (“International Red” I learned from the guidebooks), a bunch of hills, and good shopping. We were lucky enough to be visiting family – hubby’s half-sister and her hubby rent an apartment there for a month each year – and so accommodations were inexpensive and we had built-in tour guides. The backyard of their apartment featured two lemon trees – a meyer lemon and a regular (?) lemon – so we had fresh lemons whenever we wanted. I was blown away. Not only were there lemon trees, there were lemons in DECEMBER. I picked one that was almost the size of my head.

We wandered around town. We saw and went up Coit Tower, went to Pier 39 and checked out the sea lions (Feist running in our heads the whole time), ate chowder on the waterfront, shopped on Fillmore street and Union Square, poked around Japantown, drove across the bridge four times, went to Muir woods and Muir beach, Sonoma (a good somnolent word for this horribly boring town), Monterey – to the Aquarium, Salinas to see hubby’s amazing 91 year-old aunt and her little dog too, Ocean Beach, Cliff House and the amazingly un-barricaded Sutro bath ruins. We had a typical-for-us whirlwind vacation. Our hosts thought a week was too short but in fact it was long enough.

I was impressed by the palm trees (they get me every time!) and the surfers. We definitely do not have surfers here in December.

I have to say: I thought experiencing Christmas stuff in a warm place would be weird, but it’s not, really. Those people have some crazy spirit. Many of the houses are decorated, Christmas music blasts in every business and everyone wishes you a ‘happy holidays!’ well mostly everybody – not that crazy old bitch in Sonoma who got mad at me for my chair placement in the bakery (I’m sending a hex her way and hope she has a terrible Christmas full of personal tragedy and financial misfortune) – but generally Christmas spirit there is almost more intense than it is here. Palm trees with Christmas lights on them are funny to me.

Rosie stayed with my parents/her grandparents, and they had a blast. I think both parties were sad when it came to an end. We were so happy to get back and to see her; while we were away I had to touch every dog I saw, I missed her so much. We came back early Sunday morning to a freezing cold northern weather blast, a cold house, and a lot of laundry.

So now it is Christmas. I hope that you and yours have a wonderful holiday however/whatever you celebrate. As for me, I look forward to giving everyone my wee gifties and am planning to eat my own weight in Oma-food.

See you in the new year!

We did it!

2009-11-18T11:44:00.001-06:00

We ate hors d'oeuvres for dinner!

gotcha.

Getting to know all about you....

2009-11-17T14:26:00.004-06:00

I have worked on a lot of projects over the past 4 and a half years – since I started this blog. You have all been thrilled by my accounts of things like planning our wedding, making shelving in the back room, the annual vegetable garden, terracing my front perennial beds, the cider-making, renovating the trailer, building a new deck, the siding on our house, purchasing and developing our waterfront land, getting a puppy, raising said puppy into a very nice (yet still crazy) two-year-old dog, and various knitting projects here and there. I am a project person, and have enjoyed the varied successes that have come along with each of these.

There remains one project that we have been working on for the past four years, which I’ve alluded to yet never described in any great detail. This involves something that we’ve attempted to build, but can never really get off the ground. It’s been in the planning stages for four years, and sacks of money have been invested into it, but still we haven’t met with any success. I will attempt to go into some detail without getting maudlin, but this project has been to build a family, and so far it’s the one thing that we’ve been completely unsuccessful at. Turns out it’s way easier to build a deck.

We’ve always wanted kids. I’m a kid-person who can often be found in the kid room at a party, being entertained by the under-3-foot set. When I was young I babysat, and man did I babysit; one summer there were 20 families in my area whose kids I babysat. Those kids are all driving and going to university now, and here I am with grey streaks in my hair, wondering how the heck it happened that my kid-friendly house hasn’t got any kids in it.

Lots of people that I read about start families in their mid-thirties, and they’re all like “I wanted to be sure that I was established in my career before I started my family.” Fair enough. I was the opposite. Until a year ago, I had jobs that made me crave a one-year slate-wiping maternity leave. I couldn’t wait to announce to someone “I’m pregnant, and I’ll be leaving for a year. Let somebody else have fun at my desk.” I can’t really account for why we waited so long, just that it took us 7 years to get established enough to be married: in the first year hubby moved to Thailand for six months. In the second, we were getting used to co-habiting and working out the kinks of job, bills, lifestyle, etc. In the third, we bought a house. In the fourth I guess we just sat around, and in the 5th I got a new job. It wasn’t until the 6th that we got engaged, and in the 7th we got married. I was never curious as to why I’d never even had a pregnancy scare in those 7 years, but that has since explained itself.

We started trying to have kids right away. I remember the anticipation and assuredness that I felt, that yes, we’d timed this one right and we’ve been married for two months and we are going to have a baby! How exciting! But life doesn’t work that way. I learned that if you wait that long to find out if you can get pregnant, you’re already a few years behind the eight ball if you find out that you can’t get pregnant.

After a year and a half of timing things just right and taking my temperature every day, and spitting on an ovulation ferning kit predictor thingy every morning and peeing on sticks of all kinds, with no results, my doctor referred us to the fertility clinic. So in our 9th year we met with the nice doctor there, who is a young asian man with an ok sense of humour. He subjected us to rounds and rounds of testing and more months of recording my temperatures before he decided that I don’t ovulate very consistently and hubby’s swimmers aren’t in peak condition. We just miss each other every time. It kind of figures. When asked what causes the lack of top-drawer sperm, he said that the only cause they have found so far is environmental pollutants, which build up in a body, emulate estrogen and do all kinds of other wacky things (and it's on the rise). Needless to say, hubby now uses herbal shampoo, soap, and doesn’t put his food in plastic containers. We have recently seen some improvement.

We went on a few rounds of Clomid, the second of which stimulated my ovaries so much I couldn’t walk comfortably or do my pants up all the way. Clomid was easy to take but tough to deal with. That was two summers ago - I think I wrote about it. After about 5 months (not consecutive) of Clomid, Dr. determined that that wasn’t likely to work either. I then took a break, as my resentment towards the clinic and the process had built up and my stress levels had risen – being told one appointment that I likely had PCOS and the next appointment that I did not, over and over again, made me beyond frustrated – so in our 10th year, I had to step back.

Which brings us to the present reality: we returned to the clinic early in 2009, and decided to give the Dr. the ‘go’ to do whatever it takes to have a kid. Tickety tock, in our 11th year. By May we were signing consent forms for IUI and IVF, and in July I was on my first round of injectible fertility drugs. They are a trip. Being a kind of science nerd (secretly), the process of giving myself the injections doesn’t bother me a bit. I got a kit containing a fun little pen-like syringe thing, and it comes with lots of needle heads, and alcohol pads, and I crank it to the right dose and just pop it right into my belly. That first month it sent me for a loop – I was tired all the time, cranky, woozy about an hour after the shot, and kind of forgetful, like I was in a fog. When in early August I went to the washroom and found out that it didn’t work, I was distraught.

The process isn’t really fun, for any of you who haven’t had the pleasure: for about two weeks, you inject every day, into your stomach or your thighs. Every other day, you go into the clinic in the morning for blood tests and an ultrasound (not the on-top-of-the-belly one you see in movies, either). They count and measure your egg follicles, and then you meet with the Doctor, who tells you what dose to continue with and when to come back. Towards the end, you go in for bloodwork every day. You have to wake up early because you live an hour away, and you are generally late for work each time. Also, the medication has to stay refrigerated so it’s really fun up at the lake, and you can’t travel anywhere because you have to go to the clinic every damn day. Oh and the medication is really expensive and my drug plan doesn't cover it. When you’re ready (meaning your follicles are big enough your estrogen levels have risen), they tell you to ‘trigger’, which means you use a different injectible medication to make you ovulate. Then you wait a day (phew, a day of respite, where you wake up at a normal time and don’t have to inject anything into yourself). Then you go into the clinic (hubby goes at 8am, I go at 11), his little guys get spun in a centrifuge so only the very best survive, and they use a catheter to put them inside your uterus. You wait 15 minutes then go back to work. You stop drinking wine and start making lots of jokes about 'eating for two.'

I’ve done this twice now (number two gave me nothing either), and am close to the ‘trigger’ of my third as I write this. My stomach is covered in bruises as I think I’ve been a bit more cavalier with the injections this cycle. It’s really pretty. I've had 16 needles in 10 days. They added a new step this round, which is apparently now common practice: progesterone suppositories, which sound superfun. I am to take those twice a day for two weeks once the procedure’s done. The bottle has to be disguised or stay hidden in the back of the drawer, as it says “INSERT INTO VAGINA TWICE DAILY” in big black letters and I don't want company finding it. Is that TMI? I am kind of blind to TMI these days, sorry. Also, it has a fun sticker on it that says ‘may cause dizziness’, illustrated with a fun confused-looking little character. This will be my excuse for doing a lot of sitting down over the next two weeks.

I have high hopes for this round ‘cause if it doesn’t work, we’re on to the big bad IVF in the new year. This whole thing has been a bit disruptive to the new job that I love and don’t really want to leave (a strange sensation I am experiencing for the first time), as nobody at work can have any idea what I’m cooking up in the background. I don’t exactly work at a daycare, and this beloved job is a contract.

All in all, it’s not something that brings me sadness on a daily basis. I am pretty matter-of-fact about it. I suppose that if this one doesn’t work and then IVF were to fail, then I would be despondent, but I’d probably just pull a Madonna and steal a kid from somewhere. I am at the point in my life that I could bond to a hot water bottle wrapped in a towel. I make jokes about it, and will discuss the process with anyone who’s interested. I just don’t want anyone waiting on tenterhooks for me. I want it all to be a surprise when it finally happens, a miracle of life. There are many blogs dedicated to the fertility treatments and exploits of women who’ve been through much much more than I have, so if you’re really interested and want to hear more about this, then I advise you go to explore over there, because I don’t intend to talk about it much more in this blog.

In the meantime, Christmas is coming, and I wish I could tell you all about the knitting projects I’m working on, but THEN I’D HAVE TO KILL YOU!

Better late than never

2009-11-10T08:54:00.004-06:00

I’m a big liar and didn’t post pictures of my Halloween party last week like I said I would. It was a great success (I think) – in total 27 people showed up, the place looked great, and we had so much food that I never even remembered to crack into the boxes of frozen hors d’oeuvres I’d bought in a panic at 4:30 p.m. Now I look forward to enjoying hors d’oeuvres for dinner some night.

People took the zombie theme and ran with it, even though dressing as a zombie wasn’t mandatory. We had a zombie fisherman (dear hubby), a zombie bride, a zombie fireman, a zombie barbarian, a zombie tinkerbell, a zombie doctor, a zombie cowboy, a zombie country girl and me, the zombie hostess. We also had a mad doctor, a clown, a Patsy from Absolutely Fabulous, a beautiful Wakefield lady, a man in a sari and pearls, his lady friend in a long Moroccan jacket (kind of a last-minute costume), a mummy, a Bolivian person (actually a Cuban person in a Bolivian hat), a spooky scarecrow, a Frida Kahlo, a man in a fur vest and bowler hat (maybe he was a zombie man in a fur vest and bowler hat?) an undertaker, a sex criminal, a pumpkin, a family of circus freaks (a bearded lady, a werewolf, a baby werewolf, and a ringleader) and I guess that about does it. There was dancing. At one point, we had 100% dance floor participation, as everyone contributed a semi-coordinated effort to Thriller, of course (zombie anthem).

The next morning I was full of vim and vigour and got up at 7 a.m. and cleaned the house. I crashed around 2 or 3 but there’s nothing I love more than having a party and then, the next day, getting the house cleaner than it was before.

Now here we are at November 10th already. We visited the cottage construction site on Sunday and oh man, am I jealous. It is gorgeous. And expensive. The roof is on and it’s the talk of the lake. Once the windows go in it will truly be stunning. We moved our mini-kayaks into our trailer and tarped it up, and it’s pretty much ready for winter now – though Ben the builder still has to put a little roof over it. We may go up one more time once the windows are in the cottage, just to check it out.
I’m off tomorrow because government employees get to stay home on Remembrance Day. I have a day of medical interventions planned – at 7 a.m. I’m going to go and try to get a flu shot for the H1N1, because I’ve had rather a yucky case of asthma since I was 12 and any respiratory illnesses would be rather serious for me. Then I get to go to the fertility clinic and have another blood test and ultrasound. I hope to be home for 11, so I can clean my house and perhaps teach my neighbor how to knit. I am working on my Christmas knitting and making good progress, aided by the fact that a new yarn ‘warehouse’ opened up not too far from my workplace. There goes the neighborhood. On Friday I look forward to a visit from my cousin and her boyfriend, who I have not met, and who knows what the weekend will bring – perhaps I’ll try taking Rosie to the city again, if the weather’s nice.

No more parties for awhile. Our next big thing is a trip to San Francisco in a month, and then onto Christmas. Ah Christmas.

Two Halloween Revelations

2009-10-30T08:03:00.002-05:00

Two things came to my attention this morning:

1. I have readers who are not related to me, and
2. There are other folks out there (adults) who are just as enthusiastic as me about Halloween.

So for all of you out there (relatives and non-relatives) who are glueing, sewing, painting, last-minute-craft-supply-shopping and figuring out how to wire your wigs into just the right shapes, I want you to know that I'm here for you, and we can have a virtual brag-fest right here. Send your pictures to me at gennyland(AT)yahoo.com and I will post them. In the meantime, here's some inspiration. Celebrity Halloween Costumes.

Halloween is for Grown-Ups

2009-10-29T09:25:00.001-05:00

I am dismayed by the lack of enthusiasm around Halloween these days.

My friends are all in their thirties and forties. I understand that life is busy, dignity has to be maintained, and children complicate things. I understand all that but yet I still can’t figure out why nobody can match my enthusiasm when it comes to Halloween because it is seriously my favorite holiday of the year (sorry Christmas, you’re stressful).

This year I am most disappointed by the fact that even though Halloween falls on a Saturday, I’m still having a hard time drumming up enthusiasm for my Halloween party. Not to sound like a whiney 12-year-old, but really? For once you get to dress in disguise and drink all evening, not have to work the next day, and you’re choosing to stay home? Maybe I need to re-think my lifestyle choices but that sounds like a load of fun to me.

Also for the first time, we’re having a party that may not be for the kiddies. I am going out of my way to make things truly disturbing – blood in the bathtub, gory art on the walls, creepy lighting, boozy punch, décor that hints at recent not-exactly-professional surgical operations, etc. I can’t wait to decorate. So far in my social world I’ve made a real effort to incorporate my friends’ kids into our gatherings, but this time, not so much. I’ve bought a spray bottle of fake blood and will use it liberally. I’ve made frozen hearts out of fruit juice, to use as ice cubes in my bloody punch. I’ve gathered ‘creepy’ fruits (there are a lot of creepy fruits, as it turns out).

This year I get to develop two costumes: since I work in the Visual Arts section at work, we have collectively decided that everyone, all 17 of us, will dress as a famous work of art. They actually organize a Halloween parade at our work, so at 11:30, up to 50 trick-or-treaters will weave up and down the hallways collecting candies, and judges will dole out prizes to the best costumes and best-decorated section. We’re going for gold this year; five of my colleagues are going as ‘dogs playing poker’, one’s going as Van Gogh, a few of them are going minimalist – a Mondrian, a Malevich, and a Magritte, two are teaming up to do ‘American Gothic’, the CanCon will be Emily Carr, we have a token Mona Lisa, and I will be Frida Kahlo, which has been a hoot to (re)create.

For the party Saturday night, I’m going to be a terrifying zombie, plain and simple. Halloween is meant to be scary, in my book. That leaves the door open, as one can be a zombie anything (except a zombie vampire, which my neighbor Dawn argues is entirely possible “what if you were bitten by a vampire AND had your brains eaten by a zombie?” she asked in all seriousness). First Rosie goes to the kennel, because she lost her mind last weekend when I put on my Frida Kahlo wig and I don’t really think she’ll be able to hack a costume, let alone a room full of costumes. Then I’ll decorate, and then will get the trick-or-treaters out of the way, and then I’ll get into my costume. I am so excited. Only two more big sleeps!

I PROMISE I’ll post pictures next week.

Pizza Night!

2009-10-15T12:31:00.003-05:00

So evidently my mother now feels that she needs to make my lunch before I go to work and/or drive in to give it to me, to make sure that I get a healthy balanced meal every day and don’t waste my money. Sorry Mom, I didn’t mean to make you concerned. And today’s Moroccan vegetable soup and strip of baguette is delicious so please don’t start delivery just yet.

Tonight is pizza night. We are creatures of habit, my hubby and I, and so every Thursday night since approximately 1999 we have had pizza for dinner. We’re flexible on this of course – sometimes we go out for dinner, as we did last week (it was Thai). Sometimes pizza doesn’t make sense, either because there’s something else that absolutely has to be eaten before it turns green or we’re out of the ingredients. Yes that’s right, ingredients – our pizza is homemade. We have an amazing pizzeria in our small town (we have almost no delivery food in our region except pizza, and we have about four pizza options) but it’s for special occasions only because it’s a bit expensive. It’s so good that our German and Austrian visitors annually request Luigi’s at at least one point during their stay. But I digress.

I make my pizza dough in the breadmaker, once every three weeks (theoretically). I put it on the ‘dough’ setting and take it out when it’s a large fluffy warm blob, I divide it into three portions, I roll/shape them into pizza shapes (not exactly round) and then I half-bake them. They go into the freezer after that, to be pulled out one by one every Thursday night as soon as we get home from work. It’s all very well-orchestrated: Rosie goes to daycare Thursdays so we go and pick her up first, and then when we get home, she doesn’t really need a full walk because she’s been running around all day. Hubby gets a crust out of the freezer and I start chopping. Our Thursday pizza usually has the same toppings each week, with some room for variety: sauce, pepperoni, red peppers, sun-dried tomatoes, kalamata olives, mozzarella and feta cheese. I am so confident in this combination that I am able to buy the vats of sun-dried tomatoes at Costco. Hubby grates the cheese and the pizza goes into the oven for a few minutes, to be ready at approximately 8 pm when our t.v. shows start. We eat it on the couch in front of the television and Rosie’s (hopefully) so zonked that she doesn’t harass us too badly, and falls asleep soon after. We proceed to watch two hours of fine comedic television programming. Ah Thursdays.

NBC is the pizza network at our house. We find NBC on the dial at about 7:54 and stay with it until 10 p.m., until we switch to the CBC for the national news. These days we get to enjoy the weird Saturday Night Live Weekend Update not-so-Saturday special, Parks and Recreation (which is really getting its legs these days), The Office (Jim and Pam’s wedding last week made me cry), and then Community, a new addition to our roster that we’re 75% enthusiastic about.

I’m not sure what’s going to happen tonight, however, because tonight is special: it’s the season’s premiere of our all-time favourite, 30 Rock. 30 Rock is the jewel of Thursday’s crown and takes precedence over everything else so I’m pretty sure that the weird SNL show has to go, and the schedule will shift back, making room for the three real shows (The Office, P+R, Community) before 30 Rock, which usually has to be on at 9:30 p.m. due I’m sure to its fairly-mature content. We’ll see. I am a super big ladynerd when it comes to Thursday night television so I just checked NBC’s website and indeed: Community, Parks + Recreation, The Office, and 30 Rock. Only 6.5 hours to go.

I buy food.

2009-10-14T12:28:00.001-05:00

My husband and I have a somewhat unorthodox way of managing household expenses. More traditional folks have looked at our system and wondered why we go through all the trouble and not just do it their way, but for us, it works. What we do is, we save all receipts for things that are shared expenses; this category includes things like groceries (I buy most of them), gas (hubby buys most of it), bills (I pay them) and other incidental things like furniture or goo-gaws from garage sales or the occasional “hey I have no money in my wallet can I borrow 20 bucks?” Half of all of these amounts are written down into two columns – what I pay and what hubby pays – and every two weeks we ‘tally’ these two columns up, or balance them against each other. Since I have paid more things (mortgage, bills, etc) whatever he has paid for is put against this to come up with the amount that he owes me. Then he pays up through our shared account, which is really just a ‘bounce’ account.

This is good for a few reasons: we can itemize all the things we spend money on and figure out what our household expenses generally are, we can track trends and major projects, and it’s an easy way for me to pay the bills but for each of us to still have our own accounts, so we don’t bicker over the small stuff (like shoes I might buy at Winners, or the fishing stuff he buys constantly). Nobody feels slighted, and we have never once fought about money. So far, so good.

Adding it all up and looking at it over a number of months, I figure that our household expenses – everything from groceries and gas to mortgage to phone bill and hydro and insurance – usually averages between $1800 and $2400 a month. This doesn’t include personal expenses, like entertainment or clothes or the hairdresser or those shoes I was talking about earlier. Since we make considerably more than that in a month, I often get to wondering where I’m spending all that extra money. Sure I have investments, and other accounts with little pockets of money here and there, but something is eating up a large part of my budget and I needed to get to the bottom of it.

And then I held that thought and went downstairs to get something to eat and realized: I buy food.

I’m not an enormous person - I’m a healthy size, pretty tall for a girl, medium active – but man can I pack it away. Here’s today’s menu: coffee from home, a breakfast sandwich (no bacon – this means English muffin, egg, cheese) from the shop downstairs, a Caesar salad from the salad place downstairs, and no doubt I will head down around 3 or 3:30 for a coffee and a cookie because salad never fills me up and I have yet to really internalize that lesson. That list doesn’t even include dinner or wine or after-school snacks – in fact, our dinners are so economical, my lunch costs about twice what my dinner costs, on average. The breakfast sandwich is $2.60, the salad was $7.55, and the coffee and cookie will be about $3.00. Add that up! That’s $13 bucks per workday down my gullet! I am an idiot!

I have really good intentions. I bought a beautiful metal one-cup Bodum at a garage sale in Toronto in August, and have since failed to buy a supply of coffee, cream and sugar to go with it. It sits on my bookshelf looking terrific and virtuous but it’s pristine for a reason. We have a huge cupboard at home filled with plastic food storage containers of all kinds but I don’t have to worry about Bisphenol-A because I never fill them with anything. Even when I do prepare a nice little lunch the night before, I unfailingly forget it in the fridge.

I think the truth of it is that I like to buy food. Nothing makes me feel more at peace with the world than going to the market to buy vegetables, or hitting the Italian specialty shop for some nice cheese and ‘authentic’ pasta. This carries over into my work life, because let’s face it, food from home is boring. That and I don’t love sandwiches. I see colleagues walk by my office with plates of re-heated lasagna or salads brought from home and it doesn’t appeal to me at all. I have home food and then I have the entire world of work food and I like it that way. Every day at 11:45 I think ‘what will it be today? Indian? Thai? Salad? Sushi?’ and my life feels all the richer for it, even if my bank account is not. Sometimes it makes me feel stupid or dirty (last week I bought a pizza for $8.95 that turned out to be a SMALL pita bread with toppings. That’s a snack at my house), but mostly it keeps the line between work and home firmly drawn.

I have officially accounted for another $275 out of my monthly budget. Now I have to figure out where the rest of it goes.

Fall Obsession

2009-09-25T10:20:00.002-05:00

Well fall is officially here, which I could have told you without even looking at the calendar. There’s a bite in the air, especially at night, and we know that even if it gets hot in the day, the sleeping will be cool and comfortable at night. The sumacs are electric red, if that's a colour. I think I have to bring in my peppers, pick the rest of my tomatoes, and plant my garlic this weekend.

We had a visitor yesterday – a rude houseguest who trampled the perennials in front of my deck, ate the apples off of my tree, took a big poop in front of my veggie garden, and then crushed my plume poppies on the way out of the yard. I think he had a rather large bottom, by the looks of things. Tonight we are going to go to Canadian Tire and buy one of these, because how many times have I thought that I wanted one over the last 7 years? Too many to count. I am looking forward to it; if we get good shots I will definitely share. Fun for home and cottage!

I was having this discussion with my sister-in-law today: it is fall and for some biological crazy reason, all I can think about is food. I am packing it on. I’m not alone in this so don’t get excited or anything, but fall is when the bear in me goes “get fat and hibernate.” Maybe if I kept my house warmer in winter, that urge would go away? I eat one thing and start thinking about the next. I feel like baking, even though I don’t specifically know what to make or how I’m going to eat it. I’ve started to crave stews and things with apples in them. She mentioned pumpkins and I went “oooh I haven’t even thought about pumpkins yet!” I want to buy some squash this weekend just for the sake of buying and having squash in my house. Is that ridiculous?

So this weekend, on top of cleaning the house and garden and preparing for more guests, I want to bake things with apples, buy a bunch of squash, buy organic garlic and plant it, pick the apples off of our trees to save them from the wildlife, and plan things to bake and experiment on with pumpkins this fall (pumpkin cinnamon buns? Pumpkin pasta? Pumpkin cookies?) Man I am hungry already. What time is lunch?

Things I Hate.

2009-09-22T15:07:00.000-05:00

Things that I find really oppressive right now are the following:

Fruit flies I am at war with fruit flies. I surmise that they are coming in through the screens in the kitchen windows, because right outside the kitchen is our apple orchard (two trees). There is a lot of fallen and rotting fruit, and I believe this is where the flies originate. The compost pail has now moved outside to the deck, which is for the best because it’s a breeding ground for fruit flies, though hubby insists on bringing it inside from time to time and enraging me. There are flies in and around the sink, and flies around our heads while we eat dinner. I bought a trap from Lee Valley Tools but I don’t know how many have fallen for it. They are wiley, those fruit flies.

Threatening wildlife, fattening up for winter Apparently this is the time of year when I have to really worry about fishers, coyotes, etc etc. Cats are starting to go missing, and we all know how I feel about that. My little fatty Sasha sticks close to home most of the time, but she’s started staying out later and later at night, and it makes me nervous. We’ve started enlisting Rosie to go out (on a leash) and find her in the dark.

My slow garden I have tomatoes, they’re just not red yet. I have picked a bunch, and want to bring them inside to ripen, but am terrified of encouraging the abovementioned fruit flies. Any ideas are welcome. I am still waiting on some potatoes (I planted them really late) and am still getting zucchini, but everything else is a wash. I got garlic (whoop, that’s the easiest thing) and onions, and potatoes (which were all floury and terrible), and four carrots which were purple, so I suspect my sister-in-law threw them out when she found them in the fridge. They were meant to be purple but she didn’t know that. I got one plum. At least we will have a wonderful apple harvest. Everything is a giant mess, as it always is at this time of year.

The onset of fall We’re unprepared for fall this year. We don’t have our firewood, let alone have it split and stacked and put away. We haven’t had our chimney cleaned. I haven’t cleaned out the garden. The grass is half-mowed, because our mower died. The car needs repairs, and we need to sell the Saturn station wagon that lives in our driveway which will get us peanuts I’m sure. We sold the blue truck (sniff) and will keep it to the Vibe for the winter, I think. We may need new winter tires (cha-ching). We haven’t done anything regarding our siding this year, though Stuart, our handyman guy, said he’d do it in the fall sometime. However, I haven’t painted any boards for it, and don’t even know how many we’ve got. The trailer is woefully unprepared for the winter onslaught, as we don’t think it can handle 4 feet of snow on top of it, and it’s definitely not mouse-or-water-tight, I’ve learned. I feel like I just pulled the garlic out of the garden and I need to think about weeding it and planting next year’s. I need to buy an extra month somehow. I am anxious just writing this out, and could really use a glass of wine.

Junk I am tired of dealing with all the junk in our house. I keep trying to encourage a clean up day (!! to make it sound fun) but we never seem to get rid of a satisfactory amount of stuff. All the empty spaces fill right back up again. This is why we need a cottage. I keep things around (old kitchen sink, old bottles, etc) because I have plans to put them in a cottage someday, but in the meantime you can’t hardly walk through our basement. This weekend I have to do the ol’ twice-annual clothing switch (summer to winter, boo hoo) and I really want to get hubby to do a major sort in his closet. We need to make space, because it’s getting a bit oppressive, and winter only makes that feeling worse.

However, all of this being said, I am a person with a can-do attitude (ha!) and this list of things that I hate now turns into a list of things to deal with:

- put up sticky traps for fruit flies.
- pick tomatoes, remaining potatoes and onions. Ripen them in a fruit-fly-free locale.
- Buy organic garlic and plant it for next year.
- Rip all the weeds and old plants out of the veggie garden.
- Pick apples.
- Order firewood.
- Split and stack firewood.
- Have chimney cleaned.
- Repair car.
- Sell Saturn.
- Call Stuart.
- Check winter tires.
- Winterize the trailer.
- Clean closets.
- Switch clothes summer/winter.
- Put junk away or throw it out.

I should just keep this list as a template, an annual to-do list, because these tasks are the same from year to year. Fall sucks.

Things I Love

2009-09-18T16:00:00.002-05:00

These are the things that I presently am really into:

Reading Reading is a funny thing to me. Either I do it 100% or not at all. I can go months and months without reading anything and then all of a sudden the dam bursts and I read three books in a week and will read while doing everything; going to the bathroom, cooking dinner, watching t.v. even.

Free decorating magazines My fertility clinic has a lot of decorating magazines. My hubby and I worked out that this is very savvy on their part: not only does the demographic match (usually thirty-somethings, many females, and most of the people I see in that clinic are fairly upwardly-mobile), but it’s a comforting subject to boot. Fashion magazines might make people feel even worse about themselves than they already do – infertility is a real punch to the gut for body image – and decorating magazines appeal to the nesting instinct that is zinging around that waiting room. Anyway, I pay the damn clinic so much money that I feel justified stealing their magazines, and have come away with two good ones in the past week. I also feel justified because I have a major project (a cottage) coming up so this is like R+D.

Kitchenalia There is this terrific store in Ottawa called Kitchenalia, which stocks really nice high-end and esoteric kitchenwares, but also a lot of antiques. The Austrians bought their kitchen table there. The little old man who runs it is super-nice and knowledgeable and he stocks a really wacky and eclectic mix of antiques. I just love it. I am going there now. There’s an orange table I’ve got my eye on. Edited to note that the table is $325 so it seems I won’t be buying it.

Rosie Rosie came in second in the photo contest. We didn’t get enough votes to win the spa package, which is fine, because it was enough to get her picture in the paper. We got 104 votes in the end. Rosie was very pleased. She has become such a lovely dog, you have no idea. We just finished 8 weeks of obedience and agility training with her and while she wouldn’t win any contests in either (come on people, it’s only 8 weeks), she can do all of the tricks, and doesn’t even hesitate on the teeter-totter, the bridge, the high jumps or the tunnel, which is her favorite. She is so smart. Lately her entire diet is apple-based, so her breath is always sweet and kiss-ready. I just wish I could bring her everywhere with me. If I ran Kitchenalia, as is my dream, she would totally come to work with me. Bull in a china shop anyone?

Bears We have bears in our neighborhood. It used to be an orchard, years and years ago, so there are apple trees everywhere. We find bear turds all over the roads, and bear prints in the mud, but they are so funny because they’re really well-fed in our area, and are therefore relatively non-threatening. All of the turds are like big piles of apple-pie filling. Rosie eats those too. We haven’t actually seen one in our parts yet but we go out looking every night, and one was huffing at my husband in the front yard (from a distance) around midnight a couple of weeks ago. That is a bit scary, but it adds an element of suspense to our days that keeps things lively. My new job as the car passenger is ‘bear-spotter’. So far I have seen only one.

Cottages I am all about cottages these days. I doodle floor plans, I research dock designs and materials, and I mostly just dream. It keeps me going, and will keep me going through the winter.

Family Time

2009-09-16T10:09:00.002-05:00

Gosh I don’t even remember the last time I wrote you. So much has happened in the meantime – all of August has passed us by, and nearly half of September – that I don’t think I can recount it in these pages.

Sorry. I’ve been reading Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and it’s affecting my writing style. I’m going all Jane Austen on your asses. I haven’t read the original, but this one’s much more exciting. I enjoy a Victorian comedy of manners so much more when it’s laden with gut-wrenching zombie-killing violence. It’s the love child of Jane Austen and Quentin Tarantino.

In early August, back in what I like to call ‘the rainy season’, I hosted a BBQ party for my mother’s side of the family. It was a hoot, from what I remember. There was dancing. There was drinking. People fished and golfed and swam and one of our number even went zip-lining in the quarry. We had big plans to go on the aerial adventure at the Cavernes Lafleche aerial park but those sizeist bastards wouldn’t take anyone with hips larger than 42 inches. For those of you who are familiar with my family, there are very few among them with hips smaller than 42 inches. Thankfully this is balanced out – many of them (females, mostly) are six-footers. I am a shorty at 5’7 ½ (barefoot). What can those cave-people expect?

After that, we began preparations for the arrival of the Austrians. During this time, we didn’t really visit the land much, so when we finally went up with the Austrians we were pleasantly surprised to find a lovely first-floor and three walls standing where there once was only bush. I must admit to feeling a sense of accomplishment. While the majority of the actual work has been done by my brother, by builders and various other service-people (septic installation, laneway backhoe, etc), I feel like as a unit we’ve moved the project in its entirety along at a great pace in just a few months. It also just so happened that the arrival of the Austrians was timed perfectly so that they could watch their cottage being built.

Their visit was a bunch of fun. We went to the land. We swam, we boated, we kayaked (we bought kayaks!), we slept in the trailer, we drank beer from the bottom of the lake (warm beer!), we fished, I watched Rosie redundantly chase a loon, before she decided she was outmatched and gave up. I kayaked WITH Rosie, which was adorable even though nobody else even saw it. We went bowling. We went shopping, and I forced them to buy stuff for their cottage so progress could be made on things like bathroom and kitchen fixtures, when the time comes. My brother came over a lot, which was nice, and many decisions were made about construction details. I got a really great sense of what goes into building a cottage, so that I now feel better prepared to tackle our own when the time comes.

They stayed for two weeks. It was great fun and we all got along and Rosie behaved herself, but I was exhausted at the end of it, and I’m still (four days later) setting the house to rights. I really look forward to the day when we will have side-by-side cottages, so we can play together, we can eat together if we want, we can visit for coffee, campfires, games, and then have quiet alone time when we want as well. My idea since the beginning that we should remain in seperate cottages was reinforced during this visit, so I feel better about the decision, even though it may seem frivolous from the outside. While we have many of the same tastes and interests, several factors would make it difficult to share: they have a lot more disposable income than us, so their standard for household things is higher. The budget for building their cottage is higher than ours will ever be. We will beg, borrow and steal whatever materials we can use, where they are thinking about buying fixtures in Italy and filling a shipping container to get them here. They were actually contemplating commissioning someone to build them a wooden bathtub, where I want a used tin farm tank as a shower stall. They are discussing having the visible steel i-beams in their living room be pierced with plasma-cut ovals where we would be happy with rough pine. They bought an antique dining table for $800, where I hope to use the table my Opa built. They don’t love kitsch as much as we do. They don’t like colour as much as we do. They don’t like spicy food as much as we do. We let our dog onto the furniture and they don’t. They don’t wear as many clothes as we do. I would hate to have my sister-in-law’s quality bed linens muddied by my dog’s filthy paws, or have anything petty like that become an issue between us. I think we have such a lovely relationship, the five of us, that this set-up will be absolutely perfect. If you feel like curry tonight, feel free to come over. Otherwise we will meet afterwards at the campfire, or for games and dessert. Quality, enjoyable, family time.

My mom thought that this project would slake my desire to build right away, but it’s done the opposite – I can’t wait to start. I think we’ll get a move on next spring, start by plotting it out, and putting in a septic. I am jealous.

If I Had 200 Million Dollars

2009-08-20T10:02:00.005-05:00

If I won the Italian mega-lottery, these are top ten things I would do:

1. Quit my job. No offense, colleagues, but when I'm sitting on an egg that big, I see no need to heed the alarm clock every morning. If I have to have a job, I adore the one I’ve got, but I’m not super ambitious so if I don’t have to have one I’ll be off like a whore’s pajamas. I’m not a person who would lie on a fainting couch and eat bonbons all day, fanning myself while my man-servants fetch me mint juleps and piña coladas; I would be busy each and every day, building things, making things, traveling, socializing. OK maybe not that last one. I won’t be a lazy rich person, just one with few external demands on my time.

2. Have a larger house built. My house is terrific. I love it to death – we bought it when I was 26, we were both broke, and it was like a palace to us. However, when we have houseguests everything in the house has to kind of jenga around a bit, as we have limited space. If we ever have kids, we will have to forego houseguests, or relegate them to the basement. If we have more than one kid, they will be sharing a bedroom. Admittedly it’s a really large bedroom but still, I am hoping for either two girls or two boys. Said larger house will be timber-frame or log, on a huge piece of land, too, on a private road, with a gate, because humans irritate the crap out of me. We would have a separate garage and an enormous vegetable garden to which I would dedicate all my time between May and October. We would also have an orchard where I would grow perfect apple trees, grapes (for wine, duh) plums, pears and lots of cherries. We would build a big giant log fence – really tasteful and attractive – and hide all of our junk behind it because every house has a junk pile.

3. Invest in help. I would like to have a live-in housekeeper, who would be dedicated to pet-hair-removal, floor washing, kitchen cleaning, and ironing (this could be a full-time job), and a handyman on call. I would have the new house professionally landscaped, or hardscaped so I can do the gardens myself.

4. Build a tasteful cottage with tons of glass, pale wood, solar panels, and a bad-ass dock. On 31-Mile Lake.

5. Buy a pied-à-terre in Austria. My in-laws (well brother-in-law + family) live in Graz, and it’s the most gorgeous town. We would go there for a month or two every winter and just ski the alps, eat strudel and shop. I would pay to have my fear of flying miraculously cleared up, or just pay for drugs to knock me out. Rosie would fly on her own when pet airways decides to develop service to Europe.

6. Get a few more dogs. Part of my huge property would be fenced, so the dogs could play all day long, and we would have a giant bed so they could all sleep with us. Rosie would be queen, and would get to pick out all the other dogs. With 200 million do you think I could afford to have Rosie cloned? In which case, we’d have Rosies running around for all eternity.

7. Give cash to my family. Sorry this is number 7 – I meant for it to be higher up there but all the shopping got more tempting. I’d give you all a wad, pay off your mortgages and other debts, get you fancy cars, buy you some fancy cheeses etc. Maybe we would all go on vacation to our pied-à-terre in Austria some winter. Also you could all buy really fancy shoes. My immediate family would live on our huge acreage, so we would have a compound that’s guarded against the world. My dad would have a workshop for all his crazy projects on one end of the compound, and my brother would have a state-of-the-art garage for his projects on the extreme other end of the compound, and they would each have their own set of tools so nobody would have to borrow anything from anybody. My mother would have a posh sewing room with a terrific view but she wouldn’t ever have to sew anything she didn’t want to. She could lay on a fainting couch and eat bonbons all day if she so desired. My brothers-and-sisters-in-law-and-nephew would have a fund set up so they would never have to pay to visit us again.

8. Open up a shop. For something to do, I would open up my own shop. Maybe. I’d sell homewares that are both new (chosen very carefully through my travels) and stuff culled from garage sales and fixed up, etc. Rosie would come to work with me every day and be the shop mascot. I’d hire super reliable help to work whenever I don’t feel like it. Secretly they’d be irritated by me and my erratic hours and my jumpy dog but they wouldn’t be able to show it because I’d be the rich boss-lady – not a tyrant, just powerful – and because they’d be the only retail employees in town with a health plan. I wouldn’t worry too much about the profits, because I have 200 million dollars.

9. Pay to have kids. ‘Nuff said. Wait I’m already doing this.

10. Give to charity. I would give a lot of money to the Humane Society, local no-kill animal shelters, and cancer research. I would set up a fund to help people pay for veterinary treatments for their pets and for a free spay and neuter program in my area. I would set up a turtle rescue operation that works to save slow-moving turtles from being hit by cars during mating season.

So basically I want to become a kooky Martha Stewart. With this list, I am also hoping that there will be enough money left over (100 mil or so) that I can hire a trusted advisor (I already know someone so I'm ready) and set up some investments that will allow me to live off the interest for the rest of my life. I don’t want to eat caviar for breakfast, but neither do I want to worry about money ever again. I don’t think this is too much to ask.

Oh and a footnote: we've entered Rosie in a photo contest and we're rallying the vote, so if you feel like moseying on over to their site and voting, we're #8. Go Rosie! http://lowdownonline.com/photo-contest-aug/

How I spent my summer vacation

2009-08-04T13:28:00.006-05:00

OK I’m back. Once again, I departed on a summer vacation with a list of things to do as long as my arm, and once again, I did many of them but not all. I return to the land of the living with the homestead in good order, ready for a happy onslaught of company at next weekend’s family reunion.

I would like to share a few things with you all. The first one is a phenomenon I like to call ‘Vacation Hair.’ My once-fabulous haircut, dubbed the Bonjour Baby! by my hilarious hairdresser Azra, went through the vacation hair translation machine and came out comme ça:

What people at work don’t know about me is that I often wander the earth looking like that. If they ran into me in my town one day, while they were enjoying a day of sightseeing or something else genteel, and I was running into town for a jug of milk or something, they would not have stopped to chat. They would likely not have recognized me.

The biggest undertaking of my two-week vacation was to build railings onto my new deck. I had the crazy plan to use cedar and galvanized steel cable, and people doubted me (I’m not naming names) but I think it turned out ok for a home-made jobbie. Even the guy who built my deck was impressed, and is off to go put steel cables on HIS railings, the copycat. So I present to you a visual tour of my railing installation project:

There were several underlying themes to my holidays: the rain (almost every single day), the hair (see above), some medical experiments (no animals were involved), lots of cleaning, which made absolutely zero difference ‘cause the house is still a mess, and I am now convinced that Rosie speaks English. Well, understands English – more work is required to get her to speak it. We spent so much time together, she’s probably jonesing as badly as I am right now. At least I hope she is. She’s probably catching up on her sleep. We spent all of our time together, as she became like my little shadow, following me from room to room, sleeping wherever I was working. We spent good quality time together, me and Rosie, and we are now closer than we’ve ever been. I now officially love her TOO MUCH.

I went to the land with my brother and the septic folks to talk about my BIL’s cottage, I went to the land for the afternoon with my girlfriend Fiona and Rosie, and we went this past weekend for the first overnight stay at our cozy cottage. We had our neighbor friends up on Saturday with their dogs and we had a lovely time, basking in the first really nice day in a long time. We floated on air mattresses, ate chocolate chip cookies, and then when they left hubby and I took Rosie fishing. She’s not a good fisherman, Rosie. She thrashes around in the boat. She threatens to jump in the water at all times. It’s so not relaxing. Eric still managed to catch two fish, one of which became the dinner that we ate at 10:45 pm (damn campfire cooking!) in our trailer, by the light of two tealights. We learned that we need to improve the lighting in our trailer.

Sunday a.m. we built a little deck off of the front of our trailer, using pre-cut boards taken from our old deck at home. A little bit of recycling DIY. Another fun swim (Rosie has the air mattress all figured out now. She rides it on her own, all four paws up, standing on it. I have now purchased her a boogie board so fun pictures will come, I am sure of it.) and then home for a day of normalcy before the back-to-work bug hit.

All that surfing makes her sleepy.

I should be in that photo, spooning her and smooching her ears!

And now, I am back at work. I have a bit of a tan. I feel like a caged wild animal, but at least my hair has been tamed.

SuperMom

2009-07-17T08:44:00.007-05:00

A long long time ago, I publicly stated my intention to slipcover my couch. I had this fantasy that I was going to simply buy 18 metres of fabric (according to my measurements), measure it out, and make a slipcover, using my very basic sewing skills. The couch body is still in very good shape but 10 years of regular use, in a fully-sunny room, with an assortment of cats and one gregarious dog, took its toll on its fabric shell.

Well that did not happen. Life is busy, I hate sewing, and priorities got shifted around. We re-tiled the kitchen, had a deck built, finished the trailer, cleared a lot, had a laneway put in, etc. etc and our poor little couch (actually not so little) sat there throughout, getting holier and more and more grungy. I have been afraid to wash the cushion covers in fear that they would disintegrate in the washer, so they were getting a bit gamey. The stuffing was popping out of them and the middle cushion was held shut with safety pins, a victim of the last time I tried to wash it. I’d taken to covering it with various jaunty tablecloths to ‘freshen it up’ and hide the injuries. It was overdue for a re-haul.

Enter my mother, who started fabric shopping for me in my absence. She is a seamstress/dressmaker/fabric expert/designer by trade, and informed me that she would take on the project. I was saved.

We hit the mondo fabric shop in town last Saturday, where we found not one but two options for a slipcover. The first was ok, the colour was not perfect, but it was really sturdy and the price was right at 10 bucks a yard. The second was the absolute perfect colour, but twice as expensive and not as tough. We went with the former - $10 a yard enabled me to justify buying a really gorgeous contrasting fabric for cushion covers. At the cutting table we learned that though the chart said we’d need 13 yards to cover a sofa like ours, the roll only had 9.5 on it. We decided to take it anyway; it was extra-wide and Mom said she’d make it work.

And make it work she did. I got a call at work informing me that she’d finished cutting it all out, and had ONE INCH of fabric left. Hubby calculated that to be a 99.7% efficiency rate.

And now, not even one week later, I have a new couch. The colour (as it turns out) is more than perfect, and goes with everything else in my living room. Behold:

Is this not the most beautiful couch arm?

My mom is a wizard. She could teach a class at Hogworts.

In honour of this most recent and resounding success, I thought I might highlight some of her other major successes. She is good at everything she touches, my mother, which is tough to live up to but damn handy to have around. And I wasn’t going to make my own wedding dress:

How many hours of hand-beading did that take, mom? Like 100 or so? How much bad t.v. did you have to endure while working on that puppy?

Her skills have plenty of industrial applications too. My brother recently needed his free dirtbike pants to fit, but since they were free they were the wrong size – way too small. Mom added sporty swooping panels of tough fabric, cut out of an old hockey bag, and now you can’t even tell that they weren’t bought that way at the store. Also, she made an awning for their boat. Hemp curtains for my living room. Slipcovers for my easy chairs. My ski pants. My cousin’s wedding dress, my other cousin’s wedding dress, my cousin on the other side’s wedding dress, my aunt’s wedding dress, my girlfriend’s maid-of-honour dress (sight unseen – she sent in the measurements. It fit perfectly) and the wedding, prom and bridesmaid dresses of nearly everyone in our area. At my prom, four or five people had dresses made by my mom. She had her own line of clothes for awhile too, and once in a while a coworker would turn up wearing one of her pieces, or I’d see one walking down the street.

I would feel like the next-generation-failure, but I take heart in focusing on the few things that I can do better than her. There aren’t many – she cooks better, she knits better, she bakes better, she reads tons of books, my dog is nuts about her, she can build things, she makes great potatoes, she cuts hair, and even though she’s 25 years older she’s way hotter than I am – but I think I have her topped in three departments: the first is pottery. And only because I have been at it longer. If she’d taken four full rounds of pottery classes she’d probably have made an ornate bathtub by now. The second is computers. I am by necessity better with computers than she is but I suspect she’s catching up (hi mom!) The third is…. um…….maybe there isn’t a third. Finding tiny things? I’m good at that. Skiing maybe?

I guess the one disadvantage of being good at everything is that everyone always asks you to do stuff for them. Whether overtly or passive-aggressively, which is my preferred method. By simply NOT slip covering my couch, and forcing her to look at its grubby, slouchy, hole-covered, faded shell, I subtly maneuvered her into doing something about it. Sneaky eh?

Anyway, I have a supermom. Me and Alexis Stewart should get together and commiserate. Alexis, if you’re reading this, call me. I know how you feel.

Not that your own moms aren’t all great, but I know that you are all secretly a bit jealous. Hands off! She’s mine.

The weekends, from here on out

2009-07-13T09:14:00.008-05:00

I’ve had to adjust my lifestyle. I am a person who is not super-fond of change, so I find myself struggling to come to grips with certain lifestyle shifts that have been necessary of late. I have major issues. Right now they are:

- now that we are at the lake every weekend, when the hell am I supposed to do my laundry?
- Now that I have to pack a cooler every weekend, what do I eat for lunch?

I am not used to confronting these kinds of questions. To the first, my solution has so far been to do a load or two every weeknight evening, but the wardrobe’s been a bit disjointed as a result. We find ourselves having to wear either all white or all black, or all bright colours. Hubby’s solution has been to drag out some of his clothes from the olden days and so one day last week he went to work looking like a gigolo. I was sleepy in the morning and didn’t catch it until he picked me up at 5:30 p.m. That shirt is now going into the ironing basket and never coming out.

It has also resulted in my forgetting that I have a load in the washer that needs to go in the dryer, so several times this week I’ve gone to the basement to discover a dank, soggy load of laundry in the washer left over from the night before that doesn’t smell so hot, and has to be re-washed. This is what happens when you start doing laundry at 10 p.m.

The answer to the second question is not so simple. I am not a fan of sandwiches per se, and I find lunch kind of a stressful meal to prepare. Breakfast is easy: eggs, bread, bacon, done. Cereal and milk? Done. Oatmeal, water, and a microwave? Done. Dinner is more complex but a bit more creative, and it’s not unreasonable to fire up the stove/campfire/BBQ to cook a meal at dinnertime, planned around one central meat item.

But lunch? I resent cooking at lunch, so it has to be something cold and easy to prepare. Salads require a lot of ingredients and don’t always travel well, and don’t fill up a man who’s been working in the bush with a chainsaw. Sandwiches require luncheon meats, the majority of which I find kind of disgusting, and the right blend of condiments and toppings that don’t make your bread soggy. To really avoid sogginess you have to bring all the ingredients in the cooler separately, which requires packing them all up individually in space-hogging containers. And then there’s the fact that I don’t love sandwiches. They’re too limp and bready or something. I can handle a bun, but I don’t keep buns in the house (I don’t know why) so it always requires a trip to the store. See? Lunch is fraught. I prefer to snack and snack and snack in the middle of the day but hubby loves a lunch. Last night we had a ‘serious’ conversation about how he doesn’t feel like we can adequately share our love because we don’t enjoy eating sandwiches together. “I wish that you loved sandwiches as I do. Then we could eat them together and truly feel united.”

At least now when we go up to the land I have a nice spot to prepare said sandwiches. Behold:

And then when we eat lunch, we are very civilized:

Rosie also enjoys the trailer.

It’s difficult because so far, she doesn’t wear shoes (though I have my eye on these. Just kidding . They're more expensive than mine.) so she can’t take them off when she comes inside and she tracks dirt all over the place. I took that lovely picture of the kitchen knowing that the dirty futon in the background is my new reality. Luckily it’s pretty sandy all around the trailer so unless it’s wet out, the dirt brushes off easily, but the floor ends up being kind of grubby all the time. Next weekend we are building a deck out front of the trailer so there will be an added level of distance between dirty feet and trailer floor. I need to also keep a foot-washing bucket handy by the door, because I don’t want dirty feet in the beds.

We haven’t yet slept in the trailer overnight (what is WITH this summer?), but I will surely report back when we do. I took a nap but that doesn't count. So far, we have only gone up for the day, to enjoy the front yard:

The Open Window is More Interesting.

2009-06-23T15:39:00.002-05:00

Last night I had the good fortune of getting a ride home with my brother and his girlfriend. It’s not that I dislike riding home with hubby, it’s just that it’s always late, and getting home at 5:30 is a real luxury that I could get used to very quickly.

Alas it was like 48 degrees in my house when I got there. It was so hot, poor Rosie was being very still, lurking in the shadows. I immediately threw all the windows wide open and set up a fan in the back-est darkest room, and we decided to just lay low for a bit.

I turned on the t.v. because I never do that. I thought “I am going to watch all those shows that I don’t get to watch when hubby’s here because he’d rather watch documentaries/nature shows/the news 3 times in a row.” I turned on the t.v. and Rosie and I plopped onto the futon and we watched t.v. Rosie is injured and that’s enough excuse for me.

Wow is t.v. ever bad these days. In my normal life, when hubby’s around and it’s not the middle of summer, I generally only tune in for a handful of shows: Tuesday nights we’d watch Flight of the Conchords for a half-hour, Wednesdays I’ll watch like 4 episodes in a row of At the End of My Leash where an annoying but effective dog-trainer guy works with all these families, usually completely irritating, to rehabilitate their dogs/themselves. It’s my guilty pleasure. He thinks he’s Cesar Milan but he’s so totally Calgary. I like the dogs though, and Rosie enjoys it.

On Thursdays we settle in with our pizza dinner (home-made! It’s not as bad as it sounds!) and allow ourselves to watch 3 hours solid of television. We start with My Name is Earl, not our favorite favorite but we’ll miss it anyway, then move to whatever they’ve got on next, which most recently was the excellent Parks and Recreation featuring the excellent Amy Poehler. Then we slide into The Office and cap it off with 30 Rock. Following that hilarity, we use The National as our chill-out room. Usually I knock off at about 10:30, once I’ve seen the top stories.

But it's summer now, and last night I flipped the channels, desperately looking for something to watch. I started with ET Canada where I learned all I never wanted to know about celebrities for the day, and then I went over to HGTV, where I watched perky real estate agents try to help people look for homes. A fellow named ‘Cheyne’ (pronounced ‘Shane’) who was also a falconer was looking for his first home, with great expectations. His mother carried a small dog with her wherever she went and was convinced she could negotiate $50k off the asking price. A young married couple, the husband of which was in a rock band, were looking to move out of the tour bus and into an apartment (!)… but with the bandmates. That’s an understanding wife. As she squealed, upon seeing her fully decorated new bedroom, “it’s just like a hotel!” and caught myself yelling “BECAUSE IT’S GOT NONE OF YOUR DAMN STUFF IN IT!” I realized I needed to turn off the t.v.

These days, if the options are watching snotty NYC Prep school kids being horrid, watching snotty airheads in L.A., watching irritating ‘celebrities’ survive in the jungle, watching people compete in talent shows, watching the evidence of peoples’ bad financial or relationship decisions, or watching real estate agents try to turn a silk purse into a sow’s ear, I think I might just throw the t.v. set out the window and enjoy the breeze.

OK Summer, It's ON.

2009-06-22T11:06:00.001-05:00

This weekend our little family was bitch-slapped by mother nature. It was nothing that we should ring alarm bells about I don’t think, but someone flicked the ‘summer’ switch and we were immediately inflicted with all summer concerns.

Saturday we went up to the land to check out our new laneway. It was momentous – we were finally able to DRIVE into our lot. What a great feeling. However, when we parked the truck and got out, we realized the side-effect of taking a backhoe to black earth in the deep forest in June – the place is a wall of blackflies and mosquitos. The laneway is a bit messy but give it a few weeks and the edges will start to grow back and cover up the mess. We need to cut down a few more (dead and scruffy) trees to get the air moving in there, to ward off the insect army.

We first headed down to the waterfront and I took the first swim in my own lake. It felt marvelous – the water was the perfect temperature, the bottom felt ok, it was nice and shallow and Rosie had the time of her life, running back and forth through the water, swimming around in circles and chasing sticks. She swam for about an hour solid. She and hubby swam down the shoreline and then back up the shoreline, while I stayed behind with the loppers and clipped down the crappy little trees that made the beach inaccessible. I didn’t cut them all down – just the ones blocking our beach and the ones blocking the access point for our future dock. The beach is now sunny and passable. I call it a beach but really it’s a sandy strip about 2 feet wide – 4 at its widest.

Then we tried to measure out BIL’s cottage footprint, based on plans he sent us Friday night. I think we did an ok job, but we were rushed, as the dog was being eaten alive. No joke, her eyes are still surrounded by little bumps. Luckily the bites don’t seem to irritate her the way they irritate me, but it still makes me sad to see her with flies stuck to her eyes. I think that footprint will need to be re-measured so he doesn’t end up with a wonky cottage.

Sunday we took off and headed north, to 31-mile lake, to spend the day with my family. My parents launched their boat for the season, so it was the first day ‘on the lake’ for all of us. We got out of the car at the boat launch and Rosie went running into the water to frolic as she usually does, but I heard her yelp, and saw her hobble out of the water in such pain that she didn’t want to stand up. She just lay in the dirt holding her paw up and looking at me, whimpering. All I saw when I examined it was a raised swollen bump that appeared to be rasped or scratched – no blood, no nothing. Anyway, when we got to the island 40 minutes later she appeared to feel better but then got worse, and even though her brother was there, she didn’t really run and play. Swimming felt ok (the water was pretty chilly and it’s low-impact, and probably cleans it out a bit) so we swam and swam, around the island. She must have gone around the island four full times. She spent the rest of the time huddled up on the dock or in the boat, shaking a bit, covered in a towel, giving us the sad eyes. He paw wasn’t looking any better – between the toes it was all puffy and red, but still no blood.

So far, our leading theory as to what happened in the water is that she was nipped ever-so-slightly by a ticked-off snapping turtle. When we returned to the parking lot at the end of the day, our theory was reinforced by the lot full of snapping-turtle tracks, and areas dug up in search of a nesting site, which had all happened while we were out for the day. There was a busy snapping turtle in the hood, and it was feeling a bit defensive. I think Rosie accidentally paddled it while it was lurking in the mud, and it nipped her between the toes – obviously it didn’t get a good shot at her thank god, or else she’d be down a toe today. For once I’m happy Rosie is always moving.

She slept all the way home and last evening appeared to be feeling a bit better – she was walking on it limping a bit, and using it to stabilize her bone while chewing. This morning her body no longer felt hot, and wasn’t panting anymore, but the paw was still swollen so my mom’s taking her to the vet this afternoon to check it out. I want to see if we can give her any painkillers.

It was an on-and-off cloudy day, and while we were all on the island enjoying ourselves, all of a sudden the wind whipped up and it started to rain. It poured, but we all got into my parents’ boat and pulled the cover over us just in time. We were cozy in there, with 6 humans and 2 (large) dogs, curled up, listening to the radio and having some cocktails. The weather got beautiful again quickly once the rain passed, and we all ended up going home burnt to a damn crisp. We are all red today. Those cloudy days are sneaky!

Anyway, stay tuned for the next part of the turtle-bitten dog saga. My heart breaks for Rosie, who didn’t have much fun at all yesterday. Between the bugs, the turtles, the rain, the sunburns, and the knee I bashed on a rock while swimming, we were walloped by summer this weekend and going back to work feels a bit like sweet relief. The deck guy is at our place, the trailer’s almost finished, and I have high hopes for July and August.

Letting Go

2009-06-12T09:06:00.003-05:00

Hubby and I were on our way into work this morning and the conversation turned to comedy. He’d seen Carol Burnett on TV last night and was reminded of how hilarious she is, and how much her brand of humour works to this day, even though comedy in general has changed. I told him that I have come to the point in my life where I can admit that I really love comedy. I seriously love it. I am totally comfortable saying that I don’t really like dramas. Where some folks might think that indicates a kind of shallowness or lack of intellectual rigour, I am now 33 years old and I don’t like dramas. Lofty Oscar-winning movies like Doubt or The Reader sound like boring dirges to me, exercises in emotional manipulation. Give me Judd Apatow any day. I’ll take Seth Rogan over Sean Penn please.

We got to talking about all those arty movies that film students and people in their early 20s love or love to talk about. I did genuinely enjoy many of them. I’ve seen much of Jim Jarmusch’s oeuvre, I’ve seen Brazil, I’ve seen many Peter Greenaway movies. But the time in my life for such things has passed. I’ve let go of the intellectual poseur that I once maybe aspired to be – I no longer have anything to prove.

That made me think of all the other things that I have let go. Not including my ass (ha ha see? comedy). I have let go of aspirations that I might one day become a jeweler. I enjoyed making jewelry when the time was right, and I really love having that knowledge under my belt and may one day take a course or something just for fun. But I don’t think I’ll invest any more money in tools or other supplies, because I have realized that I don’t have it in me anymore to focus on it. I am putting it on the back burner. Maybe not letting go completely, but not putting pressure on myself to pursue it anymore.

I am letting go of the idea that I will travel the world. I thought about that question in detail one day, and got rigorous with myself in deciding on the places that I’m actually interested in. I made a list. I mean no offense to anyone and I’m sure glad other people are doing it, but in all honesty, I have zero interest in traveling to China, Russia, South America, Africa, Japan and most of the rest of Asia. I’d go to India on a free ticket, but I wouldn’t pursue it. This may make me less interesting in the eyes of some folks, but I had to get honest with myself and pare down the list, because I am at my roots a homebody. Also I hate flying. Now I can really focus on a short list of places that I would really like to see or revisit: Scandinavia, Thailand, the Yukon/Northwest Territories, Italy, and more of Austria, the Netherlands and Germany, which are places with real relevance to my life. So freeing.

I am letting go of some hobbies, because frankly I am overbooked in terms of interest and commitments. I am letting go of the idea of myself as ‘photographer’, because I realize I’m not that good at it and I don’t have the brain energy or focus (ha) to learn all about all the camera settings. I am a point-and-shooter and whatever success I’ve had in the past has been a fluke. I’ll learn to use what I’ve got but nobody should expect a career out of me. Also my sister-in-law is so much better at it that I will defer to her for all photographic needs.

Soon I will let go of home decorating, because I hope that at some point in the near future, it’ll just be done. Once I do this and this and that and this and that other thing….I am taking the pressure off of myself to be a terrific cheese maker, and will instead make easy cheese when the situation calls for it and I really feel like it, like in the summer when the basil and tomatoes are ripe and I can make a quick mozza, and sprinkle it all with fresh ground pepper and balsamic vinegar. Very do-able.

I’m letting go of the idea that I’ll someday be able to grow all of my own produce. Realistically, I have a job, and so am out of the house for 11 hours a day. I’m not a farmer. Also realistically, I live north of Ottawa in zone 4.5/5 and our growing season is not that long. I already got realistic with myself this year and decided not to grow things that are difficult or that I don’t actually love eating (radishes, beets, cantaloupe). One day I will let go of the grow-op too, because I know that I can find organic tomato and pepper seedlings somewhere if I look hard enough and it’ll be worth the time and energy to just pay for them. Also I am lazy – full disclosure. I have tons of enthusiasm for the garden in May and June but come late July and August, things start to become quite neglected in there. When pestilence hits, I’m all like “whatever.”

I am not ambitious. I have come to realize this about myself. I have a great job, am financially comfortable, and I’ll be happy to stay at this level for a really long time. I am not one to climb the ladder and I don't have my eye on anyone else's job. I squeezed my way into the job that I love, and hope that I get to keep it when my term is up in two years, but aside from that I don’t have any more need for power, money, additional responsibility, etc. I hope to become a happy and knowledgeable lifer.

I’m letting go of the idea that I’m young. I’m trying now to focus on not being an awkward middle-aged person. I find it sometimes hard to relate to my much-younger coworkers, and sometimes find myself feeling old and weird and square. Questions like “is that your boyfriend?” sound much weirder coming from someone ten years older than you.

I’ve let go of the idea that I am hip to new music. I have zero idea what all the kids are listening to these days. I just think they should all get out into the sun and eat a cheeseburger and stop wearing their hair so that it looks like it’s on backwards. I stick with my old friends – the Beastie Boys, Beck – all of whom are comfortably middle-aged (I think the Beastie Boys are actually approaching 50) and have picked up a few new ones along the way, but I do not by any means have my finger on any kind of pulse anymore. If it comes to my local bar, I might go see it but other than that I no longer go to see bands at bars and clubs or feel that desire to NEVER MISS ANYTHING. I haven’t bought a music magazine in 5 years.

I’ve let go of the idea of myself as a cat person. I am officially through my cat phase. I still have a cat – Sasha – and I love her dearly, but it’s not the same anymore; the term ‘Crazy cat Lady’ no longer applies. Turns out I was only obsessed with certain cats. When offers of free cats come my way, my gut reaction is “nonononono.” I’ve marked it in memoriam, I’ve moved past it, and now I’m fully committed to being a dog person. Dogs are hilarious and It’s better for the aforementioned ass.

I'm mostly letting go of high heels. I wear orthotics people! From now on it's platforms or kitten heels, but stilettos are no longer my speed.

All of this housecleaning might be indicative of a mid-life crisis, but I really feel like I’m in a simplification phase. Life is busy, the projects have gotten larger, and I’m at a crossroads in terms of family planning etc., so something had to give. I think it’s healthy to do this kind of analysis once or twice a decade.

My Town

2009-06-02T09:58:00.002-05:00

My town is funny.

Long a refuge for disenchanted city folks and people who run at a slightly different speed, my little town is unique in that in many ways it’s a rural small town, where everyone knows each other and who they’re sleeping with, and yet it’s a half-hour out of the city, so the lifestyle is sustainable in that you can hold down a decent job while living ‘away from it all’. It’s a haven for industries such as yoga and pottery studios, organic mushroom farming, watercolour painting, shiatsu massage and dog-sledding. It has for several decades been happy home to a large gay and lesbian population. There’s ‘Hippie’s Custom Tattoos’ right beside the pizza place, which serves the best pizza on earth, and features one called the ‘Magic Mushroom.’ It's a great place to visit if you need your chakras realigned. Why, just this morning I got a copy of the daily email newsletter with the following public service announcement:

Kripalu yoga is cancelled this Tuesday, June 2nd due to the demystification of channelling happening in the space.

There are literally about 15 yoga classes happening in my village at any given time.

All of this lives side-by-side and in relative harmony with the local population of hunters and fisherman, wood-cutters and dudes with ATVs and snowmobiles. Many of them are one and the same (i.e. fishermen who do pottery or yoga). Our local bar (one of two rockin’ local bars) is owned by a music impresario, who has brought in acts such as the Arcade Fire, Grizzly Bear, Final Fantasy, Danny Michel, and Buck 65. The music they feature has a contemporary-folk and world beat focus and is normally of really high quality, and bands reportedly love playing the venue, whose stage sits right in front of a picture window looking out over the dark river and the mountains. On the off nights, I’m pretty sure the bar still has a ‘Dart Night’ and the old local dudes hold up the bar while drinking their quarts of beer with tiny little glasses. There is a pool table and usually a hockey game on the t.v., and the owner’s dog walks around freely among the crowd. In the winter it’s not uncommon to see the parking lot filled with ski-doos, and in the fall, sometimes the trucks in the lot have deer strapped to their roofs. The other local bar is owned by a local band, and is always hopping. Last saturday there was a horse tied up to the patio, and last night someone pulled up in a backhoe. You can bring in a picture of your dog and they will put it on the dog-wall with everyone else's dogs.

When we bought our new car, the wonderful Pontiac Vibe (the ‘Viberator’) I called up Richard at the local dealership and pretty much said “hey Richard we need a car, do you have any cheap Vibes?” When I couldn’t make up my mind about it, they just held it for me until I was ready to commit. When I call they jokingly answer the phone with “whaddya want?” or some other old-man phone-answering joke because they can see my name come up on the screen. There’s some yuks about my dad to get out of the way before we can do business, and they are always very accommodating with regards to my schedule, or loaner cars.

There are some notable gaps in the economy of our town, which some brave individual should fill some day (not me). I believe an art supply shop, maybe one that sells fabric and yarn as well, and could bring in specialty items like clay for the potters, would do really well. We don’t have a gas station – are we the only town on earth without a gas station? The only take-out around is pizza; I’m not complaining, because our local pizza is earth-shatteringly good, but sometimes I have a hankering for Chinese. A tackle shop and/or marina could do well, since our town is on a river and is surrounded by cottage country; some genius could combine this with the gas station and start raking in the cash. Unfortunately, it’s tough to make a go of it and I’ve seen a lot of businesses start up and then fail almost immediately. They’re doomed before they open their doors. The place nearly shuts down in winter, so if it’s a tourist-driven business, they have to know what they’re getting into before committing.

The government of Québec insists that signage in our town be posted in French only, or French-first-and-bigger, but nobody who actually lives there cares much. Those things matter more in other towns. When those laws came out, local retailers started posting their specials in Ukranian, Thai, Swedish, just to piss off the man. Visitors are usually tourists from all over, and they don’t much care either I don't think, though I’m sure the cottagers visiting from Ontario and from the states would prefer that their cashiers at the grocery store speak at least a bit of English. It’s just economics. We’re a border town and the lines get fuzzy. In our town, English folks speak a bit of French and French folks speak a bit of English and generally everything is copasetic until an election comes along and some politician 'from away' jams a stick in our spokes.

Anyway, that is my ode to my town. I have lived there since I was two years old, interrupted by only one short sojourn in the city when I first moved in with hubby, and I can’t imagine living anywhere else on the planet. Someone asked me the other day “what’s it like actually being from here?” and I couldn’t answer the question. It’s paradise, obviously, and it’s funny, and sad when negative changes or conflicts happen, and interesting to meet the people who come through, stay awhile, then move on. It’s the only place I know.

Victory Weekend

2009-05-28T11:54:00.006-05:00

It has taken me until now to recover from what has been one of the most foot-intensive weekends I can remember.

Friday night we met up with some friends who were visiting from Toronto. They have 4 kids, and the two eldest girls were in a synchronized swimming competition. We met at their hotel and walked downtown to a restaurant, then walked back, but I had been unprepared for the walking and was wearing inappropriate footwear. I got myself a nice blister which bled all over the back of my shoe. Nice eh?

The next morning we were up with the robins to head into town once more for the Great Glebe Garage Sale. I think I have illustrated in this site before the importance of this event in our household. This year we brought my mom, who made us yummy breakfast sandwiches for proteiny fortification, and it was a very good year. Between us we purchased the following items:
- a really really old first aid cabinet, which will eventually go in our cottage;
- a very cool yellow lamp – I don’t yet know where it will live. I have a rather large lamp collection already;
- Martha Stewart’s “How to Decorate”, 1996 edition;
- A pair of never-worn brown wedge-heel sandals, Nine West, for $8;
- A tiny metal train (engine, two cars and caboose), total 3 inches long, for 50 cents;
- An enamel pail with a handle, which came from a real ghost town in Saskatchewan, apparently (ghosts use buckets? I wonder what for?);
- A chemical toilet for our trailer – brand new, never used – which we were going to have to buy anyway but we got it for $40 (less than half price);
- A beautiful ceramic bed pan;
- A painting – paint by numbers – that hubby paid a dollar for. A woman came up to him later on and said she’d nearly mugged him for it, but offered him $20 for it instead. He didn’t accept;
- Two board games, for the trailer;
- A dinner party game called “Deadly Vacation” which we will play at the electricity-less cottage some dark and stormy night;
- Flippers;
- An ‘O Canada’ ceramic hotplate, featuring the coat of arms’ of all Canadian provinces, for my BIL’s cottage (ha ha we are going to decorate it for him);
- A cooking pot with a lid, for the trailer;
- A chrome kettle, for the trailer;
- Never-used thermal insoles (free);
- Two backpacks (ask hubby why – he collects backpacks like I collect lamps);
- A beautiful new collar for Rosie (pale purple with black polka-dots). She looks like she’s going to a party.

Hubby making off with his loot. He likes to walk out front to keep an eye out for bargains.

And notable things we did NOT purchase include:
- plants of any kind
- fishing things of any kind
- dishes for the trailer
- dog toys

I think we showed great restraint. I’m not sure how much hubby spent (more because I made him buy the high-ticket items), but I got away with only spending $39. I also petted about 1,200 friendly dogs. That’s a fun day in my book.

As you can see, I even took pictures. Here’s a view down one of the streets:

At the Great Glebe Garage Sale, the pedestrian is always right.

And here’s a series of shots I call “Garage Sale Tragedies” ™:

Kitty's found a new place to hide.

No comment (The Strangler).

Sleeping Beauty (The Strangler part deux).

We were home by one but we weren’t sure whether or not the Toronto friends would be coming to our place for dinner, so while hubby drove up to our land to discuss the laneway with the backhoe guy, I stayed home and cleaned the crap out of our house. It felt good but two days later it was filthy again. Le sigh. By Saturday evening I was pretty spent.

Sunday hubby went fishing and I stayed home and painted the trailer with my mom. I got most of the trailer covered with the first coat, but I didn’t buy the best-quality paint and I fear it could go to 3 coats. It’s a really crappy painting job too – lots of tiny areas that require a brush, lots of rough spots to cover, lots of gaps to fill. Totally miserable. Anyway, I will keep on trucking and painting my little heart out.

Then Sunday night we went to the local bar (the most excellent Black Sheep Inn) and checked out SoCalled, a klezmer-rapper I went to high school with. It was an excellent show and I actually danced, and drank a bit too much wine, and Monday morning my feet AND my head hurt.

If every weekend were like that I don’t think I’d have any feet left.

Suddenly I See...

2009-05-19T16:10:00.007-05:00

….where in the hell that damn trailer will go.

The weather was kind of poopy on Sunday so we took the opportunity to spend a chilly black-fly-free day up at the land clearing for a laneway. Back in the fall we’d purchased a brand new shiny Stihl chainsaw at our local hardware store during a sale, and were starting to feel a bit foolish with a spic-and-span $500 chainsaw sitting in the basement untouched. We recruited my dad and then my brother volunteered and before you know it, we had a real honest-to-goodness work crew.

We’d gone up there a few weekends earlier, when there was still a bit of snow on the ground, and marked with spray paint which trees we wanted to cut. We chose a route that would allow us to carve out one laneway for the two properties, which would branch off at the end in an informal ‘T’ formation from my brother-in-law’s (BIL’s)place to ours.

Once on-site, and in consultation with my brother who is much more realistic about such things, we realized that the last part of our laneway (leading right down to the cottages) wouldn’t work, as BIL would have to drive smack into the back door of his cottage and down a hill too steep for any rental car to climb. Brother thought there might be run-off issues as well, dribbling into the lake, which is against our vision for the whole place. We instead made the difficult decision to end the laneways at the top of the ridge behind each place, and in future install two nice sets of stairs and pathways down to the cottages. When you visit our cottages, your vision will not be cluttered by unsightly automobiles.

My brother ‘borrowed’ (the guy wasn’t home but you snooze you lose) a super-powered brush cutter, which made short work of the saplings and raspberry bushes covering the first half of the six-acre parcel. He walked the marked laneway and zig-zagged the brush cutter through everything in its path, trees included. Here’s a picture of my brother with the fancy tool, which comes with its own harness (anonymity protected – not everyone likes having their faces plastered on the internets without their permission):

He did return the brush cutter at the end of the day.

Once that was cleared out, we could really see the terrain, and found a logical point at which to branch the two laneways apart that was nowhere near our original plan. As it stands now, we have pretty much cleared our own mini-road, which extends about 500 feet before branching off right (for us) and left (for BIL).

Ours continues down what was once a skidder track for the logging company that selectively cleared the land ages ago, so no major trees were left in our path and it was smooth sailing. We found a clearing – well, we made a clearing – filled with dead birch trees which were promptly removed. It is now a sunny site on a plateau overlooking the lake and what will be our future building site. Here’s a shot of the view from there. The birches will be removed later this summer, in preparation for future cottage-building.

BIL’s laneway ends rather abruptly, so we cleared a little area for cars to turn around and park right nearby. He will have to build a path and a short set of stairs leading down to his cottage, which my brother claims he wants to build right into the hillside. Easy.

When we were done, the neighbor (Ted) came by on his ATV to check it out, and we chit-chatted with him for a bit. Thank god he’s lovely. He and his friends have noisy toys, but if you can’t beat ‘em, you may as well join ‘em. I’m sure BIL will get himself a dirtbike in no time flat and hubby’s already told me he is absolutely going to buy an ATV someday. I can’t complain – I love me an ATV.

Then yesterday I spent a blackfly-filled day gardening and installing my new backyard squash garden. I had a temper tantrum and was going to quit when my parents came over and helped me over the hump. I am off to buy more dirt tonight – sucker’s bigger than I’d planned. I am also planning to buy myself that long-coveted pear tree this evening, so I’m pretty excited. It doesn’t take much.

I also dug in the terracotta flue liners that hubby and I found in a pile of garbage near the fertility clinic. Ha, at least something good has come of it. I will plant these up with a variety of annuals and maybe herbs and I’m sure they will look beautiful for about three weeks, until they become hidden by the monstrosities growing beside them. I always forget how big things get in the garden.

Rosie supervised.

Also this weekend I planted potatoes, cilantro, and some more bulbs in a planter by the front steps. I moved my huge terracotta containers into position on the deck but left them near the stairs, since I know they’ll have to be removed when we tear the deck off.

It was a good weekend’s work, though I didn’t touch the trailer. Sigh. Next weekend’s the Great Glebe Garage Sale, and on my list of things to look for this year are:

- more terracotta flue liners
- retro books on cottage, deck, or outdoor furniture building projects
- board games to leave in the trailer
- dishes for the trailer (metal or plastic)
- vintage tins and bottles i.e. future cottage décor
- a large enamel milking bowl with a red rim, with no rust
- galvanized buckets and things to put plants in
- weird ceramic forest animals (squirrels, bears, birds) from the 50s and earlier

As usual I will report back on our findings. Hubby is expecting a big haul this year, though I’m not sure how he can predict these things. I am going to wager that he comes back with at least one electric motor and some esoteric fishing thing that he will never use. I love the Great Glebe Garage Sale.

Satisfaction

2009-05-13T14:09:00.001-05:00

Hubby mowed the lawn last night and I have to say it: it doesn’t take much to make me the happiest woman around.

When I was young I was kind of a bit on the edgy side; there were moments of wardrobe craziness, I used to dye my hair black (woo) and clomped around in army boots for awhile. I had a bunch of holes in my ears. These days that’s nothing, but back in 1992 I was pretty weird for my town. I never really imagined the way that my life would turn out. To be fair, I didn’t ever have a clear picture of where I wanted to be in 10, 15, 20 years, or what I wanted to do when I grew up. I knew what I didn’t want, but was fuzzy on the other details. I knew I liked to draw, I loved rock music and boys with long hair and animals and fashion magazines. What 16 year old kid doesn’t?

I sort of always imagined myself wearing black a lot, being really stylish, having kids, and maybe being an art dealer. Everyone in art history class wanted to be an art dealer.

Here I sit, 33 years old, in a wardrobe that’s getting progressively better-made yet more boring-looking, hair that looks vaguely like it belongs to a soccer mom, comfortable shoes (OK black Converse sneakers, but still. Heels? Not usually). I live in the country, 3 minutes from my parents, in a house that’s one year younger than I am but has aged less gracefully. I have a lovely husband, we have been together for 11 years and we had a beautiful wedding, and he is also settling into middle age comfortably (a recent quote: “I can’t understand how I’m getting so FAT with all this dog walking!” My response? “you’re 37 dear.” Was that supportive?). We have no kids, which I couldn’t predict and has thrown us for a loop, but even that is okay most days. I have a great set of European in-laws and a nephew, and my own brother has turned into a real man and found himself a heckuva nice lady too.

I live in a neighborhood filled with lovely people who are around our age and a bunch of nice dogs and cats. On Saturday, the big excitement was being invited to a neighbor’s house for game night with other neighbors. We had a blast and walked home at 11:30. I made dip. I take a pottery class also within walking distance, and my good good friend from a long time ago is moving in to the house behind me. I have what’s considered a ‘nice neighborhood’, filled with nice people.

My job is wonderful. I have a dream job. I’m not an art dealer but I’m pretty close, and I have a great health plan. I am downtown every day and sometimes I go to the Chinese grocery to buy my frozen squid and my fish sauce. Best of both worlds.

So this morning when I walked out onto the deck I took a moment to inhale. The grass is evenly clipped and fresh-smelling, and at this time of year it makes the garden POP. The tulips were covered in dew and the crocuses are still out, and the apple trees are starting to get teeny little leaves. The birds were chirping their fool heads off, and I made a mental note to fill a feeder tonight for the first hummingbird I saw in the garden on Monday. It’s my mother’s birthday today and as she is my very best friend, I left her a special treat on the kitchen counter, for her to find when she goes to walk Rosie at lunch. I look forward to joining a new doggie play group in my town after work, so Rosie will have the chance to run around and meet new dog-friends, and I remembered to leave meat out of the freezer for dinner. Work is going really well and we’re approaching a long weekend.

In the end, it takes little more than a nicely-mowed lawn to trigger the happy.

Progress!

2009-05-11T09:19:00.002-05:00

On Saturday I had the opportunity to work on the trailer undistracted by anything – husband, dog, etc. I’d gotten it to a pretty good point by then but everything was still rough, and I had stopped last weekend when the wall I made didn’t fit right. I was on the verge of a tantrum and thought it best to call it a day.

Saturday I calmed myself, went into the trailer, and began to work relatively systematically. I made the wall fit, then affixed it, then cut trim to cover the parts that didn’t fit right. I caulked everything up and made it all smooth before starting onto the next area. I managed to get the trailer to the point where no pink insulation or moldy wood is showing. I swept and vacuumed everything. Behold, the before and after of the front part of the trailer:

There’s still some ‘hardscaping’ to be done; I have to build a little cabinet under the window with a hinged lid, which also functions as the seat back, and then I have to install a shelf along the width of the trailer. I also have to rig up my patented (not really) table-bracket system which involves magnets. Fancy eh? Here’s a rough outline of what I have to do to that corner still:

And in the back, I have also made good progress. It’s not totally sealed yet, but that’s mostly because that damn back wall is curved and I can’t find anything to seal the corner. I bought bathtub surround stuff but it all came unglued, so it was a bit of a waste of money.

Behold the work I’ve done so far in the back:

And the work I have yet to do (that thing above the bed structure is a shelf.)

My next steps are: to finish building that stuff at the front of the trailer. To clean the entire thing with bleachy cleaner to kill any remaining mold or other infectious stuff. Fill gaps with wood filler and caulking. Rip off the linoleum from the ‘kitchen backsplash’. (That’s one weekend). Then, I will paint. Paint paint paint. (that’s another weekend). After it’s painted, I will build in the bed frame, install the bed, put in the cushions, put in the table, remove the stove and put in the new countertop. Then I will move on to the bathroom, where I will remove the toilet and install a chemical toilet (another weekend). After that it’s the really fun stuff: the hardware and storage things that I have yet to buy from Ikea (baskets, racks, hooks, shelves, etc). I figure this thing will be ready to move onto our land by July, when we will also finally be done our laneway, we hope. Once it’s up there, I will buy the most industrially-sized tube of silicone caulking I can find, and when it’s in place, I will caulk the living daylights out of it. Water will fall upwards to get away from it, it will be so watertight.

In other progress, I planted 100 onions and some spinach this weekend. I also planted my flower bulbs in the perennial garden, so if the godforsaken squirrels don’t get them, I should have an explosively beautiful garden this year. The grow-op is trucking along, though my tomatoes are a bit of a disappointment. One of the two varieties I grew didn’t produce at all (maybe two sprouted, and they are weenie). The peppers are up, but I suspect that it’s the cayennes and not the red peppers. I always have success with cayennes. I planted kale seeds and they came up, like, the next day, so that should be interesting. Some evening this week I will dedicate an hour to the veggie garden and plant carrots and potatoes.

We have reserved a guy to build our new deck the third or fourth week of June, so that’s pretty exciting, though we’re still undecided as to what we want to do about railings. I have more wood to order, but the cedar decking is sitting by my driveway ready to go. Also, I think next weekend we might dedicate a day to tree-cutting up at our land. It’s the long weekend so maybe we’ll even be able to drum up some assistants.

Things are moving along.

Happy Earth Day

2009-04-23T15:17:00.001-05:00

Yesterday was Earth Day, and I celebrated it in a variety of ways.

I am one of three co-Chairs of my workplace’s ‘Green Committee’ and we recently completed a fairly comprehensive environmental audit (with an outside consulting firm) of our operations. It’s the first one my organization’s ever done. Yesterday, Earth Day, we had the opportunity to present the results of our audit to all of our colleagues (about 230 people). Co-Chair #1 went up and introduced the project, gave some background, and passed the mic to Co-Chair #2, who outlined the findings of the audit. Then they gave the floor to me, who was to explain the next steps and communication of the audit results.

I firmly believe that not all people are good at everything. There are a lot of things that I am really really good at: I can knit pretty well, I can cook a mean dinner, I am a pretty competent driver, I walk really well and I can write a list like nobody’s business. However, this means that there are necessarily things that I am not good at. This category includes team sports, juggling, dieting, doing hair, understanding concepts verbally i.e. without drawings, having patience, cooking potatoes and public speaking.

I got up there well enough – made it to the podium without falling or farting or anything* – but things started to go downhill very shortly after I got there. For some reason, about 10 seconds into my presentation, I forgot to breathe. Once I was behind myself by one solid breath, I couldn’t pace any future breaths, and started to breathe too shallowly. My voice started to wobble audibly, and my palms got really sweaty. I tried to pause – everyone in the room was uncomfortable by then – but the problem was still there when I continued. It was physical, but exacerbated by nerves. I think I told everyone I had a cold but I can’t remember. I think I must have blacked out. Anyway, I managed to skip part of my presentation, get the slides screwed up, then tried to back out of the last paragraph by asking Co-Chair #1 to take over for me but he didn’t get my cry for help and refused. I finished it off ok, but it has to have been the most embarrassing moment of my entire career.

People keep coming up to me and asking me if I’m ok. It’s so humiliating. One of my colleagues, an older gentleman who I like very much, told me that once he had to do something similar, and broke down crying. So you see we can’t be good at everything. Happy Earth Day everybody at my work!

When we got home, we took Rosie out for a walk. Up the road, she startled a partridge, which promptly flew into a neighbor’s window and killed itself. My neighbor came out in her cute little flannel penguin pyjamas and pronounced him dead at the scene, and offered it to us. Rosie went mental. She has never actually had her mouth on a freshly-killed anything before, and her wolfy nature came out full scary force. She was thrashing all over the road, yelping and acting the fool, so we took the poor dangly-necked bird home and dispatched it. Hubby stood on its wings and pulled on its feet and it’s really disconcerting how little effort it takes to completely disembowel a partridge. They were meant for eating, apparently. No tools required. We gave Rosie the remains and she went all National Geographic on us in the yard, rolling in it, covering herself with feathers, then after about 45 minutes of playing with the dead thing, she finally ate it all. Crunch crunch, feathers and all. We went on our walk and came home and she promptly barfed up the entire dead bird on the futon. Happy Earth Day everybody!

* Sorry, that was crude, but it’s always a concern. You know.

So about that camper...

2009-04-21T11:16:00.003-05:00

The saga of the camper continues.

I found, once I really got into it, that there had been more water damage than I expected in our beloved trailer. Some of it was still wet when I opened up the walls. I ended up having to remove the back walls, the back ceiling, and re-build the wooden inner structure of the walls and back end. The floor was wobbly, so I firmed it up with some 2x4s, and have ended up unscrewing and screwing everything back together. It’s been a challenge.

I am now nearly finished ‘shoring up’ the back end of the trailer. I have yet to screw the outside of the trailer to the new 2x4 on the floor, but that will happen soon.

I am discovering new things every time I go into it. I lifted up the seat bases in the ‘dining room’ and discovered the water tank, filled with black mold. That will be coming out, or cleaned and repurposed as grey water disposal. The trim on all of our cabinets is loose and gappy. Whoever did the last paint job wasn't so careful about avoiding hardware, doorknobs, etc. I discovered that someone had likely run the camper into a tree at some point, and the front end is all crunched in at the back of a cabinet. Water damage followed, so the bottoms of the upper cabinets have to be replaced. I found a little plaque that says “God Bless This Camper.” Indeed.

What do you get for $600?

All of this being said, I am still enthusiastic and my vision for the trailer still stands. I have or will have torn out:
- the bunk bed in the back
- the stove (we will use a coleman – same thing)
- the cushions on the front benches (will replace)
- the countertop
- the linoleum backsplash
- the fluorescent light above the sink
- the toilet (will replace with a chemical toilet)
- the window cranks (replaced)
- the window screens (replaced)
- the mattress at the back (replaced)
- the table (replaced)
- the furnace/air conditioner
- the walls at the back end
- the walls at the front end
- the floor of the cabinets at the front
- and potentially the vinyl flooring, to be replaced with wood-look laminate, of which we have a ton left over from previous projects.

We’ve determined that we don’t need a tap, a flushing toilet, a stove, an air conditioner, electric lights, or anything that requires electricity, propane, or running water. This is pretty much a glorified tent, that you can stand up in and keep stuff in during the week, with a chemical toilet and a place to wash dishes.

I’ve already thrown a bunch of this stuff out, and have purchased many of the supplies needed to get it shipshape. I have a vision. Behold (this is as if you were peeking into the kichen window):

Maybe I’m dreaming in technicolour, but stay tuned.

Springy?

2009-04-07T13:54:00.002-05:00

As I write this, snow is pelting past my window at a 45 degree angle. I fear for all of the teeny little perennial nubbins that were popping up in the garden this past weekend, which I uncovered (silly me), all excited that spring had finally arrived. I’m assuming that these early bulbs and perennials (tulips, columbines, crocuses, jacob’s ladder) will survive a couple of days of wet snow but it’s still sad to think of them out there, all soggy and freezing. Boo.

Rosie loves it though, the little freak. I let her out to pee last night and she tore around the snowy yard in a big circle, her back end nearly flying over her front. She loves the snow – and the water. Anything wet and messy.

The seeds in my grow-op are coming up; so far I’ve got a bunch of tomatoes, and I think one basil or some other stringy thing (an errant weed) in the basil cell. Eggplants and peppers aren’t up yet, and neither is tarragon or basil. The tomatoes win the race this year. They’re so tall (and stringy) that I had to remove the cover of the seed-starter. I grew two varieties this year: ‘Winterkeeper’, which I will apparently be able to pick late in the season and keep in my basement into the winter, and ‘Teton de Vénus’, which I bought because I belive it means ‘Venus nipple’. How could I resist?

As for progress made on other projects, so far I’ve been really good at finding people to do stuff for me. I have to nail them down still with regards to specific dates, but I have found an eavestrough/sofit person who charges very little, and a handyman to do all of my heinous jobs, also for very little. This makes me happy. I have a bit of preliminary work and shopping to do but I look forward to coming home and having the work done for me. I am getting so bourgeois and old.

I called a lady who does slipcovers in my area, to see what a couch slipcover would cost me, and nearly snorted my lunch out of my nose when she told me it’d run to about $1,000. I paid $600 for my couch, and it is used primarily by my dog, so I won’t be going that route. Looks like the mother and I are going to have to do it ourselves.

Tile backsplash is done, and it is beautiful. Photos to come (as soon as I tidy up the kitchen).

I have booked a ton of appointments over the course of the next month or so. I will be all caught up and checked out by mid-may. Also, have booked an appointment with the municipality guy for April 30 to discuss permits/allowances/bylaws/regulations for our new land.

Have also collected two cedar logs (free) for my side garden project. More progress will be made on this soon…maybe hubby can practice using our superduper new chainsaw.

And another project that I have not yet mentioned: turning Rosie from a crate dog into a free-in-the-house dog. We left her out of her crate last Friday, and it went swimmingly. We’re trying to get her used to the idea of being mature and responsible, a little bit at a time. So far so good.

Speaking of dogs (when am I not?), we will soon have a new doggie extended family member. My brother-in-law in Austria called us last weekend to tell us to check our email, where we found pictures of their tiny little four-week-old black lab puppy, Dakota. Little Austrian Dakota, who goes home to them on May 3. I am very excited for them, and look forward to hearing their tales of chewed arms, sleepless nights, ruined furniture… good times. Here I was afraid that Rosie was too much for them to take at Christmas time. Guess she wasn’t that bad after all.

Camping, updated

2009-04-06T10:36:00.006-05:00

I would love to tell you that I am a camper. I would love to be able to talk about the latest high-tech tent I bought at Mountain Equipment Co-op, the fancy little one-burner stove I’ve got for making my coffee in the neat steel percolator I found at a nifty camping store in so-and-so little town. I would love to be able to brag about back-packing into remote locations and setting up shop, pooping in the woods and taking it all back home with me.

Unfortunately, I have to be honest with myself. I live in the country. I have never lived in the city (except for a couple of years there, which I didn’t love as much in practice as I did in theory and during which I did actually like to camp a lot) and have usually had a home where I could see more trees than neighbors. I have never felt the primal need to get ‘out there’ and set up camp, feeling like an explorer, reveling in the hardship. I’m already out there. I don’t like sending my food up a tree. I hate having my legs restricted in sleeping bags that I can’t pull up over my ears. I hate trying to track down that one mosquito who got into the tent. I’ve done it, I’ve enjoyed it, and I’ve got some great memories of really fun camping trips, but when asked the honest question “do you want to go camping?” I would have to say the answer is usually no, I prefer to keep my bed dry and my food close by.

I’m a good camper, too. I can cook a mean dinner on an open fire. I can set up a tent in the dark. I can wash dishes with very little water and very little impact. I do actually like camping on islands (fewer bears, more swimming) and can canoe there and make it downright homey. I don’t even so much mind going to the bathroom over a log. However for some reason, whenever I go camping I have the overarching urge to sleep. I become narcoleptic. Maybe it’s because I’m like 100% relaxed, or maybe it’s because there isn’t much to do but sit around, but all I want to do at all hours of the day is sleep. When I’m awake, I like to drink. I’m usually too cold, or damp, have allergies or sore hips or both, am dirty, or my hair is itchy, so sleeping and drinking distract me from all of that.

When I go camping (and there will be more tent camping in my future, I’m sure), I must have access to the following things at all times:
- un-frigid water to swim in, preferably rocky and clear;
- sunshine, lots of it;
- a toque for sleeping;
- food, lots of it, mostly junky;
- booze, see above, beer for hot afternoons and red wine for cool nights;
- lots of polar fleece clothing;
- many changes of underwear;
- a book or magazine or something to distract me;
- a folding camp chair;
- friends, for variety.

So it ends up being “well for both of us we need the big tent. Then I need something to sleep on. Then my sleeping bag isn’t warm enough so I need a fatter one. Then we need the coleman stove, the cooler, the food bag, the beer, the wine, my backpack, hubby’s backpack, something(s) to sit on, dishsoap, toilet paper, spatulas, forks, knives, salt and pepper, towels, tarps, bungee cords, rope, rain jackets, life jackets, paddles, fishing equipment and I am exhausted just thinking about it.

All this being said, I am about to take camping to a new level. Behold, the camper:

(not our picture or our stuff)

This little puppy was found on a local used-stuff website, and we got it for only $600. It will be placed permanently on our piece of land, at the lake, and will be our ‘summer home’ until we have a cottage built, in futuretimes.

I have big plans for this camper. There was a feature in Domino magazine (R.I.P.) called ‘can this outfit be made into a room’ or somesuch nonsense, and for this camper project, it will be Genny’s design challenge: Can This Room Be Made Into A Camper?

(a terrible picture of what is actually quite a nice room)

Our new little acquisition will be completely gutted, its fittings replaced with new ones, a wider bed, better storage, sleeker accessories, a comfy seating area, nice flooring, a decent (chemical) toilet, a deck, patio furniture, BBQ, and outdoor lighting. We have zero power up at our land save for what can be powered by propane and solar panels, so living in there will be a challenge, aimed at readying us for our eventual off-grid cottage. It has to be comfy, dry, well-ventilated, spacious, and Rosie-fied (i.e. easy to clean). I will paint the interiors, build a new and spacious table, make nice foam cushions for the seating area, buy all new plush bedding, get baskets for our stuff (Scrabble, first-aid kit, blankets, etc), and install laminate wood-look flooring. And decorate. I’m going to leave the outside looking shabby, and make the inside sleek, elegant, and cozy. The deck will be built out of our former deck at home (once it becomes the former deck) and my dad built us some lovely compact patio furniture. I bought exterior solar lights at Ikea (they have a lot of solar-powered stuff for summer!) and look forward to stocking the kitchen with finds from the Great Glebe Garage Sale.

I am really looking forward to CAMPING in my CAMPER this summer. I may never be satisfied with a tent again!

Spring Things

2009-03-06T15:49:00.003-06:00

Oy vey it's going to be a warm weekend, and I am so looking forward to losing our snow you have no idea.

We ran out of firewood about two weeks ago. We borrowed a batch from my parents, and hubby dug a pile of it out from underneath the snow last weekend (he had to split it, it was all wet, etc.), but it still hasn't been enough to indulge in fires on days that are not the coldest. If it goes below minus ten, sure, but above that, we've been sucking it up and wearing polar fleece.

I have a number of objectives for this spring (spring being defined as March, April, May). They are:
- start my seeds in the basement grow-op: zinnias, tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, basil, and melons.
- install a new white tiled backsplash in my kitchen, to replace the beige/orange daisies we currently enjoy.
- chop down/thin out some of the cedar trees in the woods beside the house.
- get back into the groove of doctor's appointments that I've been neglecting.
- slip-cover my sofa.
- build a long raised bed out of previously-cut cedars from beside our house.
- Fix the fences on my veggie garden. Weed garden.
- Evaluate the perennial garden. Remove/move wrong or wrongly-placed things.
- Hire someone to replace my eavestrough and install sofit.
- Meet the guy from the municipality where our land is and tackle all the permits, assessments, etc.
- Install a cable run for Rosie somewhere where she won't get all tangled up but can still run around.
- Begin the siding project for one more (final) year.

Then we'll be on to summer. I think that's very reasonable, considering that I could do the first two in the coming two weekends, doctors' appointments are currently booked, and my mom is on the slip-cover case. Hubby loves to use his chainsaw, so he will be in charge of thinning the cedars. A number of things can't be started until late April, so everything has its place.

I am watching the sun shine into my dirty office windows, and it's 4:58 p.m. Daylight Savings is this weekend, which is wonderful, and means that while it'll be miserably dark when I get up in the morning, Rosie might sleep until 6:30 like she's supposed to, and by the time we get home at night, it'll be full-on bright when we take her for her walk.

I have a stressful week here at work next week, so wish me luck!