Almost Wordless Wednesday

I tend to be a wordy girl, rather than a wordless one. But here are some of my favourite moments from last week's chilly and rainy zoo trip.



Jake with his favourite animal.

Mark, there's a stegasaurus behind you!

Interview with Nicole

I'm doing a meme from Marilyn over at A Lot of Loves. Fun!

I should probably warn you that I'm feeling PRETTY giddy and silly today because it's sunny and beautiful and I spent the morning at a pool party! In Calgary! And it was warm! In Calgary! I feel like I won the Saturday morning jackpot. Plus there are sunny days to come this week. Evidently I should have been a California girl. Or gurl. Except that there is NO WAY I would ever wear Daisy Dukes. I don't even wear regular shorts, for goodness' sake. Also my husband is currently at the golf course so I'm going to watch NYPD Blue reruns and the thought of it is filling me with joy. "You tell him JOHN KELLY is looking for him. JOHN KELLY." Oh David Caruso, and your angsty hunkiness.

So! Here goes with the meme. I haven't done one of these for ages.

What experience has most shaped you, and why?

I have very fine hair with a lot of cowlicks. When I was a kid, my mother always told me I had "terrible hair" and I spent my childhood with either a) a super short haircut, or b) a HOME PERM and so ever since then I have had long hair, with the regrettable exception of the time in university that I had a "Rachel". I always thought I had uniquely bad hair, but I now realize, with the power of hindsight, that I just had really bad short haircuts. And home perms.

If you had a whole day with no commitments, what would you do?

I'm overwhelmed with just that thought. I don't even know. I think I would spiral right off the freaking planet with giddiness. I would definitely go out for a huge dinner and eat a lot of cheese, but other than that I HAVE NO IDEA.

What food or drink could you never give up.

Oh, that's easy. Red wine and cheese. One of my favourite restaurants serves a baked goat cheese encrusted in pecans and it is truly one of the best things I have ever eaten.

If you could travel anywhere, where would it be and why?

A friend just returned from safari in Zambia and Namibia, and I am DYING of jealousy. I want to go! Why didn't she take me? Maybe because it was her honeymoon?

Who do you have a crush on?

If you read this blog with any kind of regularity, you will know that I have many, many crushes. I may be 35 but I'm like some boy crazy tween. Of course, my husband is unbelievably hot so I am going to say I have a crush on him. Also Hugh Jackman. Yes, the lady would like two tickets to the gun show.

If you were the leader of the country, what would you do?

I would outlaw home perms.

Give me one savoury recipe that doesn't include cheese.

I make a MEAN pan of kale chips with tahini sauce. It is delicious. Full disclosure: my husband tasted them and said it was the "worst thing he had ever put in his mouth." So, I guess it depends who you ask.

What did you think you were going to be when you grew up?

Oh! Haha! I thought I was going to be either a) a concert pianist, or b) a great theatre actress. That sure panned out for me.

If you could spend just one day in the body of someone else, who would it be?

I would like to give a really intelligent answer to this one, but I'm drinking wine and watching Sex and the City, so erudition doesn't really come into play in this situation. I'm going to say a Victoria's Secret runway model, so I could wear those really big wings.

Which woman writer - living or dead - do you most admire and why?

I love so many woman writers. My favourites are Margaret Atwood, Jane Austen, LM Montgomery, LM Alcott, and Alice Munro. Alice Munro is probably my most admired from a literary standpoint, but my least admired from a personal standpoint.

What character trait inspires you the most?

I really admire positivity and joyfulness in people.

******************************************************************************

I'm supposed to tag other bloggers and add a question of my own. So, I'm tagging:

Happy Geek, who is as hilarious in person as she is on her blog
Valerie, who is my gorgeous friend and also has a brand new blog, which is beautiful and makes me think that I should really get her to show me how to take a decent photograph
Subspace Beacon, who constantly makes me laugh with her wit and erudition

But if you are reading this and want to answer a few of these questions, leave me a comment! It's fun!

And the question I am going to add is:

Sweet or salty? Discuss.

Joy is an Inside Job

I heard that quote the other day and it made me smile. Happiness, despite current thought, is not some gift-wrapped package we can open after following the lead of that Eat, Pray, Love woman. It isn’t something we can depend on other people for, although other people can certainly add to our happiness. I read this article, which is all about the happiness, or otherwise, of parents. According to a number of studies, parents are much less happy than non-parents, indicating that having children has a statistically significant negative impact on one’s happiness.

I read that, and the little statistician that lives deep inside my heart refilled the lead in her mechanical pencil and sighed. Studies like this irritate me, and not just because of the implication that birthing and raising children is - surprise! – not all sunshine, lollipops, and rainbows. They irritate me because happiness is subjective. How does one measure happiness? On a scale from one to ten? Or are there numbers assigned to certain categories – Very Happy, Somewhat Happy, Neither Happy nor Unhappy, etc. How do you compare “happiness” among populations? It’s not like measuring your BMI or income, it’s a subjective factor that is skewed depending on the day.

I do, however, feel sympathy for people who feel they are much less happy than prior to having children. I’m not one of them, but I do understand how the drudgery of day to day life can overwhelm a person; the never ending laundry, the mess and chaos. The sheer number of hours a week I spend procuring food, preparing food, and cleaning up the kitchen is astounding. Nonetheless, I am much, much happier than prior to having kids. Of course, my pre-kid life consisted of days at which I would leave for the office at 6:30 in the morning and return home at 7 or 8 at night, spending my days at a desk in a stressful environment in which I would frequently hide in the bathroom to cry. The highlight of my week would be ordering #15 at Vietnamese Village and my dreams would be all about spreadsheets. If I had to do that now, in addition to having children, you can bet that I too would be much less happy. If my evenings were spent frantically picking up the kids and getting dinner on the table and trying, desperately, to spend some Quality Time with them before putting them to bed and starting all over again the next day, I would be a wreck.

A few days ago, I was in a waiting room with Jake. He sat on my lap, colouring a picture of a police dog while talking about elephants. Across the room was a woman with a baby, probably 6 or 7 months old. I couldn’t take my eyes off the baby, who was wiggling and flapping her arms and happily kicking her feet. She played with her mother’s purse strap, she pulled on it and chewed it and smiled a giant, gummy smile. When my boys were very small, I did miss things from my pre-kid life, notably the glamourous things like wearing nice clothes and high heels, having pricey lunches on my expense account, and using the bathroom without having a screaming, sobbing child at my feet. But the time goes so fast. It did not feel like that long ago that Jake was a wiggling, flapping baby on my tired lap, and now he sat on my lap with his feet reaching the middle of my calves, his head bumping my chin. I understand exhaustion and the frantic tedium of life with small children, but it really does go by so fast. I wanted to tell those unhappy mothers that maybe, just maybe, it’s a matter of time.


How did these guys

turn into these guys so quickly?

Talk me down, baby.

So it seems like a LOT of us like the Canadian boys! This is a point of national pride! Thanks for all the comments, I absolutely loved them. They reminded me of the many, many crushes I had in my long-vanquished youth: Judd Nelson, Michael Hutchence, Mark Wahlberg, Han Solo. Check, check, check, CHECK. Speaking of Michael Hutchence, in my days as an INXS fan, I would listen to Need You Tonight incessantly, and my mother was always completely repelled by it. “For God’s sake, Nicole,” she would say as I would rewind the cassette in the car, “What kind of PERSON says ‘You make me sweat’? That’s disgusting.” “Oh MOTHER” I would reply impatiently, “You just don’t GET IT.” This I would say while tightly rolling up my acid washed jeans and tossing my spiral permed hair, just to solidify my position as a sophisticated woman of the world.

So how was your weekend? Please tell me you did something exciting, because this was the highlight of mine: getting the carpets cleaned. Last week I was in despair about our filthy and disgusting carpet, and I just could not live another minute with our filthy and disgusting carpet, and so the carpet cleaner came and our carpet does not look significantly different, leaving me to the disheartening conclusion that our carpet’s life is at its end. We have lived in this house for ten years and have done many, many renovations. When we purchased this house it had a) a main floor that had been painted Pepto Bismol pink, which clashed jarringly with the rust coloured rock fireplace, b) trim and doors that had been painted a shiny, dark forest green, c) a kitchen with five different patterns of wallpaper and homemade cupboards that were constantly getting stuck and jammed, and d) a bathroom with dark brown fixtures. Classy! So we have done a lot of renovations, and now it looks like we are going to get rid of our carpet altogether and I am NOT looking forward to the upheaval. I become horribly crabby when the house is in more chaos than usual. I’m tense just thinking about it. I AM looking forward to not having filthy, disgusting carpet, however, so I’m trying to look at the big picture, rather than the (hopefully) 48 hour picture.

The filthy, disgusting carpet is not being helped by the fact that it’s raining and cold, again, and the dog is lending a lovely wet-dog aroma to the house in addition to his wet paw prints. Last January, when I was feeling particularly down, I came up with the brilliant idea to paint our living room blue! And the kitchen orange! Such happy colours, no one could be sad with a blue and orange house! My husband was fairly silent on the subject, cognizant of my distaste for chaos and confident that I would eventually come to the conclusion that I would rather live with taupe and butter yellow than tape up the cupboards, cover all the furniture, wash the walls, and paint. He was right. But with all the rain right now I’m starting to feel like blue might not be such a bad idea...no. NO. Someone talk me down off my rainy weather ledge, please, before I do something drastic. Like paint my kitchen orange.

Hey, did you hear Michael Jackson died?

I know. Shocking isn’t it?

Kidding, of course, I’m not THAT out of touch - you’re out of touch, I’m out of time, but I’m out of my head when you’re not around – but I do find it very difficult to relate to people I saw interviewed on the anniversary of his death, whenever that was. I saw tearful people confessing that they had a hard time accepting it, that they had to move on but sometimes it’s just hard to get out of bed, and I thought, really? I just cannot relate to that at all. I mean, perhaps if someone very close to me had died, but Michael Jackson? I mean, I like to car dance to Billie Jean as much as the next person, but I cannot really say that celebrity deaths affect me in a particularly emotional way. Or any way, really. Usually, when I hear a celebrity died I either immediately assume it’s due to a drug overdose, or I am confused because I thought that person already passed away (i.e., my thoughts on Dennis Hopper’s death).

However, MJ’s death (can I call him MJ? I’m not even really a fan) did mean that there is one less celebrity alive who I actually recognize. I was at the hair salon today, getting my inch of grey roots covered (“The hair is actually white, not grey” my stylist informed me) and of course I read that hair salon staple, People magazine. I would guess that at least ninety percent of the people in People are, at best, vaguely recognized by me. The other ten percent comprise people I recognize, but somewhat wish I didn’t, i.e. Mel Gibson. How’s THAT for a nutjob? I heard the transcript from one of his infamous phone calls on the news and I could barely understand it, so bleeped out was the conversation. It was like watching an episode of Hell’s Kitchen, the bleeps so numerous I actually was not able to get the gist of the conversation, such as it was, except that it rated pretty high in the crazy and angry category.

Speaking of celebrities: apparently there’s a baseball player named Corey Hart? When I saw that, at first I was confused: are people listening to Corey Hart again? Perhaps I should look out my Boy in the Box record. Ah, but it’s someone else. Not the Corey Hart whose glossy face lined my rosebud papered bedroom in the eighties. Canadian girls who were teenagers in the eighties: I just heard that Corey Hart married Mitsou! Remember her? I thought he was supposed to marry me. Along with Corey, I also had well-within-wedlock fantasies about Tom Hooper from the Grapes of Wrath and, just to round out the musical Canadiana, Jim Cuddy!

Alert! Gratuitous photo of me and Jim Cuddy, twenty years after crush was first established.

If you are thinking that you’ve seen this photo before and that maybe I should give it a rest: join the club founded and chaired by my husband.

Another crush of my youth, strangely enough, was the long-dead Jim Morrison. Remember Denis Leary’s bit about the Doors movie? “I’m drunk, I’m nobody, I’m drunk, I’m famous, I’m drunk, I’m f***ing dead. Big fat dead guy in the bathtub, there’s your title.” Thank goodness I got over my thing for troubled, alcoholic, tortured artists, in order to marry my non-alcoholic, non-tortured, although long-suffering husband. It’s MAGICAL being married to me!

So here’s the question for you: who did you have a crush on in your youth? Do you still find said crushes attractive?

Octopuses or Octopii?

I’ve spent whole chunks of the day staring out the window at the sheets of rain pounding my already hail-flattened garden, popping Vitamin D capsules in an attempt to stave off a grey sky and petal-less flower induced depression, avoiding the front window where I have a clear view of my shirtless neighbour’s yard, where he had, inexplicably, piled a very large pile of topsoil on his lawn several weeks ago, this pile of topsoil having turned into an unsightly mud mountain.

Mark, very cheerily, announced this morning that the great thing about rainy days is that we don’t have to put on sunscreen!

That’s true, and that’s one way to look at things. Putting sunscreen on the kids is not what it once was: essentially chasing them through the house, with a handful of SPF 45, shrieking at them to hold still and wrestling them to the ground while applying it to a child who apparently has mistaken sunscreen for boiling oil and is screaming appropriately. Now, the boys do allow me to apply sunscreen in a painless, tear-free way, but not without a constant stream of complaints and sighing. I do like Mark’s look-on-the-bright-side approach.

Because I am evidently a masochist, I like to visit a website called Rhythm of the Home. It’s such a lovely website, with inspiring crafty ideas, which I have no hope of recreating. Really, the rhythm of my home is much less melodic. The rhythm of my house is more based on Dinosaurs: Meat Eaters Chomping the Plant Eaters, or Bakugan Battle Brawlers versus Ben 10 Aliens, or Mom I Accidentally Destroyed Something. However, I occasionally strive to be a crafty, artistic mother, and I know what you’re going to say. Enough already, Nicole. Enough. You will never be that crafty, artistic mother. And you would be right.

I saw this craft, making a yarn octopus, and I thought it looked fairly simple, fairly straightforward. So this morning, in anticipation of the need for rainy day activities, I bought some yarn and some felt. My parents popped by for a visit this afternoon and my mother spied the giant ball of yarn and looked at me quizzically. “Are you going to try to KNIT something?” she asked calmly and clearly, the way you might speak to someone in a hostage situation.

Here is the result of my best effort in octopus making.




Mark named his Moppy. Jake named his Bum.

I asked Jake if I should make a face on his octopus. He said, "I don't really think you should. I like him with no face." I feel judged.

Moppy and Bum, getting ready for their Heart and Soul duet.

There goes the garden

Q: What's better than a good friend?
A: A good friend who has kids that get along with your kids.

Today a friend and I took our kids to an amusement park, which my poor deprived children had never visited before. In fact, not only had they never visited that amusement park, which is located less than thirty minutes from my house, they had never in their lives visited any amusement park. One huge benefit of depriving your children of childhood delights is that they are incredibly excited to finally partake in them. They were so! thrilled! with all the various rides and games and cotton candy, which they had never before tasted. Since coming home, they have incessantly discussed the roller coaster, the log ride, and have eaten their way through a giant bag of cotton candy. They also enjoyed the little airplane ride.




So we had a fabulous time, until the sky turned black and the thunder started. We left the park for home, and returned just before this happened:

What's that on the ground? Hail.

That was my pretty new rosebush.

Slightly Warmer than Average Wave!

The whole continent, it seems, is having a heat wave, and meanwhile it has been slightly warmer than average in Calgary. I’m certainly not complaining, mind you, I’ll take slightly warmer than average over unbelievably cold with gale force winds, which was the case earlier in the week, when I met my best friend and her four kids at the playground. We ended up staying all of ten minutes before the rain started and the boys and I began our cold, windy, and wet walk home.

But now it’s lovely and warm and we have been spending our days outside. I saw this article and wondered if, perhaps, this explains why my neighbour persists in shirtlessness, regardless of the weather conditions. Sadly, I think it is unrelated to the noise level and has more to do with the intrinsic belief in the kind of sexuality that can only be expressed through the wearing of nothing whatsoever but cut-off sweat pants and gigantic running shoes. But even writing this I know that I am being hypocritical: if my neighbour resembled someone in one of those Diet Coke commercials, I certainly would not be complaining about it. However.

Yesterday I forayed inside in search of heat-resistant snacks, and was treated to some words every mother loves to hear: “Mom, I pulled the thing off the blue thing outside? And it exploded.” Ah. Explosions. I went out to see our mister/sprinkler, missing the screw that makes it a mister, shooting water into the air not unlike a fire hose. The mister is now a high-pressure instrument of water torture. And because I subscribe, apparently, to a very high level of energetic parenting in the summer, I relaxed on the deck with a book whist said water torture instrument was vigorously employed. The boys took turns stepping into the line of fire, so to speak, and then taking their umbrellas into the line of fire, and then shot streams of water onto the trees, which the trees probably appreciated. I looked up from my book only occasionally to ask them to turn down the water if it started to go into our neighbour’s yard.

My lovely, elderly next door neighbour is very tolerant of the boys and their shenanigans. I think perhaps she is a little hard of hearing, which works well for neighbourly relations. This did not stop me from becoming completely smug while we chatted over the fence and she complimented me on the boys. “I never hear them fighting!” she said, “They sure get along well. I don’t ever hear crying!” Which is true, they rarely fight or cry, especially outside. I straightened my shoulders proudly. At that exact moment of pride, the back door flew open to reveal a sobbing, hysterical Jake, naked except for a t-shirt. Tears streamed down his face as he screamed that he needed to use the bathroom, but there was a spider in the toilet, and he didn’t want to eliminate on it. And with that, I excused myself from the conversation and went to flush a spider.

Welcome to the world!

I have a brand new niece! She was born yesterday and although I haven’t met her yet, her pictures are pretty cute! My mother informed me today that she thinks the baby looks like me, when I was a baby, and I am both flattered and deeply skeptical. I mean, she’s one day old. Most one day old babies look pretty much the same, colouring and the existence or otherwise of hair notwithstanding. Also, I am completely skeptical of family resemblance claims unless those claims come from some non-emotionally invested third party. I don’t know how it is in your family, but in mine, discussions regarding who the baby looks like are wrought – wrought! – with emotion and bias. Similar features can be imagined, or, alternately, refused to be acknowledged, depending on the family member who shares said features.

I have a very bizarre example. My older son is the spitting image of his father. This is universally acknowledged, with the exception of one member of my husband’s family, who did not see the resemblance at all. Instead, this person persisted in comparing my son to another family member, at every single opportunity. I cannot say why, but this bothered me to no end. I have since made peace with this irritation; children look the way they look and that has nothing to do with the little people they are.

That said, I just got grumpy thinking about it.

But back to the important news – my new niece. I’m very excited she’s here, and I’m looking forward to shopping for baby gifts. Do you think she’s too young for a bikini?

(Bikinis are size 0-3 months, from Gap and Old Navy)

DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, or What I Did On My Summer Vacations

So the other shoe dropped.

The weather suddenly turned, the sky grey and the wind chilly, and I felt like perhaps this was my own doing; like I had expressed passionate emotions to an indifferent date; I was like “Let’s spend our lives together, I love you, baby” and the weather really just wanted to be friends, saying, “You’re a nice girl and all, but I’m not really ready for commitment right now.”

Then the kids. Holy smokes, the kids. By Friday I was vacillating between thinking that I was possibly the Worst Mother Ever or, alternately, that I had given birth to the Worst Children Ever. Looking back on it, I am pretty sure that it was not them, it was me. We were all having an off day but hoo boy! I was bitchy. I was bitchy and completely despondent and overwhelmed about things that are not really overwhelming or despondency-inducing. Like folding laundry. Or packing for our overnight trip to my parents’ cottage. Packing a small amount of clothes and toiletries – for one night! – was pushing me over the edge. I was also slightly enraged that I Am Always The Person Who Packs, this rage despite the fact that I would never, never allow my husband to pack anything other than his own personal effects.

Fortunately Saturday found me in a non-bitchy state of mind and we had a very fun time at my parents’ cottage. THIS is my idea of camping: plumbing, hot showers, and a kitchen, with a fridge full of delicious things and also coolers. Their cottage is very close to the Lutheran Bible camp I went to as a child, and you can hear the bells ringing, calling the children to meals, chapel, and vespers. The bells, along with the cool weather and the late-night sunsets, really take me back to those days of lanyards and campfires and swimming in the icy cold lake. One year I memorized the lyrics to Parents Just Don’t Understand at that camp; I still get it stuck in my head when I hear someone say “Here’s the situation.” (“My parents went away on a week’s vacation and they left the keys to their brand new Porsche! Would they mind? Mmm. Well. Of course not.”)

Speaking of pop culture from when I was thirteen, I read today that Darryl Hannah had turned down the role of Vivian in Pretty Woman because she thought the movie was “degrading for the whole of womankind. They sold it as a romantic fairytale when in fact it’s a story about a prostitute who becomes a lady by being kept by a rich and powerful man.” And here come some words I never thought I would say: Darryl Hannah, you’re my hero. That is EXACTLY how I have always felt about that movie. Even at thirteen, I found that movie offensive and terrible. I could go on and on how Pretty Woman epitomizes everything that is wrong with society, but I will spare you the diatribe, as I’m still fairly relaxed from my night away, despite the fact that I Am Always The Person Who Unpacks. But that’s a whole other story.